2.1: Early Modern Globalization
- Page ID
- 154798
Global Interactions, 1450-1650
The world of 1450 was a world without a center. Rather than having a single dominant region with the ability to influence the activities and development of most of the rest of the world, the globe was tied together through a polycentric world system. This means that there were many regions within which interactions were relatively intensive while interaction between and among the separate regions was more sporadic or, in some cases, nonexistent. In this section, we will look at the nature of interactions in this first era of our story and how the intensification of global connections transformed the world.
Globalization is something of a buzzword in the 21st century and is often used to describe very specific trends and challenges of the contemporary world. However, globalization as a process has a history that stretches back even further than the period discussed in this chapter. According to historian Felipe Fernandez Armesto, globalization simply refers to, “the spread of similar ways of life around the globe.” To explain further, if we imagine a reality in which all human societies were always completely isolated, then each group would develop its own unique cultures, technologies, social arrangements, and survival strategies. In the context of complete isolation, each human group would not only be different from each other, but those differences would only become greater over time. Of course, this is not how the actual history of humanity has played out. Rather than being defined by isolation, human history has been defined by frequent interaction between and among groups. The term interaction describes the encounter of two or more separate entities (in our cases, this can mean individuals, communities, societies, or even civilizations). When this occurs, one entity will influence the other in some way or, more commonly, each will influence the other. As a result of this mutual influence, both entities leave the encounter more like each other than they had previously been. At times, the adoption of the ways of another group is the result of conscious choice (“your pottery technology or style is better than mine so I will adopt yours”), sometimes as a result of a slow process of adaptation (over a series of encounters we each adopt some aspects of the pottery technique and style of the other), and in some cases the result of coercion (I conquer you and impose my pottery technique and style).
For most of human history, the scale of interaction was limited in scope and intensity by geography and technology. This meant that throughout history globalization mostly proceeded slowly and unevenly. The most interactive societies gradually became more similar over time while the more isolated ones were influenced less by long-range interactions and were more likely to maintain their unique qualities. Rather than seeing globalization as a process that “began” in a certain time period, it is more useful to think of it as a process that has ebbed and flowed over the millennia. For instance, when the Mongol Empire emerged in the 13th century, it created an unprecedentedly large region of interaction and thus an intensive era for globalization. By contrast, as that empire collapsed across the 14th century and plague spread across Afro-Eurasia, interaction declined, and globalization slowed.
Finally, before discussing how empire, exploration, and trade drove globalization to new heights after the 15th century, it is necessary to address one more issue about this process of globalization. It is common in history education to have students think of historical events and processes in terms of “pros and cons”, but this approach has no place in a textbook emphasizing anti-racism, equity, and social justice. When we reduce history to simple binaries like “good” or “bad” we risk turning the past into a string of ugly moral calculations: Could the suffering and violence inflicted by advancing Mongol armies on an untold number of people ever be balanced by the spread of knowledge and technology that their empire made possible? How many people fed by Andean potatoes could make up for the tens of millions of Amerindians who died from the violence of colonization as well as the introduction of Old World diseases? Can the enrichment of some ever justify the exploitation of others? When we accustom ourselves to seeing past human suffering as just the cost of history, as the collateral damage necessary in creating the “world we live in today”, we also make it easier to justify exploitation and violence in the present and future. Instead of creating after-the-fact martyrs to modernity let us see this era of globalization for what it was: a messy, often destructive period that was also radically transformative. The human world would continue to be revolutionized in the centuries to come. Yet, in many ways, our global society is still built upon the foundation of early-modern globalization.
