THE STORY OF MAN
AN INTRODUCTION TO 150,000 YEARS OF HUMAN HISTORY
CARROLL & GRAF 2007
PART X
Chapter 16: Riding the Roller-coaster: The European Experience
Chapter 17: The Scourge of Asia
Chapter 18: Riding the Roller-Coaster: The Asian Experience
Chapter 19: The World in 1455
An alien visitor conducting an audit of the human race in the year that Gutenberg published his Great Bible would have concluded that the species was more than holding its own. Most of the population losses suffered across Eurasia through war and plague had been made good. And thanks to increases in numbers elsewhere, world population was now back at the 400 million level it had first reached around the year 1200. China, admittedly, had still not fully recovered from the double blow of the Black Death and the Mongol conquest, but this was balanced by the increase achieved in two regions – sub-Saharan Africa and the Americas – that the plague had not reached.
In terms of sheer numbers, Africa south of the Sahara had been the greatest success story of the previous three centuries. Starting from around 30 million in 1100, its total population had more than doubled and was now, at nearly 70 million, greater than Europe’s, and within striking distance of China’s. This impressive increase was attributable to three factors: more and better food; improved technology; and the benefits of trade.
- In northern and western Africa, the most important trade was the trade in slaves. It was also one of the oldest, dating back to Roman times.
- In the mid-fifteenth century, villages in the western part of the continent were still plagued by raiders who appeared out of the blue to carry off the able-bodied young.
- Within a hundred years, these slave-traders would find a huge new market in the Americas. But in 1455, the existence of the Americas was still unknown to the rest of the world.
In the Americas, isolated from Eurasia’s germs, and sustained by highly efficient farming cultures, the population had been increasing for centuries, and now numbered about 50 million, speaking around 2000 mutually unintelligible languages. A sizeable proportion of this total was accounted for by two recently established civilizations: one in Mexico, and the other on the Andean Plateau, from Bolivia, through Peru, to northern Chile.
- The Aztecs believed that their God required a continuous supply of human hearts, which had to come from the living bodies of warriors taken in battle.
- The hatred and resentment that this created would prove a decisive factor in the later downfall of this seemingly invincible empire.
- Three thousand miles away, in the Andes of South America, the Inca empire was just emerging.
- In a series of campaigns beginning in 1438, and continuing over the next 30 years, the Inca succeeded in conquering all the rival states in the region, establishing themselves as undisputed masters of western South America, from Ecuador to Central Chile.
The Incas were the inheritors of a farming tradition more than 4000 years old and had developed one of the world’s most sophisticated systems of agriculture, featuring massive irrigation works and backed up by a magnificent network of roads. To administer their far-flung dominions, they employed a large corps of administrators, whose training and skills might have impressed even the self-satisfied mandarins of imperial China.
- In North America at this time, around 50% of the area now occupied by the United States was home to farming cultures that supported a multitude of prosperous villages and small towns.
- In present-day Alabama, Georgia and eastern Oklahoma, substantial towns, ruled over by proud chiefs and defended by disciplined warriors, looked out across extensive fields of maize.
- Beyond the fields, there was often a belt of sweet chestnut or hickory trees, deliberately planted in cleared ground, to provide a supplement to a corn-based diet.
- In the more arid south-west, a different kind of agriculture was practiced on terraced hillsides watered by artificial irrigation
- In a forest landscape rich in small game, there was usually a source of meat close at hand.
- On the other side of the Pacific, the people of Japan still lived much as their ancestors had done three centuries earlier.
- Their numbers had continued to increase, and in 1455 stood at 10 million, twice what it had been 300 years earlier.
- Under the shogun, the people were governed by, and existed to serve, a military aristocracy. These were the samurai, the highest caste in a rigidly stratified society, in which the lowest class, as in India, was untouchable.
- In China, the overthrow of the Mongol dynasty in 1368 and its replacement by the Ming dynasty, which had roots in northern China, had led to a reversal of the long-running trend of population and prosperity from north to south.
- In 1456, China’s population of around 75 million was still well short of what it had been before the Black Death and the Mongol invasion.
- But in an atmosphere of internal peace and increasing prosperity, it was on a rising curve that would carry it to record levels during the next two centuries.
‘Ming’ means ‘brilliance’, and artistically this was one of the most brilliant periods in Chinese history. By the mid-fifteenth century, the country’s craft workers were turning out great quantities of fine carpets and carvings, and exquisite embroidery. Particularly notable was the beautiful blue and white porcelain, some of which was of eggshell thinness.
- Advanced technology provided the underpinning for artistic achievement, and for the luxurious lifestyle of the upper classes.
- Inventive genius is like a plant. If it is to flourish, it needs favourable soil, and room to grow.
- In the restrictive, inward- and backward-looking atmosphere of the Ming dynasty, scientific enquiry was discouraged, and commercial enterprise was tightly controlled.
There was no immediate obstacle to material progress. A country with advanced technology, efficient administration and a literate culture can prosper on the basis of its accumulated wisdom for a long time. But in a fundamental sense, this society was marking time. Half a world away, in Europe, other societies were changing fast, and a series of revolutions –scientific, technological and commercial – was imminent, that would eventually leave China, and all the nations of Asia, trailing hopelessly in their wake.
- In the furnace of Europe’s wars, a new kind of entity was being forged: the nation-state – England, France, Spain, Italy and Germany.
The papacy had lost the struggle for earthly power over the continent’s rulers, but its spiritual authority still gave enormous leverage in European politics. And over much of the continent they possessed absolute power of life and death over those who dared to challenge them in matters of faith, conscience and learning. But there was a spirit of intellectual and religious restlessness at large that threatened that authority. The printing revolution inaugurated by the publication of Gutenberg’s Great Bible in 1455 gave that spirit a voice, and it would in due course deal that authority a blow from which it would never recover.
Chapter 20: The Bridging of the Atlantic
Chapter 21: The Remaking of North America
Chapter 22: Wealth real and Imaginery
Chapter 23: Europe’s Discovery of Art and Science
Chapter 24: Empires of East and South Asia