Global History

A Short Overview

Noel Cowen

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745628066, 9780745628059
• eBook ISBN: 9780745666068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This short book offers a clear and engaging introduction to the history of humankind, from the earliest movements of people to the contemporary epoch of globalization. Cowen traces this complex history in a manner which offers both a compelling narrative and an analytical and comparative treatment. Drawing on a new perspective on global history, he traces the intersection of change in economics, politics and human beliefs, examining the formation, enlargement and limits of human societies. Global History shows how much of human history encompasses three intersecting forces - trading networks, expanding political empires and crusading creeds.

Abandoning the limits of a Eurocentric view of the world, the book offers a number of fresh insights. Its periodization embraces movement across continents and across the millennia. The indigenous American civilizations are included, for instance. The book also ranges over the early civilizations of China and Europe as well as the Russian and Islamic worlds. Modern American and Japanese civilizations are, in addition, a focus for attention. The author examines national and regional histories in relation to wider themes, sequences and global tendencies. In conclusion, he seeks to address the question of the extent to which a global society is beginning to crystallize.

THE MODERN ERA

PART IV
New Beginnings

For several centuries from the decline of the classical empires, the movement of peoples was resumed on a massive scale as the civilized centres from China to Europe were overrun. By the ninth century there were new ethnic blends in areas from the Pacific to the Atlantic and around the rim of the Mediterranean, exploring the habitats for what became the early modern centres of civilization. Four in particular found the resources to produce economic surpluses: by means of agricultural revolutions in southern China, Islam and western Europe; and in Russia from a run of improved harvests combined with extensive trade. In support of the primary economic thrust and its technological innovations, alliances were formed in all four regions between the political and spiritual elites. In China the Confucian scholars, in Islam the successors of the Prophet, in Russia the Orthodox church and in western Europe the Catholic church gave sanction to the secular search for wealth and power.

10

Movement of Peoples

Nomads and New Settlers

The political equilibrium of the civilizations which has been perceived by some historians in the first two centuries of the Christian era came increasingly under strain in the third and fourth centuries; and there is a consensus that in the fifth century the crisis of the classical world reached a peak, marking the end of one phase of history and the beginning of another. The cause of the crisis, it is often said, was the massive movements of mounted nomadic peoples across Eurasia which overwhelmed all the civilizations. Nomadic invasions were indeed a perennial factor, before, during and after the last days of empire. If, however, the fifth century was the turning point (and there are good reasons for thinking it was), then other factors than tribal intrusions must be taken into account. In particular, there was at that time a spiritual and intellectual crisis, a movement of deep anxiety across the whole civilized world, as the classical empires appeared no longer to be able to guarantee political security and stability.

Religious yearning and philosophical speculation were certainly not confined to the fifth century, but there was at that time a search of unprecedented vigour and marked eclecticism for new principles to guide the future course of mankind. It is significant that this search was undertaken, not independently of political developments, but closely involved with them. Roman, Persian and Indian emperors, and provincial rulers in Egypt and China, were all engaged in the inquiry and made pronouncements regarding it, as they appraised the value of competing faiths and ideologies to bind political societies that were falling apart. If the fifth century is to be accepted as marking the great divide, the universal spiritual crisis of the empires provides part of the explanation for the movements of nomadic tribes, who may be seen as taking advantage of the weaknesses of the civilizations rather than causing them. More significantly, the nomadic movements were a kind of reassertion of the global impulse, which several centuries later settled new peoples in what became the regions of new civilized centres, Chinese, Russian, western European, and eventually Islamic.

Unlike the speakers of the Indo-European languages who had overflowed in the second millennium BC, the newcomers used languages that were mostly of the Altaic group, associated with an area that extended from the north-eastern region of Asia into China, Siberia and the Middle East. Their primary centres of power were not in arid steppe or desert, but in the more favoured regions closer to China. From here they struck out in a series of movements. After being repelled or held at bay, they came to dominate northern China and caused large numbers of people there to migrate to the south. Meanwhile, a separate confederacy in central Asia was associated with movements which destroyed the Gupta empire, overran much of the Sasanian empire, and finally set in motion the movement of Germanic peoples who infiltrated the Roman empire. The links between all these peoples remain speculative, but the general pattern was of nomadic pastoralism and formidable mounted aggression.

