Chapter 2 - Starting with China

• Historians agree that the voyages of Christopher Columbus, constitute important developments in the emergence of the modern world.
• Eurocentric interpretations tend to see them as major steps taken toward the inevitable rise of the West
• k it is important to place those voyages of discovery in a broader global context of the real structure of wealth and power in the world around 1500

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• China

  • After the death of the founding emperor of China’s Ming dynasty, the successor wasn’t one of his sons but one of his grandsons.
  • The emperor wanted his son to succeed him to establish a principle of primogeniture but after his eldest son died he chose his grandson to succeed him.
  • In a civil war that lasted from late 1399 to mid-1402, the Prince of Yan destroyed his nephew’s forces and captured the throne, this was motived by the resentment of being skipped for his nephew
  • As the new emperor Yongle, the Prince of Yan sought to extend China’s power and influence in all directions.
  • He sent embassies far into Central Asia to secure the acknowledgment by those rulers of China’s preeminence. He also intervened in affairs in Vietnam, to incorporate Annam, as northern Vietnam was then called, into the Chinese empire.
  • in one of the greatest adventures in world history, he launched massive maritime expeditions into the Indian Ocean.

• The Voyages of Zheng He, 1405–1433

  • In the autumn of 1405, the largest fleet of ships the world had ever seen began assembling in the mouth of the Yangzi River on China’s eastern coast.
  • 2 Over 300 ships manned by 27,000 sailors waited for the reliable winter monsoon winds to begin blowing from the northwest to take them south toward Indonesia and then west through the Strait of Melaka into the Indian Ocean, where they had set Calicut, a major trading city on India’s west coast, as their destination.
  • this armada had three primary objectives.
  • the emperor ordered it to track down his nephew, the emperor he had deposed, who was rumored to have escaped
  • the emperor was outward looking and wanted to ‘‘show the flag,’’ impressing all of the foreign countries in that part of the world
  • the emperor wanted to encourage overseas trade.
  • the emperor was like the emperors of earlier dynasties, especially the Tang and Song, who had encouraged overseas trade, well aware of the wealth that could be generated both for society and the state.
  • China’s monetary system, based on paper money, had collapsed along with the Mongols.
  • copper coins from previous dynasties were used, but eventually, the regime reopened silver mines and allowed unminted silver bullion to be used to settle private commercial transactions.
  • To prepare for these voyages, China had undergone ‘‘a frenzy of shipbuilding.’’ Between 1404 and 1407, some 1,681 ships were built; the largest—the gigantic nine-masted ‘‘Treasure Ships’’.
  • Other ships of the fleet, ranging in size and function, carried horses, goods for trade, supplies, water tankers, and marines; some were warships bristling with cannons and rockets.
  • Chinese ships sailed as far as Mozambique on the east coast of Africa, into the Persian Gulf, all around the Indian Ocean, and throughout the Spice Islands of Southeast Asia.
  • Admiral Zheng He himself was Muslim, and his father’s given name, Hajji, suggested that he had made the pilgrimage to Mecca.
  • China’s withdrawal of the most powerful navy on Earth from periodic patrols on and around the Indian Ocean turned out to be of immense importance for the course of world history.
  • that political struggles within China struggles that had been going on for some time at the imperial court finally resolved themselves in favor of the latter when the emperor died in 1435.

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• India and the Indian Ocean

  • the collapse of the Mongol empire and the ravages of the Black Death may have been part of a wider mid-fourteenth-century crisis that affected much of Eurasia
  • the Indian Ocean had been, and would remain, not just a crucially important link in the global trading system, but a source of great wealth and access to luxuries, spices, and manufactured goods to any and all who could get their merchants, goods, or ships to the major trading cities on the Indian Ocean.
  • In fact, the Chinese excursion was but one episode in a longer history of the Indian Ocean, starting in about 650 with the expansion of the Islamic world and the establishment of the Tang dynasty in China and ending around 1750 with the British colonization of India
  • From 650 to 1000, Arab traders and mariners carried goods and ideas all the way from the Islamic Near East to Southeast Asia and China, and back again.
  • In the western zone, from East Africa to the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and the west coast of India, Arab traders were most active
  • The central circuit from Ceylon to the Bay of Bengal and to Southeast Asia was dominated by Indian merchants
  • The Chinese dominated the South China Sea trade circuit from China to Indonesia and the Strait of Melaka
  • Within and among these three zones, great trading cities arose to handle the trade.
  • During the third period, from 1500 to 1750, the Portuguese, the Dutch, English, and French introduced ‘‘armed trading’’ into the Indian Ocean, forcing others already there to arm themselves in defense or to pay the intruders for protection.
  • Four great centers of civilization and economic power provided the impetus for the Indian Ocean trade: the Islamic Near and Middle East, Hindu India, China, and Indonesia, or the Spice Islands. To Melaka, the Chinese brought manufactured goods, in particular silk, porcelain, and iron- and copperwares, and in return took to China spices, other edibles, pearls, cotton goods, and silver.
  • Indians brought cotton textiles and returned with spices. To the Middle East and East Africa, India exported cotton textiles, some of which found their way to West Africa, and other manufactured goods. From Africa and the Arabs, Indians received palm oil, cocoa, groundnuts, and precious metals.
  • China was still the greatest economic power on earth. It had a population probably in excess of 100 million, a prodigiously productive agricultural sector, a vast and sophisticated trading network, and handicraft industries superior in just about every way to anything known in other parts of Eurasia.
  • India had three great textile manufacturing centers: Gujarat on the west coast, Madras in the south, and Bengal on the east. Cotton was spun and woven in artisan homes with material advanced to them by merchants, who then collected the thread and cloth for dyeing and printing before being brought to market to sell.
  • Unlike China, though, India at this time was not a unified empire and indeed had a history of both political disunity and unity imposed by outside conquerors.

