SCOTT C. LEVI
Consumers in today’s global market regularly shop in a virtual bazaar, using the internet to survey and compare a vast array of merchandise available at warehouses across the world. Relying on online descriptions, digital photographs and reports posted by other consumers, we trade the opportunity to physically see, touch, smell and taste for an exponentially larger selection and a convenience unimaginable just a few years ago. With the click of a button, the consumer sets in motion a chain of events. An order is logged into a computer database and an item packed in cardboard and plastic, sitting on a shelf in a warehouse in Shanghai, or Mumbai, or Atlanta, is almost immediately packed into a box, tagged, loaded onto a truck, and then placed on a cargo jet, to be delivered to the consumer’s doorstep in Europe, North America, or most anywhere else around the globe, in just a few short days.
Globalization is a modern phenomenon, but long-distance trade is not. The transregional exchange of commodities among peoples of distant civilizations has been a persistent feature of world history since the early stages of human civilization. For millennia, merchant groups have overseen the transportation of goods available in abundance in one place and in demand elsewhere. Already during the fourth millennium BCE, even before the Bronze Age (3000–1200 BCE), archaeologists have noted nearly synchronous developments in pottery and material production among the ancient peoples of the Indus Valley, Central Asia, Mesopotamia, and the Nile River Valley, indicating a high degree of transregional engagement. (See Yoffee, this volume.) Additional material evidence from the Bronze Age demonstrates a vibrant commercial exchange in a variety of goods: lapis lazuli from Afghanistan and other precious and semiprecious stones; Indian indigo and other dyes; cloth made of flax, wool and cotton; wheat, barley and other grains; salt, salt-cured and dried foods; tin and copper, and the bronze they were combined to make; farming implements, tools, and other objects made of metal; special varieties of wood; and, of course, gold and silver.
Throughout recorded human history, nearly every commodity imaginable – both the precious and the mundane – has been harvested, mined, or manufactured, and then packed, transported across great distances, and exchanged for other commodities. Camels, donkeys, bullocks, horses and other beasts of burden, as well as ships great and small, have transported aromatic spices, incense, luxurious silks, magnificent porcelains, and gold and silver jewelry, coins, and ingots. But at least as important as the trade in luxury goods was the trade in the everyday necessities of life: livestock, leather, wool and other animal products, salt, grains, fruits both fresh and dried, base metals, textiles, medicinal plants, and so on. The totality of transregional commodity exchange, or “objects in motion,” through human history is too vast even to begin to summarize. This chapter directs attention to a few of the key commercial systems that have emerged over the past two millennia to facilitate this trade, from the trans-Eurasian Silk Road of antiquity to the colonial economy of the nineteenth-century industrializing world. This survey addresses technology, environment, and the spirit of exploration as we chart the gradual movement toward the global economy of today.
The Silk Road
In the first decade of the third century BCE, two rival powers in East Asia came into being. (See Liu, this volume.) In northern China, the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) emerged following the collapse of the Qin (221–206/7 BCE). Nearby, in the open grasslands to the north and west, the nomadic Xiongnu established a powerful steppe empire, the rise of which is typically attributed to the charismatic leader Modu Chanyu (r. 209–174 BCE). In subsequent decades, as the territory of the nomadic Xiongnu expanded to cover much of the northern steppe, the Han conducted a lucrative exchange with their nomadic neighbors. The Chinese commodity that the Xiongnu most desired was silk, which the nomadic nobility valued as a symbol of prestige. In exchange for their bolts of silk, the Xiongnu provided the Chinese with many thousands of horses and other livestock. This “silk diplomacy” was an effective means to appease the Xiongnu nobility, but the Han simultaneously worked to strengthen their defenses by continuing earlier Qin efforts to link the various walls that earlier states had constructed into a singular “Great Wall.” Even at this early date Chinese rulers knew well that peaceful relations with their nomadic neighbors were both desirable and temporary (Di Cosmo 2002).
Some decades later the Han Emperor Wudi (r. 141–87 BCE) sent a young man named Zhang Qian westward to the court of another nomadic confederation, the Yuezhi, hoping to establish an alliance with them against the Xiongnu, their mutual enemy. The Xiongnu twice captured the unfortunate emissary, and kept him as a captive for more than a decade. But the young man escaped both times, and eventually made his way back to the Han court, having traveled as far as the Ferghana Valley, in modern Uzbekistan. The mission was technically a failure, as the Yuezhi balked at the notion of taking up arms against the much stronger Xiongnu. But Zhang Qian submitted an official report to the emperor, the surviving portions of which include abundant information about the lands and peoples of the west, as well as detailed descriptions of the rich luxuries and merchandise available in those lands. The imagination of the Han aristocracy appears to have been ignited by tales of the regal, legendary, supposedly blood-sweating horses of Ferghana.
