After Tamerlane (16 page)

The American
conquistas
, Europe's seaborne trade with the southern coasts of Asia, and the Russian advance into the North Asian steppe were a huge enlargement of European horizons and a colossal stimulus
to European ambitions.
¹²²
But there was little sign by the end of the long sixteenth century (
c
.1620) that they had triggered the emergence of a world economy or weakened the cultural autonomy of old civilizations in other parts of Eurasia. Europeans had woven a new mercantile web that linked the Americas with Eurasia. The supply of American silver gave them an entrée into Asian markets where there was little demand for purely European produce. It affected prices and money supply in the Ottoman and Ming empires as well as in Europe. But the commodities that circulated in this new global exchange were not staples but luxuries; their volume was tiny. In the sixteenth century, an average of fifty to seventy ships departed annually for the East from Lisbon;
¹²³
and the traffic in manufactures like porcelain or textiles flowed mainly westward towards Europe and not the other way round.

Nor was there much sign that the balance of technical or cultural advantage had shifted significantly. In the sixteenth century, perhaps the most widely exported technology was gunpowder warfare, in which Europeans enjoyed a technical lead. Ottoman artillery used European experts. Japan's ‘feudal' warfare was transformed by the import of European firearms. But neither in Japan nor in Iran nor in Mughal India was the social and political system unable to adjust to military innovation. Nor did a technical ‘lag' create a real disparity between the military capacity of European states and those in the rest of Eurasia. On the contrary. The threat of further Ottoman expansion hung over Europe until the 1690s. In India and East Asia, Europe's remoteness made its mode of land warfare almost entirely irrelevant. In much the same way, patterns of consumption, codes of social etiquette and notions of hierarchy in the rest of Eurasia showed few signs of being influenced by Europeans' behaviour. The ‘Columbian Exchange' between the natural products of the Old World and the New diversified Eurasian agriculture with novel plants like maize and potatoes, but created no dependence upon European suppliers.
¹²⁴
European activity in the Americas aroused little if any interest in the rest of Eurasia.
¹²⁵
Islamic and East Asian cosmology showed no loss of confidence in the face of European learning, or the violent upheaval in European religion and ritual.

In the two centuries that followed the death of Tamerlane, Eurasia
remained divided between the three civilized worlds we have explored so far, and a number of others, Buddhist and Hindu, that we have passed over in silence. There was little to show that their cultural differences were narrowing. If anything, the energetic state-building that was taking place right across Eurasia and the wider diffusion of knowledge (through printed books in Europe and East Asia) were hardening the boundary-markers between them, and raising the stakes of cultural identity. Sometimes, of course, the meeting of cultures produced a mixture of feelings. The curious story of the Buddha's tooth showed how quickly the mood could change from casual indifference to religious zeal. In 1560 the viceroy of Goa led a raid against the Buddhist kingdom of Jafna (in modern Sir Lanka). Among the booty taken (so it turned out) was one of the holiest relics of the Buddhist world, the Buddha's tooth. Its fate quickly became known in the Buddhist states around the Bay of Bengal. The king of Burma made a huge offer for its safe return, and the viceroy accepted. But before the deal was concluded the Inquisition stepped in. The Inquisition in Goa was a very powerful body, waging constant war on (non-Christian) superstition and heresy. A few years later it forced the outlawing of Hindu rites in the Portuguese enclaves in India. Far from seeing the tooth as a profitable business (alas, for somebody else), it saw its deliverance into Christian hands as a providential victory – a chance to destroy one of the enemy's most powerful weapons (for the Church had no doubt about the power of relics). The viceroy was forced to give way. The tooth was removed, ground to dust and burned. Here, as elsewhere, the ‘Age of Discovery' in Eurasia had brought greater physical contact but not a meeting of minds. It remained to be seen whether in the ‘Age of Commerce' that followed it would be a different story.

3. Batavia (modern Jakarta), colonial capital of the Dutch East Indies

The long sixteenth century of European expansion culminated in the founding of English and French colonies in the northern part of North America and the arrival of the Dutch and English in the trading world of the East Indies. But between the 1620s and the 1740s the expansive impulse of the Europeans lost much of its momentum. As we have seen already, the early modern European ‘march to primacy' is in many ways an optical illusion, the deceptive product of hindsight. Europeans saw themselves as embattled against a triumphant Islam even while they plundered the New World and invaded the Indian Ocean. Their own achievements in political, military and commercial organization were matched or overshadowed by those of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, Ming or Tokugawa. State-building and cultural innovation were striking features of Eurasian, not just European, history in the early modern era.

Of course it had been the Europeans who had made the most spectacular advance into the Outer World, who had captured the huge new resource base in the Americas, and who had opened up new long-distance trade routes linking South East Asia, India, West Africa and the Americas. But we should not assume that by these means they had created the basis for global predominance, or were now poised to encircle, isolate and subjugate other societies and cultures in Eurasia. It was far from clear, for example, that they had freed themselves from their long-standing dependence upon costly Asian manufactures; that their organizational skills – civil or military – gave them any special advantage over other Eurasians; that their high culture yielded greater material benefits than, or promised intellectual predominance over, other high cultures; or that the geostrategic weaknesses that had penned them in the Eurasian Far West since late Roman times had been decisively overcome by innovations in maritime transport and warfare. By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world', the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal
transformation to which Europe's subsequent primacy is usually attributed.

