Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (47 page)

Asian opposition to European participation in Littoral zone trade brought about the unhesitating deployment of European naval military force at sea and in the continental periphery—at first, exclusively in the Littoral zone. This has been condemned rather moralistically by many modern historians,
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but the Europeans’ motivations for the military activity in Asia
on land
were mostly not genuinely imperialistic in nature until the end of the nineteenth century.
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Even then, it is very difficult to feel much sympathy for the governments that the European
merchants
had to deal with from Arabia to Japan.
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At first, due to the lack of interest in maritime trade by the imperial governments,
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the problem the Europeans faced was mainly the opposition of local merchant groups and local potentates to competition by newcomers. The great empires were on the whole uninterested in maritime or other trade and almost totally ignored it. For example, “most of the extant documentation relevant to trade in Safavid Iran springs from the quills of the Western company agents and … most Persian-language sources yield virtually no data on trade, indigenous and international alike.”
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This disinterest is probably to be explained in the case of Mughal India by the fact that maritime trade accounted for a tiny percentage—estimated (generously) at perhaps 5 percent—of its total revenues, nearly all of which were derived from control of land.
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“The Mughals came from interior Asia. Babur (1526–30), the first of the dynasty, never saw the sea.” Similarly, in none of the contemporaneous political struggles in southern India “did maritime matters play any role at all.”
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After the establishment of European control of the sea, and of bases in and around the Littoral, the Europeans had increasingly to deal with the direct representatives of the great powers themselves—Safavid and Qajar Persia, Mughal India, the Manchu-Chinese Ch’ing Dynasty, and Tokugawa Japan. The detailed accounts left by early trader-explorers show that they sometimes found it necessary to force the Asian rulers to follow the rules of peaceful diplomatic and commercial relations. For example, much of the widespread piracy that struck at the heart of the Europeans’ maritime interests was approved or even sponsored by the local rulers of the port towns, who were frequently just as piratical on land. Like Central Eurasians, European traders had the backing of their governments and generally did not need to acquiesce to the extreme forms of corruption and summary violence that were customary among the officials and military of the local governments of Asian ports.

In short, in order to be able to participate in international trade, the Europeans needed to stabilize the trade routes and the port cities by establishing their pol itical dominance over them, exactly as the Central Eurasians were forced to do over and over for the two millennia that the Central Eurasian economy flourished—the period of existence of the Silk Road. The result was European military defeat of the local Asian rulers, or pressure on them, and the growth of European pol itical power in Asia. As long as the major Asian states were strong enough, and European technological superiority was only marginal, it was not possible for Europeans to gain more than footholds on land in the Littoral zone.
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They established their right to maritime trade in the region, secured it with fortified trading posts, and took control of the open seas.
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It was only when the great Asian peripheral empires lost most of their effective power in the nineteenth century that Europeans stepped in to fill the power vacuum. But the Europeans’ primary goal, at first, was still not to build new empires but simply to stabilize the political situation to ensure the continuation of peaceful, profitable trade. Again, this was exactly what the Central Eurasians did time and again in their relations with the peripheral powers. Central Eurasians almost never attacked strong, unified urban-agrarian empires—and usually did not have a chance to do so, because the latter attacked them first in their expansive phase; even in their decline, the urban-agrarian empires were usually too strong to be attacked by the smaller, weaker Central Eurasian nations. It was only when the peripheral empires became feeble, or actually collapsed, that the Central Eurasians attempted to set up new governments or otherwise stepped in to attempt to stabilize things. This is just what the Europeans did in India and China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In both the Silk Road and the Littoral System cases, only gradually did the Central Eurasians and the Europeans, respectively, become involved in attempting to govern directly.