There were also population movements at this time in parts of Australasia. Around AD 300 there appears to have been new activity throughout island Melanesia and western Polynesia as Samoans ventured eastwards in canoes as far as the Marquesas, which became a primary dispersal centre, sending settlers, foodstuffs and technology widely across the islands. New Zealand was reached but developed its own subsistence system as hunter-farmers settled in mainly coastal areas and experimented with new tool-kits in a distinctive Maori culture. Groups in central Australia ranged over wide tracts of territory, but larger numbers were supported in smaller areas of the fertile river valleys and along the coasts, sustained by local plant and animal foods.

From the fifth century, the classical empires confronted the steppe peoples and each other in what might be characterized as the wars of the civilizations. There was intermittent war between Byzantine and Sasanian forces, and with the nomads who sought to take advantage of the conflicts between them. A campaign against the Huns in the late fifth century had in fact been a disaster, leaving the nomads the victors and the Persians contending with famine and fears of an apocalypse. From this numbing experience, they turned away towards the softer lands of Mesopotamia, where, in the sixth century, they found themselves confronting the forces of Byzantium. Seeking to recoup their losses at the expense of their western neighbours, they began to loot the area as a way out of bankruptcy. In an all-out counterattack, the Byzantine forces put the Persians into retreat and seized their most valued religious sanctuary. The entire Byzantine economy had been placed on a war footing in what was perhaps the first total war in history. All exploitable resources were mobilized for military ends and the currency was drastically adjusted to pay for the war effort. The Persian collapse was indeed total, but Byzantium too was exhausted by its supreme effort. Between what was left of the great empires lay ravaged lands and defenceless peoples.

The sequel was the last great war of the period and its most extensive, a world war in fact which carried the Arab armies to the western limits of the Roman world and to the frontiers of India and China. There are several ways of regarding the wars of the seventh century. For many historians, they decisively marked the division between antiquity and the interlude before the beginning of the modern age. For some, they have been seen as the last desperate struggle between competing political systems. For others, they were ideological encounters, the struggles between rival interpretations of the destiny of peoples on earth and their relations with their deities. Certainly it was seen in those terms by those who experienced the holocaust and sought to justify it to their followers.

By some twelve centuries ago, the world of the classical civilizations had passed. Everywhere peoples had been on the move, looking for new habitats. Mounted nomads had roved the plains of Asia and Europe, plundering the old urban centres and pushing other peoples aside. The security of the old frontiers had gone. Slowly new areas of settlement appeared, political order returned and systems of farming and trading were renewed. Four regions in particular were important in this process: western Europe, the river systems of the Russian steppes, the fertile areas of the Middle East, and the river and coastal basins of southern China. Here the seeds of new civilizations were to be sown. What are now recognized as revolutions in agriculture were important, not only in the context of subsistence, but for the creation of the surpluses without which permanent societies could not endure; and here the development of trade within and between them also played a crucial part. Over several centuries, commercial and industrial innovation contributed to the further development of the societies.

In all of them, tensions arose between secular rulers and the custodians of belief. The resolution of these tensions depended to a significant extent on the way the economic life of the communities had developed: in western Europe open and exploratory, allowing commercial and some intellectual freedom; in Russia by the exercise of monopoly control; in Islam by a wide response to market forces; and in China by the infiltration of commercial values into the bureaucracy. Everywhere, political forces and patterns of ideas responded to the need for stability and economic growth.

The peoples who formed the new western European societies arrived over several centuries in an area which faced towards the Atlantic. Much of the region to the west of the Rhine had been settled by Celtic peoples who were skilled metal-workers. East of the Rhine were various German tribes, primitive in comparison but beginning to farm and trade across uncertain frontiers. In the fifth century the area was disturbed by Hunnish peoples from central Asia. In the next century, a larger and steadier movement carried the Franks from their Rhineland base into northern France and Anglo-Saxons into England. Finally, beginning in the eighth century, came the Northmen, the Viking masters of the open seas. With the withdrawal of Roman political authority, the religious authority of Rome passed to the Christian bishops and presbyters. By 600 the Anglo-Saxons were being converted, and by 750 the faith was being carried to the Germans.

