Europeans Abroad, 1450-1750 1442251778, 9781442251779

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Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750

Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750

David Ringrose

Rowman & Littlefield Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Rowman & Littlefield An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB, United Kingdom Copyright © 2018 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All maps courtesy of Mack Carlisle, MFA All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4422-5176-2 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4422-5177-9 (electronic) The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

To Kathryn Spouse, friend, lover, intellectual companion, scholarly critic, and relentless editor Fifty-seven years and still counting

Contents



List of Figures, Maps, and Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Perspectives on European Expansion

1

Chapter 1

Europe Crosses the Threshold

9

Chapter 2

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?

21

Chapter 3

An Era of Empires

35

Chapter 4

Three American Empires

65

Chapter 5

Africa, Portugal, Brazil, and the Atlantic

85

Chapter 6

Atlantic North America: No Empires to Conquer

109

Chapter 7

An Era of World Trade

125

Chapter 8

Europeans and the World: Spices, Silk, and Silver

149

Chapter 9 Europeans and Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century

173

Chapter 10 Disappearing Colonists: Death, Assimilation, and Desertion

193

Chapter 11

217

Conclusion

vii

viii  •  Contents

Notes

231

Bibliography

245

Index

273

Figures, Maps, and Tables

Figures 1.1a. 1.1b. 1.2. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 5.1. 5.2. 6.1. 8.1. 8.2. 8.3. 9.1. 11.1.

Henry VIII’s Warship Mary Rose Magellan’s Victory Vasco da Gama Embarking for India in 1497 Charles V (painted ca. 1540) Suleiman the Magnificent (ca. 1530) Bullocks Dragging Mughal Siege-Guns during the Attack on Ranthambore Fort Dom Pedro de Castro Slaves Cutting Sugar Cane on the Caribbean Island of Antigua New Amsterdam, later New York, 1664 Portuguese-controlled Hormuz in the Sixteenth Century Malay and Chinese Ships Arriving in Manila to Trade Asian Products for American Silver, 1616 Port of Acapulco, Mexico, Late Sixteenth Century Asian and European Ships Anchored at Batavia The Spanish real de a ocho, a Global Currency, Compared with the US Silver Dollar

ix

14 14 16 44 53 58 94 104 118 154 170 170 188 227

x  •   Figures, Maps, and Tables

Maps 1.1. 3.1. 3.2. 3.3. 3.4. 4.1. 4.2. 4.3. 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 6.1. 7.1. 7.2. 7.3. 7.4. 8.1. 8.2. 9.1. 9.2.

Prevailing Winds and the Portuguese, Dutch, and English Routes to the Indies Voyages of Zheng He China and the South China Sea Trade Network Habsburg Empire in Europe and the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1530) Four Muslim Empires that Dominated the Middle East Spain Occupies the Caribbean, 1492–1530 Inca, Aztec, and Spanish American Empires Global Silver Flows South-Atlantic Trade Connections between West Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, 1500–1700 Plantation Colonies in the Caribbean, Seventeenth Century The Atlantic Slave Trade, Sources and Destinations Early European Settlements in North America African and Eurasian Trade Routes before Europeans Entered the Indian Ocean Land and Sea Routes through the Middle East (ca. 1600) Cities and Towns with Armenian Merchant Colonies by 1700 Trade Routes Dominated by the Southsea Chinese before European Participation Portuguese Forts, Trading Posts, and Trade Routes in the 1540s The Spanish Pacific: Prevailing Winds and Route of the Manila Galleons Principal Portuguese, Dutch, and English Trade Centers (ca. 1700) Partition of the Spanish Low Countries into the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands

18 39 41 45 49 66 67 76 100 103 107 111 127 133 140 146 153 168 180 184

Tables 5.1. 5.2. 5.3. 10.1. 11.1.

Trade and Exchange between Brazil and Atlantic Africa (ca. 1700) Sugar Consumption in Europe Destinations of Slaves Taken from Africa to the Americas Migration and Mortality from Europe to Asia Rates of Growth of GDP in East Asia, 1990–2016

100 104 108 195 244

Acknowledgments

This book is the integration of thoughts and ideas I have accumulated over many years, beginning with involvement in a World Civilization course at the University of California, San Diego’s Eleanor Roosevelt College as far back as the late 1980s. An earlier effort to make sense of global trends in the Early Modern era,* combined with the limitations inherent in teaching World Civilization as part of an interdisciplinary faculty committee, brought home to me the pervasiveness of Euro-centrism in the teaching of world history. The book itself is the product of many years of reading and of teaching world history with both undergraduates and graduate students. Any mistakes or misunderstandings, however, are my own. I am grateful to my colleagues in the History Department at UCSD, where I taught for thirty-four years, and to the university’s Research Committee. My colleagues provided valuable critiques of parts of the manuscript, while the department, by allowing me to introduce the occasional unconventional course, helped open new perspectives on established narratives. UCSD, meanwhile, provided sabbatical leaves at helpful moments, and the Research Committee provided several timely travel grants. I am also indebted to two other great institutions: the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and the Rockefeller Foundation. At a critical time in the development of this book, the National Humanities Center awarded me a yearlong research fellowship that provided time to read, reflect, and write. Surrounded by scholars from several branches * David Ringrose, Expansion and Global Interaction: 1200–1700 (New York, 2000).

xi

xii  •  Acknowledgments

of the Humanities, my approach to the project was enriched in many ways. Sometime later, the Rockefeller Foundation awarded me a residential fellowship at their Research and Conference Center in Bellagio, Italy. The foundation’s Villa Serbellone, which overlooks the picturesque town of Bellagio and Lake Como, was a uniquely peaceful setting. Its regular seminars, in fields as diverse as Neurology and Developmental Economics, enriched my approach to the evolving book. The two anonymous reviewers solicited by Rowman & Littlefield provided long, thoughtful, and exacting critiques of the manuscript. They will find that, thanks to their suggestions, the book is much changed and significantly better. My thanks to both of you. Without a sense of geography, World History can be frustrating to both the reader and the author. My attempt to overcome that problem is embodied in the twenty-one maps scattered throughout the book. The credit for these maps goes, without reservation, to Mack Carlisle, MFA, of Portland, Oregon. Mack’s keen intelligence and remarkable computer graphics skills produced a set of maps that make the geographic dimensions of this essay manageable to any reader. Finally, I am deeply indebted to the Maritime Museum of San Diego and its welcoming crew of volunteer docents; its director, Dr. Ray Ashley; and its executive director, Susan Sirota, creator of the museum’s remarkable education program. This museum and its unique collection of ten historic vessels—most of them seaworthy—have provided space for a post-retirement career that includes this book and the Robert and Laura Kyle Chair in Maritime History. It is not enough to write history for a few hundred academic colleagues; it is also important to make it accessible to the rest of society.

Introduction Perspectives on European Expansion

Generations of historians of Europe have labeled Europe’s engagement with the world between 1450 and about 1750 as the “Expansion of Europe.” While not a very accurate title, it is so embedded in European and World History that we haven’t much choice but to accept it. Because it is our history as Westerners, it is too easy for us to overemphasize Europe’s importance in the early modern world. It is also common for Europeanists to read backward from nineteenth-century imperialism and see early modern European expansion as the first phase of Western imperialist hegemony. The Expansion of Europe has been compared, inaccurately, to the geographic expansion of other great societies. In Europe’s own history the obvious example is the Holy Land crusades that began in 1095 CE and ended about 1289. Farther afield, examples of dramatic geographic expansion include the occupation and imposition of Han Chinese culture in southern China (ca. 100 BCE to 200 CE), the Inca occupation of Andean South America in the fifteenth century, and the Russian occupation of Siberia in the seventeenth century. The so-called Expansion of Europe of many textbooks is often explained in terms of European military and commercial prowess. We are told (rightly) that by 1500 both the Spanish and Portuguese were looking for a route to the East. Quite by accident, the Spaniards discovered America, and over the next half-century they conquered the Aztec and Inca empires, took local women as partners, learned a bit about the Pacific Ocean, and confiscated the accumulated treasure of the Aztec and Inca monarchies. Similar narratives 1

2  •  Introduction

tell us that first the Portuguese and then the Spanish, Dutch, and English opened ocean routes to India and China, sending out armed fleets and building maritime empires. In this Eurocentric account, the three centuries after 1450 saw Europeans exploit the Mexican and Peruvian silver mines, take over Asian trade, create the plantation system, and enslave millions of Africans. These narratives, built into histories of Western Civilization, have encouraged the implicit assumption that other societies existed only after being encountered by Europeans. Europe’s entry into the rest of the world also relies on heroic stories about Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Afonso de Albuquerque, Hernán Cortés, and the Pizarro brothers. Nationalist European historians wrote of early European expansion as heroic conquests because nineteenth- and twentieth-century nation-states needed national heroes to reinforce their national self-images. For Spain and Portugal, the achievements of Cortés, da Gama, and the Pizarro brothers were a part of their nineteenth-century national identity. The Iberian version of heroic conquest was challenged by an Anglo-Dutch version that cast Iberian imperial triumphs as military aggression, greed, and bigotry. The Dutch and English followed this up with their own imperial legends. Their great East India Companies were better capitalized and could afford more ships, “proving” that Holland and England were better imperialists and capitalists than the Portuguese and Spanish. These stories assume that a prosperous Europe grafted itself onto a static Asian economy, casting Europe’s sixteenth-century heroes as the founders of Europe’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialist hegemony. This narrative highlights the institutions created by European states: the Spanish Empire, the Portuguese Estado da India, and the Dutch and English East India Companies. Europeans emerge as aggressive, intent on spreading Christianity, and intolerant of infidels, heretics, and idolaters. It is easy to assume that since Europeans were present in many parts of the world before 1750, Europe was already building its nineteenth-century hegemony.1 If we look past these assumptions of European domination, the first thing we see is that most of the Europeans who first went abroad were looking not for conquest but for the commercially profitable spices, silks, and porcelains of the Middle East and Asia. This European entrance into Asian trade may have been important to the changes under way back home in Europe, but it did not significantly change the evolution of an Asia where China and India were each bigger and richer than all parts of Europe combined.2 Moreover, except possibly in the Americas, European military technology was not notably superior to that of other societies. Under the right circumstances, Asian or African military tactics often worked better than European ones.

Introduction  •  3

The appearance of Europeans in various parts of the world brought dramatic conquests in America and growing amounts of direct trade with Asia. This form of expansion was important to Europe because it (sometimes) enriched private investors and brought new revenue to European governments and speculators. Its importance to the rest of the world varied from place to place. As the slave trade evolved into a very large enterprise, it enriched many Brazilian plantation owners, strengthened some African governments, and undermined the demography of many parts of Africa. The devastating epidemics that Europeans brought to America radically altered Native American societies, big and small. The demographic catastrophe that cut the population of Mexico from more than ten million to a little more than one million in eighty years was repeated on a smaller scale all over the Americas, often before sustained European contact. In the Americas, land taken from the Native Americans, European capital and management, and African labor then created a new kind of society—a society based on the plantation, with its redefinition of African workers as machines. In Africa and Asia, however, Europe was represented by three or four substantial, fortified urban enclaves, several fortified agencies with factors (purchasing agents), and dozens of unfortified agencies. The result was a militarized trade diaspora. Europeans participated in, and even expanded, trade in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea by adding new routes to those already in use, but this was far from changing the basic structure of Asian maritime trade. This brings us to an interesting aspect of the “European empires” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If they were less powerful than we have been told, and the rest of the world was more dynamic than once implied, we need to reexamine how and why thousands of Europeans became a permanent part of the world’s social landscape, often living well outside any vestige of European control. Having downgraded diplomacy, aggression, and military technology as incomplete explanations for a widespread European presence, what else should we consider? I began looking at European expansion in a broader framework after years of teaching World History. It became apparent that in 1400, scarcely any Europeans could be found outside Europe and the shores of the Mediterranean; by 1700 thousands of European men were living in places across the globe. Older narratives imply that the world was a difficult, hostile place for Europeans, but this image of constant conflict between East and West is misleading. The encounters between Europeans and members of other societies were actually cultural exchanges that transformed both.3 With the exception of China, African and Asian governments and societies were reasonably

4  •  Introduction

open to outsiders as long as they accepted local codes of behavior and the legitimacy of local authority.4 Behind the standard depictions of the military might of Portuguese, Dutch, and English trading empires, one detects the presence of growing numbers of European men who apparently lived well in parts of the world outside Europe without military support. Somehow they combined smallscale, local diplomacy and mutually profitable exchange while living in unfamiliar places. The Spanish American Empire, in which a few thousand Spaniards governed several million American Indians, functioned for almost three hundred years backed only by local militias. For this to have worked, Spaniards and Native Americans had to have developed various forms of collaboration. The Portuguese, English, French, and Dutch constructed many distinctive relationships with the Native Americans of Brazil and North America. Each was a different combination of land use, trade, slavery, disease, and European settlement. The most striking of these constructs grew out of the Portuguese interaction with the countries along the Atlantic coast of Africa before the European entry into the Indian Ocean. During the fifteenth century the Portuguese opened trade and established formal relations with several African countries. They also discovered and populated the Cape Verde Islands and the island of São Tomé, just offshore from the mouth of the Congo River. This stimulated a modest coastal trade in gold, horses, salt, iron, copper, cotton cloth, and slaves. In 1500, more or less by accident, Pedro Álvares Cabral found Brazil; by 1550 the first Brazilian sugar plantations were in operation. Initially they used enslaved Native Americans to work in the fields, but by 1600 the supply of Indian slaves had disappeared, and the Brazilian plantations were importing Africa slaves as part of a complex trade network linking countries on both sides of the South Atlantic. This regional network grew into a trans-Atlantic trade network. It is also a classic example of the combination of free land, slave labor, and European capital that was the basis for the Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century. Given that today the world is drifting into a high-tech version of seventeenth-century international relations, with China and India becoming world-class economies, our assumptions need reevaluation. The shifting foundations of our current world could benefit from a reexamination of the relationship between Europe and the world before the Industrial Revolution. The great powers of that era were the Ottoman, Chinese, and Mughal Empires. This book addresses the reality of European power in that context.

Introduction  •  5

The Reality of European Power Abroad In practice, the early European “empires” had rather puny resources. In 1525, when the Chinese Empire had a standing army of one million men and the Ottoman Empire could put 150,000 troops into its Balkan campaigns every year, the Habsburg emperor Charles V had trouble raising an army of twentyfive thousand. Cortes had at most nine hundred European soldiers in Mexico in 1521. He did not defeat the Aztecs because he had gunpowder weapons, but because he had thousands of native allies and because the Aztecs, lacking the Europeans’ acquired immunities, were decimated by a massive epidemic of smallpox. The reality of the era 1400–1700 was one in which Europeans won some naval battles and a number of small-scale military confrontations but also relied on diplomacy and on building local partnerships. Europe’s biggest technological advantage in the Indian Ocean was its use of ship-mounted artillery. The logistical problems of maintaining a land army of any size so far from home compelled Europeans to avoid large-scale military confrontations and often forced them to garrison their overseas strongholds with Asian and African mercenaries. Asian and African rulers countered by hiring European mercenaries, especially those familiar with artillery. When Europeans used force, they were often met with effective resistance. On the West African coast, a half-dozen war canoes, carrying sixty or seventy warriors each, could overwhelm a European warship, while African fortifications easily resisted European artillery. The Japanese effectively used infantry armed with muskets fifty years before the same volley fire tactics were taken up in Europe. Ming China’s coastal defenses effectively limited foreign access to the Chinese mainland. The Mughal, Safavid, and Ottoman Empires generally played the European countries off against each other, and by 1700 the Sultanate of Oman had conquered almost all the Portuguese strongholds in East Africa. As Europeans entered the world arena in the era 1450–1750, their most durable successes were accomplished through trade and collaboration with local commercial elites. Even in Spanish America, which really was a conquest empire, local European elites conceded substantial autonomy to Native American communities in return for various kinds of collaboration. Europeans of the Early Modern era were not reflexively suspicious or belligerent when meeting strangers. The merchants, administrators, and early colonists who ventured abroad between 1400 and 1700 grew up in a European culture that assumed that people everywhere were descended from God’s creation of the world and therefore shared the same values. In a

6  •  Introduction

largely unconscious, ad hoc way, they were inclined to look at any society for institutions like family, law courts, and government that resembled those of Christian Europe. Admittedly, European thought included alternative perceptions that assigned levels of barbarism and humanity to various societies and assumed that Christian humans were the most truly civilized of men. Yet European travelers appreciated the complexity of other societies and considered that some societies, especially that of China, were superior. With what was, in reality, limited military support, collaboration and trade allowed Europeans to create commercial networks that grew up alongside those of Africa and Asia. They integrated into local societies in ways that resembled the Armenian and Jewish diasporas rather than empires of conquest. I would argue that what European rulers advertised as great colonial empires were networks of small enclaves that were either useful to Asian states or tolerated as minor nuisances. Meanwhile, since almost all the émigrés leaving Europe were men, thousands of Europeans who ventured abroad married local wives. As we will see, under the influence of their wives, these men often adapted to local ways of life. This resulted in “European” households that were not transplanted bits of Europe but instead had Asian or Indian servants, indigenous local wives who managed the internal life of the family, and mixed-blood children who spoke the local language before they learned Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish. Even in Spanish America, European society was an amalgamation of Spanish and indigenous blood and lifestyle and shared increasingly vague boundaries between mestizo, criollo, and Spaniard. Not until the later eighteenth century did travelers stop looking for cultural similarities and, under the influence of the Enlightenment, begin cataloguing differences.5 While the degree to which European men joined foreign communities before 1750 suggests an ability to adapt, it also suggests acceptance of the reality that, as de facto expatriates, they adjusted because that was the best way to succeed. As they did so, class, status, and religion became more important than language, race, or color. This pragmatic approach, while seemingly contradicted by assumptions about ChristianEuropean superiority, reflects a strain of thought that ran through European culture from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment. Meanwhile, this European maritime diaspora coexisted with the rise of large, land-based empires across Eurasia and America—the Mughal Empire in India, the Safavid Empire in Persia, an Ottoman Empire that stretched from the outskirts of Vienna to Iraq and Algiers, a Habsburg Spanish Empire that controlled half of Europe, and a revived Chinese Empire. In America the Aztec and Inca Empires of the 1400s laid the foundations for the Spanish American Empire of the 1500s. By the 1600s, effective royal government was being consolidated in

Introduction  •  7

Japan and effective governments were also taking shape in smaller Asian countries, including the Taungoo Kingdom (now Myanmar), Siam, Champa, and the Sultanate of Oman at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. As late as 1800 China was the world’s biggest and wealthiest economy and the real reference point for the story of global trade. When America declared its independence in 1776, the Chinese Empire was the most populous empire the world had ever seen. World trade in the Early Modern era was not driven by European demand, or by the supply of silver, but by China’s and India’s demand for monetary silver, spices, and much else. On the whole, early European “empires” were trade diasporas that were more important to their home countries than they were to the societies of Asia and Africa.6 Nor were European enclaves secure. The Mughal emperor in India and Safavid shah of Persia actually welcomed English merchants—largely because they could pit the English against the Portuguese, Dutch, and French. The Dutch and English East India Companies maintained dozens of commercial agencies on the Malabar and Coromandel Coasts of India, but most of them were unarmed and depended on the goodwill of local rulers. Meanwhile, the Portuguese were being evicted from their African forts in small-scale versions of Japan’s expulsion of the Portuguese in 1639 as the Sultanate of Oman built its own maritime empire in the Arabian Sea. A few thousand Portuguese or Dutch sailors and soldiers, scattered throughout the ten-thousand-mile Indian Ocean commercial network, had surprisingly little impact. This complex and untidy story of cultural interaction, collaboration, and exploitation, laced with real and imagined military resources, stands in sharp contrast to the military and industrial hegemony that the West acquired in the nineteenth century.

Rise and Demise of Western Hegemony Most readers would agree that between 1800 and 2000 the West (Europe and the United States) dominated the world. By contrast, Europe in 1500 was one of several dynamic societies around the world, and not the biggest or wealthiest. As of 1750, on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, Europe had made important improvements in metallurgy and cloth production, but it still lacked the ability to take direct control over distant countries. In the two hundred years after 1800, however, Western hegemony emerged from a potent mixture of rampant nationalism and modern military technology. Western expansion thus had two phases: an early modern, preindustrial interaction between the world and Europe; and a rather different post-1800 phase marked by Europe’s economic and political hegemony enforced by industrialized military power.

8  •  Introduction

Western hegemony reached its peak on the eve of World War I. To pay for that war, the European powers sold off most of their overseas economic assets, weakening the effectiveness of their political authority in their empires. Between the two world wars, a combination of economic dislocation, the Great Depression, and political instability further undermined Western hegemony. Even though that hegemony seemed to revive as the Cold War turned the United States into a global policeman, Western hegemony became increasingly tenuous. The modern transfer of industrial and military technology to countries like China, India, and Iran has ended the conditions that sustained Western hegemony since the nineteenth century. Although Western dominance lasted barely two centuries, Western leaders (and historians) still act as though it persists. The lessons of Western interventions in Suez, Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan have been slow to take hold. Modern technology has created the paradox that a guerilla movement can win simply by surviving massive, high-tech interventions by great powers, while the most powerful weapons of great powers are too dangerous to use.

So, What About 1450–1750? The United States and Europe are looking at a future that will be shared by a number of powerful states, with many smaller, autonomous countries as part of the mix. This pattern resembles that of the Early Modern era (1450– 1750), in which several great powers, with similar technological capabilities, coexisted with numerous smaller states and shared in widespread commercial interdependence. This characterization helps to explain how, between 1450 and 1750, modest numbers of Europeans came to live in every corner of the world, most of which were places they could not hope to conquer. There is no shortage of settings in which Europeans were bad neighbors, and they often fought among themselves. Yet many of the societies with which Europeans interacted required the Europeans to collaborate to get what they wanted. No one prior to the later eighteenth century, except possibly Francis Bacon, could have envisioned a world in which any or all the European countries dominated China or ruled India. A better understanding of the Early Modern world could help us manage the modern loss of Western supremacy. That possibility, of course, depends on the lessons we derive when we try to understand the Early Modern world without letting modern assumptions distort our conclusions. Hopefully the following perceptions of the Early Modern world will suggest ways to come to terms with the twenty-first-century world.

CHAPTER ONE

Europe Crosses the Threshold

Background to the Great Journeys The fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw worldwide population growth and prosperity. It was evident in China, India, and the Middle East, and Europe followed the same trend as it recovered from plague and adjusted to climate change.1 While economic recovery brought more trade, prosperity by itself does not explain why Europeans broke out of their European and Mediterranean world in such a dramatic fashion. Their objective was not new. European merchants had long sought access to Asian products that reached the Mediterranean Europe over traditional trade routes through the Middle East. The search for an alternate route to Asia was prompted by the disruption of these traditional Asian trade routes. Throughout the Middle Ages merchants from Venice, Genoa, and a variety of smaller Mediterranean ports had connected Europe with Asia. By 1300 these Italians had been joined by French and Catalan merchants. They were found in most Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea ports, including Kaffa and Trebizond on the Black Sea, Constantinople and Iskenderun in modern Turkey, and Alexandria in Egypt. This network of European merchants had also reached inland to cities like Tabriz and Aleppo, where caravan routes from the East converged. During the fourteenth century these trade routes were disrupted by the breakup of the Mongol Empire and conquests of Tamerlane (Emir, 1370– 1405), forcing the network of European merchants to return to Europe. As a

9

10  •  Chapter One

result, European merchants lost contact with their traditional Middle Eastern trade networks.2 Throughout the fifteenth century political unrest hampered overland trade from India to Egypt. The Sultanate of Delhi, which had ruled northern India since the thirteenth century, was breaking up. Persia was politically unstable until the rise of Shah Ismail, who established the Safavid Empire in 1502. The Mamluk Empire in Egypt was losing its cohesion and, in violation of a long-standing treaty, attempting to extort additional revenue from the Venetian merchants.3 The Ottoman Empire, after recovering from its defeat by Tamerlane, expanded rapidly, extending its rule to include the lower half of the Balkans, Constantinople, and Cyprus.4 Genoa was the city most hurt by these changes, losing most of its Eastern Mediterranean trading posts to the Ottoman Empire. Forced out of their Eastern Mediterranean sources of commodities, Genoa’s merchants needed new places to invest their capital. They shifted their investments westward, becoming involved in the finances of Spanish-ruled Naples and expanding their trade with North Africa. They began sending their merchandise to Antwerp by ship, stopping at Seville and Lisbon along the way. There they married into prominent Spanish and Portuguese families, bringing with them Genoese capital and commercial expertise and a willingness to speculate in Atlantic ventures.5 The Portuguese had their own history of trading with North African ports, where, in a multilingual setting, Christian and Muslim merchants met face to face while negotiating sales, payment of customs duties, and local court proceedings. Both the Genoese and the Portuguese were familiar with the customs and patronage practices of this Arabic world. Guidebooks written for Christian merchants in the late Middle Ages list many entries for North African ports, suggesting that not all Portuguese were hostile to trade with Muslim North Africa. The Portuguese ruling nobility, however, was still living in a world of heroic deeds and crusades against the infidel and pushed for war with Muslim Morocco. Underlying the political and economic events of the early fifteenth century were social changes that affected all of Europe. By the 1480s the fifteenth century civil wars were settled in England, France, and Castile, where the last Muslims had been driven out of Granada in 1492. Less burdened by constant warfare, Europe’s rulers began using their revenue to enhance their royal courts, enrich their capital cities, and attract the aristocracy to court life. Portuguese, Castilian, and Genoese investors began by funding the exploration of Madeira, the Canary Islands, the Cape Verde Islands, and the Azores, and by investing in trade with the west coast of Africa. By the last quarter of the fifteenth century, the Genoese in Lisbon were backing the

Europe Crosses the Threshold   •  11

systematic search for a route around Africa. At the same time, their Genoese relatives in Seville helped fund the conquest of the Canary Islands and Christopher Columbus’s voyages to America. The first question that comes to mind is: What prompted men to embark on these dangerous, precedent-breaking voyages? It is a question that has two answers. The economic historian will tell you, rightly enough, that the population of Europe was growing and that Europe was becoming wealthier.6 The social historian will tell you that the men who participated in these risky ventures were men who were being marginalized by the social change that came with economic growth.

Prosperity and Demand Even as trade through the Middle East became unpredictable, other factors intensified the European demand for imported luxuries. Part of the demand came from simple population growth.7 In addition to that demand, Europe was becoming more urbanized, and that urbanization strengthened the appetite for exotic commodities. As the European economy grew, wealth tended to concentrate near the top of society, causing elite demand to grow faster than the rest of the economy. If the elites also concentrated in cities, they were more accessible as consumers. Economic growth also brought more revenue to Europe’s rulers, and they used some of that revenue to build capital cities as a way of enhancing their prestige. Capital cities then acted as magnets that encouraged the nobility to move to the cities, adding their incomes to the elite market. Attracted to the royal court by the possibility of royal favor and profitable sinecures, the nobility turned capital cities into market centers for elite consumption. The urbanization of the wealthy European elites in turn drew a more general population to capital cities, adding another layer of demand. The process of building, furnishing, and staffing new palaces attracted an urban population. Bureaucrats, lawyers, doctors, brokers, merchants, artisans, day labor, and household servants moved to the city to provide the services that made life comfortable for the rich. Given the high cost of land transport, urban growth concentrated customers and demand, reducing the cost of reaching those customers.8

Getting to the Supply: Exploration and Risk The early expeditions into the Atlantic and beyond were risky, speculative ventures. They tested the available ships to their limits and more. Mariners

12  •  Chapter One

depended on navigational technology that allowed them to measure latitude, albeit with a twenty- or thirty-mile margin of error, but they could not measure longitude. By the 1490s the kings of Portugal and Castile were chartering expeditions that required several months of continuous sailing, not just the few weeks required by the African trade. Not only were the voyages long, but some went on for months without fresh water and food. Inevitably, the mortality on these voyages was high; Magellan’s expedition of 1519 started out with 270 men and returned with eighteen. It is easier to take risks if you have little to lose, and many of the men on the early voyages were either seeking better situations or escaping from bad ones. Earlier we saw that by the 1480s, Europe’s various civil wars had been settled, while Castile finished its conquest of Granada in 1492. This left Europe with a supply of unemployed soldiers. Many of them were barely hanging on to noble status and willing to take great risks to keep it. Many were younger sons of noble families who, because of mayorazgo, or entail, were excluded from inheriting the family patrimony.9 With prior military experience, and desperate for money and social recognition, many younger brothers signed on for very risky ventures. Whether these expeditions sailed under the Portuguese or Castilian flag, they included hopeful lesser nobles and Genoese agents, along with soldiers and sailors from all over maritime Europe. Economic and social trends in Europe thus provided merchants and investors who were ready to make risky investments and created a supply of men ready to sign on for risky voyages. The distinction between voluntary and coerced emigration was not always clear.

Ship and the Role of Risk Long sea voyages were always risky, and the available ships deteriorated rapidly as the voyages got longer. One recurrent explanation of early European expansion tells us that the Europeans began to travel longer distances by sea because they learned how to build better ships. That is a debatable point. The accumulation of knowledge about winds and currents and better navigational tools contributed more to the safety of long voyages than improvements in ships. By 1460 ship captains were beginning to use the quadrant for nighttime observations, and by the 1480s they were able use it for solar observations. Portuguese authorities also worked to combine the astrolabe with adequate tables, improving the accuracy of long-distance navigation. After a century of Atlantic fishing, exploration, and trade along the African coast, the winds and currents of the Atlantic were well known.

Europe Crosses the Threshold   •  13

European rulers could, and did, build very large ships both for war and as a display of royal power. They were, however, clumsy and expensive to maintain. Seasoned seaman preferred, and could afford, smaller and more manageable ships. Magellan’s five ships ranged from 75 to 120 tons capacity. Most of the ships of 1500 were small and sturdy, having been built to cope with the rough waters of the North Sea and the Bay of Biscay. They worked well for Atlantic voyages that lasted six to twelve weeks, but if we look at the results from long voyages, these ships were often pushed beyond their potential. It was not unusual for the early voyages of exploration to lose some of their ships, but losses continued to plague the Portuguese even after regular trade around Africa began. Over the entire sixteenth century, about 12 percent of the ships leaving Lisbon for Asia were lost, as were 15 percent of returning ships. The record worsened after 1586 and for the years 1586–1605, when close to half the ships sent from Lisbon to Goa, the capital of Portuguese Asia on the west coast of India, turned back or were lost at sea. This improved in the seventeenth century, but even then, a loss rate of 15 percent seems to have been normal. European expansion was above all the result of individual ambition and the acceptance of risk, not a process triggered by building better ships. Early expeditions simply used the ships that were available. Chinese rulers and sailors, for example, had ship technology that could take people just about anywhere, but after ambitious voyages in the early 1400s, they deliberately chose not to go abroad. Similarly, the fact that Europeans had the seafaring technology to undertake long distance travel is hardly an explanation for why they did so. The primary motives seem to have been economic and social. In the 1490s it was Europe’s turn to produce men desperate enough, brave enough, or foolhardy enough to explore beyond known boundaries. Portugal’s well-known “crusades” against Muslim Morocco have obscured another side of Portuguese relations with the Muslim world. Alongside Portugal’s episodic anti-Islamic offensives, conducted by the Portuguese aristocracy, we find the Portuguese merchant community taking part in numerous routine Muslim-Portuguese trade arrangements. As merchants in a half-Muslim Mediterranean, the Portuguese were experienced with multilingual settings, and in the later Middle Ages, Portuguese merchants traded regularly in North African ports. There, Christian and Muslim merchants had extensive face-to-face contact as they completed business transactions and responded to proceedings in local courts. These Christian-Muslim interactions were extensive enough to suggest a reexamination of our assumption of mutual hostility.

Figure 1.1a.   Henry VIII’s Warship Mary Rose, as Depicted about 1546. It was approximately 150 long with a 500-ton displacement. (Courtesy of the British Library)

Figure 1.1b.  Magellan’s Victory. Also called the Victoria or Vittoria, the Victory was about sixty-five feet long, with a displacement of about eighty-five tons.

Europe Crosses the Threshold   •  15

Four Expansion Narratives As part of a reexamination of European expansion, the story is best told through four parallel narratives: the return of European merchants to the Middle East, the African route to India and China, Spain and the American Empires, and the Spanish-Mexican urge to reach Asia by sailing west. Narrative #1: Across the Middle East The first narrative, which seldom gets much attention, is the ongoing effort to reestablish European connections with the trans-Asian trade routes after the breakup of Tamerlane’s short-lived empire (1370–1405). Europe had traded for centuries with Asia, through a variety of intermediaries, before the route around Africa was opened. This older trade depended on sea and caravan routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Along these routes, goods were transported in small ships that hugged the coast from India to the Persian Gulf and Basra, where their cargos were transferred to caravans for delivery to Aleppo and the Mediterranean. Alternatively, the ships worked their way up the Red Sea, where the goods were transferred by caravan to Cairo and then by riverboat to Alexandria. By the middle of the fifteenth century, European merchants and diplomats were trying to reestablish their connections to overland caravan routes and establish factors (brokers or purchasing agents) in Middle Eastern trade centers. Well before the Portuguese set out to sail around Africa and Columbus sailed into the Atlantic, members of the Armenian, Greek, and Jewish trading diasporas, along with French and Italian merchants and diplomats, were reappearing all over the Middle East. They could be found in accessible places like Constantinople, Izmir, and Aleppo, but they also appeared in Isfahan, capital of the Safavid Empire, at Trebizond and Kaffa on the Black Sea, and as far away as Samarkand in Central Asia and Multan in India. By the middle of the sixteenth century, hundreds of Italian and French merchants visited Isfahan and Hormuz every year to buy Indian pepper and Persian silk. Narrative #2: Portugal, Africa, Brazil, and the Indian Ocean The second narrative tells of the Portuguese circumnavigation of Africa and the opening of direct trade with Asia. Behind that simplistic statement are three interconnected segments. The narrative really starts with Portugal’s exploration of West Africa. Drawn by the gold from sub-Saharan Africa, the Portuguese brought the countries of the African Atlantic coast into the Atlantic maritime world. A second part of the narrative relates to the discovery and development of Brazil as part of a South Atlantic economic and

16  •  Chapter One

political zone. The third, and biggest, part of this narrative is the entry of Portugal, and later England and the Dutch Republic, into the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In 1488 Bartolomeu Dias sailed far enough past the Cape of Good Hope to confirm that he had, indeed, found the way around Africa. Ten years later, Vasco da Gama set out on the first European voyage into the Indian Ocean. Staking his life and his expedition on an untested theory about the prevailing winds in the South Atlantic, he sailed west and south away from the Cape Verde Islands and Africa. European sailors had learned that the North Atlantic had a circle of prevailing winds that blew south from Spain to the equator. Just north of the equator they blew west and north toward the Caribbean, after which the prevailing winds blew north along the North American coast to forty degrees north latitude. There strong prevailing winds blew eastward toward Europe. Vasco da Gama gambled that there was an analogous grand circle of winds in the South Atlantic. South of the equator he found a prevailing wind that blew west and south toward what we now know as Brazil. Coastal winds blowing south along the South American coast then took him to the prevailing winds at forty degrees south latitude, letting him sail to the coast of southern Africa. It was a remarkable voyage.

Figure 1.2.  Vasco da Gama Embarking for India in 1497. (Alfredo Roque Gameiro [1864–1935], courtesy of the National Library of Portugal)

Europe Crosses the Threshold   •  17

This sounds simple from a modern perspective, but on leaky wooden ships with crews dying of scurvy, sailing for months out of sight of land was a serious gamble. Given that no one had ever done this before, and that no one yet knew about Brazil, it was a remarkable feat. The gamble paid off, and da Gama established the basic route to Asia that would be used for the next four centuries. Once in the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese set out to control the spice trade and to capture Jerusalem for Christianity. Afonso de Albuquerque patterned his attempt to control the spice trade after the armed trade diaspora the Venetians used in the Mediterranean. He went after the key transit points in the Indian Ocean—Melaka, Goa, Hormuz, and Aden—and captured three of the four. The campaign to conquer Jerusalem failed when the Portuguese had to go to the defense of their Christian ally, Ethiopia. This expansion narrative becomes more complex in the 1590s as Dutch and English ships start visiting the Maluku Islands in search of spices. In 1619 the Dutch began building a permanent base at the port of Jayakarta on the north coast of Java. Jayakarta was later renamed Batavia by the Dutch. The English, meanwhile, shifted their focus to India. During the first half of the seventeenth century, the Dutch East India Company was the most potent European participant in Asian commerce, but by the 1660s the reorganized English East India Company, with its focus on India, was overshadowing its Dutch competition. In practice, the English and Dutch engaged in a mix of rivalry and collaboration, made necessary because of their weak positions relative to most Asian trading partners.10 Meanwhile, the flood of American silver into Europe allowed both the Dutch and the English to buy silver, a commodity much in demand in the Chinese and Indian markets. Narrative #3: Into the Americas Like the first two scenarios, this expansion narrative started as an attempt to open a new maritime route to Asia, but it also grew out of the desire of business interests in Seville to keep ahead of their Portuguese competitors. It quickly became the compelling story of the Spanish conquest and occupation of the two great Native American empires. When Columbus finally headed west in 1492, it was thanks to the same venture capital investors that had supported earlier Atlantic ventures. The next twenty-seven years (1492–1519) were marked by unrewarding exploration and settlement. This changed in 1519–1522, when Cortes conquered the Aztec Empire, and in 1533, when the Pizarros consolidated their control over the Inca Empire. Until about 1550 the Crown focused on creating a coherent way of governing its new empire, but the mid-century discovery of

Map 1.1.   Prevailing Winds and the Portuguese, Dutch, and English Routes to the Indies. Solid lines indicate Portuguese routes; light dotted lines indicate Dutch routes; heavy dotted line indicates early English routes, primarily to India.

Europe Crosses the Threshold   •  19

silver mines in Mexico and Peru changed its approach. By 1560, because of the volume of new wealth from the American silver mines, the Crown began to build an export-oriented colonial economy that would supply and exploit the Mexican and Peruvian silver mines. Narrative #4: Across the Pacific In 1513 Vasco Núñez de Balboa discovered the Pacific. At that moment, the returns from exploring the Caribbean were still disappointing, while the profits from Portugal’s Asian trade were imposing. This prompted a fourth, and less well-known, narrative of European expansion. In 1518 Charles V of Spain authorized and subsidized a new attempt to reach Asia by sailing west. A small fleet left Spain in 1519 under the command of Ferdinand Magellan. Magellan seemed a good choice as commander, given his experience with the Portuguese in the East Indies. He explored the coast of South America and discovered the Straits of Magellan. At that point, part of his fleet mutinied and went back to Spain; storms and rough seas left him with only two ships by the time he was crossing the Pacific to the Philippines. While serving with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean, Magellan had watched them intervene in local politics in order to get trading privileges. He tried to use that tactic in the Philippines and misjudged his situation, with the result that he and nearly thirty of his men got trapped on shore and were killed. Juan Sebastián Elcano took command of the expedition. With two surviving ships, the Spaniards visited the Sultanate of Brunei on the island of Borneo, then went on to the island of Tidore, where they obtained a cargo of cloves. The two surviving ships set out for Spain—one heading east back to Cape Horn, the other sailing west for the Cape of Good Hope. The eastbound ship proved unseaworthy and was lost with all but a handful of crewmembers. The other ship, the Victoria, headed for the Cape of Good Hope commanded by Elcano. The expedition returned to Spain on June 6, 1522, more than three years after leaving. The tiny Victoria, the sole remainder of the original five ships, carried just 18 of the original 270 crewmembers. The Victoria was the first ship to sail all the way around the world, and her modest cargo of cloves not only paid for the entire expedition but even yielded a small profit. The return of the Victoria prompted more Spanish attempts to establish trans-Pacific trade. In 1525 a fleet under García Jofre de Loaísa left Spain to follow Magellan’s path around South America and across the Pacific, and in 1527 another expedition left from Mexico under the command of Álvaro de Saavedra. Both expeditions were disasters, and eventually a few members of

20  •  Chapter One

the two crews were returned to Spain by the Portuguese. Finally, in 1541– 1542 two more expeditions were sent out—one along the known route to the East Indies, the other to look for a northern route to Asia along the North American coast. The fleet sent directly to the East Indies was lost except for a few crewmembers. The other expedition, led by Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, sailed up the California coast as far as the modern border between California and Oregon. By then the crew was convinced that prevailing winds and currents made a northern route to Asia impossible. European expansion thus becomes a blend of four narratives. The first saw Europeans trying to renew Europe’s traditional overland connections through the Middle East. The second expansion narrative saw the Portuguese heading down the coast of Africa, discovering Brazil, and entering the Indian Ocean, to be followed eventually by the Dutch and the English. The third narrative started with the Spaniards trying to reach Asia by sailing west across the Atlantic. That goal was redefined by the discovery of America, which turned this third narrative into the story of the conquest and colonization of North and South America. Despite the excitement aroused by the discovery of the New World, the returns from the first generation of colonization in the Caribbean were modest, especially when compared with Portuguese profits from their trade with India. After the loss of the Saavedra expedition and the failure of the Cabrillo expedition in 1542, the goal of sailing west to Asia languished. It was revived in 1564, when the supply of American silver and the strength of the Chinese market induced the Spaniards to find the maritime route from Acapulco to the Philippines and back, opening a flow of American silver to Asia and turning Mexico City into an emporium for world trade. These four narratives frame the experience of Europeans who went abroad after 1400. That experience can only be understood if we know something about the political and cultural baggage that Europeans carried with them, and if we know something about the world these Europeans entered. Only then can we understand how Europeans related to other societies in a world of powerful empires that Europe could not dominate.

CHAPTER TWO

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?

Historians rarely notice that the expansion of early modern Europe was a mass migration, the biggest in the history of preindustrial Europe. The history of that migration includes a series of heroic explorations, but these were only a prelude to Europe’s entry into the global economy after 1450. In the three centuries after 1450, almost four million people left Europe in a migration that was unique not only for its size but also because virtually everyone left by ship. By the time of the American Revolution, half these migrants, two million people, had left Europe for the Indian Ocean and the far East; half a million went to the English colonies in North America, and more than 750,000 people left Europe for the Spanish Empire in America. The scale of this migration was unprecedented, as was the level of risk.

Migrants to Colonists The two million men, and they were almost all men, who traveled to the Indian Ocean under the auspices of the Portuguese Estado da India, the Dutch East India Company, or the English East India Company embarked on a great but dangerous venture. While we know that the risks were huge, the participants had no way of knowing what modern historians have learned about the frequency of death due to disease and shipwreck. The trip from Amsterdam to Batavia took eight to twelve months, and even on a well-run Dutch East Indiaman, 10 to 15 percent of those who sailed for Asia died at sea.

21

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While most of the men who left Europe to join the world of Asian and Indian Ocean trade probably thought in terms of returning, hopefully with a decent bank balance, less than half did so. Their decisions to migrate, despite the risk involved, reflected both desperation and ambition, depending on their place in society. To keep Europeans in the colonies, both Portuguese and Dutch governors refused to allow married men to bring their Asian or African wives and families back to their home countries. This effectively prevented seasoned colonists from returning to Europe and encouraged them to translate whatever skills they brought from Europe into positions as bureaucrats, artisans, or merchants in local Asian societies while building new family networks. Many of these men shed or revised their European identities and learned to tolerate very diverse communities. It is worth unpacking the mental baggage that shaped their lives. The goal is to tease out the layers of identity attached to these immigrants. This includes their religious and geopolitical identity, identification with the community where their families lived, the social network of the surrounding region, and the all-important identification that each man had with his extended family. Finally, there is the crucial question of how the men who went abroad viewed other societies.

Europeans Our modern era is burdened by three powerful concepts: nation, country, and society. These concepts provide the framework for modern history, but we forget that the twentieth-century concept of nation-state did not exist until after about 1800. In the nineteenth-century, a cluster of these imagined national communities became real enough to precipitate two world wars in the twentieth.1 Despite their power, nation-states are modern cultural conventions. Among other traits, the word “nation” implies clear geographic boundaries that encourage us to think in dichotomies—inside/outside and us/other. As Benedict Anderson points out, clear-cut territorial boundaries are a relatively new Western concept, one that privileges historical narratives that fit those boundaries and modern definitions of the nation-state.2 The term “European” appears frequently in this discussion. It is primarily a label applied by modern observers and is used as a convenient collective label to refer to the people who emigrated from the area we now know as Europe. It is not a label that had much meaning for the people who lived in Europe in the Early Modern era. Historians also routinely impose modern national identities upon the men who sailed under the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch,

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?   •  23

or English flags. In that connection, many of the men who went to Asia were not even subjects of the countries that recruited them. While national identity has some relevance, it is easily used by historians in an anachronistic way. A person’s political identity as the subject of an early modern monarch was not the same as the political identity of a citizen of a modern nation. The question of identity is also complicated by the fact that these emigrants were almost all men. With no European women available, European males abroad lived with, and often married, Asian, African, or Native American women. Marrying women from established local families was one way for Europeans, like other new residents in foreign places, to develop useful business connections. It also began the process of founding a local family patrimony and family-based information network (see chapter 9). The “national” identity of the men from Europe was probably more important to colonial administrators than it was to the men involved. In order to maintain a “European” population in the face of high mortality and desertion, colonial authorities generally acquiesced in intermarriage. Mixed-race, or mestizo, children of legally married European men were baptized and registered as subjects of the king of Portugal, the Dutch Republic, or the king of Castile. Among the socially “proper” bourgeois members of European society, such children became officially European members of the social hierarchy and were eligible to enter the administrative hierarchy of the colony of which they were part. European administrations increasingly were staffed with people who were officially European but who looked Asian and lived in households shaped by Asian customs.3 The nineteenth-century loss of this acceptance of intermarriage and interracial families is one of the things that marks nineteenth-century imperialism as different from the early modern experience.

Political and Religious Identity The Europeans who ventured abroad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did not think of themselves as Europeans—modern geopolitical labels were not a part of their identity. It was the Asians who began to use collective nouns like “Frank” or “firingi” to designate the scruffy, bad-mannered white men who arrived in large, odd-looking sailing ships. Europe was more readily identified as a single “civilization” by outsiders than by Europeans themselves. The latter lived too close to Europe’s multiple identities and conflicting loyalties to think this way. The term “nation” was also used in the Early Modern era, but in a different way. The modern habit of applying national identities (Italian, Spanish,

24  •  Chapter Two

etc.) to the people of early modern Europe is fundamentally anachronistic. While a man of that era might identify himself as a subject of the ruler of his home country, this did not make him a “Spaniard” or a “German” in the modern sense. “Nation,” or “natio,” referred to groups of people with common backgrounds, as when referring to the merchants from a given town or region, but this use carried no connotation of loyalty to a territorially defined state.4 The members of the network of Jewish trading colonies, physically scattered all over the Atlantic world, consciously defined themselves as the Jewish “nation.”5 The term was frequently used to refer to groups of merchants, like those from the Hanseatic League who lived in Venice or the various merchant “nations” in Antwerp.6 Fifteenth-century Europeans were far more likely to identify with rulers, kingdoms, Catholicism, or, later, Protestantism than with a geopolitical identity outlined on a map. As an example, over three centuries, thousands of Portuguese quietly left rural Portugal and moved south to the Atlantic islands and then to Brazil or Atlantic Africa. They were part of an informal empire that emerged on the fringes of Portugal’s formal imperial structures. Living outside of effective political control, these migrants married locally, adjusted to local customs and religion, and often completely abandoned their identity as Portuguese.7 The very nature of European monarchy, plus the recurrent religious conflicts and political instability of Europe itself, made geopolitical identity an unstable concept. Early modern European emigrants sometimes did identify with a specific European monarch or city-state, but this identification was tentative. A man who regarded himself as the subject of a particular ruler could discover that, thanks to a civil war, his ruler had been replaced by the head of another aristocratic family. Alternatively, the ruler with whom he identified may have died, to be replaced by someone who had inherited the right to rule the country even though he was a “foreigner.” Moreover, since the boundaries between Europe’s loosely integrated monarchies were hazy, and characterized by ethnic and cultural syncretism, the geopolitical identity of individuals from border areas was inherently unstable. Modern writers routinely label the Europeans who went abroad in the first century of European expansion as either “Spaniards” or “Portuguese.” In practice, there were no Spaniards in the sixteenth century—there were Castilians, Aragonese, Catalans, Basques, or Gallegos. Most of Cortes’s soldiers were subjects of the Kingdom of Castile, but they were likely to identify themselves as Estremeños or Andaluces.8 This defined them as natives of Extremadura or Andalucía, historically defined regions within the Kingdom of Castile. One’s identity might be associated with loyalty to a certain mon-

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?   •  25

arch, and many of the men who invaded the Canary Islands in 1402–1404 did so as subjects of Henry III of Castile. In fact, however, the initial cadre of recruits came from all over maritime Europe and found it convenient to swear an oath to the king of Castile as a condition of fighting under his flag. They fought as subjects of the king of Castile, but their leader, Gadifer de la Salle, was a Fleming who blithely shifted his own allegiance from the king of France to the king of Castile.9 The early Portuguese and Castilian expeditions into the Atlantic Ocean and West Africa sailed with charters from the rulers of Portugal and Castile, but they can also be thought of as de facto bands of European adventurers. Because these were known to be risky ventures, it could be difficult to recruit local skilled navigators or sailors. Most crewmembers were recruited regardless of their origins. John and Sebastian Cabot were Italians who sailed under the English flag, although Sebastian also worked for the king of Spain, as did the Italian Christopher Columbus. Ferdinand Magellan, who sailed as a subject of Charles V of Spain, was originally Portuguese. While Hernán Cortéz was a Castilian subject of Charles V, his army was diverse and included soldiers of northern European and African origin. Henry Hudson was the Englishman who led the expedition that claimed Hudson Bay for England, but he also led the Dutch expedition that initiated the Dutch colonization of New Amsterdam, now New York. The Portuguese administration in Asia included many officials who were not Portuguese. It is almost automatic to think of the Portuguese trade route around Africa as connecting Goa, the Portuguese capital in Asia, to Lisbon; but in fact, the cargoes brought to Lisbon did not stay there long. The Portuguese route merely passed through Lisbon before continuing to Antwerp. Antwerp was the commercial center of northwestern Europe until the 1560s, and Asian spices, pepper, and silks could be marketed much more effectively from Antwerp than from Lisbon. Soon the Portuguese trade in Antwerp drew Flemings, Germans, and Dutch into Portuguese commercial and administrative positions, both in Europe and in Asia. Fernando Kron, an Augsburg-born German, is a well-known example. Kron entered the Portuguese world as an Antwerp broker in the marketing network that distributed spices brought from Lisbon to Antwerp. Later he moved to Portuguese Goa, where he became an official in the Portuguese colonial administration. The commercial connection between Lisbon and Antwerp brought many men like Kron into the Portuguese Empire. This was ultimately helpful to the Dutch, who rebelled against Spanish rule and waged a prolonged war for their independence. By 1585 the Dutch had secured their independence, creating the Dutch Republic. Men from the

26  •  Chapter Two

now independent Dutch provinces who had been recruited to work in the Portuguese Estado da India, sometimes followed their provincial loyalties. They left their jobs and moved to the new Dutch Republic, bringing with them valuable secret maps and commercial information about Portuguese trade in Asia, making it much easier for the Dutch to break into East Asian commerce. We can see some of the ambiguities inherent in relying on the label “European” when we look at the way historians talk about Mediterranean trade. The discussion usually gives the impression that the trade between the Middle East and Europe was the preserve of merchants from Italy, Catalonia, and France. This stereotype ignores the role of Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and Muslim merchants, who also participated in Mediterranean trade. While some members of these trade diaspora communities were subjects of European rulers or cities, many had family members who were also business partners and subjects of the Mamluk, Ottoman, or Safavid sultans. These transnational or diaspora communities provided commercial bridges anchored on both the Muslim and Christian sides of the Mediterranean. The activities of these trade diaspora communities defy any attempt to find a clear geographic, commercial, or religious boundary for “Europe.”10 At least until the 1550s, most people who went abroad from Europe shared one common identity. They were almost all Roman Catholic Christians. Confronted with a strange society, however, these European expatriates seem to have had two reactions. One was to assume that Catholic Christianity was the true religion, making its adherents slightly superior to the non-Christian peoples they met.11 The other European reaction was conditioned by the Christian assumption that all peoples were descended from the same creation. If they thought about it at all, the Portuguese and Castilian explorers assumed that all societies were part of a common humanity and valued certain basic human institutions.

Family and Identity Despite the various identifiers suggested above, the most important source of identity and self-esteem for a man of this era was his standing within his extended family and that family’s social and economic status in the larger community. This is not the nuclear family of the modern West but a form of extended family that spanned two and often three generations and included aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, and in-laws. This kind of family could also be extended by establishing fictive relationships with trusted trainees, foster children, and clients from other family networks. Whether

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?   •  27

embedded in the worlds of government or church offices, court privilege and patronage, or the world of commerce, these family-based networks of interpersonal contact influenced the way individuals made decisions. An individual’s identity, status, and self-esteem were based on the degree to which his achievements enhanced the social status of his entire family.12 The early modern extended family was not just the key to building a personal identity; it was also the institution that organized the economy and society of both the local community and, among the elites, bureaucracy and trade. This view of the family is central to understanding Europeans abroad, in part because it was not very different from the family as a social and economic institution in most areas of the early modern world. Almost all businesses were partnerships, but most of the members of a partnership came from a single family, and any jobs created by the partnership were first offered to other members of the family. Family members in higher government or church positions routinely gave preferential treatment to other family members when hiring their own subordinates. Wealthy families worked to build up the family patrimony and tried to prevent its dispersal among multiple heirs. In most countries, especially England and Spain, the landed nobility developed the practice of primogeniture. This was a legal formula, authorized by the king, that bound an estate into a single hereditary unit that then passed to the oldest living male heir. Primogeniture, mayorazgo in Spanish, often left younger noble sons dependent on their older siblings for their income. This practice prevented the breakup of family estates, but it also produced men who were desperate for the money and reputation needed to maintain their noble lifestyle and thus willing to sign on for risky ventures. The family was thus a carefully constructed network of personal and economic relationships orchestrated by a patriarchal father, grandfather, or matriarch. The family patriarchs and matriarchs monitored the careers of all their brothers, uncles, cousins, and nephews. They set up marriage alliances between families because it was the most important way to gain access to new financial or patronage resources. The ideal spouse either connected the husband’s family network with families of higher status or with families with substantial economic resources. The classic European example is the Medici family in the 1400s.13 At its center was a business partnership that included a small number of senior members of the family. Their wool manufacturing company, located in Florence, was a legally separate business partnership, but some of its partners came from the “central office.” Branch offices in several cities in Europe were organized as legally autonomous partnerships. Each branch included

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local partners, but each branch also included a Medici partner, who kept a controlling interest in the business. The scope and wealth of the Medici example makes it exceptional, but small or large, family networks sustained the personal identity of members of the clan, even when dispersed over thousands of miles.14 This type of family-based business network was not uniquely European. We get a glimpse of a similar family firm from the will of the Armenian merchant Khojah Petrus Uscan, who died in Madras (now Chennai), on the east coast of India, in 1750. At the age of fifteen he was sent to Chennai as a trainee in the business of another Armenian family. He traveled as a company agent to places as distant as Nepal and Lhasa. He was one of a small group of Armenian merchants based in India who controlled the export of American silver from Manila to India, providing the English East India Company with much of the silver it needed for its business in India. Through traveling relatives and local agents, Uscan did business in cities from London to Basra to Chennai and Manila.15 The importance of family contact over long distance is clear from the anxiety Uscan expressed over the questionable decisions of a young relative in a distant city.16 A slightly different example comes from the Spanish Empire and illustrates how far a family-based network could extend. The population of the small Kingdom of Navarre lived on family-owned farms and formed a tightly knit, strongly endogamous community. Farms were protected from dispersion by primogeniture and produced a variety of products, including wheat, barley, cheese, sausage, and cattle destined for urban markets. Younger sons were routinely prepared for careers in government, trade, or the Church through a combination of cross-family apprenticeships, university education, and reciprocal favoritism. Within the community, as younger sons emigrated, families created a larger network of mutual support wherever they went. One result was a Navarrese support system that stretched from Madrid to northern Spain to Mexico and the highlands of colonial Peru. By 1700 Navarrese merchant families dominated retail trade in Madrid and were involved in Spain’s trans-Atlantic commerce. To reinforce this pattern of informal mutual support, the Navarrese community formed a Madrid-based Hermandad de Navarros (Brotherhood of Navarrese). Officially, the Hermandad was charged with collecting funds that could be used to help distressed members of the Navarrese community. Their office in Madrid kept records of its members throughout the Spanish Empire and sent agents as far as Peru to solicit funds for its activities. The Hermandad was thus an “old boy” affinity network that stretched six thou-

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?   •  29

sand miles from northern Spain to the Peruvian highlands—a network that lobbied for positions for its members when government posts or contracts were being awarded.17 Whatever their origins and motives, the actions of merchants and other travelers were conditioned by ties to the paternal core of the family and concerns for the well-being of the extended clan. This is important because it was not uniquely European. It was equally true of merchants, administrators, and landowners in most of the advanced societies that Europeans encountered. This suggests the merits of the early modern habit of trying to understand other societies by looking for institutions and customs similar to those of European society. For example, early contacts with Native Americans in Virginia caused Europeans to comment on the strength of bonds among Native American families and communities.18 The same family structures sustained international diasporas like the Southsea Chinese, the Jews, and the Armenians.

Christian Thought and Mediterranean Experience Since interpersonal relations were important in all societies, it is worth restating that, whether or not they were very religious, Europeans lived in a culture conditioned by late medieval Catholicism.19 The premise that Europeans saw themselves as part of a single human community was reinforced by medieval Europe’s experiences in the Mediterranean. For many historians the Middle Ages were dominated by the Crusades and an ongoing tension between the Christian and Muslim Mediterranean, but the story of European contact with Islam involved much more than the Crusades. It is also a story of continuous Christian-Muslim commercial relations. Europeans regularly exchanged goods and personal experiences with their Greek Orthodox and Muslim counterparts. At one point the merchants of Barcelona negotiated with the ruler of the Muslim state of Tunis for access to the African gold trade and admission of Franciscan missionaries into Tunisia. In return, the Tunisian government got a slice of the profits and a company of Catalan soldiers to guard the royal palace. It is true that the Portuguese were intermittently at war with parts of North Africa, and they captured the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415. Despite these conflicts, the merchants and shipowners of Lisbon developed a routine trade with Muslim North Africa, sometimes even transporting Muslim pilgrims across the Mediterranean on their way to Mecca.

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Travel Literature and the European Perception of Others While the commercial society of Mediterranean Europe had long understood the diversity of the Mediterranean world, by the fifteenth century less cosmopolitan parts of European society were developing an appetite for accurate travel literature. Between 1200 and 1500, more and more people also sought out the thoughtful and accurate accounts found in diplomatic reports and the memoires of traveling merchants and explorers with secular backgrounds.20 These were men who offered systematic, eyewitness descriptions of what they saw.21 William of Rubruck and Marco Polo are the best-known thirteenthcentury examples. The images they offered were more comprehensive than pilgrim accounts, and usually left out the fantasies repeated by European publicists who mixed real and fantastic stories about the outside world. William of Rubruck’s travelogue, presented to the king of France in 1266, reads much like a modern ethnography as he tries to understand the societies he visited by citing parallels between Mongol and European societies.22 Visiting the Mongol court in the 1250s, William provides a nonjudgmental description of the customs, food, habits, and religious eclecticism of the Tartars.23 He is speaking as a real observer in a practical world.24 He accepts the logic of local customs and seems to approve of the Khan’s religious policy, presenting him as saying: “We Mongols believe that there is but one God, by Whom we live and by Whom we die and towards Him we have an upright heart. . . . But just as God gave different fingers to the hand, so has He given different ways to men. To you, God has given the Scriptures. . . .”25 Then, William says, the Khan chided him because Christians fail to observe the tenets of their own faith, which commanded them not to disparage others and to place justice above wealth. This same approach appears in the writings attributed to Marco Polo, Europe’s best-known medieval traveler. Returning from Asia in 1294, with Rustichello da Pisa as his ghostwriter, he constructed an extensive verbal picture of China. The accuracy of parts of his account is controversial,26 given that he apparently combined his own eyewitness accounts with material from informants at the Mongol court, but the result is still convincing.27 Marco Polo himself is indifferent to religion as he presents his reader with descriptions of various religions and debunks old myths and fables about China.28 Along with other observers, Marco Polo questions the assumption of European superiority, finding that China was more civilized and livable than Europe.29 William is probably a more accurate reporter than Marco Polo, but Marco Polo was far more widely read and at least conveys a level of realism that reinforced the curiosity of his readers.

