#2 Our World Turned Upside Down: An Overview of 500 Years

An Overview of 500 Years

The introduction to Blog 1 provided a table of contents and an overview of what will follow. In Blogs 2, 3 and 4, I will offer an extended overview of the last 500 years to give readers a perspective of time and content of what is to come from future blogs.

In this blog, I concentrate on what the world looked like in the year 1500. In later posts, I consider the processes through which the world was transformed; how Western Europe, followed by the USA and Japan used a mix of slavery, monopoly companies and colonialism to increase their wealth and power. The story takes place over 400 years from 1492 to 1914, when the new global powers fought each other over who should be dominant. 

If this story had not actually occurred, it would be difficult to make it up.

A Bird’s Eye View of the World in 1500

In 1500, China, India, Indonesia and Japan were among the richest economies in the world. For several thousand years the peoples and societies of Asia had been more ‘developed’ in terms of technology, production, and governance than almost any other part of the globe that we now know in some detail.

We don't know much about the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas; they were destroyed by Spanish and Portuguese invaders between 1492 and 1550 and they did not have a written language. In terms of trade, the Americas were cut off from the rest of the world by the scale of the oceans on either side.

Africa was also relatively isolated. We know something about a range of major empires within the continent, but the slave trade, from the 16th until the middle of the 19th century, deeply disturbed the wellbeing of large parts of the continent. As with the Americas, scholars are only now putting together a picture of the dynamics and governance of the continent during that period.

The key global trading routes in 1500 were comprised of the Silk Road, sea routes across the Indian Ocean, and other routes across land by horse, donkey and camel caravans. China, India and Southeast Asia supplied produce that found markets across central Asia and into all parts of Europe, including Russia.

By 1500, China and India had been ruled by the Mughal and Ch’in dynasties for hundreds of years. Compared with Europe, peace had prevailed for a long period. Sophisticated systems of rule had developed and many of the institutions we value today, such as government infrastructure, law, education, medicine and religion, were present. Raw cotton and silks were manufactured and processed locally and then traded globally.

These civilisations were predominantly rural but were governed with powerful pre-capitalist centralised political authority. The central governments regulated production, trade, and famine relief across huge geographical areas. In China, large engineering works and the management of water supplies from the Himalayas were essential parts of the function of central government. China had long period of peace compared to European feudal societies. One of the most likely explanations for this was that the central government was generally accepted across divergent languages and religions in China,

The rituals and opulence of emperors and courts dazzled visiting Europeans. Behind these facades of accumulated wealth and court procedures, however, lay a history of ‘good governance’ in China which seemed to have met the expectations of rulers and people alike. Huge efforts were made over centuries to secure the populace against the ravages of drought and famine; these were later dismantled by colonising Europeans.

Although China had developed technology hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years before Europe, change in the country never became systematic. The transformative technologies in Europe and then North America, accompanied by new colonial enterprises, led Europe down a path of regular measurable change never before encountered anywhere else in the world. Europe was on the brink of measurable change by 1800. By then, change was sufficiently regular that every student of economics would know the first major economic text by Adam Smith.

In 1500, and even into 1600, the idea of a ‘world power’ or a ‘global power’ was unheard of. The imperial powers of the past, such as the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Romans were regional. This had important consequences for the form of empire. They largely left the structures of production as they found them and the conquered people’s way of life was left unaltered. Of course, there were exceptions like the Aztecs in Central America, but in broad terms, the pre-industrial empires grew rich at their centres through control of existing trade routes and through taxing the people. The blogs that follow will illustrate how both colonial and industrialised societies fundamentally reorganised both political and economic life.

Over the period from 1600 to 1914 these two forms of empire – the ancient and new  – existed side by side. The old empires were the Russian, Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian Habsburg, Mughal, and Qing; none of these was prepared for an industrial revolution. The new European empires, especially the French, British and Dutch developed as a consequence of their colonisation. Throughout these blogs, I show that colonisation became a desirable action for new states to aid their rapid industrialisation. In the 19th century, for instance, Germany, Italy, the USA and Japan began colonising almost as soon as they became established as new states. The USA was perhaps the exception, and that was only because she focused on internal affairs related to the establishment of the United States throughout the 19th century. Nonetheless, colonisation was the sine quo non of all independent states. Why was colonising so popular?