Meanwhile, Emperor Wudi grew strong enough to take an offensive position against the Xiongnu, and in 133 BCE he unleashed an overwhelming military force against the nomadic troops occupying the lands to the north of his capital at Chang’an (modern Xi’an). The victory was decisive, and it turned out to be only the first of many. During Emperor Wudi’s long reign, Han armies annexed a substantial amount of territory in virtually all directions, and they made their way far to the west, where, for the first time, Chinese rulers extended their control over the desert oases of modern Xinjiang. In subsequent decades, Emperor Wudi and his successors extended the Great Wall and established military garrisons to protect merchants and other travelers moving along the northern Hexi (or Gansu) corridor, a narrow strip of fertile land wedged between the Qilian Mountains and the Gobi Desert that connected Chang’an with urban centers to the west. This put China in contact with new neighbors and, as caravan towns grew along this new trade route, gave rise to the first great commercial system to emerge and facilitate the movement of commodities between East and West: the Silk Road (see Map 21.1).
That said, precisely what is meant by the term Silk Road requires some explanation. The German geographer Baron Ferdinand von Richthofen (1833–1905) first coined the term “Seidenstrassen” (or Silk Routes) in 1877 to refer to the movement of Chinese luxury goods, most notably silk, along the overland caravan routes that connected Han China with the Roman Empire. References to the Silk Road, or even Silk Roads (or Routes), are quite often accompanied by a map of Eurasia (like this one) that illustrates the horizontal movement of merchandise along what appears to be a premodern superhighway of sorts. Beginning at the Han capital of Chang’an and moving westward, the “Silk Road” diverges to skirt either the northern or southern rim of the inhospitable Tarim Basin, after which it passes through Central Asia and Persia on its way to the shores of the Mediterranean. Some versions of this map add a southern branch of the Silk Road that passes through Afghanistan, connecting Central Asia to the markets of north India.
The term “Silk Road” conjures, for many, a romantic image: dusty, turban-clad Central Asian merchants leading long caravans of hundreds of richly decorated camels with bells jingling as they wend their way along isolated desert trails. The travelers walk for months under a hot sun as they gradually make their way the full distance of 4,000 miles to Rome. Upon reaching the bustling entrepôts on the shores of the Mediterranean, these merchants unload their camels, take razor-sharp knives in hand and cut open the bales to reveal thousands of bolts of exquisite Chinese silk. Local wholesalers excitedly line up to inspect this exotic merchandise and, in no time at all, the Eastern merchants exchange their silk for silver and gold. The caravan then disappears back into the desert, beginning the long journey home to China, where local artisans are already hard at work producing more silk for the merchants to purchase – and thus the process begins anew.
This is a compelling image, or succession of images, but it is also an oversimplified fiction that has at least partly been perpetuated by those who have approached the study of the Silk Road as a subject of cultural, not commercial inquiry. The commercial network popularized as the “Silk Road” has been a medium for some scholars to investigate the mechanisms by which travelers exported Buddhism from India to Central Asia and China, where it found a remarkably receptive audience. Others have looked into the transmission of other faiths along the Central Asian caravan routes (Manichaeism, Nestorian Christianity and, later, Islam), or the transfer of technologies, artistic styles, knowledge and information, and more.1 Scholars of such subjects found little need to complicate the simplistic commercial model presented above. But those more familiar with the dynamics of the Silk Road trade itself all recognize that this simplified narrative is inadequate to explain the structures and mechanics of overland Eurasian trade. This subject requires further explanation in its own right.
To begin, it must be noted that the term “Silk Road” is itself a misnomer. First, the commodities that constituted the overland Eurasian caravan trade were in no way limited to, or even dominated by, silk (although the value associated with the luxurious textile did earn it a special place in the historical record). Even in the early centuries BCE, caravan traders dealt also in spices, perfumes, foodstuffs, animals and animal products, and nearly every other commodity mentioned above. Additionally, while it was possible for a trader to travel the full distance from Chang’an to the Mediterranean, it would have been a truly exceptional occurrence. In general, merchandise passed through many hands as it made its way from producer to consumer, with value and cost increasing every step of the way. This provided important opportunities for many merchant families based in China, Central Asia, and elsewhere to profit handsomely by placing family members at key locations along the most vibrant commercial networks.2
Map 21.1 The silk roads from ca. 200 BCE.
Source: Based on J.H. Bentley and H.F. Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters, 5th edn (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010), p. 237.
Furthermore, while the routes mentioned above represented several “trunk roads” of primary importance, the caravans that moved along them by no means carried all, or even most, of the goods that moved along the overland Eurasian caravan routes. There was indeed an increase in China’s westward trade following the Han conquests, but there was nothing uniform about it. During the Han period, as before and after, caravan traders utilized an elaborate network of roads that crisscrossed and connected virtually every human settlement in the Eurasian landmass. Travelers relied on fresh water supplies, mountain passes and other natural features to facilitate travel. They also thirsted for intelligence about security. When travel along a route or through a territory became for any reason inhospitable, whether from the threat of robbers or political instability, merchants would opt for an alternate route. Envisioned this way, instead of an unpaved superhighway connecting East and West, one might conceptualize the overland caravan network as an ever evolving web that expanded and contracted depending upon the historical vicissitudes of the time. The importance of this commercial system continued in subsequent centuries, and it gave rise to multiple mediatory commercial networks, with multiple centers, in the vast expanse between Europe and China. But this is only part of the story.