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?   •  31

At least one earlier writer helped define an empirically accurate approach to evaluating distant places. In the mid-twelfth century, John of Salisbury pointed out that the classical world had all the elements of civilization, even though it was not Christian. He also provided a philosophical basis for the assumption that all societies had comparable traits. He did this by proposing a model for evaluating cultures that could be applied to any society. It was based on the presence of secular justice and the right of every man to disagree with authority without persecution.30 Joan-Pau Rubiés has analyzed the writings of medieval ambassadors from all parts of Eurasia and finds that these ambassadors would probably have agreed with John of Salisbury. Diplomats responsible for advising their governments on important international issues were inclined to describe what they actually saw. Rubiés shows us that diplomats from most medieval governments shared the assumption that a society was “civilized” according to “the extent of [its] urban prosperity and commerce, the refinement of artistic skills, and the strength and stability of a political authority responsible for security and the administration of justice.” Ambassadors were obligated to make accurate reports to their superiors, but they also wrote for an emerging audience that wanted factual information. Two centuries later the logic of John of Salisbury and medieval ambassadors was the foundation of Bartolomé de las Casas’s argument for the civilized humanity of Native Americans.31 By the fifteenth century there was a growing literate audience that was attracted to accurate information about the world—an audience that did not automatically assume European superiority, except possibly in the area of religion.32 This growing curiosity about the world was connected to a parallel growth in European demand for a wider range of exotic imports. Urbanized court elites were an important part of that demand as they were drawn to life at royal courts. The growth of royal entourages, the fashion of collecting and displaying exotic objects, and the emergence of permanent capital cities brought about the urbanization of royal followers. This increased the size and disposable income of court elites, and fashions at court created a growing demand for literature about exotic places. The use of exotic goods like coffee, silks, cottons, porcelain, precious jewels, and decorative objects aroused curiosity about the places that produced them. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century travel writers both responded to and reinforced the widening outlook of this changing European world by accurately presenting what they saw.33 This is reflected in the attitude of several different travelers that visited and described southern India and the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646) in the 1400s and 1500s.34 They abandoned the wonders, religious metaphors, and legends of earlier writers

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in favor of pragmatic observation, making credible their own descriptions of the societies they had visited. These travelers, ignorant regarding local religion and dependent on translators,35 used explicitly cross-cultural analogies to work out such complex phenomena as the logic of urban layout and the complexity of royal ritual.36 One of these travelers, Ludovico di Varthema, visited India around 1500 and commented that he saw nothing especially “alien” about the people of South India.37 In the early seventeenth century, a traveler like Pietro della Valle could express a desire for religious dialogue with the Hindus of South India and expect a coherent, intelligent reply.38 The ultimate cross-cultural traveler was probably the Russian Afanasii Nikitin, who traveled through Persia and India from 1468 to 1475. Nikitin blended in well and learned local languages. As a Russian Orthodox Christian, he found Islam more comfortable than Hinduism and tried to celebrate Orthodox religious holidays. As time went on, however, he lost track of their dates and compromised by celebrating Muslim holidays in their place. At one point he formally converted to Islam for the simple reason that the local Muslim ruler had limited the amount of time Christians could stay in his domain.39 We do not know how much of this travel literature reached the men who risked long and dangerous voyages to Africa, Asia, or America, nor do we know how critical Dutch readers were in their use of sources. Medieval “science fiction” like John Mandeville’s often-fantastic Travels, written around 1360, was popular well into the sixteenth century, and Christopher Columbus even referred to Mandeville to back up some of his own assertions.40 For our purposes, it is important to know that by the fifteenth century, a growing proportion of travel literature contained thoughtful eyewitness observations. Even if the early explorers and their sponsors were not directly exposed to the travel literature outlined above, they probably encountered secondhand, word-of-mouth versions. If the stories of Prester John could circulate as part of an oral tradition, so too could the adventures of Marco Polo or the descriptions of Hindu India. By the later fifteenth century, therefore, many Europeans were intrigued by other societies and assumed that if they visited them, they would find values and institutions that paralleled those of Europe. Whatever the mix of fact and fancy that circulated in Europe, the late 1400s saw the beginning of an era in which thousands of Europeans settled permanently in places across the world—an outcome that suggests a willingness to interact with the societies they contacted. While survival required a careful approach to strangers, from the thirteenth century onward, more and more travel literature appeared in which Europeans examined other cultures by looking for behavior and values similar to their own.41 They looked for

Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?   •  33

such things as family traditions, impartial justice, sovereign governments, familiar business practices, and aspects of everyday life that seemed familiar. Whether in Asia or North America, Europeans found similarities, traded with local merchants, married local women, and sometimes assimilated into local society—all of which hint at a tenuous attachment to Christianity and European identity and an openness to alternatives.42 Although differences were noted, essentialist, racist assumptions were not part of the evolving European identity.43 While the case has been made that fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europeans were open to understanding and collaborating with foreign societies, that is probably not the only factor at work as Europeans established themselves abroad. It remains that when surrounded by an alien and potentially dangerous community, survival recommends a circumspect approach. Especially during first encounters, which combined curiosity with wariness and attempts at diplomacy, there is no lack of cases in which Europeans shot first and negotiated later. The small size of most European expeditions, their limited resources, and their distance from home all restricted their ability to use force when trying to obtain what they wanted from a host society. The crucial bridge in any cultural exchange is language. Language allows us to communicate with one another, and works best if both participants in a conversation speak the same native language. Language is thus an important part of the personal identity we present to others. English-speaking Americans, who seldom speak even one other language, have little sense of how common it was to be multilingual in the age of expansion. Europe itself was more linguistically diverse than it is now, and its main languages existed in several, sometimes mutually incomprehensible dialects. No early modern ruler or merchant assumed that his subjects or customers all spoke the same language or dialect. In the arena of trade, societies in frequent contact quickly developed simplified and syncretic trade languages. The result in the Indian Ocean was that even the Portuguese’s worst enemies used pidgin Portuguese for trade. Language was rarely mentioned as an obstacle to diplomacy, government, or long-distance trade. In such an environment, the importance of being multilingual or being able to locate competent translators is obvious. Any merchant who traded over any distance was almost certainly able to speak two or three languages. Those who traded across the Mediterranean probably found that Italian, Greek, and Arabic were essential. If Europe was linguistically diverse, Indian Ocean seaports were even more so. Depending on the port you were visiting, you could hear Swahili, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Greek, Tamil, or Malay. Market towns everywhere included professional brokers and

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translator-middlemen who could adapt quickly to a new language. Alongside Malay and Chinese, pidgin Portuguese, mixed with other languages, became a new lingua franca around the Indian Ocean littoral and in maritime Southeast Asia, Macau, and Nagasaki. Two of history’s most remarkable language bridges illustrate European ingenuity in making verbal contact. When Cortés landed in Mexico, he confronted a totally incomprehensible language, the Nahuatl of the Aztec rulers. At that moment he rescued a Spaniard who had been stranded for several years in the Yucatan. This man had lived among the Maya and spoke the Mayan language fluently. Meanwhile, Cortés acquired a young Indian woman as a “companion.” One of her attractions was the fact that she spoke both Mayan and Nahuatl. The result was a three-step process of translation from Spanish to Mayan to Nahuatl and back that allowed Cortés to communicate with the ambassadors the Aztec emperor sent to meet him. The story of the survival of Plymouth Colony in 1620 is equally improbable. Soon after landing, the Pilgrims were met by a local Indian who spoke fluent English. He identified himself as Squanto and explained that he had been picked up by men on an English ship and taken to England, where he lived for several years and became fluent in English. Squanto had returned to America shortly before the Mayflower arrived. Thanks to Squanto’s diplomatic service, half the original complement of Pilgrims survived the first winter in New England. Having sailed unprecedented distances, with little hope of return, Europeans frequently found themselves in situations where they were not in charge. Whatever their cultural conditioning, tolerance and adaptability suddenly became valuable survival skills. Even after they were well established, Europeans were both outnumbered and unlikely to return home. Having partnered with or married local women, they often assimilated local practices, abandoned Christianity, and worshiped local gods. In such cases, the search for similitudes and the ability to redefine one’s personal identity were rational adjustments to reality, whether or not it resembles modern open-mindedness. Family, clan, hometown, region, ruler, and religion were in various degrees part of the self-aware identity of the men who left Europe, survived the risks of the transition, and settled in distant parts of the world. The test of this “European identity” came when, as permanent residents far from home, they found themselves embedded in very different cultures and societies. The choices these men made as they settled into new worlds, married local women, and produced intercultural offspring will tell us which parts of their “European” identity were really important to them.

CHAPTER THREE

An Era of Empires

By the end of the fifteenth century, most of the world had recovered from the plagues and climate changes of the previous century.1 Almost everywhere the population was growing and the economy expanding. New technologies in metallurgy, gunnery, printing, intensive agriculture, and navigation were being discovered, rediscovered, and exchanged. Three major religions—Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism—were spreading into new areas. Against this background, a remarkable roster of empires was taking shape. By the sixteenth century the term “empire” had been applied to a variety of polities, some very different from history’s two greatest empires, the Chinese and the Roman. This essay will sometimes refer to the “Portuguese Empire” or the “Genoese Empire” as a matter of convenience, but these maritime empires were little more than armed trade diasporas—privileged trade networks tied to the home country and reinforced by the occasional use of naval power. In contrast, the land-based empires being built in this era had large populations, provided stable government, and were capable of raising sizable armies on short notice. All of them regulated and encouraged trade, whether through established seaports or along overland caravan routes. The empires of Eurasia not only maintained strong armies but also eagerly sought out the latest gunpowder technology, from muskets to siege guns.

The Roster of Empires At least nine major empires appeared around the world between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, six in Eurasia and three in the Americas. 35

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The following pages provide an overview of the six Eurasian empires: the Chinese Empire of the Ming (1363–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties, the Habsburg Empire in Europe, the Mamluk Empire based in Egypt, the Ottoman Turkish Empire, the Safavid Empire in Iran, and the Mughal Empire in India. Simultaneously, the Americas saw the emergence of three great land empires: the Aztec, the Inca, and Spain’s American Empire. Eventually the Spanish American Empire plays a major role in shaping both the global economy and the evolution of the Habsburg Empire in Europe. After a brief review of the background on these empires, we will look more closely at each, starting with China, the biggest and wealthiest empire of the era. We will then move on to the most fragile empire on the roster, Europe’s Habsburg Empire. The immense geographic space between China and Europe was filled by four Muslim-ruled empires that were legacies of the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century and Tamerlane’s attempt to recreate the Mongol Empire at the end of the fourteenth century. In 1258 the Mongols captured Baghdad and executed the caliph. The caliph of Baghdad had been the nominal ruler of Islam and actual ruler of Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. The next year, 1259, the Mongols set out to conquer Syria and Egypt. Since about 1240, Egypt had been defended by an army of military slaves, the Mamluks, who were in the service of the caliph. The Mamluk army met the Mongols in southern Syria and handed them their first major defeat, ending the Mongol advance into the Middle East. The commander of the Mamluk army then established the Mamluk Empire, with its capital in Cairo, Egypt. This empire controlled the Holy Land, southern Syria, and the Muslim holy sites at Medina and Mecca on the Red Sea. This meant the Mamluks also controlled the Red Sea trade in spices and Asian luxuries; equally important in the Muslim world, the Mamluks were required to defend the Muslim pilgrimage routes to Mecca and Medina. The Mongol invasions also left behind a small Turkic tribe in western Anatolia, on the border of the Byzantine Empire.2 Under the leadership of Osman, the first Ottoman sultan, the tribe declared its independence in 1299. Its warriors were hired as mercenary soldiers by warring factions within the Byzantine Empire, fighting on both sides of the Bosporus. Once established on the European side, the Ottomans seized control of what is now European Turkey and eastern Greece. By 1390 they controlled the western half of Anatolia and the southern third of the Balkans. A century after the Mamluks defeated the Mongols, a Mongol noble named Tamerlane attempted to rebuild the Mongol Empire; in 1366 he launched a thirty-nine-year campaign of conquest and devastation. Between 1366 and 1405 Tamerlane conquered much of Central Asia, invaded India as

An Era of Empires   •  37

far as Delhi, and seized control of most of what is now modern Iran. He then went on to conquer Iraq and eastern Anatolia. The peak of his success came in 1402 when he not only defeated the Ottoman army but also captured the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Tamerlane died suddenly in 1405, and his empire rapidly disintegrated. Tamerlane’s short-lived empire left the Middle East with two momentous legacies. In the wake of his campaigns, a Turkic tribe called the Safavids had settled near the Caspian Sea in the area of modern Azerbaijan. The Safavids became the nucleus of a great empire that eventually controlled the southern Caucasus, Iran, Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Tamerlane’s empire also left a second great legacy, this one in Central Asia. After losing out in the civil wars that broke up Tamerlane’s empire, the Turkic tribe now known as the Mughals was forced south into Afghanistan. There the Mughals set up a capital in Kabul and began a series of raids into India that eventually resulted in the creation of the Mughal Empire. By 1530 the entire Middle East had been consolidated into three Muslimrun empires that stretched from Hungary and North Africa to the Bay of Bengal. The Ottoman Empire had conquered the Mamluk Empire in 1517 and controlled the Middle East and the Balkans. The Safavid Empire had expanded into Iran and parts of Afghanistan and Central Asia and was challenging the Ottomans in the Caucasus and Syria. In 1525 the Mughals had moved out of Kabul and taken over most of northern India.

Imperial Contrasts: China and Habsburg Europe China and Habsburg Europe were as far apart geographically as the Eurasian landmass allowed. They were also very different. China had a tradition of centralized administration a thousand years old; the Habsburg Empire did not. China was the largest and wealthiest country in the world, while the Europe of the sixteenth century was a developing region. China established a stable core in the thirteenth century, then went on to add major regions to the empire, notably Yunnan and Manchuria, at a time when the Habsburg European Empire had no coherent borders and had to fight constantly to keep various provinces from breaking away. China was an empire that worked. The Habsburg Empire did not. The Chinese Empire was administered by a self-perpetuating class of scholar-bureaucrats who ran the agencies of the empire and recruited their own replacements through a centuries-old system of examinations. These exams were based on a large body of traditional Chinese literature and philosophy, and the candidate had to have the resources of a prosperous family if

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he were to devote all his time to preparation for the exams. The entrenched position of this bureaucratic class provided China with a central administration that lasted even when the invading Mongols set up the Yuan dynasty in 1261, when civil war brought in the Ming dynasty in 1368, and when the Ming were displaced by the invading Manchus in 1644. The scholar-bureaucrats controlled access to the emperor and were both conservative and suspicious of outsiders, especially those connected with maritime trade. The official line was that overseas trade introduced subversive ideas. Unofficially, the bureaucratic elite feared they might lose control of imperial policies to an expanding business class. The arrival of a new dynasty always brought people to power from outside the bureaucratic and court elites, triggering a period of reform; but in the background, the requirements of the examination system protected the bureaucracy from the merchant class that may have threatened its status. Within a couple generations of each dynastic change, the scholar-bureaucrats reestablished control over the education of imperial heirs and the information reaching the emperor. As a result, China experienced alternating periods of openness to maritime trade from abroad and restriction of foreign trade. When the Ming dynasty took over in 1368, the first Ming emperors brought in officials from outside the scholar-bureaucrat ranks, the most remarkable example being the admiral Zheng He. These men reflected the economic interests of those who supported the Ming takeover and allowed the first two Ming emperors to implement a policy of maritime expansion. Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming emperors sent seven large fleets into the Indian Ocean under the command of Zheng He. Each of these fleets was the size of Philip II’s Spanish Armada of 1588, suggesting that the resources of the Chinese state were much greater and better organized than those of Philip II’s Habsburg Empire in Europe. Each of Zeng He’s fleets carried more than twenty thousand sailors, soldiers, and diplomats and consisted of more than two hundred vessels, including giant “treasure ships,” horse transports, troop transports, regular warships, and a variety of smaller vessels. The seagoing abilities of the Chinese ships were also striking when compared with the Spanish Armada of 1588. The Spanish Armada was at sea for only three or four months, but a third of the fleet was lost to bad weather in the North Atlantic on the way home, and many of the ships that did survive were barely seaworthy. Zeng He’s Chinese ships were in continuous use on voyages that sometimes lasted more than two years. The goal of the Indian Ocean voyages seems to have been to build a Chinese sphere of influence in the Indian Ocean. We know that on a couple

Map 3.1.  Voyages of Zheng He. Routes followed by Chinese Admiral Zeng He on his voyages to the Indian Ocean, 1405–1433.

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of occasions, Chinese troops intervened in the selection of rulers in Indian Ocean polities. While these expeditions may look like diplomatic exercises, they also had an economic component. The Chinese defined foreign relations in terms of tribute that dependent states paid to the emperor. Under a diplomatic facade, this was a form of trade. The scholar-bureaucrats around the throne distrusted this overseas policy, in part because it brought social change that threatened their authority, and in part because they were more preoccupied with security along several thousand miles of borders in Central Asia. Once the new Ming dynasty was in place, it took sixty years for the scholar-bureaucrats to regain their control over imperial affairs. By the 1420s they had reasserted their control over imperial policy, shifting the diplomatic emphasis to internal stability and control of China’s Central Asian frontiers. One last fleet visited the Indian Ocean in 1431–1433; but, skeptical of foreign influences, the emperor was persuaded to end China’s maritime diplomacy and restricted Chinese participation in foreign trade. The end of Chinese naval ventures and closure of the imperial shipyards reduced foreign trade from China but couldn’t stop ships outside China from coming to China to trade. In practice, the attempts to restrict trade were sporadic, often evaded, or just tacitly ignored. Despite formal restrictions, China remained the world’s largest importer of Southeast Asian spices. This trade had grown up under the Yuan and early Ming emperors and was controlled by émigré Chinese scattered around the seaports of the South China Sea. Referred to as the Chinese of the Nanyang, or Southsea Chinese,3 they were a major force in the maritime trade of the South China Sea and, regardless of policy in Beijing, carried on extensive trade with the southeast coast of China. The areas most active in trade were the southern coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian and the city of Guangzhou, where at times piracy/ privateering went on without much interruption. The Ming government conquered the southern region of Yunnan in 1381–1382, and the fifteenth century saw China emerge as a prosperous and expanding empire with an economy substantially bigger than that of all Europe. The population grew from about 72 million in 1400 to 205 million by 1600. By 1700, however, economic crises and prolonged conflicts as the Manchu took control of the empire left the population at 150 million.4 In 1403 the Ming emperors moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, but the economic center of China remained in Jiangnan in the lower Yangzi region. This area was at the center of a network of rivers and canals. Inexpensive water transportation allowed local and regional specialization on a large scale and created a huge zone of interdependent markets and producers.5

An Era of Empires   •  41

Map 3.2.   China and the South China Sea Trade Network. Although Chinese authorities discouraged mainland Chinese from overseas trade, a vast network of ethnic Chinese living overseas maintained a network that included all the South China Sea and Southeast Asia.

The Ming emperors built upon this asset with better roads and investments in river navigation and long-distance canals. During the fifteenth century the entire north–south Grand Canal was restored, connecting China’s major river systems and making China an outstanding example of the economic potential of preindustrial infrastructure. The Chinese network of waterways allowed easy access to raw materials, labor-intensive farming, and regional specialization.6 The efficient transport of large quantities of food, fuel, and building supplies allowed China to develop some of the largest cities in the world. The profits from the expansion of internal trade provided the capital to fund silk and porcelain industries. These manufacturers were quick to

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respond to overseas markets, producing porcelains and silks with designs tailored to Persian, African, Indian, and European markets. At the same time, manufacturers were responding to growing domestic markets created by efficient transportation. Under the first three Ming emperors (1368–1424), the old paper currency system collapsed in the face of inflation. As a result, first the commercial sector and then the government shifted to a silver-based monetary system. With an expanding population and economy, and a limited supply of silver, every ounce of silver steadily became more valuable in China compared with other parts of the world. By the early sixteenth century, the attraction of the Chinese market for silver was felt as far away as Europe. In the 1560s, as the Spanish American silver mines came into full production, the wealthy merchant-bankers in Mexico City were well aware that silver in China was worth twice as much as in Mexico. China imported at least forty-eight tons of silver per year in the late 1500s, and in the 1600s, imports averaged at least one hundred tons per year.7 By the early 1600s, incompetent government in China and a widespread economic recession opened the way for an invasion by the Manchu of northern China. The Manchu captured Beijing in 1644, establishing the Qing dynasty; by the 1660s, most resistance to Manchu control had been wiped out and trade was beginning to recover. Even after 1700, when silver stopped being more valuable in China than in Europe, China continued to prefer silver to other European exports. Between 1719 and 1777, Europe alone sold an average of thirty-three tons of silver a year to the Chinese market.8 That tells us that for almost 250 years, the American silver mines provided Europe with a commodity that China wanted, thus subsidizing much of Europe’s trade with Asia.

The Habsburg Empire in Europe The Habsburg Empire of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe was responding to the same stimuli as China, including economic expansion and a demographic recovery following the plagues and economic expansion. Europe was being transformed in ways that were analogous to the changes under way in China, but with a very different political outcome. The era 1450–1750 brought substantial economic growth to Europe, but that prosperity was compromised by endemic religious and civil wars. Amid political and religious chaos, a great European empire took shape. It is commonly referred to as the “Spanish Empire,” but that is a misleading label. It was not really Spanish and was barely an empire. The Spanish

An Era of Empires   •  43

Empire of most history books was actually two distinct political entities, one based in Europe and the other in the Americas. They were governed by the same ruler, but in very different ways. The European part of this Spanish Empire appears in this essay as the “Habsburg European Empire” or the “Habsburg/Spanish Empire” and was the product of Isabel I’s dynastic imperialism. The American part of the Habsburg power structure appears as the “Spanish American Empire,” although technically it was conquered and administered by the Kingdom of Castile. Charles V and his successors referred to this overseas empire as “the Indies” and created a separate overseas imperial administration for it that was a dependency of the Crown of Castile. While it had the same ruler as the Habsburg Empire in Europe, it was a distinct entity; therefore, Spanish America’s unique history and role in the global economy requires separate treatment. Europe’s Habsburg Empire is probably the world’s most dramatic example of marital dynasticism. It illustrates changes in political allegiance that could have left any individual far from clear about his “national” identity. A triumph of dynastic marital diplomacy, it is hard to find an accurate label for the Habsburg power structure. It was ruled by a family created by the merger of two dynasties, the Habsburg dynasty of Austria and the Trastámara dynasty of Castile and Aragon. In the Iberian Peninsula, the Trastámara clan seized control of Castile in 1369 and fought a couple of civil wars. By 1500 King Ferdinand Trastámara of Aragon and Queen Isabel Trastámara of Castile jointly ruled five of the six countries on the Iberian Peninsula, plus Naples and Sicily. Meanwhile, the Habsburg family in Austria had united Austria, Bohemia, Belgium, and the Netherlands under the same ruler, who was then the presumed heir to the Holy Roman Empire. That empire dated back to Charlemagne in the 800s CE. By 1500 it was an ineffective political overlay that included an area that roughly corresponds to what we know as modern Germany. In 1500 this territory was made up of dozens of essentially independent countries. At this point the diplomatic skills of Isabel I of Castile (d. 1504) and the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I of Austria (d. 1519) came into play. They brought the Trastámara and Habsburg inheritances together with the marriage of Juana of Trastámara to Philip of Habsburg. Philip died very young, and his mother, Juana, who was officially queen of Castile, was declared insane, leaving the six-year-old Charles (1500–1557), grandson of Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabel I of Castile, the heir to three enormous pieces of dynastic real estate.9 He inherited his mother’s Castilian holdings after the death of his grandmother, Isabel I, in 1504 and after his mother, Juana “la Loca,” was declared mentally incompetent in 1506. Charles inherited

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Aragon, Catalonia, Valencia, Naples, and Sicily after his grandfather, Ferdinand of Aragon, died in 1516. Finally, Charles’s Habsburg grandfather died in 1519, and he inherited Austria, Hungary, and Bohemia, along with a claim to the crown of the Holy Roman Empire. The result was an inheritance of more than forty widely dispersed principalities, each with a different idea of its ruler’s actual jurisdiction. Among Charles V’s holdings, the Kingdom of Castile was the most important and had the single biggest economy. Because the Castilian Crown had a great deal of absolute authority, Castile had developed a reasonably reliable bureaucracy.10 Isabel I had laid the foundation for the training of this bureaucracy by sponsoring a new university in Alcalá de Henares. By 1515, when Charles V came of age, Castile had built one of the most effective tax collection systems in Europe and paid the heaviest taxes in Charles V’s empire.

Figure 3.1.   Charles V (painted ca. 1540). Charles ruled Castile, Aragon, Naples, the Low Countries, Germany, Austria, and much of northern Italy, as well as Mexico and Peru between 1515 and 1556. (Titian, courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid)

An Era of Empires   •  45

Throughout his reign (1516–1556) Charles V drew most of his revenue, power, and prestige from his European holdings. They included some of Europe’s richest and most prosperous provinces: the Low Countries (now the Netherlands and Belgium), the German and Bohemian industrial and mining centers, Naples, and Genoa. All were major parts of the European economy and were at the core of Europe’s economic expansion. They were also some of Charles’s most ideologically and politically unstable domains.11 Organizationally, the Habsburg Empire in Europe violated every rule for the maintenance of a durable empire. Except for Castile, it had virtually no overall bureaucracy, and revenues were defined and collected differently by each local authority. It had no standing army, no organized or unified military command other than the king and his advisers, and no central system for assessing, collecting, and dispensing revenue. At the same time, this Habsburg Empire was constantly at war with rebellious provinces, neighboring France, England, and the Ottoman Empire.

Map 3.3.   Habsburg Empire in Europe and the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1530). For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Ottoman Empire was the largest country in Europe and dominated most of the Mediterranean. The year 1530 marks the territorial stalemate between Charles V of Habsburg and Spanish Europe and the Ottoman Empire of Suleiman the Magnificent.

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Governing the geographically dispersed Habsburg Empire was complicated at best. It was made worse when Charles V was confronted with religious dissent that challenged his legitimacy as king. The resultant wars of religion were expensive. Local elites in many of Charles’s provinces refused to pay for his wars if they were not fought to protect their own provinces. High taxes in Castile and the modest early revenues from the Americas were not enough to pay the cost of Charles’s wars. This shortfall forced Charles V to take out masses of short-term loans from Europe’s financiers. He also took enormous amounts of money as permanent loans from the landed aristocracy, promising to pay interest forever. Since, in practice, payment of that interest depended on the goodwill of the king, the aristocracy became vulnerable to his whims. The Crown, meanwhile, accumulated a huge, and eventually unmanageable, debt. Virtually bankrupted by the cost of confronting Turkish invasions in the Balkans and the Mediterranean, by war with France, and by religious wars in Germany, the Habsburg Empire in Europe was ungovernable and on the verge of collapse by 1550. Charles divided his empire between his son, Philip II, and his brother, Ferdinand. Philip inherited the larger share, which included the Low Countries, much of Italy, Castile, Aragon, and the American Viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru. Philip’s Habsburg Empire in Europe held together for another century, but only because the Hapsburg Crown had the good fortune to strike it rich in the Americas. All European governments routinely spent money faster than they collected it. They borrowed money from Europe’s merchant bankers at high rates of interest, and a king’s ability to borrow depended on how well he paid the interest on his loans.12 Most of Philip’s revenue came from domestic taxes, but beginning around 1560, Spanish America began exporting huge quantities of silver to Europe. Since a quarter of that silver belonged to Philip, and it arrived regularly twice a year, Philip II was in a better position than most European monarchs to pay off his short-term loans. This in turn allowed Philips II, III, and IV—all Habsburgs—to borrow more and fight longer in their attempt to hold together the Habsburg Empire in Europe.13 Aside from the American silver, the Kingdom of Castile was Philip II’s most important source of revenue, troops, and war materials. It was the one part of the Habsburg holdings in Europe with both a sizable economy and an effective bureaucracy. The king appointed royal officials to seats in town councils, made the final decision on the selection of mayors, and appointed and paid royal judges in local, regional, and national courts. These officials were recruited from a class of university educated letrado families, usually with noble status. These families sent their sons to univer-

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sity, if possible to one of Castile’s three elite universities: Alcalá de Henares, Salamanca, or Valladolid. University admission depended on approval of the applicant by a committee filled with older friends and relatives. On graduation the student became a member of the faculty until a position opened in the bureaucracy. The would-be official then applied to a subcommittee of the Council of Castile, where his file was reviewed by the royal personnel committee—staffed, as before, with his friends and relatives—and a recommendation was sent to the king, who then formalized the candidate’s appointment. From that point onward, an official’s career depended on a combination of influence and proven competence. While the system depended on patronage, an official’s reputation and sense of self-worth depended on his effectiveness and loyalty to the king. This arrangement staffed Castile’s bureaucracy with men who promoted family interests, but who were also university trained and whose careers depended on continued royal favor.14 As a result, Castile had a reasonably competent administration, a system that worked in Castile (and America) for three hundred years. Unfortunately for the Habsburg Empire in Europe, the rest of the king’s European Empire, including the Aragonese Crown lands, was much harder to manage. The Habsburg government, along with other imperial governments, spent its income in regressive ways that had political benefits.15 Some of it supported the construction of Madrid as a new capital city. Madrid became a center for elite consumption designed to reinforce aristocratic subordination to the Crown.16 As aristocrats gravitated to the capital, they brought with them their landed incomes, redistributing income to the capital city. The Habsburg-European Empire of Charles V and his son, Philip II, was short-lived compared with the Chinese or Ottoman Empire, but its greatest achievement as an empire was to stop the Turkish invasion of Europe. The Habsburgs thwarted the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529, prevented an Ottoman takeover of Malta in 1565, and forestalled an Ottoman invasion of Italy at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Lepanto marked the beginning of a prolonged stalemate between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires. American silver helped the Habsburg Empire in Europe fight the Ottoman Empire to a draw, but Habsburg success was also helped by the fact that the Ottomans had been drawn into a prolonged war with the Safavid Empire. Habsburg/ Christian resistance to the Ottoman Turks was at best a qualified success, given that the Ottoman Turks were left in control of a quarter of Europe and two-thirds of the Mediterranean. The fiscal viability of the Habsburg Empire in Europe depended on a unique outside source of revenue: a steady supply of silver from America.

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Unfortunately, by 1610 a growing share of America’s silver evaded official regulations and entered Europe via alternative channels. The silver that actually belonged to the Crown either stayed in America to pay for fortifications or stuck to the hands of corrupt tax collectors. Privately owned silver avoided the tax collectors in Seville as English, French, and Dutch ships carried on a growing contraband trade with Spanish ports in the Caribbean. Although they had no silver mines, England’s Atlantic colonies earned silver by selling food and shipbuilding materials to the Spanish in the Caribbean. That silver, in turn, enabled the Atlantic colonists to buy European manufactures for North American use. Spanish colonial merchants and administrators collaborated in evading government regulation because goods smuggled into Spanish America were cheaper than those that were imported legally and subject to tariffs. Ships about to dock at Cádiz frequently anchored offshore the previous night and offloaded privately owned silver to Dutch and English ships, thus avoiding Spanish taxes. Increasingly, silver flowed to other parts of Europe, not to the imperial coffers. By 1648 the Habsburg Empire in Europe had forced its lenders to accept partial defaults on royal debts several times as an alternative to actual bankruptcy, but the empire was again virtually bankrupt and forced to sign a peace treaty acknowledging Dutch independence.

Four Muslim Empires: Mamluks, Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals The Mongol Empire, which provided a safe environment for transcontinental trade in the 1200s, had broken into four segments by 1300. One of those segments, known as the Ilkhanate, included most of modern Syria and Iraq and roughly the same territory as modern Iran. The western limit of the Mongol conquests had been established in 1259 when the Mamluk army handed the Mongols one of their few serious defeats. By preventing the Mongols from invading Egypt in 1260, the Mamluks were able to establish their own empire, with its capital in Cairo. The Mamluk Empire included Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and western Syria and controlled both shores of the Red Sea. It was regarded throughout Islam as the guardian of the Muslim holy sites, the pilgrimage routes in the Arabian and Red Seas, and the caravan routes across the Arabian Peninsula. From 1260 to the mid-fifteenth century, the route from Aden to Cairo to Alexandria was the main source of Europe’s Asian imports and provided important revenue for the Mamluk Empire. This arrangement

Map 3.4.   Four Muslim Empires Own the Middle East. The four Muslim empires of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Middle East: Mamluk, Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid.

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was formalized in the 1340s with a treaty between Venice and the Mamluk Empire. The Mamluk treaty with Venice gave the Venetians a near monopoly on the importation of Asian luxuries into Europe. By the later 1400s, however, many of the tribal leaders who had supported the Mamluks were no longer happy with their leadership and the empire was losing its internal cohesion. Meanwhile, the Mamluk sultan attempted to alter the terms of the old treaty with Venice and extort additional revenues from the Venetians. By the last twenty years of the fifteenth century, political unrest and attempted extortion were making it difficult to supply Europe with Asian goods. The trading networks of both Venice and the Mamluk Empire were further disrupted when the Portuguese sailed into the Indian Ocean. Starting in 1502, the Portuguese began seizing Egyptian ships in the Red Sea, disrupting both the spice trade destined for the Venetians in Alexandria and the Muslim pilgrim trade. Claiming that the Mamluks were unable to protect commerce in the Red Sea, the Ottomans began “assisting” the Mamluk navy. In 1506 they sent shipbuilding materials and shipwrights to the Mamluk navy base at Port Suez on the Red Sea to help build a new fleet to ward off the Portuguese.17 The Mamluk navy then joined forces with the sultan of Gujarat to protect the pilgrim ships from the Portuguese. The combined Mamluk and Gujarat fleets beat the Portuguese at the Battle of Chaul in 1508, but in 1509 the Portuguese caught the Mamluk navy in harbor and destroyed it using shipboard artillery. The inability of the Mamluk leadership to protect the Muslim holy places gave the Ottoman Turks another excuse to intervene in Mamluk affairs, while the interruption in the delivery of Asian goods provided the Genoese, Castilians, and Portuguese with a reason to look for alternative routes to Asia. Originally located in Anatolia on the border of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottomans declared their leader, Osman, sultan of the little Ottoman state in 1299. While serving as mercenaries for warring factions in the Byzantine Empire, by 1390 they had built a small empire in western Anatolia and the southern Balkans. Defeated by Tamerlane in 1402, the empire was rebuilt after his death in 1405. Following the decades of reform, by 1450 the Ottoman empire was very different from the one defeated by Tamerlane. Sultans Mehmed I (ruled 1413–1421) and Murad II (ruled 1421–1444) built a new system for recruiting and training talented royal officials, one that also produced a loyal imperial guard known as the Janissary Corps. To assure that these guardsmen were free of the tribal affiliations that had weakened the early empire, children were drafted from Christian families in

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the Balkans. The boys were placed in Turkish foster families, learned Turkish, converted to Islam, and were then sent to secondary training academies where they learned Persian, studied literature and science, and were taught basic military skills. The bulk of these cadets joined the Janissary Corps, but the best students moved up to academies located in imperial residences. The most successful of these students provided a pool of well-educated candidates for positions as ministers in the imperial government, provincial governors, and military commanders. The sultan’s authority was reinforced in another, less well-known way. All Janissaries, even if governors and army officers, were technically slaves and property of the sultan. The Ottoman Empire’s legal system, based on a moderate version of Sharia law, protected all free men from arbitrary arrest and punishment without a trial, but slaves were property rather than legal individuals. Since this left the sultan legally free to punish, or even assassinate, administrators, any administrator’s well-being quite literally depended on his loyalty to the sultan and his effectiveness as a local extension of imperial authority. This system for recruiting and managing bureaucrats was at the heart of the Ottoman Empire’s longevity. It endowed the Ottoman state with an unusually competent and loyal administration, one that could provide logistical support for a much larger army and navy than was possible anywhere else in Europe. Led by Mehmed II “the Conqueror” (ruled 1452–1481), Bayezid II (1481–1512), and Selim I (1512–1520), the Ottoman Empire expanded dramatically. One of the most durable of the early modern Eurasian empires, the Ottoman Empire was not only a constant threat to Europe but also was arguably another European country. The Ottoman Turks had been expanding into the Balkan Peninsula since the 1300s. The ultimate target of this expansion was the massively fortified city of Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 gave the Turks a coordinating center for the trade routes and hinterlands that once had been part of the Byzantine Empire, and gave Mehmed his title “the Conqueror.” The city drew overland trade from Anatolia to the southeast and the Balkans to the north. Constantinople was also the focal point for maritime and riverborne trade that stretched across the Black Sea to the caravan terminals at Trebizond and Kaffa and up the Dnieper and Don Rivers into Muscovy. The city’s even bigger maritime network reached across the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas to Alexandria and the North African ports that, in turn, connected to the Mali gold mines. To feed what was becoming the biggest city in Europe, the Ottomans were forced to do what the Romans and Byzantines had done: import grain from Egypt and North Africa to feed the city.

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Mehmet II promptly made Constantinople his capital city and added “Emperor of Rome” to his list of titles. He expanded his empire farther into the Balkans and in 1471 conquered the island of Cyprus. Mehmed II’s death in 1481 triggered a succession struggle in which Bayezid II defeated his brother Cem and Cem’s Venetian supporters. In 1503 Bayezid proved that the Ottoman Empire had become a naval power by defeating the Venetians at sea and establishing Turkish naval supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean. As a result, the Venetians had to pay higher port dues and were required to protect ships flying the Ottoman flag from piracy. For a decade after 1503, Bayezid undermined the Mamluk government while pretending to help that government protect the Muslim holy places. As we saw earlier, Bayezid “assisted” the Mamluk navy by sending shipbuilding supplies to Port Said. Supplies were followed by advisers and shipwrights, then by soldiers to protect the advisers, and finally by a commander to “protect” the soldiers, advisers, and shipwrights. By 1512 the Mamluk navy base at Port Said on the Red Sea was de facto an Ottoman navy base with an Ottoman commander. Faced with the threat of a Mamluk-Safavid alliance that would have brought the Safavid Empire into Syria, the Ottomans won a major battle against the Safavids in 1512 and established Ottoman control of Syria. With that groundwork laid, and regional sheiks backing away from Mamluk authority, in 1517 the Ottoman sultan Selim staged a lightning three-month conquest of the entire Mamluk Empire.18 Control of Mecca and Medina brought the Ottomans diplomatic prestige in the Muslim world, but as with the Mamluks, it also obligated the Ottoman government to protect the Muslim pilgrimage routes. One of those routes ran up the Persian Gulf to Baghdad and Aleppo and was controlled by the Safavid Empire. Antipathy toward the Safavids, and the advantages of the safer Persian Gulf–Baghdad–Aleppo trade route, prompted the Ottomans to conquer Mesopotamia. Once the Turks had captured Baghdad and Basra (1534), and improved safety along the Euphrates route, trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean shifted from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf and the shorter Basra–Baghdad–Aleppo route. Aleppo soon displaced Damascus as the major caravan center in the Fertile Crescent and acquired resident communities of Armenian, Syrian Christian, Arab, English, French, and Venetian merchants.19 The Ottoman Empire also promoted overland trade in Anatolia. From Julfa, just inside the Safavid Empire, a major route crossed Ottoman territory to the former Byzantine port of Trebizond on the Black Sea. Another route, provided with magnificent caravanserais since the twelfth century, ran across Anatolia through Diyarbakir, Kayseri, and Konya to Constantinople and

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Figure 3.2.   Suleiman the Magnificent (ca. 1530). Suleiman ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1520 to 1565. (Titian, courtesy of Museo del Prado, Madrid)

Izmir. By 1540 most of the main trade routes between the Arabian Sea and the Mediterranean were inside the Ottoman Empire. The wars between the Ottoman Empire and Christian Europe have caused historians to lose track of the amount of trade between the two. The Greek trading community constituted an international trade diaspora that operated across political boundaries. By 1500 most Greek merchants were Ottoman subjects, but many of them were also citizens of one of the Venetian or Genoese colonies in the east and had regular access to Venice, Genoa, and other European ports. Greek firms, based on the extended family partnerships of the Greek diaspora, had relatives and partners on both the Christian and Muslim sides of the Mediterranean. Through these connections, the Greeks helped provide both high-value goods and foodstuffs. Alexandria, Tripoli, and Izmir sent Asian luxuries to Europe, while Venice, Marseilles, Barcelona,

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and Seville paid for those Asian products with a combination of European products and silver bought on the European market. Silver played an important role in Asian trade. Since Europe produced little that the sophisticated economies of Asia wanted, silver was an important trade commodity. Europe produced only a modest amount of silver, and her long-distance trade was hampered by lack of silver until the late 1550s, when American silver began to arrive in Europe in large quantities. That silver then followed the caravan routes to markets in the Middle East and China, In the Middle East, when Tamerlane’s empire collapsed in 1405, two Turkic tribes emerged from the ruins. The Safavid tribe established itself in the area of modern Azerbaijan, while the Mughals set up their capital in Kabul. By 1525 each tribe had laid the foundations for a major empire, one in Persia and the other in India. These two empires are sometimes grouped with the Ottoman Empire because, while each was unique, they had features in common. The three are often referred to as the “Gunpowder Empires” because they pioneered the use of siege artillery, field artillery, and musket-carrying infantry. All three had converted to Islam as they entered the Middle East, and all three ruled empires with large non-Muslim populations. The Safavid Empire emerged in the 1490s from Azerbaijan and northwestern Iran, the birthplace of several previous Persian empires. The Safavid tribe had occupied the area after the region had been conquered by the Mongols and during the fifteenth century was repeatedly attacked by the Ottoman Empire. Safavid forces grew rapidly as they attracted other Turkic tribes and took in Shia refugees from the Sunni-dominated Ottoman state. The boy who became Shah Ismail (1487–1524, ruled 1501–1524) survived a series of local wars after his father was killed in battle in 1488. With the help of an alliance of Turkmen tribes, Ismail conquered the key city of Baku in 1500 and in 1501 was declared shah of Azerbaijan. A charismatic Sufi leader, Ismail soon conquered most of the southern Caucasus, northwestern Iran, and Baghdad in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley. He also developed ties with the regional elites in Mamluk Syria, aggravating the instability of the Mamluk Empire just when, on another front, the Portuguese began threatening Mamluk control of the Red Sea and the pilgrimage route to Mecca. In 1510 Ismail shifted his attention to the east and added the Afghan regions of Khorasan, Herat, and Qandahar in eastern Afghanistan to his empire. By the time Ismail died in 1524, he had consolidated Safavid authority over most of the territory between India and the Ottoman Empire. During the middle decades of the sixteenth century, the Safavid Empire suffered from civil strife, ineffective rule, and several defeats by the Ottoman Turks. The picture changed when Shah Abbas I (1571–1629) came

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to the throne in 1588 and began a remarkable forty-two-year reign. Abbas reorganized his army along Ottoman and European lines and learned to make effective use of artillery, winning a prolonged war with the Ottoman Empire in 1603–1618. The border area caught up in that war included the cities of Tabriz and Julfa. Tabriz was home to hundreds of merchants and craftsmen, while Julfa was the historic hometown of the Armenian trade diaspora. Thousands of people from both places became refugees because of the war. The most important of these refugees were the Armenian merchants of Julfa, which, until 1607, was the coordinating center of the Armenian trade diaspora. Shah Abbas resettled these Armenians in the suburb of New Julfa, just outside his new capital, Isfahan.20 Abbas then co-opted the Armenians as a service class with a status a bit like that of the Castilian letrado nobility, appointing them to important posts in the Safavid fiscal administration.21 He also put them in charge of revitalizing the Persian silk industry and expanding the export of raw silk and silk textiles.22 As a cadre of ethnically distinct businessmen and financiers, the Armenians were reliable because they were outside the factional competition at court and entirely dependent on the shah’s goodwill. Their cosmopolitan background also allowed them to function as hosts for foreign diplomats and serve as envoys abroad. A council of Armenian merchants advised the shah on commercial matters and negotiated on his behalf with Portuguese agents, the English East India Company, and the English Levant Company. By using the Armenians, Abbas kept the empire’s finances in his own hands, separating them from Persia’s networks of local interest groups. Like Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia was affected by American silver. Silk was the Safavid Empire’s main export, and silver was the era’s main form of foreign exchange. American silver gave Europe a commodity that Persian merchants would take in exchange for their silk. As silver became plentiful in Europe, European merchants were able to buy more silk, in turn increasing the ability of Persian businessmen to expand their purchases of Indian textiles, jewels, and other products. The successful development of the Safavid silk industry had one drawback. The main clearinghouse for the export of Persian silk was the emporium city of Aleppo—a city well inside the Ottoman Empire, and outside Shah Abbas’s control. Aleppo was the exchange center for goods arriving on at least three important caravan routes as well as the route by sea and river from the Persian Gulf to Aleppo via the Euphrates River. It also housed colonies of Catalan, English, French, Indian, Armenian, and Persian merchants. The Armenians who managed the Persian silk industry took advantage of

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the competition between various merchant communities at Aleppo to get the best possible price for Persian silk exports. Shah Abbas, who was often at war with the Ottoman Empire, disliked having to depend on an Ottoman clearinghouse for the export of most of the Persian silk output. He diverted some silk away from Ottoman territory by encouraging the Persian, Greek, and Indian merchants who had partners in Muscovy to ship some of Persia’s silk north to Moscow. Abbas also tried to arrange for the English East India Company to buy Persian silk in the port of Bandar Abbas and ship it around Africa to Europe. Aside from the risks of the longer sea route, this scheme involved transporting silk an extra six hundred miles on the caravan route through Isfahan to the port of Bandar Abbas before it could be loaded onto English East India Company ships. Although the shah had encouraged the English to propose the new export arrangements, when the English showed the proposal to the shah’s Armenian financial advisers, the Armenians all but broke out laughing. They pointed out that the route through Aleppo to the Mediterranean was far cheaper and that they could get better prices at Aleppo.23 As part of his strategy for consolidating his authority and minimizing the damage from Ottoman attacks, Abbas built a magnificent new capital city at Isfahan. The new city was located well away from the Ottoman border and became a commercial and diplomatic crossroads. The city soon acquired a sizable community of diplomats, commercial agents, and missionaries from England, France, and Holland.24 When it became apparent that the Ottomans and Portuguese were capturing a growing share of the trans-Asian trade, the shah countered by opening Persia to French merchants and missionaries, hoping they would move their trade to routes in the Safavid Empire.25 The larger picture shows us that throughout the Early Modern era goods moved between East Asia, the Middle East, and Europe along a complex and flexible network that integrated maritime and overland routes. In the early seventeenth century, when political conditions were stable, the overland routes were used. When wars on the mainland made the overland routes risky, goods were sent by ship from Calicut or Surat to Basra or the Red Sea.26 Although small amounts of Persian silk traveled in English East India Company ships from Persia around Africa to Europe, most Persian exports traveled along the older Middle Eastern, Mediterranean, and Russian land routes.27 East of the Safavid Empire was the Indian subcontinent, and there too the sixteenth century saw the consolidation of a strong regime that revived overland trade. The India encountered by the Portuguese around 1500 was a loose network of three political worlds. The coastal towns of India were au-

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tonomous principalities, although many of them were nominally subordinate to one of the larger states in the interior of the subcontinent. The Sultanate of Delhi in the north was Muslim-ruled but predominately Hindu. Created by the Turkic invasions from Central Asia and Afghanistan in the thirteenth century, at its height the Sultanate of Delhi controlled most of North India. The interior of South India was ruled by the Hindu Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646). That empire maintained loose suzerainty over many of the autonomous port cities on the Indian coast. The western part of the Sultanate of Delhi, now part of Pakistan, included the major caravan cities of Multan and Lahore. Multan was the starting point for caravans heading west to Kandahar and Persia; Lahore was the starting point for caravans heading for Kabul, Persia, and Central Asia. By the late fifteenth century, the sultan in Delhi was losing control over the regional princes in the Ganges Valley, and political unrest was disrupting internal markets. As the trade routes up the Ganges and Indus Valleys became risky, trade shifted to the emporium port of Calicut on the southwest coast of India. When Tamerlane died in 1405, the Mongol and Turkic tribes that had followed him fought among themselves to control parts of his empire. One of the tribes, later known as the Mughals, tried to capture Samarkand but was driven south over the mountains into Afghanistan. Led by a young chief named Babur, the Mughals took control of eastern Afghanistan and in 1504 established their capital in Kabul. Over the next twenty years, Babur led the Mughals on several raids into North India.28 In 1525 he staged a raid in force, using modern artillery and muskets he had gotten from the Ottoman Empire. This time his army smashed a much larger Indian force when his new field artillery stampeded his opponents’ elephants, breaking up their attack formations. Babur then began the process of organizing the remnants of the Sultanate of Delhi into a new Mughal Empire. He spent the last five years of his life subduing the powerful princes of the region; but despite his efforts, the next twenty-five years saw persistent unrest. This ended in 1556 when Babur’s fourteen-year-old grandson, Akbar, became emperor. Akbar, who ruled until his death in 1605, merits a place among history’s truly great emperors. In a short time, he established effective rule over India from the Bay of Bengal to the Gujarat, in part thanks to his routine use of modern artillery. He first established a core of strongholds at Lahore, Delhi, Agra, and Jaunpur, securing control over the trade routes from Afghanistan to the heart of the Ganges basin. In the 1560s, with this as the core of his new empire, Akbar developed Agra as a massively fortified capital city and went on to secure the caravan route south toward the Gujarat and the Arabian Sea.29

Figure 3.3.  Bullocks Dragging Mughal Siege-Guns during the Attack on Ranthambore Fort. The fort was captured in 1569 by the Mughal emperor Akbar, who routinely used modern artillery. (From the Akbarnama [1590– 1595], author unknown)

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As in China, the Indian monetary system was based on silver. The Mughal economy expanded faster than its supply of silver, and the purchasing power of silver rose, making India an attractive market for anyone with silver to sell. Europe and the Middle East had long been markets for Indian textiles, jewels, and pepper, and the increasing availability of silver after about 1560 allowed European traders to buy a growing volume of Indian products for shipment home. By 1574 Akbar had conquered the Gujarat, adding the emporium port of Surat to his empire. This brought the Gujarati merchant community, which maintained one of the major Indian Ocean trade networks, under Mughal jurisdiction. Also in the 1570s, Akbar moved down the Ganges Valley into Bihar and Bengal and the seaport of Orissa on the Bay of Bengal. This allowed Mughal merchants to trade directly with ports on the Bay of Bengal, Aceh at the north entrance to the Malacca Straits, and Melaka at the south end of the Strait of Malacca. Akbar also built up Lahore as a stronghold against any invasion from Afghanistan and took control of the upper Indus River, Kashmir, and the caravan cities along the Indus River. Akbar ruled for almost fifty years, providing stability and safe inland travel across India from Surat on the Arabian Sea to his new capital at Agra and down the Ganges to the Bay of Bengal. He also improved the routes from Lahore and Multan to the caravan cities in Afghanistan, coordinating security measures with those of the neighboring Safavid Empire. Agra, the empire’s centrally located capital, attracted aristocratic wealth, creating a concentration of disposable wealth that drew trade into the Indian interior. Stability and prosperity in the Ganges basin made India a major market for Asian commodities and American silver. This explains why the Portuguese at Diu, and later the English at Surat and the Dutch at Orissa on the Coromandel Coast, were eager to develop trade links with the northern part of the Indian subcontinent. Like the rulers of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, the Mughals actively encouraged long-distance trade on the inland caravan routes of Southwest Asia. Akbar’s seventeenth-century successors continued his policies, extending Mughal authority to central and southern India; but in terms of longdistance overland networks and expansion of the Indian market, the crucial developments were in place by 1590. In 1639 emperor Shah Jahan began the construction of a new capital at Delhi, about 125 miles north of Agra. The construction of a new capital city brought massive new royal expenditures, shifting the central node in the urban network about 140 miles north and stimulating additional commercial activity. Somewhat speculative estimates suggest that at this point Mughal India was the richest country per capita

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in the world. By one estimate, the revenue collected by the Mughal Empire around 1650 was four times the revenue collected by the most powerful ruler in late-seventeenth-century Europe, King Louis XIV of France.30 Comparable in size to all of Europe, the Mughal Empire was second only to China in its size and wealth. The Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires were often at war with one another, but they all had similar commercial policies. The rulers of the Safavid and Mughal Empires both built large new capital cities, cities that magnified the aura around the ruler and became magnets for long-distance trade. Despite their warrior traditions, all three empires promoted overland trade, investing in roads, highway security, and new caravansaries. For two centuries after 1500, the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empires formed an immense block of trade-friendly territory that reached from the Bay of Bengal to Hungary and Algiers.

Making Empires Work Given that only two of the six empires discussed above remained politically autonomous into the nineteenth century, it appears to have been easier to assemble an empire than to hold one together. Most empires were brought together initially by conquest, often by charismatic leaders who could inspire strong tribal alliances. The Ottoman Empire before its defeat by Tamerlane and the Safavid Empire of Shah Ismail in 1500 are good examples. One way to visualize such an empire is to begin with an effective, charismatic ruler of a central principality. That core kingdom is then surrounded by several subordinate provinces. The elites of those provinces are loyal to the central ruler, but that loyalty depends on several things. One is the ruler’s ability to dispense privileges and offices to those same local elites. Another reflects the extent to which the ruler is identified with some ideology of divine ordination. Finally, provincial loyalties depend partly on the ruler’s ability to control a loyal military force and stimulate personal loyalty. A successful leader faced the problem of holding together a tribal alliance based on personal loyalty to the ruler when that loyalty could easily be weakened by the self-interest of those same tribal allies. Early modern Europe was something of an exception to the above model, in that dynastic ties were more prominent than conquest in building states and empires. European monarchies of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries were assembled through marital diplomacy and dynastic merger, though often combined with coercion. Royal power was very dependent on a ruler’s ability to maintain a balance between royal authority and the privileges of

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the landed elites who were only nominally subject to that authority. During the late Middle Ages, Europe’s landed nobility had acquired a variety of privileges that compromised royal jurisdiction and captured royal revenue. The nobility was reluctant to return these privileges to any central authority. This required European rulers to be shrewd dispensers of patronage and masterful politicians if they were to control the nobility while staying within the rule of law. European kings often reinforced their position by taking control of the kingdom’s church, both as a source of income and of royal patronage. Another more relaxed model developed in early modern southern and southeastern Asia. Large kingdoms, rather than attempting to conquer and rule their smaller neighbors directly, recruited them as autonomous “friendly” neighbors who acknowledged the “superior” king’s jurisdiction but were largely independent of his administration. As “allies and friends,” small kingdoms avoided being absorbed into the larger kingdom’s political and administrative structures, allowing their rulers to retain their titles, local prestige, and administrative autonomy.31 Seen as a problem in political geography, actual authority was not a matter of direct nominal sovereignty but of effective jurisdiction.32 Imperial and regional capitals were centers of political authority, but effective authority tended to weaken as one moved away from the capital to outlying districts. In successful premodern empires and dynastic states, politically astute rulers used power, authority, and legitimization to recruit loyal agents and tie together secondary jurisdictional centers.33 The Ottoman Empire sent governors out to the capitals of the recently conquered areas, with the backing of an efficient army, to function as viceroys. In some areas, local administrative arrangements were left in place as long as the local elite responded to requests from the sultan. In the Balkans, district administrators were installed to administer justice, collect taxes, and be ready to mobilize for war within a few days. Without effective leadership at the center, authority tended to drift into the hands of regional elites, a problem for the Mughal Empire by the early eighteenth century and the Habsburg monarchy in Madrid after about 1645. Clearly, after the initial consolidation, political skill was the first key to sustaining a durable empire. As the examples cited above show, central authority was the product of political understandings in which local or regional elites traded part of their autonomy for the benefits and protection of a powerful central ruler. When the economy declined, central authority was vulnerable. Plague, population loss, or recurrent crop failures invariably prompted local elites to hold back the revenues they would normally forward to the central authority, undercutting the ruler’s ability to enforce his jurisdiction. At the fringes of an empire, centralized jurisdiction was more readily

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challenged by local notables or by the ruler of a neighboring state. Modern historians like to map these empires with clear-cut boundaries in modern fashion, but these boundaries are better thought of as bands of territory at an empire’s periphery. If an empire was to last, its ruler had to achieve three interconnected innovations. One was the creation of a state bureaucracy staffed by competent people who believed that their careers and status depended on the effectiveness of the state and the goodwill of whoever occupied the throne. The crown reinforced the collective identity of this bureaucratic cadre by creating institutions that both trained and indoctrinated potential commanders and officials. This could be university training as in Castile, royal academies as in the Ottoman Empire, or specialized examinations as in China. It also was important that members of an administrative cadre felt rewarded for implementing policy, providing justice, organizing defense, and collecting taxes in the ruler’s name. These officials had to be convinced that their status depended on the survival of central authority. A successful ruler sometimes enlisted the support of minority communities by granting them internal self-government and enlisting them as service elites. The Armenians in the Safavid Empire are a good example. Muslim-run countries dealt with some of their non-Muslim communities by drawing on the Muslim tradition of acknowledging the Peoples of the Book. Jews, Christians, and Muslims all drew part of their religious tradition from the Old Testament. The early Muslim governments recognized this by allowing almost total civic rights to Christians and Jews while collecting a small tax on each person claiming that status. This policy worked well for the Ottoman and even the Safavid Empire; but in India, Muslim rulers were confronted with a huge Hindu population that was neither Christian nor Jewish. Eventually they worked out a rationale that let the Mughals extend the status of Peoples of the Book to other religions in India. Typically, Peoples of the Book were granted administrative autonomy and interacted with the government through the recognized religious heads of their communities. If a reliable bureaucracy was crucial to a durable empire, so too was a professionalized military staffed by well-trained officers who were convinced that their status depended on loyal service to the central government. In the absence of a formal recruitment program, the Habsburg Empire appointed prominent members of the landed nobility to major military commands. This forced the Crown to rely on personal loyalty reinforced by the social prestige of major appointments. The best field commanders among such appointees trained their soldiers and sailors to operate as disciplined, cohesive units. Lacking bureaucratic

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infrastructure, however, the most valuable skill for high commanders in the Habsburg Empire was administrative talent and an understanding of logistics. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, the senior commanders came out of the same system of schools and academies that produced the empire’s senior administrators. Finally, virtually every major monarch of the Early Modern era built or rebuilt a capital city that embodied his status and power. An impressive capital city was both a physical setting for courtly affairs and a visual embodiment of royal authority. It also drew provincial elites to court and separated them from local and regional politics. Whether it was Madrid, Istanbul, Cairo, Isfahan, Agra, Edo, Tenochtitlán, Cusco, or the Mongol capital of Khanbalik, capital cities showcased the ruler’s power. In most empires these capital cities, with two hundred thousand to seven hundred thousand people, were an order of magnitude larger than the other important cities in the empire. Rulers used these cities to domesticate the notables and make them dependent on royal largesse. Some rulers even required that provincial aristocrats reside part of the year in the new capital. Life at court reoriented the cultural, political, and social priorities of traditional elites, channeling their lifestyle into the hierarchy of court status. Exposed to a wider range of fashions, and imbued with a value system that linked status and ostentation, courtiers and titled nobles soon became addicted to consuming exotic goods that then became status markers. Although it is rarely pointed out, in addition to creating a new market for elite goods, building a new city was a gigantic real estate development and construction project. Madrid and Paris illustrate the way in which political capitals concentrated the demand for high-value goods. Paris contained 200,000 people in 1500 and 550,000 by 1700. The city grew because nobles wanted to be near the king, and because the king “possessed the finest palaces . . . and bought more than anyone else in the city.” Madrid tripled its population between 1560 and 1630, when it had 180,000 inhabitants. The king drew the Spanish aristocracy into a form of competitive conspicuous consumption that intensified the demand for high-value imports. A new capital city was a huge real estate development, with many opportunities for profit, as well as for graft and corruption. As they grew, royal cities became markets for imported goods and for huge quantities of construction materials. The mundane activities of obtaining control of the land, laying out the city, parceling out building lots, granting building contracts to court favorites, and purchasing building supplies from aristocratic estates all drew members of the landed nobility to the royal court in search of lucrative deals, wealth, and court sinecures. The reality was that the court elite usually ended up deeply in debt and dependent on royal favor.

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The new bureaucratic or military appointee knew his success depended on royal favor, but he also knew he was obliged to use his position to bring other members of his family or clan into better positions if he could. The new appointee also knew that his future status depended on implementing the policies of the government. Royal agents had to be kept separate from local or regional status hierarchies, which is why many governments moved officials from one region to another on a regular basis. If longevity measures success, the two most successful early modern empires were the Ottoman and Chinese Empires. The Ottoman dynasty holds the record for the longest-lived dynasty (623 years, from 1299 to 1922), while the Chinese Empire, despite having gone through three dynasties, not only retained its thirteenth-century boundaries but also conquered and assimilated Yunnan and Manchuria between 1271 and 1912 (640 years). Another measure of an empire’s success is its relative ability to mobilize resources. The Chinese Empire could draw on a population of 150 million by 1700; the Ottoman Empire had a population between 15 million and 20 million. At its height, the Ottoman state was certainly mobilizing more military resources relative to its population than China. These six Eurasian empires obviously had very different long-term outcomes, since only two of them (the Ottoman and Chinese Empires) were still major powers by the nineteenth century. All of them are important to this essay because they provided much of the political framework for Europe’s entry into world commerce between 1450 and 1750. The next task is to integrate the three American empires into the global landscape.

