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The Acapulco-Manila connection by Louis Proyect 08 February 2002 01:14 UTC |
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[Combining elements of the sort of dialectical anthropology found in Stanley Diamond's writings, world systems theory and first-person travel journalism, Jack Weatherford's "Savages and Civilization: Who will Survive?" is a must read for scholars or laypeople. [Although it was written directly for the paperback market, the book is up-to-speed on scholarly sources, including Braudel and Eric Wolf among others. Weatherford's main purpose is to illustrate how every gain in "civilized" society has come at the expense of earlier bonds of solidarity and ecological sustainability. Perhaps the epigraph to chapter 14 by Herman Melville summarizes Weatherford's goal in barest terms: "Civilization, for every advantage she imparts, holds a hundred evils in reserve…" [The passage below concludes chapter 11, "The Silver Ship Across the Pacific". Writing from a hotel in Acapulco, whose seedy charm he captures vividly, Weatherford explains how the navigation routes between Spain, New Spain (Mexico) and the Philippines made the rise of Europe possible. Even more intriguingly, in light of 9/11, is the suggestion that by bypassing the Mideast, the new route essentially condemned the Arab and Central Asian world to a stagnant "back road".] The trans-Pacific voyage of the Mexican galleon to Manila each year was the longest and probably the most dangerous voyage of any ship in the world. It covered the longest distance on the high seas without sight of land of any other route. Particularly the return voyage, which sailed far to the north in order to catch the North Pacific Current, passed through treacherous waters plagued by typhoons, Japanese pirates, and the constant threats of scurvy and beriberi. The Manila galleon put the cities of Spain in direct and continued contact with the cities of China. By today's standards, the two years that it took to make a round trip from Cadiz to Canton seems long, but compared with the years that it took Marco Polo to make a similar trip by land, the Manila galleon made a new and fast connection. The sea route proved not only much faster and more secure than the land route, but it was considerably cheaper because the goods had to pass through fewer hands. From the time the goods were loaded onto the ship in Manila until they were unloaded in Spain, they were under a single authority, that of the king of Spain, who ruled not only Spain but Mexico, Central America, South America, and the Philippines. In the Spanish imperial administration, the Philippines constituted a part of New Spain (Mexico), which lay much closer to the islands than did the mother country. The Spaniards even called the Filipinos indios, or Indians, the same name they used for the Mexicans and other Native Americans. A letter from the Spanish court left Madrid by land, sailed from Seville in the spring, and crossed the Atlantic and Caribbean by ship, landed at Veracruz on Mexico's eastern shore two months after leaving Europe, was transported by hand or horse across the mountains to Mexico City, then down the mountains to Acapulco, to wait for the Manila galleon in April. Even though Spain and the Philippines lay on opposite sides of the same Eurasian landmass, the commercial and bureaucratic lines connecting them ran the other way around the world and across the Pacific. Madrid and Canton sat on opposite sides of Eurasia, separated by 6,500 miles of land, but connections between the two went in the opposite direction from Madrid, 5,600 miles across the Atlantic, a few hundred miles overland, and then 9,000 miles by water to Manila, and then another 775 miles to Canton, a total distance from Madrid to Canton of 16,000 miles, two-thirds of the way around the earth. Acapulco served as the key link between the two distant lands. A letter from the king took more than a year to travel to Manila via Acapulco, and the response to the letter might take even longer traveling eastward from the Philippines back to Spain. For a letter to go and return even within a decade must have seemed momentous to the people of that era because the Manila galleon made communication around the world quicker than it had ever been. The fast new sea routes across the world meant the nomadic tribes who traded across Eurasia and the Middle East no longer played a significant role in global commerce. Once necessary, albeit slow and expensive, the cheaper, faster sea routes made them obsolete. Their crossroads of civilizations became the back roads, and often these atrophied into the niggling routes for a few local products such as metal pots, firearms, tea, and sugar, for which they sold their laboriously woven and knotted rugs and other handicrafts, and sometimes even their own children. To this day, the tribal merchants of central Asia have never recovered from this financial setback of the Manila galleon, and they have never again flourished as they did when they controlled the trade. They descended from being the conquerors and the arbiters of power to being the pawns of China, Russia, Persia, Turkey, and other invading armies. The fleet across the much more heavily traveled Atlantic sea lanes from Spain numbered from eighty to a hundred ships each year. By contrast, the Manila galleon usually crossed the Pacific alone. The distance of nine thousand miles in each direction was far too great to risk more than one ship at a time. Accompanying ships would have required more water, food, and supplies than could be furnished, and even then they were little protection from a shipload of determined Chinese, Dutch, or Philippine pirates. Most of the goods on the Manila galleon were not destined for Mexico or other parts of the Americas; they continued on across Mexico to Spain and other parts of Europe. Mexico was the stopping-off station for European-Asian trade, but relatively little of the goods or wealth of either continent stayed in America; instead, the American colonies had to work hard to produce inordinate amounts of gold, silver, and other precious materials for their European overlords. In some years the Mexican merchants sent more silver across the Pacific to Asia than across the Atlantic to Spain. Scholars estimate that between one-third and one-half of the silver mined in America ended up in China (Braudel vol. 2, 1982, 198). The total amount of silver shipped over in a little more than two hundred years of commerce was approximately five thousand tons (Wolf 1982, 154). The silver added greatly to the wealth of the late Ming and the Qing dynasties, but it also made China a more visible target for colonial powers wanting to wrest that silver away from the Chinese. The exact amount of the wealth that flowed from America to Europe and Asia will never be known. It included the accumulated wealth of virtually all the American Indian civilizations-all the gold, jade, and silver