Long before the rise of the overland “Silk Road” trade during the Han Dynasty, merchants also relied on maritime routes to move goods and people across great distances. Peoples used ships to transport heavy commodities as early as the Bronze Age, when new metal tools enabled craftsmen to build stronger seagoing vessels. Ancient Greek mariners confidently sailed the Mediterranean, and Herodotus (484–425 BCE) reports that they regularly ventured to the northern shores of the Black Sea.3 Well before his time, Greek traders had established a series of trading colonies there that supplied Greece with grains produced in the fertile Pontic steppe of modern Ukraine.
Navigating the Mediterranean and crossing the Black Sea was one thing, but early ship captains were generally less eager to venture into the open waters of the Indian Ocean. This was partly because of the limitations they faced in navigational technology, and partly because of the larger and more dangerous waters. Nevertheless, trade continued. Ships loaded with all varieties of merchandise gradually made their way from one port to the next, skirting the shores of the Indian Ocean and connecting the markets of China, Indonesia and India with those in the Mediterranean and beyond. Ancient authors, including Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE), report persistent Roman demand for silks, spices, cotton textiles and incense originating in China, Southeast Asia, India and Arabia, which the Romans paid for partly with their own merchandise, but largely with exports of gold and silver acquired from their mines in Iberia, Macedon, Gaul and elsewhere, as well as their trade with Africa (Bostock and Riley 1855, vol. 2: 63). In the first centuries of the Common Era, when the Silk Road was still young and flourishing, Roman sailors in the Indian Ocean added to the earlier Greek genre of travel literature known as the periplus tradition, enriching it with their own experiences. The most famous of these, the Periplus Maris Erythraei, provides abundant information pertaining to the geography of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, as well as the merchandise available in Indian port cities (Casson 1989).
The Mongol World Empire
In the history of the premodern world, the Mongol conquests of the early thirteenth century stand out as arguably the single most disruptive force to existing commercial networks and institutions the world had ever seen. But in the later thirteenth century, as the Mongols’ focus shifted from conquest to governance of the world’s largest ever contiguous empire, the Mongol leadership instituted a series of highly successful policies deliberately designed to encourage long-distance trade and communication across Eurasia.
The Mongol conquests were both rapid and devastating. (See Morillo, this volume.) They began under the leadership of Temujin (ca. 1167–1227), an extraordinarily talented military strategist who united the nomadic tribes of Mongolia and, from 1206, ruled them as Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. China at the time was governed by three rival states: the Xi Xia and the Manchurian Jin in the north, and the considerably larger, more populous, and more powerful Sung Empire in the south. In 1209, Chinggis Khan’s nomadic warriors defeated the Xi Xia and by 1215 forced the Jin to abandon their capital of Zhongdu (modern Beijing). Chinggis Khan’s attention at the time was focused squarely on China, but it was soon drawn to Central Asia, where the regional ruler, the Khwarezmshah, represented a potential threat. In 1219, Chinggis Khan broke from his campaigns against the Jin to lead a large-scale invasion of Central Asia. As was usual Mongol policy, those cities that submitted willingly were looted and made subject to Mongol governance. Those that resisted were completely demolished and, with few exceptions, depopulated.
The Mongols swept through Central Asia and, in 1221, returned northward to resume their campaigns against the Jin. Chinggis Khan died in 1227, but his sons and successors continued these efforts and achieved victory over the Jin in 1236. The Mongol armies next directed their attention westward and, from 1236 to 1241, they defeated a variety of Slavic princes (including those of Muscovy), and made their way into Europe, reaching as far as Poland and Hungary. Further expansion stopped temporarily with news of the great khan’s death, and the subsequent contest for succession. But in the late 1250s, the Mongol conquests began again, with one force quickly occupying the Middle East while another began the long process of completing the conquest of China. It took nearly 20 more years, but with the defeat of the Sung in 1279, the Mongols ruled an empire that stretched from Europe to the Pacific Ocean, and from the Himalayan Mountains to Syria.4
Our sources describe the devastation: millions of people killed, irrigation canals and agricultural territory laid to waste, and great cities of antiquity destroyed, with their monuments tossed to the ground and libraries burned to ashes. The Mongol destruction was cataclysmic, but it was also uneven. Some regions were incorporated into the empire relatively unscathed. Additionally, as the nomadic conquerors transformed into governing administrators, they developed an appreciation for the importance of encouraging agricultural production, technological advancements, trade, and communication across their empire. Regions that were not devastated soon flourished, and, with some notable exceptions (e.g. northeastern Iran), areas that had been demolished recovered. Industrial centers and commercial entrepôts across the empire were, in some key ways, bound together in a single economy. The historically unprecedented dichotomy between this period and the one before it has led some to characterize the century from 1250 to 1350 as the Pax Mongolica: the Mongol Peace.