CHAPTER FOUR

Three American Empires

Our third expansion narrative starts with Columbus sailing west in order to connect Spain with Asia while avoiding Portuguese interference. The initial idea of a route to Asia that did not pose diplomatic problems with Portugal appealed to investors in Seville. Most educated people understood that the world was round, and Columbus’s plan to reach Asia by sailing west was understood to be plausible. Columbus had difficulty getting his project financed not because the concept was faulty, but because his use of available geography was faulty. The data he used to make his case was known to underestimate the size of the globe and therefore the distance to Asia. His fleet was similar to those used in other ventures along the African coast—a small nao, the Santa Maria, and two caravels, the Niña and the Pinta. Columbus’s estimates of the distance to Asia were off by thousands of miles, and he was unbelievably lucky that the Caribbean Islands happened to be where he thought Japan should have been. Unexpectedly, Columbus found an America that, until 1492, no one had ever even dreamed of. The accidental but world-changing discovery of America turned the third narrative of expansion into the European encounter with the “New World.” Columbus and his men arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, fresh from the conquest of the Canary Islands. In their search for treasure, they enslaved local Indians and, in 1503, brought the first African slaves to the Caribbean. Using forced labor, they extracted a moderate amount of alluvial gold in Santo Domingo, but further expeditions in the Caribbean proved expensive

65

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in terms of men and ships. Later expeditions regularly attracted a few hundred Europeans, half of whom died or returned home without much to show for their efforts. For the most part, the returns of the first two decades of conquest after 1492 were modest. The alternative to finding treasure was for the invaders to seek wealth and status as they understood it—control of a landed society like that of rural Andalucía and Extremadura, one in which they were the landed class. For almost thirty years they explored and settled parts of the Caribbean, confronting local cultures not dramatically different from those of the Canary Islands.1 In the process they triggered the first major American pandemic as European diseases and forced labor reduced the population of Santo Domingo from at least one million in 1492 to twenty-five thousand by 1515.2 The Spanish colonists also brought sugar cane with them from the Canary Islands, and the first sugar mill in the New World went into operation in 1516. After a generation of preliminary exploration in the Caribbean, the Spaniards finally discovered the wealth of the Aztec and Inca Empires and the idea of sailing on to Asia faded away.3

Map 4.1.   Spain Occupies the Caribbean, 1492–1530. Spain began colonizing the Caribbean in 1492, but it took more than twenty-five years to build up a supply of men and horses big enough to allow Hernán Cortés to invade Mexico in 1519.

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The Empire of the Inca The Inca Empire started with a small tribe that had been living in the Cusco Valley, high in the Andes Mountains of modern Peru, since the twelfth century. By the early 1400s the Inca had created the Kingdom of Cusco. After a

Map 4.2.   Inca, Aztec, and Spanish American Empires. The Spanish American Empire appears larger than the other two, but it was firmly anchored on the economic and administrative centers of the two earlier empires, which became the Viceroyalties of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru, respectively.

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leadership struggle around 1430, the forceful King Pachacuti took power in 1438. The conventional date for the founding of the Inca Empire, 1438, saw the start of nearly a century of imperial expansion. Before the arrival of the Spaniards in 1532, the Inca Empire was far larger than most European countries. It stretched from modern Colombia to the middle of central Chile and included some twelve million people. Its capital city, Cuzco, had about 150,000 inhabitants. A royal residence like Madrid or Agra, Cuzco was primarily a residential center for the Inca imperial court and administration. The capital’s grandeur legitimized Inca authority over an empire that had overcome major limitations: The economy had no recognizable monetary system, and its commercial life was constrained by its mountainous geography. The Inca state had adapted to rugged mountain conditions by developing a decentralized administrative structure. Food and raw materials were produced and stored locally. Controlled by the state, these resources were redistributed both as supplies for mobile army units and supplies for the local population. Local communities and their storehouses were linked together by an extensive highway system. Given the rugged terrain, these roads were built for foot soldiers, human porters, and pack llamas. Roadside communities maintained inns, storehouses, and roads. Roadside inns and decentralized storage of supplies allowed army units to move rapidly without supply trains, since food and shelter would be available at the end of each day’s march. The system was supervised by administrators sent from Cuzco and was supported by taxes collected in kind or as labor services. The Inca rulers took ownership of undeveloped hillsides, co-opted local elites, protected communities against crop failure, supplied armies on the march, and maintained the roads, inns, and bridges that held the empire together despite the difficult terrain of the Andean valleys. By 1530 the Inca imperial highway system extended more than three thousand miles from north to south along the Andean valleys. Centered on Cuzco, it included lateral links to the coast and the nearby Chimor Empire, which the Inca conquered in the late fifteenth century. Inca society was based on extended, lineage-based clans that were also integrated, self-sufficient economic units. Each of these clans controlled a portfolio of different types of land that included everything from lowland jungle and farmlands to terraced mountainsides and high-altitude plots where potatoes, one of the Andes’ staple food crops, were grown and freezedried for long-term storage. The plots were parceled out to different clan members, and each clan’s ecological niches contributed a range of products that were exchanged among clan members with different specializations.4

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Before the Inca started to build their empire, the people in the Andes had lived in regional kingdoms, each with its own dynastic ruler and religious cult. When the Inca conquered one of these kingdoms, they brought the local cult figure to Cuzco, associating it with the imperial cult. At the same time, the Inca took the local ruler’s oldest son and daughter to Cusco as hostages. There the hostages entered the entourage of the imperial family. The young women joined the imperial workshops supervised by the empress and learned to make the special garments needed by the royal family. The young men entered the emperor’s entourage and learned the skills that prepared them to be administrators in some part of the emerging imperial structure. Most of Andean economic life, both state and private, seems to have been based on labor service and reciprocity rather than markets. Economic links between the highland valleys and lower coastal areas were contained within the state’s organized use of land and labor, or within the internal economies of the clans, which have been characterized as “economic archipelagos.” By the time the Europeans arrived, the empire had developed an economically independent aristocracy strong enough to resist the policies of the Inca rulers. This privileged class emerged because the Inca assumed that when a person died, his spirit merely crossed an invisible divide between the material and spiritual worlds. An individual who had entered the spiritual world was still alive and, under the right conditions, could give advice to people living in the material world. That is why the Inca dead were carefully mummified and brought out for important meetings. As a result, each dead emperor was believed to still be alive on the other side of the spiritual boundary that defined material life. Each time an emperor died, he resigned his role as ruler; but since he was still “alive,” he still owned the properties and estates he had accumulated as emperor. These assets were held in trust and exploited by the cadre of courtiers that had been his entourage. The next emperor thus inherited the right to rule, but not the emperor’s property. Each new emperor had to build his own personal patrimony, one of the many traditions that led to repeated wars of expansion. After four or five imperial successions, the empire had a sizable number of Inca aristocrats who were supported by funds from the estates of deceased emperors and therefore did not depend on the current emperor for support. That political reality, combined with a dispute over the royal succession in the 1520s, threw the Inca Empire into a civil war just as the Europeans arrived. The European invaders understood this kind of political unrest and were quick to exploit the civil war. After three unsuccessful attempts, Francisco Pizarro invaded Peru in 1530. By 1533 Pizarro was in control of Cuzco, and

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in 1536, with the help of Native American allies, he beat off an Inca attempt to take back Cuzco.

The Aztec Empire The Mexica, whom we usually call the Aztecs, had migrated south from central Mexico in the late fourteenth century, possibly as a reaction to climate changes of that era. When the Aztecs reached the rich lakes region of the central valley of Mexico, the rulers of two indigenous kingdoms on the shores of Lake Texcoco allowed them to settle on a swampy island in the middle of the lake. Like the early Ottoman tribe, the Aztecs served as mercenaries in nearby regional wars, in this case in Mexico’s central valley. In the process, the tribe moved from a system of government by tribal council to government by a military elite. By 1400 the military power of the Aztecs had achieved parity with their neighboring lakeside kingdoms. They confirmed this by adopting as king an important member of one of the neighboring royal families. This allowed them to become junior associates in a triple alliance that included the two neighboring tribes in about 1420. A regional war then allowed the Mexica to seize control of the alliance in 1428. The Mexica continued to use the title Triple Alliance, but 1428 is generally recognized as the beginning of what we call the Aztec Empire. The Aztec Empire, like that of the Inca, was less than a century old when the Spaniards invaded. Unlike the Inca, the Aztecs built and maintained their empire by collecting tribute and using force to back up their demands. In the eighty years after 1428, the Aztec army conquered one regional kingdom after another, turning much of central and southern Mexico into a tribute-paying empire. This new empire seems to have been a giant protection racket rather than an administered empire. Regional kings retained their local authority as long as they regularly sent tribute to the Aztecs in Tenochtitlán (later Mexico City), the Aztec capital. The tribute was used to support an expanding Aztec warrior class and to buy the loyalty of the client kings of recently conquered neighboring kingdoms. Tenochtitlán, with roughly three hundred thousand inhabitants, was three times larger than any city most of the invading Europeans had ever seen, and they were stunned by its wealth and size. The city, and the empire, depended on an enormous tribute system, and on the unique environment created by the lakes of central Mexico. Valuable tribute goods, which could bear the high cost of transport by human porters, came from distant sources. Bulky basic supplies, produced locally and brought by water across the lakes,

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were readily available at low cost. The lakes were roughly sixteen miles wide and thirty-one miles long, providing an extensive shoreline that supported intensive, irrigated agriculture in which a given plot could produce several crops a year. Huge freight canoes transported supplies to the capital by water at a fraction of the cost of human portage.5 Although differently organized, both the Inca and Aztec Empires were comparable in size to the Eurasian empires of the time, but both also had internal weaknesses that left them vulnerable to outside intervention.6 As the Aztec Empire grew, the warrior elite continued to expand. As new conquests became more distant, the cost of conquering and controlling distant tribes consumed the revenues those wars generated. To keep up the government subsidies expected by the Aztec warrior class, the empire increased the tribute it demanded from older parts of the empire. This triggered local rebellions and required yet more unprofitable campaigns. Discontent among the tributary kingdoms was aggravated by a religious ideology that demanded human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that the vital spirit of a warrior was similar to the spirit that moved the sun and made things grow. They thought it was necessary to replenish the sun’s energies by releasing the vital energy of captured warriors. This explains why Aztec battle tactics emphasized capturing enemy soldiers alive so that they could be sacrificed. When Cortés and his men arrived, the tensions within the Aztec Empire presented an ideal environment for outside intervention. Cortés spent more than a year in or near the Aztec capital (November 1519 to February 1521) before the final siege. Once the invading Spaniards had learned to communicate with surrounding tribes, they were able to recruit thousands of allies from the Tarascan and other discontented tribes. As a result, when Cortés laid siege to the Aztec capital, his few hundred Spaniards were joined by several thousand men from subject kingdoms glad for a chance to end Aztec hegemony. Cortés’s final capture of Tenochtitlán was also aided by a devastating smallpox epidemic among its Aztec defenders.

“Las Indias”: Castile’s American Empire The contrast between the apparent resources of the Aztec and Inca Empires and an invasion force of well under a thousand Europeans has inspired numerous explanations for the outcome of the Spanish invasion. One explanation depends on the technological gap between Europe and the stone-age cultures of the Americas. Another depends on the aggressive ruthlessness of the Europeans. A third explanation draws upon the geopolitical fragility of

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the Inca and Aztec Empires, which made it easy for the European invaders to find Native American allies. Yet another explanation depends on the dramatic vulnerability of Native Americans to European diseases. Whatever explanation, or combination of explanations, is best, the empire that took shape after the Spaniards arrived played a major role in European history and in the globalization of economic life. The Spanish American Empire was the only real territorial empire conquered by Europeans in the Early Modern era, and the Spaniards went to some lengths to blot out the vestiges of the Aztec and Inca Empires. The latter left one heritage, however, that is hard to evaluate but may well have been important. Most people in Mexico or the Andes lived within regional kingdoms that had only recently been integrated into the Aztec or Inca Empire, and many of these kingdoms readily helped the Spaniards topple their Aztec and Inca rulers. In both empires the populace was accustomed to the concept of rule by a large-scale, central political authority. Because the Aztecs and the Inca had built large, centralized states, the Spaniards could preempt that tradition of central authority and use it as the foundation for a centralized political system. The Spaniards were not creating empires, they were taking control of established empires. In doing so, they took over the empires’ indigenous provincial structure and encouraged the Native American elites to remodel their governmental institutions using the Spanish form of city government as a model. The importance of prior Native American experience with centralized government is impossible to measure, but it may help explain why the newly conquered Native Americans accepted the new imperial government and the Spaniards, with a surprisingly small warrior elite, were able to assert control over the Native American empires.7 Once in control of the Aztec and Inca Empires, a few hundred Europeans were faced with managing indigenous populations that outnumbered them many times over. In the immediate wake of the conquests, the invaders concentrated on confiscating the accumulated treasure of the Aztecs and Inca and shipping it home. Their next goal was to extract tribute that could be converted to European forms of wealth. They searched for any valuable commodity, from gold to sarsaparilla, that could be sold profitably in Europe despite the high cost of shipping it home. Having unexpectedly found America, and having dramatically conquered its two empires, the Spanish invaders and their Habsburg rulers were faced with the task of managing a huge new empire. The men who carried out the conquest needed to establish control over the countryside and its people. The first official solution was the encomienda, or trusteeship. Individual

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soldiers were appointed as encomenderos, or trustees, over Indian towns, in theory charged with governing them in the name of the king of Castile. This official solution was reinforced by an informal one in which, from the first conquests in the Caribbean islands, Spanish men took local women as partners. While many liaisons were simply consensual and often forced, many others took the form of formal marriage to duly Christianized Indian women. As a way of transferring the authority of the previous ruler to the encomendero, the latter often married a woman from the family of the Indian ex-king.8 For these European men this was a chance to create an idealized version of a landed estate in Andalucía, which entitled them to almost complete control over the country people and their land—a neo-feudal society in which the landlords controlled access to the land and had virtual ownership of its people. The new European landlords expected to control rents, labor, taxes, and justice as they saw fit, free of interference from the Spanish Crown, and attempted to turn their improvised controls into the framework for a landlord-dominated agrarian society. They also set about Europeanizing the ecology of the New World by introducing familiar crops from Spain: grapes, wheat, barley, pigs, sheep, cattle, and horses. The Spanish invaders also needed to be able to coordinate their dispersed military resources; having dismantled the central authority of the Aztec and Inca Empires, they took over the underlying urban networks that had sustained the defeated empires. After establishing Lima and Mexico City as capitals of their two viceroyalties, the new rulers took over most of the important Aztec and Inca towns and put themselves in charge of local government, grafting Spanish-style town governments upon preconquest communities. Meanwhile, the Spanish Crown was evolving a long-term policy intended to establish direct royal jurisdiction over its new Indian subjects, assert royal authority within the empire, and marginalize the conquerors and their encomiendas. Soon after the conquest, the Crown authorized the Franciscan and Dominican missionary orders to build dozens of missions intended to convert the Indians to Catholic Christianity. While that was the official agenda, the Crown also saw the missions as a way to protect at least some Native Americans from the conquistadores. Each new mission was granted royal jurisdiction over the Indians in its town. The Crown accepted the premise that Indians were potentially full-fledged humans and lacked only the knowledge of Christianity to become truly civilized gente de razón (“reasoning men”). By granting the missions civil jurisdiction over the Indians, the Crown separated them from the neo-feudal societies evolving in the encomiendas. Soon the Crown had to confront the growing independence and power of the encomenderos. The Castilian Crown had a vision of colonial jurisdiction

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different from that of the invading soldiers—one in which the Indians were royal subjects subordinate to royal policy. Royal policy and the rule of law were to be implemented by officials and judges appointed by, and responsive to, the government in Spain. Vice-regal governments in Lima and Mexico City represented the Crown and set policy. Each capital had a viceroy, a treasurer, and a vice-regal judge; and each of them reported separately to the Spanish Crown, presumably as a check on corruption. Implementation was put in the hands of the cabildos, or city councils, in a system that assigned jurisdiction over both countryside and urban areas to municipal governments. This form of local administration was similar to that of Castile except that, from the Crown’s perspective, it was free of the intermediate provincial or national assemblies that frustrated royal administration at home. By 1530 the emerging Spanish American Empire was governed through the Consejo de Indias (Council for the Indies), appointed by and reporting to the king. On the pattern of the Castilian bureaucracy, the Consejo de Indias had a subcommittee, or Cámara de Indias, that functioned as a personnel committee. The Cámara kept dossiers on hundreds of candidates for positions in its American Empire. When a position came open, the committee reviewed the files and proposed candidates to the king, who made the final decision. Through this mechanism the king selected the viceroys, treasury officials, judges, and customs officials who staffed the colonial administration. The king and his personnel committee, the Cámara de Indias, also had jurisdiction over the selection of the bishops and archbishops in Spanish America. Charles V coerced the papacy into creating a patronato, or patriarchate, of the Indies, with its office in Madrid, to govern the Catholic Church in America. Nominated by the king, the patriarch of the Indies controlled all religious appointments in the empire. He made recommendations about bishops, archbishops, and other important church officials, and the candidates were processed by the same personnel committee that selected members of the civil administration in the Indies. Thus the Catholic Church in Spanish America was a de facto arm of the royal bureaucracy, giving the Spanish Crown more authority over the Church in America than it had over the Church in Spain. At the level of city government, the conquistadores set up the original cabildos, or town councils, and filled them with their political friends. The cabildo was the municipal agency that implemented royal policy for a city and its surrounding township. Thus, control of the cabildos was crucial to the power of the encomenderos. City officials were nominated locally, but the king reserved the right to ratify or reject the nominations. During the sixteenth century the crown displaced the conquistadores from town councils

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and dismantled the encomienda system, abolishing the landlords’ control over labor and transferring legal jurisdiction to the Crown and its system of royal courts. Meanwhile, in the first half of the sixteenth century, the invaders reorganized American agriculture to fit Spanish diets and customs. Given the costs and risks of trans-Atlantic shipping, the new sixteenth-century Spanish American Empire seemed destined to become a largely self-sustaining agrarian society that replicated the agrarian economy of Europe. But the Spaniards also realized that only if America could be made to produce goods valuable enough to stand the cost of trans-Atlantic transport would American merchants be able to pay for European products. Meanwhile, newly introduced European crops and livestock had devastating effects on the American landscape and native agriculture. Even as this process was working itself out, the Spanish Crown was confronted with another challenge—the discovery of immensely rich silver mines in Peru and Mexico. The first silver mines were discovered in the 1540s at Zacatecas in Mexico and Potosí in Peru. Over the next decades, additional mines were discovered at Guanajuato, Taxco, San Luís de Potosí, and elsewhere. The task that now faced the Habsburg government was the creation of an export-oriented mining industry. As in a modern oil-producing country, the production, transportation, and export of the key commodity, silver, shaped the routes, transport, and strongholds of the empire, mobilizing thousands of tons of silver for export to Europe and Manila. In addition, a rapidly expanding workforce of miners and laborers had to be fed and housed. The mines themselves had an endless appetite for lumber to reinforce the mine shafts and charcoal for refining the silver. Located in a rugged countryside still not entirely pacified, the silver industry required heavily protected wagon trains on land and naval convoys at sea. Soon an extractive, export-oriented economy was being superimposed on what had been emerging as a self-sufficient agrarian society. The most constant problem at the mines was a chronic shortage of labor, and it got worse as the population declined and more silver mines were opened. A Mexico that had at least 10 million people in 1519 had a population of about 1.5 million in 1600. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Crown had abolished the old encomiendas and had shifted its focus from protecting the Indians to exploiting them as labor for the mines. To do this the Crown took back the jurisdictional rights it had given to the missions and the mission towns. By the later sixteenth century, thanks to European diseases, the rapid spread of sheep and cattle raising, and the destruction of field crop farming,

Map 4.3.   Global Silver Flows. Within the Spanish American Empire, silver flowed from northern Mexico and Peru to Cartagena de Indias, Vera Cruz, and Acapulco. Once in Europe the silver passed through local markets, then through the Middle East or around Africa to China. Meanwhile the silver sent to Acapulco traveled to Manila, where most of it was bought by Chinese merchants.

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most Mexican villages were half deserted. The Crown then forced the consolidation of small Indian towns into larger communities that were more easily administered. Every town maintained a register of all adult men and their ages. The Crown, or local authorities, could then requisition a portion of the men on the roster for two-week work periods wherever the authorities needed them. Given that labor conscription often meant work in the mines or on sugar plantations, and that silver refining used large amounts of mercury, work in the mines soon shortened the worker’s lifespan. When the conscription system didn’t work, the mines began paying their workers what looked like a reasonable daily wage. At the same time, they began selling the workers their food and other supplies in company stores. The workers contracted to work a stipulated amount of time, only to discover that they owed money to the company store and could not leave until the debt was paid. The result was a form of debt peonage that made it impossible for workers to leave the mines. Keeping the mines working was only part of the Crown’s problem—once the silver was refined, it had to be brought safely to Europe. This led to a set of carefully regulated transport routes from the American mines to Spain. One route carried silver from Mexican mines to Mexico City and then to Vera Cruz. The Mexican silver mines were located in distant, rugged mountain areas, and keeping up the supply of labor, food, and mining supplies was a constant logistical problem. To move the building supplies and fuel the mines needed, the Spaniards had to build a new road system that could handle large freight wagons. By 1600 wagon trains were passing through Mexico City on a 560-mile journey to Zacatecas, and then to even more distant mining towns.9 These convoys rarely traveled more than fifteen miles a day, and for much of the later sixteenth century they traveled in armored convoys because of recurrent attacks by “unpacified” Chichimeca Indians. The second interior route began high in the Andes at Potosí and carried silver twelve hundred miles overland to Cuzco and then to Lima. From there the silver went by sea to Panama, where it was carried by mule train across the isthmus and then transferred to Cartagena de Indias on the Caribbean coast. From Vera Cruz and Cartagena, the silver traveled by ship to Havana. From there, after the fleet was resupplied, the silver traveled in protected fleets to Seville. The advantage of the convoyed fleet was clear. Despite the aura of incompetence historians have generated as they interpret seventeenth-century Spain, over more than two centuries, only a handful of treasure ships, and only one fleet, were ever captured by Spain’s enemies. The regulations on private trade that were part of the convoy system allowed the Crown to col-

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lect its taxes and supposedly protected the monopolies on trade held by the merchants in Seville, Mexico, and Lima. While it did protect the silver shipments, the convoy system hampered trans-Atlantic trade because royal taxes and merchant guild monopolies kept prices high. One of the more onerous taxes was the avería that paid for the warships that protected the convoys. Like other European governments of the time, the Spanish monarchy did not maintain a standing navy. The Crown kept a few warships in reserve; when a fleet was needed, some of the royal ships were refitted for action, but most of a royal naval fleet consisted of large merchant ships and their crews that were hired by the Crown and equipped with artillery. The armed escorts for the periodic fleets to America and back were naval squadrons assembled in this fashion. Rather than paying for an expensive escort squadron from the royal treasury, the escort was paid for by assessing an avería on all the goods carried by the fleet being escorted. This tax varied from trip to trip, and the cost of the escort was calculated as a percentage of the value of the cargo. Spread across a large fleet, the averia could be quite modest, but if the fleet were small, the averia could be as much as 17 percent of the registered value of the cargo. As the official fleets got smaller in the seventeenth century, the averia increased, encouraging evasion. Not surprisingly, much of the trans-Atlantic trade slipped into various kinds of smuggling and contraband trade, with local Spanish authorities quietly welcoming ships from England, Holland, and France. Only in the mid-1700s was the Spanish commercial system reformed and made more flexible, allowing selected ports in Spain to trade directly with several Spanish American ports, and allowing individual ships to sail when and where they chose, rather than forcing them to wait for a convoy. Meanwhile, central Mexico experienced dramatic demographic and ecological changes. Aside from the needs of the mining industry, better transport had become crucial for adequate urban supply. As European diseases killed off the native population (and labor supply), the intensive agriculture in the Valley of Mexico collapsed. The introduction of European livestock aggravated the problem, with overgrazing and deforestation degrading the hillside terraces around the central valley. This, in turn, damaged the watershed and lowered the water level in the lakes around the capital city, disrupting transport by water. As farmland near the lakes was shifted to grazing, wheat and corn had to be imported to Mexico City from towns as far as 125 miles away.10 In the Viceroyalty of Peru, the new seaport of Lima replaced Cuzco as imperial capital and primate city, but Cuzco remained important as an

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economic center for the Andean region. Roughly halfway between Lima and Potosí, Cuzco was a crucial link in the mobilization of supplies for the mines at Potosí. Because of the rugged Andean terrain, this supply network depended on long trains of pack mules.11 At considerable cost, this network distributed mercury, wheat, maize, cacao, coca, wine, sugar, silks, porcelain, American-made cloth, and European trade goods throughout the Andes, but the first priority went to supplies for the mines and to the export of silver.12 The emerging Spanish American Empire looked large and important on a map, but in reality, it was in a precarious situation. An empire of several million Native Americans, reaching from Santa Fe in modern New Mexico to Santiago in Chile, was governed by no more than twenty thousand to thirty thousand Spaniards. For Spanish control to work, the Spaniards had to find a balance between coercion and collaboration. That balance changed from one time and place to another, but it only worked if the Indian communities were given a fair amount of autonomy. The Spanish government modified the traditional Indian town governments to look like Spanish town governments, but in practice they continued to be run by the traditional elders of the Indian communities. These elders preserved their autonomy by accepting some Spanish demands and quietly ignoring others. They converted part of their farmland to European crops, in part because the Spaniards wanted wheat and barley, but also because the collapse of the Native American population reduced the demand for traditional American staples. In Mexico the Spaniards created a written alphabet for use with Nahuatl, the Aztec language, and developed an entire legal and administrative system using that language. The Native Americans soon learned how to exploit Spanish forms of local government and how to take advantage of Spanish contract law in bargaining with the government for service contracts. The ability of Indian communities to resist Spanish forms of government and social control was part of a complex tension between Spanish authority and indigenous resistance. When the Spanish pushed too hard, they sometimes ran into local revolts, the most dramatic of which took place in New Mexico. In 1680 several Indian communities in New Mexico carried out a coordinated attack on Spanish authority, killing several hundred Europeans and driving the Spanish out of New Mexico for more than a decade.13 Beginning in 1610 the Jesuits began developing a series of missions in what is now Paraguay, recruiting and converting Guaraní Indians. With large herds of livestock, the missions became a target for raiders from Portuguese Brazil. This prompted the Jesuits to train a small army of Native American soldiers that included well-trained infantry backed by expert Native American

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cavalry. Beginning in the 1630s and lasting until the Jesuit missions were disbanded in the later eighteenth century, this corps of three to five thousand trained Guaraní soldiers protected the Viceroyalty of Peru from foreign attacks and helped put down Indian uprisings within the empire.14 Another illustration of this de facto collaboration and local autonomy involved the Potosí silver mines in Peru. Once Potosí was discovered, it became the viceroyalty’s principal raison d’être. It was crucial to keep the mule trains loaded with silver moving to Lima. The Indian communities that once had provided transport services for the Inca government now negotiated contracts with the Spanish government for the transport of mining supplies and silver. These communities acquired a degree of self-government as the Spaniards converted traditional village governments to their Castilian equivalent. The Indians soon learned how to use their Spanish-style town governments to negotiate the contracts that provided transport services to the viceroyalty, including the transport of silver from Potosí to Lima. From the perspective of the European Habsburg Empire, an unbroken flow of silver from America to Spain was crucial. Perennially at war with the Turks, the Dutch, and the French, the government in Madrid depended on American silver for the survival of Habsburg power in Europe. Even a short disruption of the flow of silver to Lima and Spain because of a local labor dispute could disrupt the Habsburg Empire’s ability to pay for its European wars. Thus, the Habsburg Empire in Europe, which depended on American silver, was hostage to Mexican and Peruvian communities whose members had learned Spanish legalisms and could disrupt the flow of silver.15

At Last, a Direct Route to Asia By the 1560s, Spanish American merchants in Mexico City were very interested in direct trade with Asia. Earlier expeditions had demonstrated that you could sail from Acapulco to the East Indies following the tropical trade winds. It was also well known that American silver was very valuable in China. A direct connection between Mexico and Asia, one that cut out various Asian and European middlemen, could bring American silver to China, where it was literally worth twice as much as it was in Mexico or Lima. The problem was to find a way to return to Mexico once you reached Asia. Spain had sent out a number of expeditions in search of Pacific trade routes, starting with the voyage of Ferdinand Magellan. Knowing that the Pacific Ocean promised a maritime route to Asia and aware of the profits being made in Lisbon, Charles V authorized a new attempt to find such a route. Magellan seemed a good choice as commander, since he had extensive

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firsthand experience in the Indian Ocean. He had been a member of one of the first Portuguese expeditions to the eastern edge of the Indian Ocean and had participated in the conquest of Melaka in 1511. He may also have visited the Maluku Islands. Discredited by political enemies in Portugal, Magellan brought his experience to Castile and was named commander of the new Pacific expedition. After leaving Spain, Magellan first had to find a passage through or around South America into the Pacific. Then he had to find a route to the Maluku Islands, which, he hoped, were on the Spanish side of the papal demarcation line.16 Storms, mutinies, and deteriorating ships left Magellan with only two ships when he reached the Philippines. Once there, he intervened in local politics, as he had seen the Portuguese do, and was killed. The two remaining ships sailed south to the Maluku Islands, Tidor, and Ternate, the sources of nutmeg, cloves, and mace. The survivors negotiated for cargo, and the two surviving ships set out for Spain. The eastbound ship proved unseaworthy and was lost with all but a few survivors; the other ship, the Victoria, sailed west for the Cape of Good Hope. The westbound Victoria left the Malukus in November 1521; reached the Cape of Good Hope on May 22, 1522; and limped into the Andalucían port of Sanlúcar de Barrameda in September 1522. Commanded by Juan Sebastian Elcano, the ship arrived with only 18 of the expedition’s 270 original crewmembers. Seventy feet long and displacing about eighty-five tons, the Victoria was nothing special in terms of European ship design. Largely by accident, she was the first ship to sail around the world. The return of the Victoria with enough cloves to pay for Magellan’s expedition prompted the Spanish to send another fleet to Asia in 1525 under the command of García Jofre de Loaísa. Following Magellan’s path, part of the fleet reached the Malukus, where the last of Loaísa’s ships was wrecked. Another expedition left Mexico in 1527 under the command of Álvaro de Saavedra. Saavedra followed equatorial trade winds, which were now well understood, to the East Indies—the problem was to find a way to sail back to Mexico. Saavedra tried twice to sail back to America, but the expedition had to return to the Malukus, where the survivors were stranded together with the survivors of the Loaísa expedition. Eventually the Portuguese, who considered the Malukus within their jurisdiction, rounded up the survivors and returned them to Spain. Two more expeditions were undertaken in 1541–1542, chartered by the viceroy of Mexico. The first, commanded by Ruy López de Villalobos, left Mexico with six ships and four hundred men. Their first task was to plant a colony in the Philippines. The westbound trip went smoothly, but the colony

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was badly equipped and was abandoned after six months. Ships lost, and captured by the Portuguese, two-thirds of the one hundred survivors opted to stay in the Malukus while the Portuguese returned the others to Spain. The viceroy’s second expedition, launched in 1542, suggests that he had seen some speculative cartography showing that the unexplored coast of California curved northwest, allowing a northern coastal route to Asia. Even more speculative cartography hinted at a northern passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic. In any case, the main goal of the expedition was to find out if there was a coastal route to Asia. The expedition sailed from San Blas, Mexico, under the command of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo with the two-hundred-ton San Salvador and two smaller ships. Cabrillo was a veteran of Cortés’s conquest of Mexico. He apparently had training as a boat builder, since he had helped build the boats that allowed Cortés’s men to capture the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. Subsequently he followed Pedro de Alvarado into Guatemala, where he became a wealthy encomendero. In the 1530s Cabrillo helped build several ships, including those used for the Villalobos expedition, and was personally involved in the construction of the San Salvador. Led by the San Salvador, his squadron reached the Oregon-California border despite contrary winds and currents, indicating that he was a first-rate navigator. He is remembered in San Diego, California, because the San Salvador was the first European ship to make landfall on what became US territory—sixty-five years before the first European settlement in Virginia. Cabrillo died of an injury on one of the Channel Islands. Short of supplies, and having failed to find a route to Asia, the squadron headed back to Mexico. After that failure, the prospect of trans-Pacific trade dropped from sight. Twenty years later, things had changed in the Spanish Empire. The young and vigorous Philip II had replaced his aging father, Charles V. Promising new silver mines had been discovered in Mexico and Peru. By 1560, significant new revenues were arriving in Spain from the American Empire. As silver became more plentiful in America and Europe, it financed a rapid increase in European trade with Asia, especially with China, the world’s biggest economy and one committed to a silver-based monetary system. By the mid-1560s, American silver was worth twice as much in China as in America. The merits of a trans-Pacific trade route were more obvious than ever. In 1564 Philip II authorized and subsidized an expedition intended to enforce the Spanish claim to the Philippines and open direct trade between Mexico and Asia. The expedition was charged with establishing a permanent base in the Philippines and with finding a viable route back to Mexico. Led by Miguel López de Legazpi, with Andrés de Urdaneta as

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navigator, the expedition left Mexico in November 1564 and landed at the southern Philippine port of Cebu in February 1565. With Cebu as a base, Legazpi visited several other islands, negotiating with the local rulers. In 1570 he turned his attention to Manila, about 375 miles north of Cebu by sea. Legazpi finally got control of Manila, a small port subordinate to the sultan of Brunei, in 1571. Meanwhile, Andrés de Urdaneta took off from Cebu on June 1, 1565, heading north. A veteran navigator, he was convinced he would find prevailing winds that blew from west to east at latitude forty degrees north. Whether by accident or by design, he set sail at the best time in the spring and apparently found the northbound Kuroshio current. This current begins near the Philippines and flows north past Japan until it branches into the eastbound North Pacific current. There, at about forty degrees latitude north, Urdaneta also found the eastbound prevailing winds he was looking for. Urdaneta made it back to Acapulco in only four months, but he arrived with a large part of his crew dead from scurvy and the rest barely able to handle the ship.17 By 1570–1571 the merchant community in Mexico City had followed up on Urdaneta’s success and organized the first round trip of the Manila galleon. For the next 250 years, at least one galleon a year left Acapulco loaded with silver and a plan to purchase silks and other Asian luxury goods. For the first twenty of those years, the Manila trade was essentially unregulated; one to six ships sailed in any given year, some of them from Lima rather than Acapulco. In the 1590s, however, the merchants of Seville persuaded Philip II to limit the Manila trade to only two ships per year. Thereafter, one or two official ships sailed every year for the next 220 years. There is a lot of scholarly debate over how much silver went to China by this trans-Pacific route and how important it was to global trade and to the evolution of the Chinese Empire. When we look at this silver trade in a larger context, we can reconsider the importance of the Manila galleons and the great maritime trade route that connected America with Asia and completed the chain of trade that literally encircled the globe. Remarkably, for most of three centuries Spain’s American Empire extended five thousand miles from New Mexico to Chile with little need for a standing army to enforce its rule. While there were more than a few local rebellions, the underlying pattern was one of interdependence. As we have seen, the empire was an enormous demographic disaster. The population of the two viceroyalties fell from around 12 million in Peru to about 2.5 million, while that of Mexico fell from at least 10 million to about 1.5 million between the conquests and 1600. Given the sheer size of either Mexico or

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Peru, much of the countryside was left virtually deserted and much of the indigenous ecosystem destroyed. Gradually the Spanish Empire in America developed its own economy, producing not only sugar but also cotton and wool textiles and ships of all sizes. The enormous output of the Mexican and Peruvian mines beginning in the 1550s, and Spain’s control over the export of silver from America, extended the Habsburg Empire’s domination in Europe to the 1640s. As early as 1615, however, Habsburg power was being undermined. The powerful merchant communities in Mexico City and Lima controlled the flow of silver; as a result, more and more silver was invested in America itself or went directly to Asia on the Manila galleons. As more American silver was held back in America, sold to other countries illegally, or shipped to China, the government in Madrid found it harder and harder to get the silver it needed to fund its endless European wars. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the Habsburg Empire in Europe was bankrupt, while Spain’s American Empire was becoming economically more complex and self-sustaining. America had acquired an importance in the larger world out of proportion to its modest and thinly distributed population. It was important to Europe because the Habsburg Empire in Europe needed American silver to fund its prolonged wars in Germany and the Netherlands. At the peak of silver shipments to Spain, America’s silver helped fund the struggle to stop Ottoman expansion into Europe and the Mediterranean. Equally important, as American silver escaped Habsburg control and reached other parts of Europe, it provided European merchants with a commodity for which there was an endless demand in China and India. By the mid-1600s, American silver was eluding Spanish control but was benefitting the commercial worlds of Europe and America. Meanwhile, the enormous profits produced by a direct, trans-Pacific trade route between Spain’s American Empire and Asia constituted the final link in a truly global commercial network.

CHAPTER FIVE

Africa, Portugal, Brazil, and the Atlantic

The first Portuguese voyage to India in 1497–1498, and its sequel in the Indian Ocean, is such a compelling piece of history that it has overshadowed the history of Portugal, Africa, and Brazil. The less dramatic story of the South Atlantic starts in the same place as the opening of the Indian Ocean: Lisbon, Genoa, and the ports near the Strait of Gibraltar. The focus shifts when we look at the coastal islands of Africa and the gradual buildup of trade based on sugar and slaves. It begins with the settlement of the Cape Verde Islands and the island of São Tomé. São Tomé developed a prosperous sugar industry based on free land (the island was initially uninhabited), European capital, and African slave labor. As the sixteenth century progressed, these islands were well located to become entrepôts in the trade between West Africa and Brazil, especially as intermediaries in the trans-Atlantic African slave trade. Initially the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé traded between the west coast of Africa and Brazil, and then between Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and Europe.

West Africa Sub-Saharan Africa and its Atlantic coasts are probably the victims of more stereotypes than any other part of the world. The image of jungle tribesmen with stone-age weapons propagated by the Tarzan movies is seriously misleading. The area south of Algeria, Libya, and the Sahara was a broad, grassy plain that became tropical forest as you traveled farther south. From Roman 85

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times this region was the home of a sequence of empires with large armies, effective cavalry, and important centers of Muslim learning. The western part of this sub-Saharan region contained three major gold-mining areas. Since there was a strong demand for gold in the Mediterranean world, the mines were the basis for a substantial trans-Saharan caravan trade, and several routes crossed the desert between Jenne (Djenné), Timbuktu, Gao, and North African ports. The merchants who arrived along the Saharan trade routes were usually Muslim, and as in many places, the Muslim merchants soon converted local elites to Islam.1 The revenue from this trade helped support large royal courts and armies. Between the early thirteenth century and the fifteenth century, the Mali Empire was the dominant power in West Africa, but it seems to have reached its peak about 1330. At that time, it controlled the coast between the Senegal and Gambia Rivers and stretched inland for more than a thousand miles. The Portuguese wanted to reach the Mali Empire because it was the legendary source of African gold. In the fifteenth century, when the Portuguese finally made direct contact with the Mali Empire, it had been greatly reduced by invading Songhai warriors. The Songhai Empire (1375–1591), created by this aggressive warrior elite, took control of most of Mali’s territory and eventually became one of Africa’s more important exporters of slaves. As the Portuguese discovered, African society had both the organization and the technology it needed to resist European incursions. West Africans were familiar with horses and used them effectively for cavalry. They knew how to work copper, brass, bronze, and iron. Their weapons (knives, swords, spears) were of iron, and they quickly learned how to use guns. A welltrained African army, complete with cavalry, was a formidable opponent; larger kingdoms could field armies of several thousand infantry and large troops of cavalry. Africans also knew how to cast metal into everyday utensils and decorative objects. They were skilled blacksmiths, and in colonial Brazil, a slave who had been a blacksmith in his West African home was a valuable asset on any plantation. By 1500 the ruling elites of sub-Saharan Africa were nominally Muslim, but many of them also acknowledged the animist cults practiced by most of their subjects. Sub-Saharan Africa had centuries of experience with trade and cultural exchange, and cities like Jenne and Timbuktu were major seats of Muslim learning.2 On the fringe of this economic region, the West African coast was controlled by a variety of polities, large and small, many of which maintained their political independence from Europe until the nineteenth century. Although many of the states of coastal Africa were small, the Portuguese learned not to try to occupy them or overawe them with military force.

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While Native Americans were vulnerable to European diseases, the situation was reversed in Africa and the tropics. Disease was Africa’s first line of defense and included sleeping sickness (trypanosomiasis), bilharzia (schistosomiasis), malaria, and yellow fever—diseases to which Europeans had little resistance. Early modern European armies exposed to mosquitoes, tsetse flies, or water contaminated with schistosomiasis parasites, compounded by their minimal sanitation practices, were quickly decimated by disease.3 The Portuguese learned to avoid land campaigns in coastal Africa and instead negotiated with local rulers. They seem to have forgotten this experience in the late sixteenth century when they sent hundreds of Portuguese troops into inland campaigns in Angola, where most of them soon died or deserted. The Portuguese traded with the Songhai, who traded slaves for horses, guns, gunpowder, and other iron weapons, which they used to threaten neighboring countries and mount additional slave collecting expeditions. Benin was another important West African state, and one with which the Portuguese had many interactions. Benin took shape in the mid-fifteenth century, occupying the area between Dahomey and the Niger delta and between the coast and the Yoruba Kingdom. It was ruled by a series of effective kings. With a strong, well-trained army and coastal navy, Benin dealt with the Portuguese as equals and remained independent well into the nineteenth century. The political scene in West Africa between 1450 and 1750 saw two more strong states emerge in the area of modern Nigeria: the Yoruba Kingdom of Oyo and Dahomey. The Yoruba Kingdom of Oyo took shape in the second half of the sixteenth century; with a strong army and an effective cavalry, it lasted some two hundred years. During that time, it was effectively the middleman for trade between the inland societies to the north and the coastal kingdoms to the south. It has been suggested that part of the reason for Oyo’s success was the availability of European horses and weapons, which gave it a military advantage over countries farther inland. Dahomey took shape beginning around 1600 and gained control of two of the major slave trading ports, Whydah and Allada in modern Benin. By the 1700s, Dahomey was one of the most important slave trading countries, supplying thousands of slaves not only to the Portuguese but also to Dutch, English, and French slavers. Like Oyo, Dahomey maintained its importance in part because the European merchants were happy to trade guns for slaves. Along much of Africa’s west coast, in addition to the Kingdom of Benin, the maps of sixteenth-century West Africa include numerous small and midsize kingdoms. Some regions housed very small polities that controlled only the land identified with one or two extended clans, within which certain

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families were by tradition the heads of state.4 It is important to note that most of these states, even quite small ones, retained their autonomy in their interactions with Europeans. They were reluctant to allow permanent settlers, or lanzados, to settle permanently in their territories, and lanzados were more likely to be found in the small “stateless” societies. Farther south, in the very different environment of the forest zone, was the Kingdom of Kongo, perhaps the African state that has gotten the most attention from historians. Located in the northwest corner of the modern country of Angola, Kongo was first consolidated about 1385. By the time the Portuguese arrived in 1483, it had also taken over the Kingdom of Loango on its northern border, in what is now the Republic of the Congo, and claimed the Kingdom of Ndongo to the south as a dependency. With a well-defined tax structure, an effective army, and recognizably monarchical royal protocol, the Kingdom of Kongo was a state worthy of respect.

Enter the Portuguese The Portuguese who first visited the African coast in the 1400s were as inclined to raid the isolated villages as to try to trade with them. This was their first step in a century of learning how to relate to African societies and their ruling elites. Meanwhile, the Genoese, Catalans, and Portuguese in the Mediterranean were trading with medieval North Africa—a perennial source of gold that had been brought to the coast by trans-Sahara trade caravans since the fourteenth century. The Genoese visited North African ports and knew quite a bit about this trade with sub-Saharan Africa.5 As early as the 1350s, European expeditions, some with Genoese backing, had ventured down the African coast as far as the Gambia delta and the Canary Islands. Various small expeditions tried to trade with the Guanches who inhabited the Canaries; a few missionaries even tried to convert them to Christianity. Their reports were so optimistic that the pope even established a bishopric for the Canary Islands. Castile’s first official attempt to conquer the Canaries took place in 1402–1406, but the last of the islands was not conquered until 1495.6 While Castile concentrated on the Canary Islands, the Portuguese focused on the African coast. They captured the Moroccan ports of Ceuta (1415) and Alcazer (1458). In 1443 the Portuguese found and fortified the island of Arguim (Arguin), off the coast of Mauritania. Arguim then became a base for trade with the nearby African coast allowing the Portuguese to establish a connection with the inland caravan town of Wada and divert some of the caravan trade to the coast.7

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As the Portuguese moved south along the coast of Morocco and Mauritania, they used a combination of raiding and trading that was only marginally profitable. Their main revenues seem to have come from the sale of a small number of African captives. Moving farther into the delta areas of the Gambia and Senegal Rivers, the Portuguese discovered countries well able to resist their armed attacks, and got a rude surprise when they raided part of the Wolof Kingdom. The Wolof soldiers and war canoes made short work of the Portuguese soldiers and captured any ships the Portuguese brought into the inshore waterways. The Portuguese also discovered that West Africans were familiar with long-distance trade and had learned Mediterranean business techniques from Arab, Armenian, and other merchants that had been trading across sub-Saharan Africa.8 By the 1460s, the Portuguese had developed a thriving trade with the kingdoms in the Senegal-Gambia area and finally reached the Mali Empire and its gold mines by traveling up the Senegal River far enough to make contact with Mali. Mali and other states exported gold, bronze castings, cloth, malagueta pepper, and slaves in return for European cloth, iron ingots, and horses. Some trans-Sahara caravans were attracted to Portuguese outposts on the Atlantic coast of Morocco, where their cargoes were loaded onto Portuguese ships bound for Lisbon. Within a generation of first contact, the trade in Senegal-Gambia was brokered by mixed-race Luso-African merchants and brokers, men and women who were the descendants of the first white settlers and their African wives. The Mali gold had been one of the explorers’ early objectives, and by 1500 a modest but varied trade had been established with the northern coast of West Africa, trade in which the Portuguese diverted a substantial amount of the trans-Sahara gold trade to Lisbon.9 As African coastal towns became active seaports, inland trade diasporas were drawn to the new markets along the coast. Possibly the most powerful and effective state along the African coast was the Kingdom of Benin. The oba of Benin was willing to keep up diplomatic ties with the Portuguese, but he refused to convert to Christianity and did not allow the Portuguese to introduce missionaries. He requested European firearms, but when the Portuguese refused, he restricted the Portuguese to a narrow range of foreign trade goods that included pepper, ivory, and cotton cloth. Benin also resisted the introduction of large-scale slave trading, limiting it to a level that met its domestic needs. As a result, Benin retained its own identity and autonomy until the nineteenth century. The most distinctive of the assorted relationships that defined Portugal’s role in Atlantic Africa was its association with the royal family of Kongo. The Portuguese first visited Kongo in 1485 and recognized it as a well-run

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and well-defended country. They opened diplomatic relations with the royal family in 1490, establishing a close relationship that lasted until the 1560s. By 1491 they had succeeded in converting the king to Christianity. The Portuguese supported the royal family against domestic opposition and worked with the royal family to promote Christianity. In return, the king granted the Portuguese carefully limited slave trading privileges, including a prohibition on enslaving Kongolese subjects. While the king and the Portuguese negotiators agreed on limiting aspects of the slave trade, Kongolese nobles with access to seaports made deals with slave traders from São Tomé and the Cape Verde Islands. They enslaved any Africans they encountered whether they were Kongolese subjects or not. The effect was to erode the authority of the king while making Kongo one of the biggest exporters of slaves in Africa.10 This progressively undermined the Kongolese monarchy. The Portuguese had avoided territorial conquest, which involved sending troops into Africa, because of the high mortality among troops in the field in the tropics. They changed their policy at the end of the 1500s and mounted overland campaigns in Kongo and Angola, in part because of diplomatic commitments to the Kongolese monarchy, which on various occasions sent Kongolese troops to support Portuguese interests. This arrangement was interrupted in the late 1560s when a people called the Jaga overran Kongo and forced the king into exile. The Portuguese, possibly hoping to emulate the Spanish takeover of the Aztec Empire, then mounted a military expedition to restore the deposed king. Six hundred Portuguese soldiers, supported by large contingents of Kongolese soldiers, successfully restored the king, but the outcome was anticlimactic. Rather than staging a coup at the top, as in Mexico and Peru, the successful Portuguese army simply melted away. Virtually all the European recruits either died or became lanzados, married African wives, became traders or ranchers, and merged into Kongolese society. Recognizing that the Portuguese had used their own soldiers to support his government, the Kongolese king in turn provided soldiers for a Portuguese campaign in the Kingdom of Ndongo to the south, the logical first step toward a conquest of Angola.11 The official reason for the invasion was an attempt to establish a colony of Portuguese settlers in Angola and gain control of “unused” land suitable for planting Portuguese colonies. The real reason was the slave trade. The Kingdom of Kongo had maintained a regulated segment of the slave trade, but after the Jaga invasion, the slave trade had become something of a free-for-all. Meanwhile, conflict between Kongo and Ndongo led to a Portuguese attack on Ndongo with Kongolese help. For

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the first time, the Portuguese used their own troops to round up and enslave Africans in Angola. This was an exceptional act, since everywhere else in Africa the slave trade depended on African forces to round up the prospective slaves and on African brokers to bring slaves to the seaports for delivery to European buyers.12 After the restoration in the early 1560s, the political base of the Kongolese monarchy was weak and fragile. The informal slave traders from Portuguese-controlled São Tomé began trading with Kongolese regional nobles, who ignored royal authority and raided parts of Kongo itself for slaves. Confronted by internal dissent, slave raiding by independent lanzado merchants, and Portuguese slave raiding in Angola, the political base of the Kongolese monarchy disintegrated.

The Atlantic Islands The years 1427–1433 saw the discovery and colonization of the Azores. The Cape Verde Islands were discovered in 1456; São Tomé, near the mouth of the Congo River, was discovered in 1473. Without the story of the Atlantic islands, any account of the opening of trade with Africa or Brazil is incomplete. These islands were strategically and economically important. The role of the Azores was different from that of the coastal islands. Despite their apparent isolation, nine hundred miles out in the Atlantic, the Azores were ideally located for the return to Lisbon from West Africa. Prevailing winds and currents favored the trip south along the African coast, but the return was very difficult until navigators learned to sail northwest from Africa, cutting across the prevailing winds until they reached forty degrees north latitude, where they found the prevailing west-to-east winds that took them directly to Lisbon. By happy coincidence, the Azores were located at that latitude and provided a well-placed resupply port. Beginning in 1492 with Columbus’s first voyage, the Canary Islands were strategically valuable because they extended far into the Atlantic and were useful as a place to pick up the equatorial trade winds that blew toward America. In 1479 the Portuguese recognized Castile’s title to the Canaries— just in time for them to become a crucial link in Spanish communications with America. Farther south, the Cape Verde Islands played a key role in the history of Portugal’s relationship with both Africa and Brazil. With erratic rainfall and an unpromising climate, the Cape Verde Islands attracted only a few white Portuguese men as settlers. To spur development, in 1462 the king of Portugal granted captaincies in the Cape Verde Islands to several petitioners who

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wanted to develop plantations in the new colony. A captaincy was both an administrative post representing the king and a hereditary fief. The captains, in turn, imported African slaves to help develop the islands. As in other colonies, the European settlers married African women, and the islands soon had a Luso-African elite that no longer identified with Portugal, along with a much larger population of both free and enslaved Africans. The islands’ location proved convenient as a base for further African coastal exploration and, after 1497, as a resupply port for ships bound for Brazil and India. The islands were too inhospitable to attract many European settlers, and only two of the islands had permanent settlements by 1500.13 Because they lived a short distance from the African mainland, Cape Verde residents were inclined to ignore trade regulations made in Lisbon and developed their own commercial relationships with the mainland. Since the climate was too erratic for large-scale sugar production, Cape Verde Islanders gradually created a mixed agricultural economy that produced cotton and later cotton cloth for the African market.14 By expanding trade in those commodities and developing commercial contacts, Cape Verde Islanders became major intermediaries in the trade between Africa, Brazil, and later the Caribbean, often in violation of Portuguese policies. By the early sixteenth century, the Cape Verde Islands were also becoming a center for the collection and sale of American-bound slaves from the mainland. By 1490 the Portuguese had also colonized the offshore islands of São Tomé and Príncipe. Located near the mouth of the Congo River, São Tomé’s merchants came to play a major role in Portugal’s trans-Atlantic network and were important in undermining Portugal’s relationship with the Kingdom of Kongo. Both the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé were first settled under the auspices of the Portuguese Crown, but as in the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé attracted only a few European men, who soon married African wives. Both colonies evolved into virtually independent societies, with commercial activities that ignored policy from Lisbon. In both cases, while the initial settlers included men recruited from Portugal, before long most of the nominally Portuguese residents were mixed-race lanzados. Found all over the Portuguese sphere of influence, these often mixed-race lanzados were men who left European jurisdiction and moved to the fringes of the Portuguese world. Wherever they settled, they adopted local religion, clothing, and eating habits. Some of them abandoned all traces of European culture and blended into the society around them. On the Portuguese-controlled Atlantic islands, after two or three generations of racial intermarriage, it was impossible to distinguish between a self-defined European and an African, suggesting that

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the European, in this case Portuguese, identity was very weak. Clearly, skin color and race were less important in these colonial societies than were class, status, and business connections, especially in places where European immigrants were few, and almost entirely men. Unlike the Cape Verde Islands, São Tomé was also an ideal place to grow sugar. Since it was uninhabited when the Portuguese discovered it, the island’s few European settlers began planting sugar and importing African slaves to work in the cane fields. By 1500 the island was a major exporter of sugar; later in the sixteenth century, when Brazil also became a producer of sugar, São Tomé became an important intermediary in the slave trade, sending African slaves to the sugar plantations of Brazil. The people of both the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé were also adept freelance traders. They built their own small boats, traded at many different places along the African coast, and avoided or ignored Portuguese attempts to regulate or tax their trade.15

A Portuguese Sphere of Influence In the early sixteenth century, Portugal’s place in Atlantic Africa was framed by three disparate economic elements. The crown controlled the long-standing gold trade from Mali and Songhai. It also profited from its royal slave-trading activity in the Kingdom of Kongo. As this implies, gold and slaves were the king of Portugal’s two most important sources of African revenue; gold alone covered as much as 25 percent of the royal budget. Portuguese Africa also depended on a less tangible asset: the growing network of independent traders and merchants who avoided royal authority. They could be found in almost any seaport on the African coast, in addition to the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé. During the sixteenth century these independent merchants played an increasingly important role in the third economic development, the slave trade. Portugal’s loose-jointed sphere of influence over Atlantic Africa was held together by those three elements and a maze of treaties, subsidized rulers, trade outposts, and diplomatic understandings that varied from one African kingdom to another. Portuguese involvement in the coastal kingdoms varied. In the kingdoms where Portuguese lanzados were allowed to settle, their social development was similar to that of the lanzados on the islands, and a growing number of Portuguese men became permanent African residents or even citizens. Mainland lanzados learned the local language, married African women from important commercial or political families, and converted to the local animist religion. Their Luso-African children grew up with backgrounds in both

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Figure 5.1.  Miguel de Castro. A prominent African merchant and diplomat, de Castro was on his way to Lisbon when he stopped in Brazil for several weeks, where he had this portrait painted. (Courtesy of the National Museum of Art of Denmark)

cultures and often became powerful as brokers and intermediaries between local African society and the Europeans.16 During the sixteenth century, Portuguese commercial activities shifted south from the Senegal-Gambia to El Mina, Benin, São Tomé, and Kongo. One stream of trade was sponsored by the Crown and went to certain regulated ports. There, as in Kongo, representatives of the Portuguese crown were backed by the local government. Elsewhere, a second stream of commerce was carried on by independent merchants living on the Cape Verde Islands and São Tomé. They carried a growing share of African trade and traded when and where they pleased, ignoring government controls. These merchants were ideally positioned to exploit the expanding maritime connections with Brazil.17

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From Africa to Brazil: Unexpected Consequences While Portugal was building its sphere of influence in Atlantic Africa, its leaders were also pursuing the possibility of sailing around Africa in order to get to Asia. Bartolomeu Dias had found the Cape of Good Hope and verified that he really was in the Indian Ocean in 1488. This set the stage for the first trip to India, a trip that was also a daring experiment. Knowing that the winds and currents on the coast of southern Africa were against him, and knowing that his ships could not tack effectively into the wind, Vasco da Gama was determined to find a better route to southern Africa and Asia. The gamble began when he sailed southwest from the Cape Verde Islands, almost directly away from Africa. By following the tropical trade winds that blew southwest across the southern Atlantic, da Gama was gambling that he would find prevailing winds from west to east near latitude forty degrees south. No one had actually seen those winds, but da Gama assumed that since similar winds crossed the North Atlantic, he would find them in the South Atlantic. His gamble paid off, and he was able to make a giant loop that took him back to the southern tip of Africa. In doing so, he not only set the route to Asia for the next four hundred years but also marked the beginning of Portugal’s Asian “Empire.” He did not, however, sail west far enough to find Brazil. The story of Brazil began in 1500, when Pedro Álvares Cabral led Portugal’s second India fleet southwest from the Cape Verde Islands. Cabral held that course longer than da Gama had, with the result that he encountered the coast of Brazil. In Brazil, as elsewhere, first encounters were almost always warily cordial. Indians generally met strangers with gestures of peace and hospitality. Having discovered Brazil on his way to India, Cabral went through the ritual of claiming what he thought was an island for the king of Portugal. He stayed nine days before continuing on his way to India. Brazil had no recognizable rulers or governments with which the Portuguese could negotiate, and appeared to have little to offer that was worth the trouble of carrying it back to Europe. Preoccupied with the spice trade, the Portuguese Crown ignored Brazil except as a supply stop for ships on the way to India. Thus no one paid much attention to this new discovery other than a few solitary lanzados, who settled among the Native Americans. The first commercially viable Brazilian export was brazilwood. Brazilwood was used to make a high-quality, deep red-brown dye for expensive woolen cloth. By the 1520s a few lanzados, using Native American labor, were exporting significant amounts of raw brazilwood. Brazilwood trees, about two feet in diameter, were scattered throughout the forest, one or two trees per

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acre. The trees were felled, their bark was stripped off, and the trunk was cut into portable pieces of about seventy-five pounds. The wood was taken to the shore and stacked at coastal landing sites until a supply ship picked it up. In the first decades a few men became lanzados, staying permanently and living among the Brazilian Indians. Only in the 1530s did the Portuguese Crown begin to promote settlement by granting hereditary captaincies to Portuguese noblemen and businessmen. Each grant included a stretch of coastline and reached well into the interior. The recipients were supposed to explore their property, search for valuable exports, and bring families from Portugal to create a permanent European presence. Only a few of these captaincies were actually settled, but the Brazilian coast acquired a number of small settlements. Like many of the early European settlements in the Americas, the small colonial towns in Brazil were often unable to feed themselves. They survived with the help of local Indians who, responding to both coercion and negotiation, traded food for simple European goods. This marks a sharp contrast with Africa, where trade developed quickly as African countries imported European cloth, bar iron, and horses in return for gold, African-style cloth, and African pepper. As they built permanent buildings, the newcomers persuaded the local Tupi and Guaraní Indians to work for them in the new settlements. As the first formal settlements took shape in the 1530s, the natives remained willing to trade but grew wary of being enslaved.18 The initial coastal settlements were soon populated by a motley assortment of people. The few Portuguese settlers were almost all male, ranging from voluntary settlers to refugees and exiled criminals. The rest of the population consisted of local Indians, a few African slaves, and some free Africans. Initial European interaction with the inhabitants of Brazil defies easy generalization.19 The Portuguese married Native American women, but when African women arrived with the Portuguese, the Portuguese also intermarried with them. The Portuguese seem to have preferred African or mulatto wives, possibly because they already spoke pidgin Portuguese or, having come from Kongo, were Christians. The new towns, scattered along hundreds of miles of Brazilian coast, included São Salvador da Bahía, Rio de Janeiro, Recife, and Olinda. As late as 1550 the largest town, the new capital, São Salvador da Bahía, had only three thousand people. The little port towns of early sixteenth-century Brazil, with the forests behind them, faced the ocean and lived from their maritime connections. Since the interior offered no profitable exports, commerce in the Brazilian port towns amounted to little more than providing fresh supplies for the carracks outbound from Lisbon on the way to India.