The Vikings had also undertaken mercantile ventures to the east, through the Baltic and into the river systems of Russia. Here they were to encounter some of the Slavic tribes from central Europe who had been displaced in the eighth century. On the trade routes along the Dnieper to the Black Sea and along the Volga to the Caspian, the Vikings helped to turn the Slavic settlements into fortress towns and forge trading links with the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The Kievan state there lasted from the ninth to the thirteenth century, and important Kievan traditions were transmitted to Russian civilization as it emerged from the Mongol occupation.

While the Vikings were exploring from the north into western Europe and into Russia, the Arabs were fanning out from their peninsula into all the lands of the Middle East. There was a longstanding tendency for desert bedouins to seek new pastures and in the seventh century the movement reached crisis proportions. Political and economic disturbances upset the balance at a time of rising population, and under the added stimulus of religious fervour they entered the borderlands between the east Roman and Persian empires which lay unprotected after the wars. Together with the skills of peoples already long settled in the region – Greeks, Syrians, Persians and Egyptians – the followers of the prophet Muhammad created the basis of Islamic civilization.

During much the same period, the formation of modern Chinese civilization was taking place to the south of the area of classical civilization. The centuries since the great Han dynasty had been filled with invasions and migrations. While the north was being occupied by Turkic and Mongolian cattlemen from the Asian steppes, emigré Chinese families were colonizing the indigenous peoples in the south and facilitating immigration from Vietnam, Cambodia and parts of India. In the early T’ang period, efforts were made to secure the northern frontier, but it was along the Yangtse and down the southern coast that the beginnings of the new China emerged under the Sung emperors.

During these centuries, other groups of people, nomads and primitive agriculturists, explored on a transitory basis the potentials of many and varied habitats across the Eurasian land mass. Some created tribal kingdoms for short periods, within or linked with the areas of the new civilizations, and between all regions trading communities were sustained by the wealth the civilizations were creating.

This sequence appeared independently in east and west Africa, leading by the tenth century to towns, trading networks and the beginning of nation states. In the sixth cen-tury a variety of subsistence strategies sustained different cultural groups in east Africa, ranging from foraging to stock-breeding, and by the eighth century more settled communities were engaged in trade. In west Africa there were important trade centres at that time which led eventually to urbanization and state formation. By the seventh century the earliest known African town was acting as an exchange market for savannah products, salt and metals. Ghana was probably the first state in west Africa, followed by a quickening of activity around Lake Chad. Nearer the coast the forest kingdom of Benin produced bronze sculpture, and nearby Ife was the birthplace of the mature Yoruba nation. By the ninth century trans-Saharan camel trade was being stimulated by the consolidation of Islam, and by the tenth century there were major trading networks across the northern half of the continent.

It is, however, with the four regions where settlements proved permanent that the following narrative is concerned: in western Europe and in southern China following shifts from political to economic contexts; in Islam by the creation of an ecological zone from India to Spain; and in Russia by an eastward movement from Kiev to Moscow and beyond. Despite their differences, there was in all regions an initial process to provide subsistence and acquire a surplus; and the political and religious leaderships entered into supportive alliances.

11

Economic Breakthrough

New Bases of Subsistence

The end of Roman rule in the west had left a political vacuum and a cultural ruin, and as late as the ninth century the physical outlook was of a vast wilderness, with here and there clusters of occupation. From this low level began the struggles from which a new civilization arose. There came over the centuries a quickening of change, as higher productivity and surplus population began to fuel the assertive tendencies of a newly confident society. Feudalism was the political and economic base, emerging in the tenth century and reaching its zenith in the thirteenth century. The bedrock of the system was the entrenchment of the power of local aristocrats and landowners over the peasantry, who occupied and tilled the land but were not its owners. The estates were held as a fief from a superior noble who could demand military service in time of war and who in turn was the vassal of liege lords upwards towards the monarch.

During the four centuries of its existence the feudal system allowed for striking increases in agricultural productivity, which yielded the essential surplus to create permanent civilized centres. Land clearance intensified, and within two hundred years the forests which once covered most of central Europe had largely disappeared. In a major modification of the natural environment, ploughing advanced at the expense of woodland and marsh, with a widening belt of farmland around the settlements. Some later techniques undoubtedly owed something to eastern sources as well as to Rome, but the craftspeople of western Europe often had little alternative but to find their own solutions to problems as they arose.

