A Concise History of the World: A New World of Connections (1500-1800)

4 A new world of connections,...

4 A new world of connections, 1500 ce–1800 ce In 1503, the Florentine trader and explorer Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) wrote to his former employers, the Medici banking family, detailing in vivid language the mapping expedition spon- sored by the Portuguese in which he had been involved over the previous several years. This voyage sailed along the coast of a large land mass across the Atlantic Ocean from Portugal, which Vespucci in the opening paragraph of the letter called a “new world, because none of these countries were known to our ancestors” and extolled as “a continent full of animals and more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa, and even more temperate and pleasant than any other region known to us.” This letter and a subsequent even longer one were published many times in different European languages over the next several years. Among those who read them was the Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. German map-maker Martin Waldseemüller (1470?–1522?), who in 1507 printed a globe and a giant wall map of the world in which the land mass Vespucci had helped map was not connected to any other. Waldseemüller gave the southern part of this landmass a name: America, taken from the Latin form of Vespucci’s first name. He justified this with the comment, “I see no reason why, and by what right, this land of America should not be named after that wise and ingenious man who discovered it, Amerigo, since both Europe and Asia had been allotted the names of women.” (Europa and her mother Asia were Greek demi-goddesses.) By just a few years later, map-makers—including Waldseemüller—and others knew this was wrong, and that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) had reached 210 Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE 211 the continent before Vespucci; they wanted to omit “America” from future maps, but the name had already stuck. The Flemish cartog- rapher, mathematician, and instrument maker Gerardus Mercator (1512–94), who invented the projection most commonly used to show the globe on a flat surface, used the word America on his world map of 1538, and later the designations “North” and “South” were added. To the people who already lived there, of course, Vespucci’s designation of what he had mapped as a “New World” was no more accurate than Waldseemüller’s claim that Vespucci was the first European to see it. The idea that any European “discovered” islands and continents that were already full of people is also now seen as silly, and many historians avoid using either “discovery” or “New World.” Biologists, epidemiologists, agronomists, and envir- onmental scientists do use “New World” and its counterpart “Old World,” however, as spatial terms to designate parts of the globe that had been cut off from each other for tens of thousands of years, so that their biospheres evolved independently. By crossing the Atlantic and then the Pacific, European ships linked the two worlds, which allowed the transfer of plants, animals, germs, and people in new directions over vast distances, with consequences that were both disastrous and beneficial. In 1972 the environmental historian Alfred Crosby termed this process the “Columbian Exchange,” and noted it began with Columbus’ very first voyage. Columbus took ordinary and luxury goods with him, along with men and boys, a group of whom he left in the Caribbean. (They all apparently died, Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. though there are legends that some did not.) He brought back what seemed most exotic: parrots, feathers, cotton cloth, tobacco, rubber, perhaps the pineapple, and several Taino boys captured on the islands. European mariners and adventurers may not have dis- covered a new world, but they created one. Thus for the study of human beings, “new world” might best be understood in terms of time rather than space. Although interregio- nal interaction had increased with the expansion of the Mongol Empire and the Indian Ocean trading network, the scale of the contacts between peoples was much greater after 1492 than it had been before. Many historians see this as the beginning of a new era in world history, the “early modern.” Like “New World,” “early Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  212 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE modern” has been criticized as hopelessly Eurocentric, implying there is only one path to modernity, that taken by Europe. And it has been criticized for emphasizing change, when throughout the period 80–90 percent of the world’s population remained peasants, who continued to be exploited by their landlords and the state. But for world history “early modern” is useful, as there were parallel and interwoven processes of dramatic change going on in many places. This chapter surveys some of these developments, beginning with the spread of disease, the transfers of plants and animals that were part of the Columbian Exchange, and the establishment of colonial empires through exploration and war. Trade brought in new types of foods, drinks, and addictive substances, many of which were produced on plantations worked by slave labor. These products were often consumed in new urban social settings and cultural institutions, where men—and a few women—shared ideas as well as commodities. Religious reforms and reinvigorations heightened spiritual zeal and created new arenas of