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Clearly, the results of early settlement were not overwhelming, but the volume of dyewood exports rose steadily. In 1548, as brazilwood exports rose, the Crown organized the scattered small settlements into a colony, with its capital and governor in São Salvador da Bahía. In the 1560s the Jesuits were allowed to establish several missions in a part of the interior that later became Paraguay. By the 1630s these missions had a large Indian population and owned thousands of head of livestock. As in other parts of the world, the newly arrived Europeans examined the people they met for parallels between local and European society. In Brazil they found few signs of what Europeans defined as civilization. Civilized or not, one observer expressed great respect for the native way of life. Jean de Léry, a Protestant clergyman who came to Brazil in the 1550s with an unsuccessful French colony, spent several months living with the Tupinamba of Brazil. His memoir expresses admiration for the way native Brazilians treated their children and for their personal integrity.20 Initial contacts between European immigrants and native communities had a cautiously optimistic tone, but the unanticipated effects of European diseases soon colored every early encounter between Europeans and Native Americans.21 Many things shaped the long-term development of Brazil, but the most important early factors were the disastrous effect of European diseases on indigenous peoples and the need for cheap labor to produce any kind of profitable crop. Disease obviously came with the Europeans and would often appear within a few months of sustained European-American contact. Because of the small and scattered nature of Indian settlements, epidemics spread slowly; and their spread seemed inexplicable because neither Europeans nor Brazilians understood the process of transmission. Disease loaded the demographic dice in favor of the invading Europeans; by the end of the sixteenth century, Indian slavery and European diseases had left the coastal areas almost completely cleared of its original native population. Seen from a larger frame of reference, Brazil’s early society exemplifies aspects of European expansion that were true almost everywhere. Whether the destination was Africa, Brazil, or India, almost all the Europeans who went abroad were men, and most of them were not likely to return. Brazil saw widespread ethnic intermarriage, both formal and informal. The Brazilian Indians had what Europeans considered relaxed ideas about sexual contact, and it was decades before the Brazilian settlements included a significant number of European women. Brazil’s commercial ties with Africa brought not only slaves but free African men and women. Consequently, intermarriage between European settlers and African or Indian women hardly merited comment. In fact, to a European exile living in a miserable, neglected

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Portuguese settlement, life in a Brazilian Indian community was sufficiently congenial to explain why colonists sometimes “went native,” echoing Jean de Léry’s respect for the native way of life. Interracial marriages and liaisons were routine and, as the towns grew, gave children the cultural tools that allowed them to mediate between interior tribes and coastal settlements. Reflecting the matrilineal nature of Brazilian Indian society, native and mestiza women became the most effective cultural intermediaries in colonial Brazil. They emerged as recognized brokers and mediators known as mamelukas. This status allowed women to become overseers on slave plantations, where it was even customary for the mameluka to marry the owner of the plantation. As in Southeast Asia or Africa, European fathers recognized their mixedrace children, had them baptized, and registered them as “Portuguese.” Mixed-race sons sometimes became mamelukos, a title that for a male implied not only the mediating skills of a mameluka but also a wider range of activities, including long-distance travel inland on behalf of the family business.22 Soon there were so many mestizo children approaching adulthood in Brazil that the Portuguese settlers, instead of asking for European women, petitioned the Crown to send more Portuguese men so that they could become husbands for their mestizo daughters. Whether formal or informal, extensive intermarriage reflected the lack of alternatives, but it also illustrates the flexibility of premodern, pre-Enlightenment attitudes toward color and race when compared with Europeans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. From their beginnings, the small Brazilian port towns were part of a South Atlantic commercial zone. In 1548, when the Portuguese Crown gave the colony an official identity and a governor in Bahía, the first sugar plantations had already been established. By 1548 the sugar plantations in São Tomé and Príncipe were running out of good soil and planters were developing plantations on the coast of Brazil. The sugar industry expanded rapidly, and by 1600 Brazil was the world’s largest producer of sugar. Northern Brazil had a seemingly endless supply of good land, and for much of the 1500s, the plantation owners tried to solve their labor problems by capturing and enslaving Indians from the hinterland. This did not work well, since Indian slaves, exposed directly to European diseases, soon died or else escaped into the nearby forests. By the end of the sixteenth century, Brazil had imported a large number of Africans, both slaves and freedmen, and was bringing in more. The coastal towns were also developing commercial exchanges with Africa. Brazil exported sweet potatoes, maize, and manioc, which became staple crops in Africa, and imported bananas and sorghum. When, despite Spanish

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regulations, Peruvian silver was being smuggled from Peru into the Rio de la Plata area, it became the most common way of paying for imports from Africa. Increasingly the most important import from Africa was slaves, but the trade also included other commodities. As the cross-Atlantic trade grew, Brazil played an ever-larger role in Atlantic affairs. No longer a neglected backwater, by 1600 Portugal’s trade with Brazil was more valuable than its spice trade with Asia. Brazil was also becoming the economic and administrative center of a South Atlantic commercial and administrative network. Brazil exported tobacco, sugar, manioc, beans, flour, spirits, cloth, and sweets to various ports on the African coast. Africa in turn sent Brazil slaves, palm oil, rice, and ivory, along with Asian luxuries left in African ports by ships on the way to Lisbon from India.23 São Salvador da Bahía became the focal point for more South Atlantic contacts when the Portuguese Crown transferred management of its African holdings from Lisbon to the governor in Bahía. The ecclesiastical administration was also reformed, and African bishops were put under the supervision of the archbishop of São Salvador de Bahía.24 The economic links across the southern Atlantic grew stronger, along with the number of sugar plantations. The cross-Atlantic urban network grew even stronger with the 1690s discovery of gold in the Brazilian region now known as Minas Gerais. Before long, the exchange of gold for slaves became a major part of South Atlantic commerce. By the 1750s, Bahía was a city of some thirty thousand people and the capital of a unique maritime province that included both Brazil and the Portuguese holdings in Atlantic Africa. Lauren Benton suggests that the cross-Atlantic linkages were deeper and more informal than the commercial, administrative, and ecclesiastical connections.25 The integration of African slaves, some of them skilled artisans, into Brazilian society brought with it a blend of Portuguese and African legal traditions. African slaves provided important skills, especially horse breeding and training, the care of livestock, blacksmithing, and rice cultivation. As slaves became freedmen and formed part of the artisan class, they reinforced the amalgamation of the two legal traditions. Brazil was the point of departure for more far-reaching links in what was becoming the “Atlantic World.”

Brazil, the Dutch, and the Spread of Plantation Society By the 1620s the Atlantic world was changing rapidly. In Brazil the supply of Native American slaves dried up by 1600, and plantation owners were replacing them with African slaves. In Europe the Dutch had won their independence from the Habsburg Empire, and in 1621 they went to war with

Table 5.1.   Trade and Exchange between Brazil and Atlantic Africa (ca. 1700) Brazil to Atlantic Africa

Atlantic Africa to Brazil

Royal Administration Church hierarchy Gold European cloth Bar Iron Horses Sweet potatoes Maize Manioc Tobacco Sugar Alcoholic beverages Sweets

Government revenue Church revenue Slaves Free African men Free African women Bananas Sorghum Palm oil Rice Ivory Blacksmiths Cattle herdsmen Horse trainers

Map 5.1.  South-Atlantic Trade Connections between West Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean, 1500–1700

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the combined Spanish and Portuguese Empires, then ruled by the young Philip IV. Since Portuguese Brazil was one of the richest colonies in the Atlantic region, the Dutch set out to conquer it. They created the Dutch West Indies Company on the model of the Dutch East Indies Company, with the power to both regulate trade and go to war on behalf of the Dutch Republic. The first attack on Recife, on the easternmost tip of Brazil, in 1624–1625 was driven off after several months of Dutch occupation. In 1628, however, the Dutch staged a successful invasion that became a twenty-six-year occupation of the northern, sugar-producing, part of Brazil. While the political and economic situation of Brazil changed with the arrival of the Dutch, colonial society retained it earlier traits. With virtually no European women, Dutch soldiers and traders replicated the practices of their Portuguese predecessors and acquired Native American partners. In some cases, the wife was baptized and became part of a formalized Tupi-Dutch marriage. The requirement for a formal marriage was religious, while race was unimportant. This marks a contrast with the more tightly controlled society in the towns of New Netherland.26 The Dutch then encouraged the Sephardic Jews of the Netherlands to modernize the Brazilian sugar industry and direct its trade away from Lisbon and toward Amsterdam. To guarantee the continued supply of labor for the expanding plantation economy, the Dutch also captured the Portuguese slave trading post at Elmina in 1637; by 1642 they controlled all the European trading posts along the adjacent Gold Coast, now the coast of Ghana. This facilitated the rapid expansion of plantation society into the Caribbean, reflected in Europe’s consumption of sugar. Portugal forced the Dutch to return most of Brazil in 1654, after which the Sephardic Jews left Brazil or converted to Christianity to avoid the Portuguese Inquisition. These Sephardic Jews became part of a Jewish trade diaspora that spanned the Atlantic, Europe, and the Mediterranean. With trade contacts all around the Caribbean and the Atlantic, some of these Jewish families returned to the Dutch Republic; others settled on the Caribbean islands of Curaçao and Jamaica or in New Amsterdam (after 1664, New York). This put the Sephardic Jews in an ideal position to trade across imperial boundaries. As a result, while the Dutch West Indies Company tried to control Atlantic trade, the Sephardic Jews ignored its regulations and traded across the boundaries between Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English jurisdictions. They quietly traded directly with African agents to obtain slaves, and when the Brazilian gold mines opened up, they gained control of a large part of the Brazilian gold trade, often evading Portuguese regulations. Similarly,

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when diamonds were discovered in Brazil in 1720, the Sephardic Jews, who already had a role in the diamond trade of Amsterdam and London, were well placed to control much of the Atlantic diamond trade.27 Dutch activity in the Caribbean also facilitated the dispersion of the Sephardic Jews after 1654. This coincided with the breakdown of Spanish control over most of its islands in the Caribbean. At this time, seventeenthcentury Spain was preoccupied with exploiting its American mining empire and with the safety of the treasure fleets bound for Europe. As a result, except for guarding the route of the silver fleets from America to Europe, the Spaniards were paying little attention to the Caribbean they once had conquered. By 1655 the Dutch, English, and French all had control of important Caribbean Islands. The Dutch base in Curaçao became a major clearinghouse for goods and slaves smuggled into the Spanish Empire. The English meanwhile had conquered Barbados (1625), several smaller islands, and a much bigger prize, the island of Jamaica (1655). Meanwhile, promoters in England were reacting to the potential profits they saw in the tobacco trade. For the first twenty years of colonization in the Caribbean, the English concentrated on recruiting indentured servants from Europe to create both tobacco plantations and small farms on which freed indentured servants could establish their own farmsteads. As the 1640s saw the rapid spread of sugar production in the Caribbean, including its English colonies, large landowners shifted over to sugar on their own lands and aggressively bought out small holdings. This forced the white farmers in the islands to move, first to Jamaica and later to North Carolina and New Jersey.28 The French captured Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635, 1636), and the western half of the island of Santo Domingo, which became the colony of Haiti (1663). As the plantation system spread across the Caribbean, the Dutch provided slaves, transported sugar, and thereby facilitated the opening of new plantations. Many plantations became so specialized that they could not feed their own slave populations. As we will see, this gave the Atlantic colonies of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania markets for their wheat, flour, and other foodstuffs, providing them with the profits they needed to buy imports from England.29 As sugar spread beyond the Portuguese controlled area, it became the engine that helped knit together a transAtlantic commercial network with similarities to that of the Indian Ocean.

Sugar This poses the question: “How was it that sugar could transform the Atlantic economy and trigger the forced migration of twelve million to thirteen

Map 5.2.   Plantation Colonies in the Caribbean, Seventeenth Century

104  •  Chapter Five Table 5.2.   Sugar Consumption in Europe, Pounds per Person per Year Year

Per Person

1600 1700 1800 1900

2 pounds 4 pounds 18 pounds 90 pounds

million Africans?” The answer is implied by the figures in table 5.2. In the context of a preindustrial world largely populated by people with little or no disposable income, sugar became a unique commodity. Unlike almost any other commodity in the preindustrial economy, sugar had a very elastic demand. In the case of most goods, an increase in the supply will cause the price to fall. The seller will sell a few more items, but not enough to prevent a drop in the total profit. In other words, it did not pay to expand production too fast. Sugar was unique in that it was a commodity that had to be produced far from its final market. In a world with limited flavors and no refrigeration, the sweetening effect of sugar made it close to addictive. Once people had used

Figure 5.2.   Slaves Cutting Sugar Cane on the Caribbean Island of Antigua. (Courtesy of the British Library)

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sugar, they eagerly rearranged their personal economies in order to buy more. If the seller increased the supply of sugar on the market, the price would fall, and he would make less profit on each bag of sugar. This could work to the seller’s advantage if, in the case of sugar, a lower price attracted a great many new buyers. Unlike most goods in an early modern market, cheaper sugar attracted and kept enough new buyers so that, despite the reduced profit per unit, enough more units were sold that the smaller profit per unit produced a larger total profit. This is the underlying reason for the steady expansion of sugar production. To make the sugar cheap enough to sell profitably, the plantation owner needed an ideal set of inputs. One was good land, preferably free, as it often was in the New World. Along with free, or nearly free, tropical land, the plantation needed European capital and management. Finally, the plantation needed an ongoing supply of cheap labor. As sugar plantations appeared in Brazil, the first recourse was to enslave Native Americans, since it was cheaper to capture local Indians than to buy imported African slaves. By the early 1600s, 90 to 95 percent of the Indians along the coast of Brazil had either died of European disease or had fled far into the interior. Brazilian plantation owners routinely sent slave-hunting expeditions into the forests to sweep up any available Indians. Few Indians could be found within 185 miles of any Portuguese town. With fewer and fewer Native American slaves available, plantation owners had to shift to African slaves. The English on Barbados went through a similar transition in the 1620s and 1630s. Initially committed to raising tobacco and using English indentured servants, when the landowners shifted to sugar production, they forced the tobacco farmers, often former indentured servants, off the land and consolidated it into large plantations. The indentured servants were replaced with African slaves.30

The Atlantic Slave Trade The combination of good, cheap land, African slave labor, European capital, and an indefinitely elastic demand curve created a new kind of economic institution. The Atlantic sugar plantation operated like a modern factory, with slaves bought and depreciated like machines.31 Sugar was a part of the economy that widened Brazil’s connections to the Atlantic world, driving the expansion of Brazil for most of the seventeenth century. The slave trade has come up repeatedly in talking about Portugal, Africa, and Brazil. Historically, slavery was a long-established institution in both Mediterranean Europe and Africa. It was an integral part of both societies

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and since Roman times had included African slaves brought to the Mediterranean across the Sahara. Thus, it is hardly surprising that, even on their very first raids on the African coast, the Portuguese brought home small numbers of African captives to sell as slaves. The conditions of this slavery varied widely, and in some Mediterranean countries it could include a recognized civic identity. Up to a point, the slave trade along the African coast was a logical extension of the centuries-old intra–West African slave trade. Slaves were used in large numbers in the gold mines of Mali and in a wide range of domestic and commercial services throughout Africa. Slaves in Africa worked as mine laborers, household servants, artisans, and soldiers in the armies of Mali, Songhai, and Benin. This defines indigenous African slavery as a large institution in its own right. The slavery we know about on large-scale Atlantic plantations was significantly different from its earlier, more traditional African forms. Its beginnings go back to the fifteenth-century sugar plantations on Madeira and São Tomé. As African slavery spread to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern colonies of English North America, it became vastly larger than any earlier Mediterranean or intra-African slave trade. By 1700 about four million Africans had been exported to the Americas, with Brazil the largest buyer.32 Sugar production involved a grim reality: Sugar cane only grew in the tropics, and it needed a large amount of hard labor. It required an endless cycle of burning debris, digging it in, planting the cane, cutting it, hauling it to the mill, pressing the cane, and drying the sugar. The work was hard, slaves often died young, and an active plantation required a constant stream of replacement slaves. In the seventeenth century English West Indies planters imported 265,000 slaves between 1600 and 1700; only 100,000 were alive at the end of the century.33 The growth of the plantation economy and the slave trade is reflected in the growth of the slave trade itself. From 1551 to 1575 the slave trade brought about twenty-five hundred Africans to America every year; that number reached four thousand a year from 1576 to 1600. A century later the average for 1651–1675 was fifteen thousand; for 1676–1700 it reached twenty-four thousand per year.34 When the Dutch occupied the northern half of Brazil and modernized its sugar industry, they also made sure of a continuing supply of slaves by capturing the slave trading posts along the Gold Coast. The economic links across the southern Atlantic grew even stronger with the development of more sugar plantations, and they were further strengthened by the discovery of gold in Brazil in the 1690s. On the African side of the South Atlantic, African slave dealers were ready to sell slaves to brokers on São Tomé and

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the Cape Verde Islands for gold because it allowed them to import more European products for the African market.35 While Brazil was the largest single customer for the slave trade, and the Portuguese were prominent participants in the trans-Atlantic part of the trade, increasingly it was also carried on by traders from Spain, France, England, Holland, Denmark, and Sweden. The slaves ended up in Brazil, the West Indies, Spanish Central America, in Mexico (both on plantations and in the silver mines), in Peru, and in all of what became the thirteen North American colonies. As we will see, 40 percent of the population of Virginia in 1700 consisted of slaves. Without their labor, sugar, and later tobacco, coffee, and cacao, could not have been produced as cheaply as it was, and the Atlantic economy would have developed very differently. Sugar—and later tobacco, coffee, and cacao—was a new phenomenon in the world of trade and commerce. Most early modern long-distance trade involved goods that were relatively valuable for their size and weight. They were commodities destined for the small, upper-income part of society, and that market was easily glutted. The rationale behind the chartered compa-

Map 5.3.   The Atlantic Slave Trade, Sources and Destinations

108  •  Chapter Five Table 5.3.   Destinations of Slaves Taken from Africa to the Americas Destination Brazil Spanish Empire British West Indies French West Indies British North America & United States Dutch West Indies Europe and Other Islands Danish West Indies

Percent 35.0 22.0 18.0 14.0  4.4  4.4  2.0  0.2

Sources: Thomas, Slave Trade; Lovejoy, Transformations.

nies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was to regulate the supply of foreign goods so as not to glut the market and drive down prices. Sugar and similar products had equally exotic origins, but they became mass consumption commodities. They appealed to people who could afford to buy only in small quantities, but there were enough of such people to produce profits even at what seemed like low prices. Not surprisingly, the slave trade grew in tandem with the production of goods like sugar. By one estimate, the Americas exported about twenty thousand tons of sugar in 1600; by 1775 the figure was two hundred thousand tons.36 The boom in trans-Atlantic trade reflects an integrated and expanding Atlantic economy. How important this was in triggering the Industrial Revolution remains an open question and has been hotly debated.37 The similarity between a sugar plantation and a capitalized industrial factory is clear.38 The growing demand for exotic goods clearly reflects changing economic choices among European consumers. We can never forget, however, that this growth came at the expense of dispossessed Native American societies and at the expense of the twelve million to thirteen million Africans who were taken from Africa as slaves, two to three million of whom died crossing the Atlantic.

CHAPTER SIX

Atlantic North America No Empires to Conquer

Trade, Conquest, or Settlement? As late as 1600 North America from Georgia north to New England, the Saint Lawrence River, and the Great Lakes was a vast, uncharted area. It had been visited by a handful of Spanish, French, and English explorers, and by Basque and Portuguese fishermen who often went ashore on Newfoundland, the banks of the Saint Lawrence estuary, and the coasts of New England. Based on the scattered information from those sources, it appeared that Atlantic America had no empires to conquer and no valuable mines. Discounting its Native American population, Atlantic America’s only obvious assets were furs and land. To profit from this part of the New World, one had to either find a way to trade with the Native American people or learn to produce a salable export crop. Using the joint stock company as a way to raise capital, groups of speculators and developers proposed to establish “plantations” in America. Sir Walter Raleigh, using private funds, formed a colonizing company in 1585 and recruited people to settle permanently in Virginia. Overly optimistic about the possibility of finding valuable mines or profitable trade, his colonists included too few farmers and too many gentlemen. That first colony was a failure. Some of the original settlers returned home, but the rest had disappeared without a trace when a supply ship finally arrived. Jamestown, as we will see, had similar supply problems and struggled until the introduction of tobacco farming.

109

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The settlement colony, called a “plantation” by the English, was used to settle people in English North America. The model was first tried in sixteenth-century Ireland and, unsuccessfully, in the Caribbean and Madagascar. These colonial plantations were promoted by investors in a joint stock company with a charter from the Crown. The promoters then recruited settlers with the goal of creating a profitable export-oriented plantation and trading post. This assumed the possibility of trade with the local population and the availability of a marketable crop suited to the plantation’s soil and climate. The important variant from this model was the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay Colony. In their case, the promoters and investors were the colonists themselves. They controlled the majority of the stock in the joint stock company and took the actual royal charter with them to the new colony. Their goal was not a profitable export-oriented colony but the settlement of a large number of people at a new location where they would permanently occupy the land and create a self-sufficient European-style settlement. Religious refugees from English persecution, they used the company charter as the basis for self-government, keeping the document itself physically out of reach of English political or religious intervention. With no large, organized governments in North America waiting to be conquered and no valuable mines, the other options for extracting profit from Atlantic America were to exploit the fur trade or develop a profitable general trade with the Native Americans. This is why the first English, French, and Dutch settlements in North America were planned to be trade centers. Since the indigenous culture did not produce much that would interest European consumers, the most valuable North American export commodity was fur.1 Fortunately for Europeans interested in North America, the first part of the seventeenth century was relatively peaceful. From 1609 to 1621 there was a twelve-year truce between Spain and the Dutch Republic. England’s war with Spain ended in 1604, and France was recovering from a long civil war and a Spanish invasion (1562–1598). This peaceful period gave England, France, and Holland an opening to explore the possibilities of trade with North America.2

Jamestown and Virginia The Jamestown colonial project, as conceived by the Virginia Company, was initially planned to be both a settlement and a trading post. Raleigh’s first Virginia settlements (1585–1590) were undertaken as the English were

Map 6.1.   Early European Settlements in North America

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learning how to finance and organize “colonial” settlements in Ireland. In 1607 some of the colony’s leaders had quite a bit of experience as both soldiers and traders in other parts of the world. They and the local Native Americans both knew that trade required consistent behavior and mutual trust. Unfortunately, despite the colonists’ good intentions, their leaders were military men who readily used force when frustrated. The Jamestown colonists landed in an area where the Native Americans had only recently been hit by a major epidemic. When European settlers appeared in Virginia in 1607, the surviving Native American communities were trying to reorganize and consolidate their fragmented tribes. Many communities simply lacked the manpower to exploit what once had been their territory, much less drive away invaders. Weakened by disease and struggling to reintegrate their own society, the local Native Americans were led by a dynamic chief the English called Powhatan. He had organized about fifteen thousand survivors from about thirty small communities into a loose federation and could easily have eliminated the entire Jamestown colony. Powhatan, however, seems to have decided that he could integrate the colony into his network of alliances.3 He admired the English weapons and novel technology but considered their knowledge of gift giving and protocol to be poor. The colony was entirely men, many of whom had extensive military experience in a variety of settings, though few knew much about farming. While the promoters hoped the colony would become a profitable trading post, it really began as a military installation intended to secure a safe base for future settlers. Dependent on England for their supplies and faced with erratic and often long-delayed deliveries, colonists barely survived some of the colony’s early years. Under the command of Captain John Smith, and at times desperate for food, the colonists alternated between negotiating with the Indians for food and conducting brutal raids that captured food stored by the Indians for their own use. Despite John Smith’s aggressive behavior, Powhatan provided enough help in the early years to keep the colony alive.4 A handful of statistics tells the story of the first grim years of the colony. In 1610, after three years during which the colony imported nine hundred people, only sixty remained. In 1616, despite the arrival of 2,100 more settlers, the community had only 650 European inhabitants.5 Powhatan led a bloody but abortive raid in the early 1620s that killed a third of the colonists; his successor led another major revolt in 1644. By that time, thanks to disease among the Indians and immigration from Europe, the Indians were outnumbered and restricted to a number of small reservations.

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The English had hoped to create trade relations with the Native Americans, and both sides knew that patience and trust were crucial to trade in the long run. Nevertheless, the military leaders of Jamestown badly mishandled their attempts to open trade with Powhatan, shifting back and forth between negotiation and force in order to obtain food and other supplies. Admittedly, the Native Americans had little to offer that the English regarded as valuable, but if relations had been handled differently, and the two parties could have coexisted more amicably, Jamestown would have suffered much less death and misery. Powhatan’s bloody raid in 1622 convinced the English promoters that the colony could not survive on trade alone and that they had to find a way to produce a profitable export commodity. In 1611 one of the colonists developed a hybrid type of tobacco that grew well in Virginia. By 1617, when ten thousand pounds of tobacco were exported, Virginia was beginning to look like a promising plantation colony. This collective commitment to tobacco farming set the colony on a course that led to friction with neighboring Native American communities. As long as it had been run as a trading post, the colony needed only a limited amount of land, but that was to change as colonists and indentured servants began to clear land for tobacco farming. Once committed to cultivation of tobacco, the colony negotiated for, or simply took, more and more Indian land, dispossessing its indigenous owners.6 Inevitably this led to recurrent violence along what would become a steadily moving frontier. Like sugar, tobacco was addictive and had a similarly elastic demand curve. Virginia’s tobacco exports went from ten thousand pounds in 1617 to fifty-five million pounds in 1775. In contrast to sugar, tobacco could be grown on plantations or on small family farms.7 A small farmer, however, was more vulnerable to weather or market changes than a large plantation owner. For the small farmer, a crop failure or a drop in the price he received for his crop easily put him in permanent debt. The owner of a plantation could survive a temporary loss because he could get credit in England based on future crops. The tobacco plantations of Virginia faced the same difficulties maintaining a labor force that we saw in Brazil. In the early decades of the 1600s, the nearby Indians were well organized, making it impossible to capture and enslave them. Consequently, indentured servants provided most of the labor in the first decades of the tobacco era. If they survived their indenture and received the land promised in their contracts, they then became tobacco growers themselves. Indentured servants proved hard to manage and more expensive than slaves. As of 1650 Virginia had 18,700 people, half of them indentured

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servants, but only four hundred African slaves. As the plantation economy expanded during the second half of the seventeenth century, the number of African slaves rose faster than the white population. In 1700 Virginia had fifty-eight thousand inhabitants, seventeen thousand (or 30 percent) of whom were slaves. The more northerly colonies also used slaves, and in 1750 northern English America, from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, had a total of almost twenty-five thousand slaves. Slavery did not end the use of indentured servants as a source of controlled labor. By the time of the American Revolution, the population of the thirteen colonies was about 2.4 million inhabitants, and about half a million (roughly 20 percent) of them were African slaves. About five hundred thousand people had moved to the American colonies from Europe; about three hundred thousand of them came as indentured servants.8 They arrived committed to work three to five years for whomever held their contract of indenture. While they were not regarded as slaves, their working conditions were little better than those imposed on slaves. The fact that 40 percent of indentured servants died before finishing their contracts certainly suggests that their working conditions were like those of many slaves.9 As of 1775 Virginia was by far the largest of the thirteen colonies, with more than 450,000 people. Less advertised is the fact that African slaves accounted for 41 percent of that total, twice the percentage of the thirteen colonies combined. Of the remainder, a sizable part of the white European population consisted of indentured servants. Virginia had become a society consisting of a dominant plantation-owning oligarchy, a huge slave population, and a class of European small farm owners who had nothing to say in colonial government.

New England As suggested at the beginning of this chapter, the New England colonies followed a different and, as of the early seventeenth century, unique path. The settlers at Plymouth and Boston were religious refugees intent on creating a European-style agrarian society where they could control their own religious and political affairs. The colony’s organizers had done serious advance planning. In 1614 they commissioned Captain John Smith, veteran of the Jamestown project, to survey the Atlantic coast and identify potential sites for the new colony. When the Pilgrims arrived in 1620, they reviewed the preselected locations and settled on the site of an abandoned Indian village. The Pilgrims at Plymouth settled in an area where earlier epidemics had killed most of the indigenous peoples. The surviving Indians had abandoned

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the site and merged with another community. The site the Pilgrims chose had been cleared by its previous users, was in an easily defended position, and was near open fields the Indians had prepared for planting before the epidemic. Arriving late in the year, the colonists were forced to spend their first winter living in miserable conditions on the Mayflower while building houses onshore. The colonists would not have survived at all without the help of the neighboring Pokanoket community. In an unlikely encounter, the Pilgrims met a Native American named Squanto. Squanto had spent some years in England and had recently persuaded the captain of an English fishing ship to drop him off not far from the Plymouth landing site. Despite Squanto’s mediation, by spring, bad food, winter weather, scurvy, and related diseases had killed 45 of the original 102 settlers. The Pilgrims were followed by the Puritans, a much larger group of settlers who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony and Boston. The first four hundred of that group arrived in 1628–1629, while the main contingent of seven hundred colonists and a fleet of twelve ships arrived in 1630. This was the beginning of a flood of ten thousand new colonists over the next ten years. The need for additional farmland and the tension between the settlers and the Native Americans of the area increased as the European population of Plymouth and Boston grew from about eight hundred people to more than ten thousand in a decade. The first colonists had negotiated treaties for land use, a process that worked well when the colonial population numbered in the hundreds. As the population reached several thousand, the colonial appetite for land grew beyond what could be acquired with treaties. The colonists grew increasingly impatient with the Indian concept of land ownership. The Indians considered the land to be the collective property of the community and thought in terms of leasing or selling specific ways of using the land. This included sharing what the land produced in ways that were alien to European ideas of property. As the colony grew, the settlers paid less and less attention to Indian land rights and to their own promises to the Indians. A series of incidents escalated into what has been labeled the Pequot War (1634–1638). The English settlers systematically organized an attack on a major Indian town. At the time of the attack, the men of the town were away on a hunt and the town contained only women, children, and a few old men. Despite that fact, the colonists surrounded the town, set it on fire, and systematically killed anyone who tried to escape.10 Except for the bloody Pequot War, most of the period between 1607 and 1675 saw an uneasy coexistence between the New England settlers and their Native American neighbors. As more farm families arrived, however,

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the colonies appropriated more and more Indian land for farming, progressively alienating the nearby Indians and undermining the comity between Native Americans and invading Europeans.11 By the 1670s the settlers were self-sufficient and no longer experienced the food shortages that made them grateful for Indian help. Disputes over land use and land ownership surfaced more readily. As New England expanded after 1675, the colonists appropriated more and more land, triggering recurrent bloody clashes. By 1710 colonial perceptions of Native Americans had altered dramatically. Indians living in or near European settlements became suspect and were forced out. Skin color emerged as an identifier of race, and for the first time, Indians were identified as “red.” By 1740 colonial America had a hierarchy of races and their relative abilities; everyone was white, red, or black, in a descending order of racial abilities.12 Meanwhile, Boston had become New England’s leading commercial center. By replicating agrarian Europe in America, the Puritans were left with very little to sell to Europe. At the same time, the colonists needed European manufactures to maintain their lifestyle and had to figure out how to earn the foreign exchange they needed to pay for the products they imported from England. The solution came with the evolution of the Brazilian, Caribbean, and colonial American economies. As we have seen, Spain had loosened her hold on the Caribbean in the 1620s and 1630s, and the Dutch, English, and French took over many of the islands. The English captured Bermuda, Barbados, Nevis, St. Kitts, and Jamaica; the French took part of St. Kitts, Guadeloupe, and Martinique.13 The smaller islands were first settled with indentured servants who were used to raise tobacco. As sugar replaced tobacco as the most profitable crop, the tobacco farmers migrated to Virginia and North Carolina. Meanwhile, the Caribbean sugar plantations became so specialized that they stopped producing their own food and fed their slaves with imported flour, wheat, and rice, all of which came from the colonies of Atlantic North America. Thus, the northern colonies’ agricultural surpluses coincided with the growth of highly specialized plantation economies in the southern colonies and in the Caribbean. Plantations specializing in sugar, tobacco, and cotton found it cheaper to import food for their workforce than to try and produce it locally. Merchants in the northern colonies traded their wheat and flour for sugar and molasses. The molasses was distilled into rum that they sold in England. As trade connections like this multiplied, New England, with plentiful timber, began to build the ships required to move the goods being exchanged. By the time of the American Revolution, as much

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as a third of England’s merchant ships had been built in Atlantic North America.

New Netherland From their first contacts with North America, the Dutch planned their settlements as adjuncts to the fur trade. In 1609 the Dutch hired Henry Hudson to explore the northern parts of the North American coast, and as part of the project he sailed up the Hudson River as far as modern Albany. Hudson reported that the natives were both friendly and eager to trade furs for European goods. The Dutch followed up on Hudson’s report and in 1614 built Fort Nassau near modern Albany. Founded by the Dutch West Indies Company, the colony was under Dutch control for only fifty years before it was ceded to the English in 1664. Fort Nassau was built as the focal point for Dutch development of the fur trade, primarily with the Iroquois. Over the next decade, small Dutch villages were founded near Fort Nassau and in the vicinity of the seaport of New Amsterdam (later New York) in the hope they would be able to supply the two towns with food. In 1624 the Dutch formally established the province of New Netherland, claiming jurisdiction over much of the modern states of New York and New Jersey. The population of New Netherland grew very slowly, reflecting the Dutch West India Company’s lack of interest in sponsoring a European agricultural community. Its single-minded focus on the fur trade is suggested by the fact that in 1630, sixteen years after building Fort Nassau, the entire colony of New Netherland counted only three hundred settlers. Twenty-five years later, in 1655, the population of the entire colony was only about three thousand. Most of them lived near New Amsterdam. Only a few settled in the Hudson River Valley. New Netherland was distinctive because, except for one incident, the tiny Dutch settlements along the Hudson coexisted amiably for twenty-five years with the Indians of the region. Between 1630 and 1660 Fort Nassau and nearby villages lived among, and were vitally dependent upon, neighboring Indian communities. Indian farmers sold food crops to the Dutch in return for pots, pans, knives, gunpowder, guns, and a variety of trade goods. The Native Americans were also dependent on this collaboration because as the fur-bearing animals in the area around Fort Nassau were trapped out, the local Iroquois became middlemen between the Dutch and more distant Indian communities. They needed a supply of European trade goods to trade with these communities, which still had a supply of furs.

Figure 6.1.   New Amsterdam, later New York, 1664. (Anonymous, courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

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This equilibrium was interrupted briefly in 1639–1643, when an illadvised Dutch governor triggered a revolt by attempting to tax the nearby Indians as though they were Dutch subjects. The Indian community forced the governor to rescind the tax, after which the Hudson Valley enjoyed two peaceful decades in which Dutch settlements and Native American communities lived side by side. Coexistence worked in part because the colony continued to grow very slowly. As late as 1664, when it was surrendered to the English, all New Netherland counted only nine thousand Europeans. The Dutch colony and the neighboring Indian towns developed a complex, almost symbiotic relationship. Dutch authorities discouraged sexual relations and intermarriage with Indians, but such social control was less effective among the soldiers and trappers who lived on the edges of colonial society.14 Individuals from both communities did form person-to-person business agreements, and Native Americans moved freely around the Dutch towns to transact business. If the business was transacted with a Dutch family, the Indian participants in the transaction routinely slept overnight in the family home, a form of hospitality that was reciprocated when the Dutch visited nearby Indian communities. The Dutch had mixed feelings about close contact with the Indians, mostly because of Indian ideas regarding good manners and hygiene. The Indians apparently had similar feelings and found the Dutch insulting, brusque, and stingy.15 Yet the relationship was part of a pervasive network of mutual dependence that the Dutch found uncomfortable but necessary. The Dutch dealt primarily with the Iroquois. But in the 1660s the Iroquois had long since trapped out the hunting grounds near Fort Nassau and, as noted, were using European trade goods to buy furs from more distant Indian communities. By the time the English took over New Netherland in 1664, the Iroquois controlled most of the fur trade in New York and Pennsylvania. With the Dutch out of the picture in New York, France and England now confronted each other in frontier areas between New York and French Canada and in the Ohio Valley south of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. The Iroquois dominated the frontier area covered by the French and English territorial claims, and they had a large enough army to command the respect of any European forces in the area. With the departure of the Dutch, and depending on your perspective, the Iroquois became either the allies or the victims of the English. England’s recurrent wars with France in Europe were projected onto the American frontier.16 The Iroquois allied with the English in hopes of retaining control of the fur trade, but they had to reach farther and farther west to trade with Indians who still had a supply of furs. Meanwhile, New York, the former New Netherland, was recruiting more and

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more settlers and appropriating Iroquois land, undermining what had been a stable relationship between the English and the Indians.

France, Native Americans, and the Fur Trade In 1608, only a year after the English planted their first permanent settlement at Jamestown, a small group of Frenchmen moved into Canada and founded Quebec City. The contrast with Brazil is striking. The Portuguese in Brazil avoided the interior and used plentiful land, imported capital, and slaves to create an externally focused economy based on sugar. By contrast, the French in North America ventured deep into the continental interior to mobilize the trade in furs, setting up a system of paternalistic trade and gift giving that created and maintained good relations with the Indians. In the process, the French drew the Native American population into a trade network that reached from the Saint Lawrence River to the western shore of Lake Michigan and the shores of Hudson Bay. French ships had been visiting the Saint Lawrence River since Jacques Cartier’s explorations in the 1530s, regularly negotiating treaties with the Native Americans and trading for furs. The city of Quebec was founded in 1608 as a permanent base for the fur trade and, with Montreal and the fort at Detroit, became the framework for the French fur trade. These settlements were supplemented by a number of smaller trading posts convenient to the Native American communities with which the French traded. The French network of small trading posts was supplemented by treaties with the Indian tribes of the Ohio River Valley and Great Lakes, reaching as far west as Wisconsin—treaties the French were careful to honor. As the French and English in southern Canada and the Ohio Valley began to compete for the fur trade, the Indian tribes began to fight for access to European agents and their trade goods. The French started by developing a trade relationship with the Huron Indians located in Canada north of Lake Ontario and Lake Erie and east of Lake Huron. As Huron territory was trapped out, the Hurons became middlemen between the French and more distant tribes. The Iroquois had been trading with the Dutch at Fort Nassau until 1664, when the English replaced the Dutch. Supported by the English, the Iroquois repeatedly attacked both the French and the Hurons, and by the end of the 1660s, Iroquois attacks had wiped out the Hurons. The Iroquois, meanwhile, continued to help the English fight the French.17 At the same time, European diseases were hitting the Indian tribes in the region. That and conflicts between tribes over parts of the fur trade dislocated several Algonquian-speaking Indian tribes from the Ohio Valley

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and the southern part of what is now Ontario Province. Several thousand of these refugees moved to northern Illinois and Wisconsin, where their leaders tried to gather the fragments of several tribes into a new and coherent community.18 The French governor in Detroit responded by developing a policy of acting as a benefactor and donor, providing European trade goods and sometimes food supplies to the refugee Algonquian tribes. In return the Indians kept furs moving toward Detroit, Quebec, and the agents for the French fur trade. As they trapped out the fur-bearing animals in the areas they controlled, the Algonquians became middlemen or brokers between the French and the Indian communities living in more distant areas where fur-bearing animals were still plentiful.19 The French attempt to control the Great Lakes region evolved into a complex exchange with Indian communities on both sides of Lake Michigan. Based on mutual understandings conveyed by symbolic gestures, gift exchanges, and verbal formulas, this “middle ground” allowed Native Americans and French agents to settle diplomatic, judicial, and commercial disputes while exchanging Indian furs and foodstuffs for European tools, weapons, tobacco, and cloth. This relationship remained stable for almost a hundred years. It included various ways of settling disputes, but it was never tested as a way of negotiating transfers of Indian land to European settlers, something the French consciously avoided.20 This trade network was supplemented by what may have been as many as several hundred roving trader-trappers, or coureurs de bois. These men were independent traders who spent much of the year living with or moving between the more distant Indian communities, buying and trapping furs. When the season was over, the furs they had collected were brought by canoe to Quebec. Although to European eyes these trappers were loners, they actually made up a community of several hundred men. Most of them married, or had longterm relationships with, Indian or mixed-race women. The women of this community, along with their children, were victims of growing racial prejudice in the eighteenth century as New France began to attract a significant number of European women.21 By the 1660s, when the French fur trade had been in place for some time, a group of English promoters pieced together an understanding of the sketchy geographic information available about northern North America. They realized that they were missing an opportunity and in 1668 sent out an experimental voyage to Hudson Bay. The expedition founded a small trading station and fort at York on the southwest shore of Hudson Bay and returned

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with a profitable load of furs.22 This prompted the foundation of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1670. The company made no attempt to actually colonize the Canadian north, nor did they send out the roving trappers that were part of the French trade network. Instead they maintained buyers or agents at a small selection of permanent trading stations where the buyers simply waited for the Indians to come to them. They offered favorable prices and an escape from the tension between the French and the English farther south. The Hudson’s Bay Company soon attracted a growing list of Native American communities to its company outposts. The geographic scope of this trade in an era of foot travel and canoes is hard to grasp. The York station was visited by Indian traders from as far away as what is now central North Dakota. Archaeological evidence shows that the Indians of that region in turn had had trade connections that reached Minnesota, the Gulf Coast, New Mexico, and what is now Washington and Oregon since the middle of the 1400s.23 On at least two occasions, the French tried to capture the English trading post at York but were driven off. The logistics of organizing and mounting an attack on a fortified trading post that was more than two thousand miles by lake, stream, and portages from Quebec were beyond the resources of the French authorities. The English of the Hudson’s Bay Company were commercially successful in part because they did not use roving trapper-traders and because they deliberately avoided any participation in disputes between competing Native American communities. In this way they maintained an aura of neutrality and peace around their stations, where Indians from otherwise warring tribes did their business side by side. That aura was very effective in attracting Indians who wanted to trade. French Canada, meanwhile, gradually became something more than a series of trading posts, since it also included a slowly growing colony of French settlers. Quebec was a small, miserable place, even by seventeenth-century standards, and included virtually no European women. Ten years after being founded by twenty-eight men, Quebec City had barely one hundred inhabitants. As in other distant outposts, resident Frenchmen took Indian women as partners or wives. The French authorities encouraged this, on the theory that the Indian wives would adopt their husband’s French culture—language, attitudes, and religion. Predictably, mixed-marriage households embedded in Canada’s indigenous culture actually adopted Native American customs and family relations. When, in the eighteenth century, attitudes toward Indians became negative, the offspring of French colonists and Native American women experienced the same rejection by European society as the offspring of the roving coureurs de bois. By contrast, Native American communities

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readily integrated both renegade white colonists and mixed-race children into their society. The colony’s slow growth and its emphasis on the fur trade allowed the French to maintain stable relations with the Native Americans. Quebec did not reach five hundred inhabitants until after 1663, when all French Canada had only three thousand European inhabitants. During the seventeenth century, about fifteen thousand Frenchmen migrated to Canada, but half of them either died or returned to France. The slow rate of growth and the concentration on the fur trade created little friction with the Native Americans over the actual control of land, and the fur-trading network lasted well into the eighteenth century. From a global perspective, the fur trade tied an otherwise isolated and inaccessible area amounting to one-third of all North America into the global commercial network.

Encounters and Outcomes In sum, Europeans typically arrived on the shores of North America in small numbers, poorly equipped, short of supplies, and suffering from the effects of a long voyage.24 The Native Americans they met were equally handicapped because they were coping with the effects of devastating epidemics. The natives were curious and willing to extend hospitality to strangers, a tradition that saved many European colonists from starvation. Land was the underlying source of conflict between colonists and Indians, while furs and deer hides sustained a long-term commercial collaboration. This is why French Canada enjoyed prolonged, stable relations with the Indians. In contrast, as agricultural colonies grew, they appropriated ever more land, undermining Native American communities and prompting them to violence to protect their land.25 The irony is obvious. Native Americans provided the food that kept the early settlers alive. Their participation in the fur trade helped pay the early costs of establishing the colony. The next cohorts of colonists repaid the Native Americans by appropriating lands that were part of the Indian way of life. The progressive and permanent appropriation of Native American land undermined any stable relationship between Native Americans and European invaders. Once the survival of a colony was assured, the next problem was to find something profitable to send home to the people who invested in the colonial project. In North America, French, Dutch, and English investors were first attracted to the rich supply of furs discovered through early contacts with coastal Indians. When the French entered Canada by way of the Saint

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Lawrence River, they found indigenous trade networks already in place. When they saw it was to their advantage, the Indians adjusted their activities and began exchanging furs for European manufactures. As successive hunting grounds were trapped out and dislocated tribes settled in the upper Midwest, the fur trade became more complex. Tribes near the French forts became commercial middlemen, trading European goods for furs trapped by more distant communities. As a result, the global commercial network was extended deep into the seemingly isolated center of North America, following age-old indigenous trade networks. The long-term outcome of this commerce left the Indians dependent on a supply of European manufactures they could not make for themselves. Once the fur-bearing animals were trapped out, the Indians became vulnerable to European exploitation. Virginia, and later Maryland and North Carolina, quickly specialized in the production of tobacco once a viable hybrid was available. South Carolina became a major exporter of rice to the plantations in the Caribbean. The irony in that case is that plantation owners learned how to produce rice from slaves imported from the Caribbean. Many of those slaves had learned these techniques in Africa before being sold into slavery.26 In Pennsylvania and New York, the new farms soon produced surpluses of wheat and other agricultural foodstuffs, goods for which there was no market in Europe except in cases of extreme shortages.27 As farming in Virginia and the Carolinas became more specialized, those colonies imported food from Pennsylvania. Farther south, in the Caribbean, the same process of specialization created markets for foodstuffs from the Atlantic colonies. Their ships returned to New England with sugar and molasses. The molasses was distilled into rum, giving New England a product with a ready market in England. By 1700 the shores and seaports of the Americas, Africa, and Europe were tied together by a network of maritime connections—a network more complex than the “triangular trade” of many textbooks. This New World economic zone was crossed by countless cargos of sugar, tobacco, European manufactures, wine, coffee, cacao, indentured servants, gold, silver, and slaves. Within this Atlantic framework, sugar and tobacco, for which Europe had an insatiable demand, played an important role in integrating intercontinental trade in the Atlantic, a role that was similar to that of silver in Eurasian trade.28

CHAPTER SEVEN

An Era of World Trade

For historians of Europe, the opening of the route around Africa has a heroic quality. When Vasco d Gama reached India, it was a spectacular feat of navigation, but its importance has been overstated. Before we can grasp just how Europe related to Asia, we need to know more about the geography and technology of world trade in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The two factors that really shaped the global economy over the next two and a half centuries were the Chinese market and American silver. Vasco da Gama’s cargo of European merchandise found few buyers in India, and even with recurrent use of force, he headed home with only a few hundred pounds of pepper in otherwise empty cargo holds. Da Gama’s route was the first really new addition in centuries to the available routes between Europe and Asia, and for a time the Portuguese enjoyed a near monopoly on the supply of Asian spices in Western Europe. Western Europe, however, accounted for only a small part of Asia’s trade in spices, and the older routes continued to serve the Middle East, the Eastern Mediterranean, and Eastern Europe. Once the Asian commercial world adjusted to Portugal’s intrusion and the Asian political situation had stabilized, the Portuguese dream of a monopoly over the Asian spice trade melted away. From an Asian perspective, the Portuguese simply added one more intercontinental route to the many that were already available for trade between Asia and Europe. The European urge to reach Asia was not a matter of ending European isolation; Europe had been part of a long-distance trade network since Roman times. Da Gama’s voyage was an attempt to improve trade 125

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with Asia at a time when political unrest was interfering with the traditional trade routes. The addition of a new route in 1498 had an important impact on the European spice trade, but as we have seen, great empires were taking shape along with a vast network of autonomous seaports and market centers. It is a bit Eurocentric to credit da Gama’s addition to that network as reshaping history. At the height of Dutch, English, French, and Portuguese trade with Asia, the Cape route carried less than 20 percent of Indian Ocean trade. While this trade became important to Europe, especially in the seventeenth century, European participation had little effect on most aspects of Asian trade until the late eighteenth century. It is likely that the rapid increase in the world’s silver supply, coming from Mexico, Peru, and Japan, was more important to world (or European) trade than the route around Africa. America began exporting huge quantities of silver around 1560, and because silver gave Europe a commodity with ready markets in Asia, Europe was able to buy increasing amounts of Asian products from Middle Eastern middlemen. This provided the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires with more silver for their own trade. Before we look at Europe’s role in world trade, we need some sense of the scope of the AfricanEurasian network the Portuguese sought to join in 1498.

The Geography of Eurasian Trade, 1497 The Indian Ocean and the South China Sea constituted the core of the world’s long-distance trade, and the two most important participants were China and India. The markets for their exports—spices, silks, cotton cloth, gemstones, and porcelains—were located all around the Indian Ocean and as far away as Japan, the Middle East, and Europe. Over the centuries the merchants of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea had developed sophisticated, interlocking trade networks designed to move high-value merchandise through those networks as efficiently as possible. Fifteenth- and sixteenth-century ships, whether Asian or European, could not tack very well against the wind. Asian sailors had long since figured out that the physical geography of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, together with seasonal winds, created three distinct maritime zones. The prevailing winds in the Indian Ocean blow out of the northeast between October and April, favoring trade from India to the Red Sea and East Africa. In the spring the winds reverse and blow from the southwest to the northeast, favoring trade from Africa to India. The pattern is similar in the South China Sea, but the seasonal changes in the wind come a month or two later.

Map 7.1.   African and Eurasian Trade Routes before Europeans Entered the Indian Ocean. The six small circles are the emporia ports that coordinated long-distance trade across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean between China and the Mediterranean Sea.

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These seasonal patterns encouraged the development of three trade zones. To the east was the South China Sea, bounded by China, the Philippine Islands, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula, and Vietnam. The Bay of Bengal defined the middle zone, with India to its west and the Malay Peninsula and Sumatra to the east. The western zone, defined by the Arabian Sea, was bounded by Africa to the west, India to the east, and Persia and Arabia to the north. Since most merchants and shippers operated within only one of the three zones, the high-value goods of intercontinental trade moved in stages, from one zone and its merchants to the next.

The Eastern Zone: South China Sea In the early fifteenth century, the Chinese economy generated an important part of the world’s long-distance trade and dominated trade in the eastern trade zone. Chinese merchants and shipowners controlled most of the trade between the ports that surrounded the South China Sea, and most of this merchandise was shipped in Chinese junks sailing between Java, Melaka, the Philippines, and China. Most of the merchants were known as Nanyang, or Southsea Chinese, and constituted an informal but widespread trade and data network. The eastern trade zone also included Malay traders and Japanese, whose ships appeared regularly in the South China Sea, stopping first at the island Kingdom of Ryukyu (Okinawa) and then at the Kingdom of Champa on the way to the emporium at Melaka.1 Chinese merchants had settled in ports all around the South China Sea during the Yuan and early Ming dynasties and could be found in Aceh, Java, Cambodia, Champa, Brunei, and Ayutthaya (Thailand). This network was then augmented by refugees from the Manchu invasion and takeover of the Chinese Empire in 1644. The result was an ethnically defined Chinese trade diaspora that connected every part of the South China Sea, from Formosa to the Philippines to the Straits of Malacca, prompting the phrase “the Chinese Mediterranean.”2 After 1435, official policy in China discouraged the construction of large ships and limited foreign access to China. This “withdrawal” was evaded or ignored by imperial officials in Canton and Guangzhou on China’s southeastern coast, where merchants and capital continued to engage in a remarkable amount of overseas trade.

The Middle Zone: Bay of Bengal The middle zone, the Bay of Bengal, lay between India and Sumatra. This zone sustained a complex trade in Indian cottons, Southeast Asian spices,

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gemstones, gold, and silk cloth. The gold and silk were brought overland from China into the Taungoo Kingdom (now Myanmar) over a busy caravan route between the two countries. Since crossing the Bay of Bengal was a relatively long trip on the open sea, merchants there used larger ships, usually Arab dhows or Chinese junks. The most important group of merchants in this zone were the Hindu Chettiars from the east coast of India, but they shared the trade with Malays from the spice-producing Maluku Islands of Southeast Asia and the Gujaratis of northwestern India.

The Western Zone: Arabian Sea The third and westernmost Indian Ocean trade zone, known as the Arabian Sea, connected western India with Persia, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, and the east coast of Africa. This region was the site of a loose commercial triangle. The eastern side linked India to the trade routes that carried Asian goods via the Red Sea or Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and Europe. The western side connected the maritime city-states of East Africa with the same trade routes to the Mediterranean. The southern side of the triangle linked East Africa’s supply of gold, ivory, and slaves directly to Southwest India and the emporia that stocked the spices and silks from farther east. Much of that trade was carried in small ships that worked their way along the coast between India, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea. This huge, three-zone Indian Ocean–South China Sea commercial network extended beyond its regional limits both into the Pacific and through the Middle East in several directions. From the South China Sea, ships sailed north to the Ryukyu Islands, Korea, and Japan. A second route extended south and east from Melaka to the spice markets at Makassar and Ternate. A third ran from the spice islands north to Manila and on to either Japan or China. At the western end of the Indian Ocean network, a trade route ran through the interior of the Safavid Empire to the Caspian Sea and Muscovy. Other routes ran up the Persian Gulf to Aleppo and the Eastern Mediterranean or up the Red Sea to Cairo and Alexandria on the south shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Even farther afield, trade routes reached Constantinople, Venice, Northwest Europe, and North Africa. Within the Indian Ocean, the process of relaying commodities across trade zones was coordinated by five distinctive seaports, usually referred to as emporia. These emporia have been mentioned in various places in this essay; now we have enough information to see how they coordinated an intercontinental commercial network. Emporia were more than seaports providing import/export services for their hinterlands. They also linked points in the

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trade zones in the Indian Ocean with those in the South China Sea and maintained commercial ties that reached beyond the Indian Ocean to Japan, Central Asia, Europe, and North Africa. As of 1497, five emporia organized the flow of trade across the Indian Ocean. In the 1400s, Melaka, located on the Strait of Malacca, was probably the most important of these emporia. Located near modern Singapore on the Malay Peninsula, Melaka was the place where trade from the Indian Ocean to the west, the South China Sea to the east, and the Malukus intersected. Melaka housed literally hundreds of merchants and their families, the largest groups being the Chettiars of India, the Southsea Chinese, the Malays from Makassar and the Malukus, and the Gujaratis of northwestern India. The sultan of Melaka recognized four self-governing ethnic merchant communities, negotiating with them through their internally selected leaders. The Chettiars were Dravidian-speaking Hindus from Tamil Nadu on the Coromandel Coast of eastern India. They had been established as merchants in Melaka before its conversion to Islam in 1414, but in the fifteenth century they found their trade position in Melaka challenged by Muslim Gujarati merchants. The Hindu Chettiars thought the newly arrived Muslim Gujaratis were being favored by the Melaka’s Muslim sultan. This left the Chettiars disaffected and willing to help the Portuguese capture the city once they had arrived. As a gauge of the importance of the trade at Melaka, that port alone handled most of the spices traveling to India, the Middle East, and Europe, as well as half of the spices destined for the China market.3 Calicut, an emporium near the southern tip of India, was the meeting place for traffic arriving from Melaka to the east and for ships crossing the Arabian Sea from East Africa. A cosmopolitan commercial center, Calicut housed merchants from Egypt, Syria, West Africa, Persia, Gujarat, North Africa, and from Deccan, Bengal, Ceylon, and Melaka.4 Calicut also had a large community of Indian Christians, members of a branch of the Syrian Orthodox Church that had been established on the west coast of India for almost a thousand years. Known as the Saint Thomas Christians because, according to tradition, Christianity had been brought to the area by the Apostle Thomas, this community controlled the region’s export of Indian pepper.5 Surat, an emporium on the northwest coast of India, also serviced the east–west trade between India and the Middle East. In addition, Surat was the port of entry for goods headed overland to the emporia cities of Lahore and Multan. In these two inland caravan cities, merchandise was loaded onto the camel caravans that crossed Afghanistan to Samarkand, Lhasa, Kabul, Kandahar, Tabriz, Aleppo, Izmir, and Constantinople.

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Hormuz, an emporium city at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, sent goods by ship, riverboat, and then caravan through Baghdad to the inland emporium city of Aleppo.6 Aden, an emporium city at the entrance to the Red Sea, provided a base where goods headed for the Mediterranean were repackaged for transfer to smaller ships that were better suited to the tricky navigation of the Red Sea. Most of this merchandise was then carried to Cairo and ultimately to Alexandria for distribution around the Mediterranean. Larger than most seaports, emporia were the nerve centers of longdistance trade. They provided a range of financial and maritime services, including merchant-bankers who provided commercial credit and shipping insurance. Emporia also provided brokers and factors that stored, processed, and repackaged commodities for further transit. An arriving ship captain could expect to find a wide variety of merchandise to carry as cargo, repair facilities for his ship, and supplies of food for the next voyage.7 Emporia were populated by people from all over Eurasia, including merchants from Egypt, Syria, Africa, Gujarat, the Mediterranean, Persia, Bengal, Melaka, China, Japan, and Armenia. Each of these emporia had commercial relations with dozens of commercial city-states within its adjacent maritime zones. Collectively, these emporia and their satellites made up a remarkable network of interdependent commercial centers, few of which were fortified. These maritime connections were only part of the picture. Maritime transport was also part of an integrated network that included overland connections, usually by camel caravan. The caravan routes connecting the Mediterranean and the Near East with China and Southeast Asia began where the Ganges River emptied into the Bay of Bengal. When politics allowed, trade traveled on riverboats up and down the Ganges and Yamuna Rivers, where one of most important stops was Delhi, capital of the Sultanate of Delhi. The caravans then went either to Lahore or Multan in the Indus River Valley. There they met caravans traveling north from the seaport of Surat. From Multan and Lahore, caravan routes extended to Kandahar or Kabul, and then west to the Caspian Sea. Along the way, that route was joined by caravan trails from Samarkand, Bukhara, and other Central Asian cities and by a caravan route that came north from the port of Hormuz through Isfahan on the way to the Caspian Sea. From the Caspian Sea and northwest Iran, caravan routes stretched north as far as Moscow and west to Aleppo, Izmir, Constantinople, and Trebizond on the Black Sea. Another caravan route connected Basra on the Persian Gulf with Baghdad, the market at Aleppo, and the Mediterranean port of Iskenderun, while routes from the Red Sea went to Cairo and Alexandria. Farther west, a set of caravan routes linked

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the north coast of Africa with sub-Saharan West Africa, connecting Mali and the cities of Djenné, Gao, and Timbuktu with Algiers, Tunis, and other North African ports. Seen in conjunction with the maritime routes across the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and South China Sea, the caravan routes were part of a huge, integrated network that offered long-distance merchants several combinations of maritime and overland routes.

Trade and the Constraints of Transportation The scope of this transcontinental network is striking, but it is even more impressive when we consider the physical or technological capacity of preindustrial trade and travel. Because few long-distance roads were more than walking trails, most long-distance overland trade was done with pack mules, camels, or horses. A pack mule usually carried 250 to 300 pounds of cargo, and a train of fifty mules, with its ten to fifteen muleteers, could move seven tons of merchandise about twenty miles a day. Camels were better suited for long desert routes. On long trips a dromedary camel of the Middle East could carry 350 to 400 pounds and travel about twenty miles a day, provided it was allowed to rest every three or four days.8 In the few areas where rough roads allowed the use of two-wheeled oxcarts, a train of thirty carts could carry fifteen tons of cargo ten miles in a day. This sounds more efficient than pack animals, but oxcarts moved slowly and took twice as long to reach a destination as a camel caravan or mule train. A large mule- or horse-drawn four-wheeled freight wagon could carry up to four thousand pounds and travel about twenty miles a day, but it needed two to four mules or horses and a well-constructed road. Carts and wagons may look more efficient than pack mules or camels, but they only work when some authority has invested in building and maintaining an adequate road. The one thing that reduced the cost of moving goods was water. The same pair of mules that could carry eight hundred pounds of freight overland could pull a canal or riverboat loaded with twenty tons of cargo. From early times, rivers like the Danube, Rhine, Nile, Euphrates, and Ganges were used by small boats or lined with towpaths for mules pulling barges. In China the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers were linked together by the Grand Canal, allowing the inexpensive transfer of bulky commodities like wheat and rice over long distances. As a result, China became the largest inland market area in the world, one that sustained specialized industries, intensive agriculture, and large cities with concentrations of elite buying power. For areas near the sea, sailing ships offered the cheapest and fastest transport available—as long as their holds were full. A ship with a capacity of

Map 7.2.   Land and Sea Routes through the Middle East (ca. 1600). This revived network competed successfully with the European sea routes around Africa and across the Pacific.

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three hundred tons and a crew of forty could carry bulky goods for hundreds of miles without dramatically raising the final price of its cargo. While the cost of carrying a ton of goods one mile by ship was a fraction of the cost of overland travel, this bargain had limits. Ships did travel faster than overland caravans—easily a hundred miles in a day compared with twenty—but ships rarely traveled in a straight line. The distance traveled between ports was determined by prevailing winds and was usually far longer than it would appear on a map. Sailing ships represented large capital investments and had a limited lifespan, especially in warm, tropical waters. On really long trade routes, they rarely lasted for more than two round trips. Moreover, ocean travel was inherently risky, and big ships required large investments in adequate docking facilities. They also needed wholesale markets big enough to handle large cargos, or big cities with large, wealthy elites and good distribution networks that reached wealthy consumers in outlying towns. To exploit the cost savings in the use of larger ships, the commercial world needed concentrated markets and convenient waterborne transport services. The merchant’s biggest problem was finding enough affluent customers in a given area to absorb a large cargo without flooding the market. The size of that market was limited if one had to use too much ground transport to complete the retailing of the goods. The nature of this problem is suggested by some basic demography. The world of 1500 had only about 425 million people and only a handful of cities with more than 250,000 inhabitants. Agricultural productivity was low, and 80 to 90 percent of the population worked the soil or tended livestock in order to support the 10 percent that was not engaged in agriculture. Most people lived in scattered villages of two hundred to four hundred people, and a city of twenty-five thousand was a metropolis. The few people who had much discretionary income were dispersed among dozens of towns. These demographic realities help us understand the importance of large new capital cities. By drawing wealthy elites to live at court, new capital cities helped provide merchants with concentrated markets. While most of the profits in long-distance trade depended on the sale of high-value goods to wealthy elites, the emphasis on high-value goods is deceptive. A ship or camel caravan that carried compact and valuable commodities in one direction needed a return cargo. That cargo depended on what a local freight agent or broker could arrange. Rather than return empty, the ship’s agent or the caravan master would accept a cargo of everyday goods if they could be sold at the destination for enough revenue to pay for the initial purchase and even part of the overhead for the return trip. As a result, the lists of long-distance cargoes included a surprising number of everyday

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commodities alongside the high-value goods that made up the really profitable cargoes.

