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OK, I would really rather discuss Palestine, but the list doesn't
seem
>interested. > And of course all this stuff on hierarchy in the forest has utterly no relationship whatsoever with `World System Research' which appears to have moved to other lists. For those on this list who are interested in the formation of the World System rather than in chimps and baboons and not member of `H-World' I therefore take the liberty of cross-posting something I wrote on `H-World' as it is, well, concerned with `World System Research' and this is my specialist topic. Re: New Research in Chinese Economic History In response to Erik C. Maiershofer After all, why was the Kingdom of Spain backing >Columbus in the first place? To gain access to the Indian Ocean trade. To >see the effect of this "last minute (I prefer last century)" discovery, one >only need look at what happens to the Indian Ocean trade and the >Trans-Saharan trade after European-American contact. Much of the >Trans-Saharan trade is shifted towards the Atlantic to profit from the >demand for slave labor in the Americas. The Indian Ocean trade in >increasingly dominated by Europeans (initially the Portuguese >then the Dutch), but this is neither linear nor completely because of >European technology. >Remember that British inroads into India are only >possible after the disastrous policies of Aurangzeb, and that Shah Abbas >does regain control of Hormuz for a time. Certainly the wealth gained by >the various European nations by the Atlantic trade both justified and >provided for European economic, political and military policies in the >Indian Ocean, but by no means are these necessarily possible without the wealth of the Americas. In order for world-history to have equal `scientific' status as `national' or `area'-history we have to be VERY careful with our chronology. The trade of the Americas had a very major impact on European trade with Asia (i.e. Asia AND East Africa). And this not only concerns silver but sugar, indigo, pearls (i.e. Venezuala vs. Bahrain/Ceylon pearls), coffee, manpower (mainly but not only slaves), cotton, gold, wood (i.e. Brazilian vs. Indian wood) and ivory (West vs. East Africa) etc. etc. Actually it concerns most luxury and bulk-products dealt with in the Indian Ocean. In the late 17 th/18 th century all these products come to be integrated into a single global circuit of pricing and commodity-flows. (And note that in this respect Pomeranz UNDERRATES rather than overrates the importance of America during the `great divergence' of the late 18 th century) That's a 17-18 th century development not one of the sixteenth though, and it has to do with the steady drop of the costs (that's mainly transaction-costs i.e. maritime insurance) of oceanic navigation in the 17 th and 18 th century. It also is related to the growth of an integrated banking-circuit linking Brazil, the Carribean and (yes!) Boston with, say, Calcutta, Goa or Canton. That's a critical new development in the late 17 th - 18 th century. For European expansion - that means EUROPEAN expansion: i.e. French, Dutch, Portuguese and not only British - in Asia is `country-trade' expansion and `country-trade' builds on banking. The Europeans at large were more creditworthy for Indian, Armenian and (in Indonesia) Chinese bankers because they commanded such a worldwide credit-circuit. Thus e.g. in the eighteenth century Portuguese trade in Goa (I'm not sure about Macao) is largely financed by proceeds of the Brazilian trade, and financed by drawing bills on Pernambuco or Rio de Janeiro. (Again, Pomeranz very much UNDERRATES rather than overrates the importance of America in the `Great Divergence') This applies to far more fields though, thus manpower: e.g. by the mid-eighteenth century Goa and Mozambique are increasingly run by Brazilians and Portuguese trade in Asia is mainly Brazil-Asia trade. Portuguese products dealt with in India and East Africa consisted of Brazilian sugar, gold and tobacco. (Practically no products from the motherland were involved anymore - except wine) To repeat: the impact of the Americas on Asian trade is UNDERRATED rather than overrated (I'm not going to touch on the whole topic of North - American enterprise in Asia here but basically wherever you come in the late eighteenth century Indian Ocean you'll find Yankee merchants at work). Albeit - the big BUT here is that these are all seventeenth/eighteenth century developments not sixteenth. The Portuguese `state in India' (Estado da India) was not built on the American silver (and, hence, `Europe did not buy a ticket on Asian trade merely because of American silver' as Gunder says.) And that has a very simple reason: it wasn't discovered yet. In its first phase (1498- ca. 1560) Portugal exported some (Bohemian) silver, some (African) gold - it mainly exported `courage' (weapons and troops) though. In its first phase the Estado da India was mainly financed by the taxation of trade within Asia (and by the monopolization of some routes). It's in the second phase of the Estado da India (roughly from 1580 to 1640) - to follow S. Subrahmanian's Portuguese Asia 1498-1700 A Political and Economic History (London, 1993) - that the Portuguese trade is mainly financed by American silver. This silver, directly consigned from Seville on Lisbon (merger of the Spanish and Portuguese crowns - 1580) was supposed to be used only for purchasing pepper, spices, cinnamon on behalf of the crown. But it was partly also used to support private Portuguese inter-Asian trade Note that the image of this trade in the existing literature is by and large wrong - Portuguese inter-Asian trade was NOT an affair of marginal peddlers. It was an affair of the officials, the church and the nobility. And only they had direct access to the silver received on the Carreira da India. Thus, if the Estado da India was not constructed on the proceeds of the silver-trade, to an extent Portuguese private trade was. (And perhaps so was the trade in `new' products which begin to emerge in European-Asian trade in the 1570's: that's first and foremost Indian textiles and also saltpeter.) Had the Americas not been discovered (I always find this a rubbish thought-experiment but OK) Portuguese trade could conceivably have been financed by Japanese silver and copper - after all much of the VOC's inter-Asian trade was financed in that way. But, then, of course the Americas were discovered. Hence, it can not be said that the Portuguese presence was initially built on the proceeds of the American trade or that the wealth gained by the various European nations by the Atlantic trade both justified and provided for European economic, political