The Americas
We can begin in the Western Hemisphere (North and South America and the Caribbean) which had largely remained shielded from interactions with Afro-Eurasia due to the expanses of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. It is now widely accepted that Norse settlement occurred in North America around 1000 CE, although there is still little to suggest that the encounter had much long-term impact. Beyond that event, populations in the Americas would have largely developed independently from those in the rest of the world for many thousands of years. That isolation did not prevent the development of the types of complex societies that we commonly study in the histories of Afro-Eurasia. Most famously, discussions of the Americas tend to emphasize the Maya and Aztec of Mesoamerica and the Incan Empire of the South American Andes, each of which resemble their Eastern Hemisphere counterparts due to their systems of intensive agriculture, urbanization, hierarchical political systems, long-distance trade networks, and intricate ideological systems. There are legitimate reasons to highlight those societies – including the fact that they occupied the most densely populated parts of the Americas and left behind more accessible historical evidence – but that focus also reveals a bias in history education towards societies that seem most familiar to us. On the one hand, this is likely because it is easier to imagine ourselves in past societies where things like permanent structures, monumental architecture, written laws, sewage systems, or social hierarchies are present for the simple reason that these things exist in our contemporary world as well. But there is also an uglier side of this bias. We have mostly been taught to view history as an evolutionary or progressive story that culminates in our own time. In other words, as a series of smaller changes or developments that lead progressively to modern societies like our own which are presented, either explicitly or implicitly, as clearly “better” than those societies that came before. Through that lens, human communities that seem most familiar can easily be placed within the progressive narrative while, alternatively, those that are least similar as relics of a lower stage of development and assigned to categories like “primitive”, “barbaric”, or “savage”. So, it is not only that we have a hard time recognizing the similarities between ourselves and the many peoples throughout history who have lived outside of state formations, but also the fact that such people fit uncomfortably into the historical stories we like to tell. Few places provide as much of a counter to the traditional narrative as pre-contact North America (leaving aside Mesoamerica for now).
The scholars David Graeber and David Wengrow have argued for what they call “the three primordial freedoms… the freedom to move, the freedom to disobey, and the freedom to create or transform social relationships.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 28) At some point in history populations in most Afro-Eurasian civilizations lost these freedoms. Wengrow and Graeber would say, “they became trapped.” Interestingly, traditional histories tend to celebrate this entrapment. Long-lasting civilizations are celebrated for their durability, while those that disappear are said to have “fallen” or “collapsed”. As James C. Scott reminds us, there is no particular reason we should be rooting for large states especially when, for many of their subjects, their collapse would have represented “the destruction of an oppressive social order.” (Scott, 31)
By contrast, the history of North American societies demonstrates what it looks like when societies avoid the trap. This is not to say that there were no oppressive states in the Americas. Even in those cases, though, we still find the resurgence of the primordial freedoms. The story of the city of Cahokia offers an example of this. At its height in the 12th century, Cahokia was the largest urban site north of Mesoamerica. Situated on a fertile floodplain of the upper Mississippi, Cahokia and its satellite settlements grew to contain perhaps 40,000 residents with as many as 15,000 living within the city itself. For centuries before its emergence, the location may have had importance as a site of pilgrimage or rituals with only a small permanent community living there. Then, relatively suddenly, Cahokia arose through what must have been a master-planned burst of activity. The city took shape in an urban area six square miles in size which contained over 100 pyramidical earthen mounds each within their own spacious plazas. The central focus of the city was a large flat-topped pyramid now known as Monk’s Mound (see Figure 2.1.1) from which the elite lived, ruled, and likely surveilled the inhabitants of the city below. Many of those inhabitants seem to have been resettled from surrounding areas and were grouped into what we might call planned communities possibly based on their craft specializations or ethnic identity. Much of the available evidence suggests a society based on coercion and violence. Once sizable communities in the surrounding area were broken up with their populations dispersed into smaller homesteads throughout the region. Even as those outside the city saw their self-governing communities dismantled, those within the city were subject to terrifying spectacles such as public mass executions often associated with the funeral rites of nobles. In one such example, one male and one female noble were interred together in a mound along with four mass burials totaling fifty mostly young women each of whom were likely killed for the occasion.