Indeed, by contrast with the drama of discovery and conquest, with whose consequences Europeans had barely come to terms by the early seventeenth century, the century or more that followed was a phase of much more gradual change in Europe's relations with the extra-European world. The windfall gains of the ‘discoveries' were not to be repeated. Political and economic conditions in the Euro-Atlantic world limited the scope for further expansion. Preoccupied with Atlantic rivalries, the European maritime powers showed little enthusiasm for empire-building in Asia. At the same time the states of the Islamic realm and East Asia displayed much greater robustness than might appear from many later accounts of European dynamism and Asian decay. The sphere of Islamized civilization continued to expand. The scope of Chinese imperial power reached its apogee in the second half of the eighteenth century. The prestige of Indian and Chinese manufactures in the West was at its zenith. Viewed in this light, the century and a half before the British conquest of Bengal after 1757 was not just a long prelude to the ‘Eurasian Revolution' by which Europe overpowered the rest of the Old World. It was a period of near equilibrium between the dominant societies in Eurasia, and, in parts of the Outer World, between the invading Europeans and the native communities. What remained in question was how long this global pattern of competition, collaboration and coexistence, created by the geographical expansion and closer economic interdependence of Old World societies, would endure; and which societies, if any, would overcome the technological, organizational and cultural barriers to a more general predominance.

For much of this period, then, Europeans were intent more on consolidating their grip in the Atlantic world than on acquiring vast new tracts to occupy. The scope of geographical exploration, while evidence of remarkable individual tenacity, was comparatively modest
overall. Vast areas of the globe remained a necessary blank on European maps – even in North America, where international competition between Europeans was fiercest. Although the location of Hudson Bay was known by 1610, it was only in 1682 that René-Robert La Salle travelled the whole tortuous river route from Montreal to the Mississippi mouth.
¹
Until
c
. 1700 California was widely thought to be a huge island.
²
Bering's confirmation that no land bridge connected Asia and the Americas was known only in the later 1740s. Until after 1750 it was generally assumed that a vast inland ‘Western Sea' lay beyond the height of land that fringed Hudson Bay.
³
South America's geography was better known, but much of the more remote interior, especially in Amazonia and Patagonia, remained a
terra incognita
well into the nineteenth century.
⁴
In the Pacific, European geographical thinking was dominated until Cook's great voyages of the 1760s and '70s by the mirage of a great ‘Southern Continent' – Terra Australis.
⁵
In West, East and South Central Africa, Europeans had almost no first-hand knowledge beyond the narrow coastal belts visited by slave-traders and other merchants. Consequently, in 1750 it was still believed that the river Niger flowed westward from East Africa, reaching the Atlantic via the rivers Gambia and Senegal – a delusion that invested both the latter with an undeserved significance.

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort. Wider exploration was impeded partly by technical difficulties: the high cost of overland travel; the obstacles of climate and disease, which destroyed human capital at an alarming rate; the reluctance of indigenous rulers to allow spies and interlopers who might infringe valuable monopolies of furs or slaves. In West Africa, European traders had to be careful not to offend local rulers, who readily disciplined them for misbehaviour. Nor were they a match for the armies that the rulers could muster – especially so in the case of Dahomey, whose soldiers were equipped with imported firearms.
⁶
Apart from a very limited amount of state sponsorship, it was usually the prospect of commercial gain or of new lands for settlement which funded exploration – a misleading term, which usually signified the ‘mapping' of existing trade paths through local informants. But the
propulsion of economic or demographic need was spasmodic at best. The Brazilian gold rush of the 1690s sucked in immigrants and encouraged the Sao Paulo
bandeirantes
(or frontiersmen) to roam the
sertao
in search of new finds.
⁷
But in Spanish America the inflow of European migrants fell away sharply after 1625.
⁸
English colonization of North America was slow. Not until the 1670s – a century and a half after Cortés had landed in Mexico – were the mainland colonies secure against economic failure and Indian counter-attack.
⁹
Migration to the English Caribbean was brisker, because economic prospects seemed better there. Whites in Jamaica, says a recent study, were ten times as wealthy as those on the mainland of British America. But a subtropical climate and its diseases, local and imported, exacted a fearful toll. Between 1700 and 1750, between
30,000
and
50,000
European immigrants arrived in Jamaica, but the white population in 1752 was a mere
10,000
.
¹⁰
In 1700 there were perhaps
250,000
white settlers in Britain's American and Caribbean territories.
¹¹
The pace of advance on the mainland was slow: not until the 1750s did the ubiquitous colonial land speculators and their friends in government begin to cast their net beyond the Appalachians. The number of French settlers in New France (Quebec), Acadia (now Nova Scotia) and Louisiana was tiny: perhaps 60,000 by the 1750s.

Altogether, by the middle of the eighteenth century there were between 3 and 4 million inhabitants of European descent in Spanish, French, British and Portuguese America – perhaps 5 per cent of the population of Europe including Russia. But of course the great majority of the transatlantic migrants to the Americas were not freeborn Europeans but enslaved Africans. An authoritative estimate suggests that by as late as 1820 four times as many Africans as Europeans had arrived in the Americas – some 8 million, compared with 2 million Europeans.
¹²
Their death toll in the tropical Caribbean was also enormous. Colonies like Barbados, originally reliant upon contract labour from the British Isles, rapidly converted to slavery after 1670.
¹³
Slavery had two important effects on European migration. Once introduced, it choked off the demand for manual labour from Europe in plantation economies, and through the spread of African diseases it probably increased the mortality of those Europeans who did come.
¹⁴
But, paradoxically, by promoting the development of those plantation
economies, it eventually created the local markets (for foodstuffs, building materials and light manufactures) from which later European arrivals could profit. For it was only by concentrating upon a few subtropical commodities raised by slave labour that agricultural colonization in the New World could be made profitable. From the 1660s onward, sugar was king, with tobacco a distant second and cocoa and chocolate trailing behind.
¹⁵
But even sugar paled in comparison with the importance of silver mined in Peru (less and less) and Mexico (more and more). Silver remained the premier American export, despite a declining production through much of this period that was dramatically reversed after 1750.
¹⁶