Diversity, Integrity, and Tolerance If the geographic extent of the Eurasian trade routes is striking, European observers were also struck by the ethnic diversity of Asian seaports. They invariably had resident communities from all parts of the Indian Ocean, communities that spoke a variety of languages and practiced various forms of religion: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Animism. One of the hardest things for many Europeans to adjust to was the importance of Islam in the world of Eurasian commerce. From East Africa to Japan, the commercial world of the Indian Ocean and South China Sea was shaped by certain realities. Muslim society in general did not suffer from the stigma that Europe’s landed nobility attached to commercial wealth. European cities were governed by city councils controlled by a combination of landed magnates and commercial notables. This usually established a close connection between economic policy and the preferences of the commercial oligarchy. While the Muslim port cities lacked such “republican” institutions, and the position of sheik was hereditary, the fact that the ruler was often part of the commercial elite normally precluded arbitrary or confiscatory rule.9 The fact that Islam attached no stigma to commercial wealth, while in Europe the landed nobility considered itself superior to the merchant community, made it easier for Muslim landed elites to invest agrarian profits in trade. At the same time, Islam had a tradition of toleration toward the “Peoples of the Book.” Initially this applied to Jews and Christians, who were recognized as subjects of Muslim rulers provided they paid a small head tax. Faced with large non-Muslim populations, Muslim rulers in India, the Safavid Empire, and the Ottoman Empire developed rationales for similar forms of tolerance to religious communities from outside the Old Testament tradition. As a result, any Muslim-ruled commercial center tolerated numerous ethnically distinct merchant communities, including Muslims, Armenian Christians, Jews, Animists, Sikhs, Chinese, and Hindus, often granting formal autonomy to non-Muslim ethnic communities. Despite this cultural and linguistic diversity, merchants from Europe to Japan carried out business transactions in very similar ways. Regardless of religion or ethnicity, business was transacted by individuals or by partnership companies in which the partners were family members, close relatives, or relatives by marriage. It was a world based on the same family-oriented values that were the foundation of a European’s personal identity. As we observed

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earlier, Europeans were conditioned to seek personal achievement in ways that enhanced the reputation of their extended families, with the result that they could relate to similar family structures in other parts of the world. The foundation of the whole commercial system was credit. Credit, in turn, depended on trust and business integrity. In a world in which transactions were completed across great distances, over long periods of time, and between people speaking different languages, one had to be able to trust both intermediaries and final recipients who were total strangers. This put a premium on doing business with members of one’s extended family. It explains why the family ethos was so important and why families were often widely dispersed within the commercial network. Agreements were usually defined in written contracts, and commercial city-states usually had judges or employed arbitrators who enforced the terms of contracts. At the same time, verbal agreements based on the equivalent of a handshake were considered equally binding. The objective was to make a profit, but any transaction had a nonmonetary component as well. A properly implemented contract not only assumed a profit but also enhanced the extended family’s reputation for reliability and integrity. It enhanced a merchant’s political connections and, in India, his standing within his caste. These unwritten rules were enforced by peer pressure, reputation, and the threat of ostracism. While profit could be counted in monetary terms, a “good outcome” in business included much more than just monetary profit. Commercial honesty was reinforced in market towns, whether in Europe, Africa, or Asia, by agents and institutions appointed to facilitate trade. This included resident brokers who kept track of current inventories, merchant bankers willing to extend credit, translator/go-betweens, and courts designed to settle commercial disputes. In some places the brokers were assisted by officials who weighed, measured, and certified the quality of goods. In Indian Ocean ports, where merchants spoke several languages, commercial facilitators generally included translators or, in the Portuguese colonies, lenguas.10 In the South China Sea, the Portuguese also used local language experts, or jurebasas. This ethos of commercial integrity was as important in Europe as in the Indian Ocean, but its application was complicated by ideological differences. This was especially true among the Portuguese. Part of Portugal’s landed aristocracy remained committed to the medieval ideal of a Christian crusade against Islam. These differences in perspective between factions at the Portuguese court explain some of the inconsistencies in Portuguese behavior once they found their way around Africa into the Indian Ocean. When the Portuguese arrived in the Indian Ocean, they found that most Indian Ocean

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seaports were controlled by Muslim elites. While the Portuguese learned to deal with Muslim governments, they were often hostile to Muslim merchants. Muslim merchants were not welcome in most Portuguese-governed ports, and the Portuguese occasionally disrupted the pilgrim trade to Mecca. The Indian Ocean was ringed with small and mutually dependent port cities that had no need for serious military defenses. In Southeast Asia, port towns sometimes used a defensive tactic that was hard to defeat. The typical port town in this region was spread across an open river valley site, with few defensive walls. Most buildings were built of bamboo, with woven matting walls, wood floors, and thatched palm roofs. They were lightly built and easily replaced; even the aristocratic residential core had little more than a bamboo palisade thrown up when war threatened. This inexpensive infrastructure gave these towns considerable mobility. When some of the Malay city-states in the Straits of Malacca faced aggression from the Sumatran city of Aceh, they simply disassembled their city and moved inland far enough to discourage seaborne raids. On more than one occasion, raiders arrived at a town they had targeted only to find a few abandoned buildings.11

World Trade and Trade Diasporas Given the obstacles of distance, time, and risk, it took an enormous amount of ingenuity, trust, and integrity to sustain a complex network of long-­ distance trade. However powerful the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, or English looked from Europe, European trade could not have functioned without collaboration from preexisting local, regional, and international merchants and governments. As we have seen, the keys to trade and credit were trust and integrity, usually based on the extended family firm. Individual success came from reinforcing the status of family and clan. A successful business depended on working partnerships reinforced by marriage, internships, adoption, and fictive relationships. While this was true of trade in general, trust and integrity were reinforced in long-distance commerce by distinctive communities referred to as trade diaspora societies. Each of these diaspora colonies maintained its distinctive language and usually practiced marital endogamy. Scattered along trade routes, these colonies provided their compatriots with ready-made local business contacts. A significant part of the world’s long-distance trade was managed by merchants who were members of trade diasporas and did not identify with any one city, country, or ruler. These merchants systematically placed colonies in trading centers strung along important trade routes. The inhabitants of these colonies

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retained their distinctive language and religion and married women from other colonies in the diaspora or from their original homeland. Merchants, family members, or formal friends could visit any town in the diaspora’s network and find relatives, friends, or family members who specialized in finding connections with local commercial enterprises. A diaspora could extend over only a few hundred miles of trade routes, like those in Africa cited by Philip Curtin, or be a global network, like those of the Armenians and the Jews.12 Four examples stand out among the many diasporas that helped integrate long-distance trade. Among other things, they illustrate that Europe had no monopoly on entrepreneurial skills. Together, the Multani of India, the Overseas Chinese, the Jews, and the Armenians illustrate the ways in which trade diaspora communities maintained their cohesion. The internal cohesion of diaspora societies reinforced the integrity of business transactions across long distances, over long spans of time, and between very different cultures. Among their many important assets was their ability, as neutral middlemen, to trade across boundaries between warring states and provide communication between governments. They were particularly effective in dealing with the long-term tensions between the Safavid and Ottoman Empires. In that case, the Armenians had several colonies in both empires, and even though the two empires were often at war with each other, the Armenians regularly sold Safavid silk exports at markets in the city of Aleppo, deep inside the Ottoman Empire.

The Multani Merchants of India The creation of the Mughal Empire in 1525 brought recovery of the caravan trade across Southwest Asia and growing prosperity to northern India. One indication of India’s economic dynamism was the emergence of a diaspora of thousands of Indian merchants that spread across western Asia from the caravan city of Multan in India.13 Unlike the Armenian or Jewish diaspora, the Multani Indian diaspora was not the result of persecution or forced migration. As the opportunities for trade increased, colonies of Indian merchants settled first in the caravan crossroads of Kabul and Kandahar and then followed the caravan routes to the Persian cities of Isfahan, Tehran, and Shiraz. By the end of the sixteenth century, Indian merchants, mostly from Multan, had followed the caravan routes to the Central Asian cities of Bukhara, Merv, Samarkand, and Tashkent. They also followed the trade route that ran north along the Caspian Sea to the city of Astrakhan, located at the mouth of the Volga River. From there they expanded up the Volga and its tributaries to Kazan, Novgorod, and Moscow.

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The Multani do not seem to have maintained a self-conscious organization within their diaspora, but there is ample evidence that the Multani organized their businesses based on the extended family and family firm. While the diaspora started from the city of Multan, it came to include Indian merchants from other Indian cities as well. Unlike most diasporas, the Multani did not depend on a common religion, and its members included Muslims, Hindus, and Jains. The members of this diaspora maintained a degree of marital endogamy, recruiting wives from their home communities in and around Multan. In cities where large numbers of Multani congregated, they developed a collective organization that built and maintained large lodging houses and warehouses for Indian merchants. By 1650 literally thousands of Indian merchants, generally referred to as Multani, lived in Isfahan, Astrakhan, the cities of Central Asia, and Moscow. Among these Indian entrepreneurs were merchant-bankers as wealthy as any in Italy. They used forms of contract, concessions of credit, and shipping loans just as modern as those being used by Italian or Armenian merchants. They formed companies of ten to forty individuals, pooling capital and spreading risk. At their height, individual merchants had business connections from Moscow to Surat, roughly four thousand miles by road. As an example of their potential as merchants, one Multani merchant based in Moscow left an estate worth three hundred thousand rubles (roughly $7,500,000 in today’s money) in 1759. The Multani diaspora lost its cohesion in the first half of the eighteenth century. It had depended on safe long distance overland transport, which was hampered by the disintegration of central authority in the Safavid Empire in the late seventeenth century. The situation of the diaspora worsened after 1720 with the decline of effective Mughal government and the loss of safe overland routes within the Mughal Empire. Fragments of this diaspora lasted into the nineteenth century, when it was still possible to find Indian moneylenders in a number of Russian cities.

The Armenians The Armenian trade diaspora originated in the city of Julfa, in what was then Armenia.14 Julfa is now located in a corner of Azerbaijan between modern Armenia and Iran. The Armenian diaspora evolved into a far-flung constellation of colonies. By 1700, the geography of its network stretched from London to Manila. The most important unifying elements in the Armenian diaspora were a long history of dispersal from their original homeland, a distinctive form of Christianity, a distinctive language, and systematic marital endogamy.

Map 7.3.   Cities and Towns with Armenian Merchant Colonies by 1700

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At the time of the Roman Empire, the Armenians occupied an area in eastern Anatolia and the Caucasus that included modern Armenia and a third of modern Turkey. They experienced forced migrations under the Byzantine, Seljuk, and Ottoman Empires until their homeland was reduced to the small territory that approximates the modern, post–Soviet Union country of Armenia. They were strongly loyal to what became the Armenian Orthodox Church, a variant of Eastern Orthodox Christianity that separated from mainstream Christianity in the fifth century and developed its own liturgy and an episcopal hierarchy headed by the catholicos, a rank they considered higher than that of patriarch. The Armenians retained their own unique language, which they used for both religious and business purposes. They also maintained a very strong tradition of family ties that operated over long distances, often marrying members of the Armenian community from colonies hundreds of miles away. By the eleventh century, Armenian merchant colonies could be found along most routes crossing Southwest Asia; and as Europe’s Mediterranean seaports revived in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, they too attracted Armenian colonies. In the 1350s wealthy Armenians were well enough known in Italy to figure prominently in one of Boccaccio’s stories. In 1500 Armenian merchant colonies were present in most Mediterranean seaports and in Surat and Calicut on the west coast of India. As the Portuguese inserted themselves into the world of Asian trade after 1500, they encountered Armenian merchants who helped the new arrivals connect with the local commercial community.15 Because the center of the Armenian diaspora was in the city of Julfa, on the border between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, between 1603 and 1618 the Armenians were caught up in a war between the two empires. By 1607 the Armenians were virtually refugees. At this point the Safavid shah, Abbas I, persuaded (or coerced) the Armenians to move to a suburb of his new capital, Isfahan. This Armenian suburb has come to be known as New Julfa. Shah Abbas then adopted the Armenians as a kind of service nobility. The advantages for Abbas were considerable, since he could place imperial finances in the hands of a financially astute cadre that was not linked to the tribal politics at his court. Abbas also put the Armenians in charge of the Persian silk industry. Using their international market connections, they were able to reorganize and expand the export of Persian silk, Abbas’s main source of foreign exchange, and provide Abbas with revenue that he used to improve caravan routes. As the scale of their financial activities grew, the Armenians deferred to a cadre of family elders in New Julfa who managed their relations with the Safavid government.

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The Armenians also took advantage of Europe’s growing supply of American silver and the parallel increase in European demand for Asian products. As trade between Europe and Asia expanded, the Armenians were ideally placed to extend their commercial and financial network. In some areas their monasteries even provided basic banking functions, taking in assets for safekeeping and providing credit for international trade.16 In addition to facilitating trade for their compatriots, the Armenians provided brokerage services and credit for other merchants. When the first Portuguese ships appeared in Surat and other Gujarati ports with little in the way of salable cargoes, capital, or credit, the Armenians not only provided them with credit but also connected them with Gujarati merchants who wanted to export Indian goods. A century later, they did the same thing for the English who arrived in India.17 By the mid-seventeenth century, Armenians had established a colony in Manila, where they controlled the flow of American silver to customers in the Indian Ocean, including the English East India Company. Armenians based in India routinely owned or leased ships for trade with Malacca and Manila. They sailed flying an Armenian flag, which virtually all governments recognized and allowed to enter port and trade. This was important for the English and French East India Companies, because the Armenians often carried English and French goods to Manila and brought back the American silver that the French and English needed in their trade with China.18 The Armenians sometimes acted as factors for the English East India Company, arranging cargoes for company ships and occasionally sending their own merchandise to Europe in company ships.19 Because of the security of their overland connections, both the Dutch and English East India Companies used the Armenian courier service. It took less time for letters to travel across Persia and the Mediterranean to London and Amsterdam than for the cargoes from Indonesia or India to travel around Africa. With advance knowledge of what the incoming fleet carried, the home office could manage their markets to maximize profits. By 1700 Armenian merchant colonies could be found from London to Moscow, Isfahan, Surat, Melaka, and Manila. The early eighteenth-century Armenian merchant banker Khojah Petrus Uscan, mentioned earlier, did most of his business with relatives scattered across Eurasia, illustrating the scope of the Armenians’ trade diaspora. Very occasionally an Armenian would marry someone from outside the community, but such a marriage was always part of a carefully calculated business arrangement, as when the daughter of a prominent family in New Julfa married the English factor in Isfahan. The scope of Armenian commerce, their ability to give credit, and their insurance contracts were among the most sophisti-

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cated in Europe or Asia. The Armenians seem have been everywhere, filling gaps in the Eurasian trade network.

The Jews If the Armenians helped integrate Eurasian trade, the Jewish trade diaspora did something similar for trans-Atlantic trade, creating links between Europe and the Americas, often across imperial boundaries. The Jewish trade diaspora is probably better known than the others we have discussed, simply because the Jews were deeply embedded in European society. The term “diaspora” has a double meaning here. Its most general and historical meaning refers to the dispersion of the Jews out of what is considered their ancestral homeland (the Land of Israel), creating the communities built by them across the world. Closer to the topic of this book, that definition includes the expulsion of the Sephardic Jews from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s and their dispersion to Turkey, Italy, the Netherlands, England, Brazil, and the Caribbean. As conversos, or former Jews forced to convert to Catholicism, members of Spain’s Jewish diaspora were officially subjects of the Spanish Crown. This left them free to visit the farthest reaches of the Spanish American Empire—places as distant as New Mexico and Manila. The term “trade diaspora” uses the word to refer to people with a distinct cultural heritage living in colonies located in commercial centers along important trade routes. This is something Jews often did because other economic activities were closed to them. The Jewish trade diaspora emerged because they were already dispersed and were skilled at staying in contact with one another, a skill that could also be used to good effect in trade. Although the Jewish diaspora has dimensions that go beyond the fact that it functioned as a commercial and financial network, it is the commercial aspect that is at the forefront here. The Jewish trade diaspora was so complex by the seventeenth century that it can be seen as two or three distinct, overlapping networks. The Middle Eastern Jewish network is documented as far back as the tenth century, thanks to the Genizah manuscripts, a huge collection of documents found in Cairo. These papers document every aspect of life in the Jewish community of Cairo and describe its activity as a trade diaspora with a commercial network ranging from Aden, at the entrance to the Red Sea, to Lebanon and North Africa. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a later part of that trade network was active in North African seaports, where its members brokered connections between the trans-Sahara caravan trade and both Christian and Muslim merchants in the Mediterranean.

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The fifteenth century saw communities of Jews throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Many members of this medieval Jewish diaspora had lived in Spain and Portugal for centuries. In 1492, when they were formally expelled from Castile and Aragon, they settled in the Ottoman Empire, parts of Italy, North Africa, and Portugal and became known as Sephardic Jews. Only four years later, in 1496, the Jews in Portugal were forced to leave or convert. Several Jewish merchant families converted and stayed in Portugal, becoming “New Christians,” or “Marranos,” a pejorative term often applied to New Christians when they were suspected of being false converts. Laying the basis for expansion of the Sephardic network beginning in the fifteenth century, wealthy New Christian families in Spain and Portugal, along with the Genoese, provided part of the venture capital for Atlantic exploration, including funds for Columbus’s voyages. Once the Asian trade around Africa was established, the New Christians became an important part of the spice trade between Lisbon and Antwerp, giving them strong connections in the Low Countries. In the 1560s, just as the Dutch began their war for independence, the Portuguese Inquisition began persecuting these New Christians for supposed backsliding into Judaism. A few well-placed or thoroughly integrated families stayed, but many of these New Christian families followed their business connections and moved to Holland and England, where they often returned to Judaism. For the most part, the Protestant Dutch were happy to accept these New Christian/Jewish businessmen. The result was a network diaspora of Jews, some in Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, and North Africa. They became an interlocking web of extended families and coreligionists that maintained commercial and cultural bridges between the Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, and Muslim parts of both Europe and the Mediterranean. The Sephardic Jewish diaspora expanded again in the seventeenth century. In 1630 the Dutch conquered a large part of the sugar-producing area of Portuguese Brazil, as well as some Caribbean islands off the coast of Spanish Venezuela. The Dutch then encouraged the Sephardic Jews to settle in Brazil and the Caribbean, where they modernized the sugar industry and opened contraband trade with Spain’s American Empire. While nominally Dutch, this Jewish trade diaspora crossed political boundaries and traded with merchants in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies and with ports in West Africa. The result was a trans-Atlantic Jewish trade diaspora that transcended imperial and national boundaries and helped integrate the Atlantic economy. As the colonial economy evolved, these New Christian/Sephardic Jews played key roles in emerging trans-Atlantic trades, crossing the boundaries

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between the colonial empires. By 1700 this Jewish diaspora network connected Brazil, the Caribbean, English North America, and Europe, specializing in the most lucrative Atlantic trades of the seventeenth century: sugar, slaves, gold, emeralds, and diamonds.20 The Jewish and Armenian trade diasporas were similar in many ways; each was committed to a distinct religion, and each relied on complex extended families. They differed in that they had distinctive ways of connecting with the larger commercial world. The Sephardic Jews were relatively sedentary and made extensive use of local, non-Jewish commission agents. The Armenians depended more on long-distance agents in the form of traveling family members who were apprentice merchants.21

The Chinese of the South Sea East of Melaka, oceanic trade and many local enterprises were dominated by a different diaspora, sometimes referred to as the Chinese of the South Sea, or the Southsea Chinese.22 Thanks to the lack of regulation of Chinese emigration during the Yuan (Mongol) and early Ming dynasties of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and despite the erratic nature of Chinese trade policy, by 1500 every seaport on the South China Sea had a permanent colony of Chinese immigrants.23 This Chinese diaspora included communities lodged in the Philippines, Indonesia, Melaka, and Indochina.24 As a diaspora, it lacked the self-conscious, centralized coordination of the Armenian diaspora. Instead it was a diaspora of small, localized communities that often engaged in business activities other than trade and maintained a variety of relationships with their host societies. Like the European entry into the Indian Ocean and Indonesia, the Chinese diaspora was almost entirely male. These men settled in port towns, married local women, engaged in small-scale trade, and provided a variety of everyday services ranging from bookbinding to tavern keeping and masonry.25 Small Chinese colonies were already present in Manila before the Spanish took control in 1570 and in Batavia before the Dutch arrived early in the seventeenth century. The Chinese quickly realized that they could profit from working with the European invaders. In Batavia the Dutch depended on Chinese merchants, creditors, and contractors for the construction of Batavia’s fortifications and warehouses. Before long, many of the taxes imposed within Dutch-controlled enclaves like Batavia and Makassar were farmed out on contracts to Chinese businessmen. Under this arrangement, Chinese contractors collected the taxes and kept the revenue, paying the Dutch government a prearranged lump sum and keeping the rest as profit.

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One of the important aspects of the Chinese merchant diaspora was its role in the development of the Spanish colony in the Philippines. While administratively Manila was a colony of Spanish Mexico, it was a de facto economic colony of China. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Manila had at most two thousand people defined as Spaniards and as many as twenty thousand Chinese, along with a similar number of Eurasian immigrants.

Map 7.4.   Trade Routes Dominated by the Southsea Chinese before European Participation

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The Chinese community not only controlled the trade between Manila and China but also provided virtually all the service industries in Manila, from bread baking to shipbuilding. Arguably it was a Chinese commercial colony that China chose not to control politically, although on one occasion a Chinese war fleet of five large junks attacked the colony and was barely beaten off. Manila was an uneasy city where ethnic and economic tensions triggered recurrent mass murders of resident Chinese. In each case the colony could not function without Chinese-provided services, and the Chinese population soon recovered. The Chinese merchants at Manila also traded intermittently with the Japanese. The Japanese record of civil wars and piracy along the coast of the Fujian area of China prompted the Chinese to prohibit direct trade with Japan. By exporting their silver to Portuguese Macao on Portuguese ships, the Japanese “laundered” their silver.26 It officially became Portuguese once it was landed at Macao and could then be sold in China. As Portuguese relations with Japan came unraveled in the early 1600s, the Spanish and the Dutch competed for the Japanese silver trade. In the end, the Dutch were the only Europeans allowed to trade with Japan, and they shared the Japanese silver trade with Chinese merchants. The Dutch in Batavia were equally dependent on the Southsea Chinese. They tried several times to open direct trade with China but never succeeded. In chapter 8 we will see just how far the Dutch went in trying to set up regular contact with China. Even when China eased its trade regulations, it still insisted that the trade take place on Chinese junks. As a result, most ships bringing Chinese goods to Batavia were Chinese junks owned by members of the Chinese diaspora. Apparently, the harbor at Batavia often contained more Chinese junks than European-style Dutch ships. Without including the role of the overseas Chinese diaspora, any version of the history of Dutch or Spanish expansion into Southeast Asia seriously understates the importance of Asian capital and entrepreneurial abilities. As a trade diaspora, the Chinese lacked the centralized coordination of the Armenians, but it did combine a common ethnic and linguistic tradition with effective use of long-distance family and business connections. The Chinese also had an advantage: When the Europeans arrived in the spice islands, the Chinese already controlled the spice trade in the South China Sea. Since they had the ships and a commercial network in place, and European resources were limited, collaboration was the logical solution. This was reinforced by the fact that, except for the Portuguese port at Macau (1557–1999), the Europeans were not allowed to trade in China itself, while the Southsea Chinese had valuable family and business connections in the Guangzhou-Fujian area of China that for-

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eign merchants lacked. As a result, the Dutch and the Spanish had to depend on the Southsea Chinese for exports from China while the Southsea Chinese depended on the Dutch and Spanish for the spices and silver demanded in China. The Spaniards eventually accepted the relationship, but, as we will see in the next chapter, the inability to trade directly with China was a constant source of frustration for the Dutch. The Dutch East India Company gradually expanded its activities in Southeast Asia, diversifying its exports to Europe and adding new crops such as tobacco and sugar. While this looks like the work of the entrepreneurial Dutch, it also reflects the symbiosis between the Dutch and the Southsea Chinese. As Dutch control gradually spread out from Batavia into rural Java, Chinese investors bought land in neighboring Bantam, brought in slaves, and produced the sugar and tobacco that the Dutch in Batavia wanted to send to Europe.

A Wider Perspective If we step back and look at the overall pattern of world trade in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, certain things stand out. China was by far the largest, richest, and most advanced country in the world. Chinese consumers, while they bought large quantities of Indonesian spices and quality Indian cotton cloth, were not attracted to most European exports. As we have seen, by the sixteenth century, China had shifted to a silver-based monetary system. With an economy growing faster than its supply of silver, silver was becoming relatively scarce in China. This caused it to become more valuable in terms of other goods. Thus, imported silver had strong buying power, making the China trade potentially very profitable. Similar conditions shaped the Indian market, especially once the Mughal Empire was consolidated after 1560. With an estimated 140 million people in 1601, internal peace, improved caravan routes, and the construction of a major new capital city by the emperor Akbar, Mughal India was second only to China as a generator of world trade. As the Mughal government increased its use of silver-based coinage and the Indian economy grew, India, like China, became an attractive market for silver. While Indian consumers had limited interest in European products, they were ready to export quality cotton cloth, high-quality pepper, gemstones, and spices. In that context, the story of Europe’s relationship with the world is not one of European conquest. It is a story of European entrance into a dynamic Eurasian commercial world. It was a commercial world network that could be dislocated briefly, but it was far bigger and more complex than anything the Portuguese or Dutch could hope to control.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Europeans and the World Spices, Silk, and Silver

After a century of raids, diplomacy, and trade with the countries of Atlantic Africa (see chapter 5), in 1497 Vasco da Gama led the first European expedition around Africa to India. For the next sixty-six years, the Portuguese and their Estado da India would be the only European presence in the Indian Ocean. Not until 1564–1570 did the Spanish establish a base in Manila for a trans-Pacific trade route with Mexico, making trade truly global. For most of that time the driving force behind Portugal’s policies in the Indian Ocean focused on the spice trade, a trade that almost seems trivial to the modern reader. Initially the goal was a monopoly on the supply of spices for the European market, but before long the Portuguese realized that for their monopoly to work, they had to control the flow of spices and other goods as they crossed the Indian Ocean. Very profitable at the time, the spice trade has acquired a symbolic importance in the history of European expansion greater than it deserves. The diet of that era, even for the wealthy, was inherently bland and limited. It was heavy on bread and cereals and, for the wealthy, included meat from a short list of animals, typically beef, pork, mutton, goat, rabbit, and birds. Without refrigeration, fresh meat has a short shelf life. Spices increased the range of flavors available to a good cook and covered the taste of food that was beginning to spoil. Because they were expensive, spices also played a role in aristocratic conspicuous consumption. Spices were used in ostentatious ways to demonstrate the user’s wealth and importance. Our world retains vestiges of this display.

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On certain holidays, especially Christmas, celebrants bring out cinnamonflavored cocoa, put cloves on the baking ham, and drink spiced mulled wine in a faint echo of how spices once were used. Pepper accounted for the largest part of the annual shipment, but the more valuable spices were cloves, nutmeg, cardamom, and cinnamon. At its peak around 1550, the annual shipment of spices from India to Portugal weighed about four thousand tons—a fraction of the cargo capacity of one small modern oceangoing freighter.1

East Africa As their ships first sailed into the harbor of Mombasa, the Portuguese were impressed by the size of the stone-built part of the city. As the Portuguese sailed up the East African coast, they found several seaport cities—Malindi, Kilwa, Mombasa, Mozambique, and Sofala—that were active participants in the commercial life of the Indian Ocean. Many of the smaller ports between these cities had flat beaches where smaller ships could be pulled ashore between tides while business was transacted. These seaports were governed by sophisticated Afro-Arab Muslim elites who used Arabic for both religious and business purposes. Like other Indian Ocean seaports, the East African towns routinely welcomed resident foreign merchants, many of whom were from India. Known as Banyan, they could be either Hindu or Muslim and were the principal financiers and creditors for African trade in the Indian Ocean. The other large trading community in East Africa was made up of Arabs from various ports in the Middle East.2 The coastal cities of East Africa also traded with Bantu-speaking merchants from the interior highlands. These inland merchants brought food to the port cities, especially during periods of famine. Merchants in these port cities bought African ivory, cloth, gold, and slaves from the merchants of the interior while selling them Chinese silks, porcelains, spices, and Indian cottons. These East African seaports had been active in long-distance trade since the 1200s, so by 1498, Arab and Indian merchants had been permanent residents for generations. Long before the Europeans arrived, it was routine for these foreign merchants to marry daughters of local businessmen as a way of cementing commercial contracts. Over time this created ethnically AfroArab and Muslim ruling elites.3 East Africa exported slaves, ivory, and gold. Slavery had been an important part of the society and economy of the Indian Ocean for centuries, and East Africa normally exported five to ten thousand slaves a year, primarily to the Middle East. Unlike the plantation slavery of the Atlantic, Indian Ocean

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slavery took many forms. While some slaves did work on plantations, most were household servants, skilled craftsmen, laborers, and even confidential assistants to prominent men. As of 1498, most slaves were men who had been prisoners of war and were sold by their captors to the merchants who connected the interior with the seaports. Other slaves were convicts who had been sentenced by local courts to be sold into slavery. Since slavery was a normal part of urban life in the Indian Ocean, East African cities were markets for slaves and absorbed many of the slaves brought out of the interior before they reached the overseas slave traders. In the Atlantic world the slave trade drew overwhelmingly upon Africa for its slaves, and the trade itself was carried out by merchants who specialized in that business. The Indian Ocean slave trade drew slaves from several sources besides Africa, including India, Madagascar, Sumatra, and Sulawesi.4 The numbers were much smaller, and slaves were often transported on merchant ships as part of a mixed cargo. This Indian Ocean slave trade reached as far as Manila and Acapulco. Chinese merchants brought African and Chinese slaves to Manila for sale to Spanish merchants, who took some of them to Mexico on the Manila galleons.5 Slaves in southern and southeastern Asia were racially and ethnically as diverse as the free population, with the result that slave status was not, as in the Atlantic world, automatically associated with racial prejudice or skin color. It was not unusual in Asian societies for slaves to be manumitted or buy their freedom, after which they blended into urban society. The other important African export was gold, which had long passed through Sofala, the southernmost East African port. Sofala was connected with the South African interior and provided the main commercial outlet for the gold trade and the Empire of Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe had emerged as a political power in the 1300s, but by the 1450s, well before the arrival of the Portuguese, both Zimbabwe and its gold trade were in decline. By 1450 the major political power in the interior was the Kingdom of Mustapha, which, from 1450 to 1760, dominated much of the interior north and west of Sofala and west of the port of Mozambique.6

The Portuguese Enter the Indian Ocean The narrative of the first voyage to India, with Vasco da Gama’s alternating use of belligerence and diplomacy, was predictive of Portuguese behavior in the following decades. It offers a preview of Portuguese suspicion of Muslims and tendency to use force in negotiating for trade privileges. The leaders of the first expeditions were divided between two incompatible objectives.

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Some were military men who hoped to conquer an empire and turn the voyage into a crusade that might reach Jerusalem. Others were merchants who were not interested in a crusade or territorial conquest; they simply wanted to capture the ports that organized the long-distance trade in spices. This second group appears to have subscribed to the earlier Venetian doctrine of armed trade—building fortified trading posts and relying on armed men-of-war to protect their merchant ships. They also had almost a century of experience trading and negotiating with the countries along Africa’s Atlantic coast. Their economic goal was to control Europe’s supply of spices, but this required Portuguese control of the entire Indian Ocean spice trade.7 Sailing along the African coast, da Gama found East Africa’s prosperous port cities: Sofala, Kilwa, Mombasa, Malindi. The men on the expedition were impressed by these East African cities, with their stone-built public buildings and mosques. As Vasco da Gama proceeded up the coast, he set a tone that hampered Portuguese trade for decades. He captured several unarmed Arab ships and bombarded at least one unfriendly seaport. Intervening in a local dispute, he established a friendly government at Malindi, and in Mombasa he hired or coerced a professional pilot to guide him across the Arabian Sea to Calicut, one of the emporia that coordinated trade across the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese stayed in Calicut for three awkward months, during which da Gama negotiated with the zamorin of Calicut, ruler of most of the Malabar Coast. Da Gama was a peremptory negotiator and, lacking attractive trade goods, tried to force local merchants to buy the European goods he had brought from Lisbon. Eventually he headed back to Lisbon with only a few hundred pounds of pepper. Da Gama’s behavior initiated a pattern of antagonism and suspicion that infused Portuguese relations with Muslim-run seaports on the Indian Ocean. The most important lesson of the voyage was that trade with Asia required either better European products or a generous supply of silver. Meanwhile, the Portuguese set about establishing their authority in selected seaports. The Portuguese soon discovered that almost all the seaports around the Indian Ocean, whether ethnically Arab, Indian, or Malay, were governed by commercially oriented Muslim elites. In 1505 the Portuguese began building their armed trade diaspora with two sizable fleets, one tasked with capturing Sofala, the most important outlet for gold from the mines near Zimbabwe. The other fleet sailed under the command of Francisco de Almeida. Almeida was the first viceroy of the emerging Portuguese government in India, usually referred to as the Estado

Map 8.1.   Portuguese Forts, Trading Posts, and Trade Routes in the 1540s

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da India. Sailing up the coast, Almeida systematically attacked East African ports and established trade forts in Mozambique, Kilwa, Zanzibar, Malindi, and Mombasa. Subsequently, the Portuguese established a major supply base on Mozambique Island for ships en route to either Goa or Lisbon. The inevitable internal factions associated with government gave the Portuguese a way to gain political leverage. In East Africa the city-state seaports were run by Muslim Afro-Arab merchants, but most of their inhabitants were non-Muslim Africans. By allying with the Muslim elites in the face of a larger African population, the Portuguese got the trading privileges they wanted.8 In 1507 Almeida captured the emporium port of Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf and then went on to his next target, the west coast of India. There he negotiated trading rights at several seaports. After an inconclusive battle with the Mamluk fleet at Chaul in 1509, Almeida trapped the enemy fleet in the harbor of Diu and destroyed it with his artillery. Then, after intervening in a brief local war, he seized the small port of Goa from the zamorin of Calicut and made it the capital of the Portuguese Estado da India. The Portuguese also began negotiations with the sultan of Melaka in 1507. A major emporium on the Strait of Malacca, Melaka mediated the trade between the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean. At first the

Figure 8.1.  Portuguese-controlled Hormuz in the Sixteenth Century. Hormuz dominated the entrance to the Persian Gulf, one of the key Middle Eastern routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea. (From Gaspar Correia, “Lendas da India,” written ca. 1558, published 1858)

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sultan granted the Portuguese routine trading privileges, but soon reports of Portuguese attacks on Muslim merchants and ships carrying pilgrims to Mecca reached the Muslim merchants of Melaka, who convinced the sultan to withdraw his grant. At the same time, Melaka’s Hindu Chettiar merchants had come to resent the city’s rival Muslim Gujarati merchants and were convinced that the sultan was favoring the Muslims. The Chettiars, led by a merchant named Nina Chatu, quietly began talking with the Portuguese about taking control of Melaka. The Portuguese, attuned to the merits of “divide and conquer,” guaranteed the Chettiars their traditional trading concessions and promised them some of the Gujarati’s trade routes.9 At this point, a large Portuguese fleet arrived from Goa. With the help of Chettiar mediators, and a large junk provided by the resident Chinese merchants, the Portuguese captured Melaka in 1511. The East African exports that most interested the Portuguese were slaves, ivory, and gold. Once the Portuguese began trading in slaves, they exported fifteen hundred to twenty-five hundred East African slaves a year, a fraction of the number of slaves exported by the existing slave trade. Most of the Portuguese slaves were destined for the same variety of tasks as other Indian Ocean slaves. Portugal also tried to control the Zimbabwe gold fields, and established permanent settlers on the route from the mines to the coast. These landowners intermarried with local women and, together with their Luso-African offspring, resisted Portuguese interference. In any case, gold mining of Zimbabwe was hard to organize because there were hundreds of small, widely scattered diggings and gold panning operations. Moreover, the actual mining operations were run by members of independent families.10 The port of Sofala had been the main outlet for gold from the interior, but when the Portuguese tried to assert control over trade there, Arab traders found isolated coastal inlets where the gold trade could escape Portuguese supervision. In Southeast Asia, once in control of Melaka, the next problem for the Portuguese was to connect with the long-distance spice trade. Here Nina Chatu, the Chettiar merchant who facilitated the Portuguese capture of Melaka, provided crucial help. The Hindu Chettiars constituted an extensive trade diaspora in southeastern Asia and the South China Sea and organized the flow of spices to Melaka. The collaboration of Chatu as head of an extensive trade network allowed the Portuguese to enter the spice trade with little delay. Chatu also persuaded other merchant communities to return to Melaka once the Portuguese were in control. Chatu’s collaboration brought the Portuguese permission to build a fort and trading post on Ternate, an island near important sources of spices. He was rewarded with the position of

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overseer of all foreigners in Portuguese Melaka. With Chatu as adviser (and investor), the Portuguese were able to add profitable local trades in cloth and rice to their trade in spices. The Portuguese captured four of the key transit points in the Indian Ocean—Goa, Calicut, Hormuz, and Melaka—but failed to capture the fifth, Aden, where they were driven off by forces of the imam of Yemen. As a result, they never were able to reliably control the flow of spices up the Red Sea and had to depend on local merchants to gain access to Mocha and other Red Sea ports.11 A number of Gujarati and Karimi merchants helped the Portuguese break into maritime trade routes between India and the Red Sea. The Gujarati were Indian Muslims from Surat, seaport for the Sultanate of Gujarat on the northwestern coast of India. The Karimi were Muslim Arabs who had created a trade network based on extended family ties and were active in Malabar Coast ports facing the Arabian Sea and on the trade route from the Red Sea to Damascus and the Mediterranean port of Alexandretta, now Iskenderun, north of what is now Lebanon. The Portuguese connected with these trade networks thanks to the help of prominent Gujarati merchant Malik Gopi of Surat and the Marakkas family, a part of the Karimi merchant network on the Malabar coast, the southern part of India’s west coast. In addition to arranging for cargoes, in 1507 Gopi provided the Portuguese with useful information about local politics. The Marakkas family, meanwhile, used its extensive family network to provide the Portuguese with cargoes, capital, and credit. While Gopi and the Marakkas family helped Portugal with commercial connections between India, East Africa, and the Red Sea, the Portuguese got additional help from a shady but highly placed merchant and bureaucrat named Khwaja Shams-ud-din Giloni. Originally from northwestern Persia, Shams-ud-din Giloni had been a prominent official in the government of the shah of Bijapur, the principality inland from Portuguese Goa. Shams-ud-din Giloni arranged Portuguese access to the pepper, cinnamon, cloves, and nutmeg they wanted. As an agent for the Portuguese, he negotiated numerous privileges and exemptions from the sultanates in the spice islands. Shams-ud-din Giloni acknowledged Portuguese policies and arranged for Portuguese access to the goods and credit that they needed, but on his own he traded in Mocha and Jidda on the Red Sea and in Hormuz for coffee, pepper, and gold.12 His connections reached into Southeast Asia, including Pegu (Burma) and the emporium city of Melaka. He also traded on his own account in every important port on the Indian Ocean, whether or not the port had Portuguese forts or factors.13

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While this all sounds efficient and businesslike, it is important to remember that there was a religious dimension to Portuguese policies. As the Portuguese network of fortified trading posts was taking shape, a part of the Portuguese leadership was pursuing a religious agenda. Many members of the noble elite were suspicious of Muslims and dreamed of recapturing Jerusalem. The struggle to expel the Moors from Portugal in the Middle Ages had been cast as a crusade, and the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw recurrent warfare between Christian Portugal and Muslim Morocco. To men committed to the Crusader ethos, the route around Africa promised direct access to the Holy Land and uncharted parts of the Middle East where these would-be Crusaders hoped to make an alliance with the mythical Prester John. The Empire of Ethiopia had long been a Christian empire in East Africa and was seen as a potential ally in the crusade against Jerusalem, even though its Coptic Christianity was very different from European Catholicism. The Portuguese opened diplomatic relations with Ethiopia in hopes of bringing it into a crusade that would sail up the Red Sea and capture Jerusalem. As part of this abortive project, the Portuguese sent a fleet into the Red Sea that briefly held a bridgehead in Sinai. Instead of setting out for Jerusalem, however, the Portuguese had to help Ethiopia stop a Muslim invasion sponsored by the Ottoman Empire. Beginning in 1543, the Ottoman and Portuguese navies clashed over Portuguese control of Diu, Bandar Abbas, Hormuz, and Aden, but the result seems to have been a draw. Meanwhile, the Portuguese sent several hundred troops to aid the Ethiopians (1538–1542). Once the invasion had been stopped, Ethiopia disintegrated into a collection of principalities ruled by squabbling warlords, while the surviving Portuguese soldiers simply deserted, married local women, and disappeared into Ethiopian society.14 The episode was a waste of scarce military and financial resources. Impressive as the Portuguese network was, Arab, Persian, and Gujarati merchants learned to evade Portuguese patrol ships and renewed their use of the Red Sea as a route for delivering Asian commodities to the Mediterranean. By the 1540s more trade than ever was moving from the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean over traditional Middle Eastern caravan and shipping routes.15 Moreover, within the Indian Ocean, the Portuguese had to depend on Malay traders and shippers to find local crews, negotiate wages, and identify go-betweens. From the beginning, Portuguese attempts to control Asian trade relied on two basic strategies. They tried to use their control of emporia cities at important maritime crossroads to regulate trade across the Indian Ocean; and they set up a system of written cartazes, or licenses, that ships on several important routes were required to carry while at sea. A merchant ship without

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such a license faced a heavy penalty, even outright confiscation, if stopped by a patrolling Portuguese warship. The problem was that it was easy to evade enforcement. Merchants evaded the patrols by using smaller ships and traveling along coastlines between the many small fishing ports. The Portuguese simply could not keep enough warships at sea to patrol thousands of miles of ocean. By the 1540s, evasion was common, often helped by information passed to the merchant community by Asians working inside the Estado da India or, in the 1600s, one of the East India Companies. The second major problem was the difficulty in finding European exports with a ready market in Asia to exchange for Asian luxuries. The one European export that had a ready market in Asia was Mediterranean coral, a product best mobilized by the Sephardic and Armenian trade diasporas.16 This problem also faced the Dutch and English a century later. The alternative to selling European products in Asia was to buy Asian goods with silver.17 Until the 1560s, the European supply of silver depended on modest silver mines in Bohemia, Germany, and Spain. Portugal could never afford to buy enough silver in Europe to support an expansion of its import/export trade with Asia. This is why the Portuguese became active traders and shippers inside the Indian Ocean commercial world. By trading and transporting local goods from one place to another within Asia, they earned funds that could be used to buy more of the spices they wanted to carry back to Europe.

Governing a Maritime Empire To govern this growing collection of fortified enclaves and maritime routes, the Portuguese created a kingdom parallel to the Kingdom of Portugal. Officially known as the Estado da India, it was patterned after the monarchy in Lisbon. A viceroy in Goa represented the king and governed the Portuguese colonies. He was also responsible for enforcing the royal monopoly on the import of spices into Europe, as well as any other trade between India and Lisbon. With its capital in Goa, the Estado da India acquired a council of wealthy nobles, royal courts, a treasury council, and a council that supervised and paid the army and navy. Goa became the seat of a Catholic archbishopric in the 1540s and received a branch of the Inquisition in 1560. The Estado da India was inherently a decentralized organization. Its jurisdiction covered Portuguese-controlled enclaves scattered from Mozambique in East Africa to Timor, not far from Australia, and to Macau on the coast of China. At its height in the middle of the sixteenth century, the Estado da India was nominally in control of almost fifty fortified trading posts, most of which operated with a great deal of autonomy. The only area where the

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viceroy in Goa had effective control was in the forts and feitorias (factories) along the west coast of India near Goa. Staffed with Portuguese aristocrats and place seekers, the central administration in Goa was soon a hothouse for bureaucratic intrigue and financial manipulation. Each outlying feitoria was supervised by a captain. By the seventeenth century, the more distant captains enjoyed an autonomy that was close to independence.18 Outside Goa, the most important of these posts were Hormuz, Melaka, and Macau. These captaincies often presented opportunities for patronage and profit from illicit trade. The Estado had only two halfway effective means of control: the ability to withhold the captain’s salary and the threat of removing him from his post. We can get a sense of the potential for patronage by looking at ­Portuguese-controlled Hormuz in 1574. Its administrative, commercial, and financial staff numbered 163, the fort’s garrison included 425 soldiers and officers, and the captain’s galleon had a crew of 39—for a total payroll of 627 people.19 Both Melaka and Goa had even larger administrative structures. The agreements with local governments that defined Portuguese authority varied with almost every port, making it impossible for a central authority to implement general policies. Finding reliable personnel continued to be a problem. By the middle of the sixteenth century, the Estado da India in Goa was having so much difficulty hiring qualified Portuguese to run its empire that they had to recruit Italian, Flemish, and German businessmen through their commercial connections in Genoa and Antwerp. Soon the Portuguese trade network in Asia included people from many parts of Europe. Fernando Kron is a good example. A German born in Augsburg in 1559, in 1576 Kron joined the Welser firm of German bankers and merchants. The Welser had long been a distributer of Portuguese spices.20 In 1587 Kron moved to the Welser office in Goa. He worked there until 1592 as an agent for both the Fugger and Welser commercial networks.21 Apparently, he also worked for the Estado da India, since he is known to have arranged for the capital the Estado used to buy the cargoes they needed for their shipments to Lisbon. Throughout the sixteenth century, the annual shipments of spices from Goa to Lisbon were crucial to the Portuguese treasury. While the Crown sometimes leased ships elsewhere in Asia, the carracks that operated between Goa and Lisbon were built for and owned by the Portuguese Crown and loaded with merchandise purchased by agents of the royal monopoly and its elite merchants. Official trade traveled in similar ships between Goa, Melaka, Macau, and Nagasaki. Officers and passengers on these ships were allowed to bring along limited amounts of privately owned merchandise for sale in Europe. Through

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various devices, ranging from formal permits to judicious bribery and smuggling, the private allotments grew far beyond their legal size. As a result, while the royal trade might account for two-thirds of a ship’s cargo by weight, the privately owned goods were often worth substantially more than the cargo belonging to the king.22 This private trade left the carracks leaving Goa so badly overloaded and vulnerable to bad weather that the losses on the return trip to Lisbon were appalling. Between 1580 and 1600, ninety-one ships left Goa en route to Lisbon, but only sixty-five arrived. The situation was not much better in the seventeenth century. In the decade 1620–1630, twenty-eight ships set sail from Goa en route to Lisbon; only nineteen arrived.23 The most important task of the Estado da India was to repair, maintain, and staff the king’s ships and arrange for Lisbon-bound cargo. Given the decentralized nature of the Portuguese administration, and its precarious finances, by the 1550s many of the “royal ships” in the Portuguese network east of Melaka were actually private vessels chartered by the Crown. In the South China Sea, a so-called royal ship could in fact be a Chinese junk that was operated by a Malay crew and carried only one European, the king’s purchasing agent.

The Reality of Portuguese “Power” Given the modest resources that Portugal could maintain in the Indian Ocean and the decentralized nature of the Estado da India, it is hard to define the exact makeup of Portuguese “power.” Portuguese authority was based on local combinations of coercion, politics, and collaboration, all reflecting dozens of compromises between Portuguese representatives and individual port cities, each reflecting local conditions. Coercion Coercion and the threat of force were based on the superiority of Portuguese ships and artillery and probably get too much credit from historians. As a threat to buildings and people on land, early sixteenth-century artillery has been overrated. Even so, when confronting an unfortified town, the backing of a Portuguese squadron obviously strengthened Portugal’s negotiating position. The problem for the Portuguese, however, was that their serious warships were scattered across twelve thousand miles of ocean and not as threatening as they seemed. The scarcity of warships and the long transit times between Portuguese-controlled ports limited the usefulness of this tactical advantage.

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Politics Portuguese power was more likely to derive from skillful Portuguese use of local political conditions. The political struggles in most seaport towns were generally on a small scale, so Portuguese intervention with a few dozen soldiers and some local mercenaries was often enough to shape the outcome. On his first voyage, Vasco da Gama used this technique in East Africa. Having been tipped off about an ongoing internal conflict in the African port of Angoche, the Portuguese took sides. When the faction they supported had control of the town, the new rulers granted the Portuguese a fortified trading post. Western historians often portray this kind of outcome as a Portuguese conquest, but local rulers were more likely to see it as a useful defense against other interlopers, whether European or Asian.24 When the side backed by the Portuguese won, the winning leader generally granted his Portuguese allies trading privileges and the right to build a fort. Collaboration Collaboration was probably the most important “building block” of Portuguese authority. In any given Portuguese port, the presence of willing collaborators among the indigenous merchants who bought and sold goods within the local trade networks was crucial. Without their networks reaching into the countryside, it was difficult to consolidate small rural surpluses into the quantities of goods needed to complete profitable cargoes. The pepper trade offers an example. The Portuguese discovered that the west coast of India was home to a large community of distinctive Christians that legend claimed had been founded by the Apostle Thomas. An offshoot of the Syrian Orthodox Church, these “Saint Thomas” Christians (Nasranis) had been in India for centuries. Among the Saint Thomas Christians was a group of wealthy merchants who controlled the Indian pepper trade. Since pepper was a profitable spice, the Portuguese maintained cordial relations with this religious community for almost forty years. When other sources of pepper became available, the Inquisition was installed in Goa and the Saint Thomas Christians were persecuted as heretics. Portuguese control of the supply of spices in Europe was effective for a few decades, until about 1540, but their position was increasingly marginal. Their control in the Indian Ocean was never very complete, and their attempts to control it also were increasingly ineffective. Before the Portuguese opened the maritime route around Africa to Asia, Europe was already using about 25 percent of the spices on the Asian market. At its height in 1515, Europe consumed at most 30 percent, but by 1600 the figure was again down to 25 percent. In terms of its impact on the structure of the Asian spice trade

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and the traditional channels that brought spices to the Middle East and the Mediterranean, the importance of the Portuguese trade diaspora has been overstated.25

1550–1565: Years of Transition in Eurasia By the 1550s, the Portuguese were having trouble controlling their complex Estado da India.26 Their monopoly on the European supply of spices had evaporated, and Venice was once again a serious competitor. Despite a few challenges, the Portuguese still maintained major ports at Mozambique, Hormuz, Goa, and Melaka and had recently extended their network to include an informal post on Macau, which was legalized by the Chinese government in 1557. But as the political scene changed in Asia, the Portuguese faced growing competition. The fifteen years after 1550 brought important changes in Europe and in much of the world. In that short period, the Habsburg Empire in Europe and Spain’s American Empire acquired a vigorous new ruler, Philip II (ruled 1556–1598). The mines of Mexico, Peru, and Japan began producing unprecedented quantities of silver. In 1565 the Spaniards finally found a viable trade route between Mexico and the Philippines. As we have seen, the changing political situation in the Middle East brought the consolidation of three major empires, all of which encouraged overland trade (see chapter 3). By far the richest of the three was the Mughal Empire, which turned India into a market for luxuries and silver second only to China. The unification of Japan was finished in 1598, and the Dutch Republic was effectively independent by 1585, although its War of Independence continued until 1648. England’s remarkable Queen Elizabeth I (ruled 1558–1603) began her forty-five-year reign, and some of her merchants began to experiment with long-distance trade. The Portuguese were trying to maintain a commercial network that reached twelve thousand miles from East Africa to China and Japan. They never had enough soldiers, and the ones they had died faster than they could be replaced. They often depended on local rulers, from whom they hired mercenary troops to garrison many of their forts.27 Far from their German and Flemish sources of commercial credit, the Portuguese depended on Armenian, Gujarati, and Chinese merchants for both the credit and shipping services they needed to keep their operations going. By the 1550s, contradictions, corruption, and competition were cutting into the profits being registered in Lisbon.

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Not everything went badly for the Portuguese. The valuable trading post at Macau was becoming increasingly important. At the same time, the Japanese formalized Portugal’s right to trade in Nagasaki on a regular basis. Moreover, the Portuguese were still supplying Western Europe with most of its spices, although their monopoly was eroding steadily. More and more Portuguese were leaving the king’s service and going into business on their own. Even within the Estado da India, corruption was widespread, with agents using the space on royal ships for private gain.28 The political situation in Asia was changing and, along with it, the importance of the Portuguese spice trade. The Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids encouraged overland caravan trade, and Arab and Gujarati merchants began sending spices and Indian cottons up the Red Sea in convoys with armed escort vessels. From the Red Sea these goods went by caravan to Cairo or to the great emporium at Aleppo. Apparently, the Portuguese were never well informed about the potential of this overland trade route and had long underestimated its ability to compete with the maritime route around Africa. The decade 1555–1565 brought new economic and social developments worldwide. These developments greatly favored the expansion of longdistance trade and turned it into a global network. China became a major exporter of quality silk and silk textiles and became a voracious consumer of silver. The Peruvian and Mexican silver mines reached full production, as did the silver mines of southern Japan. Brazil was becoming the world’s leading producer of sugar—also the world’s leading consumer of African slaves. In Europe, Phillip II replaced his aging father in 1556 and used the American silver to start rebuilding the Habsburg Empire in Europe. He forced his creditors to accept a restructuring of royal debts, made peace with France (1559), and pulled together a fleet that broke the Ottoman siege of Malta. Not all his reforms were politically astute. Philip tried to reorganize the government of the seventeen provinces by restructuring the Catholic episcopate and adding bishops to provincial councils. He also attempted to raise taxes while reinforcing the power of the Catholic Church. By 1566 the Low Countries were in open rebellion. The resulting war created the new Dutch Republic, which quickly became Europe’s most powerful maritime country. The Ottoman Empire, having conquered most of the Middle East, finally took control of Baghdad in 1534. Throughout the century the Ottomans continued their policy of encouraging trade. Having earlier opened the Red Sea route, they now opened the Persian Gulf routes between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. The spices and Asian goods being carried on these routes were being shipped not just to the Ottoman Empire but also

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to Venice, which was again competing with the Portuguese for European markets. By 1600 the Safavid and Mughal Empires were prospering. In India the young emperor Akbar had by 1572 expanded his empire so that it stretched from Orissa on the Bay of Bengal to Surat, now the most important port both in the Mughal Empire and on the Indian Ocean. By 1600, in addition to its role as an emporium for trade across the Indian Ocean, Surat had become the port of entry for imports into the increasingly prosperous Mughal Empire, a market of some 110 million people.29 Surat also was the port of entry for luxury goods on their way to Multan and Lahore and the camel caravans bound for the Middle East. Meanwhile, the Mughal government limited Portuguese trade at Surat in retaliation for the Estado da India’s periodic attacks on Muslim cargo and pilgrimage ships. Thanks to his management of key issues, Akbar turned India into a peaceful market second only in size to China. Concurrently, Shah Abbas I came to power in the Safavid Empire (1588), bringing forty years of stable government, better roads, new caravansaries, and improved trade in the area that is now Iran. Meanwhile, on the eastern end of Eurasia, Tokugawa Ieyasu ended the prolonged civil war in Japan in 1600. He became the first effective shogun and made unified Japan a major player in the East Asian commercial world. In part his success was due to an ongoing ad hoc arrangement with the Portuguese for the export of Japanese silver. In 1571 the Japanese authorized the Portuguese to begin annual trade at Nagasaki, opening the door to a lucrative Portuguese role in the Japanese silver trade. The Portuguese colony on Macau, recognized by China in 1557, allowed the Portuguese to trade directly with merchants from the Chinese mainland. By taking Japanese silver to Macau and reselling it, the Portuguese circumvented the Chinese prohibition on direct imports to China from Japan, and developed a tremendously profitable business in the process. While much of Asia was relatively peaceful in the era 1550–1600, Europe and America experienced important changes, and the Habsburg Empire in Europe fought to survive. The change started with the abdication of Charles V in 1556. Considering his inheritance ungovernable, Charles bequeathed Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, and the Holy Roman Empire to his younger brother, Ferdinand. The wealthier half of his empire, including Castile, Aragon, Naples, and the Low Countries, along with the American Empire, went to his son, the thirty-year-old Philip II. Meanwhile, Spain’s American Empire was going through a rapid change. The Caribbean, Mexico, and Peru all started as exciting discoveries, but by 1540 the empire was drifting toward an agricultural economy like that of

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southern Spain, based on cereals and pigs, cattle, sheep, and horses. While this promised the kind of society many of the conquistadores preferred, the returns to the Crown and to European investors left something to be desired. In this context, the most important event of the sixteenth-century world was the discovery (1540s) and development (1550s) of immensely rich silver mines in Mexico and Peru. Located in isolated mountain ranges in an American Empire with a rapidly declining labor supply, it took several years to develop the mines; but by 1560 the mines were in full production and flooding Europe with American silver. Helped by the first significant revenues from the American silver mines and a restructuring of the Crown’s debts, Philip II extracted a peace treaty from France in 1559, ending an expensive and pointless war. This gave Philip a moment of peace during which he could shore up the Habsburgs’ reputation. He rebuilt his Mediterranean fleet, began to reorganize government in the Low Countries (with disastrous results; see chapter 3), and revived Columbus’s idea of getting to Asia by sailing west. As we saw in chapter 4, Philip launched an expedition that would make good the Castilian claim to the Philippines, a claim established by the Magellan expedition in 1520. Philip ordered the viceroy of Mexico to send an expedition that would create a Spanish base and open trade between Mexico and Asia. The expedition, launched in 1564 under the command of Miguel López de Legazpi, created one of the most improbable, but durable, commercial connections of the Age of Sail. Once Legazpi had a secure base at Cebu in the Philippines, the expert navigator Andrés de Urdaneta borrowed one of Legazpi’s ships and, on June 1, 1565, set sail for Mexico. Finding the right combination of currents and winds, de Urdaneta reached California and then headed south along the coast until he reached Acapulco on October 8, 1565, just four months after he set sail from the Philippines. He had calculated that, like the North Atlantic, the Pacific had prevailing eastbound winds at around forty degrees north latitude. The voyage was a strategic success, but after four months at sea without fresh provisions or water, sixteen of the forty-four crew members had died; the rest were so ill they could barely bring the ship into port.

Toward a Different World, 1565–1600 In the Philippines, Legazpi, with a combination of diplomacy and force, gained control of Manila in 1571. Manila was a small port that was part of the spice trade between the Maluku Islands, Japan, and Korea and was nominally subordinate to the Sultanate of Brunei on Borneo. The intervention

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of a few Spanish soldiers, supported by mercenaries from other parts of the Philippines, allowed Legazpi to capture the city. The first Manila galleon with a significant cargo of silver arrived in 1571. For the next 250 years, these galleons sailed from Acapulco to Manila and back, carrying American silver and Chinese silks. Philip II’s biggest failure was the loss of the northern part of the Low Countries. For forty years after 1566, Philip faced a tremendously expensive war in northwestern Europe. Yet, despite the expense of the Dutch War and the concurrent war with England, Philip managed some notable successes. Perhaps more important than the Dutch War, Philip stopped the Ottoman Empire’s expansion into Europe. When Philip became king, the Turkish border in the Balkans was within a hundred miles of Vienna, and the Ottoman navy controlled all North Africa. In 1564 the Turks began a siege of Malta, the gateway between the two halves of the Mediterranean. Philip broke the siege in 1565, forcing the Turks to withdraw from Malta. Then, in a huge naval battle at Lepanto in 1571, Philip II prevented a Turkish invasion of Italy. Philip’s second great success was the acquisition of the entire Portuguese Empire. We saw earlier that the king of Portugal led a disastrous invasion of Morocco in 1578. The king was killed in battle, leaving the elderly cardinal archbishop of Lisbon as the next king. When the archbishop died in 1580, Philip II had a legitimate claim as the next male heir to the Portuguese throne. Not taking anything for granted, he sent thirty thousand Spanish troops into Portugal to make his point.30 While the acquisition of the Portuguese Empire was a major coup, it was expensive, as were the campaigns against the Turks. The second half of the sixteenth century saw two other countries move into Asian trade. Long in the shadow of the Habsburgs’ European Empire, by 1560 the small country of England had worked its way through the Reformation, first under Henry VIII (ruled 1509–1547) and then under Henry’s only son, Edward VI. Edward died in 1553 when he was fifteen, but to the extent that he influenced religious policy during his turbulent reign, Edward favored an extreme form of Protestantism. When he died, the next legal heir was Princess Mary, who reigned from 1553 to 1558. Daughter of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, Mary I was a devout Catholic. She restored Catholicism to England and married Philip II of Spain. Philip spent almost two years in England but returned to Spain when Mary was unable to have children. Mary died in 1558, bringing Henry VIII’s last surviving heir to the throne as Elizabeth I (ruled 1559–1603). England had far fewer military resources than the Habsburgs, but Elizabeth could see that eventually England would get drawn into the Dutch Revolt.