The key to all of this activity, as I will show in later posts, is that a large part of the surpluses from colonialization was then absorbed by the colonising society into new industrialisation. As we now discover today, so many of our ancient institutions were financed out of colonising profits. Such as my country’s case, the UK, the Bank of England, the older banks, much of the City of London’s infrastructure, the older Universities, and many old buildings were all funded by surpluses from colonial enterprises.

In 1500, the world’s major trade either moved from the east by land along multiple caravan routes or was carried on small ships around the Indian coast and up through the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. There were many cities along the way: Cairo, Alexandria, Bagdad, Constantinople, the towns of the eastern Mediterranean and the now-defunct but once-thriving cities of Palmira and Petra.

Goods moved from the east, China, and India to the eastern Mediterranean, and trickled through to Europe from Venice and other Italian city-states. The struggles that drew the mini-states of Venice and others into today’s Italy only make sense in terms of controlling some of the commodities that arrived via the Silk Road.

The Silk Road represented a major part of this long-distance trading system; it was established over thousands of years and many great cities along the route still bear testament to this trade. The cities across central Asia, the Iranian cities, Isfahan is one of many cities where magnificent mosques, mark the routes of the Silk Road.

Over the next three centuries, and before the 19th century of industrialisation, the new colonising states of Europe increased considerably their wealth and power. By the 18th century, they were threatening the old still existing global empire. For instance, when Maria Theresa ascended the Habsburg throne in 1740, her regime instituted a range of reforms that might have led to industrialisation. She abolished unfree labour and feudal dues, curtailed the powers of the aristocracy, reformed the military and introduced new forms of taxation and justice. But all this proved insufficient. As these blogs will show, empires that did not reform their system of government either failed or were forced through war or revolution to overthrow the ancient regime. Despite her earlier imperial conquests, for example, Spain failed to industrialise in the 19th century and remained a relative backwater.

By 1900, the major European countries dominated the world; the story of how this happened is the key theme in these blogs. The major European kingdoms built monopoly trading companies, trading in India and the east, and then invading states and colonising populations. The fundamental difference between the Habsburgs and the three other European empires was that, in the latter cases, the wealth obtained from colonising ventures became the capital on which industrialisation was based in the 18th and 19th centuries. For example, in France, Britain, and Holland, all of their older institutions – such as their central banks, the City of London, and many of their Universities – were built using profits from the slave and opium trades i.e. from colonisation. Of course, the process was more complicated than I am outlining here. However, what is important to understand is the close connection between industrialisation and the surpluses obtained from the colonisation process.

The Beginnings of Momentous Change

The initial stimulus for these alterations to world power dynamics occurred when the Ottomans took control of Istanbul in 1453. Europeans had been part of the wider trade from the east over many centuries. Now the Ottomans monopolised the trade routes down to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. This caused Spanish and Portuguese explorers to look for new routes to India and China.

"History of the Ottoman Turks: from the beginning of their empire to the present time.” The British Library

Over time, they succeeded. This advance was led by the Portuguese, who had been trading and slaving down the west African coast for some decades. Although their sailing ships were tiny in comparison to ships that came later, and their knowledge of the world was limited, Portuguese ships sailed down the African coast and by the late 15th century had managed to round the southern tip of Africa, and to sail as far as India, where they established trading stations. Portugal's Vasco da Gama established a toehold at Calicut in 1498 and Goa in 1510. India was sophisticated relative to Portugal at the time and produced a wide variety of goods for trade.

Spanish ships sailed west, hoping to reach the east from other directions. In 1492 Christopher Columbus arrived in the Caribbean. Over the next three centuries, i.e. until the period of the French Revolution in the 1790s, the Spanish Empire would expand into vast territories across the Caribbean Islands, half of South America, most of Central America and much of North America. It is estimated that during the Spanish colonial period (1492–1832), a total of 1.86 million Spaniards settled in the Americas, and a further 3.5 million emigrated there during the post-colonial era (1850–1950). The outcome for indigenous populations was very different, with an estimated 8 million deaths following the initial conquest through contact with European diseases. The destruction of civilisations of the Americas is covered in later blogs.

When European powers began exploring after the early 1600s, therefore, they were competing with each other. This had an important consequence. All ships leaving Europe were equipped for fighting against other European ships.

In 1500, London had not really begun to grow. Paris and Antwerp, by comparison, had more people and larger markets. By 1600, the port of London had grown considerably with ships and people. The trade was in tobacco, caviar and silk. The Royal Exchange had been established and the city had become a global hub.