The rulers of Cahokia likely did not have the capacity to pursue larger imperial ambitions, but the city’s influence was still felt far beyond its core region. Sites clearly modeled on Cahokia emerged up and down the Mississippi and as far away as Virginia. Elites in these cities were often buried with grave goods produced in Cahokia and wherever such cities popped up so too did evidence of increased conflict. At the same time, cross-continental trade routes became more active in order to supply Cahokia’s elites and craftsmen with the treasures and raw materials they required. Cahokia’s power and reach may have peaked in the 12th and 13th centuries alongside increasing levels of violence. By the 14th century, however, the city was becoming depopulated and had all but disappeared by 1400. Other Mississippian towns modeled on Cahokia followed a similar trajectory of peaking and then emptying out in the course of a couple of centuries.
There are many arguments for why Cahokia and its imitators declined and disappeared in the way they did. What seems relatively certain is that the population did not suffer a catastrophe so much as a dispersal. Interestingly, for centuries after its disappearance, the site of Cahokia remained vacant of human habitation while the memory of the city is virtually absent from later oral traditions. Those people who descended from the refugees of Cahokia largely seemed to form themselves into smaller, more communal, and less hierarchical communities that were also far less prone to internal or external violence. Given the chance to restructure their politics and social relations, many of those who descended from the refugees of Cahokia chose to do so in ways that imply, “a self-conscious rejection of everything the city of Cahokia stood for.” (Graeber and Wengrow, 468)
This is just one of the more famous examples of a larger trend that can be found across the Americas. It suggests that traditional evolutionary history within which societies evolve through predetermined steps – from bands, to tribes, to chiefdoms, to states, empires, and nations – fails to describe the history of Native societies in the Americas since they rarely followed such directionality. Even just focusing on the Mississippi Valley, we find that sometimes populations there were more mobile, sometimes they were sedentary; sometimes they hunted and gathered, sometimes they farmed; sometimes they formed into hierarchical political systems dominated by powerful elites, sometimes into more communal societies with more egalitarian tendencies; sometimes levels of violence were more pronounced, sometimes conflict was rare. Even more confounding to those traditional narratives, those shifts at times played out across long time periods, but also could be observed in the shorter term and even in the transition from one season to the next. In locations ranging from the Great Plains of North America, the Pacific Coast of what is now Canada, and the Amazon Basin of South America we find examples of people that congregated in fixed locations under coercive and hierarchical social arrangements for part of the year before reverting to small, mobile, clan formations with little formal political structure at other times. In the case of the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest, individuals even adopted different names in the summer and winter to reflect the change in lifestyle. The idea here is not to exoticize Native America but rather to suggest that the history of the Americas can help overthrow assumptions about how human societies develop. As previously discussed, so much of the way we think about history is the direct result of modern European thinkers who took their own carefully constructed version of the European past as evidence of ironclad and universal laws of history. This is a useful viewpoint if your purpose is to suggest that the European (or “Western”) way of life represents the peak of civilization that all other people should aspire to, but of very limited value for describing the histories of the rest of the world’s peoples.
Of course, the two most famous civilizations in the Americas are those that are commonly referred to as the Aztec and Inca Empires1. The two states had no direct connection because of the lack of existing maritime or land routes that could connect the two states. There were enough indirect links, at least, that materials did move between the regions. This is how, for instance, the growing of the Mesoamerican crop maize (corn) could take hold in some of the lower altitudes of the Andes. The two regions may not have shared a lot of contacts, but they did possess some broad geographical similarities that can help explain why these regions were the most consistent sites of state formation in the Americas. To begin with, both empires ruled over territories that centered on high-altitude capitals – The Inca capital of Cusco was at 11,000 feet, while the Aztec Empire ruled from the city of Tenochtitlan at 7,000 feet above sea level. There are disadvantages to living at high altitudes, but the locations of the Aztec and Inca empires also provided key benefits. The primary advantage of their locations was that it provided them with access to incredible ecological diversity within a relatively small area. This ecological diversity meant that they could still command the degree of wealth necessary to sustain a large imperial state even without the type of long-distance trade routes as those that sustained states in Afro-Eurasia.
