This period is variously named, and is sometimes subdivided. World historians largely agree, however, on several major themes for the centuries involved – themes to which most major societies had to react. The onset of the period was shaped by the turmoil in much of the classical world. Several regions, including Western Europe and India, did not recover the degree of political organization they had developed during the classical period.
During this period, a large number of new regions established the apparatus of civilization, including more important cities and formal government. Japan, Russia, northwestern Europe, additional parts of sub-Saharan Africa (both West Africa and eastern Africa down the Indian Ocean coast), additional sections of central and Andean America were key cases in point.
During the period also, a number of newer areas, in trade contact with more established centers, began a process of deliberate imita- tion, particularly in technology and culture. Japan thus explicitly copied many features from China, Russia looked to the Byzantine Empire, Western Europe borrowed both from Islamic civilization and from Byzantium, Africa interacted with Islam and so on. Imitations often involved religion or philosophy, artistic forms, as well as agricultural techniques.
The two most important overarching themes in the postclassical period were the spread of major missionary religions and the acceleration of trans-regional trade among societies in Asia, Africa and Europe. Both of these developments permanently altered the framework for world history and the experiences of literally mil- lions of people in different areas.
MISSIONARY RELIGIONS
Buddhism was a well established religion by 500 CE. Christianity had started five centuries before, gaining ground slowly within the Roman Empire (about 10% of the Roman population was Christian by the fourth century), then much more rapidly when the Roman government began to provide support. Islam, the newest world religion, began around 600 CE and would initially enjoy the most rapid spread of all. All three of the expanding religions reflected the
political and economic troubles of the late classical period, which prompted more interest in otherworldly goals. They were also strongly supported by vigorous missionary efforts. During the post- classical centuries, hundreds of thousands of people converted, usually from some form of polytheism, to one of the world religions, one of the great cultural shifts in human history.
TRADE CONNECTIONS
The second great change involved intensification of trans-regional trade, backed by important improvements in ships and navigational devices. Arab traders, soon supplemented by Persians and others, established a strong route across the Indian Ocean, linking the Middle East to India, Southeast Asia and the Pacific coast of China. Clusters of Arab traders located in southern Chinese ports. Connecting to this route in turn was an Arab-African network down the African east coast; a trans-Sahara overland connection from West to North Africa; a route from Scandinavia through western Russia to Constantinople, with contacts with Arab trade; a bit more gradually, links from Western Europe to the Mediterranean and hence to Arab merchants, Japan’s regular trade with Korea and China was a final major connection. More regions, exchanging more goods of wider variety, were important components of this whole network. Other interactions were attached: Arabs, for example, learned the Hindu numbering system and then spread it more widely, with the result that Europeans called the numbers Arabic as they began to adopt them. Knowledge of paper, a Chinese invention, spread more widely. Maps and travel accounts both expanded and improved.
Technological advances included new sailing ship design, by the Arabs, and toward the end of the period additional shipping improvements from China. The introduction of the compass, initi- ally from China, was a huge navigational gain, and it spread quickly around the Indian Ocean and thence to Europe.
Contacts facilitated technological exchanges and exchanges of different crops (new strains of wheat, for instance, spread from Africa to Europe) that helped improve agriculture. This in turn began to accelerate world population gains following the declines in the late classical period, with levels reaching almost half a billion by
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1350 CE. At the end of the period, the rapid spread of bubonic plague from China through the Middle East and Europe briefly reduced population levels, however.
The postclassical period began to draw to a close when Arab power and political effectiveness started to decline, by the twelfth to thirteenth centuries. New commercial rivals for the Arabs arose, including European (particularly Italian) merchants in the Mediterranean but also Indian and Southeast Asian Muslims in the Indian Ocean. The Arab empire– the caliphate – began to lose significant territories, and it was finally toppled late in the thirteenth century.
THE MONGOLS
Briefly, a new force arose to help organize the trans-regional frame- work. Mongol conquerors from central Asia swept over China, into the eastern part of the Middle East, and conquered Russia. Interlocking states, or khanates, provided new travel security from Europe to Asia, and the Mongols proved tolerant of new contacts. Land-based trade and travel increased, and so did exchanges from Asia westward. Europeans learned, mainly from China, about printing, explosive powder, playing cards and other items. The Mongol period also rearranged relationships, reducing for a time Russia’s regional role; Japan, unconquered despite two Mongol invasion attempts, rethought its relationship with China which, having yielded to the Mongols, now seemed less lofty. African regions, not directly involved in the Mongol exchanges, did not acquire the technologies that Europe gained.
Mongols were expelled from China at the end of the fourteenth century, and China briefly launched a massive series of trade and tribute expeditions through the Indian Ocean as far as Africa. A policy change ended these expeditions in 1439. By the middle of the fifteenth century, with Chinese trade becoming less venture- some, European expeditions down the African coast began to suggest a more assertive European commercial role. At this time also, a new Turkish-led Empire, the Ottomans, formed in the Middle East, and would conquer the Byzantine Empire after 1453. Russia, at the same time, began creating an independent zone around Moscow, pushing the Mongols back. This accumulation of changes– capped
by the European discovery of the Americas in 1492, clearly brought the post-classical period to an end. Trans-regional trade would soon be replaced by global trade, under a new level of European influ- ence. The spread of world religions did not cease but, except in the Americas, became a more minor theme as most of the religious map of Asia and Europe was fairlyfirmly set.
THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD, 1450
CETO 1800
CEThree major changes define this period:
GLOBAL EXCHANGE
The Americas began to be included in global interactions for the first time, and then after the middle of the eighteenth century the same applied to Australia and key Pacific island groups. The first implication of these inclusions was a biological exchange (often called the Columbian exchange), between the previously isolated territories and the rest of the world. New diseases reached the Americas (and later the Pacific) from Europeans and Africans, including measles and smallpox, which decimated the population. This opened the way, in the Americas, for the importation of new peoples, from Europe but even more, through the slave trade, from Africa to supply necessary labor. Columbian exchange also brought animals from the old world to the new, where previously the range of available domesticated animals had been surprisingly sparse. Columbian exchange also brought new world foods into use else- where, including corn, the potato, chili peppers and other crops. The ultimate impact of these new foods helped fuel a new accel- eration of population growth, from about 375 million in 1400 (after the plagues) to almost a billion in 1800 (Chinese population alone soared to 350 million). This global change occurred despite rapid population decline in the Americas until recovery began after 1700.
GLOBAL TRADE
The second major development was the formation of a truly global economy, with European merchants and commercial companies
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serving disproportionately as carriers. Other societies continued to use Indian Ocean routes, but Europeans took over almost half of these, mainly through the use of force. Europeans monopolized trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific exchange. Crucial for the Europeans was the ability to use silver mined in the Americas for the purchase of Asian goods, including both manufactured products (the word china came into European languages in the seventeenth century) and spices and other products like tea and coffee. Europeans also profited hugely from the Atlantic slave trade, though within Africa itself this was largely organized by African merchants and rulers. The economic relationships in much of the global economy became markedly unequal, with Europeans gaining large profits and depen- dent areas like Latin America relying on the export of cheap goods generated by servile labor. Strong elements of this unequal pattern persist to the present day.
The global economy had other players, however, notably in Asia. While the Atlantic economy was clearly Western-dominated, the world economy was not, though the West gained a growing role. Chinese production and export of silks, ceramics and other goods won it the largest amount of American silver in exchange, and India (with printed cotton cloth and spices) came in second. The Middle Eastern economy, though no longer in prime place, remained important. New levels of commercial and manufacturing activity defined early modern Asia in important ways.
It’s also been argued – though hard to prove – that labor changed in this global economy. Thanks to the new levels of Atlantic slavery plus more pressure for commercial production in Europe, the Americas and Asia, plus the burdens of population growth, the intensity of human labor may have increased in the early modern centuries, from more use of children to more need to continue working hard in later age.
EMPIRES
The third big global development involved the formation of a number of new empires. This reflected growing political capacity in many regions, as well as the importance of new military tech- nologies– notably cannon – and new attention to military training and organization. “Gunpowder” empires formed of course under
European sponsorship – Portugal and Spain, followed by Britain, France and the Netherlands set up massive overseas empires in the Americas and in ports and island groups in parts of Africa and Asia. But new land-based empires also emerged. Russia was not content to chase the Mongols back to central Asia, but began to expand further in central Asia, in Europe and in East Asia, becoming a sig- nificant player in Eurasian affairs. In the process, the separate importance of central Asian nomads, such a major factor in world history through the Mongols, dropped away. The Ottoman Empire in the western Middle East was rivaled by a Persian Safavid Empire farther east. In India, the new Mughal Empire (like the Ottomans and Safavids, Muslim-ruled) gained substantial territory on the subcontinent. These new empires brought significant changes to the regions involved, and some of them had lasting impact into the twentieth century and, in Russia’s case, beyond. Along with the revived Chinese empire and the European holdings, most of Asia and the Americas came under imperial sway.
Biological exchange, with important population and migration results; the new world economy, with its complex relationships; and the new age of empire and new levels of military activity– these were the key themes of the early modern period. They draw attention to the growing vigor of Western Europe, but also to Russia, the Asian empires, and the new interactions among Europeans, Native Americans and imported African slaves that would gradually forge a new society in Latin America.
SCIENCE
Afinal major development began to take shape in the early modern period, but its global significance was not immediately apparent. On the whole, global cultural exchanges were limited in these centuries, as if societies reacted to new trade contacts and empires with an implicit desire to keep identities separate. Japan, indeed, deliberately adopted a policy of substantial isolation in part because of fear of too much Christian influence from Europe.
In Western Europe, however, particularly from the seventeenth century onward, a real scientific revolution occurred that would have huge implications for world cultures and technologies over time. Triggered by major discoveries on planetary motion, gravity
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and the circulation of blood, scientists began demonstrating that major advances in knowledge were possible, beyond anything tra- ditional learning had to offer, through the application of scientific methods. Their achievements began to push science, rather than religion or philosophy, to the forefront of intellectual life, with implications for technological change, education and even the study of human society (key social sciences, like economics, began as a result to emerge in the eighteenth century). This upheaval, with consequences but also bitter debates still reverberating today, was initially a largely European enterprise. By the eighteenth century, however, Western science began to interest people in places like Britain’s North American colonies and Russia, and by the nineteenth century American and Russian scientists would become full participants in the larger scientific endeavor. Japanese leaders, informed by contacts with the Dutch about European advances, began to allow translations of European scientific and medical works, and a bit of interest developed in the Ottoman Empire. This was not yet, by 1800, a clearly global current, but it would become one, which adds to the areas in which the early modern period was a seedbed for significant and durable world-historical changes.