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Elizabeth was astute enough to postpone war with Spain by “secretly” sending troops to help the Dutch while she built up her navy. When Philip II finally decided to invade England, he put together the huge, well-disciplined Spanish Armada, which sailed for England in 1588. The armada was supposed to meet a Spanish army and a fleet of barges built to carry troops massed on the coast of Belgium and assist in the invasion of England. The Spanish fleet maintained its discipline in the face of English attacks but was unable to connect with the Spanish army. Anchored in an exposed harbor, the fleet faced a strong onshore wind that pushed its ships toward the beach. At this point the English sent in several fire ships, creating chaos as the Spaniards cut loose from their anchors and tried to keep off the shore while evading the fire ships. The Spanish fleet had little choice but to flee north around Scotland. About two-thirds of the armada made it back to Spain.

Spain and Trans-Pacific Trade While Spain made little headway against the Dutch and the English, its trans-Pacific trade grew rapidly. The outbound ships from Acapulco to Manila carried American silver, with extra space used to carry the Castilian and Mexican commodities preferred by Europeans in Manila. Return cargoes included spices, porcelains, and beeswax, but the most important item was Chinese silk. Imports from Manila to Acapulco found a ready market in both Mexico and Peru. The Mexico City merchants, who provided most of the commercial capital, made a 50 to 100 percent profit on their investments. The trans-Pacific exchange rates were so favorable that Chinese silks, forwarded to Seville by way of Mexico, competed favorably with silks arriving via the Middle Eastern caravan routes. In the first thirty years of trade across the Pacific, as many as half a dozen ships from either Acapulco or Lima headed for Manila, and the Merchant Guild of Mexico City began forwarding some of its Chinese silks to merchants in Seville. As a result, the Merchant Guild of Seville submitted a protest to the king, claiming that the Mexicans were infringing on their monopoly. Whatever the merits of their case, the Merchant Guild of Seville was an important source of credit for Philip’s government; as of 1593, Philip limited the Manila trade to two galleons per year. That remained the official limit for the remaining history of the Manila galleons, although there is an ongoing controversy over how much silver and how many ships actually made the trip. The Manila galleons were owned and administered by the Spanish government. When they sailed west from Acapulco, in addition to private funds,

Map 8.2.  The Spanish Pacific: Prevailing Winds and Route of the Manila Galleons. The southern, westbound trip generally took two to four months; the eastbound route took five to six months, dropping to four months in the 1700s.

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they always carried a large shipment of government-owned silver sent from the Mexican treasury to subsidize the Spanish colony in the Philippines. The government granted permits for passengers to travel on the Manila galleons and allocated cargo space to a wide variety of merchants. Over time these allotments of cargo space became private property and were sold or transferred to other users. As smaller merchants sold their allotments, most of the cargo space accumulated in the hands of wealthy merchants in Manila and Mexico City. The policy of limiting the cross-Pacific trade to two ships a year put a premium on cargo and passenger space. This encouraged the shipyards in Manila to make the galleons larger, which also made them less manageable. Whatever their size, the galleons left Manila seriously overloaded, with the result that over the long history of the Manila galleons, one in nine was lost on the way to Acapulco, while the mortality rate of passengers and crew on ships that completed the trip was as high as 25 percent. These losses are very similar to those experienced by Portuguese ships sailing from Lisbon to Goa. The contractors in Manila who supplied the water and other provisions for the trip were corrupt, and on the four- to six-month trip from Manila to Acapulco, many of the supplies spoiled before they could be used. If anything prolonged the voyage beyond five months, scurvy, dehydration, and dysentery afflicted almost everyone. The trans-Pacific trade was extremely profitable, especially for the merchants of Mexico City and Manila, who invested in cargo but seldom took the risk of leaving home. The beginning of regular trade between Mexico and the Philippines changed Asian commerce and helped turn Mexico City into the major financial center of the world. The importance of the silver to trade in the South China Sea is suggested by the number and origin of the ships that put in to Manila. Between 1577 and 1612 a total of 654 ships called at Manila. Twenty-five were Japanese and forty-five were Portuguese; the remaining 584 ships were Chinese. The point made by those numbers is that Manila relied almost completely on Chinese merchants and shippers to dispose of American silver and provide silks and other valuable goods for the Mexican and Peruvian markets. The city also depended on Chinese merchants and ships to provide much of its food, labor, and mechanical skills.31 The final irony in this phase of European expansion was that, no matter how much silver they produced, the Spaniards never got past Manila as a doorway into Asia. Despite early attempts to establish factors in the Maluku Islands and a short-lived fort on Taiwan, the Spaniards remained on the periphery of the Asian economy. Even during the union of the Spanish and

Figure 8.2.   Malay and Chinese Ships Arriving in Manila to Trade Asian Products for American Silver, 1616. The ships marked “H” are Malay or Indonesian; the ships marked “K” are Chinese. “A” marks the Bay of Manila. (Courtesy Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

Figure 8.3.   Port of Acapulco, Mexico, Late Sixteenth Century. Hot, humid, and prone to tropical fevers, Acapulco was a ghost town much of the year and came alive only when the Manila galleons were preparing to leave or expected to return. (Courtesy of the Benson Latin American Collection, University of Texas at Austin)

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Portuguese crowns (1580–1640), the Portuguese in Macau refused Spanish access to their port. The only other way to connect with the Chinese market was through the Southsea Chinese trade diaspora. These Chinese merchants controlled most of the trade in the South China Sea, and its members had direct access to China itself. The Spaniards soon discovered that their access to Asia depended on the Southsea Chinese, although Manila also traded with Japan, the Portuguese, and India, the latter connection by way of the Armenian trade network. The silver brought on the Manila galleons was an additional stimulus to Asian trade and the Asian economy, but it also had implications for Spain and her American Empire. Officially, Mexico and Peru were ruled from Madrid, but Madrid was vitally dependent on American silver. Organized from Mexico City, the silver trade created a wealthy and politically powerful economic community in Mexico, making it a key link in the European and world economies. Spain depended on American silver to fund its international position in Europe, but after about 1610 the merchants in Mexico City found that investments in the developing Mexican economy were more profitable than trade with Spain. More and more American silver was either used for illicit trade with England, the Dutch Republic, and France or used for direct trade with Asia. As a result, by 1648 Spain was impoverished and the Habsburg Empire in Europe was defeated, while Spain’s Mexican colony prospered.

CHAPTER NINE

Europeans and Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century

By 1600 the changes of the late sixteenth century had added two new countries to the list of European maritime powers. England was developing a new textile industry and could put a respectable naval force to sea. The Dutch Republic had separated from Spain, taking with it many of the merchants and entrepreneurs who had made Antwerp an economic center. The Dutch economy was growing, and the newly independent Dutch Republic was soon to be the most important commercial country in Europe. Spain and Portugal were still the two most prominent players in European power politics and in world trade, but the Dutch had forced Spain to recognize their existence by agreeing to a truce in the War of Independence. England, meanwhile, had raided Spain’s main naval base at Cadiz and had thwarted two Spanish invasions, in 1588 and 1596. For most of the sixteenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese had kept the English from using the route around Africa to the East, but by 1600 the Dutch Republic and England were challenging that power. The 1630s saw the Dutch and the English challenging Spanish and Portuguese control over the Africa route and were literally pushing the Portuguese aside. In 1648 the Dutch Republic forced Spain to recognize Dutch independence, reinforcing the Dutch Republic’s dominance in European maritime trade. By 1689 England had taken the lead from the Dutch after defeating them in a series of naval wars, after which England then brought the Dutch William of Orange to England as King William III and co-regent with Queen Mary II. In the process, England surpassed the Dutch as a maritime power. 173

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England Looks to the East The search for access to Asian goods began in England in the 1550s, during the reign of Mary I (1553–1558). The first English initiative seems implausible to the modern eye, since it involved getting Asian spices by way of the Arctic Ocean, Moscow, and the Safavid Empire. The proposal shows the lengths to which English merchants were willing to go to get a supply of spices. In 1555 a group of investors formed the Muscovy Company, ostensibly to promote trade between England and Moscow. It planned to reach Asia by sailing north around Scandinavia to the White Sea and the Russian port of Archangel. Merchants and goods would then travel overland almost seven hundred miles to Moscow. Since the Multani merchants of India were present in Moscow, it might have been possible to buy spices there, but the English project also included sending factors (agents) two thousand miles from Moscow down the Volga River to the Caspian Sea and then to the Safavid Empire—a distance of two thousand miles. For various reasons, including Russian vested interests and clumsy English diplomacy, the czar never gave the English permission to go beyond Moscow. In any case, English merchants appeared in Moscow in the 1560s and developed a substantial trade in hemp, tallow, and rope. The Charter of the Muscovy Company also had a clause giving the company a monopoly on whaling south of Spitsbergen Island, another small source of profit, but the company was never able to develop trade in Asian spices by way of Moscow.

The Eastern Mediterranean While the Muscovy Company was an implausible way to get access to Asian goods, by the 1570s the English were developing a better connection. In the wake of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), the Ottoman Turks needed to rebuild their artillery. The best large cannons of that era were made of bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, and England had important tin mines. The Turks also needed small arms and lead balls for their infantry. The two countries negotiated a formal treaty in 1580, allowing the Turks to buy the war materiel they wanted, while the English took home currants, indigo, olive oil, wine, alum, and raw cotton. The treaty of 1580 also allowed the English to establish permanent trading posts or factories in Constantinople (1583) and Smyrna (1620). The Levant Company then set up its eastern headquarters in Aleppo (1586),1 a major emporium for the caravan trade on the route from the Persian Gulf and the Safavid Empire to the Mediterranean port of Isken-

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derun. To take advantage of the treaty with the Ottomans, English trading companies active in the Eastern Mediterranean worked together to create a larger version of the Levant Company in 1592. The Levant Company did not engage in trade itself, but provided offices, port facilities, and brokerage services in the Eastern Mediterranean for its merchant members, with agencies as far inland as Isfahan. The Levant Company ships exported both local Turkish products, like dried fruit and alum, and Asian goods that had crossed the Ottoman Empire to its Mediterranean ports. The Levant Company also assisted its members by transferring silver from Europe to Aleppo for merchants engaged in trade farther east, an illustration of the movement of silver eastward to compensate for Europe’s lack of salable products. While the English bought silk produced in the area around Aleppo, they also bought the Persian and Chinese silk that had reached the Aleppo market by caravan. In 1617 the shah created a state monopoly governing the Safavid silk trade and appointed Armenians to administer it. As they negotiated with the Armenians for Persian silk, the English developed Armenian contacts that allowed them to do business with Armenians in Surat or Manila. The Armenians preferred to export Persian silk through Ottoman Aleppo because it gave them access to customers who paid with American silver that had come by way of Europe. That silver stimulated the Safavid economy and let its merchants buy imports from India. As the English economy developed its wool textile industry under Elizabeth I, the Levant Company exported increasing quantities of English wool textiles to Ottoman markets. The Ottomans, like the other “Gunpowder Empires,” were always ready to buy European weapons, and the English sold them artillery, muskets, and military supplies as well as silver to satisfy England’s growing appetite for Middle Eastern and Asian products. The bottom line, however, is that, like the Portuguese and the Dutch, the English could not sell enough European commodities to pay for their imports from the Middle East and regularly brought large quantities of silver from Europe to pay for the goods they bought. As the first Dutch and English ships arrived in the Indian Ocean in the 1590s, they headed first for Java and the Maluku Islands in search of spices for markets in London and Amsterdam. Unfortunately, several shiploads of spices returning at the same time sent European prices down dramatically. That, and experience in the East Indies, persuaded the businessmen of both England and the Dutch Republic to set up large joint stock companies that could control European marketing and guarantee an adequate supply of the most important spices. The Dutch maintained their interest in Java and the East Indies, while the English soon shifted their emphasis to India and the

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Mughal Empire. Given their more limited resources (see below), the English established themselves within a powerful and well-organized empire, while the Dutch preferred to set up an independent stronghold away from any of the stronger Asian states. This had advantages for the English since, at much less expense than incurred by the Dutch, the Mughal Empire provided the English with a degree of protection. The Mughals regulated the behavior of England’s European competition and, with their base at Surat, gave the English access to a market second only to that of China. Supplying a national market at home, the unprecedented length of supply lines, the number of ships needed, and the complexities of extracting the right commodities from the Asian commercial economy required private enterprise on an unprecedented scale. The financial innovation that made this possible was the joint stock company. Forerunner of the modern corporation, the English and Dutch East India Companies merit a certain amount of attention. As we suggested earlier, most businesses in early modern Europe were partnerships. Typically, most of the partners were members of the same extended family, allowing the family to maintain control of the business. A partner, however, owned his piece of a company personally. He could sell it back to the business, but he could not sell it to anyone else without permission from the other partners. Historically, the partnership form of business allowed merchants to accumulate capital to pay for new ships and cargoes, and to spread any losses among all the partners, but it was limited to the resources available within a family-based commercial network. A joint stock company raised capital without having to depend on family networks, relying instead on the more impersonal sale of standardized shares. The men organizing the company issued hundreds, even thousands, of shares, each with the same modest face value. As a document, the share simply said that whoever possessed the share was entitled to a portion of company profit. Since each share had a small face value, thousands of people with moderate incomes could afford to buy them. The additional attraction for the small investor was its flexibility as an investment. If a shareholder ran short of funds, he could sell some of his shares on the stock exchange. If the company was doing well, potential buyers might even pay more than the face value of the share. By selling shares to thousands of shareholders spread throughout middle- and upper-class society, the promoters tapped huge amounts of capital, even though the participation by individual shareholders could be quite small. The joint stock company was not a new idea in 1600. It had been used in England for smaller enterprises such as the Muscovy Company and the

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Virginia Company, but never on the scale projected for either the English or the Dutch East India Company. The English East India Company was put together by a group of wealthy promoters who obtained the charter and arranged to sell the shares, promising implausible rates of return. Technically, the shareholders elected the managers. In practice, since few shareholders attended shareholder meetings, an inner cadre of major investors, who often selected themselves to run the company, decided how to invest the capital. Most shareholders were effectively separate from management. The Dutch East India Company was also a joint stock company but had a distinctive, politically driven organization. The central office was run by a seventeen-man board of directors. Each of the Dutch Republic’s six major seaports had its own chamber, with its own elected board. The six chambers each chose members of the Board of Seventeen according to the amount of capital they raised. This gave Amsterdam eight of the seventeen seats and virtual control of the board that ran the company. The company issued a limited amount of “preferred” stock to a few dozen major participants and thousands of shares of ordinary stock that could be sold on the stock market. While the actual amounts of capital raised by these two countries are just numbers to a modern observer, the scope of these projects was enormous for their time and place. The initial sale of shares by the English East India Company yielded 63,000 pounds sterling. This was the equivalent of 20 percent of Queen Elizabeth I’s annual revenue from the entire country of England. That makes it an impressive project by English standards, but it seems small next to the Dutch company. The Dutch East India Company raised 550,000 English pounds, which is eight and half times the English figure and close to two years of Elizabeth’s annual revenue. Chartered as joint stock companies, each East India Company enjoyed a monopoly on the sale of spices from Asia in its home country. Unlike most chartered companies, however, the Dutch and English East India Companies were also granted the right to act as governments in their respective empires.

England: A Low-Budget Trading Empire Compared with its Dutch counterpart, the English company had relatively limited capital reserves. The English East India Company put most of its capital into outfitting ships and providing their captains with the silver and European products that would interest Asian customers. Rather than invest in infrastructure, the English EIC seems to have assumed that its ships and captains could participate in Asian trade without much protection beyond a few ships’ guns.

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During the EIC’s first years, its ships and agents were simply new participants in Asian trade. When an English ship arrived in port looking for cargo, the captain and his secretary would go ashore in search of wholesale markets and landowners with unsold export commodities. Over time, the English captains routinely sought one another out and exchanged information on navigation, local politics, and economic conditions.2 The company’s first voyages went directly to Bantam, on the western end of the island of Java, for pepper; but by 1608 their emphasis had shifted to the seaport and emporium at Surat, which became England’s main base and first port of call. The company soon decided that having each captain act as a purchasing agent was inefficient and began to establish factors, or purchasing agents, who resided all year in eastern ports. Their job was to buy goods when prices were low and store them until a company ship arrived. In places where ships called frequently, the factor was given a staff of four or five assistants. The English EIC seems to have had no consistent policy regarding the fortification of these trading posts. Some factors asked for fortification and were ignored. Others were given orders to build a fort and ignored them. In at least one case, the local factor got tired of maintaining his fort and simply closed it down, paid off the mercenaries in the garrison, and sent them away.3 Once the English had been in the Indian Ocean long enough to be familiar with military and commercial conditions in the area, they began to exploit Portugal’s weakening position in the western half of the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese network between India and East Africa was in financial trouble. Profits and revenues were falling as Portuguese officials traded outside the royal monopoly, sometimes profiting from the shipment of spices to the Middle East, even though in their official capacity they were supposed to be preventing that kind of trade. Asian merchants revived the old routes through the Middle East, a trend reinforced by trade-friendly mainland governments. The English soon discovered that the Mughal government in India was willing to allow them to trade in Indian ports and, in fact, regarded the English as a useful counterweight to the Portuguese and their periodic attacks on Muslim pilgrimage ships. The English East India Company also gave its agents wide latitude for participating in Asia’s local trade. At first this was on a semi-licit ad hoc basis, but it was formally legalized after 1660. The result was a rich source of information, both official and private, that allowed the company to function more efficiently.4 In this way the English gained hands-on knowledge of the local individuals and family networks that moved goods around. This in turn allowed the company to shift away from its initial emphasis on spices to a

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range of more basic goods that could be sold to the growing middle-income markets of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. Over the course of the seventeenth century, the English EIC tried to penetrate the lucrative Safavid-Persian silk trade. The main obstacle to an English EIC role in the Safavid silk trade was neither the Dutch nor the Portuguese but English merchants who belonged to the English Levant Company. The Levant Company had been established in Mediterranean ports and markets of the Ottoman Empire for several years before the English East India Company reached the Indian Ocean shores of the Safavid Empire. Through its Asian headquarters in Aleppo, Levant Company merchants were buying silk from the Safavid Empire with the help of Armenians from New Julfa. They sent the goods by caravan the short distance to Iskenderun on the Mediterranean coast. There the goods were loaded on the ships of Levant Company merchants and taken to England. The English East India Company tried to negotiate with these same Armenians for an agreement that would divert silk to their ships at Bandar Abbas, at the entrance to the Persian Gulf. From there company ships would carry the silk around Africa to Europe. The Armenians pointed out that they had a variety of outlets for their silk and saw no point in committing to a monopoly with the English East India Company. Furthermore, they did not believe the English EIC had the capital needed to finance the silk trade on the scale the Armenians required. Until the EIC was revised and recapitalized in the 1660s, it depended on short-term loans and commercial credit from Gujarati Indian merchants. Later, even when the English EIC had more capital to work with, they still depended on local merchants for commercial credit. They also maintained a close relationship with the Armenian community in India. The EIC borrowed funds from the Armenians as short-term loans and arranged to use the Armenian merchants’ long-distance courier service. This allowed the English to send correspondence overland through the Middle East to the Mediterranean and then to England. This way, the home office knew what was coming on the ships en route long before they arrived and could adjust the markets to maximize profits. The Armenians proved to be valuable allies. They had been a trusted part of the Indian commercial networks for at least two centuries. They not only provided the English with credit but also helped the English establish a business relationship with the Gujarati merchants and helped them get silver from Manila. Provided annually by the shipload from Mexico, silver in Manila was cheaper than silver bought in Europe and then shipped to the Far East.

Map 9.1.   Principal Portuguese, Dutch, and English Trade Centers (ca. 1700)

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The Underlying Reality Like the Portuguese and the Dutch, the English EIC could not find enough in the way of European products to pay for the Eastern and Middle Eastern goods they wanted to take back to England. As a result, the English East India Company sent large quantities of silver to its agents in India and elsewhere.5 Despite complaints from economists of the seventeenth century, who equated national wealth with the amount of bullion within the country, the English EIC pointed out that to buy goods in Asia, the company had to buy silver that came from America and reexport it to Asia.6 Through the 1630s, English EIC ships bound for India often carried nothing but the silver they needed for operating in Asian markets.7 The English EIC was always buying silver for its trade with India and China, and in the first half of the seventeenth century the company bought it on the European market. The English EIC also knew that silver was relatively cheap in Manila, but neither the Dutch nor the English were allowed to trade there. The English got around this prohibition by turning to their Armenian colleagues in India.8 The Armenians had been able to establish themselves in Manila because they were useful to the Spaniards in many kinds of transactions. The Armenians operated their own ships and flew a distinctive Armenian flag, and the Spaniards treated them as subjects of an independent country. Secretly working on behalf of the English, the Armenians took English-owned Indian cloth and other products to Manila and traded them for American silver. The Armenians then delivered the silver to the English East India Company offices at Chennai, Mumbai, or Kolkata. In the process, the Armenians made a good profit and the English got silver more cheaply than if they bought it in Europe. The English East India Company, unlike its Dutch counterpart, maintained only modest military assets. Beyond a few small forts with garrisons of mercenaries, the company did not maintain a significant land-based military until the 1660s, while the Dutch maintained a colonial army of ten thousand troops. At sea, the EIC maintained a minimal navy; in 1623 the English EIC had exactly two warships based in Mumbai, while the Dutch had sixty-six ships active in Asia.9 The first fortified English trading post was built in Surat in 1619, after careful negotiations with the Mughal government. The next, in Chennai (Madras), was not built until twenty years later. Meanwhile, the company got caught up in English politics. The 1640s in England saw civil war, the execution of the king, and the beginnings of a military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell. In that chaotic environment a

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group of speculators tried to start a second English East India Company that would exploit areas the first East India Company was ignoring (see chapter 6). It accomplished little except for two abortive attempts to colonize Madagascar in the 1640s. As late as 1650 the English EIC had only twenty-three factories, most of them in India, and only two had serious fortifications. The entire English East India Company had only ninety paid employees in India, hardly an army of conquest. The EIC’s Asian headquarters in Surat were only there by agreement with the government of the Mughal Empire. The English got the nearby island of Mumbai and its decrepit fortress in 1661 but were slow to develop it. When the English kept insisting on more privileges, the Mughal emperor refused and promptly sent the Mughal navy to force the Mumbai fortress to surrender. By the 1680s, however, the English East India Company was wealthier and more profitable than its Dutch competitor. Until about 1740 the English EIC was focused primarily on the commercial and financial opportunities inherent in the Indian economy and its “lively market in commercial, fiscal and military opportunities.”10 Its factors not only were active in private trade but also mobilized exports from India to Europe through partnerships with Indian merchants who were prominent in the intra-Asian “country trade,” transporting Asian commodities from one part of the region to another.

The Dutch Empire and the Dutch East India Company The prosperity that came to the Portuguese with the Japanese silver trade lasted until the 1630s but then proved to be very fragile.11 The Portuguese merchants had borrowed large amounts of money from Japanese merchants and bankers. The shogun saw this as making the Japanese business community vulnerable to Portuguese preferences. The shogun also suspected that, despite a Japanese prohibition on Christian missionaries in Japan, the Portuguese were protecting Christian missionaries. Not surprisingly, the Dutch did what they could to reinforce that suspicion. This prompted the Japanese authorities to expel all Portuguese from the country in 1639. In one stroke they destroyed the apparent prosperity of Portuguese Asia and left the Dutch as Japan’s sole European contact. The loss of the Japanese silver trade, along with other setbacks, reduced the Portuguese trade diaspora to a few small ports. The problem worsened with Portugal’s declaration of independence from Spain. This war for independence (1640–1668) reduced the flow of men and materials to Asia and made it difficult to trade with Spanish-controlled Manila. During the second

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half of the 1600s, the Portuguese lost most of their trading posts in East Africa. The Sultanate of Oman, using the same tactics the Portuguese used to build its own trading empire, peeled off one Portuguese port after another, starting in 1650 with Muscat on the Persian Gulf.12 The low point for Portugal came when Oman captured the Portuguese port and massive fortifications at Mombasa in 1698. Meanwhile, the Dutch War of Independence dragged on for many years (1568–1609, 1621–1648). Spain had been forced to accept a truce in 1609, but it stubbornly renewed the war when the truce ran out in 1621. For practical purposes, the Dutch were not only independent by 1585 but also remarkably rich. The Spanish Low Countries had been one of the wealthiest and most advanced parts of Europe. When the seventeen provinces of the Spanish Low Countries were divided into the Dutch north and the Spanishruled south, the political situation in Europe presented the new Dutch Republic with a unique opportunity. Most of the trade that had made Antwerp wealthy moved north to the new Dutch Republic. This was possible because of the complicated politics of the Habsburg Empire in Europe. At the end of the fifteenth century, the seventeen provinces of the Spanish Low Countries had been ruled by the Habsburg family in Vienna. They became part of the Spanish Habsburg Empire at the beginning of the sixteenth century and were one of the richest parts of Charles V’s Empire. Europe’s sixteenth-century economic expansion was concentrated in the Low Countries, and the coordinating center for that economic expansion was Antwerp, the largest city in the seventeen provinces. Long before Dutch independence, Antwerp and Amsterdam, both cities in the Low Countries, had developed an economic partnership. The physical volume of trade passing through Antwerp had outgrown the city’s modest harbor, and merchants who handled bulky commodities had taken to sending cargoes of wheat, barley, lumber, and building stone to Amsterdam, which had better dock and storage facilities. Antwerp-based shipping companies and merchants that used Amsterdam as a kind of out-port found it convenient to have branch offices in Amsterdam. When the Portuguese started bringing spices around Africa to Europe, they discovered they had to rely on the Flemish, Dutch, and German merchants of Antwerp to distribute the spices throughout Europe. The Portuguese had trouble finding enough experienced merchants and financiers in Portugal to staff the Estado da India, and before the Dutch Revolution they routinely recruited Dutch and Flemish merchants to positions in their Asian trade diaspora. When the Dutch Revolution got seriously under way, two things happened to help the rebels.

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Map 9.2.  Partition of the Spanish Low Countries into the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Netherlands

They were able to block access to Antwerp’s harbor, which crippled that city’s foreign trade. Many of the Dutch and Flemish family businesses that had their headquarters in Antwerp and branches in Amsterdam simply moved their headquarters to their offices in Amsterdam, leaving a small of-

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fice in Antwerp.13 In this way they quietly moved most of the commerce that had made Antwerp prosperous to Amsterdam and the new Dutch Republic. The second important development involved the Dutch and Flemish employees of the Portuguese Estado da India who had come from the seven provinces of the now independent Dutch Republic. They had to decide between their loyalty to their home province and loyalty to their Portuguese employers. This became even more difficult in 1580, when Philip II took over the entire Portuguese Empire. Dutch and Flemish employees of Portugal suddenly found themselves working for the Spanish king who was trying to defeat the new Dutch Republic, which contained their hometowns and home provinces. Many of them quietly resigned their jobs in the Portuguese empire and joined their family firms in Amsterdam. Their knowledge of the inner workings of the Portuguese empire proved invaluable when the Dutch reached the Indian Ocean. The most famous example is Jan Huyghen van Linschoten (1563–1611), who spent several years as secretary to the Portuguese viceroy in Goa. Once in Amsterdam, van Linschoten published topsecret Portuguese maps of Asian ports and commercial guides, making them available to the Dutch commercial world.14 In 1596 a sizable Dutch fleet arrived at a small port on the northwest shore of Java, a port destined to become the port city of Batavia. Variously called Sunda Kelapa or Jayakarta, the Dutch hoped to influence local authorities and negotiate a treaty that would allow them to trade there on a regular basis. Located near the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, the little port was well positioned to support trade connections that ranged from Japan to Sri Lanka. As we have seen, Dutch and English experience in the spice trade during the 1590s showed that it was easy to glut the European market for spices; too many independent participants would drive down the price of spices in Europe. The English solution came in 1600, when they founded the English East India Company. The Dutch followed in 1602, consolidating their various East India merchants into the Dutch East India Company, with several times more capital than its English counterpart.15 Both companies had a monopoly on sales within their respective countries. Both were joint stock companies, and although neither was a modern corporation, they were able to raise more capital than a traditional family-based partnership. By 1611 the Dutch had established a route from Europe that ended in Batavia, a route they would use for over a century. As they passed the Cape of Good Hope, instead of sailing north along the African coast, the Dutch sailed east across the open Indian Ocean, following the prevailing winds at latitude forty degrees south. When the captain and the navigator agreed that

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they were south of the Sunda Strait between Java and Sumatra, the captain turned north, aiming for the strait and nearby Batavia. As they crossed the southern Indian Ocean, Dutch ships sometimes sailed far enough east to encounter Australia, and by 1627 various Dutch encounters with Australia allowed them to map its west coast. This southern route had the advantage that ships outbound from Holland avoided the Portuguese, who sailed north along the east coast of Africa, and the English, who sailed up the east coast of Madagascar. Since the Dutch were at war with either the Portuguese or the English through much of the seventeenth century, this southern route offered serious advantages. The disadvantage was that it involved an open ocean voyage of almost eight thousand miles, with few places to get fresh water and food. A modern map implies that ships could have stopped on the west coast of Australia, but those that did had consistently violent encounters with the Australian Aborigines. It has been suggested that hostility to Europeans reflected awareness among Aborigines that Europeans brought deadly diseases. Whatever the reason for Aborigines’ hostility toward the Dutch in the seventeenth century, it did not, at that time, stem from earlier contact with foreign visitors and the diseases they might carry.16 Once the Dutch were committed to using the southern route across the Indian Ocean, the port of Jayakarta was an obvious target for a Dutch takeover. The town was an autonomous dependency of the Sultanate of Bantam, and the sultan had earlier prevented the Portuguese from seizing it. Both the Dutch and the English wanted Jayakarta, but the sultan resisted both. In 1619 the Dutch captured the port, but only after a complicated battle against both the local government and the English, during which the town was burned to the ground. The Dutch renamed it Batavia and began building a fort, headquarters, and shipyard. Over the next twenty years they built an elaborate trade system that reached north to Japan and west to India and Sri Lanka. Taking advantage of its capital resources, the Dutch East India Company set about building a huge enterprise, at the heart of which was a well-fortified Batavia, with its shipyards, warehouses, and company bureaucracy. Batavia was, in turn, the coordinating center for a network of well-staffed and fortified purchasing factories or agencies. In its first years the Dutch EIC allowed its individual ship captains to negotiate for cargo, a strategy that forced it to invest in ships, manpower, and multiple negotiations, but did not require maintaining armed warships and forts. Similar to the Portuguese approach, this policy kept overhead down, but it meant dealing directly and repeatedly with indigenous markets and was vulnerable to changes in supply, price, and profits.

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Once the Dutch East India Company was in place, with ample capital to work with, the Dutch proceeded to build a large company, one with the resources to sustain long-term decisions despite short-term costs. They invested heavily in a company-supported army and navy and coerced producers into selling only to the Dutch East India Company. By investing in fortified ports and maintaining a substantial company army and navy, the Dutch incurred higher fixed costs than the Portuguese or English but assured themselves of high and steady profits in Amsterdam. This allowed the company to calculate potential risks and profits more accurately than if they depended on the commercial skills of individual shipmasters as they visited different ports. The system made the products it exported to Europe slightly more expensive because of higher overhead costs, but it produced more stable profits from year to year.17 The Dutch also tried to regulate the cost of acquiring spices. In contrast to the Portuguese network, where much of its trading was done by individual Portuguese traders, the Dutch East India Company operated through a bureaucracy of salaried accountants, bookkeepers, and purchasing agents. Ship captains and factors, as well as office staff, were paid salaries and not allowed to trade independently. By 1700 this bureaucracy employed about fifteen thousand people and was slow to respond to changing market conditions. In 1650 Batavia was the biggest and richest “European” city in seventeenth-century Asia. In 1700 it was the hub from which spoke-like trade routes radiated outward to Sri Lanka, India’s Coromandel Coast, the Tuangoo Kingdom (formerly Burma, now Myanmar), Melaka, Makassar, the Maluku Islands, Siam, Formosa, the Ryukyus, and Japan. While it was a success in terms of Dutch objectives, Batavia also demonstrates the degree to which even the well-capitalized Dutch depended on the collaboration of the Asian world around them. The Chinese community, already resident in Batavia when the Dutch took over, provided the contractors, laborers, and capital to build the Dutch fort at Batavia. The Dutch also depended on resident Southsea Chinese, their ships, and their relatives in China for much of their Chinese trade. The Dutch EIC was primarily interested in having a stable supply of spices and other Asian goods reach their European markets at profitable prices. Initially, this was a problem of controlling the trade routes, but increasingly Dutch policy shifted to control of actual production. This policy focused first on the production of spices, especially cloves and cardamom, commodities the Dutch forced the growers to sell exclusively to the Dutch EIR. In some cases, the Dutch systematically destroyed the trees of owners who tried to escape the Dutch monopoly.

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Figure 9.1.  Asian and European Ships Anchored at Batavia. (Hendrick Dubbels [painted ca 1650]; courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam)

By the eighteenth century, the Dutch were developing sugar plantations on Java and cinnamon plantations on Sri Lanka. On Java, many of the sugar plantations were actually in nearby Bantam and operated by Chinese owners and investors. Plantation agriculture brought a new demand for slaves analogous to that of the Atlantic world. The Indian Ocean slave trade was different from its Atlantic counterpart because, although some of the slaves came from Africa, most of them came from other countries bordering the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. As we saw in chapter 8, the Indian Ocean slave trade was centuries old and was part of the trade portfolios of merchants from a number of Indian Ocean merchant communities. In 1700 the demand for plantation labor was relatively new, and slavery in southern and southeastern Asia general was an urban phenomenon found in households rather than in the fields. As the Dutch East India Company expanded its plantations, it also took part in the slave trade, but the Dutch (and other European) participation was a small part of the Asian slave trade. In the two centuries from 1600 to 1799 the Dutch brought between 65,000 and 90,000 slaves to Batavia and Cape Town, suggesting a modest 325 to 450 a year.18 Although the Indian

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Ocean slave trade included many Africans, most slaves came from a variety of Asian societies. As a result, it fostered fewer racist stereotypes than the Atlantic slave trade. One of the continuing frustrations for the Dutch was their inability to trade directly with the Chinese. They spent years negotiating unsuccessfully with the Chinese government and with Chinese smugglers and pirates on the Fujian coast. In 1622, in hopes of gaining at least indirect access to China, the Dutch agreed to help China suppress piracy in the South China Sea in return for permission to build a fort on Taiwan. Fort Zeelandia served as a colonial base on Taiwan for forty years, functioning as a base for surreptitious trade with mainland China.19 Carried on by Chinese shippers, it was relatively easy to maintain a black market in the waning days of the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) but was more dangerous under the new Qing dynasty (1644–1912). Finally, in 1662, a well-armed Chinese fleet and army forced the Dutch to surrender and leave Taiwan. Between 1602 and 1640, as the Dutch built up their base in Batavia and created a network of factories, profits lagged behind expectations. Behind the scenes, the Dutch, like the Portuguese and the English, had difficulty paying for the goods they wanted to send to Europe. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch tried to compensate for this problem with profits from the intra-Asian trade, but those returns never paid for more than a part of the cargoes they sent home to Amsterdam. The remainder had to be paid for with silver. Merchants could always buy Chinese exports with silver. Silver reached the Asian market from Europe, Mexico, and Japan. Silver brought from Europe was the most expensive, since it had passed through the hands of several middlemen as it traveled from Mexico to Europe, then to the Mediterranean, then through the Middle Eastern economies, before reaching the South China Sea. Alternatively, modest amounts traveled around Africa in Portuguese ship to Goa before reaching the Chinese market. American silver, brought directly from Mexico by the Manila galleons, was much cheaper, but Spain would not allow the Dutch or the English to trade at Manila. That is why the English relationship with the Armenians was so important to the English East India Company—the Armenians were allowed into Manila and could buy silver there. Japanese silver was even less expensive, since Japan was much closer to the Chinese market and the Japanese mines were less expensive to operate than the American ones. From the late sixteenth century until 1639, Portugal was the only European country allowed to export Japanese silver for sale in China. The Japanese expelled the Portuguese in 1639 because they were convinced the Portuguese had encouraged a peasant revolt in 1637. They were also suspected of protecting missionaries the government

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had tried to expel. Because the Dutch had helped the Japanese government suppress the revolt, they were allowed into the silver trade.20 The Dutch eagerly picked up a large part of that very profitable trade, since Japanese silver was much cheaper than silver brought from Europe. While the Chinese also imported the spices of southeastern Asia and Indian cottons, silver was the one commodity Europeans could always trade for Chinese exports. Access to Japanese silver, control of Melaka, control of the cinnamon of Sri Lanka, and the capture of Makassar near the spice-producing islands greatly improved the situation of the Dutch East India Company. Subsequently, the Dutch seized Colombo (1656) from the Portuguese and then the rest of Sri Lanka (1658), giving them control of the main source of cinnamon in the Indian Ocean. In 1662 the Dutch and English moved in on the Portuguese ports along the coast of India and came close to capturing Goa. In 1667 the Dutch also captured the city of Makassar on the island of Sulawesi. Until then it had been a major commercial center for the surrounding Spice Islands and had collaborated closely with the Portuguese. Once the Dutch were in control, they were in a much better place to control the supply of spices sent to the Indian Ocean markets. It is important to note that Dutch success came largely at the expense of the Portuguese, not through control of additional Asian territory. In the major emporia ports that serviced the trans–Indian Ocean trade, the Dutch (and the English) used established local brokers for the purchase of exports. In lesser centers the Dutch did as other merchant communities had done and set up resident factors. The scale of these Dutch factories is suggested by the Dutch purchasing agency in Ava, the capital of the Taungoo Kingdom (in what is now Burma/Myanmar).21 Its staff consisted of fourteen employees: three senior merchants, two junior merchants, and nine assistants and sailors.22 All were established residents, and some of them had long-term local partners who bore them Dutch-Burmese children. Although these women were wives in the eyes of custom and local law, the government in Ava was reluctant to let them leave the country, and at least one chief factor chose to stay in Ava for more than thirty years rather than leave his family.23 The assertion that the Dutch East India Company was hampered by a bloated bureaucracy gets some support from the fact that while the Dutch agency in Ava had a staff of fifteen, a comparable English East India Company factory of 1650 got by with four or five people. Throughout the Dutch network in southeastern Asia, the Dutch East India Company owed a great deal to the Chinese workers and entrepreneurs found in every significant seaport.24 The development of the plantations on

Europeans and Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century   •  191

Java, often attributed to Dutch initiative, illustrates another way in which Southsea Chinese capital and management reinforced the Dutch economic empire. The symbiosis between the Southsea Chinese and the Dutch makes the image of European control somewhat shadowy. Sugar, for example, was one of Batavia’s most important exports in 1700, but it was soon replaced by coffee. In 1721 Java produced two thousand pounds of coffee. Only fifteen years later, in 1736, Java exported nine million pounds of coffee.25 As with many other businesses, a large share of the plantation crops exported from Batavia were produced by Chinese capital on Chinese-owned plantations. In the end, the Dutch (and other Europeans) made up only a small part of the Asian commercial world. They could influence the matrix of local markets, small-scale traders, indigenous wholesale merchants, and local ship owners, but at the same time they had to conform to local practice. The best examples of European dependence on indigenous Asian commerce can be seen in the fact that neither the Dutch, the English, nor the Spanish were able to trade directly with China. Both relied on the Fujianese and Southsea Chinese to bring them the silks, porcelains, and gold that dominated China’s export trade. While Fort Zeelandia on Taiwan allowed the Dutch to get closer to China’s mainland markets, that channel was lost in 1662. By 1700 the Dutch East India Company was beginning to lose its momentum. Having internalized the cost of defense and administration, the company’s overhead remained high even though profits were declining. They continued to concentrate on marketing essentially the same commodities even though by the eighteenth century, other suppliers were increasing the supply and driving down the market price. Thus, even though the volume of sales remained the same, both profit per unit and the rate of return to invested capital declined. The rate of return was declining, but administrative costs were not. Profits had leveled off at the end of the 1600s, when the Dutch East India Company had thirteen thousand employees. The profit was not much different in 1750, when the company was supporting twenty thousand people, including a sizable navy and an army of ten thousand soldiers, plus dockyard workers and a bookkeeping staff of hundreds.26 The Dutch trading empire continued to operate until its bankruptcy in the late eighteenth century; it failed because of growing overhead and declining revenues from products that no longer commanded high prices. Their English competitor survived into the nineteenth century because it invested much less in commercial infrastructure and could respond to the flow of fresh market data, thanks to the activities of their factors, operating as private merchants.

CHAPTER TEN

Disappearing Colonists Death, Assimilation, and Desertion

Whatever the aspirations of the thousands of migrants who left Europe for Asia, and whatever the plans of colonial administrators, Europe’s presence in Asia between 1500 and 1750 was surprisingly precarious. Everyone who left for Asia had first to survive two daunting hurdles before becoming established participants in colonial society.1 The trip to Asia obviously was risky, but few participants had a true appreciation of the risks they would confront. Administrators downplayed those risks and recruited a gradually expanding stream of new soldiers, sailors, merchants, and agents. Despite the growing number of new recruits, the number of Europeans in Asia grew slowly. In part that slow growth reflected high mortality rates on the trip out and during the first years in the tropics. The European presence was also undermined as men drifted away from their European identity and, through intermarriage, assimilation, and desertion, blended into the societies that surrounded them.

Surviving the Trip Few of the thousands of migrants bound for Asia would have been aware that two of every five (40 percent) of them would be dead within two years of reaching their destinations. The first hurdle they faced was the voyage itself. Of the 2 million men who sailed for Asia between 1500 and 1750, only 1.7 million actually arrived. Whether they took ship from Lisbon to Goa, from Amsterdam to Batavia, or from Acapulco to Manila, an average of 15 percent of passengers and crew died in transit.2 Sixteenth- and 193

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seventeenth-century ships were crowded and unsanitary beyond anything we would find acceptable. The larger Portuguese ships left Lisbon with five to nine hundred people on board. The Spanish galleons left Acapulco for Manila with between 400 and 450 people. Primitive medicine, limited ways of storing food, scurvy, bad weather, and shipwreck killed about 10 percent of those on board the Portuguese ships of the sixteenth century, a figure that soared to 20 percent in the first decades of the seventeenth century. Dutch ships did not do much better. Twelve to 15 percent mortality en route was considered normal. The number of people sent abroad by the English East India Company was relatively small, but one of the worst cases of shipboard mortality hit the second company fleet. Having left England with four hundred men, the fleet reached Bantam on the island of Java with only fifty men well enough to bring the ships into port.3 Having reached their Asian destinations, European immigrants faced another biological hurtle. Twenty-five to 30 percent of the 1,700,000 men who arrived in Asia were dead within two years. Much as Native Americans had no resistance to European diseases, Europeans had very little resistance to tropical diseases. This lack of resistance was compounded by the continued use of hot, heavy European clothes and by a heavy European diet. Malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, and dysentery reduced the total to about 1,200,000 survivors. Finally, of the 1,200,000 who survived the “seasoning” of the first two years, about 950,000 returned home once they had fulfilled their work contracts. In everyday seventeenth-century terms, the Portuguese Royal Monopoly and the Dutch and English East India Companies together could count on adding an average of no more than fifteen hundred “seasoned” men a year to the long-term staff that operated their trading empires. Portuguese Goa offers a concrete example of this demographic problem. Between 1580 and 1630, after accounting for men who returned home, the Estado da India was left with a net gain of about seven hundred men every year. Two years of exposure to tropical diseases, however, reduced that total to fewer than five hundred seasoned immigrants. Table 10.1 gives the estimated number of migrants and survivors for selected years between 1550 and 1750.4 This left a total of 250,000 people who, over 250 years, survived to become long-term residents. The migrants who survived the trip from Europe to Asia landed at one of three cities: Goa, Manila, or Batavia. From those cities they were dispersed into dozens of garrisons, seaports, and trading posts. Between 1530 and 1550, Portugal sent out two thousand men every year, but as of 1550 Goa had only two thousand European householders, and the entire Estado da India contained only fifty-five hundred Europeans. In 1600 Portugal was sending out

Disappearing Colonists   •  195 Table 10.1.   Migration and Mortality from Europe to Asia (Selected Years)

Year

Number Outbound to Asia

Survivors Reaching Asia

Seasoned Survivors after 2 Years

1550 1600 1650 1700 1750

 2,000  4,400  5,500  7,000 13,000

1,800 (–9.0%) 3,800 (–14.6%) 4,700 (–14.6%) 5,800 (–17.0%) 10,500 (–19%)

1,260 2,660 3,290 4,060 7,350

Note: Adapted from Jan de Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia: A Quantitative Analysis of the Cape-route Trade, 1497–1705,” in Flynn, Giráldez, and von Glahn, eds., Global Connections, pp. 35–106.

three to four thousand men a year to garrison half a dozen major strongholds, staff as many as fifty feitorias (factories, or agencies), and make up for the high levels of mortality. A single important feitoria, like the one in Siam, had a staff of fifty, while in 1574 the fort at Hormuz alone had a garrison and staff of 675 soldiers, sailors, and agents. Disease, desertion, and repatriation left the entire Portuguese trade network of 1600 with barely fifteen thousand Portuguese.5 The problem was aggravated by the fact that once new immigrants were a seasoned part of a colony’s European population, their numbers continued to decline, reflecting the relatively short life spans typical of preindustrial societies.6 A twenty-five-year-old seasoned colonist had a 50-50 chance of living to age forty-five. This normal attrition, on top of high mortality brought on by tropical conditions, helps explain the limitations on colonial manpower. Clearly it was difficult for the Portuguese to sustain a European population abroad, and the Dutch and Spanish faced the same problem. By the 1670s the Dutch East India Company needed to staff forts at Batavia, Melaka, Colombo (in Sri Lanka), Zeelandia (Taiwan), and Makassar (Sulawasi) while also maintaining fifty-seven factories. Given that the Dutch East India Company also maintained an army of ten thousand soldiers, finding enough European personnel was a chronic problem. Until the late seventeenth century, the English East India Company operated with fewer European personnel than the Portuguese or Dutch. Only near the end of the seventeenth century did the English company bring in large numbers of long-term residents. Nevertheless, they also had problems of high mortality. In one case, four hundred soldiers were sent to occupy the fort at Mumbai on the west coast of India after it was handed over to the English in 1661. A year later, thanks to official neglect and miserable conditions, only a quarter of the original four hundred soldiers were still alive.7

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Between 1498 and 1750 the number of Europeans in Asia gradually increased, but the total was never very large. The combined European populations of the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English “empires” in Asia did not reach twenty-five thousand people until well after 1700. While death and repatriation to Europe help explain the modest size of the European population in Asia, a look at the social demography of the colonial capital cities reveals other limiting factors.

Marriage and Assimilation If the European population in the colonies was limited by distance, shipwreck, malnutrition, and tropical disease, it was also eroded by the changing loyalties of men who arrived as Europeans and assimilated to Asian society. Chapter 2 tells us that early modern European identities were complex and oriented more strongly to clan and family than to country or ruler. With Europe far away, elements of European identity faded and were supplemented, even supplanted, by Asian counterparts. This was a complex process, sometimes drawing men away from European jurisdiction altogether, and sometimes changing the nature of European identity within the colonial capital cities. Much of this erosion of European identity can be traced to the littlenoted fact that almost all the migrants from Europe to Asia were unattached men, men who found themselves in a world with no European women. In this context the word “marriage” should be understood to include informal liaisons as well as formally wed couples. European men routinely entered into interracial or interethnic marriage almost everywhere. While such intermarriage was suspect back home in Europe, Europeans had not yet developed the degree of prejudice against racial and ethnic differences that emerged in the nineteenth century. European-Asian intermarriage began as soon as the Europeans arrived in Asia. Whatever reticence authorities in Europe may have felt, the speed with which intermarriage, both informal and formal, developed is striking. The first direct European contact with Asia came in 1498. As early as 1502 the Portuguese were given permission from the local ruler to install a garrison of 150 men in Cannanore, near Goa.8 Ten years later there were already thirteen children born of marriages between soldiers and local women. In 1512 Afonso de Albuquerque, viceroy of the Estado da India, hoping to encourage men to marry and stay in the colonies, offered substantial bonuses to soldiers who found local wives.9 Only the seventeenth-century English East India Company tried to stop its employees from marrying Asian women; as a

Disappearing Colonists   •  197

result, most Englishmen living in Asia formed long-term, informal liaisons. Whether or not formalized in European terms, from Southeast Asia, West Africa, Brazil, and Spain’s American Empire to French Canada, intermarriage between European men and local women was routine. A man arriving in the colonies found himself confronted by a very small European marriage market and a very diverse set of Asian possibilities. All things being equal, the first preference for a marriage partner was a Eurasian woman, followed by an Asian woman who had business and family contacts. The selection got more complex once the marriage market included Asian and Eurasian widows of varying ages and wealth. Depending on the geographic and class context, European men married Arab, Hindu, Dravidian, Burmese, Malay, Japanese, or Chinese women. Both the Portuguese Estado da India in the sixteenth century and the Dutch East India Company in the seventeenth century accepted intermarriage, rationalizing it as a way to maintain the “European” population. The Spaniards in Manila were more reticent about intermarriage, but as in Goa and Batavia, the European population was almost entirely male. Since they came from colonial Mexican society, where interracial liaisons were common, single Spanish men soon began to live with, and sometimes marry, Asian women. In Manila these women were almost always Chinese. Despite the official acceptance of intermarriage, colonial society turned formal marriage into something that was limited to the middle and upper classes. The act of formal marriage became a complicated, class-conscious process supervised by the Catholic or Dutch Reformed clergy and by the Dutch East India Company. Despite official rhetoric in favor of formal marriage, the ruling elites did not make it easy. In Batavia, the Dutch East India Company’s patriarchal policies required unmarried employees to live in company housing and follow rules about clothing, church attendance, and socialization. When an employee chose to marry, he had to request permission from the Dutch East India Company. He then had to obtain company approval of the woman he wanted to marry. The selected bride had to be interviewed by members of the church, take religious instruction, and join the local church (Catholic in Portuguese and Spanish colonies, Dutch Reformed in the Dutch colonies). She was then baptized. Only then could the actual wedding take place. The duly married new bride was now officially Portuguese or Dutch. The children of properly vetted and formally solemnized interracial marriages were also officially European and, by definition, part of bourgeois society. Dutch society and law heavily favored men as family patriarchs, but the frequency of intermarriage and high European death rates created an

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unplanned, alternative reality that left colonial Dutch society in the hands of Asian and Eurasian matriarchs. Widows, Asian or Eurasian, often survived two or three European husbands and became the de facto matriarchs of extended families. These women controlled family finances and businesses and negotiated the marriages of their children. One side effect of the high death rate among European men was that relatively young Asian or Eurasian widows with both business assets and small children appeared on the marriage market. The matriarch’s task of knitting together the extended family network was more complicated than it might sound. The result was that these “European” households were distinctly not transplanted bits of Europe. Intermarriage was important because it was one of the things that allowed European traders access to local trade networks. The bedrock of European trade was the family partnership in which commercial networks depended on family ties, fictive relationships, the fostering of apprentices from other families, and short-term inter-firm partnerships for specific ventures. In maritime Asia, as in Europe, trade networks and family structures depended closely on one another. Interracial or interethnic marriages, often used to cement relations between families and family-owned trading companies, were routine in the commercial societies of the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia long before the Europeans arrived. Given that the arriving Europeans were eager to trade, and that almost all were male, intermarriage with well-connected Asian women was not a surprising outcome. The commercial world of southeastern Asia had also developed temporary, self-terminating marriage contracts designed to provide long-term visitors with temporary wives and useful business connections. The Dutch East India Company helped arrange some of these temporary marriages. The Taungoo Kingdom (now Myanmar), with its capital in the city of Ava, went so far as to provide local wives to all long-term visitors, but it insisted that the wives and their children stay in the country if the husbands decided to leave.10 Since Asian women often played an important part in retailing, managed large businesses, and acted as moneychangers, a local wife, temporary or not, could connect a newcomer with the local economy.11 At the same time, divorce was straightforward and could be initiated by either partner. Most colonial authorities recommended intermarriage for a variety of reasons, but the most concrete was simply to discourage men from returning home. Married men were more likely to stay in the colonies with their wives and family connections. This was reinforced by policies that prevented European men from taking their Asian wives and Eurasian children with them to Europe. Colonial authorities also recommended formal marriage as a way

Disappearing Colonists   •  199

to produce new generations of Europeans, but these recommendations were largely ignored among the working classes. The English East India Company took a more rigid approach to intermarriage than the Portuguese or Dutch. The company simply did not allow its employees abroad to marry indigenous women, nor did it allow employees to take their English wives abroad with them. The English EIC accepted the idea that in England the right marriage to an Englishwoman could enhance the husband’s business opportunities in England, yet its somewhat inconsistent rationale for forbidding marriage abroad was that a wife would distract the employee from his work for the company. Nevertheless, virtually all the Englishmen who went abroad were single, and most found long-term partners despite company rules against marriage. Englishmen simply took mistresses, concubines, or slave companions. Their children could be partially legitimized by baptism, but they were stuck in the lower levels of employment in colonial cities. These marital partnerships broke up if the Englishman had to return to England; in those cases, the father usually legitimized his sons as well as he could. The reality was that he could legitimize his children within Indian society, but not within English society.12 The prohibition on intermarriage by the English EIC did not reduce the number of interracial liaisons, but it did put a higher social barrier in front of Anglo-Indian children than that confronted by their IndoDutch counterparts.13 One notable example, Cornelia van Nijenroode, illustrates the degree to which being legally Dutch in Batavia was more relevant than racial background.14 The story centers on a woman in Batavia who had married a wealthy Dutch merchant. The marriage lasted long enough for Cornelia to have two children before her husband died. Dutch society was uncomfortable with unattached adult women, and the Dutch East India Company pressured Cornelia to marry again. In a marriage market with few respectable and wealthy women, the pressure was strong, and Cornelia soon married an unscrupulous, newly arrived Dutchman. Although Dutch law automatically put a wife’s property into her husband’s possession, Cornelia had negotiated a prenuptial understanding meant to protect the estate of her first husband so that it would pass to his children. The second husband became physically abusive and, in violation of his prenuptial agreement, began raiding the assets that Cornelia had inherited from her first husband. Cornelia sued for divorce, something almost unheard of under Dutch law. Thanks to her connections in Batavian Dutch society, she managed to keep the suit going for some years. The second husband then got the case transferred to the courts back home in the Dutch Republic,

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where he had political and family-based influence. After a series of hearings, Cornelia lost most of her estate to her husband and was ordered to return to his house and live with him peaceably. Cornelia appears to be a tough, determined Dutch woman well entrenched in the higher levels of Batavian society. Then we learn she was the daughter of a liaison between a Dutch merchant and one of the Japanese women who had been provided to the Dutch merchants on Deshima Island in Nagasaki. The Eurasian Cornelia was sent to Batavia, where she grew up in an orphanage. Her first husband was a wealthy Dutch merchant, and she became legally Dutch. At the same time, she continued to correspond, in Japanese, with relatives in Japan. It is a story of oppressive control over women, but it is also a story in which race seems to have been irrelevant. Once a European man married an Asian woman, what was legally a European family gradually became culturally Asian. In Europe it was traditional for the wife of a family to manage the household, and this tradition carried over into colonial society. As manager, however, an Asian woman drew on her own background and lifestyle. Thus her “Portuguese” or “Dutch” household lived with Asian furnishings, ate Asian food, wore local clothing, and was more likely to speak Malay or pidgin Portuguese than Dutch.15 The children in these families were raised by Asian household servants and often spoke Malay or the Portuguese lingua franca as their first language and formal Portuguese or Dutch primarily as the languages of business. While the children of these households were half Asian, their civic status was that of full-blooded Europeans. The children were baptized with their father’s Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish surname and a Christian first name. Throughout Dutch colonial society, including the highest levels, civil status descended through European paternity, which took precedence over race or color in the definition of social status. This approach to intermarriage produced men and women who were officially Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish. While European in the civic sense, however, within a couple generations, many officially European men were more Asian than European. They were integrated into Asian family networks for social and commercial identity, and they were more fluent in indigenous languages than they were in Portuguese or Dutch. Marriage was a different matter among the sailors, soldiers, working-class men and shipyard workers who had been recruited from the streets of Europe’s maritime cities. These men were regarded by the middle and upper parts of society as rough, uncouth, and troublesome. Soldiers and workers were encouraged by their officers or the colonial authorities to marry local

Disappearing Colonists   •  201

women, partly because the bourgeois elite saw marriage as a form of social control. Colonial authorities apparently assumed that married roughnecks would give up their immoral behavior, stay home, have sex with their wives, and produce legitimate children. While in the abstract this policy made sense, it was not very practical. The details of a formal marriage, the fees and churchgoing involved, and the condescending process for vetting would-be marriage partners were alien to the working class. Not many men from this part of urban society bothered with a formal marriage; few could even afford it. They did, however, marry after a fashion, forming long-term partnerships with local women. Often they were married according to local custom, even though European authorities did not recognize the wedding. Their children were not only mestizo but were branded as illegitimate and ineligible for employment by the Estado da India or the Dutch East India Company.16 While colonial authorities assumed (or hoped) that marriage would curtail antisocial behavior, official attitudes toward intermarriage were largely irrelevant. Single men quickly formed partnerships with Asian women without waiting for anybody’s approval. Such liaisons were considered illicit by the “proper” parts of society, even though they may have had the desired quieting effect. Numerous cases of intermarriage also emerged on the west coast of Africa during the slave trade. Governors or agents from European countries often lived in West African ports for years, sometimes for decades, and it was not unusual for them to marry prominent local women and adopt many aspects of local society, including its animist religion. Richard Drew is a good example. For thirty years, beginning in 1746, Drew, an English merchant, was governor of Anomabu Fort on the coast of what is now Ghana. Drew apparently developed complex connections throughout the region’s African society. After his first African wife died, he married the African daughter of the chief political figure in the area. She bore him at least five children. One of his sons married into the town’s leading African family. When three of his children died, he arranged for them to be buried in accordance with local funeral customs.

