1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (67 page)

APPENDIX B
Globalization in Beta

Why did Fujian become the center of the silver trade, and not some other place in China? One answer is that it was the region in China most experienced with exchange across the ocean. The fabled city of Zaytun, one bay north of Yuegang, was the eastern terminus of the maritime Silk Road.

A glittering, congested metropolis, Zaytun occupied a key place in what might be called a first pass at globalization, a system of exchange across Eurasia that reached its apogee in the fourteenth century. One trade route went overland, across western China to the Middle East and Black Sea before reaching, through many middlemen, the Mediterranean. The other went by sea, touching down at Indochina and India before going up the Red Sea; it, too, finished at the Mediterranean. The overland route was dominant until the Mongol empire began falling violently apart, at which point the nautical route became safer. From Zaytun’s wharfs sailed Chinese junks low in the water with chests of silk and porcelain; into them came Chinese junks laden, according to an impressed Marco Polo, with “rich assortments of jewels and pearls, upon the sale of which they obtain a considerable profit.” Polo’s descriptions of Fujianese trade focused obsessively on the Asian luxury goods—precious stones, silk, porcelain, spices—that fascinated Europeans. In fact, though, Fujian’s traders made most of their money from items that Polo would have found mundane, such as bulk copper and iron, which temples across Southeast Asia needed for ritual objects. Zaytun was a full-service emporium, not a boutique.

The city was ringed by a twenty-foot-high wall, faced with glazed tile and brick. Outside the wall, trading prosperity paid for massive marsh-drainage projects, a network of irrigation canals and waterworks to prevent the harbor from filling up with the sediment from the Jin River. Inside the wall, shaded by the tiger’s-claw trees that lined the streets, walked people of every ethnicity: Malays, Persians, Indians, Vietnamese, even a few Europeans, each group with its own neighborhood. Rising into Zaytun’s coal-smoke-filled sky were seven great mosques, three churches (Eastern Orthodox and Nestorian) and a cathedral (Roman Catholic), and countless Buddhist institutions—one visitor claimed that a single monastery had three thousand monks. The Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta, who visited in the 1340s, marveled at the scores of huge junks in the harbor; around them, he said, swarmed small vessels “past counting,” buying and selling. Ibn Battuta called the port “one of the biggest in the world—I’m wrong, it is
the
biggest.” The traveler was not simply exaggerating to make a good tale; Zaytun, with several hundred thousand people crammed into the littoral beneath the hills, was one of humankind’s richest, most populous cities. Little wonder that Polo’s account inspired people like Colón to dream of going there!

After the Song dynasty fell to the Mongol invasion in the 1270s, the last embers of resistance burned in Fujian. An opposition movement there installed a Song prince as emperor. The Mongols quickly attacked in great force, and the Song prince took refuge in Zaytun with his courtiers and troops. A well-connected Muslim Arab merchant named Pu Shougeng had long been the local superintendent of trade ships, which placed him in charge of both the local militia and the local navy. The Song prince asked Pu to give him control of Zaytun’s hundreds of ships—an instant navy. The prince’s sudden acquisition of naval power would pose a threat to the Mongols, who had no navy.

A Mongol general sent emissaries to Pu, asking him not to back the Song emperor. After consulting with local scholars and landlords and other foreign trading families, Pu presented Zaytun and all its ships to the Mongols in 1276. To seal the deal, he ordered the murder of some of the prince’s family, who happened to live in town. The Song forces had been camped outside the city. Angered, they besieged Zaytun for three months before fleeing the advance of the Mongols.

The Mongols—who had now formed the Yuan dynasty—lavishly rewarded the conspirators, effectively giving control of the port to the Pu family and their allies in the Muslim trading families.
¹
So powerful did Zaytun’s Muslim minority become that some Fujianese converted to Islam, which allowed them to register as foreigners and enjoy foreigners’ privileges. Eventually most government positions throughout Fujian were held by Chinese converts.

As one might expect, the Islam practiced by these newcomers was far from the pure faith of Arabia. Rather than making the pilgrimage to distant Mecca, Fujianese believers traveled to the hills outside the city to walk seven times around the tombs of two early Sufi missionaries. Others adopted the Chinese custom of venerating their ancestors’ graves. Few learned the precepts of the Qu’ran—the book was not fully translated into Chinese until 1927. Fujianese imams, most of whom did not speak Arabic, memorized the original text, declaiming it phonetically in the mosques. As memories faded, the services descended into gibberish, meaningless recitations before uncomprehending audiences. In one way, though, this remote outpost of Islam preserved tradition most faithfully: Zaytun’s Muslim families, old and new alike, were split into quarrelsome factions, Sunni, Shi’ite, and Sufi.

Each faction dominated part of the government, controlled a section of the harbor, and had its own private militias. Pu’s lineage and its associates, who were apparently Sunni, had the Mongols’ favor and thus the most political power. The bulk of Zaytun’s foreign population, though, was Persian, and therefore Shi’ite. The Shi’ites had the biggest militias—enough to stop the Sunnis from grinding them under their heels. (Little is known about Sufis in Fujian.)

