Chapter 1 The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400

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• The Rise of the West.

  • This concept appeared shortly after the Spanish conquest of the Americas, during the Italian Renaissance of the sixteenth century.
  • provides a rationale and storyline that pretends to explain both the modern world and why it is defined by European features.

• The ‘‘Great Dying’’.

  • in Mexico, nearly 90% of the population (twenty-five million) succumbed to European diseases (smallpox and influenza).
  • Europeans were surprised to see how Spaniards defeated big and wealthy civilizations like the Incas and Aztecs.

• Birth.

  • we are born and raised under circumstances we don't choose or make
  • this including both the human and natural worlds.

• The human world.

  • The world is composed of social, economic, political, and cultural structures.
  • These structures change very slowly.
  • Rarely the change can be made as a result of conscious action on the part of a single person.
  • The change is mostly a result of huge processes that are hardly detectable, by large social movements, or historical conjunctures

• The Biological Old Regime.

  • the number of people existing on the earth is an indicator of the success of humans in creating material conditions
  • there are tremendous variations in time and place of population dynamics

• The Weight of Numbers.

  • Today there are 7 billion people on earth but in 1400 there were only 370 million people just 6 percent of the actual number
  • in 1800, the population grew to 950 million
  • in the 400-year period between 1400 to 1800 as much as 80 percent of that population, were farming peasants who produced food for themselves and the rest of the population
  • The world was extremely rural and the ability to produce food was a constant constraint to the people alive
  • For most of that period, the population rose and fell in great waves lasting centuries
  • we can see three great waves of population increase and decrease over the past one thousand years.
  • beginning about 900-1000 CE the population rose until 1300, crashing around 1350 as a result of the black death.
  • another period of increase began in 1400 and lasted until the mid-seventeenth-century decline.
  • the third advance started around 1700, and has yet to halt, population experts expect it to top out by about 2050 at 9 to 9.5 billion people.

• Climate Change.

  • The connections between climate change and human population dynamics are complex.
  • Variations in temperature, radiation, and rainfall affect all growing things, trees as well as wheat or rice.
  • Long-term cooling trends could thus seriously shrink the food supply and hence the ability of a society to sustain a given population, leading to population declines.
  • warming conditions could mean larger harvests and a growing human population.

• Population Density and Civilization

  • The 380 million people living in 1400 clustered in very few pockets of
    high density.
  • of the sixty million square miles of dry land people lived on just 4.25 million square miles, the 7 percent of the dry land, the reason being that the rest of the land was covered by wetlands, steppe, desert, or ice.
  • those densely populated regions corresponded to fifteen highly developed civilizations, the most notable being Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Indochina, India, Islamic West Asia, Europe, Aztec, and Inca.
  • 70% of the world’s seven billion people live on those same 4.25 million square miles.
  • The densest concentrations of the human population were and still are in the Eurasian continent.
  • China alone represented 25–40% of the world’s population, Europe 25%, India 20%, those three centers alone accounted for about 70 percent of the population of the world in 1400, and increased to 80% by 1800.
  • The fifteen densely populated civilizations shared several features, the most important being the relationship between those who lived in the countryside producing the food and those living in the cities consuming that food production.

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• The Agricultural Revolution

  • in the part of the world aptly called the ‘‘Fertile Crescent’’ (today’s Iraq), people learned how to grow their own food and raise their own animals, which increased the amount of food available.
  • the change from a hunting-and-gathering society to a sedentary agricultural society occurred over long periods and independently in at least seven parts of the world.
  • It may have happened independently in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea as well, although it did not happen everywhere.
  • Although some have objected to the term ‘‘revolution’’ because the development of agriculture took such a long time.
  • it was considered revolutionary because it changed the way people lived, socialized, and died
  • agricultural advances made possible ever-greater amounts of food than the direct producers could consume in any given year, in other words, an ‘‘agricultural surplus.
  • with this social groups who didn't have to produce their own food (priests, rulers, warriors, and outside raiders) started to rise.
  • The existence of this agricultural surplus meant that others could take it, either by force if necessary or as taxes, In either case, a major schism opened in society between the agriculturists and the nonproducing ruling elite.
  • the agricultural revolution also gave rise to cities and writing.
  • the elite could rule their lands while keeping track of the number of agriculturists, the amount of food they produced, and in particular the amount they owed the rulers in taxes, developing systems of accounting and writing.
  • the trading that originated from the elite ruling gave rise, over time, to empires.

• Towns and Cities in 1400

  • most of the world's population lived in the countryside but towns and cities of various sizes and cities and functions did exist.
  • towns and cities can be used as a rough indicator of wealth.
  • three of the large cities where Nanjing, Vijayanagar, and Cairo, Europe only entered the fourth place
  • To villagers, towns and cities were magical places where people with great wealth ate foods peasants could only dream of and wore clothing of such quality that it put their coarse cloth to shame.
  • the taxes, tithes, and rents the peasants paid supported these towns and cities, and they knew it.