Marriage, Private Trade, and Disappearing Europeans Goa, Manila, and Batavia were bridges between Europe and the East. Big as they appear in history, these three projections of Europe into Asia were remarkably small in human terms. Despite a steady stream of migrants from Europe, the European core of each of these cities was modest. In each case,

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the number of registered European households was never bigger than the number of registered householders in a medium-size European market town. Meanwhile, the distinction between European and Asian was blurred by intermarriage and exposure to Asian customs. Marriage to a local woman tended to erode a man’s European identity. He found himself living with local servants, eating local food, and wearing local clothes, at least in private. If married to a woman from the commercial part of local society, the European used his new family to connect with local trade. After two or three generations of intermarriage, many of the “Europeans” on these urban registers were hard to distinguish from their Chinese, Malay, or Indian neighbors. Personal and family status was identified not by skin color but by symbols of office, by articles of clothing, and by the size of the retinue of slaves that followed you around. Not surprisingly, many European migrants found the commercial opportunities in a dynamic Asian economy, available through his Asian family network, more rewarding than the work he did for the government or company that had brought him to Asia. Literally hundreds of men were attracted by such opportunities and moved to places outside European jurisdiction. The process resembles the pathways taken by immigrants from Europe to the United States in the later nineteenth century, many of whom saw opportunity in the dynamic American economy around them. This blurring of identities challenged the effectiveness of Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish control over their own agents, brokers, and other employees, opening the way to corruption and contraband among the employees of the Estado da India and the Dutch and English East India Companies. The limited amount of cargo space on the fleets being sent to Europe and the high prices paid for Asian spices and textiles put a premium on a technically legal form of smuggling. By tradition, each passenger and member of a ship’s crew was allocated a small amount of space for privately owned merchandise. Crew and passengers alike exploited their right to bring aboard either personal goods or goods on consignment from other merchants. In the Spanish case, the Crown allocated cargo space to merchants in proportion to the size of their businesses. The potential profit from selling even a small amount of Asian merchandise in Europe or Mexico encouraged both crew and passengers to use their legal privileges as loopholes that allowed them to bring on board more cargo than their allocated space could contain. This was particularly a problem for the large Portuguese carracks sailing from Goa to Lisbon and for the Spanish galleons sailing between Manila and Acapulco. Officials in charge of enforcing cargo regulations were open to bribery, and ships preparing to sail had many silent nighttime visits by small boats

Disappearing Colonists   •  203

loaded with fraudulently labeled goods. As a result, passengers and officers often brought aboard surprising amounts of extra cargo. The officers on the ships also participated in the smuggling—and in some cases even displaced food supplies. So much private cargo made its way onto the ships of the Portuguese king that in some cases it accounted for 40 percent of the total cargo by weight and 60 percent of the total cargo by value. This overloading made the clumsy Portuguese carracks hard to manage in stormy weather and contributed to the heavy Portuguese losses between 1580 and 1630. The big Portuguese carracks and Manila galleons were formidable fighting machines if properly managed, and only four or five were ever captured in naval battles. On long and lonely routes, confident that no European enemy could be in the Indian Ocean or the Eastern Pacific, these overloaded ships often carried piles of deck cargo. With decks covered with cargo and blocking the use of the ship’s guns, the big carracks and galleons could neither fight effectively nor run away. The most dramatic example of this involved the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de Covadonga. Nearing Manila in 1743, the Covadonga encountered the English ship Centurion, a sixty-gun two-deck man-of-war. The Centurion was part of a small English fleet sent to raid the Pacific coast of Spain’s American Empire. By the time Centurion reached the Philippines, the ship was in poor condition and half of its crew had died of scurvy. If properly ready for the encounter, Covadonga should have been able to defend herself. To make room for deck cargo and passengers, however, a third of the Covadonga’s guns had been stored in the hold and the deck was cluttered with cargo. After a short battle, Covadonga surrendered. The silver the English found on the captured ship was enough to pay the budget of the Spanish navy for the better part of a year. Such captures were rare, but losses to bad weather were not. These losses also highlight the degree to which unregulated “private trade” took place on ships that were a key element in maintaining control of the national monopolies at the heart of the European enterprises in Asia. In addition to participating in the private trade that smuggled goods onto ships bound for Europe, a steady stream of European men became “private traders” in the sense that they stopped working for the official trade monopolies. The export trade that sent goods to Europe was only a small part of the trade that moved back and forth around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. As used here, the phrase “private trade” is code for two kinds of unofficial trade. The Portuguese, Dutch, and English administrations all had to deal with the fact that, with or without permission, their factors and employees engaged in private trade alongside their work on behalf of their

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employers. This kind of trade enriched individual employees at the expense of their employer and helped them develop profitable unofficial contacts. Many of the men who worked for the Portuguese, Dutch, or English participated informally in trade between Asian locations, evading European taxes and control. Highly placed officials, including even the Portuguese viceroy in Goa, engaged in this kind of private trade. The next step for many European merchants was to leave their employers and move to an independent seaport. The second meaning of “private trade” relates to the activities of these men, men who left the jurisdiction of the Estado da India or the East India Companies and became private merchants in Asian communities outside European influence. The assimilation of European merchants into Asian commerce was closely intertwined with intermarriage and changing identities. In both Europe and Asia, the core of one’s personal identity derived from family. Family and clan were probably more important than one’s identity as the subject of a distant European monarch. Literally hundreds of European merchants took this step and decided to trade exclusively within the Asian commercial network. This is not really surprising, since many of the Europeans who came to the Indies were not actually Portuguese, Dutch, or Spanish and had no particular loyalty to the colonial power that recruited them. Cut off from their European networks for years, and married to Asian women, many European men assimilated into Asian families and businesses. The result was a network of once-European private merchants that spread across maritime Asia. Each of Europe’s Asian trade diasporas, whether Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, or English, had a different policy about private trade, and each of those trade diaspora “empires” had a different fate, one that in part reflected its handling of private trade. Private trade was inherent in the structure of the Portuguese Estado da India. Its network of feitores, or agents, had evolved in an ad hoc way, with treaties tailored to local conditions in each of about fifty ports. Each agreement was a unique response to local conditions. It was difficult for the Estado da India to impose general policies on fifty different trade agreements, much less verify that agents were operating within the terms of local treaties. This gave individual agents room for personally profitable trade that evaded Portuguese controls. This lack of consistency within the Estado da India hampered its effectiveness in the sixteenth century and encouraged hundreds of nominally Portuguese merchants to scatter to seaports outside Portuguese jurisdiction, forming an unplanned “informal empire.” These private traders ignored most Portuguese policies but kept up their contacts in the Estado da India so as not to miss new opportunities. Mean-

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while, the Estado da India kept up the fiction that these private traders were part of the official establishment because their Asian commercial connections were sometimes useful.17 In the later seventeenth century, when the Estado had lost Melaka, Colombo, Nagasaki, Hormuz and its East African ports, as well as its trading privileges in Japan, the employees of the surviving Portuguese outposts came to rely on trade between various parts of Asia rather than on long-distance trade with Lisbon. The surviving local agencies of the Estado da India, already decentralized and flexible, survived by renewing trade with the “hidden empire” of Portuguese private traders. Portugal’s Asian “empire” had become just another component of Asia’s interdependent commercial world. From its beginnings, the English East India Company allowed its agents to trade privately. In the first half of the seventeenth century, the company simply ignored the private trade of its factors. The reorganization of the 1650s and 1660s explicitly allowed its factors to participate in intra-Asian trade. While this “country trade” did not bring direct profits to the company, it did provide the English EIC with up-to-date information on economic and commercial trends. This flow of market information allowed the company to make timely shifts in its investments and concentrate on new commodities and markets, keeping it solvent into the nineteenth century. Trade was managed differently in Spanish Manila. The Crown owned the great trans-Pacific ships that sailed between Acapulco and Manila, but the actual trade was in private hands. The merchants belonged to a guild that controlled trade and provided commercial justice. The Crown regulated the amount of cargo space available on each ship, initially allotting amounts to individual merchants based on the size of their businesses. The merchants in turn traded directly with the Asian shippers, merchants, and brokers who came to Manila when the galleons were in port. Rather than owning or controlling this trade, the Crown collected import and export taxes on it. Unlike the English, the Dutch East India Company did not allow its factors and agents to engage in trade outside the company. The Dutch treated their commercial agents as salaried employees and penalized them if they were caught trading on their own account. Unfortunately, this restriction of employee participation in private trade insulated management from important economic trends. While the Dutch East India Company did take some initiatives in sugar and coffee, it failed to keep up with competitors in the sale of sugar, tea, cotton cloth, and opium and went bankrupt in the 1790s. The Dutch East India Company did, however, grant private trading privileges to retiring employees who stayed in the colony. After several decades, some of these private trading houses became important players in regional

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trade, and because of high mortality among European men, many of these firms were run by their Asian widows. Private trade and intermarriage reinforced each other. They diluted the European nature of the colonial cities and created a persistent drain on the personnel essential to the main purpose of the Estado da India and the Dutch and English trading companies. Sometimes called lanzados,18 or freelance traders, these men were able to assist their local Asian colleagues in avoiding European authority.19 One group of renegade Portuguese in an area north of Goa not only married locally but also converted to Islam and developed a thriving (if illegal, from the Portuguese perspective) trade in Indian pepper.20 The acceptance of these “renegade” merchants in a wide variety of Asian locales suggests the openness of the Indian Ocean commercial system and the limits to European control in the area. The fact that these lanzados left European jurisdictions makes it hard to document the number of traders and workers who assimilated into the Asian world, but we have one credible contemporary source. A report from the early seventeenth century estimated that more than eighteen hundred Portuguese left the Estado da India and became private traders just in India and the Bay of Bengal. The report identified at least a thousand Portuguese living in the Indian-controlled ports of the Coromandel Coast on the east side of India. Another two hundred to three hundred lived north of Chennai in the city of Pulicat; three hundred more had settled in Patani on the Malay Peninsula. Farther afield, another two hundred Portuguese had settled in various Chinese ports. Given that Goa in the seventeenth century received only five hundred to seven hundred net new migrants in a typical year, the fact that nearly two thousand men had abandoned Portuguese jurisdiction clearly hints at an important drain on the European population of Portugal’s Estado da India. There are fewer references to Dutch and English private traders. The English East India Company gave its agents and brokers free rein to engage in private trade, so there was less incentive to break away. The accounts of Dutch renegades say little about assimilated merchants, but there are reports of Dutch renegades in Asian armies, including some three hundred Dutchmen who provided artillery support for the Chinese attack and capture of Fort Zeelandia.

European Soldiers and Asian Armies Between 1500 and 1750, the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English recruited thousands of soldiers for service in their Asian colonies and soldiers

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made up the largest part of most shiploads of men bound for Asia. While they were needed for garrison duty and for occasional small campaigns, their presence was a mixed blessing—these same soldiers were also a large part of what the Portuguese, English, Spanish, and Dutch elites regarded as the undisciplined and potentially dangerous working poor. Since most soldiers were either conscripted against their will or hired as mercenaries, every ship sent to Asia carried sailors and soldiers whose loyalty was tenuous and lasted only as long as they were paid and supplied. While most soldiers were assigned to garrison duty, the Portuguese Estado da India often brought troops from Portugal for specific campaigns. In practice they were paid only when military operations were actually under way. Between campaigns, the soldiers were left to fend for themselves. The Dutch provided for their troops somewhat better, and the Dutch East India Company’s private army included up to ten thousand men, many of them mercenaries from various European countries. Their loyalty was strongest when they were paid properly. This points us to one of the reasons European governments in Asia were always short of soldiers. Even in Europe itself, the advantages of joining a non-European army were well established by the 1400s. The Ottoman Empire, Europe’s immediate neighbor, recruited large numbers of European mercenaries, and we know there were Europeans in the Moroccan army in 1500. Many of them were “renegades,” who began as prisoners being held in Morocco for ransom. They chose not to be ransomed, stayed in Morocco, converted to Islam, and married Moroccan women. Integrated into local society, some of them became soldiers in the Moroccan army and often ended up as officers. Thus, the presence of European mercenaries in Asian armies was not new when the Portuguese reached India. Thousands of men, disillusioned by service in European armies or navies, signed on as mercenaries in various Asian armies. The first Portuguese soldiers to join Indian armies in the early 1500s reported the presence of long-established Italian and French mercenaries.21 By 1600, Asian armies included Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, Germans, Greeks, Danes, and Swedes. Rulers in Turkey, Iran, India, Thailand, and Japan were especially interested in European seamen, engineers, gunners, gun founders, ship pilots, commanders, and shipwrights.22 Some of the Indian principalities went so far as to post professional recruiters outside the gates of the larger European forts. Attracted by the possibility of better pay and greater social mobility, thousands of European soldiers could be found in the armies of almost every country from Morocco to Japan. Aside from better, or more reliable, pay, Asian armies offered more possibilities for advancement than were available in European armies. In a

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European army, appointment as an officer required noble status and good patronage connections. Few mercenaries had that kind of background. In India the same soldiers, once they had “gone over” and converted to Islam, often rose to command positions in charge of other European mercenaries. More than a few European soldiers working as mercenaries in Asia achieved fame and command authority that exceeded anything that they could hope for at home.23 One source suggests that in the early 1600s, some three thousand Portuguese mercenaries were serving in Bengal, five hundred in Makassar, and fifteen hundred in the Southeast Asian mainland kingdoms.24 Another contemporary source estimated that as of 1627, there were five thousand European mercenaries in the Mughal army alone and another thousand Portuguese sailors in the Mughal navy.25 Assuming these are not overlapping reports, their estimates suggest that in the seventeenth century, the various Asian armies included more than ten thousand European mercenaries. If we add the desertion of a possible ten thousand soldiers to the loss of two thousand assimilated or renegade civilians—and remember that before 1750 there were fewer than twenty-five thousand Europeans in all of Europe’s Asian trade empires—the European presence in Asia was precarious. It survived in good measure because no major power felt it worth the trouble to shut it down. As it was, the Chinese kept the Europeans at arm’s length, hoping to avoid corrupt Western influences. The Japanese appear to have shut out foreign influences except when they looked useful. At the western end of the Portuguese trade network, the sultan of Oman drove the Portuguese out of East Africa, and until the eighteenth century, the Mughal Empire used clever diplomacy to pit the Europeans against one another. The Portuguese Estado da India was a weak remnant of its old self after 1639–1641, when it lost both its Japanese trade and the crossroads port of Melaka.

The Colonial Capitals: Goa, Manila, and Batavia One estimate suggests that the European trade around Africa was never more than 20 percent of Indian Ocean trade, while the Asian trade of the Dutch East India Company accounted for only 20 percent of Dutch foreign trade. The key to understanding the position of Europeans in Asia rests in part on the fact that no one felt it worthwhile to send the Europeans home. Just as important is the human dimension. Two million men left Europe for Asia; one-third of them eventually returned. The major European trade empires lost their migrants from Europe to high mortality, assimilation assisted by intermarriage, and outright desertion to join Asian armies. Several thousand

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new colonist recruits left Europe every year, but the attrition in Asia was such that the official European population in Asia grew slowly. The major centers of European residence—Goa, Manila, and Batavia—rarely had more than two or three thousand Europeans of record, while the practice of registering Eurasian offspring as Europeans makes us doubt the credibility of those numbers. Many of the people recorded as European were as much Asian as European, and many of them would end up assimilated. Chapters 2 and 5 show similar patterns evolving in West Africa and Brazil. As part of the process of building their Asian trade diasporas, Portugal, Spain, and the Dutch Republic each created a capital city from which they could coordinate their commercial networks. Goa, Batavia, and Manila were the gateway cities between European markets and Asian suppliers. They collected the cargoes for the ships returning to Europe and regulated the volume of Asian goods they carried. Because the European market for highvalue goods was limited, it was easy to glut that market, causing prices to fall enough to eliminate any profit margin. Although lower prices allowed a few more people to buy imported luxuries, there were not enough new buyers to offset the loss of revenue created by falling prices. The national monopolies allowed importers to aim for an optimal combination of price and number of customers. The Dutch and the English learned this quickly in the 1590s when several shiploads of spices arrived in Europe at once, overloading the market for more than a year. These attempts to regulate sales help explain the readiness of the Portuguese, Dutch, and English to use the Armenian merchants’ overland courier service. Reports on incoming cargoes traveled overland faster than the ships sailing around Africa, allowing the Portuguese royal monopoly and the Dutch and English East India Companies to adjust European markets while the next shipments were still in transit. Only with the development of the sugar and tobacco trades did demand become elastic enough to absorb a steadily increasing supply. Goa, Manila, and Batavia, and the trading empires they maintained, loom large in the history of the Early Modern era (1450–1750). They are often regarded as projections of European power that anticipated the imperialism of the Industrial era (see chapter 3), yet they were governed by surprisingly small colonies of Portuguese, Spanish, or Dutch men. They did function as bridges between Europe and the East, bridges crossed by religion, technology, crops, and cultural material, but they were far from able to exercise European hegemony. They channeled high-quality Asian manufactures and spices to Europe, provided shipbuilding and refitting services, and organized networks of agents. Contrary to many perceptions of these ports as projections of European power, however, these cities were surprisingly fragile outposts.

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Goa Located on the West Coast of India, Goa was the first Asian city to become a Eurasian capital and was the only European capital in Asia until 1571, when Spain captured Manila. Goa was occupied by the Portuguese in 1510 and soon after was selected as capital of the Portuguese trade diaspora in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. As capital of the Portuguese Estado da India, Goa was ruled by a viceroy in the name of the king of Portugal. Nominally a kingdom parallel to that of Portugal, the Estado da India had a full set of councils and committees meant to oversee the affairs of state. As in most Old Regime bureaucracies, these councils served two purposes. Officially the councils administered aspects of the state, including finance, war, and foreign relations. At the same time, each council had several members who were appointed by the king. This made the Estado da India a major new source of royal patronage. This meant that appointees often had little relevant experience, with corresponding possibilities for corruption. Goa’s most important role was to act as coordinator of a trade network that supported the royal monopoly on the supply of spices to Europe. The secondary goal was to get control of as much Indian Ocean trade as possible. Historians often refer to this trade network as the Portuguese Empire, but the realities of time, distance, and scarce resources meant that the Estado da India was in fact a decentralized collection of trading posts, or feitorias. At the height of Portuguese influence, Goa was the center of a trade diaspora that stretched from Mozambique to Makassar in the Maluku Islands and to Japan. Near its height in 1600, Goa had a population of about sixty-five thousand people, roughly the size of sixteenth-century Antwerp, and controlled a sizable inland province. The European society inside of Goa, however, was surprisingly small. In 1600 Goa counted fifteen hundred Portuguese households and five thousand individual Portuguese. Looking beyond Goa, the Portuguese apparently never had more than ten to fifteen thousand men in their Asian network. Like Batavia and Manila, Goa was a cosmopolitan city. A large part of the population came from other parts of Asia. Because of its location on the west coast of India, Goa attracted many Arab and Persian merchants, along with Chettiars and Gujaratis, even a few Chinese and Malays. In Goa the Hindu Gujaratis filled a role in the urban economy similar to that of the Chinese in Manila and Batavia, providing bank services, credit, and commercial services as well as small-scale retail stores. The Gujaratis also played a major role in the trade between India and Africa, and between India and the spice-

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producing Maluku Islands. As we saw, they helped connect the Portuguese with the spice trade when the Portuguese first captured Melaka in 1511.

Manila Under the protection of the Sultanate of Brunei, Manila had been a port of call on the spice route from the Malukus to China long before being captured by the Spanish. Led by Miguel López de Legazpi, the Spanish established a base in the Philippine port of Cebu in 1564 and went on to take Manila in 1571. The modest port was officially chartered as a Spanish city in 1574, making it the second-oldest of the three Eurasian crossroads. The Spaniards never had the resources in Manila to build a trade network like that of the Portuguese, nor could they effectively challenge the influence of the Sultanate of Brunei in the region. Spain attempted to set up its own purchasing agencies (factorias) in the Spice Islands. This was an invasion of Portugal’s sphere of influence and the Portuguese soon forced the Spaniards to leave. The Sultanate of Brunei was an important power in the South China Sea and was sponsoring the spread of Islam into the southern Philippines in the decades before the Spaniards arrived. Once established in Manila, the Spaniards brought missionaries from Mexico to start the process of converting the people of the northern Philippines to Christianity. Hoping to forestall the further spread of Islam, the Spaniards tried twice to invade Brunei but were easily driven off. Blocked from expanding to the south by Portugal and Brunei, Manila was also cut off from direct trade with China. The Chinese government would not allow the Spanish to trade in Chinese ports, forcing the Spaniards to depend on the Southsea Chinese for their trade with China. In the end, Manila attracted a large population of immigrant Chinese, many of whom were members of Southsea Chinese trade networks. Over time this commercial community came to include several mestizos born of marriages between Spanish merchants and women from Chinese merchant families. In addition to controlling Manila’s trade with China, the Chinese also provided the city with its mundane, everyday services and its routine retail trades. Even the ships that carried the Acapulco–Manila–Acapulco trade were built near Manila using Chinese credit and Chinese shipwrights. Manila was governed by a combination of royal authority, as in the Portuguese Estado da India, and private enterprise, as in the Dutch and English East India Companies. The authority of the Spanish Crown was represented by a governor who was appointed by, and reported to, the viceroy of New

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Spain in Mexico City. Given that it took a year for correspondence to travel from Manila to Mexico City and back, the governor had extensive discretionary power. To implement any policy or legislation, however, he had to obtain the cooperation of the Cabildo (City Council) of Manila, which was controlled by the local merchant community. In practice, the royal governor depended on the cooperation of the Cabildo and on annual subsidies from the viceroy in Mexico for the administration and defense of Manila. Beginning in 1594, Manila’s commercial sector was supervised by the Consulado de Mercaderes (Merchant Guild) of Mexico City. The Consulado was an association of private merchants chartered by the Crown. In return for various trade privileges, the Consulado provided a court for commercial disputes and collected certain taxes and revenues for the Crown. Within that framework, individual merchants dealt directly with brokers and agents who put them in contact with the Chinese, Malay, Japanese, and other merchants active in the South China Sea. Manila’s commercial life depended on China’s demand for silver and the arrival of annual shipments of silver from Mexico. Silver was one of the few Western commodities the Chinese were willing to buy. The quantities sent from Mexico were so large that historians measure the amount in tons of silver rather than in Spanish reales de a ocho. The actual amount varied over time, from a low of about 60 tons a year to a high of more than 150 tons.26 Merchants in Manila exchanged silver for silks and porcelains from China, spices from the Maluku Islands, and cotton textiles from India, all within a regulated framework supervised by the Consulado. In the early seventeenth-century Manila was about the same size as Barcelona. Manila’s dependence on the Southsea Chinese and China is evident in the fact that most of the time 75 percent of her population was Chinese. Early in the seventeenth century, at a time when Manila had thirty thousand people, twenty-four thousand were Chinese. The population also included fifteen hundred Japanese and five hundred Africans. Many of the Africans originally were slaves taken from East Africa by Arab slave traders and then sold to Chinese merchants, who in turn brought them to Manila. Some of these African slaves were sent on to Acapulco, but over time, many of them obtained their freedom and became soldiers, laborers, and sailors.27 The Southsea Chinese dominated trade across the South China Sea, and without direct access to China, the Spaniards in Manila had no choice but to depend on Chinese merchants and ships to complete the exchange of American silver for Chinese silks and porcelains. Chinese control of the all-important China trade, combined with Chinese control of most of the wholesale and retail trade in Manila, created a potentially explosive setting.

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An economic crisis, a riot triggered by hunger, or rumors of a Chinese coup readily provoked violence and orders expelling the Chinese. If the violence had government support and the militia and army garrison were called in, the slaughter in the Chinese district could be appalling. In one such pogrom, almost twenty thousand Chinese were killed; the remainder were expelled. Without the resident Chinese, however, the urban economy ceased to function, and work in the shipyards came to a halt. Within a short time after each expulsion, the Chinese were invited to return to the city. Manila’s existence as a colonial capital was inherently tenuous. The trip from Acapulco to Manila was relatively easy when compared with the route around Africa, but the return trip from Manila to Acapulco was the riskiest of the long-range trips from Asia to the European world. At best the two annual galleons carried about eight hundred people each way, and quite a few of the men who arrived in Manila were Catholic missionaries, who presumably did not reinforce the city’s European population. Meanwhile, Europeans in the Philippines were vulnerable to the same tropical diseases that limited the European populations in Batavia and Goa. One observer noted that Manila had only 150 established Spanish households in 1637. Far from being part of a collective European hegemony, Manila was a sharply clear example of the limits of European power in Asia. Its story illustrates the importance of commercial collaboration as the central theme of Europeans abroad in the Early Modern era.

Batavia Batavia was the capital of the Dutch trade diaspora in Asia and was created and operated by the Dutch East India Company. Chartered by the Dutch government, the Dutch EIC was a joint stock company similar to a modern corporation (see chapter 9) and had a monopoly on trade between the Dutch Republic and Asia. It was also authorized to act as a government and to operate its own army and navy. Originally named Jayakarta, Batavia had been a dependency of the sultan of Bantam, who controlled the western end of the Island of Java. In 1619, fifty years after the Spanish takeover of Manila, Jayakarta was the object of a complicated struggle involving the Sultanate of Bantam, the Sultanate of Aceh, the Dutch, and the English. The Dutch ended up in control of the town, renamed it Batavia, and built it up as the center of a trade network that reached from Sri Lanka to Japan and included over fifty Dutch factories. The city of Batavia evolved around the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company, which came to include a large fort, warehouses, housing for

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unmarried employees, and offices for management. At its peak in the 1670s, Batavia had a population of about 135,000 people, making it a bit larger than sixteenth-century Venice but only one-third the size of Amsterdam. By 1673 the Dutch East India Company had built a defensive wall around the inner city, surrounding the company’s headquarters and warehouses and including the residential area favored by company employees and investors. While Batavia’s total population was substantially larger than that of Manila or Goa, the city had a similar demographic profile. Protected from urban unrest, the walled inner city housed about a quarter of Batavia’s population. About half these people were household slaves. Typically, they did the household work done by hired servants in the Dutch Republic. The rest of the core population included the city’s two thousand Dutch inhabitants, three thousand Malays, and 726 “Eurasians.” It also included three thousand Chinese merchants, contractors, and creditors.28 While salaried agents conducted most Dutch trade in Asia, the Dutch East India Company, like the Spanish in Manila, depended on the Southsea Chinese to arrange its trade with China. Looking out into the harbor at Batavia, half the ships were Chinese junks. As in Manila, most of the storefront shops that provided the retail infrastructure of the city, including the bakeries, tailor shops, laundries, handicraft shops, and grocery stores, were run by Chinese or by people with Chinese fathers and local women as mothers. Since Batavia was built on low-lying ground near the sea, it was crisscrossed by canals. While it reminded observers of Amsterdam, the canals were a major health problem. In Amsterdam, tidal flows kept the canals reasonably clear, but in Batavia there was nothing similar. As a result, the canals were stagnant breeding grounds for various diseases and contributed to the city’s high mortality rates. While each of these three cities has its own history, they also had important things in common. All three were modest in size compared with cities in China or India. Being trade centers, most of their residents came from distant places around the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea rather than from their surrounding regions. The European citizens of these cities intermarried with local women, and over time their families blended into the societies around them. Some European residents simply assimilated a large part of the local way of life. Others integrated themselves deeply into Asian trade, left European jurisdiction, and moved to towns that were outside European control. These European populations included a large proportion of soldiers and sailors, who deserted in large numbers to become mercenaries in Asian armies and navies.

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Travelers entering either Batavia or Manila could easily have wondered if they were entering a Chinese city; Goa could easily have been mistaken for an Indian city. The most prominent clue that one was in a European city was the European architecture of the main religious and administrative buildings. At the center of each of these cosmopolitan and largely Asian cities was a colony of Europeans. In Goa they ran the Estado da India, in Manila they managed the Manila galleon trade, and in Batavia they operated the Dutch East India Company. These iconic institutions get full exposure in most textbooks, with the result that these key cities appear to be grander and more European than they really were. Ethnic identifications were more than a little problematic in all three cities. In Manila they were further blurred by the fact that most “Spanish” colonists actually came from Mexico or Peru, where the boundary between Spaniard and mestizo was far from clear.29 The survival of these European enclaves in Asia depended on a steady flow of migrants from Europe. The fragility of the European position in Asia reflects the fact that both cultures were part of the same technological tradition. Different Eurasian societies used that technology to solve different problems, but their solutions were easily understood and borrowed by one society from another. Indian armies quickly hired European artillerymen, while Europeans hired Indian gunners. Chinese shipbuilders in the Philippines built galleons for the Spanish. Business practices were similar from England to the East Indies. A global perspective tells us that by 1500, Europe had developed an advantage over Africa and Asia in naval warfare, but not much else. The immensely long supply line from Europe to Asia posed costly logistical problems. European vulnerability to tropical disease and the ease with which European men assimilated to Asian societies posed constant drains on the European presence in Asia. The Europeans who went to the Americas between 1498 and 1700 created four new societies. The conquest empires in Mexico and Peru produced enough silver to change the global economy. The conversion of the tropical coasts of Brazil, the islands of the Caribbean, and the southern part of English North America to plantation societies populated by imported Africans helped create a dynamic Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century, but left a legacy of marginalized peoples and island countries in the longer run. The creation of agrarian neo-Europes along the coast of Atlantic North America provided another key component in the rise of the Atlantic, one that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reinforced European hegemony. In various ways, all three American scenarios created a fourth American

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culture—that of Native American societies, which Europeans shoved aside, expropriated, and marginalized. Conquest played a role in Europe’s Asian maritime trade, but commercial collaboration, not military hegemony, was the dominant theme until the later eighteenth century. Europe’s arrival in Africa and Asia was basically an encounter between two similar preindustrial cultures.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Conclusion

Beginning about 1450, the first group of several million people left Europe for distant and alien parts of the world (see chapter 1). These ventures were organized and promoted by Portuguese and Castilian elites and, later, by Dutch and English merchants. The men who organized and funded the early explorations risked their capital in hopes of a good return to their investments, but few of them personally risked the yearlong trip from Lisbon to Goa or Amsterdam to Batavia. Once venture capital had been accumulated and initial expeditions had established safe destinations, the promoters set out to recruit people who were able to trade or ready to fight. Depending on the destination, would-be colonists were offered a range of opportunities that included free farmland, indentured service with the promise of land and freedom after service, careers as sailors or mercenary soldiers, freedom from religious persecution, and/or positions as brokers or factors in the East Indies. Some recruits were simply escaping debt or legal prosecution. Typically, recruiters exaggerated the opportunities at the end of the voyage and understated the risks implicit in sailing ten thousand miles in search of a better life. By 1750, commercial and governmental promoters had recruited almost four million people, mostly men, for these overseas projects. When this migration started in the fifteenth century, everyone was hoping to reach the Spice Islands. Columbus’s accidental discovery of the Americas changed that goal forever—and diverted half of Europe’s early modern migration to the Americas. The other half of the migrants leaving Europe sailed around Africa to Asia, where they met societies as sophisticated about trade and military power as their own. 217

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Europeans in the Americas In the Americas the Europeans encountered the Aztec and Inca Empires, as well as vast areas peopled by Native Americans living in small, autonomous societies. Some of those communities, like the Iroquois, maintained alliances with neighboring tribes, but for Native Americans living outside of the major empires, political organization did not extend beyond the local community. Europeans, wherever they went, brought European culture, technology, traditions, and attitudes as they searched for ways to get rich, as wealth was defined in European culture. Unknowingly, they also brought a range of European diseases to which the Native Americans had no immunities. Shaped by the devastating effect of European diseases and by differences in technology, European settlement in the Americas produced three distinct narratives. In all three, Europeans soon learned to subordinate or push aside the Native American populations in order to develop exports that brought profits to Europeans. In 1519 Fernando “Hernán” Cortés invaded Mexico with only a few hundred men. After a long siege, Cortés broke into Tenochtitlán and captured the surviving Aztec leaders. Once inside the city, it was clear that Cortés’s victory had been made possible by a smallpox epidemic. Ten years later the Pizarro brothers had similar grim luck in the Inca Empire, where they were preceded by an epidemic that killed the emperor and triggered a civil war. The Spaniards, with the aid of Indian allies, captured the Inca capital, Cusco (see chapter 4), and briefly used the survivors of the royal family as a facade for Spanish rule. In both Mexico and Peru, the victorious Spaniards had to create at least a veneer of political authority over millions of Aztec and Inca subjects. They managed this with occasional use of force combined with a long list of collaborative compromises that recognized Native American leaders and allowed indigenous towns to keep control over their own internal affairs.1 The resultant Spanish American Empire was geographically huge, but it was locked into a massive demographic decline through most of the sixteenth century. The scale of that decline is suggested by the fact that the lowest estimate for the pre-Hispanic population of Mexico is 10 million inhabitants, while by 1620 the population was only 1.2 million.2 Meanwhile, when the Mexican and Peruvian silver mines came into full production in 1560, the thousands of tons of silver produced by these mines made Mexico City the financial center of the world. Mexican and Peruvian silver also provided Europe with a commodity that was in great demand in China and India (see chapters 8 and 9).

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Elsewhere in the Americas, the European invaders dispersed to locations that ranged from southern Brazil to the Caribbean, Virginia, New York, Massachusetts, and the Saint Lawrence River Valley (chapter 6). Arriving in small numbers and poorly supplied, these immigrants encountered equally modest communities of Native Americans. The latter typically were suspicious, wary, curious, and often generous. If European settlements survived their first years in America, it was thanks to Native American willingness to trade and to their traditions of hospitality. Settlements in the tropical coasts and islands of Atlantic America produced a second American narrative of expansion. There, European settlement created a unique new society, one that emphasized export-oriented agriculture, primarily sugar, but also tobacco, coffee, and cacao. In those tropical settings the Native Americans fled from European contact, were enslaved, or died of European diseases. As disease killed off the indigenous population, Europeans created distinctive plantation societies. What was new, and would create a long-lived legacy of racism and inequality, was the scale of Atlantic America’s plantation society and therefore of African slavery. The plantation enterprise was built upon the lives and work of more than twelve million Africans, who were sold into slavery by African merchants and rulers and brought to America by European slave traders in miserably crowded European slave ships. Of the twelve million Africans taken from Africa as slaves, ten million lived to work on plantations. The other two million died while crossing the Atlantic. While the Caribbean plantations depended on millions of African slaves, they also benefitted from virtually free Native American land, European markets, and European capital. Plantations became so specialized that they did not grow their own food, importing it instead from Pennsylvania, New York, and New England, creating a West Atlantic sub-economy that linked the English American colonies with the plantation colonies of the Caribbean. By 1750 this formula for plantation agriculture had spread across the Caribbean and into the North American south, where it was used as far north as the Chesapeake Bay. The third narrative describes another kind of colonial American society, one that was taking shape in the northern parts of the English-controlled Atlantic coast. Even before sustained European settlement began in 1607, many Native American communities had been hit by epidemics triggered by visiting fishermen and explorers. The English in Jamestown, for example, found a confederation composed of the remnants of several neighboring Native American communities. The Pilgrims at Plymouth benefited from a major epidemic as they took over an abandoned Native American townsite,

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complete with fields cleared for planting. As European settlements grew, they inevitably forced Native Americans off more and more of their land, while disease continued to disorganize native resistance. One estimate suggests that by the late eighteenth century, the Native American population of North America had fallen by 90 percent. By 1770 five hundred thousand European settlers had migrated to English North America, more than half to farming colonies scattered from Pennsylvania to New England. As more immigrants arrived, more and more Native Americans were pushed aside and replaced with farmers living in communities similar to English villages. These agricultural communities soon moved beyond self-sufficiency and began to produce substantial surpluses. The colonies’ exports consisted of the same agricultural commodities produced by English agriculture. They needed to import a variety of tools, hardware, cloth, and other goods from England but could not sell their farm surpluses there. This forced the colonies to look elsewhere for markets. Merchants in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia responded by visiting plantations in Virginia and the Caribbean. They soon developed a profitable trade selling wheat, flour, and other goods to the tropical plantations. This allowed the Caribbean plantation owners to devote more of their land to commercial crops. The colonial American merchants took payment in silver, sugar, and molasses, which they took back home. Distilled into rum, molasses from the Caribbean gave the colonists a commodity they could profitably export to England. The collapse of Native American populations not only set the stage for conquest of the Native American empires in Mexico and Peru but also allowed the development of plantation societies from Brazil to Virginia and the construction of an agrarian society from Pennsylvania to New England similar to that of England. The plantation colonies, dependent on labor from Africa, food from North America, and markets and capital in Europe, were at the center of what Ralph Davis once called “the great engine of trade,” a development that was integral to the economic growth of Western Europe in the eighteenth century.

Europeans in the “Old World” Unlike the Americas, where disease favored the European invaders, in the Old World of Africa and Asia, disease hampered European initiatives. The Portuguese (1498), the Spanish (1564), and then the Dutch and the English (1590s) gradually created a complex, thinly spread European presence around the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. For the Europeans, Africa

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and Asia became a world not of conquest but of trade, diplomacy, and cultural adaptation. Until after 1750, the European presence in Asia was fragile. Assumptions of European hegemony in Asia before that date are projections of nineteenth-century imperialism upon an older and different experience. As the Southeast Asian historian D. R. SarDesai comments: “There was no major political or cultural European impact on the region [southeastern Asia] until well into the nineteenth century.”3 Three things worked together to define this fragile European position in Asia, limiting Europeans to a role as tolerated participants in Asian trade. The first was logistical. Sail-powered wooden ships traveling a ten-thousandmile-long supply line rendered transport slow, expensive, and risky. The second was the vulnerability of European men to tropical climate and tropical disease. The third determinant was the fact that in Africa and Asia, Europeans were confronted by well-organized societies; the newly arrived Europeans had little choice but to learn how to participate in Asian and African trade. Initially intent on controlling the European spice trade but hampered by an ingrained suspicion of Islam, the Portuguese superimposed their own trade network upon the existing pattern of Asian maritime trade. They created a combination of forts and trade agencies scattered from Mozambique to Timor and Macau, with their headquarters at Goa. The Portuguese used force to intervene in local disputes, but only where their modest military resources could affect the outcome. In return, Portuguese-backed local governments granted the Portuguese privileged trading rights and land for fortified trading posts. While the Portuguese, and later the Dutch and English, networks were remarkable achievements, they only worked because their merchants and agents developed interconnections with the intricate world of indigenous merchants. Without these small-scale Arabic, Asian, and Malay traders as an interface between European agents and local farmers and craftsmen, these European companies would have had far more trouble obtaining and consolidating the output of small producers into wholesale quantities of goods. Until 1564 the Portuguese were the only Europeans participating in Asian maritime trade. The Spaniards arrived in the Philippines from Mexico in February 1565, and by 1571 they had captured the seaport town of Manila. Before long the annual Manila galleons began arriving with large quantities of Mexican silver. Over the next half century, the Spaniards tried to build a network of trading posts in the Malukus, but they lacked the necessary resources. The merchants in Manila soon settled for a symbiotic relationship with China. Using the Southsea Chinese as intermediaries, silver arriving from Mexico was exchanged for Chinese silks and porcelains destined for the

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Spanish American market, while spices from the Malukus reached Manila, brought by Malay and Chinese merchants and ships. This was a tremendously profitable business for the merchants in Mexico City, and in 1594 the Crown chartered the Consulado de Mercaderes in Mexico City. The Consulado regulated the distribution of European merchandise in Mexico and adjudicated disputes between merchants. It also supervised trade with Manila, sending some of the Chinese textiles across Mexico to Vera Cruz for shipment to Seville.4 The Spanish were followed in the 1590s by the Dutch and the English. The Dutch built a trade network based on Batavia on the island of Java, while the English concentrated on the Indian subcontinent. A large part of the Dutch network was built not by capturing Asian port towns but by conquering many of Portugal’s most important Asian enclaves. The English, with an initially small budget, placed themselves under the authority of the Mughal Empire in India, successfully negotiating for a base in the Mughal seaport of Surat, the most active port in the Indian Ocean. There they began building up a profitable trade in Indian textiles. With the de facto protection of the Mughal government, they were encouraged to harass the Portuguese. The distance to Asia made it costly to maintain large fleets so far from home. Once the great South Asian empires were consolidated in the late 1600s, the European establishments were more likely to use their limited military resources against one another. They gained control of very little additional Asian territory after the Spaniards took control of Manila in 1571. The European presence in the Asian interior was even less imposing. Neither the Portuguese Estado da India nor the Dutch and English East India Companies ever controlled the overland routes through the Middle East. Thus the Asian commercial world easily outflanked European efforts to control Indian Ocean trade, either by using smaller ships and taking routes the Europeans overlooked or by using combinations of overland and seaborne routes protected by the seventeenth-century Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires.5 The ability of Asian states to reject European penetration was illustrated well when the Portuguese overstepped their boundaries in seventeenth-­ century Japan. When in 1639 the Japanese government decided the Portuguese were chronic troublemakers, the Portuguese had no choice but to pack up and leave. Similarly, when the Safavid Empire found the Portuguese base at Hormuz inconvenient, the Safavid army easily captured it. Near the end of the seventeenth century, the sultan of Oman captured the Portuguese base at Oman in the Persian Gulf. The Omanis went on to force the Portuguese out of one East African seaport after another. By 1700 the Portuguese had lost all their East African bases between Mozambique and the Persian Gulf.

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Even the Dutch, with the strongest European military and naval establishment in Asia, were vulnerable. China had tolerated a sizable Dutch fort on Taiwan for almost forty years (1624–1662), but when the Qing government changed its policy regarding foreign traders, the Dutch were unable to resist a determined attack by the Chinese army and navy. Meanwhile, even as disease helped the European invaders in America, it limited European operations in the East and in Africa. In seventeenthcentury Goa, for example, the soldiers’ hospital registered the death of more Portuguese soldiers than were sent from Portugal as replacements. Both the Portuguese and the Dutch lost more than a third of their men before they were “seasoned,” or acclimated enough for a serious campaign. The situation was even worse for an army in the field, where disease was augmented by poor sanitation and desertion. At least two Portuguese armies of more than five hundred men disintegrated during attempted African campaigns as the men either died or deserted. Logistical limitations, vulnerability to tropical diseases, and effective resistance placed very real limitations on European power in Asia.

Two Unifying Themes: Marriage and Silver All these European incursions had two things in common: (1) The people arriving from Europe were almost all single men who expected to stay abroad for several years; and (2) the silver mines of Mexico, Peru, and Japan reshaped international trade, supported the first truly global trade, and changed the European power structure.6 Marriage and the Disappearing Europeans Whether the destination was Southeast Asia, India, West Africa, or North America, most of the migrants were men. Most of those men were unattached and expected prolonged stays abroad, and most of them married women from the societies to which they migrated. Ethnic intermarriage could be found in every colony from West Africa to India, Southeast Asia, Brazil, and the Spanish Empire. It was even common among the roving fur hunters of French Canada. In this context, the term “marriage” includes formal marriage according to the requirements of church and society as well as marriages recognized by the local society but not recognized by European legalities. The term “marriage” also includes long-term, informal liaisons between men and women that created de facto households and raised children.7 Regardless of legal or religious rules, custom, or opinion in the migrants’ home countries, newly arrived Europeans of all classes soon arranged some type of “marriage.”

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In European-governed territories, the European ruling elites and their middle-class employees married according to the rules of the local church. In Portuguese or Spanish territories, it was the Catholic Church. In Dutch-­ controlled areas, it was the Dutch Reformed Church; and in the territories administered by the English East India Company, it was the Anglican Church. The brides, almost always Asian or Eurasian, were formally converted to Christianity and baptized before their weddings. The advantage of the formal wedding was that the legal ethnic identity of the children followed that of the European father, regardless of the mother’s ethnicity. The soldiers, sailors, and working-class men formed liaisons with indigenous women soon after arriving, but those liaisons rarely were formalized in church. For these men the requirements, permissions, and interviews involved were insulting and pointless. The children of these informal marriages were considered illegitimate by company and church authorities, but the Dutch EIC did make one concession. If the father had his boys baptized and taught them rudimentary arithmetic and reading, they would be eligible for menial jobs in the EIC organization. The maritime communities of southeastern Asia also had a tradition of temporary wives who helped newly arrived merchants find the contacts they needed, and Asian society had no trouble extending this tradition to Europeans. Children of these marriages usually stayed with the mother if the marriage was dissolved. As a logical counterpart to the tradition of temporary wives, divorce was a direct and simple procedure. The contrast between the routine miscegenation of the early modern colonial world and the attitudes of the later nineteenth century is striking. The late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a sharpening of racist undertones and attitudes toward intermarriage and interracial children. While the English East India Company briefly encouraged its political agents in Indian states to marry women from local ruling families to strengthen English authority,8 by the mid-nineteenth century, racial or class boundaries were well established in India. The mixed-race children of Anglo-Indian liaisons were being ostracized from white English society and excluded from English schools and the better jobs in British-controlled India.9 The process of ethnic polarization was more complex in the Dutch East Indies, where issues of class and income were more prominent, but the tension between “pure white” and Indo-Dutch grew steadily in the 1800s and became explicit after World War I.10 From general acceptance and encouragement, miscegenation became something that was not only shameful but officially illegal.11 The Puritan colonies of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania constituted the main exception to the general acceptance of interethnic mar-

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riage. Settled by migrants who came as families and as part of organized religious communities, these newcomers sometimes tolerated close association with Indians, as in Dutch New Netherland, but opposed marriage between European men and Native American women. Society in Spain’s American Empire lived with an intermediate compromise. The first arrivals from Spain were almost all men, and they often developed long-term relationships with Native American women, who bore their children. Once established, however, many Spaniards brought their Spanish wives and families from Spain, maintaining their Native American families in separate households. Intermarriage was one of the reasons the European presence in Asia was more fragile than it looks. Part of that fragility derived from an underlying tension. Intermarriage facilitated commercial and political connections with the surrounding society, but the same unions made it easy for European colonists to identify with the Asian or African societies that surrounded them. Whatever her background, the wife managed the internal affairs of the household. A nominally Dutch family ate Asian food, wore Asian clothes, and left the children to be raised by Asian servants. As widows, many Asian matriarchs arranged marriages for their Eurasian children.12 By the second or third generation, the officially Dutch or Portuguese heads of households looked like Asians. By birth they were more than half Asian, and growing up they had assimilated many aspects of life in Asian society. It was not a difficult transition for these Eurasian “Europeans” to move away from European colonial capitals and join an Asian commercial society. Thus one of the sources of fragility in the European outposts in Asia was the direct result of long-term colonization with only men. Intermarriage and assimilation were helped by a European worldview derived from medieval Catholicism (see chapter 2). This made European men adaptable, and one form of adaptation was the normalization of ethnic intermarriage. These men were much more concerned about class, family, and status; in all but a few colonial settings, race, ethnicity, and European political identity were secondary concerns. The ease with which early modern men married Asian or African women, modified their European personal identities, and assimilated to new cultures clearly separates the European expansion of 1500 to 1750 from the industrialized and often militarized imperialism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The nineteenth century saw two major developments that reshaped how Europeans defined their identity and how they regarded others. The Enlightenment laid out the proposition that all men were created equal, but, in a major contradiction, it also encouraged an approach to nature that emphasized classification and encouraged people to see differences between species

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and subspecies. The imposition of a racial hierarchy that separated Native Americans from Europeans is apparent in both French Canada and English America by the mid-eighteenth century. By the American Revolution, stereotypes of Native Americans had lost the aura of the “noble savage.” The Enlightenment passion for classifying and comparing tended to emphasize the apparent differences between Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans, with white Europeans as the reference point. From there it was a short distance to racial hierarchies, especially when combined with the social Darwinism of the late nineteenth century. These ideas undermined the older habit of trying to understand other cultures by looking for similarities and instead emphasized superficial differences. In this process, ethnic or racial intermarriage implied that the nonwhite partner was not fully human and that any mestizo offspring were also inferior.13 These attitudes were further reinforced when the rise of nationalism changed the European idea of identity. Europeans were increasingly taught to identify with national communities that shared a single historical heritage and language and, if possible, identify with a state that included everyone who spoke a “national” language. By 1900 European identities of this kind became much stronger and merged with national identities that bordered on racism. In that context, interracial marriage meant consorting with someone who was racially inferior.14 Silver and Early Modern Trade From this distance, it is hard to grasp the importance of the silver mines the Spaniards found in Mexico and Peru. By one estimate, Spain’s American Empire sent enough silver to Europe to increase its silver supply by 600 percent. This American silver gave Europe a commodity that China and other Eastern countries would accept in return for their Asian commodities and manufactures. It was not Europe that made Asian trade dynamic; the dynamism came from the interaction between immense new supplies of American silver and the size and wealth of the Chinese and Mughal Empires. The intensity of the international demand for silver grew out of the fact that China and India had both developed silver-based monetary systems during the 1500s. Neither empire had large domestic sources of silver, and both economies were growing faster than their domestic silver supplies. As silver became scarcer, it became more valuable, and a single ounce of silver bought increasing amounts of other commodities. Since either of these two economies was larger than the economy of Europe, the international markets attracted silver to Asia from silver-producing regions all over the world, especially Mexico, Peru, and Japan.

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Figure 11.1.   The Spanish real de a ocho (top), a Global Currency, Compared with the First US Silver Dollar (bottom). (Photo of silver dollar courtesy of the Numismatic Collection, National Museum of American History)

Both the Mexican and Peruvian silver mines were in Spain’s American Empire, but they were developed by European investors and ruled by Spain. They reached full-scale production around 1560 and roughly three-quarters of their output was shipped to Spain. A quarter of the American silver output belonged to the king of Castile as royalties and tax revenue; the rest belonged to the investors and merchants who had developed the mines and sold merchandise to the growing American market. Within Europe the new supply of silver made it easier to borrow money for new investments in manufactures, plantations, and trade. European trade with Asia, which had been hampered by the lack of salable European exports, began to expand. The Portuguese trade around Africa was supplemented by the Italian, French, and English merchants who rebuilt the overland trade through the Middle East.

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Eventually, 30 to 40 percent of the American silver sent to Europe flowed through the Middle East to Asia, where it was used to buy Asian goods. Dutch merchants and members of the Hanseatic League took silver to Poland, Lithuania, and Moscow to buy grain, iron, and shipbuilding materials. From there it traveled to the Caspian Sea and Persia. Similar trade brought silver to Austria, the Balkans, and the Ottoman Empire. The Spanish government used the silver to pay its debts to Italian bankers, and eventually that silver turned up in the hands of French and Italian merchants in the Ottoman Empire, where they bought Syrian and Iranian silks and Asian spices from farther east. In the Middle East, the silver from Europe was used to buy silk in the Safavid Empire; from there it was used to pay for cotton textiles and luxury items from the Mughal Empire. Once in India, some of the silver became part of the money supply, but some bought spices from the East Indies and silks from China. Thus American silver expanded Europe’s ability to buy Asian goods before it moved through the economies of southern Asia.15 The merchants in Mexico City were well aware that, despite many middlemen, the silver they sent to Europe was worth 50 percent more than its European value once it reached China. They estimated that if the same silver could be shipped directly from America to China, avoiding many middlemen and transactions costs, it could be sold in China for 100 percent profit. When direct trade from Mexico to Manila began in 1571, it proved that it was indeed very profitable to send American silver direct to Asia. American silver affected world trade in several ways. It increased Europe’s ability to buy Asian goods. It facilitated the expansion of trade and manufacturing across East Asia and China. Silver also changed Spain’s American Empire, moving it from the European periphery to a central place in world trade. As the economy of Spain’s American Empire matured, it retained more and more of the silver it produced, using it for investments in the Spanish American economy, for the Manila galleon trade, and for its growing contraband trade with northern Europe. This had a devastating effect on the Habsburg Empire in Europe, which depended on remittances from America to finance its wars. During the second quarter of the seventeenth century, the decline in the Spanish Crown’s silver receipts undermined the finances of the Habsburg Empire in Europe, and by 1660 France had replaced Spain as the dominant power in Europe.

A Lesson from History? European trade in the East, however important it was to Europe, had only a marginal impact on the social and political history of Asia. At times Por-

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tuguese, Dutch, or English sea power was a factor that Asian states had to reckon with, but European military resources were used more often against other Europeans than against Asians. The masculine nature of the migration we call European expansion, the widespread acceptance of racial intermarriage, and the normalization of miscegenation in Europe’s main Asian outposts represent a European behavior very different from the imperialism of the nineteenth century. Nineteenthcentury imperialism brought women as well as men to its colonies. Colonial society imposed increasingly rigid class and racial boundaries upon colonial society and rejected intermarriage. Households minimized contact between white Europeans and Asian servants. The children of interracial marriages, once an asset in a diverse commercial world, were rejected by their European relatives and assimilated into the families of their Asian relatives. The partEuropean Creole elites of the old colonial capitals were subordinated to a new, all white governing elite. In a longer historical perspective, the limits of nineteenth-century Western domination are apparent. As early as 1896 a modernizing Ethiopia destroyed a modern Italian army at Adowa. It took more than two hundred thousand troops and twenty thousand British fatalities to defeat thirty thousand militia and guerillas during the Boer War in South Africa (1899–1902). In the 1890s Japan began its climb as a major power by purchasing state-of-the-art industrial machinery and battleships from Europe. By 1910 Japan had developed its own radio communications technology and was building the fastest and most powerful warships in the world. By the 1920s the English had endowed India with an industrial infrastructure that included textile mills, railroads, and steel mills. They were managed by Englishmen but operated by Indians. The educated Indians who staffed the emerging civil service and second-tier positions in industry energized the Indian independence movement of the 1930s. Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign of passive resistance was close to victory when postponed by World War II. The Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, when Israeli, French, and British troops invaded Egypt, did not stop Egyptian nationalization of the canal, nor did five hundred thousand American troops and fiftyeight thousand American fatalities stop North Vietnam from taking control of all Vietnam. Both great world powers—the Soviet Union and then the United States—encountered a formidable foe in the guerillas of Afghanistan. The disintegration of political stability in the Middle East since the second Iraq war and the presence of nuclear weapons in places like North Korea and Pakistan all suggest the limits of Western authority. With Western hegemony on the wane after only two centuries, the current reality resembles that of the seventeenth century, when the world was

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dominated by several centers of power. Currently about 40 percent of our imports come from East Asia, including products of heavy and high-tech industries that once defined Western primacy. China’s gross domestic product (GDP), calculated as Purchasing Power Parity, is larger than that of the United States. The United States is now second, followed by India (3) and Japan (4). Moreover, every country from Korea to India is growing two or three times faster than the United States and Europe (see note).16 Asian companies sell more cars in the United States than Ford and GM together. Brazil, a rising industrial power, builds commercial airliners; Volvo is a subsidiary of a Chinese automaker; and Jaguar is a subsidiary of India’s Tata Industries. The Chinese car market is bigger than that of the United States, and its economically comfortable middle class is larger than the entire population of the United States. The world increasingly looks like a high-technology version of the seventeenth century. The counterparts to silver as a high-value commodity are now oil and foodstuffs. As the climate continues its shift, more and more areas will be vulnerable to rising oceans, while drought-induced shortages will make freshwater as valuable as oil. A careful look at the realities of European influence in Asia during the seventeenth century might suggest ways to manage the problems and advantages of the multipolar world we see taking shape around us.

Notes

Introduction: Perspectives on European Expansion 1.  Black, “European Overseas Expansion,” in Raudzens, ed., Technology, Disease, and Colonial Conquests, pp. 1–14. 2.  Broeze, “Introduction,” in Broeze, ed., Brides of the Sea, p. 6. 3. Gunn, First Globalization, pp. 2–11. 4. Subrahmanyam, The Portuguese Empire, p. 24. 5. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. 6.  Barendse, “Trade and State,” p. 223.

Chapter 1: Europe Crosses the Threshold 1.  Between 1330 and 1400, the affected areas experienced as much as a 30 percent decline in population. 2.  Lopez, “European Merchants,” p. 184; Gillman and Klimkeit, Christians in Asia, pp. 242–50; Dawson, ed., Mission to Asia. 3. Fleet, European and Islamic Trade, p. 133; Arbel, “The Last Decades.” 4.  Reid, “The Structure of Cities,” p. 235. 5. Dauverd, Imperial Ambition, pp. 23–4. 6.  The estimated population of Europe rose from 68 million in 1400 to about 107 million by 1600. 7.  See note 6. 8. Braudel, The Mediterranean, vol. I, pp. 312–22; Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, pp. 1–3; Pirenne, Medieval Cities, p. 56; Weber, The City, pp. 54–5; Fox, Urban Anthropology, p. 94; Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City.

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 9. Mayorazgo was a form of entail in which all parts of a noble patrimony were inherited as a block by the oldest son, leaving nothing for younger sons. 10. Games, “Anglo-Dutch Maritime Interactions,” in Mancall and Shammas, Governing the Sea, pp. 171–96.

Chapter 2: Ambiguous Identity and Cultural Opportunism?   1.  Pagden, “Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent”; Pocock, “Some Europes in Their History”; and Jordan, “ ‘Europe’ in the Middle Ages”; all three in Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe, pp. 33–90.  2.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, ch. 10.   3.  We will see later that virtually no women took part in this migration, the colonies of English North America being the exception. Even there, men outnumbered women three to one. In Spanish America, many European men lived with Native American partners. Sometimes they married them formally and created legally recognized households. Once they were able to support a European-style household, these men often brought wives from Spain and set up separate households for the native wife and their mestizo children.  4.  Brummett, “Genre, Witness and Time in the ‘Book’ of Travels,” in Brummett, ed., The “Book” of Travels, pp. 1–33; Jordan, “ ‘Europe” in the Middle Ages,” in Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe.  5.  Seeman, Erik R., “Jews in the Early Modern Atlantic: Crossing Boundaries,” in Cañizares-Esguerra and Seeman, The Atlantic in Global History; Jordan, “Europe in the Middle Ages,” in Pagden, The Idea of Europe.  6.  Harreld, “The Individual Merchant,” in Parker and Bentley, Between the Middle Ages and Modernity, pp. 271–84.  7. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, pp. 254–55.  8.  Rubiés, “Late Medieval Ambassadors,” in Brummett, ed., The “Book” of Travels: Harreld, “The Individual Merchant,” in Parker and Bentley, Between the Middle Ages and Modernity, pp. 271–84.  9.  Fernández-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 175–81. 10.  Goffman, The Ottoman Empire, pp. 19–20. 11. Phillips, Before Orientalism, pp. 60–63. 12. Mangan, Transatlantic Obligations, documents the strength of family ties, not just across thousands of miles but also across ethnic and cultural barriers in colonial Peru and Spain. 13.  De Roover, The Rise and Decline. 14.  For example, the Spanish Congregación de Navarros. 15.  Mentz, “The Commercial Culture,” pp. 16–25; Trivellato, “Marriage, Commercial Capital, and Business Agency,” in Johnson, Sabean, Teuscher, and Trivellato, eds., Transnational Families, pp. 107–30. 16.  See chapter 7.

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17.  Herzog, “Private Organizations.” 18. Kupperman, Indians and English. 19.  “Sixteenth and seventeenth-century observers . . . lived in a world which believed firmly in the universality of basic social norms and assumed a high degree of cultural unity between the various races of man.” Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 6. 20. Phillips, Before Orientalism, pp. 50–51. 21.  Classen, “Introduction,” in Classen, ed., Meeting the Foreign, pp. xi–lxxiii. 22.  Campbell, The Witness; Latham, ed., The Travels of Marco Polo; Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck, in Dawson, Mission to Asia. 23.  Rubruck, The Journey of William of Rubruck, in Dawson, Mission to Asia, pp. 91–106, 137–41, 195; Campbell, The Witness, pp. 113–14, 120. 24.  Campbell, The Witness, p. 120. 25.  Rubruck, The Journey, p. 195. 26.  Larner, Marco Polo, pp. 46–65. 27.  Larner, Marco Polo, pp. 66–67. 28.  Larner, Marco Polo, pp. 74–75, 82–84. 29. Larner, Marco Polo, p. 86; Phillips, “The Outer World,” p. 55. 30.  Nederman, “Social Bodies and the Non-Christian ‘Other,’” in Classen, ed., Meeting the Foreign, pp. 192–97. 31.  Rubiés, “Late Medieval Ambassadors,” in Brummett, ed., The “Book” of Travels, p. 107. 32. Phillips, Before Orientalism, pp. 200–202. 33.  Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, p. 137. 34.  Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, pp. 20, 137. 35.  Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, p. 146. 36. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, p. 30. 37.  Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, p. 162. 38. Rubiés, Travel and Ethnology, p. 375. 39.  Maxwell, “Afanasii Nikitin,” pp. 243–66. 40. Morgan, “Encounters,” in Daunton and Halpern, eds., Empire and Others, pp. 49–53. 41.  Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, p. 1. 42.  Chapin, Subject Matter, pp. 8, 23. 43.  Said, Orientalism.

Chapter 3: An Era of Empires 1.  De Vries, European Urbanization, pp. 98–101, 136–42, 167, 257–58; Hohenberg and Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, pp. 226–38; Bairoch, Cities and Economic Development, pp. 3–18. 2.  The Seljuk Turks entered the Middle East before the Mongols. They built a sizable empire, but by the twelfth century they controlled only central Anatolia. The

234  •  Notes

much smaller Ottoman tribe was settled on the western border of the Seljuk realm and south of the Anatolian remains of the Byzantine Empire.   3.  The Chinese of the Nanyang are also referred to as the Chinese of the South Sea or Huaqiao.   4.  Premodern population estimates vary greatly. These are among the more conservative ones and serve for comparative purposes. Lipman, et al., Modern East Asia, p. 43; Fairbank, “Traditional China,” in Dernberger, et al., eds., The Chinese, p. 53.   5.  Marmé, “Locating Linkages,” pp. 1082–3.   6.  Souza, “The Portuguese Merchant Fleet,” in van Veen and Blussé, eds., Rivalry and Conflict, p. 344, n. 6.   7.  Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, p. 215.   8.  Von Glahn, “Money Use in China,” p. 195.  9. Charles of Habsburg/Trastámara was Charles I in Castile and Aragon but became Charles V as emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. Since the imperial title carried more prestige, Charles is usually referred to as Charles V. 10.  “Absolute authority” here refers to areas of government and royal jurisdiction where the king can make decisions and legislate without consulting his subjects. In Castile the king had absolute authority in more areas, including taxation, than in most European principalities. 11.  See note 1 above. 12.  Most taxes were collected by tax farmers, who contracted to pay the Crown set amounts of money on stipulated dates, so it was easy to commit the returns promised by the contracts to repay loans. 13. Philip II ruled 1556–1598; Philip III ruled 1598–1621; Philip IV ruled 1621–1665. 14.  Burkholder and Chandler, Biographical Dictionary of Audiencia Ministers, pp. xi–xxiv; Burkholder, Biographical Dictionary of Councilors of the Indies, pp. xi–xxxvi; Kagan, Students and Society. 15. Tilly, Coercion, Capital, and European States. 16. Ringrose, Madrid and the Spanish Economy; Ringrose, “Towns, Transport and Crown,” in Genovese and Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives, pp. 57–80; Brown and Elliott, A Palace for A King; Klingensmith, The Utility of Splendor. 17. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower. 18. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower. 19. Masters, The Origins of Western Economic Dominance; Marcus, The Middle East, pp. 16–26. 20. Mathee, The Politics of Trade, pp. 44–45, 67, 76. 21. Mathee, The Politics of Trade, pp. 86–90, 120–45. 22.  Gregorian, “Minorities of Isfahan,” pp. 652–53. 23. Masters, Origins of Western Economic Dominance, pp. 10–18. 24. Richard, “L’Apport des missionnaires europeens,” in Calmard, ed., Études Safavides, pp. 251–66.

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25.  Hairi, “Reflections on the Shi’i Responses,” in Calmard, ed., Études Safavides, pp. 151–64. 26.  Klein, “Caravan Trade in Safavid Iran,” in Clamard, ed., Études Safavides, pp. 307–17. 27.  Herzig, “The Iranian Raw Silk Trade,” p. 81. 28. Richards, The Mughal Empire, pp. 1–55, 110–65, 220–23. 29. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City. 30.  Barendse, “Trade and State,” p. 198. 31.  Van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society, pp. 152–54; Reid, Charting the Shape, 223–30. Both sources suggest the pragmatism of lesser and greater rulers and the preservation of local autonomy. 32. Brummett, Ottoman Seapower, pp. 12–13. 33.  Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 170–73; Osborne, Southeast Asia, p. 45; Bushnell and Greene, “Introduction,” in Daniels and Kennedy, eds., Negotiated Empires, pp. 3–4.

