TECHNOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY

The one obviously necessary condition for overseas empire is maritime capacity: ships sturdy enough to survive long journeys across rough seas, sailors with sufficient nautical knowledge and skill to reach distant destinations and return home.

But west Europeans were by no means the only candidates for overseas initia­tives early in phase 1. Long-standing traditions of maritime trade evolved in East and Southeast Asia, along the vast arc of the Indian Ocean basin, and in the eastern Mediterranean.³ Large polities with some state-controlled naval capacity included China and the Ottoman Empire.⁴ Numerous smaller polities looked out to sea: city- states along the Arabian peninsula’s southern and eastern edges, in Gujarat, on southern India’s Malabar and Coromandel coasts, and bordering the Strait of Ma­lacca. The Chinese (Ming) imperial court dramatically demonstrated that it could show the flag far from home by sponsoring seven major expeditions to the Indian Ocean between 1405 and 1433. Egypt’s Mamluk rulers dispatched ships to the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century. Arab seafarers traveled widely, founding city­states along the East African coast. By the eighteenth century Oman, on the Arabian peninsula, claimed quasi-formal authority over several East African ports.

If other polities and peoples had substantial maritime capacity, why did they not compete more effectively with west Europeans for control of the seas? One answer, advanced by Carlo Cipolla, is that in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries European societies fronting the Atlantic greatly improved the quality and versatility of their ships.

Sailing ships with guns could outdo sailing ships without them, as shown in the Portuguese victory over a much larger Egyptian and Gujarati fleet near Diu in 1509. This was a turning point in world history, enabling Portugal’s ships to sail essentially uncontested thereafter throughout the Indian Ocean. Cipolla contends that Europeans enjoyed a comparative advantage in sea warfare long before they developed this advantage on land. Hence they were able to expand overseas while Ottoman armies advanced into southeastern and central Europe from the fifteenth century until well into the seventeenth.⁶

Cipolla’s argument leads to a more general point. From early phase 1 onward west Europeans invested time, ingenuity, and resources to improve the means of transport and warfare. Whether by design or accident, these improvements made it much easier to attain overseas political goals. Progress in transportation was ob­viously important given the immense distances between a metropole’s capital city and its colonial frontiers. The carrying capacity, speed, and safety of European ships improved dramatically after the fifteenth century, as caravels were succeeded by carracks, galleons, and steamships.

Further distinguishing Europeans from other societies was the practice of combining improvements in mobility and firepower. The Diana, which wreaked so much damage in the first Anglo-Burmese war, was the latest version of the gunned ship that produced victory off Diu three centuries earlier. With the coming of the railroad, troops and repeating rifles could be moved quickly from place to place to quell uprisings. Unusually mobile firepower encouraged Europeans to take the of­fensive in land warfare despite their unfamiliarity with the local terrain. Mobility gave them the advantage of tactical surprise, as the sudden arrival of troop or materiel reinforcements upset enemy battle plans. In the Battle of Plassey in 1757, for example, English East India Company troops taken by ship from Madras to Bengal were invisible to enemy forces before they disembarked yet extremely effective once deployed in battle. The ability to move quickly while killing efficiently was a pivotal factor in Europe’s global dominance.

Virtually uncontested control of the high seas offered advantages on land as well. Europeans could select among invasion sites, avoiding hostile places and favor­ing ones in which resistance was known to be weak or nonexistent.

The vehicle of choice for moving Europeans inland in phase 1, the horse, was ideally suited for conquest in the Americas. Because the animal was not native to that hemisphere, European horsemen enjoyed an immediate and usually decisive advan­tage over local warriors.

The New World’s indigenous peoples were not technically equipped to take to the high seas and discover the Old World. But several Old World societies were equipped to make voyages to the New World and back. Whichever society first made sustained contact with the New World was in a position to gain enormously. Conquest and settlement would be facilitated by the vulnerability of New World peoples to imported diseases. The “horse differential” has been noted. Concentra­tion of mineral wealth in the hands of Aztec and Inca political elites gave outsiders incentives and opportunities to acquire these resources for themselves through mili­tary victory. Maize and potatoes, the New World’s fecund and nutritious staple crops, could be literally transplanted to the Old World with positive effects on agricultural yields and population growth. There was of course no guarantee that invaders from the other hemisphere would reap all these potential benefits.