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• Dar al-Islam, ‘‘The Abode of Islam’’

  • . A fundamental fact of the fifteenth century, then, was the extent of the Islamic world and what that meant for how the world worked
  • Islam had burst upon the world in the early seventh century, and in the century following the death of the Prophet Mohammed (in 632 CE), Muslim (meaning ‘‘believer’’) armies had unified the Arabian peninsula, captured much of Persia, and took Mesopotamia, Palestine (including Jerusalem), and Egypt and North Africa
  • The significance of the spread of Islam for the course of world history was profound.
  • Fortunately for the rest of the world, the Islamic world loved books and libraries; indeed, the largest libraries in the world during the eighth to the fifteenth centuries were in Islamic lands, the most famous perhaps being the library at Alexandria in Egypt. In these libraries were stored not just the treasures of the Islamic world, but the classics from ancient Greece and Rome as well.
  • Second, the expansion of Islamic empires in the Mediterranean Sea cut Europe off for centuries from the Indian Ocean, the dynamic center of world trade.
  • central political control over the Islamic empire began breaking up, with numerous areas asserting effective independence and a new, more stable Islamic dynasty
  • The Ottoman empire originated in the late thirteenth century when Turkish nomads, led by Osman Bey began consolidating their power on the Anatolian peninsula
  • The real prize, though, was the city of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire and the eastern outpost of Christendom, albeit Eastern Orthodox, not Roman Catholic. Constantinople sat astride the Bosporus Strait and controlled trade in the eastern Mediterranean and on the Black Sea.
  • The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a huge blow to Christian Europe. The eastern outpost of Christianity in the Mediterranean, Constantinople had served as a launching pad for some of the crusades into the Levant and represented the hopes of many Christians for an ultimate recapture of Palestine and Jerusalem.
  • The Ottomans blocked European access to the eastern Mediterranean and hence the trade circuits to China and the Indian Ocean, forcing Europeans to search for alternative routes to gain access to the riches of Asia

• Africa

  • North Africa, SubSaharan Africa, and East Africa were all part of dar al-Islam.
  • By 500 CE, the social, economic, and cultural complex characteristic of highly civilized people had spread throughout Africa, and great empires soon arose, the largest of which was Ghana in West Africa.
  • After the explosion of Islam across the Mediterranean in the seventh century, all of the African empires that traded north across the Sahara converted to Islam between the tenth and twelfth centuries CE
  • . The kingdom of Ghana produced some gold itself, but the Muslims’ demand for it proved sufficiently strong and the goods they brought to trade in sufficient demand in West Africa
  • Commerce turned Timbuktu into a great center, attracting scholars, architects, poets, and astronomers to its university, and Muslim theologians came there to the more than one hundred schools established to study the Quran.
  • Most of the gold from Africa found its way first to Cairo, the great trading port linking Asia with the Mediterranean and northern Europe, and from there via trade to India and to the Italian citystates of Venice and Genoa, who then took it farther north into western Europe.
  • In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, access to African gold was crucial for Europeans
  • These cities, though, were so cosmopolitan—traders coming from inland Africa, Arabs, Persians, South Asians, Malays from Indonesia, and even Chinese that people intermarried, giving rise to a new coastal culture and language called Swahili, a dialect with strong Arabic influence.

