Webs+of+Humankind%2C+501-519.pdf

# Convergence: The Discovery of the Oceans and Biological Globalization 1400 to 1800 ## Focus Questions 1. What were the major contours of world history in 1400, as shown in the regional webs of the time? 2. What were the main differences in oceanic voyaging conducted by China's Ming dynasty and t...

# Convergence: The Discovery of the Oceans and Biological Globalization 1400 to 1800 ## Focus Questions 1. What were the major contours of world history in 1400, as shown in the regional webs of the time? 2. What were the main differences in oceanic voyaging conducted by China's Ming dynasty and the Atlantic Europeans? 3. What were the most important effects of the biological globalization initiated by the oceanic voyaging of Atlantic Europeans? 4. Why was the first Global web to extend across the world a significant development? ## The World's Webs in the Fifteenth Century - As of 1400, the 350 to 450 million people on Earth spoke several thousand languages, followed several hundred religions, and recognized several hundred political rulers. - A few tens of millions of them recognized no rulers at all, although with each passing year fewer and fewer lived in so-called stateless societies. - Despite nearly 5,000 years of states, cities, and empires, and some 2,000 years of expanding, proselytizing religions, the human race remained politically and culturally fragmented. - It was in no deep sense a community. - Even within the Old World web, spectacular diversity prevailed from the refined world of Confucian scholars in urban China, with its leisured philosophy and gorgeous calligraphy, to the poor and dangerous world of illiterate fisherfolk on the coasts of Scotland. ## The Old World Web - That diversity resulted partly from the sheer size of the Old World web. - Its frontiers stretched from Greenland to Japan and from Indonesia to West Africa. - Three-fourths of humanity lived within it. - Thousands of caravan tracks, navigable rivers, and sea routes held the web together. - It included hubs or nodes such as Malacca, Calicut, Hormuz, Cairo, Constantinople, or Venice, where people routinely heard many languages and where the silks of China crossed paths with the ivory of East Africa or the amber of Scandinavia. - But it also included spaces where people kept to themselves, deep in the forests of Siberia or high in the Himalaya mountains, minimally connected to empires, trade routes, or major religions. - These people, comparatively few in number, lived within the Old World web's frontiers, but they were not part of its fabric. ## Interactions within the Old World Web - The Old World web had two main trunk routes. - The overland caravan routes (Silk Road) linked eastern and western Eurasia. - The caravan routes flourished in times of peace, when strong empires kept brigands in check and prevented dozens of local rulers from demanding payment from traders in exchange for safe passage. - The best example is the Pax Mongolica (ca. 1260-1350), when the short-lived Mongol Empire stamped out brigandage almost everywhere along routes between Korea and Iraq, making travel safer for merchants. ## A Thickening Web - During the fifteenth century, the eastern and western edges of the Old World web were rapidly consolidating and thickening as a result of maritime trade. - In earlier centuries, mastery of the arts of camel management had boosted the connectivity of the central regions of the Old World web, making desert crossings in Central Asia, Arabia, and Africa much more practical. - Mastery of the monsoon winds had given sea traders in the Indian Ocean world a precocious start in developing long-distance networks. - But now, from at least 1200 onward, improving ship design and navigational skill in both western Europe and eastern Asia were fast accumulating, reducing the risks of sea travel and making trade and economic specialization yet more rewarding. - Sailing the western Pacific waters from Japan to Java, or the eastern Atlantic from Scandinavia to Morocco, was dangerous. - Both seas featured frequent, furious storms, not to mention (especially in the western Pacific) bold, enterprising pirates. - But bigger and better ships helped sailors overcome their understandable fears of these hazards. ## Comparing Currencies - Strange as it seems, both these images show money. - The coins at left come from the Southeast Asian kingdom of Srivijaya (seventh to thirteenth centuries) and look a good deal like money in circulation across the Old World web, where several centuries previously millions of people came to agree that small discs of gold, silver, or copper were valuable. - The giant limestone disc at right served as money in the Caroline Islands of the western Pacific, especially the island of Yap, where money was used only for major transactions. - The stones themselves did not need to move. - Instead, everyone agreed the stones had new owners after a transaction. - Srivijayan society