In the drive for territorial acquisition which seized society during the early Middle Ages, the manorial estates became the main matrix around which relationships could be organized. New equipment, such as plough teams and mills to grind the corn, was expensive and it was economic to install it only where there were enough people and an effective organization. Joint undertakings by the better-off peasant families were sometimes attempted, but the surpluses were generally raised through seigneurial revenues in the form of rent in money, labour or in kind. The early economic objective was the growing of grain, but a gradual rise in the living standards of the nobility introduced meat and wine, stimulating the growth of small market towns inhabited by dealers in these and other products.

From being at first centres of exchange, the towns also became centres of production, of cloth and clothing, footwear, leather and metal goods, and they attracted the crafts associated with building, such as brick-making, masonry and carpentry. There was an increase in the numbers following these occupations and they used craft guilds to protect their interests. The merchants and more important manufacturers founded companies to reduce competition and restrict entry. They had different interests from the lay and ecclesiastical lords and before long they were insisting on urban autonomy and claiming the right to make their own fiscal and juridical arrangements.

When the population continued to grow while yields on marginal or overworked land began to fall, the ecological balance of the system became increasingly precarious. In the fourteenth century the bubonic plague struck the population of the towns, leading to the collapse of production in many areas. There were poor harvests, famine and consequent neglect of the land. In what is known as the great crisis of Western European feudalism, uprisings of the peasantry spelt doom to the system and halted economic advance, until new patterns of social relations were established with help and stimulus from the towns.

Two regional groups of towns were particularly influential. In the Low Countries, land had been claimed from the sea by building dykes and polders; free of traditional restraints, the population grew rapidly and an early form of capitalism appeared. Loosely linked to the Low Countries through the Rhine valley, and soon cross-fertilizing with them, were the free cities of north and central Italy, with their enterprising merchants and bankers. The main international trade, in bulk and in prestige, was in woollen goods, and both the Dutch and the Italian towns prospered as commerce took to the sea. There were significant advances in seamanship – in flexible rigs and the introduction of the sternpost rudder – and the Italian commercial houses used double-entry bookkeeping, banking credit and the insurance of goods in transit. Such innovations spread into a trading network which also drew in the Baltic ports and the raw wool suppliers of Spain and England; and through the Mediterranean western Europe was linked into a wider intercontinental trade.

Classical Chinese civilization ended with the downfall of the Han dynasty, a few centuries before the end of the Roman empire in the west. Some centuries later, a new beginning was made. Whereas classical Chinese society had been based on the Hwang-ho river basin and was oriented towards the north, modern Chinese society arose in the Yangtze river basin in the south and drew the north into its sphere of influence only as and when the Chinese world was reunited. By that time, quite different people were involved, both in the south and in the north. In a striking parallel to developments in western Europe, the breakthrough began with an agricultural revolution, which opened the way to advance across a wide technological front. The introduction of wet rice cultivation, with new techniques for lifting and moving water and new tools for tilling, brought a dramatic increase in yield and released labour for commerce and manufacturing. Between the eighth and the twelfth centuries a vast economic transformation took place, spreading in time along the grand canal and major rivers to the northern ports.

Among the more striking industrial developments were the creation of a high-temperature iron and steel industry, based on coking coal and the use of metallurgical bellows, and the invention of textile machinery. The first known accurate mechanical clock was made in the eleventh century, at about the same time as the formula for gunpowder was discovered and movable type was used in printing. This was an exemplary literary age when encyclopaedias, inventories and collections of texts were published. Scientific inquiry was the source of exceptional progress in fields as varied as medicine, geography, mathematics and astronomy.

The towns grew in number and importance through the Sung period, both as commercial centres and as places of culture and entertainment. Merchants and craftsmen were brought together in corporations and guilds, and there were beneficial contacts between officials and the urban population. Paper money came into use to facilitate the flow of goods, together with cheques, promissory notes and bills of exchange. Trade grew rapidly within and between regions, and some large merchanting houses made their appearance. A coastline with good anchorages, linked with a network of internal waterways, encouraged the growth of seaborne traffic; and, with the help of the compass and other technical improvements, the southern Chinese ventured into long-distance voyages.

Between western Europe and southern China lay another region which, by the tenth century, was experiencing an agricultural revolution in the formative stage of a new civilization. Islam, the outcome of forces of economic and social change set moving by Arab conquests which began in the seventh century, arose in the core areas of much older civilizations in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. But the extensive urbanization and trading networks it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• THE CLASSICAL ERA
• THE MODERN ERA
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index