conflict, as well as sharpening those created by rivalries over territory or resources. The early modern world was a new one of global connections, in which goods, ideas, and people—including peasants and slaves— moved and mixed, changing social and economic patterns and creating novel cultural forms. th e sp re a d of d i s e a s e Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. Prime among the disastrous effects of the Columbian Exchange was the spread of disease, which began with Columbus’ second voyage in 1493. This expedition was huge, with about 1,500 men, includ- ing adventurers, soldiers, artisans, and farmers who brought with them seeds for European crops and farm animals. This voyage set a pattern that would be followed in many other places. The ships landed on the large island of Hispaniola, which had a population between 400,000 and 600,000 engaged in farming cultivated plots. The Spanish were mostly interested in gold, and they captured, tortured, and killed the indigenous Taino in their search for precious metals. Many went back to Spain disappointed after a few weeks, and many more died of starvation, intestinal diseases from drinking Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  The spread of disease 213 the local water, or diseases they had brought from Europe with them, which most likely included malaria, typhus, influenza, and perhaps smallpox. Taino died even more readily from these, and from other Old World diseases against which they had no resist- ance, such as measles, mumps, diphtheria, bubonic and pneumonic plague, and scarlet fever. After a particularly virulent outbreak of smallpox throughout the Caribbean in 1518, very few Taino were left on Hispaniola, and the number of indigenous people on other islands had fallen dramatically. Once Europeans reached the mainland of Central and South America in the early 1500s, diseases often spread ahead of actual groups of soldiers, when just a few native people came into contact with a Spanish force and then returned to their home village. People became sick and died quickly, so that when European troops got to the area later, they no longer found places “more populous than our Europe, or Asia, or Africa” that Vespucci had reported in 1503. Spanish troops led by Hernando Cortés (1485–1547) carried small- pox into Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire, when they were briefly allowed into the city in 1519, and this invisible ally— combined with their very visible allies, the Tlaxcalan and other native peoples who opposed the Aztecs—allowed the Spanish to defeat the weakened Aztecs. Smallpox also killed the powerful Inca ruler Huayna Capac in the mid 1520s, setting off a civil war between his sons that allowed Spanish forces to conquer the Inca Empire. Explorers, conquerors, and settlers who moved into the Americas Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. traveled under a Spanish flag, and then those of other European nations, but they included people from a variety of places, including free and enslaved Africans, and by the end of the sixteenth century Asians brought by Spanish galleons that took American silver to the Spanish colony of the Philippines and returned with silk and other Asian products. Thus Old World diseases mixed in a deadly stew. Although it is impossible to determine the total population of the Americas in 1492, the best estimates put it between 40 and 70 million; estimates of the total decline within the first century after European contact is about 90 percent. Mexico and Peru, whose combined population was greater than the rest of the Americas all together, suffered the greatest drop. War, famine, labor Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  214 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE 4.1 Aztec people die of smallpox, in an illustration from the General History of the Things of New Spain, a 2,400-page book documenting Aztec society, culture, and history written and illustrated in the last half of the sixteenth century by indigenous men under the direction of the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún. The information in the book came from village and city elders, recorded in Aztec pictorial writing and then expanded in Nahuatl using Latin letters. Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. exploitation, forced migrations, and enslavement were responsible for some of this, but Old World diseases were the primary killer. In 1650 the majority of people in the New World were still indigenous, but disease and other killers, combined with increasing migration, changed that. Geochemists and earth systems scientists have recently suggested that deaths in the Americas may have also changed the earth’s climate. Wooded areas that had been cleared for agriculture or modified by fire to make hunting better became reforested when no one was left to engage in these tasks. The trees then pulled Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  The spread of disease 215 carbon dioxide from the air—which is traceable in ice cores from Antarctica—reducing the heat-trapping capacity of the atmosphere and cooling the climate, the opposite of what is happening today. Other factors, including reduced sunspot and increased volcanic activity, and changes in the Pacific climatic phenomenon known as El Niño, contributed to the cooling climate as well, and together these created what climatologists have termed the “Little Ice Age,” from about 1500 (or perhaps beginning as early as 1300) to about 1850, with several