Much like “Silk Road,” the term “Pax Mongolica” is a compact and descriptive label that is also an oversimplification subject to exaggeration. Emphasizing the destructive component of the Mongol conquests, in the first edition of his classic treatment of the Mongol Empire, historian David Morgan dismisses the term as hyperbolic. Illustrating his point, he recalls the words of the Roman historian Tacitus (d. 117): “They make a desolation, and call it peace” (Morgan 1986: 73). To be sure, the century following the conquests witnessed continued wars, rebellions, criminal activity, a bloody and highly destructive civil war at the Mongol court (1259–1264), and more. But in the updated second edition of his work, Morgan recognized that more recent scholarship lends credence to the notion of a “Mongol peace” (2007: 194–196; see esp. Allsen 1997; 2001). Especially when compared to the half-century immediately preceding it, from 1250 to 1350 peoples and states across Eurasia did indeed enjoy a lengthy period of growth and prosperity.
Surveying evidence of the vibrant regional economies of this time in both Europe and Asia, Janet Abu-Lughod (1991) has sought to demonstrate that this century witnessed the emergence of the first world system: a period of profound Eurasian commercial integration and dynamic growth that, following an interlude, gave rise to Immanuel Wallerstein’s more famous “modern world-system,” which he argues first developed in sixteenth-century western Europe. (See Chase-Dunn and Hall, this volume.) Without understating the importance of later European achievements, Abu-Lughod notes that, from the middle of the thirteenth century, both overland and maritime routes were heavily trafficked with Sung porcelains and silken textiles, Southeast Asian spices, golden brocade and other “Islamic” cloth, Flemish textiles, precious stones and precious metals, and all other varieties of luxury and bulk commodities. After the Sung finally succumbed to Mongol attacks in 1279, the Mongols of the Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) oversaw an even more centralized expansion in the Chinese silk and porcelain industries. Some world historians, including the late Andre Gunder Frank, have taken issue with Abu-Lughod’s periodization and her distinction between two discrete “world systems,” which, he argues, were essentially one and the same (1998: 57, 328–329). Indeed, Frank went so far as to argue in favor of a unified Afro-Eurasian economic system dating back some 5,000 years. Be that as it may (and Frank’s view of an ancient global system is far from agreed), Abu Lughod’s conclusions regarding the systemic character of Eurasian commercial integration in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century economy have been generally accepted.
Abu-Lughod’s view is supported by the fact that medieval travelers from various parts of Europe to the “exotic East” returned home with firsthand reports that such precious commodities as pepper, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon and more – goods worth nearly their weight in gold in Europe – were available in distant entrepôts at a small fraction of their European market value. Such reports were abundant, and they collectively sparked the imagination and provided tangible motivation for the adventurous to travel eastward in search of these precious commodities. Marco Polo is a familiar name in this context, but he is only the most famous of the many travelers to take advantage of the improved safety of long-distance travel in the Mongol age. Indeed, one might argue that the only thing truly remarkable about the celebrated Italian merchant’s long journey from Venice to Yuan China and back is that, by sheer coincidence, he found himself imprisoned in Genoa with Rustichello of Pisa, a novelist, who took advantage of the long passing days to commit the merchant’s account to paper (with some embellishment). Partly because of its association with an author of romances, many contemporaries dismissed Rustichello’s Il Milione, known today as The Book of Ser Marco Polo, as fantasy. But it remained popular nevertheless and, as we shall see, drew considerable attention among later generations of explorers.
To those attuned to such things, the feverish trade and economic vitality of the Mongol era must have seemed an unstoppable force, even as the Mongol Empire itself fragmented. But the extended period of economic growth did eventually meet with a reversal brought about by the onset of epidemic disease. A highly contagious plague, first observed in the 1320s, spread across China in the 1330s and, from there, passed westward across the Eurasian trade routes. In 1347, the plague reached the Italian trading outpost of Caffa on the Crimean Peninsula. Transmitted to people by the bites of fleas that lived on rats, the disease was unwittingly carried by Italian sailors to the Mediterranean. Estimates suggest that as much as one-third of the populations of both Europe and China succumbed to the disease. Urban centers were hit hardest, with mortality estimates for some cities reaching as high as 90 percent.5 Within just a few years all seemed lost.
The Age of Exploration
There was a recovery, of course, but it was slow and its progress was hampered by the tendency of the plague to revisit regions that it had already devastated. Depopulation in Europe had contributed to the collapse of the medieval feudal system and, although the subject rests safely beyond the boundaries of our present discussion, it is worth noting that some argue the sustained trauma of the Black Death to have been a catalyst that led to the revolutionary rebirth of European civilization, the Renaissance. For decades, too, famine also spread across China, prompting peasant rebellions that eventually developed into a different sort of revolution. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) emerged from the ashes of the Yuan, and by the beginning of the fifteenth century China once again started to enjoy a new era of economic strength and cultural efflorescence. As the population recovered, China again became a leader in the production and exportation of fine silks, ornately decorated porcelains, tea, and other merchandise in great demand across Eurasia.
Demand for spices and other “luxury” (i.e. nonessential) goods in both China and Europe – indeed across the whole of Eurasia – increased dramatically from around 1400 (Chaudhuri 1985). This continued to such an extent that from the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian producers increasingly began cultivating as a cash crop first pepper and then other spices, rather than harvesting them from the wild as previously (Reid 1993: 15, 32–36). As demand within Europe increased and Italian mediatory merchants grew wealthier and more influential, others began to recognize the commercial advantage that could be had by circumventing the Italians and achieving direct access to Asian markets. This motivated certain European powers to invest in maritime exploration, primarily by building stronger and faster ships and equipping them with state-of-the-art gunpowder weapons. In Europe, the Age of Exploration had begun.