was much more trade- and market-oriented than Yap's. ## Webs in the Americas - In the Americas, much larger webs had developed around the dense populations in the Andes and in Mesoamerica. - In 1400, perhaps 40 to 70 million people lived in the Americas, and about half were in either the Andes or Mesoamerica. - Most indigenous Americans, and all those in the Andes or Mesoamerica, took part in interactive webs. - In the absence of pack animals (outside of llamas and alpacas in the high Andes), goods traveled mainly by watercraft or human porters, although on North America's Great Plains, dogs dragged sleds-called travois-laden with gear. - Canoes and rafts linked peoples on riverbanks and shorelines. - Elsewhere, people had to carry everything themselves. - The character of the American webs was slightly different from that of the Old World web, with less bulk commerce in transit. - Crops such as maize diffused widely within this web, and so did some cultural practices such as ball games and mound building. - But the volume and intensity of the exchanges of goods over long distances were modest compared to what occurred in the Old World web, with its camel and donkey caravans and its shipping. - Buzzing local markets did exist, as in the Basin of Mexico, the region around today's Mexico City. - As in the Old World web, those societies enmeshed in the American web featured more specialization and exchange, greater wealth, greater inequality, and greater military power, than those societies outside the web. ## Local Webs - In 1400, some 60 to 120 million people in Oceania, the Americas, and the southern third of Africa lived outside the Old World web altogether. - They too, of course, took part in trade networks, military conquests, and the same sorts of activities as people in the Old World web. - But their scales of operations were smaller. - In Oceania, people in Polynesia and Micronesia had built their own small webs of interaction. - Archipelagoes like that of Hawaii, or Tonga and Fiji, hosted constant interactions among hundreds of thousands of people. - In the Caroline Islands of Micronesia by 1400 or 1450, a well-integrated exchange network had grown up, using big stone discs as money - Some of them heavier than a car. - But this little web probably involved at most tens of thousands of people. - In demographic terms, these Oceanic networks were tiny compared to the Old World web. ## Webs in Africa - Most of the northern half of Africa, by 1400, lay within the Old World web. - Egypt had long been one of the web's linchpins. - Trade and cultural exchange, most notably the spread of Islam, tied the East African coast as far south as Kilwa and Sofala, the Mediterranean lands, and the West African Sahel firmly to the rest of the Old World web. - Where rivers made travel easy, as along the Nile and Niger, tendrils of the Old World web reached further still. - But the southern third of Africa, like sizeable parts of the Americas, or Siberia, stood apart from any big web. - People there were not importing shiploads of luxury goods from Egypt or India; they were not sending young men to study Islam in Cairo or Baghdad. - They were not experimenting with Indian Ocean-world technology such as sugar mills or lateen-rigged sails. - Instead, they were producing food and clothing for themselves or for local use, they were following their own religions, and they were using the same technologies—perhaps with minor alterations—that their ancestors had employed for many generations. - They lived outside the Old World web, but within much smaller webs of their own making. - As in the Americas, these little webs in southern Africa were better for circulating ideas than goods. - Without pack animals, wheeled vehicles, or ships, people here had to move everything on their backs, on their heads, or in canoes. - So, in 1400, the world included one giant interactive web in Eurasia and the northern half of Africa, a large one in the Americas, and small, local ones elsewhere. - The Old World web was home to most of the world's people, and to its most formidable states and societies. - It alone had sailing ships capable of carrying hundreds of tons of cargo. - It alone had many kinds of pack animals suited to almost any terrain. - It alone had wheeled vehicles. - By 1400, it had fewer obstacles to interaction, especially to trade, than did the other, smaller webs around the world. - The Old World web was not necessarily a pleasant place to live—certainly not if life expectancy or social equality are the measures—but it was where people had built the most powerful militaries, the most efficient communications networks, and the most sophisticated technologies. - Therefore, it comes as no surprise that the people who forged the first truly global web, came from the edges of the Old World web. ## Prevailing Winds and the Open Sea - Before 1400, as earlier chapters explained, several peoples had developed maritime cultures. - The