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• Slavery

  • Slaves were used in Europe, the Islamic empires, China, and India.
  • slaves were used as domestic servants in the households of the wealthy and powerful, and slave status had nothing to do with skin color.
  • ne of the major sources of slaves was eastern Europe, especially the areas around the Black Sea inhabited by a Caucasian people called Slavs, giving us the word ‘‘slave.’’
  • there was a world market for slaves, and European and Muslim traders were eager to supply it.
  • Africans too kept slaves. Because land was not owned privately and hence was not a source of wealth and power, elite Africans (political heads and merchants mostly) owned labor.
  • This absence of private property in land made slavery pervasive in Africa
  • Slaves were not necessarily given the most degrading or demanding work in the society, and mostly they were considered as ‘‘permanent children,’’ albeit ones who could be inherited by one’s real children. There was thus a huge indigenous market for slaves within Africa, many of whom were acquired in wars between African states.
  • Africa’s environments presented many obstacles to human population growth: poor soils, debilitating diseases, and dangerous large animals
  • Although there is much that is interesting and significant to know about Africa, for our purposes two things stand out.
  • African people had constructed large and successful empires, extensive internal trading networks and productive agriculture and industry, especially mining and refining,
  • Africa already was an integral part of the world system, supplying gold and slaves and purchasing in return manufactured goods, many of which originated in Asia, such as brightly colored cotton textiles from India and porcelain from China.

• Europe and the Gunpowder Epic

  • China was a unified empire ruled by a single sovereign, as large as the United States today and in 1400 with eighty-five to one hundred million people.
  • ‘‘Europe,’’ on the other hand, is just a convenient shorthand to name the westernmost peninsula of the Eurasian continent.
  • the truth is that Europe in 1400 was divided among hundreds of political units, from city-states (like Venice or Genoa) to principalities, bishoprics, duchies, kingdoms, and even a Muslim caliphate on the Iberian peninsula, each suspicious of the others
  • This system of fragmented sovereignty in Europe was a legacy of the breakup of the Roman Empire by the end of the sixth century and the spread of Islam in the eighth century.
  • Military force was used for protection against outsiders, against other untrustworthy nobles, against subordinates who wanted power, against serfs if they rebelled, and in the Crusades against the ‘‘Infidel,’’ the Muslims who had taken the Holy Land
  • With swords, knives, lances, pikes, and long- and crossbows being the most lethal weapons available to medieval Europeans,s. By the eleventh century, the usefulness of these essentially defensive structures proved sufficiently effective that they proliferated throughout western Europe.
  • Gunpowder and cannons had been invented by the Chinese in a process beginning around 1000 CE when Chinese sources describe ‘‘fire lances’’ and other weapons including bombs, rocket launchers, flame throwers, land mines, and poison smoke. Unfortunately for the Chinese, the Mongols gained access to this new technology, improved it with the development of early cannons called ‘‘bombards,’’ and then used those bombards against Chinese cities
  • Bombards were not particularly effective at hurling projectiles far or with much accuracy; indeed, they were used initially mostly to scare horses. But Europeans quickly improved them.
  • From 1000 to 1500, the major activity of European rulers was warfare: preparing for war, paying for war, recovering from war.
  • For a while, states that were small but wealthy (such as the Dutch) could hire mercenaries, while those that were large but poor (such as Poland) could conscript serfs into their armies and force them to fight.
  • Those who had these weapons could claim to be sovereign within their territories and then by force, if necessary, make others subject to them
  • In 1453 the Ottoman Turks used cannons to capture Constantinople, and by the same year the king of France had used cannons to drive the English out of France by leveling their fortifications and pushing them back across the English Channel,
  • By 1453, cannons had proved their worth to the leaders of the hundreds of various-sized political entities spread across Europe.
  • The French kings used their new military power to consolidate their grip on Burgundy and then Brittany, before deciding in 1494 to expand their territory by invading Italy.

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• Armed Trading on the Mediterranean

  • The reason for much of this warfare was the attainment, maintenance, and enhancement of wealth and power.
  • the understandings of those two concepts meant different things in different times and places, the fact is that most rulers (and others) found the accumulation of wealth to be a good thing..
  • The problem for fifteenth-century Europeans was that their part of the world was relatively poor.
  • Among the various problems that European farmers had was that they just did not have enough feed to keep all their animals alive through the winter, so they usually slaughtered a fair number of their draft animals.
  • Europeans did fight constantly over who would have access to those spices from Asia, in particular the northern Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice, both seaports on the Mediterranean. For centuries, Venice and Genoa competed for access to Asian goods that could be traded within Europe.
  • Europeans did fight constantly over who would have access to those spices from Asia, in particular the northern Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice, both seaports on the Mediterranean. For centuries, Venice and Genoa competed for access to Asian goods that could be traded within Europe.
  • A series of events in the thirteen and fourteenth centuries enabled Venice to gain the upper hand, by 1400 securing for its merchants a virtual monopoly on access to Asian spices and textiles.
  • The Mongols had made an overland route available for a while but that ended with the collapse of the Mongol empire in the late 1300s.
  • By the 1400s, only one route to Asia existed for Europeans: the Venetian connection through Egypt.

