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__List of terms to know from this lecture:__ Ming China Ottoman Empire Europe Bubonic Plague Zhu Yuanzhang Yuan Dynasty “Seven Great Voyages” of Admiral Zheng He Zheng He Yongle Emperor tribute system asker reaya timars janissaries

The State of the World, 1500. Europe’s rise to global dominance in the 19th century began with changes occurring worldwide in the 16th century. It was, though, not inevitable that European culture would become dominant worldwide. One of our goals as we begin to look at the history of the modern world this semester is to bring into question the whole idea of historical inevitability. With hindsight, as the saying goes, our understanding of history is “20/20”, referring, of course, to perfect vision. However, if we look at the context of events and try to identify their multiple causes and numerous effects on later history, the other events that occurred before, during, and after those we usually study, we come to find that there were many possible paths that history could have taken, and that nothing that we take for granted today was inevitable.

In this essay, I’ll try to provide a global context to the events we are about to begin discussing. I’ll look at the three large civilizations on which we’ll be concentrating in the first part of the course, and try to discern some similarities and differences, and some shared experiences, that can give us a (somewhat tenuous) grasp of the times globally.

In the 16th century, there were three major world power centers that we need to look at. These include **Ming-era China**, the **Ottoman Empire**, and **Europe**. This does not imply that they were the only important centers of human activity – just that they are the focus for this class.

Let’s start with what we know: by 1800, the Europeans were capable of dominating nearly any other world culture. By 1910, European states controlled, 85% of the planet. The key questions are how that change came about, and what processes of world history we can trace to find the answer. In order to begin answering those questions, we need to begin by getting some context. Let’s find out where Europe, China, and the Ottoman stood in the world in the early 16th century. This will provide us with a baseline for understanding the changes that each went through, and for comparing those changes with each other to try to find some causes.

We’ll begin, for no particular reason, with the Europeans. Had you in 1500 asked a European what culture s/he thought would dominate the world by 1900, the answer would almost certainly not have been Europe. First, most Europeans did not identify themselves as Europeans. Second, the major indicators of cultural, economic, and political dominance, just were not there. Most Europeans were illiterate in 1500, unable to read more than their own names, though this was beginning to change. The population of Europe was much smaller than that of China (a region of comparable size) and of the Ottoman Empire. The economic power of China and the Ottoman Empire overshadowed that of Europe, which played the role not of supplier of goods (with the exception of gunpowder and weaponry, which they didn’t supply, but the technology for which in Europe was already advancing fastest among the three) but primarily of buyer. Politically, the Europeans were a decentralized set of kingdoms, as much at war with each other as allied against threats from without. Theodore K. Rabb makes a good case that European princes were certainly willing to work against each other, and even act counter to the wishes of their religious leaders if it meant political advantage.

In1347, just about a century prior to the beginning time period of this course, the **Bubonic, or “Black” Plague** arrived in Europe. The first stages of the plague were virulent - it killed nearly everyone who got it. Historians have come to see, in fact, that the plague was not just Bubonic Plague, but a combination of many different virulent diseases acting in concert with horrendous public health practices, overcrowding, especially in cities, and the effects of overpopulation (starvation, large numbers of poverty-stricken people living close together, lack of sufficient medical care) combined with wars, which tended to spread sickness, and an unprecedented increase in inter-regional as well as inter-city trade.

In any case, the arrival of the Plague, whatever it was, depopulated large areas of Europe in an uneven way (some cities were completely spared, while others were ravaged by the plague in a seemingly random pattern). The uncertainty of life in this period led to two trends that are seemingly at odds with one another, but which, in this context can be rather easily reconciled. First was a trend toward unquestioning faith in the Catholic Church, which was to provide salvation to the souls of the many who died during the plague period, and might do so suddenly. In such a time, rather than question church doctrine, it was more common to accept orthodoxy and do what was necessary to assure salvation after death. This meant that Church interpretations of scripture and theology were accepted to a high degree (although there were certainly vocal dissenters in this period, Jan Huss among them), and punishment for heresy was strict and largely unopposed except by those who were accused of the heresy themselves.