Over the course of the fifteenth century, the Iberian Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal became the primary competitors in the race to bypass the Italians (Ringrose 2001). Already in the 1430s, the Portuguese began establishing a network of fortresses progressively farther down the coast of West Africa. One aim in doing so was to reach the Indian Ocean, but the African trade itself was quite lucrative, and these fortresses developed into highly profitable commercial outposts where Portuguese merchants exchanged European weapons, textiles and other manufactured items for African gold and slaves. Finally, in 1488, the Portuguese explorer Bartholomew Dias (1451–1500) reached the southernmost limits of Africa and sailed around it. (See Fernández-Armesto, this volume.) His success made him the first European to make his way into the Indian Ocean, but his crew refused to sail on to India, leaving him with no choice but to return to Lisbon.
As news of Dias’s achievement spread, it provided a strong motivation for the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella to gamble on the proposal made by another explorer. The Genoese captain Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo, 1451–1506) argued vehemently (if incorrectly) that he could put his benefactors in contact with Asia using a shorter, more direct route that entailed sailing westward across the Atlantic. It was generally understood at the time that if one were to sail far enough to the west one would eventually reach Asia. Critics of Columbus’s plan argued (correctly) that he had dramatically underestimated the circumference of the Earth and that Asia was much farther from Europe than Columbus believed. Nevertheless, having studied a number of available sources, including The Book of Marco Polo, and with the support of his Spanish benefactors, in 1492 Columbus sailed westward into the unknown (Pomeranz and Topik 1999: 21). After several months he returned to announce that he had been successful: he had reached land and encountered Indians. Columbus led three more voyages to “India” (1493, 1498, and 1502) and died without recognizing, as others soon did, that those whom he referred to as “Indians” were in fact a completely different people living on a continent that existed between Europe and Asia.
As was the case in the so-called “Old World,” the Aztecs, Incans, Mayans and other peoples inhabiting the Americas at the time of Columbus’s voyage were similarly bound together by an elaborate network of trade routes, and had been for many centuries. In addition to the urban and pastoralist populations of North America, there were tens of millions of people inhabiting the islands of the Caribbean and agrarian civilizations across Central and South America. Some elite members of these societies traded in precious stones, gold and silver jewelry, fine cotton textiles and some other materials that would be considered “luxury goods.” But significantly more important was the exchange in ordinary cotton and woolen textiles, metal tools, leather and other animal products, maize, and a great variety of other food items. Here, too, it was the everyday exchange of the mundane that kept people alive and societies healthy.
Within a few years of Columbus’s initial voyage, Spanish explorers, missionaries and conquistadors ventured from the islands of the Caribbean into the mainland and found that the location and its inhabitants were not all that was new. This “New World” was also rich with all varieties of unfamiliar plants and animals, as well as an abundance of gold and silver. In subsequent decades the shipping lanes across the Atlantic became much more heavily trafficked, as increasing numbers of Spanish and Portuguese ships passed from Europe to one or another slave trading outpost in West Africa, and then to the Americas, before returning to Europe to begin the circuit anew. Following the work of Crosby (1972), historians have come to refer to this triangular trade as the Columbian Exchange, a commercial network that rapidly transformed the lives of peoples across the globe. Discussions pertaining to the movement of people, knowledge, technologies, and diseases between the “Old World” and the Americas are addressed sufficiently elsewhere in this volume. (See chapters by Ward, by Pernick, and by Vélez, Prange, and Clossey, this volume.) The following discussion will therefore remain focused on commodities.
The ever more rapid movement of people and commodities across the Atlantic resulted in the introduction of new plants and animals, and other goods, to both regions. Horses were among the many animals that Spaniards brought across the Atlantic, greatly facilitating the Europeans’ military conquests and revolutionizing mobility in the Americas. Other domesticated animals that Europeans introduced into indigenous American diets and lifestyles include cattle and chickens. The very long list of Old World plants taken to the Americas includes such modern staples as coffee, bananas, oranges and other citrus fruits, peaches, pears, carrots, lettuce, garlic, onions, rice, sugarcane and wheat. In exchange, Europeans brought back to the Old World a number of animals, including turkeys, as well as legumes, blueberries, cocoa, corn (maize), chili peppers, peanuts, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, and a superior variety of long-fiber cotton.
This exchange added what must have been a wonderful richness and diversity to regional diets across the globe – introducing the tomato to Italian cuisine, for example, the potato to Ireland, chili peppers to India and China, and coffee to Columbia. More important, however, is that the introduction of new foods enabled farmers to diversify their crops and experiment with nutritious and drought-resistant alternatives. This had a positive and sustained impact on caloric intake across the globe, which decreased mortality rates and contributed to population growth and recovery in both Europe and China. It eventually brought recovery in the Americas as well, where the introduction of new crops occurred alongside the introduction of a smallpox epidemic that almost completely obliterated the indigenous communities.