most extraordinary of these was the Polynesian, which carried colonists throughout the archipelagoes of the tropical Pacific and as far south as New Zealand. - However, by 1400 its farthest outposts had become cut off, and sea traffic took place mainly within archipelagoes. - The Vikings, too, had a seafaring history several centuries long, although by 1400 they had stopped exploring the North Atlantic and their Greenland colony was on the verge of extinction. - Many other peoples sailed routinely on more protected seas, such as the Mediterranean, the Arabian Gulf, the Bay of Bengal, the South China Sea, or the Sea of Japan. - The islands of Indonesia, and adjacent coasts of Southeast Asia, hosted sizeable regular traffic by 1000 CE. - The traffic in all these seas was much thicker and more regular than in the Polynesian Pacific or the Viking North Atlantic. - The vessels were often larger, and some could carry hundreds of tons of cargo. - The routes were well established and studded with commercial seaports. - Those who plied these routes usually hugged the shores, although certain passages, such as from East Africa to India and back, took sailors far from land for a week or two. - Sailors had accumulated a considerable, if fragmented, knowledge of winds and currents. - Polynesians knew how to ride the currents and the trade winds of the Pacific. - People all around the Indian Ocean knew how to use the monsoon to sail north in the summer and south in the winter. - Everywhere, sailors had mastered the local tides, currents, and winds for the short voyages that made up the great majority of seafaring. - But no one knew the overall pattern of the planet's winds. - No one knew how it might be possible, in the Atlantic and Pacific as well as the Indian Ocean, to find winds that would reliably take ships far out to sea, thousands of miles from land, and then safely home again. - In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, people learned where to find these winds, unlocking the secrets of oceanic navigation. - The ocean winds form gigantic merry-go-rounds. - In the North Atlantic, for example, the prevailing winds spin in a clockwise fashion. - Its westerlies whip across from North America to Europe. - Further south, the trade winds blow along the northwestern coasts of Africa and then whistle across to the Caribbean. - In the South Atlantic, the merry-go-round spins counterclockwise, so the westerlies lie far to the south and the trade winds cross from Angola to Brazil. - The North and South Pacific have their own spinning wheels, as does the southern Indian Ocean. - The winds of the northern part of the Indian Ocean are governed by the monsoon. ## The Ming Voyages, 1405-1433 - In 1400, the biggest ships and perhaps the best navigators were Chinese. - Under the Song, the Yuan, and then the Ming (1368-1644) dynasties, the Chinese had rapidly developed ship and navigation technology, and Chinese merchants had taken a large role in the booming trade between East and Southeast Asia. - The Ming maintained a state shipyard that employed between 20,000 and 30,000 workers. - Their biggest ships carried a thousand people. - Chinese tinkerers had invented the magnetic compass, and Chinese navigators used it more than sailors elsewhere. - Their maritime culture was developing rapidly, thanks to constant voyaging to the islands of Southeast Asia, to Japan, and to every coast in between. - By 1400, that maritime culture and Ming finances had reached a point at which they could support large, expensive, showy voyages to overawe just about everyone from Vietnam to East Africa. - Two crucial components of that maturing maritime culture were ship design and navigational tools. - Chinese mariners had long used sternpost rudders and double-hulled construction. - Rudders improved the steering of ships, and double hulls usually saved them from sinking if rammed or smashed on rocks. - Chinese sailors also used the space between hulls to carry fresh water. - During the Song dynasty, their seaborne trade links to the Indian Ocean had acquainted them with new rigging and sails—particularly the lateen sail common in Arab shipping, good for sailing into the wind. - Shipbuilders used these features, old and new, to design seagoing ships of 2,500 tons. - They also put small cannon on these huge ships. - As for navigation, Chinese sailors were already using printed sea manuals with star charts, as well as the compass, during the Song dynasty. ## Voyages of Zheng He, 1405-1433 - The Chinese admiral Zheng He led seven massive fleets into the Indian Ocean, following routes long familiar to merchants in these waters. - Zheng He and his captains knew how to ride the monsoon winds, navigate with star charts, and find safe harbors. - His routes extended to the far edges of the Indian Ocean world, the Arabian Peninsula and the Swahili coast. ## Zheng He Organized massive maritime expeditions - A possible purpose was to find and capture