Another unanticipated result of the European Age of Exploration was the opening of direct trade routes from Spanish America to East Asia. The wealth of the Spanish Empire was based overwhelmingly on its New World colonies, which among other things produced silver. The Spanish, like other Europeans, desired the silks, spices, porcelains, gemstones, and other precious goods of the Orient. They sent their galleons across the Pacific to Manila and on to China, where they spent as much as 20 percent of their New World silver. This trade not only further enriched the Spanish and paid for their empire’s European wars, it flooded China with immense quantities of silver.
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Finally, the Europeans brought with them their religion. They sought to impress the Asians they met with what they imagined to be the superiority of Christianity over the local religions. In the early years of the European expansion, the Jesuits made a powerful first impression on the Japanese and early Manchu-Chinese ruling classes. But the later missionaries, who were not as highly educated and disciplined as the Jesuits, had less success. Most Asians were not much impressed with Christianity because they already had adopted one or another world religion and generally looked down on all the others as much as European Christians did. In Islamic and Buddhist civilizations, in particular, where the educated people of the ruling class understood more than just the basic elements of belief, most of whatever success the missionaries had was among the poor and uneducated, who did not know their local religions well. Moreover, Asian rulers and religious leaders also rightly saw a connection between the spread of the European religious establishment and the spread of European political power.

THE NEW LITTORAL COMMERCE

The impact of the extremely rapid growth of international trade under the Portuguese and their successors has yet to be fully recognized. Europe was directly connected by sea to India, Southeast Asia, the East Indies, China, and Japan.
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From Europe the Portuguese brought cloth, wine glasses, crystal, lenses, prisms, and Flemish clocks and other mechanical devices to the Orient, along with firearms, swords, and other weapons. Some of these goods were sold as far as Japan.
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Trading locally within Asia on their way, Portuguese ships reached Macao with European goods as well as Indian products, especially pepper. In Macao they acquired silk (fabrics, raw silk, and floss), porcelain wares, musk, and gold. They then sailed to Nagasaki (after 1571), sold their goods, and bought silver, lacquerware, cabinets and painted screens, kimonos, swords, gold, and other items. Upon their return to Macao they used the silver to buy more gold, copper, silk, musk, porcelain wares, ivory, and pearls and sailed with them for Goa.

The Portuguese were greatly helped in their expansion by the xenophobic Chinese. The Ming Dynasty’s policy of the Great Withdrawal, which forbade Chinese merchants to trade with the Japanese, created a virtual monopoly on shipping for the Europeans, who carried Chinese goods such as silk, gold, musk, and porcelain wares to Nagasaki, where they traded them for silver and copper. “It has been estimated that the Portuguese were the carriers of between a third and a half of all silk that left China by sea. By the 1630s, silk imports into Japan were more important than gold.”
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As well as producing great profits, the trade brought merchants from distant realms of Eurasia into close contact with both producers and consumers, increasing the availability of and familiarity with previously rare goods. And the once fabulous lands of the Orient had become real. Fascinated European travelers wrote extensive, detailed accounts of India, China, Japan, and points in between. They observed the different languages, studied them, and wrote descriptions of them. The already intense European curiosity about the world shifted into high gear. Soon, not only in physical sciences and technology but also in history, literature, linguistics, anthropology, and other fields of knowledge relating to Asia, European scholarship progressed until in many respects it surpassed even the best native Asian scholarship about the Asians’ own traditions.
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THE MUGHAL RESTORATION

As a refugee in Persia and under Safavid pressure, Hûmayûn agreed to become a Shiite. Only then did the Safavid ruler agree to help his cause. It took eight years of war, but eventually the combined Persian-Mughal forces recaptured Kandahar and in 1553 Kabul, where Hûmayûn deposed and blinded his brother. Upon the death of Sher Shâh’s son Islam Shâh Sur in 1553, North India was divided among the successors and weakened by drought. In late 1554 Hûmayûn descended into India. He met and crushed the forces of the Sur family’s ruler in the Punjab, entered Delhi in the middle of 1555, and restored the Mughal Dynasty.
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Hûmayûn died from an accident a few months later, leaving the empire to his young son, Akbar (r. 1556–1605), the greatest of the Great Mughal rulers. He suppressed the remaining opposition by the Sur family of Afghans, his brother in Kabul, and Uzbek rebels and conquered the rest of northern India, including Gujarat, Kashmir, and the northern part of the Deccan, the southern Indian plateau. He promoted a cultural and, to some extent, religious fusion of Islam and Hinduism, and under him the Mughal Empire reached its height of prosperity and culture.