• Nomadic Pastoralists

  • The agriculturally based civilizations occupied the best land for agriculture throughout the Eurasian continent.
  • The great grassland known as the steppe, which stretched from east to west across the continent while not amenable to agriculture because of too little (or too much) water, was not uninhabited.
  • For the pastoral nomads, mobility on horses was a way of life, their way of life was not completely self-sufficient, since they needed cities to get manufactured goods and to be able to trade.
  • The relations between civilizations and nomads were peaceful
  • the nomads could constitute fearsome fighting forces. As hunters, they were
    expert horsemen and archers.
  • the civilizations had armies to protect food supplies from raiding nomads
  • To those within the centers of the civilization, these nomads appeared to be the opposite of civilized: they were illiterate, and probably superstitious as well.
  • Nomads were not the only ones to challenge the civilizations, there were other groups, who, unlike
    the nomads were often quite self-sufficient and could obtain everything they needed from their environment.

• Wildlife

  • the hunters and nomadic pastoralists who lived in the vast spaces outside the densely populated civilizations were very few and far between, leaving much room for wildlife of all kinds.
  • wolves roamed throughout most of Europe, as can be attested by Grimm’s Fairy Tales, packs of wolves entered the cities as they did in Paris in 1420 and 1438
  • In China, tigers at one time inhabited most of the region and periodically attacked Chinese villages and cities, carrying away piglets and babies alike when humans disrupted their ecosystem by cutting away the forests that provided them with their favored game, deer or wild boar.
  • The two most diverse areas were Africa and the Americas from 1400 to 1800
  • In Africa, humans and animals had evolved together.
  • In the Americas, the explanation for a large number of animals involves the story of what happened to the native human inhabitants in the century following Columbus’s 1492 voyage.
  • Thus from 1400 to 1800, when the human population increased from 380 to 950 million, there was still plenty of room for wildlife of all kinds. Nonetheless, the relationship between the two populations clearly was inverse: the more people, the less wildlife.
  • Sometimes the end for other species has come like a rifle shot, with the species, wiped out without altering the rest of the physical environment, as when wolves were eliminated from England, France, or Wisconsin, or bison from the Great Plains.

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• Population Growth and Land

  • Population growth and decline each brought certain benefits and difficulties to a society
  • an increase in human numbers is an indication of our species’ success in obtaining greater food energy from the ecosystem
  • Population growth could accompany improving conditions and rising standards of living for most people
  • the human population could overshoot the capacity of the land to feed them, leading to deteriorating living conditions and greater susceptibility to death from disease and famine
  • A growing human population requires additional food and energy supplies to support it, those increases could come from but three sources: bringing more land under cultivation, increasing the labor inputs on a given plot of land, or increasing the amount of water or fertilizer.
  • In China over the period from 1400 to 1800, the population quadrupled, the increase being sustained almost equally by increases in the land under cultivation and by more intensive tilling and fertilizing of the land already under the plow.
  • In summary, nearly all of the world’s 380 million people living in 1400 were rural people producing food and raw materials for handicraft industries to sustain both themselves and a small ruling elite that took a portion of the harvest as taxes (to the state) and rent (to landowners).
  • Diet and caloric intake, along with epidemic disease, famine, war, and other disasters, kept human life expectancy much shorter than it is today. In many of the richest and most advanced parts of the premodern world.

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• Famine

  • Food shortages, dearth, and famine were an all-too-real part of life for people in 1400.
  • peasant families gave up as much as half of their harvest to the state and landlords.
  • In good or improving times, peasant families might be able to make ends meet, providing for their own subsistence needs and also meeting their obligations to the tax man and rent collector, and produce a surplus that might be sold in the market.
  • The agrarian world was not made by the ruling elites, but as a result of the interactions, understandings, and agreements among state agents, landowners, and rural peasant producers.

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• The Nitrogen Cycle and World History

  • in 1400 the world was limited by the material constraints of the ‘‘biological old regime’’
  • work was mostly done by human and animal muscle, especially in agriculture.
  • And the two things essential for muscles to form and move were calories and nitrogen.
  • Humans get their nitrogen by consuming plants or animal protein.
  • plants use a substance called chlorophyll to tap solar energy to transform carbon dioxide and water into carbohydrates, One of the chemicals plants use to make chlorophyll is nitrogen.
  • without nitrogen, plants wouldn’t exist and the world as we know it would be inexistent
  • The limited supply of reactive nitrogen in the natural environment placed a serious limit on the amount of food that farmers could grow and created significant problems that farmers and their broader societies had to solve.
  • To farm the same land year after year and not have to move to new virgin land, farmers had to figure out how to replace the nutrients in their soil.
  • in the biological old regime, natural processes limited the availability of reactive nitrogen, and that fact limited the supplies of both energy and nutrients available to humans.