Yongle's nephew, who according to rumor had escaped his uncle's extermination campaign. - But the scale of the undertaking indicates that Yongle had additional motives. - As one contemporary put it, the emperor wanted to send his soldiers to "strange lands in order to make manifest the wealth and power" of China. - In 1405, Zheng He set sail from Suzhou with roughly 300 ships, newly built in the shipyards of Nanjing along the Yangzi. - They carried 28,000 men, both sailors and soldiers, a crew larger than the population of any city they would visit. - His biggest ships were gigantic, about 400 feet (120 m) by 160 feet (50 m) and displacing 20,000 tons—far larger than any yet built anywhere and 10 times the size of Columbus's flagship. - They were the largest wooden ships ever built. - Zheng He sailed well-traveled seas from China into the Indian Ocean. - He used persuasion, intimidation, and military power to oust unfriendly rulers in Sumatra and Sri Lanka and install replacements more willing to acknowledge Yongle's overlordship and pay him tribute. - Zheng He annihilated pirates or maybe just merchant princes who failed to show proper enthusiasm for the emperor and so earned the title "pirate" in Chinese accounts. ## Chinese Geographical Knowledge - This map made by the cartographer Wang Qi in 1607 indicates the extent, by then, of Chinese knowledge of the wider world. - Centered on China and the Pacific Ocean, it offers a remarkably accurate depiction of Eurasia, Africa, the Americas, and Antarctica. ## European Voyaging, 1400-1700 - At the same time that the Ming were gliding into the Indian Ocean, western Europeans were probing the Atlantic. - Some of them dreamed of sailing to the Indian Ocean too. - They lacked the massive state support that Zheng He had enjoyed, and the states that helped them could mobilize only a tiny fraction of the resources the Ming could. - These mariners were lucky if they could cobble together a tiny flotilla. - But European mariners usually had a good idea of where they were heading. - Navigational skill had accumulated slowly but surely over the centuries in Atlantic Europe. - In Iberia especially, the practical experience of sailors combined with Arab mathematics and astronomy to improve the art of navigation. - By the thirteenth century, European sailors used the compass to find their direction on cloudy days. - By the fourteenth, they had translated Arabic texts on the use of astrolabes to help determine latitude. - Soon they were authoring their own manuals on astrolabes—the English writer Geoffrey Chaucer penned one—and building the devices themselves. - But even perfect navigational skill would have meant little without seaworthy ships. ## Portuguese Caravel - Caravels like this one were the relatively small sailing ships used by Portuguese and other European explorers on long-distance voyages. - This mosaic appears near a sixteenth-century villa outside Lisbon, the Portuguese capital. ## European Mariners' Motives - Atlantic Europeans launched onto the high seas primarily in quest of wealth, fame, and the greater glory of their God. - They started by sailing south into unfamiliar waters, looking for a practical route to West African gold or Asian spices and silks, the most valuable trade goods they knew of. - Merchants from Italian city-states such as Venice and Genoa had tapped into these trades, acquiring gold in Morocco or Tunisia and spices in Egypt or Syria, after the goods had changed hands many times. - Merchants who could get these goods closer to the source could buy them for less and make a fortune by cutting out several middlemen. - The search for glory and fame also propelled European navigators. - Fifteenth-century Europeans, especially Iberians, were steeped in a culture of adventure and chivalry as proper male pursuits. - Owing in part to the centuries-long Reconquista—in which Christians retook Iberia from Muslim rulers—Iberian books, songs, poems, and folk tales celebrated the deeds of heroes who took daunting risks and either triumphed or, if they died young, at least won lasting fame. - Young males eager to vault several rungs up the social ladder learned that they could do so through acts of reckless heroism. ## Learning the Atlantic - After about 1200, European and Moroccan mariners sailed hundreds of miles west into the uncharted Atlantic. - By the fourteenth century, if not before, some stumbled across the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. - The Canaries' population, called the Guanches, descended from North African Berber settlers who had arrived in about 1000 BCE. - Madeira and the Azores were uninhabited. ## Early Exploration of the Atlantic, 1400-1480 - In the fifteenth century, Iberian mariners figured out how to use the winds to venture far out into the Atlantic and get home safely. - This accomplishment took navigation well beyond the familiar practice of hugging coastlines, and eventually led to successful crossings of