Despite trade networks that were smaller than that which existed in the most connected parts of the Eastern Hemisphere, the earliest Spaniards to enter Tenochtitlan were awestruck by the richness and diversity of goods found in the city’s markets. According to Hernan Cortés in the great market at Tlatelolco: “There is one square twice as large as that of the city of Salamanca, surrounded by porticoes, where are daily assembled more than sixty thousand souls, engaged in buying, and selling; and where are found all kinds of merchandise that the world affords…” One of Cortés’ soldiers, Bernal Diaz, was similarly impressed: “We were astounded at the great number of people and quantities of merchandise, and the orderliness and good arrangements that prevailed. For we had never seen such a thing before.” (see Figure 2.1.2) Being at 7,000 feet meant that Tenochtitlan’s climate was temperate despite being in the subtropical zone. At the same time, the city had access to obsidian from the nearby volcano of Popocatépetl, ores and dyes from the deserts of northern Mexico, tropical plants, animals, and resources from the tropical lowlands to the south, and maritime products from the Pacific and Caribbean coasts to the west and east. Beyond the goods that arrived from throughout Mesoamerica, some came from upwards of 2,000 miles away. That may pale in comparison to the distance that brought, for instance, Chinese silks to the Mediterranean, but is all the more remarkable considering that the trade was not carried by river or sea, nor was it brought in the saddlebags of horses or camel, or in carts pulled by oxen since there were no native beasts of burden and wheeled vehicles were not used anywhere in the Americas. Instead, the markets that so impressed Cortés and Diaz were supplied through the efforts of thousands of porters who carried these diverse goods on foot up and down the highlands of Central Mexico and beyond.
Despite being familiar enough to be recognizable to Spaniards like Cortés and Diaz, the logic of Mesoamerican markets was very different from that of a market in, for instance, Malindi, Genoa, or Calicut. That is because, in Afro-Eurasian cities like these, the market was a place dominated by private merchants who bought and sold merchandise with the goal of creating wealth for themselves. In Mesoamerica, by contrast, notions of money and private property did not develop hie same way. Merchants were more like state officials than individuals searching for profit. Nor was profit the incentive that attracted goods to Tenochtitlan from so far away. Instead, those goods arrived in the capital as tribute from surrounding peoples who were coerced to do so by force or the threat of force. One result of this is that these long-distance networks completely collapsed after Aztec power was destroyed by Spanish invaders after 1521.
The territory of the Inca Empire was, if anything, more diverse than that of the Aztec. Not only did it stretch 2,500 miles north/south from the equator down to the temperate zone of the Southern Hemisphere, but the eastern slope of the Andes reached into the edge of the Amazon Basin and the western slopes descended right to the Pacific Ocean with its variety of coastal and maritime habitats. More uniquely, the Andes themselves provided a range of microclimates all in close proximity to each other. So, rich valleys suitable for the growing of maize could border terraced hillsides where hundreds of varieties of potato were farmed, while on the higher slopes, llamas and alpacas were raised to be used as pack animals, to provide meat, fur, and hides, and for their dung which could be used both as a fuel source and as a fertilizer. Beans, squash, and quinoa could also be grown at various altitudes, helping to provide Andean populations with a rich and diverse diet. Unlike in central Mexico, where trade linked together environmental zones and encouraged the transport of goods to the imperial center, in many parts of the Andes the exchange of goods was carried out by socioeconomic kinship groups called ayllu. An ayllu was made up of a series of households that were connected through a common identity based on place of origin and a shared male ancestor. Rather than being focused in one particular location, the households that made up an ayllu were scattered across their territory and in various ecological zones each of which would be engineered to maximize productivity (see Figure 2.1.3). In some cases, they also held territory in more distant regions giving them access to an even broader range of goods. Instead of our common understanding of trade as an activity done in pursuit of profit, the dispersal of ayllu households across ecological zones allowed for a kind of exchange based on cooperation and reciprocity. In other words, a household living at an altitude suitable for herding llamas but not growing crops could exchange their animal products for potatoes grown by households at lower altitudes who could grow crops but not herd llamas. The goal of the exchange was to provide each side with access to vital goods needed for the survival of the community rather than the realization of profit.