In the meanwhile, just five years after Christopher Columbus made his maiden voyage to the New World, in 1497 the Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama led four ships from Lisbon down the coast of Africa.6 In 1498, Gama successfully rounded the Cape of Good Hope, entered the Indian Ocean, and, with the help of a pilot, whom Subrahmanyam notes was probably, although not certainly, an Indian from Gujarat, navigated the trade winds to arrive at Calicut on May 20, 1498 (Subrahmanyam 1997: 121–128). This achievement ushered in a new era of European activity in the Indian Ocean. Upon meeting the ruler of Calicut the Portuguese famously asked for two things: Christians and spices. They were disappointed not to find Christians, but the Portuguese mission was a success nonetheless. The ruler of Calicut permitted the Portuguese to exchange their relatively paltry merchandise, consisting primarily of textiles and agricultural goods, for pepper and cinnamon (Subrahmanyam 1993: 56–62).
In the wake of this initial success the Portuguese rapidly went to work building more and better ships and, within a few years, the Portuguese Estado da India was a new maritime power in the Indian Ocean. Benefiting from the addition of cannons, something never before affixed to Asian ships, the Portuguese approach was “to trade where possible, to make war where necessary” (Subrahmanyam 1993: 60). Within just a few years they managed to conquer key commercial entrepôts throughout the Indian Ocean, from East Africa to Hormuz at the entrance of the Persian Gulf, to Goa on the southwest coast of India, to Malacca in Southeast Asia. The Portuguese encountered some stiff resistance, but by the 1571, the Estado da India was in control of approximately 40 trading outposts dotting the Indian Ocean coastline and beyond, stretching from Sofala in Mozambique as far as Macao in China and Nagasaki in Japan (Russell-Wood 1992: 22).
By all accounts, the initial intent of the Portuguese Estado da India was to achieve direct access to the spice trade and to monopolize the movement of pepper, cloves, nutmeg, mace, cinnamon, cardamom and other spices to Europe. While earlier scholarship credited the Portuguese with doing just that, more recent work has determined that the Portuguese were never able to achieve much more than to become a relatively minor player in a much older and much larger commercial arena. They were the primary European commercial interest in the Indian Ocean, but throughout the sixteenth century indigenous networks centered in China, India and Arabia consistently outpaced them (Frank 1998: 179). Even in the movement of spices to Europe, as late as 1585 Asian merchants using the old Red Sea route to the Mediterranean transported approximately four times more spices than Portuguese ships traveling to Europe by the Cape route (Frank 1998: 179; see also Subrahmanyam 1993: 74–78). As their efforts to achieve a monopoly failed, the Portuguese adapted by taking a more active role in the inter-Asian trade: purchasing Chinese merchandise and transporting it to markets in Africa, for example, where they exchanged it for gold and other merchandise which they traded in the markets of India, Indonesia, their new colonial territory of Brazil, and elsewhere (see Russell-Wood 1992: 123–147).
The Spanish and Portuguese movement around the globe had a direct and profound impact on the trajectory of world history: Iberian explorers established colonial empires; their movement of crops and domesticated animals revolutionized agrarian economies; and they ushered in the age of European expansion, tightening the bonds that connected the regional economies across Eurasia and, for the first time, connecting them to the Americas as well. China and Oceana had long ago boasted large-scale, powerful seafaring technologies (see Levathes 1997). Engineers now developed new models of Spanish galleons and Portuguese carracks and caravels to transport larger quantities of a great variety of commodities around the globe.7 In this long list, one commodity takes precedence as being, arguably, the single most important: silver.
In the Americas, Europeans amassed a vast amount of gold by trading, looting, stealing, and, especially, forcing indentured laborers and slaves to mine it from the ground. But in both quantity and value, silver far exceeded gold. This is partly because of the extraordinary richness of silver ore in such American locations as Potosí, Bolivia. But also, unlike gold, silver had a substantially higher purchasing power in Asian markets than in Europe and it was therefore the Europeans’ preferred medium for offsetting their trade deficits in Asia (see Flynn and Giráldez 2002: 396–397). In Spanish territories, colonizers rapidly developed political institutions that facilitated the exploitation of indigenous populations, frequently by using them to extract silver from an expanding network of mines in Bolivia, Peru, Mexico and elsewhere. (See Ward, this volume.) The figures involved in this trade are staggering. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Spanish galleons exported thousands of tons of silver from the Americas. In the eighteenth century, more American silver was mined than in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries combined (Frank 1998: 143; Flynn and Giráldez 2002: 407).
Much of this silver was taken directly to Europe, where it circulated in regional economies before making its way further on to markets in the Indian Ocean. Following Magellan’s voyage across the Pacific in 1520–1521, much was also shipped westward from the Americas to markets in China, moving through the entrepôt of Manila in the Philippines, a Spanish possession from 1571. This sustained injection of precious metals into the global economy intensified the economic system that connected regional economies in Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, leading to economic growth in some markets and, depending upon circumstances, provoking inflation and crisis in others. Over the centuries, Asian production expanded in response to growing demand, and Europeans used American silver to buy their way into the Asian markets (Frank 1998: 258–320, 356).