Chapter 4: Three American Empires   1.  The Canary Islands were the eastern takeoff point for crossing the Atlantic. They became definitively Spanish in 1479, but the conquest of the warlike Guanches who lived there was not completed until 1495.   2.  Deagan and Cruxent, “From Contact to Criollos,” p. 71.   3.  Strictly speaking, America was a Castilian project. What we now call Spain was a group of neighboring kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula that happened to have the same ruler. The anachronistic use of the label “Spanish” in reference to Castile’s American empire is so prevalent that it will be used here.   4.  Murra, “High Altitude Andean Societies,” pp. 205–14; Conrad and Demarest, Religion and Empire, pp. 96–110.  5. Kicza, Resilient Cultures, pp. 17–18.   6.  Conrad and Demarest, Religion and Empire; Murra, “High Altitude Andean Societies,” in Genovese and Hochberg, eds., Geographic Perspectives, pp. 205–14; Hassig, Trade, Tribute, and Transportation; Santley, “The Structure of the Aztec Transport Network,” in Trombold, ed., Ancient Road Networks, pp. 198–210; Calnek, “The City-State in the Basin of Mexico,” in Schaedel, Hardoy, and Kinzer, eds., Urbanization in the Americas; Bray, “Land-use, Settlement Patterns,” in Ucko, Tringham, and Dimbleby, eds., Man, Settlement, and Urbanism, pp. 909–26.  7. Kicza, Resilient Cultures, p. 70.   8.  Altman, “Spanish Women in the Caribbean, 1493–1540”; Carrasco, “IndianSpanish Marriages.”  9. Brading, Miners and Merchants, pp. 14–32. 10. Brading, Miners and Merchants, pp. 60–61. 11. Brading, Miners and Merchants, p. 64.

236  •  Notes

12. Clayton, “Trade and Navigation,” in Bakewell, Johnson, and Dodge, eds., Readings, I, pp. 175–88; Sempat Assadourian, El Sistema de la Economía Colonial; Glave, Trajinantes, pp. 37–40. 13.  Hackett, ed., Revolt of the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico, pp. 232–53. 14. Kamen, Empire, pp. 279–81. 15. Glave, Trajinantes. 16.  Castile and Portugal had negotiated a north–south line in the Atlantic that acknowledged Portuguese control of Brazil. Extending that line around the globe put a similar north–south boundary somewhere in the island complex of the modern Philippines and Indonesia. Since this was a longitudinal line, which no one could measure accurately, and the known geography was hazy at best, Castile claimed that its ships were on the Castilian side of the line. 17.  Few of the later sixteenth and seventeenth century Manila galleons made the crossing to Acapulco that fast. Six- to eight-month trips were more common. As ships and navigation improved in the eighteenth century, the eastbound crossing shortened to around four months.

Chapter 5: Africa, Portugal, Brazil, and the Atlantic   1.  Kea, “The Phenomenology of al-’umran.”  2. Connah, African Civilizations.   3.  Collins and Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, pp. 191–95.  4. Thornton, Africa and Africans, Maps 1, 2, 3, and 5, pp. x–xiv.  5. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, pp. 7–11.  6. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, pp. 10–19.   7.  Ashtor, “The Volume of Levantine Trade.”  8. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade.  9. Curtin, Feierman, Thompson, and Vansina, African History, pp. 149–50, 253–57. 10.  Collins and Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, pp. 182–84. 11.  Thornton, “The Portuguese in Africa,” in Bethencourt and Ramado Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, p. 139–45. 12.  Alencastro, “The Economic Network,” in Bethencourt and Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, pp. 105–7, 109. 13.  Ashtor, “The Venetian Supremacy in Levantine Trade.” 14. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas, pp. 32–33, 43–44; Disney, A History of Portugal, pp. 101–7. 15. Disney, A History of Portugal, pp. 45–77; Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, pp. 36–60. 16.  Thornton, “The Portuguese in Africa,” in Bethencourt and Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese Overseas Expansion, p. 146. 17.  Alencastro, “The Economic Network,” in Bethencourt and Ramada Curto, eds., Portuguese Oceanic Expansion, pp. 105–7.

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18. Disney, A History of Portugal, pp. 216–17, 244–47. 19.  The phase “Atlantic North America” is used here to refer to the area encompassed by the coast from Newfoundland to the Carolinas and reaching inland to include southern Ontario, the Ohio Valley, Michigan, and Wisconsin. 20. Chapin, Subject Matter; Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil. 21. Similar demographic disasters played out later in the Pacific islands, New Zealand, and Australia. 22.  Metcalf, “Searching for the Female Go-Betweens,” pp. 2–15. 23. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade; Connah, African Civilizations, pp. 97–150; Kea, “The Phenomenology of al-’umran: Towns,” pp. 14–21, maps; Elbl, “Cross-Cultural Trade and Diplomacy,” p. 175; Schwartz, “Looking for a New Brazil,” in van Groesen, The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, pp. 46–50. 24. Burns, A History of Brazil, p. 49; Russell-Wood, “Ports of Colonial Brazil,” in Karras and McNeill, eds., Atlantic American Societies, pp. 181–89. 25.  Benton, “The Legal Regime.” 26.  Hamer, “‘Our Dutchmen run after them very much.’” 27.  Meuwese, “From Dutch Allies to Portuguese Vassals,” in van Groesen, ed., The Legacy of Dutch Brazil, pp. 59–76. 28. Games, The Web of Empire, pp. 208–10. 29. Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies, pp. 272–75. 30.  Davis, “Sugar and Slavery,” in Northrup, ed., The Atlantic Slave Trade, pp. 33–34. 31. Mintz, Sweetness and Power, pp. 42–45. 32.  Davis, “Sugar and Slavery,” in Northrup, ed., The Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 35. 33.  Davis, “Sugar and Slavery,” in Northrup, ed., The Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 34. 34.  Curtin, “From Guesses to Calculations,” in Northrup, ed., The Atlantic Slave Trade, p. 44. 35. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, pp. 30–31, 43–44. 36.  De Vries, The Economy of Europe, pp. 120–40. 37.  Mokyr, ed., The British Industrial Revolution, pp. 68–75. 38.  Burnard and Garrigus, The Plantation Machine.

Chapter 6: Atlantic North America 1. Games, The Web of Empire, pp. 118–24. 2. Davies, The North Atlantic World, pp. 168–69. 3. Games, The Web of Empire, pp. 129–37. 4. Kupperman, Indians and English, pp. 12–40. 5. Kicza, Resilient Cultures, pp. 126–30. 6. Games, The Web of Empire, p. 139; Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies, pp. 85–86. 7.  Galenson, “Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude,” p. 4.

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  8.  The total population in 1775 included about two million Europeans, the product of a very high rate of natural increase within the colonies.   9.  Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, pp. 20–24. 10. Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, pp. 26–31; Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, pp. 15–23. 11.  Hinderaker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, pp. 126–31; 23–25. 12. Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, pp. 129–40. 13.  Klooster, “The Geopolitical Impact,” pp. 26–28, 36–38. 14.  Hamer, “‘Our Dutchmen run after them very much.’” 15. Romney, New Netherland Connections; Shoemaker, A Strange Likeness, p. 129. 16. Romney, New Netherland Connections, pp. 128–72. 17. Kicza, Resilient Cultures, p. 112. 18. White, The Middle Ground, p. 33; Kicza, Resilient Cultures, pp. 112–16. 19.  The mechanisms the leaders used to unite different tribes included gift exchanges, intermarriage, adoption, and the peace pipe. A call for the use of the peace pipe did not mean automatic peace, but it did force the acknowledgement of a space wherein negotiation was acceptable. 20. Kicza, Resilient Cultures, p. 108. 21.  Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties. 22. Games, The Web of Empire, p. 292; Davies, The North Atlantic World, pp. 168–78; Nuffield, Bay of the North, pp. 25–34; Burley, Servants of the Honourable Company, pp. 2–3. 23. Fenn, Encounters at the Heart of the World, pp. 18–21. 24. Plane, Colonial Intimacies, p. 16. 25.  Hinderacker and Mancall, At the Edge of Empire, p. 27. 26. Carney, Black Rice. 27.  In a rare example, in 1804 outright famine in central Spain was met in part by importing wheat and flour from Philadelphia. 28. Davis, The Rise of the Atlantic Economies, pp. 273–76.

Chapter 7: An Era of World Trade 1.  Van Leur, Indonesian Trade, p. 180. 2.  Chang, “The First Chinese Diaspora,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs, pp.14–19; Reid, “Structure of Cities,” p. 237. 3. Reid, “Structure of Cities,” p. 237; Thomaz, Nina Chatu and the Portuguese Trade in Malacca, p. 31. 4.  Bouchon, “A Microcosm; Calicut,” in Lombard and Aubin, eds., Asian Merchants, pp. 40–48. 5.  Aubin, “Merchants in the Red Sea,” in Lombard and Aubin, eds., Asian Merchants, p. 81. 6.  De Matos and Lopes Matos, “Christians and Muslims,” in Disney and Booth, eds., Vasco da Gama, p. 105.

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 7. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, pp. 251–60.   8.  Gauthier-Pilters and Dagg, The Camel, pp.109–10.   9.  Reid, “The Structure of Cities,” pp. 239–50. 10.  Lengua is difficult to translate. In this context it meant not just “language” but also “interpreter.” 11.  Rothermund, “Asian Emporia,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities, and Entrepreneurs, pp. 5–8. 12. Curtin, Cross-Cultural Trade. 13.  The bulk of the information on the Multani comes from Dale, Indian Merchants. 14.  For an up-to-date overview of the Armenians and their trade diaspora, see Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean (Berkeley, 2014). 15.  Dauphinois, “The Navigations . . . Turkie [1550],” in Ghazarian, Armenians, pp. 42–44. 16.  Barendse, “Trade and State,” p. 188. 17.  Arasaratnam, S., “Merchants of Coromandel,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs, pp. 37–51; Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean, p. 47. 18. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean, pp. 58–63. 19. Aslanian, From the Indian Ocean, p. 59. 20. Israel, Diasporas within a Diaspora, pp. 1–17. 21.  Trivellato, “Marriage, Commercial Capital, and Business Agency,” in Johnson, Sabean, Teuscher, and Trivellato, eds., Transnational Families, pp.107–30. 22. The Southsea Chinese are sometimes referred to as the Overseas Chinese, but that phrase carries a twenty-first-century connotation that does not apply to the Chinese diaspora of the Early Modern era. “Southsea” is a translation of the term applied to these people in the Early Modern era. 23.  Chang, “The First Chinese Diaspora,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs, pp. 14–19; Reid, “Structure of Cities,” p. 237. 24. Chang, “The First Chinese Diaspora,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs, pp.14–19; Reid, “Structure of Cities,” p. 237. 25. Wills, China and Maritime Europe. 26.  Portugal’s trade with Japan was consolidated into one large carrack, more than twice the size of most ships in the South China Sea, and was managed on contract with the Portuguese Crown.

Chapter 8: Europeans and the World 1. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, p. 139. 2.  Collins and Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, pp. 96–105. 3.  Collins and Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, pp. 109–12. 4. Allen, European Slave Trading, pp. 4, 11–12. 5. Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico.

240  •  Notes

  6.  Collins and Burns, A History of Sub-Saharan Africa, pp. 163–70.  7. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, pp. 120–21.   8.  Prestholdt, “Portuguese Conceptual Categories.”   9.  Some authors refer to members of this group as Klings. The Klings were part of a slightly different Indian caste but were closely related to and integrated into the Chettiar trade network. 10. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 140 11.  Mocha was to become important as one of the first major sources of coffee for the European market. 12.  Mathew, “Khwaja Shams-ud-din Giloni,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs, pp. 363–72. 13.  Mathew, “Khwaja Shams-ud-din Giloni,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs, pp. 363–72. 14. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, p. 120. 15. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, pp. 128–29. 16. Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers. 17. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 129. 18. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, pp. 77–78. 19. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, p. 142. 20.  The Welser family was one of the biggest companies in Western Europe. They provided much of the capital and mining technology needed to open the Mexican silver mines. 21.  Kalus, “Tracing Business Patterns,” p. 14. 22. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, pp. 106–10; van Veen, Decay or Defeat? pp. 69–71. 23. Newitt, A History of Portuguese Overseas Expansion, pp. 190–93. 24. Elbl, “Cross-Cultural Trade.” 25.  Findlay and O’Rourke, Power and Plenty, p. 157. 26. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 158. 27. Allen, European Slave Trading, pp. 39–40, 45. 28. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, p. 7; Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 125. 29.  Population estimates vary, but by 1650 the major expansions had been completed. 30. Manuel’s older son died young and was succeeded by his younger brother, Sebastian I, Manuel’s last surviving son. Sebastian led a Portuguese invasion of Morocco in 1578 and was killed in battle. The next closest heir was Manuel I’s brother, Henry. Henry was archbishop of Lisbon and almost eighty years old. As a churchman, he had no legitimate sons. When he died of natural causes in 1580, as Manuel I’s grandson, Philip was next in line of succession. 31. Souza, The Survival of Empire, pp. 66–69.

Notes  •  241

Chapter 9: Europeans and Asian Trade in the Seventeenth Century  1. Games, The Web of Empire, p. 25.  2. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, p. 55  3. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, pp. 55–56.  4. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, pp. 107–24, 169.   5.  The role of silver in the trade of this era is complicated. It was cheapest at the sources, in this era Mexico, Peru, and southern Japan. It circulated both as coined money and as silver bullion in ingots. While we think of it as money, it was basically another commodity. Coined money had the advantage that, if the government that minted it had kept the silver content of the coinage constant, the fact of being coined made its silver content more trustworthy. Silver ingots had a different advantage in that other governments could mint it into coinage, an operation that created a profit for the government.  6. Keay, The Honourable Company, pp. 119–20.  7. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, pp. 150–53.  8. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, p. 100.  9. Erikson, Between Monopoly and Free Trade, pp. 10–12. 10. Keay, The Honourable Company, p. 377. 11. Souza, The Survival of Empire, pp. 30–36. 12. Disney, A History of Portugal, p. 356. 13.  Van Veen, Decay or Defeat? p. 136. 14.  Van Linschoten, The Voyage. 15.  Given the lightly constructed architecture of Southeast Asian towns, this may not have been as serious a calamity as it sounds to a modern Western ear. 16.  The earliest evidence of smallpox in Australia is dated about 1720, a hundred years after the Dutch began sailing past Australia, and is associated with fishermen from Makassar. These fishermen began spending several months each year living on the north coast with the Aborigines, several hundred miles from any possible Dutch supply post. There is no evidence of any European disease among the Aborigines on the west coast of Australia until well after the first outbreaks in other parts of the continent. Campbell, Invisible Invaders, 1–29, 191–214. 17. Steensgaard, “Emporia: Some Reflections,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities and Entrepreneurs, pp. 9–12. 18. Allen, European Slave Trading, pp. 9–19. 19. Wills, “China and Maritime Europe,” pp. 67–77; Wills, Pepper, Guns, and Parleys, p. 65; Andrade, “The Company’s Chinese Pirates,” pp. 427–40. 20. Reid, “Economic and Social Change, c. 1400–1800,” in Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 150–51; Raychaudhuri, “The Commercial Entrepreneur,” in Ptak and Rothermund, eds., Emporia, Commodities, and Entrepreneurs, pp. 339–52.

242  •  Notes

21.  The Taungoo Kingdom (1599–1752) was located in the center of the modern country of Myanmar (Burma). 22.  Usually referred to as a “factory” in English because it was run by a “factor,” or broker/purchasing agent. 23. Dijk, Seventeenth-Century Burma, CD-ROM appendix. 24. Reid, “Economic and Social Change, c. 1400–1800,” in Tarling, ed., The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, vol. 1, pt. 2, pp. 150–51. 25. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 168; Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, p. 223. 26. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 148.

Chapter 10: Disappearing Colonists  1. Materials from chapters 2, 5, and 6 offer an overview of the demographic problem.   2.  De Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia.”  3. Keay, The Honourable Company, pp. 24–29.   4.  De Vries, “Connecting Europe and Asia.”  5. Disney, A History of Portugal, p. 147.  6. Clark, A Farewell to Alms, p. 114; David, Johansson, and Pozzi, “The Demography of an Early Mortality.” Around the world, outside large cities, life expectancy at birth was between twenty-five and thirty-five years. For the Europeans who survived the first two years in Asia and were near age twenty-five, their age-specific life expectancy gave them a 50 percent chance of living to age forty-five.  7. Keay, The Honourable Company, pp. 24–29.  8.  Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, p. 33; Pearson, Port Cities and Intruders, p. 150.  9. Da Silva, “Beyond the Cape,” in Schwartz, ed., Implicit Understandings, p. 305. 10. Dijk, Seventeenth-century Burma, pp. 29–30; SarDesai, Southeast Asia, pp. 74–76. 11.  Reed, “Organization of Production,” p. 64. 12. Games, The Web of Empire, pp. 103–9. 13. Reid, Charting the Shape, pp. 159–65. 14. Blussé, Bitter Bonds; Wills, 1688, pp. 84–86. 15. Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, p. 17. 16. Taylor, The Social World of Batavia, p. 17. 17. Souza, Survival of Empire, pp. 172–82; van Veen, Decay or Defeat? pp. 234–38; Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire, pp. 148–55. 18.  Lanzado is a bit hard to translate, but it refers to someone who is forward, assertive, or moves ahead or away. 19.  Russell-Wood, “For God, King and Mammon,” pp. 264–65. 20.  Scammell, “European Exiles,” pp. 657–60. 21. Colley, Captives, pp. 39, 95–99.

Notes  •  243

22.  Scammell, “European Exiles,” p. 642. 23.  Russell-Wood, “For God, King and Mammon,” pp. 265–68. 24. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia, p. 33; Disney, A History of Portugal, p. 192. 25.  Silva Couto, “Some Observations on Portuguese Renegades,” pp. 188–90. 26.  One ton of silver was the equivalent of almost two million pesos. Sixty tons yielded about 120 million pesos. 27. Kamen, Empire, p. 209, citing Robert Reed, Colonial Manila. The Context of Hispanic Urbanism and Process of Morphogenesis (Berkeley, 1978), p. 34; Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico. 28. Pearson, The Indian Ocean, p. 157. 29. Kamen, Empire, pp. 197–239; Wang, “Merchants without Empire,” in Tracy, The Rise of Merchant Empires, pp. 410–18.

Chapter 11: Conclusion   1.  Storrs, “Magistrates to Administrators,” in Crooks and Parsons, Empires and Bureaucracy, pp. 304–5.   2.  McCaa, “The Peopling of Mexico,” in Steckel and Haines, eds., The Population History of North America (New York, 2000), 241–304.  3. SarDesai, Southeast Asia, p. 63.   4.  García de León, Tierra adentro, mar en fuera: El Puerto de Veracruz, pp. 470–83.   5.  Barendse, “Trade and State,” p. 194.   6.  The English colonies of New England, New York, and the Netherlands, which included women and children from their beginnings, experienced few examples of intermarriage between Europeans and, in this case, Native Americans.  7. Judd, The Lion and the Tiger, p. 54.  8. Dalrymple, White Mughals, pp. 133–34.  9. Judd, The Lion and the Tiger, pp. 53–5; Hawes, Poor Relations, pp. 14–20. 10.  Bosma and Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies, pp. 293–343. 11.  Pattynama, “Secrets and Danger,” in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the Empire, p. 107; Gouda and Clancy-Smith, “Introduction,” in Clancy-Smith and Gouda, Domesticating the Empire, p. 18. 12.  Locher-Scholten, “So Close and Yet So Far,” pp. 135, 139, 144, contrasts this with the late nineteenth century and its increasingly systematic separation of racial or ethnic segments of society. This involved not only opposition to intermarriage but also ways of organizing the household to minimize contact between European families and non-European servants. 13. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, pp. 18, 235–36. 14. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 110. 15.  Approximately 40 percent of the silver sent from America to Europe ended up in China or India.

244  •  Notes

16.  Table 11.1.   Rates of Growth of GDP in East Asia, 1990–2016 Average Rate of Growth (%) Per Year Country Vietnam China Cambodia Indonesia Laos South Korea Myanmar Singapore Malaysia India Thailand Philippines United States Bangladesh Japan

1990–2007

2014–2016

13.3 12.4  8.7  7.5  7.4  7.1  6.6  6.6  6.2  5.8  5.4  4.9   4.17  2.7  2.0

6.3 6.9 7.0 4.9 7.5 2.9 7.9 2.3 5.1 7.5 2.3 6.2 2.2 6.7 0.3

Source: International Monetary Fund and United Nations.

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Index

Abbas I, Shah, 54–56, 141, 164 Aborigines, 186, 241n16 Acapulco, Mexico, 20, 76, 80, 83, 165–69, 170, 194, 202, 211, 212–13 Aden, 17, 131, 143, 156 Afghanistan, 37, 54 Africa, 2–3, 220–21; East Africa, 5, 126, 129–30, 150–54, 154, 207; Portuguese, early visits, 88–91; West Africa, 17, 85–88 agents/factors, 3, 15, 28–29, 64, 221, 242n22; Dutch East India Company, 187, 205, 214; English East India Company, 177–79, 181, 224; fur trade, 121–22; Portuguese, 204–5; shipping and, 134–36. See also Armenian trade diaspora Agra, 57, 59 Akbar, emperor, 57–59, 58, 148, 164 Albuquerque, Afonso de, 17, 196 Alcalá de Henares university, 44, 47 Aleppo, 9, 15, 52, 55–56, 131, 174–75 Alexandria, 9, 131 Almeida, Francisco de, 152, 154 Alvarado, Pedro de, 82

Americas, 215–16, 218–20; expansion narrative, 17–19. See also Aztec Empire; Brazil; Inca Empire; Native American empires; North America; Spanish American Empire Amsterdam, 177, 183–85, 184, 214 Anatolia, 36–37, 50, 52 Andalucía, 24, 66, 81 Anderson, Benedict, 22 Andes region, 1, 68–69, 78–79 Angola, 86–87, 88, 90 Anomabu Fort, 201 Antwerp, 25, 173, 183–85, 184 Arabian Peninsula, 48 Arabian Sea, 7, 53, 57, 59, 128, 129 Arguim (Arguin), 88 armed trade diasporas, 152–54, 153, 187 Armenian family firms, 138, 181; New Julfa, 55, 141, 179 Armenian Orthodox Church, 141 Armenian trade diaspora, 28, 55–56, 62, 139–43, 140, 171; Armenian flag, 142, 181; seventeenth century, 175 Asia, 2–3, 220–21; direct route to, 80–84; Europe, relation to, 125;

273

274  •  Index

political unrest, 125–26; routes to, 9, 50; view of European trade, 125–26 Atlantic islands, 92–93 “Atlantic World,” 99 Australia, 186, 241n16 Austria, 43–44 authority: central, 61, 72; absolute, 234n10 Ava, Taungoo Kingdom, 190 avería tax, 78 Azerbaijan, 54 Azores, 91 Aztec Empire, 5, 6, 17, 34, 36, 66, 67, 70–71, 218; Triple Alliance, 70 Aztecs (Mexica), 5, 70

98; plantation society, 99–102; Sephardic Jews and, 101–2, 144–45; silver and, 98–99; slave trade, 98, 99, 105–7, 108, 163; sugar plantations, 105, 163 brazilwood, 95–96, 97 Brunei, Sultanate of, 19, 165–66, 211 bureaucracy, 51, 62; Chinese, 37–38, 40; Habsburg, 44–47; Safavid Empire, 55 Byzantine Empire, 36, 50, 51

cabildos (city councils), 74, 212 Cabot, John, 25 Cabot, Sebastian, 25 Cabral, Pedro Álvares, 4, 95 Cabrillo, Juan Rodríguez, 20, 82 Cádiz, 48, 173 Babur (Mughal emperor), 57 Cairo, 15, 36, 129, 131, 143, 152, 163 Bacon, Francis, 8 Calicut, 57, 130, 152, 156 Baghdad, 36, 163 California, 20, 82, 165 Balboa, Vasco Núñez de, 19 Cámara de Indias, 74 Balkans, 36, 51–52, 166 camels, 132 Bandar Abbas, 56, 179 Bantam, Sultanate of, 178, 186, 188, 213 Canada, 120, 122, 123, 223, 226 Canary Islands, 10, 11, 25, 65, 91, Barbados, 102, 105 235n1 Barcelona, 29 Cape Horn, 19 Batavia (Jayakarta), 17, 145, 147, Cape of Good Hope, 16, 19, 81, 95, 185–87, 188, 209, 213–14 126, 185 Bayezid II (sultan), 51–52 Cape Verde Islands, 4, 85, 90, 91–94 Bay of Bengal, 57, 59, 127, 128–29 captaincies, Estado da India, 159 Belgium, 43 caravan routes, 9, 51–54, 57, 60, Benin, Kingdom of, 87, 89 129–32, 143; North Africa, 15, 48, Benton, Lauren, 99 54, 86, 131–32 Bijapur, shah of, 156 Caribbean, 19, 48, 65, 66, 116, 124, 219 bishops and archbishops, 74, 88, 99, Carolinas, 116, 124 158, 163, 166 cartazes (licenses), 157–58 Black Sea ports, 9, 15, 52 Caspian Sea, 131 Boer War, 229 Castile, 10, 12, 24–25, 43–47, 235n3, Bohemia, 43–44 236n16. See also Spain/Spanish Borneo, 19, 165 Empire; Spanish American Empire boundaries/borders, flexible, 24, 37, 62, Castro, Dom Pedro de, 94 236n16 Catholic Church, 26, 29, 74, 163, 166 Brazil, 3–4, 15–17, 79, 85, 95–99, 120, Cebu, Philippines, 83, 165, 211 230, 236n16; matrilineal society,

Index  •  275

Central Asia, 36 Centurion (ship), 203 Ceuta, 29, 88 Champa, Kingdom of, 7, 128 Charlemagne, 43 Charles V, 5, 19, 25, 43–45, 44, 74, 80–82, 183, 234n9; abdication, 164 Chatu, Nina, 155–56 Chaul, Battle of, 50, 154 Chennai (Madras), 181 Chettiars, 129, 130, 155 Chichimeca Indians, 77 Chimor Empire, 68 China/Chinese Empire, 2, 4–7, 35, 37–42; Beijing, 40; centralized administration, 37–38, 40; currency, 42; economic initiatives, 38, 40; examination system, 37–38; Fujian coast, 40, 147–48, 189, 191; Guangzhou, 40; Indian Ocean voyages, 38–40, 39; infrastructure, 40–41; inland market area, 41, 132; Manchu dynasty, 38, 40, 42; maritime expansion, 38–40, 39; Ming dynasty (1363–1644), 36, 38, 40–42, 128, 189; no European direct trade with, 147, 181, 189, 191, 211; Qing dynasty (1644–1911), 36, 42, 189, 222; scholar-bureaucrats, 37–38, 40; ships, 13, 128, 129, 147, 160; silk trade, 41, 129, 150, 163, 167, 169, 221–22; silver and, 2, 7, 17, 20, 42, 80, 83, 148, 163, 169, 189, 226, 228; successes, 64; as superior society, 6, 30; trade, 20, 41–42; Yangzi region, 40; Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, 38, 40, 128, 145. See also Southsea Chinese “Chinese Mediterranean,” 128 Christianity, 26, 29, 35, 61, 130; Africa, 90; Catholic Church, 26, 29, 74, 163; Coptic, 157; Eastern Orthodox, 141; “Marranos” (false Christians),

144; Reformation, 166; in Spanish American Empire, 73 Christian-Muslim trade interactions, 13, 29, 53–54 cinnamon plantations, 188, 190 cities, capital, 11, 31, 60, 134, 137; as centers of political authority, 61, 63; colonial capitals, 208–14; Inca Empire, 68 city-states, 131, 137 civil wars: China, 38; Europe, 10, 12, 24, 110, 181; Inca Empire, 69, 218; Japan, 147, 164; Tamerlane and, 37 climate change, 9, 70, 230 cloves, 81, 150 coffee production, 191 Cold War, 8 collaboration, 4–6, 161–62, 218; allies, native, 5, 70, 71, 218 colonists, 21–23, 217; assimilation, 200–201, 201–6, 224–25; colonial capitals and, 208–14; disappearance of, 193–216; diseases, effect on, 87, 194, 213, 214, 220–21, 223; European soldiers and Asian armies, 206–8; marriage and assimilation, 196–201; mortality, 193–96, 195, 242n6; private trade, 201–6 Columbus, Christopher, 11, 17, 25, 65, 91, 165, 217 commerce: credit, 136, 142, 162, 179; diversity, integrity, tolerance, 135–37; partnerships, 5, 27–28, 176, 198 Congo, Republic of, 88 Congo River, 4, 91 conquests, 1–3; heroic narratives, 2, 10, 21; reality of, 161 conquistadores, 73–75, 165 Consejo de Indias (Council for the Indies), 74 Constantinople, 9, 51–52, 174 conversos (former Jews), 143–44

276  •  Index

Coptic Christianity, 157 coral, 158 Coromandel Coast, 59, 130, 206 corruption, 48, 63, 78, 210; trade, 162–63, 169, 202–3 Cortés, Fernando “Hernán,” 2, 5, 17, 24, 25, 34, 66, 71, 82, 218 Council of Castile, 47 “country,” 22 credit, 136–37, 142, 162, 179 Cromwell, Oliver, 181 cross-Atlantic linkages, 99 crusades, 13, 29, 136 cultural exchanges, 3–6 Curaçao, 102 Curtin, Philip, 138 Cusco, Kingdom, 67–68, 218 Cuzco, Peru, 68, 69–70, 78–79 Cyprus, 52

Board of Seventeen, 177; Chinese community and, 187, 190–91; marriage and employees, 197–99; private trade, 205–6; staff, 187, 190, 195 Dutch Empire, 2, 25–26, 144, 222; Batavia and, 145, 147, 213–14; Brazil and, 99, 101–2; New Netherland, 117–20, 118 Dutch Republic, 25–26, 101, 162, 163, 173, 182–91, 184; War of Independence, 25, 162, 166–67, 173, 183. See also Low Countries Dutch Revolution, 183–85 Dutch West Indies Company, 101, 117 dynastic imperialism, 43, 60–61

Early Modern era (1450–1750), 8, 209 East Africa, 5, 126, 129–30, 150–54, 154, 207 da Gama, Vasco, 16, 16–17, 95, 125–26, Eastern Orthodox Christianity, 141 East Indies, 20, 175 149, 151, 161 economic archipelagos, 69 Dahomey kingdom, 87 Egypt, 36, 48, 50, 229 Davis, Ralph, 220 Elcano, Juan Sebastián, 19, 81 debt peonage, 77 Elizabeth I, 162, 166, 175, 177 de la Salle, Gadifer, 25 Elmina, 101 de las Casas, Bartolomé, 31 empires, 3; effectiveness, 60–64; reality Delhi, Sultanate of, 10, 57, 131 of European power, 5–7; roster of, demographics: Estado da India, 35–37. See also specific empires 194–95; Spanish American Empire, 75, 77, 78, 83–84; world of emporia (inter–trade zone seaports), 129–32, 190; diversity, integrity, 1500, 134 tolerance, 135–37 Dias, Bartolomeu, 16, 95 encomienda (trusteeship), 72–75, 82 diasporas, 143. See also trade diasporas England, 102, 162, 166–67, 173–82; diplomacy, 5, 31, 33, 34, 40, 56 civil wars, 10, 181–82; Eastern diseases/epidemics, 186, 241n16; effect Mediterranean and, 174–77; Levant on Native Americans, 3, 5, 66, 71, Company, 55, 174–75, 179; as low97, 112, 123, 218; tropical, effect budget trading empire, 177–79, 180; on colonists, 87, 194, 213, 214, minimal navy, 181 220–21, 223 English East India Company, 2, 7, Drew, Richard, 201 17, 21, 28, 55–56, 142, 176, 185; Dutch East India Company, 2, 7, 17, agents, 177–79, 181, 224; Armenians 21, 101, 142, 148, 176, 182–91, 185;

Index  •  277

and, 181, 189; limited capital and protection, 177; marriage and employees, 196–97, 199; private trade, 205, 206; second company, 181–82; trading posts, 178, 180; underlying reality, 181–82 Enlightenment, 225–26 Estado da India (Portuguese), 2, 21, 25–26, 149, 152–53, 210; demographics, 194–95; difficulty controlling, 162–63; feitorias (factories), 159, 195; governing maritime empire, 158–60; Low Countries and, 183, 185; Mughal limits on, 164; private trade, 204–5. See also Portugal/Portuguese; Portuguese Empire Ethiopia, Empire of, 157, 229 Eurasia, 64; 1550–1565 transition, 162–65; 1565–1600, 165–67; geography of trade, 1497, 126–28, 127. See also Mughal Empire; Ottoman Empire; Safavid Empire Eurocentric accounts, 1–2; expansion narratives, 15–20, 125–26 Europe: Asia, relation to, 125; prosperity and demand, 11, 31; reestablishment in Middle East, 15 European, as term, 22–23 Europeans, 218–20; adaptation, 6, 22, 32–33, 34; collaboration with local societies, 4–6; East Africa, trade with, 150–54; in “Old World,” 220–23; political and cultural baggage, 20; seventeenth century trade, 173–91; spices, silk, and silver trade, 149–71; values and cultural similarities, 5–6 expansion narratives: across the Pacific, 19–20; into the Americas, 17–20, 65; Eurocentric accounts, 15–20, 125–26; heroic conquest, 2, 10, 21; Portugal, Africa, Brazil, and the

Indian Ocean, 15–17, 20; return to Middle East, 15, 20 Expansion of Europe (1450–1750), 1 Extremadura, 24, 66 factories (feitorias), 159, 195 family ethos, 26–29, 135–36, 196 family networks, 22, 26–29, 156, 176, 178, 198, 200–202 Ferdinand of Aragon, 43–44, 164 Ferdinand Trastámara of Aragon, 43 fictive relationships, 26, 137 “foreigners,” 23–24 Fort Nassau, 117, 120 Fort Zeelandia, 189, 191, 206 France, 10, 56, 110, 165, 228; Native Americans and fur trade, 120–23 French East India Company, 142 fur trade, 110, 117, 120–23 Gambia River, 86, 89 Gandhi, Mahatma, 229 Ganges River, 131 Ganges Valley, 57, 59 garrisons, 5, 159, 162, 178, 181, 194–96 Genizah manuscripts, 143 Genoese, 10–11, 35, 50, 53 geography of Eurasian trade, 1497, 126–28, 127 geopolitical identity, 23–24 Germany, 43 Ghana, 101 Goa (Portuguese Asia), 13, 25, 154, 156, 158–59, 190, 209, 210–11, 223; demographics, 194–95 gold, 15, 29, 89, 93, 151, 155 Gold Coast, 101 Gopi, Malik, 156 Granada, 10, 12 Grand Canal, 41 Great Lakes region, 120–21 Greece, 36, 53 gross domestic product (GDP), 230, 244

278  •  Index

Guanches, 88 Guangzhou, China, 40 Guaraní people, 80, 96 Gujarat, Sultanate of, 50, 156 Gujarati merchants, 130, 142, 155–56, 179, 210–11 Gunpowder Empires, 54, 175. See also Mughal Empire; Ottoman Empire; Safavid Empire Habsburg Empire, 6, 36, 37, 42–48, 45, 62, 162–63; bureaucracy, 44–47; defeated, 171; dependent on Mexican and Peruvian communities, 80, 84; Dutch independence from, 99, 101; silver and, 46, 48, 228; Spanish American Empire and, 46, 80; Spanish Armada of 1588, 38, 167; Spanish Low Countries and, 183; universities, 44, 46–47 Haiti, 102 Hanseatic League, 24 Henry III of Castile, 25, 240n30 Henry VIII, 14, 166 Hermandad de Navarros (Brotherhood of Navarrese), 28–29 Hindus, 62 Hindu Vijayanagara Empire, 31–32, 57 historical background, 9–11 Holland, 144 Holy Land, 36, 157 Holy Roman Empire, 43–44, 234n9 Hormuz, 131, 154, 154, 156, 159, 195, 222 hostages, 69 Hudson, Henry, 25, 117 Hudson River, 117 Hudson’s Bay Company, 121–22 Hungary, 44 Iberian Peninsula, 43 identity, 43, 193–94, 196, 215; European, 22–24, 202; family and,

26–29; instability of Europe, 23–24; political and religious, 23–26; racism and nationalism, 226; travel literature and, 30–34 Ilkhanate, 48 imagined community, 22 imperialism, 1–2, 209, 229; dynastic, 43, 60–61 Inca Empire, 6, 17, 36, 66, 67, 67–70, 218 indentured servants, 102, 105, 113–14, 116 India, 2, 21, 54; currency, 59; Hindu Vijayanagara Empire, 31–32; low interest for European merchandise, 125; Multani merchants, 138–39, 174; silver and, 59, 226; Tamerlane’s conquest, 36–37; three political worlds, 56–57; Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646), 57. See also Mughal Empire Indian Ocean, 3, 5, 15–17, 85, 95; Chinese voyages, 38–40, 39; commercial facilitators, 136; early Portuguese voyages, 151–58; emporia, 129–31; prevailing winds, 126, 127; slavery in region, 150–51, 188–89; trade networks, 59, 156. See also Estado da India (Portuguese) Indies, 43 Industrial Revolution, 4, 7, 108, 209 Indus Valleys, 57, 131 Iran, 37, 48 Iraq, 36–37, 48 Ireland, 110 Iroquois people, 117–18, 120, 218 Isabel I of Castile, 43–44 Isfahan, 55, 56, 131, 141 Iskenderun, 9, 131, 179 Islam, 35, 36, 48, 51, 54, 130, 135, 211, 221 Ismail, Shah, 10, 54, 60 Israel, 48

Index  •  279

Jaga people, 90 Jamaica, 102 Jamestown, 109, 110–14, 219 Janissary Corps, 50–51 Japan, 5, 147, 162–64, 229; expulsion of Portuguese, 7, 182, 189–90; royal government, 6–7 Java, 175, 178, 185, 188, 190–91, 213 Jayakarta, 185, 186 Jenne (Djenné), 86 Jerusalem, plan to conquer, 17, 157 Jesuits, 79–80, 97 Jewish trade diasporas, 24, 138, 143–45 Jews, Sephardic, 101–2, 143–45 John of Salisbury, 31 joint stock companies, 109–10, 175–77, 185, 213 Jordan, 48 Juana of Trastámara, 43 Julfa, 55, 141 Kabul, 54, 57 Karimi merchants, 156 Kongo, Kingdom of, 88–91, 93, 96 Kron, Fernando, 25, 159 Kuroshio current, 83 Lahore, 57, 131 Lake Texcoco, 70 language, 33–34; lenguas (language experts), 136, 239n10 lanzados (permanent settlers), 88, 90, 92–93, 95–96, 206 “Las Indias.” See Spanish American Empire Lebanon, 48 Legazpi, Miguel López de, 82–83, 165–66, 211 lenguas (language experts), 136, 239n10 Lepanto Battle of, 47, 166, 174 Léry, Jean de, 97, 98 letrado families, 46–47, 55 Levant Company, 55, 174–75, 179

Lima, Peru, 73, 74, 78–79 Lisbon, Portugal, 10–11, 25, 29, 80, 89, 91–92, 99, 152, 158–60, 166 Loaísa, García Jofre de, 19, 81 Loango, Kingdom of, 88 Low Countries, 43, 45, 163, 165, 166; Spanish, 183–85, 184. See also Dutch Republic Luso-Africans, 93–94, 155 luxuries, demand for, 11, 31, 36, 107–8, 149–50, 208 Macau, 147, 162, 163, 164, 171 Madagascar, 182 Madrid, Spain, 28–29, 47, 61, 63, 84, 171 Magellan, Ferdinand, 12, 13, 14, 19, 25, 80–81, 165 Makassar, 145, 190 Malabar Coast, 152, 156 Malacca Straits, 59 Malay Peninsula, 130, 206 Mali Empire, 86, 89, 93, 106, 132 Malta, siege of, 163, 166 Maluku Islands, 17, 81–82, 169, 175, 211, 221–22 mamelukas/os, 98 Mamluk Empire, 10, 36–37, 48, 49, 50, 52, 54, 154 Manchu, 38, 40, 42, 128. See also Qing dynasty (Manchu, 1644–1911) Manchuria, 37, 64 Mandeville, John, 32 Manila, Philippines, 83, 142, 145–47, 149, 151, 165–66, 170, 209, 221–22; Chinese immigrants, 171, 211–13; silver and, 179, 181, 189, 211, 228. See also Philippines Marco Polo, 30 marginalized people, as explorers, 11, 12, 22 maritime routes, 17–20, 18, 51, 56, 124, 131–32, 156, 161–63; to Asia, 9, 17,

280  •  Index

20, 50, 65, 80–85, 95; currents, 12, 20, 82, 83, 95; global connections, 124; between India and Red Sea, 156; three distinct zones, 126–32, 127; winds, 16, 18, 81, 91, 95, 126–28, 127, 134, 168, 185–86 “Marranos” (false Christians), 144 marriage, 6, 22; alliances, 27, 150; divorce suits, 199–200; formalized, 196–97, 224; intermarriage, 23, 92, 190, 196–201, 215, 224–25; intermarriage, Brazil, 96, 97–98, 101; intermarriage, French and Indians, 122–23; intermarriage, Spanish American Empire, 73; legitimization of children, 199–201, 224; matriarchs, 197–98, 225; private trade and disappearing Europeans, 201–6; temporary and self-terminating contracts, 198, 224; trade diaspora societies, 137–38; Tupi-Dutch, 101; as unifying theme, 223–26; working class men, 200–201, 224 Mary I, 166, 174 Mary II, 173 Mary Rose (warship), 14 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 110, 115 matriarchs, 197–98 Mauritania, 88–89 Maximilian I, 43 Maya, 34 Mayflower, 115 mayorazgo (entail), 12, 27, 232n9 Mecca, 36, 52, 137 Medici family, 27–28 medieval ambassadors, 31 Medina, 36, 52 Mediterranean, Eastern, 174–77 Mediterranean Europe, 9 Mediterranean Sea, 15, 131 Mehmed I (sultan), 50, 51 Mehmed II (sultan), 52

Melaka, 59, 81, 128, 130, 154–55, 156, 159 mercenaries, 5, 36, 70, 181, 207–8 Merchant Guild: Mexico City, 167, 212, 222; Seville, 167 merchant “nations,” 24 Mexica. See Aztecs Mexico, 66, 163; Acapulco, 20, 76, 80, 83, 165–69, 170, 194, 202, 211, 212–13; demographic and ecological changes, 75, 77, 78, 83–84; Valley of, 78; wealthy economy, 171 Mexico City, 20, 42, 67, 73, 169, 171; Manila and, 211–12; Merchant Guild, 167, 212, 222 Middle Ages, 9, 61 migration, 21–22, 32–33, 232n3 military, 7, 62–63; armed trade diasporas, 152–54, 153, 187; artillery, 55, 57, 175, 215; Aztecs, 70–71; European soldiers and Asian armies, 206–8; Inca Empire, 68; Iroquois, 119; militarized trade diasporas, 3, 17, 35; West Africa, 86 Minas Gerais, Brazil, 99 Ming dynasty (1363–1644), 36, 38, 40–42, 128, 189 missionaries, 73, 79–80, 211; Brazil, 97; Japan, 182, 189–90 mixed-race (mestizo) people, 23; Atlantic islands, 92–93; lanzados, 92, 93 Mocha, 24n11, 156 Mombasa, 183 Mongol Empire, 9–10, 30, 36–37, 48 Mongol invasion (thirteenth century), 36 Morocco, 13, 88–89, 166 Moscow, 56, 139, 174 Mozambique Island, 154 Mughal Empire, 4–6, 36–37, 49, 54, 57–60, 148, 162, 164; England and, 176, 181–82; mercenaries, European,

Index  •  281

207; Multani of India, 138–39; tolerance, 135. See also India mules, 132 Multan, 15, 57, 59, 131, 138–39 Multani merchants of India, 138–39, 174 multilingual settings, 13, 33 Mumbai, 181–82, 195 Murad II (sultan), 50 Muscat, 183 Muscovy Company, 174 Muslim empires, 13, 32, 48, 62. See also Mamluk Empire; Mughal Empire; Ottoman Empire; Safavid Empire Muslim pilgrimage routes, 36, 52 Muslim traders, 13, 26, 29, 53–54, 154 Mustapha, Kingdom of, 151 Nahuatl language, 34 Nanjing, China, 40 Nanyang (Southsea Chinese), 128 Naples, 10, 43–44 nation, 22–24 nationalism, 2, 7, 226 Native American empires, 215–16. See also Aztec Empire; Inca Empire Native Americans, 3, 218–20, 238n19; Algonquian-speaking Indian tribes, 120–21; de las Casas’s argument for, 31; diseases, effect on, 3, 5, 66, 71, 97, 112, 123, 218; Dutch and, 117, 119; France and fur trade, 120–23; Huron Indians, 120; New England, 115–16; resistance, 79; slavery and, 65, 97, 105. See also Aztec Empire; Inca Empire Navarre, Kingdom of, 28–29 navigational technology, 12–13 Ndongo, Kingdom of, 88, 90 Netherlands. See Low Countries New Amsterdam, 117, 118 New Christians (Portuguese Sephardic conversos), 144

New England, 114–17 New Jersey, 117 New Julfa, 55, 141, 179 New Netherland, 117–20, 118 New Spain, viceroy of, 211–12 New World, 19–20. See also North America; Spanish American Empire New York, 117 Nikitin, Afanasii, 32 nobility, 11, 27, 61–63, 135 North Africa, 10, 13, 15, 29, 51, 166; caravan routes, 15, 48, 54, 86, 88–89, 131–32; Jewish network, 143–44 North America, Atlantic, 109–24, 219–20, 237n19; Albany, New York, 117; Boston, 114, 116; early settlements, 111; encounters and outcomes, 123–24; France, Native Americans, and fur trade, 120–23; French and English claims, 119–20; Jamestown and Virginia, 110–14; military leaders, 112–13; New England, 114–17; New Netherland, 117–20, 118; Pilgrims, 114–15, 219–20; settlement colonies, 109–10; shipbuilding, 116–17; tobacco farming, 109, 113, 116, 124, 209 Nuestra Señora de Covadonga (ship), 203 Old Testament, 62 “Old World,” 220–23 Oman, Sultanate of, 5, 7, 183 Oregon-California border, 82 Osman (sultan), 36, 50 Ottoman Empire, 4, 36–37, 45, 49, 163–64; Baghdad, control of, 163; defeat of, 60; Ethiopia and, 157; as European country, 51; Janissary Corps, 50–51; Jewish diaspora in, 144; mercenaries, 207; military strength, 1525, 5; as naval power, 52; Philip II and, 166; rise of, 6, 10; silver and, 84; successes, 64; tolerance, 135;

282  •  Index

trade diaspora societies and, 138; trade routes, 52–54 Overseas Chinese, 138, 239n22. See also Southsea Chinese oxcarts, 132 Oyo kingdom, 87 Pachacuti, King, 68 Pacific Ocean, 19, 80–81 Pakistan, 57 Palestine, 36, 48 Papacy, 74 papal demarcation line, 81 Paraguay, 97 Paris, 63 partnerships, 5, 27–28, 176, 198 patronage, 10, 27, 47, 61, 74, 159, 208, 210 patronato (patriarchate), 74 Peoples of the Book, 62, 135 pepper trade, 150, 178 Pequot War (1634–1638), 115 Persia, 10, 36, 54 Persian Gulf, 15, 129, 131 Peru, 67, 69–70, 73, 78–80, 163 Philip II, 38, 46, 82–83, 162–67, 234n13, 240n30; Low Countries and, 164, 166, 185; Mediterranean fleet, 165 Philip IV, 101 Philip of Habsburg, 43 Philippines, 19, 81–83, 142, 146, 165. See also Manila, Philippines pidgin Portuguese, 33–34, 96 Pilgrims, North American, 114–15, 219–20 Pizarro, Francisco, 69–70 Pizarro brothers, 17, 218 plantation societies, 3, 99–102, 219. See also slave trade/slavery; sugar production; tobacco production Plymouth, Massachusetts, 114–15, 219–20

Plymouth Colony, 34 Pokanoket community, 115 political identity, 23–26 population growth, 9, 11, 35 Port Said, 50, 52 Portugal/Portuguese, 1–2; 1550–1565 transition in Eurasia, 162–65; as addition to Asian routes, 125–26; Africa, early visits, 88–91; armed trade diaspora, 152–54, 153; cartazes (licenses), 157–58; circumnavigation of Africa, 15–17; crusade concept, 13, 136–37; direct route to Asia and, 81–84; dominance in Europe, 125; early Indian Ocean voyages, 151–58; Genoese and, 10–11; governing maritime empire, 158–60; hereditary captaincies, 96; India, early encounters with, 50, 56–57; Japan expels, 7, 182, 189–90; Kongo and, 90; “power” reality of, 160–62; religious agenda, 136, 152, 157; Spain, independence from, 182; sphere of influence, 93–94; spice trade and, 149–50, 156, 161–63; unexpected consequences, 95–99; war for Independence (1640–1668), 182; weakening position, 178, 182–83, 205, 208. See also Estado da India (Portuguese) Portuguese Empire, 35, 166, 185, 210, 221. See also Estado da India (Portuguese); Goa (Portuguese Asia) Portuguese Inquisition, 101, 144, 158, 161 Portuguese Royal Monopoly, 194 Potosí, Peru, 75, 77, 79, 80 power (Portuguese), 160–62 Powhatan, Chief, 112–13 Prester John, 157 primogeniture, 12, 27, 28 Príncipe (off-shore island), 92

Index  •  283

São Tomé (off-shore island), 4, 85, 90–91, 93–94 SarDesai, D. R., 221 Selim I (sultan), 51, 52 Seljuk Turks, 233–34n2 Qing dynasty (Manchu, 1644–1911), Senegal River, 86, 89 36, 42, 189, 222 Sephardic Jews, 101–2, 143–45 Quebec, 122–23 settlement colonies, 109–10 Seville, 17, 167 racism, 116, 219, 224, 225–26, 229, Shams-ud-din Giloni, Khwaja, 156 243n12; marriage and, 121, 196–99 ships, 126; capacities, 132, 134; carracks, Raleigh, Sir Walter, 109 160, 239n26; cartazes (licenses), real estate development, 63 157–58; Chinese junks, 13, 128, Red Sea, 15, 36, 48, 127, 129, 131, 156, 129, 147, 160; dhows, 129; galleons, 163; Port Said, 50, 52 83–84, 151, 166–71, 168, 170, 194, Reformation, 166 202–3, 236n17; limited lifespan, 134; religious identity, 23–26 Manila galleons, 167–68; overloaded, rice plantations, 124 159–60, 169, 203; riverboats, 131; risk, 10–13, 193–94 role of risk and, 12–13, 14, 193–94 Roman Catholics, 26, 29, 74 Siam, 7, 195 Roman Empire, 35, 141 Sicily, 43–44 royal entourages, 31 silk trade, 41–42, 59, 175; Armenians Rubiés, Joan-Pau, 31 and, 141; China, 41, 129, 150, 163, rulers, 60–61. See also individual rulers 167, 169, 221–22; Persian, 15, 55–56, rum, 124, 220 138, 141, 179, 228 Rustichello da Pisa, 30 silver, 19–20, 28, 82, 125, 142, 162, Ryukyu, Kingdom of (Okinawa), 128 226–28, 241n5, 243n26; Armenians and, 181; Asian trade and, 54; Brazil Saavedra, Álvaro de, 19, 20, 81 and, 98–99; Chinese Empire and, 2, Safavid Empire, 5, 15, 36, 37, 49, 7, 17, 20, 42, 80, 83, 148, 163, 169, 52, 60, 164, 222; Abbas I, 54–56, 189, 226, 228; convoy system, 76, 141; Armenians in, 55–56, 62; rise 77–78; Dutch and, 189; Habsburg of, 6, 10; silk trade, 55–56, 138, Empire and, 46, 48, 228; importance 141, 179, 228; silver and, 55, 175, to world trade, 126; Japanese trade, 228; tolerance, 135; trade diaspora 147, 182; Manila and, 179, 181, 189, societies and, 138 211; Safavid Empire and, 55, 175, Saint Lawrence River, 120, 124 228; Spanish American Empire and, Saint Thomas Christians (Nasranis), 42, 75–77, 226–28, 227; trans-Pacific 130, 161 trade, 167, 169, 171 Samarkand, 57 slave trade/slavery, 2, 219; African San Diego, California, 82 coastal islands and, 85–87; African San Salvador (ship): front cover, 82 limits on, 89–90; Atlantic trade, 3–4, Santo Domingo, 65–66, 102 105–8, 107, 108; Batavia, 213; Brazil, São Salvador da Bahía, Brazil, 96, 97, 99 Protestantism, 166 Purchasing Power Parity, 230 Puritans, 110, 115, 116

284  •  Index

98, 99, 105–7, 108, 163; Caribbean, 65; chartered companies, 107–8; conditions of, 106, 114; Dutch and, 188–89, 213; East Africa and, 150–51; increase in, 90–91; Indian Ocean region, 150–51, 188–89; intra–West African slave trade, 106; Janissaries, 51; mamelukas, 98; Native Americans, 65, 97, 105; not associated with skin color, 151; Ottoman Empire, 51; Portuguese and, 93, 96, 155; Virginia population, 113–14 Smith, John, 112, 114 smuggling and contraband, 78 Smyrna, 174 social networks, 22 society, 22 Sofala, 151, 152, 155 Songhai Empire (1375–1591), 86 South Africa, 229 South America, 16, 19–20. See also Inca Empire South Atlantic, 15–16, 85 South China Sea, 3, 15–16, 40, 41; as eastern maritime zone, 128; prevailing winds, 126–28, 127 Southeast Asia, 40, 41, 137, 147–48, 155–56, 208. See also Maluku Islands; Melaka Southsea Chinese, 145–48, 146, 234n3, 239n22; Batavia, 214; Dutch and, 187, 190–91; in Manila, 171, 211–13. See also China/Chinese Empire sovereignty, 61 Spain/Spanish Empire, 1–2, 6, 42; Americas and, 17, 19; Andalucía, 24, 66, 81; Barcelona, 29; Cadiz, 173; Castile, 10, 12, 24–25, 43–47, 235n6, 236n16; Extremadura, 24, 66; family-based networks, 28; Madrid, 28–29, 47, 61, 63, 84, 171; regional identity, 24–25; trans-Pacific trade,

167–71. See also Castile; Habsburg Empire; Manila, Philippines; Spanish American Empire Spanish American Empire, 4, 36, 67; agricultural economy, move toward, 164–65; amalgamation of cultures, 6; Asia, direct route to, 80–84; Consejo de Indias (Council for the Indies), 74; demographic and ecological changes, 75, 77, 78, 83–84; encomienda (trusteeship), 72–75; Habsburg Empire and, 46, 80; Jewish diasporas in, 143; missionaries, 73; Native American resistance, 79; neofeudal society, 73; reasons for success of invasion, 71–72; silver, 42, 75–77, 226–28, 227. See also Habsburg Empire; Spain/Spanish Empire Spanish Armada of 1588, 38, 167 Spanish Low Countries, 183–85, 184 Spice Islands, 190, 211, 217 spice trade, 17, 19, 81; China and, 40; Dutch and, 187; England and, 174; European market, 161–62, 209; Low Countries and, 183; Melaka, 130; older non-European routes, 125; Portuguese, 149–50, 156, 161–63; production control, 187; seventeenth century, 175 Spitsbergen Island, 174 Squanto, 34, 115 Sri Lanka, 188, 190 Strait of Gibraltar, 85 Straits of Magellan, 19 Sub-Saharan Africa, 86 Suez Canal Crisis (1956), 229 sugar production, 4, 66, 103, 104, 116, 124, 209; Brazil, 98; Dutch and, 99, 101–2, 188, 191; reasons for, 102–5; São Tomé, 93 Suleiman the Magnificent, 45, 53 Sumatra, 185 Sunda Strait, 185

Index  •  285

187, 190–91, 211–13, 239n22; world trade and, 137–38 trade languages, 33 trade routes: Asian revival of Middle East, 178; canals, 40–41, 132, 214; Tabriz, 55 caravan routes, 9, 15, 51–54, 57, Taiwan, 189, 191, 222 60, 86, 88–89, 129–32, 143; Dutch, Tamerlane (Emir, 1370–1405), 9–10, 185–86; eastern Asian zone, 128; 15, 36–37, 50, 54, 60 flexibility, 56; fourteenth century, Tamil Nadu, 130 9–10; global connections, 124–25; Tartars, 30 indigenous, North America, 68, Taungoo Kingdom (Myanmar), 7, 129, 124; Mamluk Empire, 48, 50; middle 190, 242n21 Asian zone, 128–29; Ottoman taxes, 78, 119, 234n12 Empire, 52–54; overland, 132, 133, technology: military, 7, 55, 57, 175, 215; 163, 222; silver, 76, 77–78; western navigational, 12–13 Asian zone, 129. See also maritime Tenochtitlán (Mexico City), 67, 70, 71, routes 82, 218 trans-Atlantic trade, 78, 92, 102–5, 103; Ternate, 81, 155 Jewish trade diasporas, 142–45 Tidor, 19, 81 trans-Pacific trade, 85, 167–71, 168 Timbuktu, 86 Trastámara dynasty of Castile and tobacco production, 109, 113, 116, Aragon, 43–44 124, 209 travel literature, 30–34 Tokugawa Ieyasu, 164 Travels (Mandeville), 32 trade, 9, 221–22; between Brazil triangular trade, 124 and Africa, 98–99, 100; between tribal affiliations, 50 Caribbean and New England, 116; tribal allies, 60 corruption, 162–63, 169, 202–3; tribute, 70, 72 European percentages, 126, 161–62, Triple Alliance (Aztec Empire), 70 208; expansion, 2–6; fur trade, 110, trust, 137 117, 120–23; intra-Asian, 182, 189, Tunisia, 29 205; Muslim traders, 13, 26, 29, Tupinamba people, Brazil, 97 53–54; no European direct trade with China, 147, 181, 189, 191, 211; Turkey, 36. See also Ottoman Empire private, 48, 77–78, 159–60, 163, 167, Turks, 51 169, 176, 182, 191, 201–6; transUnited States, 7, 8, 229 Pacific, 19–20. See also world trade urbanization, 11, 31 trade diasporas, 7, 15, 26, 204; Africa, Urdaneta, Andrés de, 82–83, 165 89; Armenian, 28, 55–56, 62, 171; Uscan, Khojah Petrus, 28, 142 Greek, 53–54; militarized, 3, 17, 35; Multani of India, 138–39, 174; Valle, Pietro della, 32 Portuguese armed trade diaspora, values, 5–6, 26, 29, 135–36, 233n19; 152–55, 153; societies, 137–38; travel literature and, 30–34 Southsea Chinese, 145–48, 146, 171, Surat, 156, 164, 176, 178, 181–82 Syria, 36, 48, 52 Syrian Orthodox Church, 130, 161

286  •  Index

van Linschoten, Jan Huyghen, 185 van Nijenroode, Cornelia, 199–200 Varthema, Ludovico di, 32 Venetian merchants, 50 venture capital investors, 17, 144, 217 Vera Cruz, 77, 222 viceroys, 74; Goa, 158–59, 204, 210; New Spain, 211–12 Victory (Victoria) (ship), 14, 19, 81 Vienna, 47, 166, 183 Vietnam, 229 Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646), 31–32, 57 Villalobos, Ruy López de, 81–82 Virginia, 109, 110–14, 116, 177 Virginia Company, 110–12, 177 war canoes, 5 War of Independence, Dutch, 25, 162, 166–67, 173, 183–85 War of Independence, Portuguese, 182 wealth, stigma and, 135 Welser firm, 159, 240n20 West Africa, 17, 85–88 Western European history, 1–2 Western hegemony, 7–8, 229–30 William of Orange (William III), 173 William of Rubruck, 30 winds, 16, 18, 81, 91, 95, 134, 185–86; Indian Ocean, 126, 127; South

China Sea, 126–28, 127; transPacific trade, 168 Wolof Kingdom, 89 women, as brokers, 98 world trade, 125–48; African-Eurasian network, 126–28, 127; American silver, 125; Armenian trade diaspora, 28, 55–56, 62, 139–43, 140; Chinese market, 125; constraints of transportation, 132–35, 133; Jewish trade diasporas, 138, 143–45; long-distance overland, 132, 133; percentage, Cape route, 126; return cargo, 134–35; Southsea Chinese, 145–48, 146; trade diasporas and, 137–38; wider perspective, 148. See also trade world wars, 8, 22, 229 Yamuna River, 131 Yemen, 156 York trading post, 122 Yoruba Kingdom, 87 Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, 38, 40, 128, 145 Yunnan, 37, 40, 64 Zacatecas, Mexico, 75, 77 Zheng He, 38, 39 Zimbabwe, Empire of, 151, 155

EXPLORING WORLD HISTORY Series Editors John McNeill, Georgetown University Kenneth Pomeranz, University of Chicago Jerry Bentley, founding editor Plagues in World History    by John Aberth Crude Reality: Petroleum in World History, Updated Edition    by Brian C. Black The Age of Trade: The Manila Galleons and the Dawn of the Global Economy    By Arturo Giraldez The Struggle against Imperialism: Anticolonialism and the Cold War    by Edward H. Judge and John W. Langdon Smuggling: Contraband and Corruption in World History    by Alan L. Karras Europeans Abroad, 1450–1750    by David Ringrose The First World War: A Concise Global History, Second Edition    by William Kelleher Storey Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, Concise Revised Edition    by Richard P. Tucker