particularly cold periods within this. Evidence for fluctuations in weather and climate comes from the natural world, such as tree rings, volcanic deposits in the polar ice caps, and layers of pollen in bogs and marshes, and from human records, including chronicles, letters, government and business documents, inscriptions, and recorded weather data. Complaining about the weather seems to be a universal human trait, but together these natural and human sources point to a period of unstable climate especially in the seventeenth century, with more extreme cold in the northern hemisphere and more extreme droughts in Africa and in South and Southeast Asia. Climate extremes contributed to crop failures, which led in turn to increased mortality from hunger and the various illnesses to which malnourished people are more vulnerable. Because grain or other staples were bulky and heavy, it was generally impossible to transport them to a famine-stricken area at a price that people could afford. It was easier for people—even weakened people—to move than for food to do so, so hunger led families and individuals to Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. migrate. Whatever the scale of the famine, governments generally could do little to alleviate them, and often made them worse by prohibiting the export of food or refusing to lower taxes, which peasants paid as a certain amount of their harvest every year. In many parts of Eurasia throughout the early modern period, peasant families paid as much as half of their harvest to their landlords and the state, even in famine years. Famine was thus a social phenom- enon as much as it was a natural one. Famine also led to reduced fertility, as ill-nourished women are less likely to become pregnant, carry a fetus to term, or be able to breast-feed successfully. Nursing mothers need far more calories per Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  216 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE day than do other people, and both they and their infants die at a disproportionate rate during times of scarcity. These dismal realities are reflected in death and burial records and in human remains themselves, which can provide information about cause of death, nutrition levels, chronic illnesses, dietary practices, and many other aspects of life and death. Just as archeologists who study the earliest periods of human history are increasingly relying on high-tech methods invented to help solve crimes or make medical diagnoses in contemporary society, such as the analysis of trace elements or DNA, so are historians of the early modern (and modern) period. This frees them from having to rely on written sources alone and allows for comparisons and calculations on a wide scale. The impact of diseases that went west across the Atlantic is clear, and a few may have traveled in the other direction; historical epidemiologists used to think that one of these was syphilis, which emerged first in Italy in 1493 in an especially virulent form, but now they are less certain about its origins. However syphilis got to Europe, this was an era in which dynastic ambitions and religion combined to provoke nearly constant warfare, which assured it would be spread. Italy was a battleground for the aspirations of many rulers, and decades of war followed a French invasion of the peninsula in 1494. Soldiers fighting in Italy took syphilis with them when they returned home, which the French labeled the “Italian disease” and most of the rest of Europe the “French pox.” Armies carried other diseases around Europe as well, including plague, smallpox and influenza, as did migrants and refugees. Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. Variations in vulnerability to disease also shaped society in China, though this was less dramatic than in the Americas. In the seventeenth century, the leaders of the Jurchens, one of the steppe peoples who lived to the north of China, changed their name to Manchu and began a campaign of conquest. In 1644, after a rebel- lion had toppled the ruling Ming dynasty, the Manchus captured Beijing, and established a new dynasty, the Qing. Over the next several decades they fought to establish their authority throughout China against Ming loyalists and rebels. Their ability to do so was affected by smallpox, which was endemic in China but to which the Manchus had no resistance. They made efforts to isolate important people from the disease by moving them whenever there was an Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  The spread of disease 217 outbreak, but the second Qing emperor himself died of smallpox in 1661, and his successor was chosen in part because he had already survived the disease. That emperor, the Kangxi emperor, would go on to rule for sixty-one years. Among many innovations, he adopted the use of variolation (from variola, the Latin term for smallpox) to inoculate the children of the imperial family against smallpox. In variolation, material taken from the sores of a smallpox sufferer was breathed into the nostrils or scratched into the skin of a healthy person to induce what was hoped would be a mild case of the disease that would provide lifelong immunity. This procedure was used in the sixteenth century in China (and perhaps earlier), and also in West Africa and the Ottoman Empire. In 1721, variolation was brought to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montague, whose husband was the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and who herself had been scarred by