West Europeans gained the New World prize, benefiting greatly in phase i from the “Columbian exchange” of people, raw materials, diseases, plants, and animals. Exploitation of indigenous and African slave labor gave Europe access to silver, sugar, tobacco, animal hides, and other commodities at high volume and low cost.’ Bullion from New World mines stimulated monetization of the European economy and growth of its market system.¹⁰ New World bullion stimulated European consump­tion as well as production by enabling its holders to pay for Asian luxury and consumer goods. Silver from the rich mines of Potosi, Zacatecas, and Guanajuato helped phase i Europe make up a perennial trade deficit with Asia. Such economic gains in turn increased Europe’s capacity to confront Old World societies that had hitherto been able to hold their own. There is thus a logic to the temporal/spatial sequence outlined in part 2. European states’ formal control of much of the Old World might not have occurred had their power not been enhanced by prior formal control of the New.

The logic of this sequence is illustrated and symbolized by the story of quinine (see chapter 5). Europeans could not safely enter the malarial zones of Africa and Asia until they became aware of the beneficial effects of a substance—quinine- derived from bark of a tree whose original habitat is the South American forest. Access to a New World tropical plant became a necessary condition for the penetra­tion, conquest, and administration of Old World tropical interiors.

But why did west Europeans reach the Americas while other Old World mari­time powers did not? Here geography figures as a conducive condition. With the possible exception of the Chinese, other societies with seafaring experience plied waters in which additional profits could be gained by expanding and diversifying trade among Old World regions. The Mediterranean was basically a closed sea con­necting European, African, and western Asian port cities, which relied in turn on trade with their respective hinterlands.

Arabs might have sponsored a New World expedition. After all, for centuries they controlled large portions of the Iberian peninsula, the same area from which Europeans set off on epochal exploratory voyages. Arabs in the late medieval period, moreover, were world leaders in the practical arts of seafaring and its more abstract dimensions, notably astronomy and cartography.¹² European rulers and mariners were aware of this. Prince Henry did not hesitate to borrow liberally from the Arabs’ maritime inventory for expeditions he sponsored.

The Arabs, however, relied far more upon land than sea power as they sped across North Africa and into Iberia in the seventh and eighth centuries. The con­querors were peoples of the desert. Their mobility was based on the horse and camel, not the ship. When it came to sea power Iberia and northwest Africa remained peripheral. The Arab and indigenous Berber inhabitants of Morocco, who were able to keep Europeans from conquering the hinterland until the end of phase 3, offered no resistance to European ships sailing past their Atlantic coastline. Had Gil Eannes been intercepted he might never have made it to Cape Bojador, much less back from the cape to Portugal. Prince Henry’s ambitious plans would have been thwarted at the outset, when prospects for success were most tenuous. And Europe’s global expansion might not have occurred. The Arab maritime presence was most impres­sive far to the east: in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Indian Ocean.¹³ These were waters so distant from the New World that efforts to reach, much less cross, the Atlantic were out of the question. Moreover, at the outset of phase 1 Arab sailors and merchants were active in the Indian Ocean, the very region Europeans were trying so desperately to reach. Why should Arabs want to circumvent Africa in the opposite direction, abandoning a profitable trade zone for no known or even imag­ined destination?

Peoples at Eurasia’s edges—Europeans facing the Atlantic, Chinese facing the Pacific—enjoyed a geographic advantage in access to the New World. But in the fifteenth century it was the Indian Ocean and adjacent Spice Islands, not an un­known hemisphere, that attracted sailors from the two edge societies. Cheng Ho’s and Vasco da Gama’s voyages mark the convergence of East and West on the same area. A major difference, however, was that Europeans had to circumvent a huge land mass to reach the Indian Ocean, whereas it was relatively easy for Chinese ships to reach the Spice Islands, Strait of Malacca, and points further east. For Europeans to bypass Africa they had to mount a sustained, risky, and expensive exploratory cam­paign. This entailed ventures financially supported by a government. Wealth seekers needed power holders. Power holders figured they could share in the profits if wealth seekers reached the source of Asia’s fabled riches. An early basis was laid for collab­oration across sectoral lines. This gave European overseas operations the empower­ing combination of institutional backing, strong and complementary motivations for aggression, and tactical flexibility (see chapter 10).

The serious obstacles fifteenth-century Europeans confronted in sailing so far south to travel east gave rise to the idea that their ultimate destination could be reached by sailing west. Once Columbus persuaded public officials in Spain to finance a venture based on this idea, the epic voyage accidentally linking Europe with the New World could take place.