Before the emergence of the Inca, it was the ayllu that organized and regulated Andean society by tying people together through a system of mutual obligations. This meant that I, for instance, would be expected to take part in labor that would improve the land of your household while also expecting to receive those benefits in turn. Thus, even though each household had its own land, the labor that went into improving that land was provided by the community as a whole instead of being the sole responsibility of the household. A power structure was not absent in this system. There were status differences between households based on how closely related they were to the ayllu’s founding ancestor and this sometimes translated to the senior members of the ayllu being able to accumulate a greater share of the community’s wealth. At the same time, that leadership role was only held by an individual for a set period of time before rotating to another individual, and the excess wealth they gained was expected to be used for feasts and rituals participated in by the whole community. The whole system seems to have been based on a principle of equality in which all members wore a uniform that was specific to their ayllu and land was carefully distributed based on the size, and therefore the needs, of the household.
Like most empires, as the Inca Empire formed across the 14th century they grafted their own forms of domination onto the preexisting system. Thus, the ayllus were reduced to the status of conquered groups and subject to various obligations to the empire. Where the pre-Inca ayllu had largely been based on communal relations, the Inca now imposed a new system that was about the extraction of resources and labor. In addition to the labor that members of an ayllu provided to each other, they were now also expected to provide further labor for the Inca as well. Unlike the old system where the labor I did for you would always be equaled out by the end of the year, in the new system one’s obligations to the Inca never ended. The new labor draft, known as the mi’ta was uniform and non-negotiable to the extent that even in cases where the amount of labor exceeded the work to be done tasks would simply be invented for those without jobs. The ayllu continued to exist with their heads now essentially serving as agents of the Inca state. Interestingly, just as the Inca co-opted and twisted the ayllus of their new subjects, when the Spanish came they would co-opt the mi’ta and turn it into an even more brutal and unforgiving labor system that helped transform Andean society in fundamental ways.
Lastly, it must be said that both the Aztec and Inca empires created ruling systems based on conquest, violence, forced labor, and extraction of wealth from subject populations. We can marvel at the complexity and sophistication of the states they created, but should never forget the human suffering and exploitation that made their systems possible. Indeed, one of the reasons the Spanish were able to successfully bring down the two empires was because of the willingness of subject populations to collaborate with the new invaders against their Aztec or Inca overlords. Both Spanish propagandists at the time and some ideologues even today pointed to the cruelty of these Native states to justify European conquest. The existence of human sacrifice in the Aztec Empire has been a particular focus of these justifications. While sacrifice was indeed a significant aspect of Aztec political and spiritual legitimacy, it would be hard to argue that even with a prohibition on human sacrifice life improved for indigenous people in Central Mexico with the emergence of Spanish rule. After all, that rule was accompanied by massacres, epidemic disease, forced labor, and a new social system that placed indigenous people at the bottom of the status hierarchy. Additionally, while something like human sacrifice, for instance, was often highlighted by contemporaries as a particularly terrible aspect of Native rule, it is not as if European societies were free of ritualized violence. Spain and England both practiced large-scale public ceremonies that included torture and execution (see Figure 2.1.4). When discussing European states we tend to discuss these rituals in terms of punishment for crimes, but the reality is that for Queen Elizabeth I just as for the Aztec ruler Moctezuma state violence was a crucial representation of their authority.
We tend to present the arrival of Europeans as the catalyst of change for indigenous societies in the Americas that had previously been defined by their timelessness. As we have seen though, pre-contact Natives had never been immune to change. Across centuries and millennia, societies across the Americas often experienced dramatic transformations, sometimes out of necessity due to conditions around them, but, as we saw in the case of Cahokia, sometimes as a conscious rejection of past social and political arrangements and a desire to remake themselves in new ways. To say that change was not a new experience in the Americas is not to understate the transformational impact of the indigenous encounter with Europeans and, through them, the rest of the globe. This encounter:
- thrust Natives into a set of global economic relations that encouraged or forced them to adopt new ways of life as, for instance, sellers of animal hides or miners of silver and gold
- it provided them with new technologies (iron tools and firearms), new desires (textiles and other Old World commodities), and new species (the horse) that expanded their opportunities even as it created a new dependence on the whims of a global system
- reshaped indigenous politics in a multitude of ways that varied depending on the region and the specific European power or powers that were involved in the encounter
- completely transformed the demographics of the Americas. Pre-encounter population estimates for the Americas vary widely but the consensus seems to have settled in the range of 50-60 million people with the highest estimates closer to 100 million. The rampant spread of disease along with the inherent violence of settler colonialism devastated indigenous communities with population reductions of 60-95% across the Americas. Coupled with the forced migration of millions of enslaved West Africans and increased migrations from Europe, the result was that by 1700 the demographic picture of the Americas looked almost nothing like what it had in 1450.