At the same time as this trend toward a high degree of obedience to the Catholic Church there was a growing market in luxury goods. It appears that there was, as with religion, a sense that one’s time in the world might be limited, and given the choice between saving for a future that might never come, or spending now on luxury goods to enjoy in the short time of life that might (many believed would inevitably) end with the horror of the plague, large numbers of people chose luxury goods.

These two trends, were critical to the changes in Europe. In fact, though, they really just amplified trends that had already begun to emerge before the Plague arrived. In any event, there were some critical effects of the plague, among the many real effects, that I want to mention here. First, the relative wealth of most Europeans went up because of decreasing population, just as prices went down due to decreasing demand. This, along with the luxuries market, stimulated trade. It also stimulated changes in labor relations, as peasants who had not been free to search for better employment situations prior to the Renaissance and Plague, but were suddenly in demand from landlords looking desperately to shore up losses in their workforces.

This increase in labor demand combined with the decrease in population to create the possibility of migratory labor, and especially the increasing ability of the highly trained or educated to improve their own lot in life. These trends in turn led to improvements in education, and a kind of labor market, where the best skills and workers went to the highest bidder. This kind of work environment, of course, encouraged people to learn a skill, and to go to the towns to practice it.

Europe’s towns in the late 14th century were already beginning to win independence from local landlords, and started in the Plague period and after to be market centers, and centers of crafts, as well as places where practitioners of the new professional trades including doctors, lawyers, bankers, could be found. Towns became the places where labor, money, and goods met. People flocked there, and there were massive population problems, sewage problems, legal problems – but there was trade, and competition, and autonomy – these are what Fernand Braudel has identified as leading to the capitalist system developed in Europe – a system of self-interest that led to the development of European business, industry, and democracy.[1]

As a result, in part, of this system of self-interest, European political leaders developed successful military systems, weapons, and powerful economies that could drive those militaries and withstand long, difficult wars, through competition. 

One of the key answers to our question, then is diversity. This diversity in European cultures led to competition. Competition, at all levels of society, led to the development of European technologies, forms of government, science, systems for tax collecting and controlling the economy. According to Paul Kennedy, European Geography may have also played some part in the diversity described above. Kennedy, in his book //The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers//, notes the importance of geographic features in determining the political shape of Europe. According to Kennedy, large rivers, major mountain ranges, and difficulty traveling contributed to a kind of atomization, and encouraged the creation of local power centers while making it impossible for those local power centers to control their neighbors – or at least, too many of their neighbors.

This kind of geographical diversity was also present, and important, in the Ottoman and Ming empires. However, in the 16th Century, both exhibited strong trends toward centralization and uniform economics, culture, and language. Both were, in 1600, no less powerful than the Europeans. In many ways, both the Ottoman Empire and Ming China held better cards in 1600, and either would have been a better bet for world dominance in 1900 than the Europeans.


 * The Ming Empire**

By 1368, the Chinese peasant-cum-emperor **Zhu Yuanzhang**, known posthumously as Ming Hungwu, the first Ming emperor, defeated the Mongol **Yuan Dynasty** and began re-centralizing China under Chinese emperor.

China had been centralized so often, and for so long in each case, that it seemed natural to the Chinese to think of their society as one, and to remark on periods of many kingdoms and great civil wars as aberrations. China, with a population in 1368 of 80 million to Europe’s 45-55 million, was already both bigger and more unified and centralized than Europe, and possessed the world’s biggest economy.

Ming Hungwu, was a very hands-on ruler. His court was more centralized, and he played a more active role in government than most other emperors in all of Chinese history. He also spent a tremendous amount of time and money defining China, reviving its economy by encouraging repopulation of the north, extending official sanction to agriculturalists, and improving Chinese economic production through incentives, effective taxation, and outright assistance.

Under Ming Hungwu, the Civil Service Examination System was revived, and government officials were chosen not by their connections to the imperial government, but through a rigorous upward-moving system of exams that brought the most diligent, and most intelligent, to the service of the government. Through this examination system, the ruling elite, both male and female, became very literate. They became consumers of culture to a degree never seen before in history, and this in itself encouraged the Chinese economy.

