Page 247 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol Two

596 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

A typical narrow street of early
modern Europe in Assissi, Italy.

Exports of porcelain and silks from China created a trade
imbalance that sucked silver from the Americas and from
Japan. Through military-commercial giants such as the
Dutch East India Company (founded in 1602), European
merchants disrupted traditional trading conditions in
Africa and Asia to muscle into regional “country trade.”
The expansion of settled populations, as well as the new
ocean trade route alternatives to the Silk Road that linked
China to the West, contributed to the decline of nomad-
numbers of species of plants and animals) did not afford ism. The agriculture of settled peoples supported large
its indigenous peoples the same immunities enjoyed by populations and tax bases that an efficient state could
Europeans, who as children were exposed to a multiplic- translate into permanent military strength.
ity of infections. Measles, smallpox, and other diseases
brought by Europeans triggered a long-term demographic Development of Large
catastrophe.The indigenous population of central Mexico and Efficient States
declined from 30 million in 1518 to 1.6 million in 1620 The global trade in firearms and similar weapons con-
—a genocide unintended, misunderstood, and undesired tributed to the growth of large and efficient states, known
by the Spanish who sought souls for salvation and labor- as “gunpowder empires.” Expensive and complex, the
ers for their mines. Contact with the wider world wrought most advanced weapons became a monopoly of central-
similar demographic calamities on other isolated peoples, ized states, which employed them to weaken local oppo-
including Pacific Islanders, Siberian tribes, and the sition. During the mid-fifteenth century the king of France
Khoikhoi of southern Africa. Increased contacts distrib- used artillery to reduce some sixty castles annually.
uted pathogens more evenly throughout the world and Administrative procedures also became increasingly rou-
generally reduced susceptibility to epidemic disease. tinized and efficient. Ever more abstract notions of state
authority accompanied the evolution of new sources of
Development of a legitimacy. From the Irrawaddy River in Asia to the Seine
Global Economy River in Europe, religious uniformity served to reinforce
The development of global sea passages integrated Amer- and confirm centralized rule. The ideal of universal
ica into a truly global economy. Rapidly growing long- empire was native to America, Africa, and Eurasia.
distance commerce linked expanding economies on every The early modern unification of England with Scot-
continent. Dutch merchants in Amsterdam could pur- land and Ireland was paralleled throughout Europe. If in
chase commodities anywhere in the world, bring them to 1450 Europe contained six hundred independent politi-
Amsterdam, store them safely, add value through process- cal units (or more, depending on the criteria), in the nine-
ing and packaging, and sell them for profit. Intensive pro- teenth century it contained around twenty-five. About
duction fueled by the commercialism of an increasingly thirty independent city-states, khanates (state governed by
global market gave new importance to cash crops and a ruler with the Mongol title “khan”), and princedoms
sparked an unprecedented expansion in the slave trade. were absorbed into the Russian empire. By 1600 the
The movement of manufactured goods from eastern Tokugawa shogunate had unified Japan. Fourteenth-
Asia toward Europe and America created a chain of century southeastern Asia had two dozen independent
balance-of-trade deficits, which funneled silver from Amer- states that evolved into Vietnam, Siam (Thailand), and
ican mines to China. Regular transpacific trade developed Burma (Myanmar) by 1825. The Mughals unified India
during the decades after the founding of Manila in the north of the Deccan Plateau for the first time since the
Philippines in 1571 and followed the same pattern: Mauryan empire (c. 321–185 BCE). Unification was also