smallpox, but it was greeted with suspicion and never became widespread. Despite the possibility of preventive measures, however, small- pox outbreaks continued in China and the surrounding areas as well as elsewhere. In the middle of the eighteenth century, for example, the Qianlong Emperor (ruled 1735–96) carried out suc- cessful campaigns to incorporate Central Asia into China. One of these, against the Zunghar khanate, was made much easier because a smallpox epidemic had recently wiped out hundreds of thousands of people, perhaps 40 percent of the Zunghar population. The rest either fled or were taken into areas ruled by others, or they were killed by Qing armies, sometimes in an intentional extermination Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. campaign ordered by the Qianlong emperor, who wanted to des- troy the Zunghars as a people as well as a state. Zunghar women were given to Manchu soldiers or their allies as bonded servants or concubines. In major epidemics and in smaller ones, disease killed more women and children than adult men, which meant that population levels were depressed for decades. Disease and famine also made people themselves depressed, or as they termed it in this era before the invention of psychological terminology, distraught, sad, full of grief, miserable, and mournful. Some wrote of their feelings, and others acted on them, committing suicide, giving up their children to monasteries or foundling homes, and marrying late or not marrying Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  218 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE at all—which further reduced population levels—all of which were also noted by contemporary commentators. Clergy in Scotland during a famine in the 1630s wrote that some of their parishioners had “desperately run into the sea and drowned themselves,” while an official in Shandong province in China wrote in 1670 that “the area was so wasted and barren” that “every day one would hear that someone had hanged himself from a beam.” Historians used to think that because so many children died at very young ages people became callous or indifferent to their offspring; that was true in some cases, but there is also evidence that mothers and fathers were deeply saddened, sometimes to the point of madness, by the illness or deaths of their children. Even those forced to abandon children for economic reasons could be torn apart by their decision; a note pinned to a child left at a London foundling home in 1709 read, “I humbly beg of you gentlemen whosever hand this unfortunate child shall fall into that you will take care that will become a fellow creature... pray believe that it is extreme necessity that makes me do this.” co l o n i z at i o n , em pi r e s , a n d t r ad e Soldiers, traders, workers, and settlers traveled the same routes that diseases did as they forged a new world. In the sixteenth century, Spain built the largest colonial empire in the western hemisphere, although Portugal also established a colony in Brazil. The Spanish Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. and Portuguese set up agricultural plantations, built Christian churches, and mined precious metals in empires with mixed popu- lations of Europeans, Africans, and indigenous people. Gold and silver mined in the Americas, especially from the “silver mountain” of Potosí high in the Andes, where tens of thousands of indigenous people were forced to work deep in tunnels, fueled the expansion of global trading. This created enormous profits for European mer- chants, and contributed to a long period of rising prices economic historians label the “price revolution.” Spain also established colo- nial rule in the Philippines, and Portugal set up small colonies along the west and east coast of Africa and at Goa, Sri Lanka, Malacca, Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  Colonization, empires, and trade 219 Macao, and a few other places in Asia. Overseas conquests gave western Europe new territories and sources of wealth, and also new confidence in its technical and spiritual supremacy. In eastern Europe and across Asia, conquests in the sixteenth century created large land-based empires, many of which also fostered trade. In 1453 the Ottomans took Constantinople (which they renamed Istanbul) and continued to conquer by land and sea in all directions; by the early seventeenth century they were rulers of about a third of Europe and half the shores of the Mediterranean. They became the official Protectors of the Two Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina, and challenged Portuguese control of Indian Ocean trade routes, sending trade ventures across the Indian Ocean down the coast of Africa and eastward to Sumatra. The Shi’ite Safavid dynasty came to power in Persia (today’s Iran) in 1501, and under Shah ‘Abbas I (r. 1587–1629) built a spectacular new capital at Isfahan, where artisans produced textiles, carpets, and metalwork, and foreign merchants gathered to trade for these. In South Asia, the Mughals, Central Asian rulers who claimed descent from Chingghis Khan (“Mughal” is the Persian word for Mongol), created a huge empire through war and alliances, including alliances by marriage to regional dynasties. India remained the world’s largest producer of textiles, and Indian merchant networks stretched from China to Africa. The decline of Mongol power in West and Central Asia allowed the rulers of Moscow to expand their holdings, and they conquered their neighbors to create a vast Russian state under autocratic rulers who called themselves tsars (the Russian word Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. for caesars), a title they adopted to link with earlier Roman emperors. They allied with the high nobles, or boyars, and increas- ingly imposed serfdom on all peasants, binding them to the land, which also happened in much of eastern Europe. States created in Africa during the sixteenth century, including Songhai, Benin, Buganda, and Kongo, were smaller than these Asian empires, but they also had well-established trading centers. Those on the coasts attracted Portuguese merchants, who often set up their fortified trading posts nearby. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought the further expansion of empires and new patterns of conquest, colonization, Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53. Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. ARCTIC OCEAN ARCTIC OCEAN Inuit Saami Paleo-Siberian Peoples Inuit Iceland Samoyeds Sweden Russian Norway Tlingit Scotland Principalities Sabir Khanate Subarctic Tungusic Peoples Subarctic Denmark Kazan England G D of Khanate Lithuania Holy Riazan Pacific Roman Poland Crimean Turkish Northwest Plateau Kingdom Empire Hungary Khanate Tribes Oirats Khanate Great Northeast of Spain France Chagatai Great Plains Wallachia Shaybanids Khanate Ainu Basin Portugal Naples Ottoman Sultanate (Mongol) PA C I F I C O C E A N Californian Southwest AT L A N T I C Sicily Timurids Japan Southeast Kashmir Fez OCEAN Mamluk Tibetan Tribes Ming Multan Delhi Nepal Tuareg Empire Sultanate Sind Sultanate Berber Tribes Nomadic Bengal Ava Tarascans Maya Taino Tribes Oman Takrur Gondwana Taiwanese Tribes Yemen Gujarat Laos Dai Viet Hawaiian Carib Songhay Kanem Aztecs Empire Fartak Pegu Siam Empire Ethiopia Micronesian Champa Akon States Somali States Adal Cambodia Luo Somali Vigayanagar Bantu Cushites States Empire Ceylon Muiscas Empire Peoples Peoples Papuans of Mali Malaccan Sultanate Malays Melanesian Kakongo Interlastrine States Interlas Ngoyo Malay States Chinchas Kongo Swahili Kingdoms Bantu Peoples Pajajaran Inca Maravi Malagasyan Peoples Polynesian AT L A N T I C Torwa Australian Aboriginal Peoples OCEAN Khoisan Peoples PA C I F I C O C E A N Araucania ns INDIAN OCEAN Maori SOUTHERN OCEAN SOUTHERN OCEAN Map 4.1 World map 1500  Colonization, empires, and trade 221 and trade. Under the Manchu Qing dynasty China expanded into Tibet and Central Asia and asserted its influence over Korea, Vietnam, and Burma. In Japan after a long period of civil war military leaders known as shoguns from the Tokugawa family re- established order and limited the presence of Western merchants, though Japanese silver continued to flow throughout East and Southeast Asia, bringing in silk and other luxuries to growing cities. The Russians expanded across northern Asia into Siberia, an imperialist expansion that brought them great natural resources, and took over the eastern rim of the Baltic from Sweden, where they built a new capital, St. Petersburg. In western Africa, trade in slaves handled by Africans and Europeans grew dramatic- ally, with major consequences for local social and political structures. In the Caribbean and the lands on its borders, many European powers contested Spanish dominance. Beginning in 1550, the English crown licensed private ships to prey on Spanish shipping and attack Spanish colonies. This government-licensed and-regulated piracy brought glory to successful captains such as Francis Drake and returned a huge profit to the merchants and landowners who invested in it, making them supporters of overseas expansion and naval power. The English, French, Swedes, and Dutch established their own colonies in the Caribbean and along the North American coast in the 1620s and 1630s, and then pushed further inland. Permanent private companies were established in England, the Netherlands, and elsewhere in Europe to support these ventures, which provided finan- Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. cial backing, ships, personnel, and military force, as did similar East India Companies licensed to trade and raid in Asia. They attempted to monopolize trade, although in a place like the Caribbean where colonies were close to one another—often on the same island— smuggling was endemic, and sometimes involved the very govern- ment and company officials who were supposed to prevent it. Piracy was also common, conducted both by licensed privateers and by buccaneers, multiethnic groups of former soldiers, escaped slaves, refugees, criminals, and others who attacked silver-laden ships from remote bases. The Dutch won their independence from Spain through warfare, and established more colonies, trading centers, and plantations in Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  222 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE South Africa and Southeast Asia as well as the Americas, taking Malacca from the Portuguese and much of Java from local rulers to gain pre-eminence in the Indian Ocean basin; in the 1650s they also annexed the Swedish colonies in North America. In the 1660s a second wave of colonies was founded in North America, especially by England. English forces conquered New Amsterdam and the rest of the Dutch holdings, renaming these New York, and founded South Carolina and Georgia to serve as a buffer between existing English colonies in the mid-Atlantic states and New England and Spanish colonies in Florida. The French moved into the Great Lakes and central river valley regions, and