accumulated by the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Toltecs, and other now-forgotten people who preceded them. It included the great wealth of the Chibcha of Colombia as well as the Incas of Peru and Bolivia and all the pre-Incan civilizations that flourished there. Later it included the rich furs of North America, the pitch tar and lumber of the greatest forests of the world, American Indian cotton and dyes, and the world's widest assortment of plants, ranging from corn, potatoes, and beans to pumpkins, squash, and chocolate. The transoceanic commerce enriched the Europeans above all others and the Asians secondarily. It cost native America and Africa a bitter price in property and lives, in return for which they received only a few crumbs from the lucrative trade that sucked out the interiors of their homes and their cultures. So much Mexican silver crossed the Pacific in the galleons that the American coins minted in Mexico, Bolivia, and Peru became the standard currency throughout coastal China and the offshore islands. These coins, which had already become the general currency of North America and the Caribbean, quickly became that of the Pacific as well. "Dollars" of various weights and values eventually became the unit of currency for Pacific countries including Australia, Hong Kong, Fiji, Singapore, the Solomon Islands, and New Zealand, as well as for the North Pacific nations of the United States and Canada. While the Spanish trade empire stretched across America and the Pacific to Asia, the Portuguese extended the long tentacles of their commerce around the African coast and north to India, Indonesia, and China. Even before Columbus crossed the Atlantic in a Spanish expedition bound for Asia, the Portuguese had set out to reach it by sailing south and around Africa. Bartolomeu Bias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1488, and ten years later Vasco da Gama rounded the cape and reached India in 1498. The Portuguese established a series of trading centers and forts along both African coasts and across India and Indonesia, terminating in the Portuguese colony of Macao, China, established in 1557 at the mouth of the Canton River. The Lisbon-Macao route served much the same place in Portuguese commerce that the Madrid-Manila route served for Spain. The slender thread of trade created by the Manila galleon and by the Portuguese and then Dutch ships became the first completely global trade network. These were the last and longest parts of a journey around the world from east to west and from west to east. With the annual run of the Manila galleon, humans had spanned the widest ocean on earth, and with the ships around Africa, humans had created ties running in both directions around the world. Since the inauguration of these routes, we have intensified these ties, added more ships, built more highways, and added railway and finally airplane links, but basically the world has merely been elaborating on this accomplishment. The unification of the world into a single economic system, a truly world economy of global dimensions, took roughly eight thousand years from the settlement of the first agricultural villages until the completion of the first trans-Pacific route from Acapulco to Manila. The process required three major sets of technological and social breakthroughs: the unification of Asia and Europe via the horse, the connection of sub-Saharan Africa with the Mediterranean by means of the camel, and the voyages connecting Europe and Asia with America across the high seas of the Atlantic and the Pacific. Each of these three breakthroughs required a host of secondary technological innovations, such as the invention of stirrups, bridles, and saddles to maximize the energy of the horse; the digging of wells to provide water while crossing the Sahara; the use of paper to maintain contact over thousands of miles across Eurasia; and the mastery of celestial and compass navigation to cross the oceans. The Manila galleon's annual crossing of the Pacific marked a major triumph in human technology and organization. With the inauguration of this route, humans had finally conquered the high seas and thereby moved from mere exploration to sustained commerce and communication. In the truest sense, the modern age began with those voyages. From the year of the Manila galleon's first round-trip crossing of the Pacific, the world had become a much smaller place; the commercial ties, stretched so thinly across the two great oceans, grew into religious, cultural, and political ties in the coming centuries. The modern global order had begun, and only a matter of time and effort remained to bring every country, island, nation, village, tribe, and band into that unified system. Today, Acapulco is still Mexico's major Pacific port. Ships registered in Panama and Liberia bring in multimillion-dollar cargoes of Japanese cars and machines, Korean textiles and televisions, and Chinese toys and crafts. The modern ships, however, are bringing goods for Mexico and not for shipment on to Europe. That cargo now heads south, through the Panama Canal, and on across the Atlantic by an all-water route, without the need to pass near Mexico. Acapulco has evolved from its former status as a major link in creating the modern world economic system to that of a bit player in world tourism. The ships that sail in and out of Acapulco harbor today are as likely to be cruise ships running the Mexican Riviera route as they are to be cargo ships from Asia. The young Filipino men and women who wear starched white uniforms and serve drinks on the promenade deck or by the poolserve as a faint reminder of the role that the Philippines and Mexico once played in world trade. The children and old women hawking tawdry souvenirs along the beach of Acapulco represent an ever-fainter version of the merchants who traveled down each year from Mexico City to trade with the merchants from the Philippines, Peru, and Japan for some of the most exotic and costly merchandise in die world. The tawdry trinkets made of silver and sold in modern Acapulco do not hint at the billions of dollars in silver bars and coins that once sailed out of this harbor to change forever the economy of Asia. The merchants and their families still come down from Mexico City each weekend and holiday season, but they come to escape work and commerce, not to expand it. They come to stay in the luxury hotels scattered among the palms, and to board the luxury boats that pay their courtesy calls on the aged city. Like many of the visitors, the city of Acapulco has retired from its active role as a major player on the international stage of commerce and has settled into an easier routine of fun in the sun, golf, swimming, boating, touring, fishing, drinking, shopping, dining, and even some occasional snorkeling. -- Louis Proyect, lnp3@panix.com on 02/07/2002 Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org
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