By contrast, the relatively short distance between China and lucrative trade sites to the south and southwest meant that China’s government and private mer­chants could gain access to these areas without having to cooperate. Indeed, non­collaboration between the two sectors was the norm. The Ming court was sole sponsor of Cheng Ho’s voyages. When in the 1430s imperial officials chose to discon­tinue these remarkable initiatives, there were no interests outside the court actively pressing it to reconsider what in retrospect was a momentous decision to abandon maritime outreach. Merchants from southern China were active throughout South­east Asia for centuries. But they operated on their own as participants in what Philip Curtin terms a “trade diaspora.” They neither requested nor received support from an imperial court that, in any case, was located hundreds of miles from their home­towns.¹⁴ If anything, the Ming court tried periodically to restrict Chinese merchants’ international activities. The same geographical factors that encouraged cross-sector alliances in western Europe discouraged them in China.

A similar point applies to Chinese settlers, whose migration from (primarily) southern China to many parts of mainland and insular southeast Asia took place over several centuries. These emigrants’ departure was not approved by court offi­cials in Beijing. Neither did the court take special notice of the economic activities of Chinese communities overseas or try to protect their interests. Rulers in territories in which overseas Chinese communities formed did not perceive them as advance agents of Chinese imperial ambitions. In sharp contrast, migration from Europe was accompanied from the outset by metropolitan claims to possess territory the new­comers occupied. Whether deliberately or unintentionally, European settlers were advance agents of distant polities. Chinese settlers were not.

Migratory movements across Eurasia account in part for the contrasting atti­tudes of Chinese and European rulers toward overseas initiatives. Nomads originat­ing in Central and Eastern Asia were directly or indirectly responsible for some of the world’s greatest land empires: Mongol, Mughal, and Ottoman. Being close to the nomads’ steppes, China has historically confronted military threats from its hinter­land, as witness the enormous efforts across two millennia to construct and maintain the Great Wall. The danger of invasion was not hypothetical: Mongol rule lasted almost a century and was not terminated until 1367.¹⁵ It would be quite understand­able if Ming officials opposed Cheng Ho’s expeditions for diverting resources and attention from defense against highly mobile peoples living to the north and west. By contrast, western Europe was not threatened by nomadic groups after the Arab invasion from Morocco in the eighth century and Magyar advances to the middle Danube in the ninth and tenth. Mongol armies advanced no closer than Hungary, the Ottomans no closer than Vienna’s outskirts. Europeans did not construct a Great Wall to repel invaders from the east because they never considered “steppe imperial­ism”¹⁶ a clear and present danger. Being distant from the Eurasian heartland, west European polities were more readily disposed than the Chinese to face away from it. Rulers could sustain maritime initiatives once threats from quite another direction— Viking raids on coastal zones—had subsided.

Europe and China differed in another respect. The Mongol Empire greatly facilitated overland contact between China, the Middle East, and Europe. The oppor­tunity this offered for long-distance trade was seized by the Venetian merchant family, the Polos, among others. Europeans knew of “Cathay” through Marco Polo’s well-known account of his Asian travels in the late thirteenth century. He conveyed the image of an imperial court with far greater wealth and artistic treasure than any European monarch, or even the pope, possessed. Europeans thus had strong eco­nomic incentives to reach Cathay.¹⁷ Ming dynasty rulers had no comparably detailed knowledge of Europe prior to phase i. Even if they had they would not have learned of a single source of wealth so impressive they would have wanted to dispatch expeditions to acquire it. In Europe wealth was more dispersed, geographically and among sectors and classes, than in China.¹⁸ Europe had the will as well as the capacity to reach China. China had the capacity but not the will to reach Europe.

It was much more likely that a European sailing west to reach Cathay would have chanced upon the New World than that a Chinese ship sailing east would have done so. Columbus’s route across the Atlantic was less than half the distance of a voyage from East Asia to Central or South America, using the most favorable wind patterns across the Pacific.

In summary, for both technical and geographical reasons sailors from Eurasia’s western extremity were more likely than those based elsewhere in the Old World to set up the first two-way ties with the New World. As these ties deepened and broad­ened they enhanced Europe’s wealth and power, strengthening its capacity to take over Old World societies at a later point. Sailors from the Eurasian far west also had more economic incentive to reach the Indian Ocean and China than mariners from those regions had to reach Europe. The unequal distribution of perceived oppor­tunities for wealth helps explain why westerners sought the East and not the reverse.