The new European imperial powers that arrived from the 16th century in the Americas and later in Asia were different from anything that had gone before. European conquests were profoundly transformative, particularly in the Americas. The invaders in the 16th and 17th centuries, according to most authorities on the subject, were driven by religion, patriotism and plunder. Acts of extreme violence were justified through racism, based on the notion that European white-skinned people were superior to the peoples they had conquered. Later blogs examine this aspect in detail.

The nature of the transformation depended, in part, on what the invaders found when they arrived. The Spanish in the Americas in the 16th century destroyed both the peoples and the cultures they discovered. Their goal was gold and silver. Superiority in weapons technology enabled invaders to wreak havoc. But conquest was one thing; how to hold onto the territory would turn out to be another.

It was not long before the adventurers chose to live on their conquered lands. Explorers from Portugal and Spain settled in the West Indies, Mexico and today’s Brazil. Once the British, French and Dutch arrived, they too began to settle further north, in today’s USA and Canada.

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Appendices

Timeline of global colonisation c 1500 – 1945

Colonisation categorised by colonising nation:

• The first wave, from the 1490s, was carried out by the Spanish and Portuguese; most of their territories obtained independence after 1815.

• The second wave, from the early 1600s until soon after 1945 was formed by the British, French and Dutch.

• The third wave, from 1765, completed by the 1860s, took place when the United States of America colonised North America.

• The fourth wave, from the early 1880s until 1945, involved the Belgians, Italians, Germans, USA, and Japan. The Germans lost their colonies in 1919.

Colonial conquests by territories:

1. 1492 to 1760: West Indies, North and South America

2. The 1760s to 1860s: the whole subcontinent of India

3. The 1840s to 1945: China, the African continent, the Middle East, large parts of Asia

Key dates in the history of colonisation:

1492: Columbus lands on the islands of the Bahamas, Cuba, and Haiti
1498: Columbus lands in Trinidad

The 1490s to 1520s: Spanish invaders take most of southern America. During these thirty years, the Spanish, Portuguese and Italian captains Columbus, Cabot, de Gama, Cabral and Magellan encircle the globe and show that European sailing vessels can traverse the world’s seas. The Aztec and Inca empires are rapidly extinguished. Southern America begins to be settled. Spain and Portugal hold on to this territory so that by 1750 they own by conquest: Mexico, Central America, Florida, parts of California, various West Indian islands, Brazil and the rest of today’s Latin America.

The Dutch, French and British start creating monopoly companies in the middle 1550s, but don’t start trading globally until the beginning of the 1600s. Spain and Portugal become the enemies of the three newcomers, as all compete to invade and hold territory.

In the 1610s, settlers begin to arrive on the east coast of North America:

• 1612: Dutch settlers arrive in Maryland

• 1620: English Puritans arrive in Massachusetts

• The 1640s: Britain takes Barbados and Jamaica; France takes and settles in St Kitts, Guadeloupe and Haiti

• The 1650s: French arrival in Montreal

Suggested Reading

In the 1990s there came a trend in world Atlases:

Jane Edmunds editor: Phillips History Atlas: 2000 Years of World and British History, Octopus 1998
John Haywood, Noel Grove: The National Geographic Society Atlas of the World, Routledge 2013

World History:

Brendan Simms, The Struggle for Supremacy: 1453 to the Present, Penguin 2013
Chalmers Johnson, Dismantling the Empire: Americans Last Best Hope, Henry Holt 2010
Alexander Anievas, How the West Came to Rule: The Geopolitical Origins of Capitalism, Pluto 2015
John Darwin, Unfinished Empire the Global Expansion of Britain, Penguin 2013
Jerry Brotton, A History of the World in Twelve Maps, Penguin 2012
Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens A Brief History of Mankind, Vintage 2011
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500, Fontana 1989
Peter Frankopan, The Silk Road A New History of the World, Bloomsbury 2015
Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism, Penguin 2015
Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Norton 1997

World history is a genre on its own. Every author in this genre has their own political perspective. So, reader’s predispositions will depend on how one will appreciate each of the above erudite texts. Oxbridge scholars predominate, and most but not all global authors wish to protect readers against the horrors of our past. Jared Diamond is perhaps the book closest to Wealth and Power.

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