The pace of global trade accelerated further from the beginning of the seventeenth century, as two new groups of explorers from northwest Europe joined the Iberians. In the year 1600, the English East India Company was chartered with the primary objective of outmaneuvering the Portuguese and establishing a direct line of trade with Asian markets. Two years later, the Dutch VOC (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie) joined the English. While the Spanish and Portuguese commercial interests were intended to be royal monopolies, the Companies were both joint stock ventures that were organized as a way for private interests to pool their capital to invest in the Asia trade. The Dutch and English Companies financed the construction of large numbers of ships that easily outpaced the Portuguese, and within a few decades the Dutch emerged as the dominant European power in the spice-producing regions of Southeast Asia while the English focused their commercial interests to the west, in India.
Prior to moving on to the final part of our discussion, we should note that the dramatic increase of Europeans’ commercial activities in the Indian Ocean was accompanied by more continuity than change in the overland trade along the Eurasian caravan routes. Although some have argued that the European maritime traders usurped the caravan trade, those arguments have been based on assumptions rather than evidence.8 This perception at least partly stems from an imbalance in the sources. Historians of Dutch and English maritime trade have long benefitted from an abundance of Company records archived in Amsterdam and London, while there is no analogous resource for historians of overland trade.
To be sure, there was little need for caravan traders to transport Chinese silks and porcelains the full distance from China to the Mediterranean. But as noted above, the east–west “Silk Road” trade in luxury commodities represented only one element of a much more complex overland Eurasian network of exchange. Recent research has demonstrated that the early modern overland trade remained quite active, with caravans consisting of thousands of pack animals – camels, horses, donkeys and bullocks – regularly making their way between commercial centers throughout the Eurasian interior.9 Rather than luxury goods, this trade consisted primarily of more mundane items such as cotton textiles and dyes, Chinese tea, both fresh and dried foodstuffs, animals, and animal products. Still, it must be recognized that European commercial interests in the Indian Ocean did gradually grow in influence, and in specific places at certain times, there were disruptions in continental commercial patterns. In general, as shown in Maps 21.2 and 21.3, during the period from the sixteenth century through the nineteenth century there was an extraordinary increase in the overall movement of merchandise across the globe, associated especially with the expansion of European trade posts (in Afro-Eurasia) and political conquests (in the Americas).
The Industrial Age
During the initial centuries of European activity in the Indian Ocean, with few exceptions European merchants represented little more than new participants in a vibrant commercial arena dominated by much larger indigenous Asian enterprises. Europeans were increasingly active in Asian markets in this period, but the Portuguese, Dutch, English, and others did not achieve anything that resembled the expansive Spanish colonial empire in the Americas. Even if it had been their aspiration to do so, they simply did not have the economic resources, military strength, and manpower to achieve anything of the sort. It was not until the early decades of the nineteenth century that European powers began to extend colonial authority across nearly all of Africa and Asia. When this process did begin to unfold, it did so rapidly and with great effect. Even China, which escaped outright European colonization, was soundly subjugated following the First Opium War (1839–1842) and found its role in global trade to be ever more directly dictated by European demand.
Map 21.2 Going global: European trade contacts in Africa and Asia, ca. 1700.
Source: Based on Bentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters (as Map 21.1), p. 479.
Map 21.3 Europeans in the Americas, ca. 1700.
Source: Based on Bentley and Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters (as Map 21.1), p. 530.
Since even before McNeill’s classic study, The Rise of the West (1963), world historians have endeavored to reach an improved understanding of the various factors behind this epoch-making shift in global power dynamics.10 (See Adas, this volume.) In recent years, researchers have made some progress in determining when it was that Western powers achieved relative economic and military superiority over China, India, and other Asian powers, and they have directed attention to a number of factors that contributed to this development. The most critical element in this equation is the Industrial Revolution, which began, in most accounts, with the mechanization of the textile industry in England during the second half of the eighteenth century (see Bayly 2004). Precisely why it took place when and where it did remains a matter of ongoing debate. It is clear, however, that the mechanization of production and the rapid expansion of an industrial infrastructure had a profound impact on global trade, first in cotton textiles and then in every other manufactured commodity (see Stearns 2007). For purposes of expediency, we will focus attention on cotton and extrapolate from this one case larger implications relating to global trade patterns.
As noted above, English East India Company merchants came to India in the early seventeenth century looking primarily for spices. From 1619, the English began to establish a growing number of trading “factories” at key locations along the South Asian coastline. English merchants stationed at these well-defended trading warehouses purchased a wide variety of merchandise, including especially pepper and other spices, but also a variety of handmade cotton textiles including muslin, calico and chintz, which were growing more popular in European markets. In subsequent years, as the Dutch focused their efforts on the spice trade, Indian cotton textiles came to represent one of the most important commodities in the English East India Company’s commercial portfolio. By 1684, Company merchants purchased an estimated 18 million yards of Indian cloth and injected a substantial amount of cash into the Indian economy in exchange (see Levi 2002: 74–76, 242–243).