the Atlantic and the discovery of routes linking the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. ## Columbus Crosses the Atlantic - In 1477, a ship broke up in a storm off the southern coast of Portugal. - Almost everyone aboard drowned, but a 23-year-old sailor swam ashore. - That sailor was Christopher Columbus. - Columbus was the son of a weaver from Genoa in northern Italy. - He was a bit of a dreamer, easily lost in popular literature with its tales of adventure. - He turned to the sea as a teenager, escaping the narrow horizons of an artisan's life in Genoa. - As a sailor, he first roamed the Mediterranean and then made forays into the Atlantic. - He became a trader too, and sometimes made lush profits in walrus tusk, whale blubber, and other items. - After he washed up in Portugal in 1477, he went to Lisbon, where he had a brother working as a mapmaker. - Through his brother, Columbus met people who told all sorts of tall tales about what lay over the western horizon. - Columbus was working in the sugar trade, shuttling between the eastern Mediterranean and the eastern Atlantic, when in the 1480s he began to peddle schemes for a voyage further west. - Sometimes he said he would find new islands, as profitable as the Canaries or Madeira. - Sometimes he said he would sail to China, which he claimed was a "few days" away. - He had learned of the equatorial trade winds blowing to the west from Africa's northwest shores, and of the westerlies (blowing to the east) at higher latitudes. - These prevailing winds, he figured, would allow a round-trip voyage to China. - They would also allow him, the weaver's son, to join the titled aristocracy, which seems to have been his primary ambition. - Columbus was at heart a social climber, willing to take great risks in his quest for status, wealth, and glory. ## Columbus's Landfall - In this 1493 engraving from La lettera dell'isole, Columbus's first account of his voyage, King Ferdinand observes from afar as Columbus and his crew land on an island in the Caribbean. - The island's indigenous inhabitants appear to flee. ## The Cantino Planishpere - This Portuguese map was drawn by hand in 1502. - Its rendering of the African coastline is especially detailed, an indication of how quickly and how well Portuguese mapmakers and navigators accumulated geographical information. ## Da Gama Sails to India - In 1497, the same year that Cabot sailed, the Portuguese court sponsored an expedition of four ships and 170 men under the command of a low-ranking provincial noble named Vasco da Gama. - A few years before, a Portuguese captain, Bartholomew Dias, had sailed from Lisbon to the shores of South Africa and returned safely. - Dias discovered the belt of westerly winds in the Southern Hemisphere that enabled ships to sidestep adverse currents and ride into the Indian Ocean from the South Atlantic. - Trusting this information, da Gama sailed way out into the South Atlantic to catch the westerlies and made it safely to the tip of South Africa and into the Indian Ocean. - He worked his way up Africa's southeast coast and soon found evidence, in the form of Indian cloth and glassware, that he was where he hoped to be in the Indian Ocean. - The ultimate prize, a practical route to and from the rich trade of Asia, lay almost within da Gama's grasp. - He and his men resorted to piracy and the kidnapping of local pilots to help them find their way along East Africa's coast. - On the shore of what is now Kenya, they found a pilot who showed them the easiest route to Calicut, a trading city on the coast of India, where the Portuguese hoped to find—as one of da Gama's captains put it—Christians and spices. ## Vasco da Gama - A sixteenth-century Flemish tapestry illustrates the moment of encounter between da Gama and his men and the people of the Indian trading port of Calicut—which actually looked much less like a European fortified city than this artist imagined. ## Vasco da Gama - The Portuguese expedition under da Gama had two main goals: to win glory, papal favor, and some practical political advantage by finding Christian allies somewhere in the Indian Ocean world, friends who would help in struggles against Muslim monarchs of North Africa and Southwest Asia. - The Crown also hoped to boost its finances by trading in spices, peppers, cloves, nutmeg, and more, items that were plentiful in India but scarce and expensive in Europe. - Some Italian traders had done well in the spice trade, linking Venetian markets, through Egypt or Syria, with producers in India and further afield in Southeast Asia. - The Portuguese hoped to command this trade by sailing around Africa and going directly to the source of spices. - Da Gama encountered no politically useful Christians in Calicut, but he found plenty of spice traders. - Da Gama and his crew did not linger long in India. - Their trade goods didn't interest the merchants of Calicut. - The local prince wanted da Gama to pay customs