and military policies in the Indian Ocean,. It wasn't - in fact, upto the 1560's Brazil was a rather marginal operation relative to Asia (and let's above all not forget West Africa here - there have been periods - the early sixteenth century, the 1670's- when West Africa was subsidizing the Asian operation). And Brazil was initially altogether marginal relative to this strangest Portuguese colonial enterprise of them all: namely the Morocco pracas. For those who are maybe unaware of this - Portugal had a whole string of fortifications along the coast of Morocco, mostly controlling only a small patch of land around the fortress and controlling the sea around them But however strange it now may seem to us - the bulk of the Portuguese military manpower (and naval strength) in the sixteenth century was sent to Morocco. This is sometimes seen (e.g. by G. Winius, Foundations of the Portuguese Empire (Minneapolis, 1978) as proof for the quite `uneconomic man' crusading spirit of the Portuguese. But there were a few sound economic reasons for it. For one thing, Morocco provided much of the grain Portugal badly needed and also - and that was probably the main economic reason behind the Morocco enterprise - the fortifications in Morocco protected Portuguese fishing from pirates. (Of course, fish was then - as it still is - the main component of the Portuguese dish, so that protecting the fisheries was pretty much interest number one of the kingdom). I should add though that in financial terms Winius is not wrong either: the Morocco pracas were running a heavy deficit. And it is probably true the Portuguese might have conquered much more territory in Asia had they not reserved the bulk of their manpower to go crusading in Morocco. But that's easy to understand. A Renaissance Portuguese noblemen needed to adorn himself with some martial glory but fighting in Morocco entailed being absent from your estate for perhaps a year - India meant being absent for decades. Hence, most senior Portuguese nobles only had experience and interest in Morocco whereas India was an enterprise of the lower country-nobility. For if you deal with the motives of Portuguese expansion in the sixteenth century you first have to consider what concievable interest which noble group might have had in it. There is a big difference between the Iberian nobility and that elsewhere in Western Europe: like in Spain the Portuguese fidalgos were a very large group - it is estimated that about 8% of the Portuguese population had at least some ascribed noble status, so that Iberian fidalgos/hidalgos were only `elite' to some extent. Hence, throughout Portuguese expansion (up to the restoration) you have a tension between higher and lower nobility. A good treatment is V. Magelhaes Godinho, A Estructure da antiqua sociedade Portuguese (Lisbon, 1971). However, these Moroccan fortifications were also of importance as they were the terminus of the trans-Sahara trade and that brings me to my disagreement with Maierhoven number two. As Adu Boahen (Britain, the Sahara and the Western Sudan (1964)) has shown even in the great `boom' period of the Atlantic slave trade (second half eighteenth century) the Trans-Sahara trade was booming too. Much of the commerce of the West African interior was much more oriented towards Egypt, North Africa and present Sudan than to the coast. In fact, the Sahara trade appears to have grown simultaneously to the trade along the coast, rather than being opposed to it. For the obvious reason that the backbone of this trade was not slaves but first and foremost salt - for which, again obviously, the Europeans along the coast were not a market Although I personally think the trans-Sahara slave-trade remained about the same in volume, it is possible that the slave-trade along the Sahara routes thus declined by the late sixteenth century but this was more than compensated by an increase in trade with other commodities - salt, copper, iron, textiles, weapons etc. - Easy to understand actually: the slave-trade made some groups very poor, but others very rich so that you should expect increasing demand for both bulk and prestige-commodities from North Africa in West Africa (after all, this is a period of Islamisation in West Africa entailing a market for prestige commodities from the Islamic heartland in West Africa). The Sahara-trade and the trans-Atlantic trade were thus not competing circuits - they were to a large extent complementary. Finally: I'm not sure British inroads into India were `only made possible by the disastrous policy of Aurengzeb' - there's a fifty year gap between the death of Aurengzeb and Plassey and we need to study what happened in those fifty years rather than in the seventeenth century. After all the East India Company did engage in a war with the Mughal Empire in the 1690's and was defeated - or rather the `Mughal Empire' hardly noted what the English were doing. There are other reasons for the rise of the British Empire in India than Aurengzeb's policy and the massive presence of the Atlantic economy was not the least important of these - and in a far more direct way than the indirect factors Pomeranz considers. Thus, e.g. by 1760 the Royal Navy (and not the Compagnie des Indes or the VOC) ruled the Indian Ocean. And seapower was critical on land too since it meant the East India Company could far more rapidly transport and supply troops than any Indian state could. Now, why did the Royal Navy triumph over the French Navy - its only serious competitor by then? Superiority in numbers really (rather than seamanship for the French had some superb seamen like the great Suffren in Asia) and one reason for these superior numbers is so obvious as to well merit repetition here: Newfoundland firs Again, while I would recommend M. Redicker's superb study Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchants, Seamen and the Anglo-American Maritime World 1700-1750, Cambridge, 1987 to gather some insight into the increasingly globally integrated maritime world which had arisen in the late seventeenth century, let's not forget that by 1740 these `seamen' also included Indian or Malay lascarins. And that this maritime world then extended to the roadsteads of `Joanna' (Anjuan) as well as to Madras or Bencoolen (Sumatra). `Joanna' was then as full of Yankees and as familiar a destination to Bostonians as say Barbados or Wydah. So, in sum, yes - there is an American impact. It only emerges when the Europeans are already on the train to follow Gunder's image though - but it's above all America which alows them to travel first rather than second-class. With excuses to those who attended the Wassenaar-seminar - I'm ill. Best wishes R.J. Barendse |