The onset of the Industrial Revolution brought about a complete inversion of European trade relations with the nonindustrialized world. As textile factories in Great Britain rapidly expanded their production, instead of finished textiles Company merchants developed an insatiable appetite for raw materials. Already in 1760, Great Britain imported 2.5 million pounds (in weight) of raw cotton. That number increased to 42 million pounds by 1800, and to 366 million pounds by 1840. Rather than precious metals, the Company increasingly offset these enormous purchases by exporting Britain’s own finished textiles and other manufactured merchandise to foreign markets. In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the British purchased Indian cotton and shipped it to textile factories in Great Britain, where power looms would turn it into cloth. They then transported this same cloth back to India, where it could be sold at a lower price than India’s own handmade textiles. In terms of the Indian textile trade, the tipping point in this equation can be dated to 1816, the year that Indian merchants purchased more textiles from Great Britain than they sold. In 1824, Indian merchants imported approximately 1 million yards of cotton cloth produced in British factories. By 1837, this had increased to 64 million yards.
Such a radical transformation in global trade patterns had profound political implications as well. Governments of industrializing, urbanizing nations, such as Great Britain, recognized that it was imperative for them to achieve a reliable supply of raw materials from abroad in order to keep factories open and keep their increasingly urban populations at work. The need to sustain growing industrial economies led such states to invest heavily in their militaries, which they used to force open markets in some places (e.g. China) and conquer territories in others (e.g. India and Africa). European colonial administrations frequently operated at a loss when comparing taxation revenues from their colonial subjects to the expenditures that supported the empire. Significantly more important, however, was that they supervised a steady flow of necessary raw materials to industrial centers in the homeland. Industrial capitalists also used tariffs and other mercantile measures to control access to their own colonial markets. In the nineteenth century, these factors, as well as growing competition among industrializing states for access to resources and markets, precipitated the rapid expansion of European colonial authority over much of Africa and Asia. (See Sinha, this volume.)
The exponential increase in the industrial powers’ demand for raw materials led to a corresponding increase in the production of “cash crops” across the globe, largely by means of a dramatic expansion of increasingly specialized plantation economies. From the turn of the nineteenth century, producers across the globe began to set aside more diverse and self-sufficient agricultural models in favor of highly specialized plantations that produced exclusively crops for export – items that were in demand on a global market. As the labor involved in such ventures could be extraordinarily expensive, this was achieved largely by relying on the labor of untold numbers of indentured servants and millions of African slaves. To reference just a few examples, farmers found the hot and humid climate of the American South suitable for cotton and tobacco. Hoping to establish their own reliable supply of raw cotton, Russian colonial authorities expanded irrigation agriculture in Central Asia and eventually established a cotton monoculture in the region. Agriculture in the Caribbean was turned over largely to sugarcane. Nearby, in Central America, some economies were based on coffee plantations, while others, the “banana republics,” produced little else. In Europe as well, Poland and Ukraine focused on wheat production at the expense of other agricultural goods, and became known as the “breadbasket of Europe.” Meanwhile, other European regions that had previously produced wheat shifted their focus to industrial production or other more lucrative (for them) economic activities, agricultural or otherwise.
Conclusion
The pace of globalization continues to increase into the twenty-first century. With a global population that is increasingly urban and has grown by more than 300 percent in the past century to reach nearly 7 billion people, agricultural producers and manufacturers have struggled to increase productivity correspondingly and devise new methods to move their merchandise more quickly and efficiently. Instead of caravans, carracks and caravels, goods are now loaded onto railroad cars, semitrailers, freighters and cargo planes and rapidly transported to nearly every market around the world. And instead of merchants and merchant families, it is now multinational corporations that oversee the production and transportation of goods worldwide. As notions of regional self-sufficiency and agricultural diversity gradually became a thing of the past, the world is no longer only bound together by a network of exchange: it has become utterly dependent upon it. (See chapters by Bright and Geyer, and by Simmons, this volume.)
Building upon recent technological developments, globalization has even transcended the movement of tangible objects to include the trade in information and technical services. To cite one common example: a consumer’s question regarding the operation of a computer made by a US company with parts from across the globe and assembled in China leads to a phone call to an English-speaking customer service agent in India. If there is one defining feature of this globalizing trend it is that it is limited only by the speed of the objects in motion.
Notes
1 The literature on the Silk Road is abundant. For two recent studies of religious transmission along the Silk Road, see Foltz (2000) and Elverskog (2010).
2 For an excellent study of Central Asian merchants in this context, see Vaissière (2005).
3 Herodotus, IV, 8, 17–18.
4 For an up-to-date bibliography of literature on the Mongol Empire, see Morgan (2007).
5 See the classic studies by McNeill (1976) and Gottfried (1983), and the more current one by Cohn (2002).
6 For a detailed historiographical discussion of the life and career of Vasco da Gama, see Subrahmanyam (1997).
7 For a discussion of the various types of ships and other modes of transport employed in this trade, see Russell-Wood (1992: 27–57).
8 One recent example is Beckwith (2009: 232–263).
9 For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see Levi (2002: 21–84).
10 In addition to McNeill (1963) and Frank (1998), see especially Goldstone (2008), Pomeranz (2000), and Wong (2000).
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