The balance of power held until the 1350s, when peasants throughout the nation rebelled against their Mongol masters. One of these revolts would eventually topple the Yuan and establish the Ming dynasty. To safeguard Fujian against the insurgencies, the Yuan emperor authorized Zaytun merchants to build up their private militias even more by recruiting and training thousands of foreign Muslim soldiers (or, perhaps more accurately, “foreign” Muslim soldiers—many were not from the Middle East but were converted Chinese). The emperor asked two Sunni militia leaders to suppress an insurrection by Chinese around Zaytun in 1357. The next year they stopped revolts in Xinghua and Fuzhou, the next two port cities to the north. Nonetheless, the Yuan were not entirely pleased. Overcome by enthusiasm, one Sunni militia had plundered Xinghua for days; the other had occupied Fuzhou, turning it into a private satrapy. The leader of the first militia was slain by a rival Sunni—a Pu family confederate who was superintendent of marine affairs in Zaytun. The second was killed by the Yuan, who didn’t like it when their creatures acted too boldly.

Proclaiming his loyalty to the Mongols, the Pu confederate took over the dead man’s militia and used it to stamp out peasant uprisings. But he also took advantage of the chaos to turn Zaytun into an independent fiefdom and “exterminate” the city’s remaining Shi’ites (the verb comes from an account in an official city gazetteer). After three years of sporadic conflict the local Yuan commanders allied with the Shi’ite militias they had previously fought against, persuaded one of the few surviving Shi’ites in Zaytun to open the city gates secretly, and wiped out the Sunni. Then the commanders switched to the side of the incoming Ming.

It was too late to save Zaytun. Years of conflict had reduced all but one of the city’s seven great mosques to rubble. (Wealthy Arabs are supposedly about to restore the surviving building, now a park, to its former glory.) Most of the foreign population was dead. The survivors fled into the hills and became farmers. They stopped identifying themselves as Muslim. The Ming were loath to restore a city that had been, in its way, a center of pro-Yuan sentiment. They allowed its waterworks to break down and fill the harbor with silt. Foreign trade did not openly resume for two centuries. The center of its revival was not Zaytun, but Yuegang, the harbor to the south. But that didn’t stop many of the old Zaytun trading families from leaving the hills to participate in the birth of globalization.

Many of the Chinese merchants who filled the junks at Yuegang thus were descendants of families that had prospered from its first pass at globalization. They were doing the work of the centuries. They were agents of humankind’s unending quest to enlace its most far-flung members in a single skein, a journey whose endpoints the travelers have rarely been able to anticipate.

¹
The Mongols eagerly absorbed Han Chinese culture but were leery of granting too much power to the Han themselves. (The Han, one recalls, are China’s dominant ethnic group—the group Westerners refer to as “Chinese.”) As a result, the Yuan often installed non-Han leaders as local rulers. Giving Arabs and Persians control over Zaytun was an extension of this stratagem.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Years after reading Alfred Crosby’s books,
The Columbian Exchange
and
Ecological Imperialism,
I met the author and got to know him a little bit. Almost every time we spoke, I suggested that he should update those books to take into account the enormous amount of research they had stimulated. Crosby was never interested; he was on to other, newer things. One day when I had mentioned this notion a few too many times, he growled, “Well, if you think it’s such a good idea, why don’t
you
do it?” Naturally, I took his offhand quip as license. The project quickly got out of hand.
1493,
the result, is scribbled in the margins of
The Columbian Exchange.

Crosby is far from the only person to whom I owe gratitude. All the way I have benefited from the help and counsel of William Denevan, William I. Woods, and William Doolittle (the three Bills). A veritable Solecism Squad read the manuscript in part or whole: Robert C. Anderson, James Boyce, Richard Casagrande, David Christian, Robert P. Crease, Josh D’Aluisio-Guerrieri, Clark Erickson, Dan Farmer, Dennis Flynn, Susanna Hecht, John Hemming, Mike Lynch, Stephen Mann, Charles McAleese, J. R. McNeill, Edward Melillo, Nicholas Menzies, Brian Ogilvie, Mark Plummer, Kenneth Pomeranz, Matthew Restall, William Thorndale, and Bart Voorzanger. They saved me from many mistakes. Nonetheless, this book is mine, along with all its problems.