The reality of that demographic collapse is vital to highlight. There is little reason to doubt that absent the impact of disease in particular, indigenous resistance would have, at the very least, made the European colonial project immeasurably more difficult and likely limited its scope. Horses, steel swords, and gunpowder weapons all contributed to initial European victories in the Americas, but those benefits would not have lasted forever. For instance, by the 1540s Andean warriors had already learned the best terrain to fight on to lessen the advantage of Spanish horses. Further south, in what’s now Chile and Argentina, an indigenous group known as the Mapuche was able to resist Spanish colonization for centuries. As early as the 1550s, a Mapuche leader named Lautaro was able to learn to ride and fight from horseback while in Spanish captivity. After escaping, he used this acquired knowledge to lead his people to several victories over the colonizers. Significantly, it was an outbreak of the Old World disease of typhus that prevented the Mapuche from fully eradicating the Spanish presence at this time. By 1641, still unable to gain a military advantage over the Mapuche, a Spanish contingent led by the local governor, Francisco López de Zúñiga, traveled to their territory to take part in a remarkable ritual. As Jacob Sauer described it: "A llama was sacrificed in front of him and branches from a sacred tree were anointed with its blood. The llama’s heart was carved out, still beating, and delivered to the marquis. Then, along with the Mapuche chiefs, the marquis drank chicha, a type of corn beer, and both the Mapuche and Spaniards buried their weapons to finalize the pact."
This meeting, known as the Parlamento de Quillín (see Figure 2.1.5), resulted in the Spanish recognition of the Mapuche as an independent people with a formal border established between their lands and those of the Spanish. The pact was even ratified by Felipe IV of Spain two years later. Remarkably, the agreement mostly held for the rest of the colonial era, with new parlementos meeting sporadically to settle disputes when they arose.
The Mapuche stand as one of the more outstanding examples of indigenous resistance, but nowhere in the Americas was “the conquest” as easy as it is sometimes depicted. European technologies, for example, were less effective than we are often led to believe. Steel swords were certainly deadly, but the heavy plate armor worn by Spanish conquistadors was not only unsuited to many American climates but proved less effective than the thick cotton armor (called Ichcahuipilli) worn by Mesoamerican warriors. Similarly, while gunpowder weapons could be terrifying to Natives who had never seen them before, they were remarkably scarce in the early era of encounters in addition to being inaccurate, slow to load, and unreliable. English colonists at Jamestown, for instance, were told not to demonstrate their firearms in the presence of Natives or they would see how relatively ineffective they were.
Few places, and certainly none of their size and scope, were as transformed by the process of globalization as the Americas were. Yet, while acknowledging that transformation we must not do so in a way that turns Native America into a place of a timeless past and an invisible present. To borrow a point made by historian Richard Reid in discussing Modern Africa, we don’t have to deny the brutality of much of the post-Encounter history to recognize that Indigenous people throughout the Americas, “operated dynamically and asserted [themselves] within that arena, nor to understand the absolutely critical role [they] played…in shaping a larger, global system.” Doing this requires us to both reject the omnipotence of the colonial (and later national) power structure, “and [acquaint] ourselves with a range of local actors who retained a profound influence over their own destinies.”
- What does the history of Cahokia reveal about change and development in indigenous North America?
- How were the Aztec and Inca Empires influenced by their geography?