in 1699 founded Louisiana at the mouth of the Mississippi to prevent either the Spanish or the British from controlling trade with the interior. French colonies never attracted as many immigrants as did the British colonies, however. By 1750 the entire population of New France probably included only 100,000 Europeans and Africans, while the British North American colonies may have had as many as 2 million inhab- itants. Wars in the last half of the eighteenth century gave Britain many of France’s overseas colonies, and it became the major power in the Indian Ocean, eclipsing the Dutch. Although Britain lost much of North America with the American War of Independence, in 1787 it established a penal colony in Australia (where it sent convicts because it could no longer ship them to America), and was on its way to establishing the world’s largest sea-based empire. Britain maintained a standing navy that now promised to end piracy and smuggling, and claimed the right to board any ship to Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. enforce this. (See Map 4.2.) Just as land- and sea-based empires expanded, so did global trade, fueling a “consumer revolution” especially in Europe and European households in the colonies, as wealthier households bought imported luxuries and the less well off cheaper imports or locally produced knock-offs. Millions of pieces of Chinese porcelain made in the inland city of Jingdezhen were transported to Guangzhou, carried on ships to Amsterdam and London, and then exported to Jamaica, Boston, Berlin, and Moscow. Calico cloth made by village residents in the Gujarati area of northwest India went to Europe, and also to the Senegambia in western Africa, where it was traded to African merchants for slaves and for the gum of the acacia tree. Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  Colonial and imperial territories Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. Map 4.2 World map 1783 Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  224 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE Acacia gum was used in Britain and France for papermaking and for producing calicoes that Europeans hoped might eventually compete with those of India. These new consumer goods were not worn or used simply by Europeans, however. Wealthy female traders in West Africa combined items of European clothing with their existing dress to create new styles, and calico was one of the many items promised “in perpetuity” to Native American tribes in treaties with British and later American authorities. Tokugawa Japan experienced a similar consumer revolution in its large cities, where imported luxuries from China joined brocade, lacquerware, and porcelain made by local artisans for the wealthy, along with less expensive imitations for those with more style than cash. Prestige goods had separated elites from everyone else since the Neolithic, but now increasing numbers of urban residents could have at least a few of these, and they paid attention to changing fashions in dress and household goods. Commerce in the Atlantic is often described as a “triangle trade” linking Europe, Africa, and the Americas, and that in the Pacific as a line from Mexico to China through the Philippines, but no geometrical figure can accurately capture the many lines of interaction. Plantations and the global trade network were essential parts of the expanding capitalist economic system. Economic historians often joke about the phrase “the rise of capitalism,” as it is invoked to describe quite varied developments over a long period of time. No matter where you look, capitalism always seems to be rising, seemingly independent of human agents, rather like bread Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. dough. Some of this expansionism comes from the elastic meaning of capitalism, which includes investment in property and the materials used to make or provide goods and services (what econo- mists call the “means of production”), wage labor, the use of money to make more money, financial institutions such as banks, and complex forms of economic organization. As we saw in earlier chapters, all of these were present to some degree in many agricul- tural societies, but they became increasingly important in the trading centers of Europe, China, Japan, India, and parts of the Muslim world during the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries, with income derived from capitalist business ventures Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  Colonization, empires, and trade 225 joining landholding as a major form of wealth and creating new avenues for social mobility. Capitalism developed first in long- distance trade—this is often termed “mercantile capitalism” — and then in production. Trade depends to a great deal on trust, on relying on those who sell, transport, and buy goods, or who borrow and loan money, to act honestly and fairly. Not surprisingly, many firms thus began as family companies or among groups that shared close cultural connections. The word “company” actually conveys this, as it comes from the Italian word compagnie, which means “bread together,” i.e. sharing bread. In Europe, the Medici family of Florence and the Fugger family of Augsburg became fabulously wealthy as bankers and merchants, with branches in many cities that loaned money to rulers as well as urban residents. Their most prominent members, Lorenzo “the Magnificent” de Medici (1449–92) and Jacob “the Rich” Fugger (1459–1525) were also patrons of the arts, commissioning