Akbar’s son and successor Jahângîr (r. 1605–1627) was followed by Shâh Jahân (r. 1628–1657). Both rulers largely continued Mughal policies and furthered the arts, especially architecture. Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) took the throne during a war of succession that broke out when his father became ill in September 1657. Although Shâh Jahân recovered, by that time Aurangzeb had already defeated the imperial forces and those of his main competitor for the throne, in the process capturing Agra and his father Shâh Jahân, whom he imprisoned in Agra Fort for the last five years of his life. Aurangzeb was a bigot who rejected the laissez-faire attitude of his predecessors, persecuted the Hindus, and warred almost constantly with the kingdoms of southern India. He expanded the territory of the Mughal Empire to its greatest extent, but he also alienated many of the people in his empire, rebellions became more frequent, and the Dutch and British East India Companies took control over India’s international maritime trade. The British, who acquired the island and harbor of Bombay in 1661, came into brief conflict with Aurangzeb, which ended by the British negotiators paying reparations to the Mughals. Nevertheless, British Bombay was fortified and continued to grow rapidly into one of the major Indian ports, as did British-held Madras, and then even Aurangzeb was unable to dislodge them. When he died, half of the realm rose in rebellion due to his long oppression. The Mughal Empire never recovered, and the British became one of the major de facto powers on the subcontinent.
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THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

When Tamerlane had invaded Russia, the dukes of Muscovy paid him off or otherwise miraculously, they believed, escaped destruction. The successor state of the lineage of Jochi—better known as the Golden Horde—was not so lucky. Due to the foolish attacks on him by Tokhtamïsh, Tamerlane devastated the Golden Horde lands from south to north. In the mid-fifteenth century
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it broke into several smaller khanates, including the Kazan Khanate in the area of the Volga-Kama confluence, the Astrakhan Khanate on the Volga River mouth at the Caspian Sea, and the Noghay or Blue Horde of the Khanate of Sibir, whose people nomadized in the Central Steppe south of the Ural Mountains from the Volga east to the Irtysh in Siberia.

In 1547 the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan IV (the Terrible, r. 1533–1584), had himself crowned the first Russian
czar
(’caesar’) or ‘emperor’, declaring Russians to be the Orthodox heirs of the Byzantines and the Russian realm, now the Russian Empire, to be the heir of the Eastern Roman Empire. Russia had already become involved in civil strife within Kazan. Although the Russians had arranged to move into the city peacefully, at the last minute there was yet another shift in the power balance in the city. Ivan then took command of the Russian forces besieging Kazan and captured the city in October 1552.
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In 1556 the Russians took Astrakhan and added the territory of that khanate to their realm too.

Meanwhile, in 1563 Kuchum, khan of the Noghay Horde, had defeated and killed the khan of Sibir, a successor state of the Golden Horde located to the east of the Ural Mountains. The khan of Sibir had nominally been the vassal of Ivan IV. Kuchum promptly assumed his Siberian predecessor’s position of Russian vassal and sent envoys to present tribute, so the Russian czar, who was busy with the Livonian War at the time, did not protest the takeover. Instead, he awarded to a private family, the Stroganovs, the right to establish settlements east of the Urals and to hire Cossacks to defend them. When the Stroganovs discovered silver and iron in western Siberia, they asked for and received permission to extend their land holdings. They then hired five or six hundred Cossacks under the command of Yermak (Ermak) Timofeyevich. On September 1, 1581, a Cossack force of 840 men
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armed with guns attacked Khan Kuchum and crushed his forces. On October 25, 1583, Yermak captured the capital, Sibir.
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Khan Kuchum retreated south to his original territory in the Noghay Horde to assemble an army to attack the Russians, while Yermak wrote to Ivan IV to request reinforcements. The emperor responded by sending money and a force of 500 soldiers. Kuchum marched north and met the Russians in battle. Though Yermak died during the conflict and the Russians had to retreat, they nevertheless retained the territory of the former Khanate of Sibir. In 1587 they constructed the towns of Tobolsk (near Sibir, which had been destroyed) and Tara on the Irtysh River, and in 1598 again defeated Kuchum, who was shortly thereafter killed by his own people. His khanate was annexed by Russia.
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