fees like any trader, whereas da Gama regarded himself as a royal emissary and above such requirements. - After three disappointing months, the Portuguese left, kidnapping a few Indians and sailing back toward Africa. - Portuguese-Indian relations were off to a rocky start. - Da Gama left in a huff, pointing his ships' prows into the teeth of the summer monsoon. - The route that had taken three weeks with the winds at his back now took him four months on the return. - Half the crew died before they reached Africa, and only 55 remained alive when da Gama returned to Lisbon more than two years after departing. - He had sailed more than 25,000 miles (40,000 km), equal to the circumference of the Earth. - He had confirmed the understanding of the winds of the South Atlantic and had pioneered a practical, if slow, route between western Europe and South Asia. - And he had brought back enough spices to inspire investors, especially the Portuguese Crown, to send him back again. ## Navigation in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, 1492-1500 - This map shows the new routes pioneered by Columbus, Cabot, da Gama, and Cabral, which began the process of tying together the coasts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and South Asia. - The Line of Tordesillas, established in 1494, divided all "new" lands between Portugal and Spain. ## Ming Giraffe - Giraffes are native to Africa, but here one appears as an illustration in a Ming manuscript indicating the reach of Chinese maritime voyaging during the Ming period. - Like other luxury goods exotic animals could be brought back from voyages as status objects and prizes. ## Biological Globalization, 1492-1800 - One of the most important consequences of the discovery of the oceans and their prevailing winds, and the establishment of regular traffic linking the world's shores, was a surge in biological globalization. - This process reshuffled the continents' flora and fauna, bringing both searing new epidemics and useful new food crops to many peoples. - It changed the world's demographic balance and altered political and economic fortunes. - By and large, it eased life for millions in Eurasia and Africa, and ended it prematurely for millions in the Americas and Oceania. - It provides an excellent example of the fact that in world history major consequences often flow from events in ways that no one intended or foresaw. - As earlier chapters have noted, over the centuries people moved plants, animals, and microbes around the world. - Sometimes they did it on purpose, like the first settlers of North America who brought dogs with them, or the Polynesians who ferried crops and animals to uninhabited Pacific islands. - Sometimes they did it by accident, like the introduction of maize and potatoes into Europe. ## Magellan Crosses the Pacific - At the end of the fifteenth century, Spain and Portugal signed what could be the most presumptuous treaty of all time, the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494). - It drew a line halfway between the American lands Columbus had visited and Portuguese territories known as the Cape Verde Islands off the West African coast. - Spain claimed all new lands (meaning new to Spaniards) west of the line, and Portugal all new lands to the east. - With the Treaty of Tordesillas in place, once Portuguese vessels were trading on the Indian Ocean, Spain acquired a motive for trying to cross the Pacific: to gain direct access to precious spices. - No one knew how big the Pacific was, and many thought the distance from America to the East Indies—the islands of Indonesia where by 1515 Portuguese merchants were buying spices directly—could not be far. - The Molucca Islands, in particular, where nutmeg and cloves grew, excited European imaginations as if they were diamond mines. - The Treaty of Tordesillas gave Spain claim to lands west of the Americas, which, if the claim extended far enough, would include the spice islands. ## Magellan's Circumnavigation - The Genoese cartographer Battista Agnese made this map of the world in 1540, showing the route Magellan took across the Pacific and Indian Oceans. - The extent of Portuguese and other European navigation enabled Agnese to produce detailed renderings of the world's coastlines. ## Namban Screen - This six-fold Japanese screen from around 1600 likely illustrates the arrival of a Portuguese merchant ship in Japan. - Portuguese sea captains began to visit Japan in 1543, bringing Christianity, guns, and Chinese silks and porcelain. - They bought thousands of Japanese slaves to sell in Macao, Goa, or other Portuguese enclaves until the trade ended soon after 1600. ## Manueline Architecture - The Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon, on which construction began in 1501, is a characteristic example of Manueline architecture. - The braided pattern encircling the midsection of the column at the center of this double arch is intended to evoke ships' ropes.