paintings, collecting sculpture, and supporting musicians and writers. Economic growth laid the material basis for the Italian Renaissance, as rich, social-climbing merchants and bankers joined popes and princes to spend vast sums to glorify themselves and their families, hiring artists, archi- tects, sculptors, furniture-makers, and metalsmiths to create beau- tiful buildings and objects. Family connections predominated in business elsewhere as well. In Japan, the family of Konoike Shinroku began as makers of sake, then became rice shippers and bankers, loaning money to local Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. nobles throughout Japan and turning swamps into rice paddies. Armenian Christians in the city of Julfa in the Ottoman Empire (now in Azerbaijan) established family firms that traded across Asia. In 1603, the city was captured by the Safavid ruler ‘Abbas I, who decided he could not hold it so burnt it to the ground and deported the Armenians to “New Julfa,” a city he built for them right next to his new capital at Isfahan. From New Julfa, the Armenians built even more extensive trade networks that extended from Guangzhou to London, and into the Americas. Here they sometimes settled permanently, building homes and churches, though they returned to New Julfa to marry, and kin networks became denser and more Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  226 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. 4.2 This detail from a Chinese porcelain bowl shows a somewhat romanticized view of the manufacturing process of porcelain itself, which involved shaping, painting, glazing and firing. Blue-and-white porcelain using imported Persian or local cobalt came to be mass produced in China, much of it made specifically for the export trade. interwoven. Most Armenian merchants were multilingual, but they wrote letters and records in a dialect of Armenian that few outsiders could read, thus protecting their trade secrets. Heavily capitalized mercantile firms in India, many from the Gujarat area of the Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  Colonization, empires, and trade 227 northwest, were also organized along family and caste lines, and those in Chinese cities and among Jews relied on connections among relatives. The merchants who traveled were almost all men, and the heads of large family firms were as well, although female family members sometimes invested money they had inherited or acquired in busi- ness ventures. Occasionally circumstances allowed a widow who did not have adult sons to play a more active role. The Mendes family of Portugal (later known as the Nasi family) was forcibly converted from Judaism by the rulers of Portugal, fled to the Nether- lands, and established large-scale banking operations in Antwerp. Gracia Nasi (1510–68), the widow of the firm’s founder, ran the family business from Antwerp, Venice, Ferrara, and eventually Istanbul, making an alliance with the Ottoman sultan Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520–66) for trading and financial privileges. She reconverted to Judaism, and established an “underground rail- road” to get Jews out of places where they were being persecuted by Christian rulers, convincing Süleyman to grant her a long-term lease on property in Greece where these refugees could resettle. Like Lorenzo de Medici and Jacob Fugger, Gracia Nasi patronized learn- ing and the arts, especially the publication of Hebrew books, and her nephew became a close adviser to the sultan and the governor of several territories. Money made in trade was invested in land in many places, which was expected to make a profit. Landowners encouraged or forced the peasants who farmed their land to raise cash crops alongside or Copyright © 2015. Cambridge University Press. All rights reserved. instead of staple food crops, or they switched to raising sheep or other animals if this would generate a higher income. Land that had been held collectively or by customary use became private property, as happened in North America as European settlers moved west- ward and occupied Native American land and in Central Asia as Chinese settlers also moved west and began farming land that had been the grazing grounds of nomadic pastoralists. This also happened in Europe and other long-settled places as common lands such as forests, meadows, and marshes were enclosed, that is, fenced off into privately owned fields and sheep-runs no longer accessible to poorer people who had used them to raise a few animals or gather firewood. Capitalist trade and production raised overall Wiesner-Hanks, M. E. (2015). A concise history of the world. Cambridge University Press. Created from northwu-ebooks on 2023-08-12 12:17:53.  228 A new world of connections, 1500 CE–1800 CE wealth and brought a greater array of goods to many people, but not everyone shared in these benefits. Capitalism developed in many places and involved many different groups, but among Europeans it became intimately related to colo- nialism. Capitalist merchants often provided the impetus and the equipment for colonization, and many colonies were established to be both sources of raw materials and markets for trade goods. Gaining and defending colonies was too expensive for family firms, and large joint-stock companies of unrelated individuals were estab- lished, a business form that was later adapted to production as well as trade. Colonies provided income to Europe, which was partly responsible for the divergence in power and wealth between Europe