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• Portuguese Explorations of the Atlantic

  • To find a different sea route to Asia around these obstacles, Portuguese mariners on the Atlantic coast of Europe under the leadership of Henry of Avis, better known as ‘‘Henry the Navigator,’’ began probing southward in the Atlantic, well aware that Muslim navies still patrolled the Strait of Gibraltar.
  • He was determined to find that route, both to establish direct trade with Asia, thereby cutting out both the Venetians and the Egyptians, and to outflank the Muslims, thereby continuing the work of the crusaders in driving Muslims from the Mediterranean and the Holy Land.
  • By 1460, when Henry died, Portuguese ships had reached Sierra Leone, near the equator, and established trading relations with Africans. The Portuguese found both gold and slaves in Africa, which they obtained by trading textiles and guns.
  • They also ‘‘Europeanized’’ several of the islands of the Azores, Madeiras, and the Canary Islands off the West African coast, producing sugar and other commodities for the European market.
  • The prize was nearly in Portuguese hands, and so, when a Genoese sailor named Christopher Columbus approached the Portuguese crown with his idea to reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic, he was rejected.
  • By the time Henry the Navigator began his voyages in 1415, Admiral Zheng He had already established Chinese dominance throughout the Indian Ocean. Had the Chinese themselves decided to round the Cape of Good Hope and head north along the African coast
  • it is hard to imagine that the Portuguese would have presented much of a threat to the Chinese fleet. Thus, it might have been the Chinese, not the Portuguese, who established a direct water route between Asia and Europe, reaping the profits from that trade and keeping the Europeans close to home.
  • Rather than encountering a formidable Chinese navy that could have turned them back with little difficulty, the Portuguese in 1498 instead sailed into an Indian Ocean remarkably free from naval power or port cities protected by walls or bastions.

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• Armed Trading in the Indian Ocean

  • After rounding the Cape of Good Hope in 1498 and taking on an Arabicspeaking pilot, Vasco da Gama set sail for Calicut on India’s west coast and on May 18 he dropped anchor.
  • Armed with cannons and instructions to expel the Muslims from Calicut, Cabral bombarded Calicut for two days, targeting Arab ships as well.
  • in 1502–1503, according to Arab chroniclers, ‘‘the vessels of the [Portuguese] appeared at sea en route for India, Hormuz, and those parts. They took about seven vessels, killing those on board and making some prisoner. This was their first action, may God curse them.’’
  • By 1515, the Portuguese had taken by force several trading cities, including Melaka and Hormuz. To consolidate their grip in the Indian Ocean, they had defeated a combined fleet of Egyptian and Indian ships trying to break the Portuguese blockade of the Red Sea.
  • After taking Melaka, the Portuguese moved into the South China Sea, sparring with the Chinese in order to get rights to trade at Guangzhou, eventually obtaining from them a territorial concession at Macao on the southern edge of China.
  • The Portuguese traded with Japan, and because Japanese trade with China had been banned, they profited handsomely by taking silver and gold from Japan to China and returning with silks
  • Having felt the effects of the European style of armed trading, some Asian rulers of coastal trading cities responded by walling their territories and purchasing their own cannons and guns.
  • Later in the 1500s, through its contacts with the Ottoman empire, Aceh imported several large and well-made Ottoman guns, sufficient not just to defend themselves from the Portuguese but to threaten Portuguese-controlled Melaka
  • Portuguese armed trading may have altered much in the Indian Ocean, but dar al-Islam continued to limit what Europeans could and could not do in the world.

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• Conclusion

  • With the exception of the Americas, southernmost Africa, and most of Oceania, the world’s societies in the fifteenth century had extensive and systematic interactions and linkages forged by trade
  • Some parts of the world, in particular China and India, had a technological advantage over the rest, and hence were able to produce industrial goods cheaper and better than anyone anywhere else, in particular silk and porcelain in China and cotton textiles in India.
  • climatic and geographic constraints limited some natural products to one or a few places on Earth; examples include spices from the Indonesian archipelago, ivory from Africa, certain kinds of incense from the Middle East, or gold from Africa and silver from Japan
  • d, consumer tastes and social conventions shaped demand for luxury items increasingly mass-market items like cotton textiles, and precious metals as the foundation for a monetary system.
  • the linkages that did exist, especially in the Indian Ocean, were for the most part mutually agreeable and peaceful
  • The world was polycentric, with three major regions centered around China, India, and the Islamic world, and others connected to one or more of those powerhouses.
  • Europeans, however, were particularly handicapped by the fact that they had little to trade with the rest of the world, with the possible exceptions of wool and, with Africa, firearms.

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