• Epidemic Disease

  • The peasantry made it possible for various forms of human ‘‘macroparasites’’ to live off of them. Additionally, the entire human population was subject to epidemic disease carried by microparasites
  • To be sure, the wealthy in both town and countryside had more ways of avoiding death from epidemic disease than the peasants or the poor of the towns and villages, but epidemics could—and did—affect entire populations.
  • To understand how and why the Black Death could move so rapidly across Eurasia and then spread within Europe, we need to understand the trading networks that linked most parts of Eurasia and made it possible for goods, ideas, and germs to travel from one end of the continent to the other.

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• The World and Its Trading System circa 1400

  • During the fourteenth century, the Old World was connected by eight interlinking trading zones within three great subsystems.

  • The East Asia subsystem linked China and the Spice Islands in equatorial Southeast Asia to India.

  • the Middle East–Mongolian subsystem linked the Eurasian continent from the eastern Mediterranean to Central Asia and India.

  • d the European subsystem, centered on the fairs at Champagne in France and the trading routes of the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice, linking Europe to the Middle East and the Indian Ocean.

  • these subsystems overlapped, with North and West Africa connected with the European and Middle East subsystems, and East Africa with the Indian Ocean subsystem.

    

  • The world in the fourteenth century thus was polycentric: it contained several regional systems, each with its own densely populated and wealthy ‘‘core,’’

  • the Afro-Eurasian system circa 1300 is called a ‘‘world system’’ not because it literally spanned the entire globe, but because it was greater than any one given part.

  • epidemic disease and death, soldiers, and war also followed trade routes, as we can see by examining the world’s experience with the Black Death in the mid-1300s, after which most Eurasians shared a common disease pool.

• The Black Death: A Mid-Fourteenth-Century Conjuncture

  • The mid- to late 1300s constituted a serious crisis in world history. The collapse around 1350 of the Mongol empire, which had served as the glue holding much of Eurasia together, was part of that crisis, and so too were the ravages of the Black Death.
  • the bubonic plague, killed tens of millions of people in the mid-1300s.
  • The reasons why the Black Death occurred are complex and debatable, but its consequences are not.
  • The bubonic plague is a result of a bacillus, that is, a disease-producing bacterium (Yersinia pestis), that a 2013 study shows exploded.
  • This plague is hosted by various kinds of rodents, it can be deadly when passed to humans by direct contact with the rodent, its feces, or fleas that have bitten infected rodents.
  • Regardless of how it was transmitted to Europe in 1347, the conditions had been set for it to spread rapidly and virulently.
  • shortages of land and forest for fuel started being notable by 1300.
  • Europeans developed a regional trading network from the city-states of Genoa and Venice.
  • The trading city of Caffa (Kaffa), located on the Black Sea, was the link between the trans-Eurasian trade routes.
  • Not only did the black rats now living in European houses spread the plague to people; infected humans too could spread it directly to others by coughing. The plague raged across Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa.
  • the plague was not a purely ‘‘natural’’ phenomenon but instead required a host of circumstances to come together for it to have such a major impact on the world and its history.
  • The death toll was high, and it etched a powerful memory in the minds of the living. But despite the horror of corpses piled high in village lanes, carted off for burial, or set afire on rafts pushed out to sea, those living fifty years later in 1400 did have more and better land, more fuel, and more resources of all kinds.
  • The story of the fourteenth-century Black Death thus not only illustrates the impact of epidemic disease on human populations and the course of world history; it also demonstrates the very early connectedness of world regions.

• Conclusion: The Biological Old Regime

  • the human population lived very much in the environment and had to be very mindful of the opportunities and limits it placed on human activity
  • Agriculture provided not only food for the entire society, but most of the raw materials for whatever industry there was, especially textiles for clothing. In China, silk and cotton reigned supreme; in India, cotton and silk; and in northwestern Europe, wool.
  • All living things need food for energy and nutrients to live, and increasing amounts of both to sustain larger populations. What agriculture allowed people to do, in effect, was to capture natural processes and to channel that energy into the human population.
  • Regardless of whether the Old World population was pushing environmental limits by about 1300, as some historians think, the Black Death drastically reduced the global population, in particular in China and Europe.
  • Europeans were to encounter a whole new world, the Americas, with vast new resources. Although this New World was already quite populated in 1400 and the land already used by Native Americans, a massive biological exchange would radically alter those relationships, making the Americas a relatively depopulated world by the year 1600.

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