Even Isaac Newton, never a modest man, admitted that he was able to see far only because he stood on the shoulders of giants. In this way—if only in this way—all writers can claim kinship to Newton. For this book, some of these giants are mostly invisible—they are beneath the text in so many places that I found it hard to cite them anywhere in particular. Whenever I didn’t understand something as I wrote
1493,
I asked, “What did David Christian say about this?” Then I would page through
Maps of Time
and find his admirably concise take on the matter. Just as dog-eared and grease-stained is my copy of Robert Marks’s crisply opinionated
Origins of the Modern World.
Encountering a question about the Spanish realm, I turned to Henry Kamen’s
Empire
. When I had a question about China and the West, I turned with equal alacrity to Kenneth Pomeranz’s
Great Divergence.
For the galleon trade, Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez have so many papers that I’m not sure which to say I pilfered most frequently. Books by Robin Blackburn, David Brion Davis, David Eltis, and John Thornton played the same role with regard to slavery. Individual chapters owe much to individual works.
Chapter 3
is indebted to
Mosquito Empires
by J. R. McNeill. Countless details in
Chapters 4
and
5
are from Li Jinming’s
Zhangzhou Port
(
). My musings on the potato in
Chapter 6
are lifted shamelessly from Michael Pollan’s
Botany of Desire.
Tom Standage’s
Edible History of Humanity
also played a role here, as it did in all this book’s discussions of food, agriculture, and other matters. John Hemming’s
Tree of Rivers
and Susanna Hecht’s
Scramble for the Amazon
are sturdy underpinnings for
Chapter 7
. John Thornton’s many works rustle alluringly in the background of
Chapter 8
. Richard Price’s
First-Time
and
Rainforest Warriors
are the foundations of my discussion of Suriname in
Chapter 9
. If
1493
brings new readers to these books, I will be more than satisfied.

Any project that attempts to cover a large area must contend with humankind’s linguistic creativity. Lucky for me, I was accompanied in China by Josh D’Aluisio-Guerrieri, who also found a host of Chinese sources for me from his home in Taipei, read even the most ancient gazetteer with aplomb, and put up with endless lists of e-mailed questions. All translations from Chinese in
1493
are by Josh, except a very few from Devin Fitzgerald, whom I asked for help when I couldn’t bear bothering Josh any more. Scott Sessions took time from the immense assembly of the African-American Religion Documentary History Project to answer many, many questions when sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish proved beyond my compass. Susanna Hecht was a boon companion in Brazil, a fine translator, generous with her immense knowledge of that great nation. There is nobody I would rather have a car breakdown with in
quilombo
country. Reiko Sono’s help with matters Japanese is hereby thanked and acknowledged.

This big book about many things had many friends in many places. Maria Isabel Garcia, the finest science writer in Manila, kindly did a host of favors there for me, including finding a boat in Mindoro, and people to pilot it. Clark Erickson provided a tent and sleeping bag for me in Bolivia, and told me how to hire a plane in Trinidad. Alceu Ramzi gave me amazing aerial tours of Acre and didn’t laugh when my lecture was interrupted, unbelievably, by a clown act. Dennis Flynn and Arturo Giráldez put up with repeated pleas for assistance; Dennis hosted me when I arrived very late one night on a flight over the Pacific.

In the United States, Greg Garman of Virginia Commonwealth University took me on a marvelous boat tour of the James River. Caleb True obtained permissions to reproduce the images in this book and began the arduous process of straightening out the endnotes. I shuddered to see the time stamps on the e-mails from Nick Springer and Tracy Pollock, who put together the maps in the incredibly short time they were allotted. Alvy Ray Smith created the amazing family tree in
Chapter 8
; the color version, available at
alvyray.com
, is even better. Peter Dana helped me understand area calculations and cartographic software, digitized a map of Cortés’s estate, and much else. Faith d’Aluisio and Peter Menzel let me use photographs, provided instruction in photo-editing software, and, again, much else. Ellis Amdur told me interesting things about Japanese swords and the people who used them. James Fallows and Richard Stone helped me get material from Beijing. Neal Stephenson, a patient traveling companion in Xiamen, opened his immense contact list on my behalf. My thanks, too, to the bloggers and other online commenters who have discussed my work, sometimes with amazing acuity.

It is a pleasure to tip my hat to the editors who published, over the years, bits and pieces of this book: Barbara Paulsen at
National Geographic;
Jennifer Sahn at
Orion;
Richard Stone and Colin Norman at
Science;
Cullen Murphy at
Vanity Fair;
and (last but far from least) Corby Kummer, Cullen Murphy (again), and William Whitworth at
The Atlantic.
At Knopf, Jon Segal was patient beyond measure with a slow and wayward author; I am grateful for his support and advice on this, the fourth (and most difficult, from my point of view) project we have worked on together. Also at Knopf, Kevin Bourke, Joey McGarvey, Amy Stackhouse, and Virginia Tan performed all of the organizing, arranging, and tidying tasks that smooth out bumps in the reader’s progress and make books and their authors look good. My thanks, too, to Henk ter Borg in Amsterdam, Francis Geffard in Paris, and Sara Halloway in London. Rick Balkin, my agent, has been a good friend almost since I began writing. Many other people gave me their good offices; I can’t possibly thank them all or even acknowledge them, except to say that I hope they believe the investment was worthwhile.