China’s economy worked through an interlocking system of towns, from farming villages where basic marketing was done to local market towns, to regional market centers, to major cities. Because of the effective power of the Imperial government, and its ability to carry out its functions in regard to defense, maintenance of order, and regulation of the economy, none of these towns developed the autonomy found in European towns. Still, China’s market structure and the population’s huge consumption of goods, made Chinese towns into engines of the largest economy in the world in 1500.

Chinese Technology in the 16th century was well ahead of nearly every other culture of the world in most areas. By the Tang Dynasty (618-907), the Chinese were printing with woodblocks, and by the 1100’s with movable type. Europe did not match these inventions for centuries in each case. Moreover, navigational technology was also often a product of Chinese inventiveness. The magnetic compass was, and the grid-lined navigational chart may have originated in China.

The Chinese were the first to invent gunpowder, and by the Song Dynasty (987-1179) were using it in rockets designed for military use as well as in fireworks, and for their formidable early cannon.

Perhaps the most important historical example of Chinese technology is the so-called **“Seven Great Voyages” of Admiral Zheng He**. Between 1405 and 1433, **Zheng He** undertook a number of voyages (probably more than 7) at the behest of the **Yongle Emperor** (the third emperor of the Ming Dynasty). For all of those voyages, the majority of the ships were over 400 feet long, with five masts, watertight doors, sectioned hulls, etc. These ships were capable of sailing on the open ocean out of sight of land – something the Europeans would not be able to do until at least 1488.

Zheng He’s ships were seaworthy, and capable of circumnavigating the globe, as I said, almost a century before the Europeans. So why did they not do this? Well, as Cooke tries to point out, to ask this question assumes that expansion is the normal condition of a state. However, if non-expansion were the normal condition, we would have to ask why he went in the first place. The answer to this second question holds the answer to the first.

Zheng He was after tribute, not trade. The objective was related to foreign policy, not financial gain. The Ming Dynasty was a Chinese dynasty ruling China after the fall of the Mongols. Part of the purpose of most of its policy activities had to do with establishing the legitimacy of the Ming as Chinese, and the legitimacy of China as the historical “Central Kingdom” that it had claimed to be. The tribute system was a way of getting other civilizations to acknowledge China’s superiority, longer history, and centrality to the project of human civilization as a whole. To do this, all they had to do was present valuable gifts and make a declaration that made them a nominal client state of the Ming. In return, the Ming usually gave them gifts worth far more than they had given in tribute. So the Ming Dynasty did not profit financially from the voyages of Zheng He or other tribute missions. They did profit politically according to their calculus, because acknowledgement of their superiority translated into official legitimacy both at home and abroad. This put the Ming rulers in clear control of all of China.

The tribute missions of Zheng He, however, also established Chinese superiority in a real way wherever they went. In Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) Zheng He used his significant military contingent to replace a king who was unfriendly to the Ming with one who sent the tribute required. The great treasure ships were not always laden with treasure of a financial kind, but were often the traveling homes of ambassadors to the Ming court on their way to and from China for diplomatic purposes. On at least one occasion, exotic animals including Giraffes were shipped home on one of these vessels. The treasure fleets themselves usually consisted of more than 60 official vessels, and were always accompanied by dozens of traders vessels from China, Japan, Korea, and other places along their routes, so their size was impressive. All this established China as one of the world's pre-eminent cultures on the eve of the Modern Era.

But Ming China was not the only great civilization that seemed to have out-performed the Europeans over the last millennium. The Ottoman Empire, largest of the Islamic States of South East, South, and Western Asia, was in 1500 a thoroughly modern state with its hands on the sources of power and wealth, and the potential to become a dominant player in the world over the next several centuries.


 * The Ottoman Empire**

As Paul Kennedy has said, to Europeans, China was exotic, distant, a center of knowledge, but not a threat. The Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, was expanding at a tremendous rate, and over tremendous distances, in this period, and was right next door to Europe. By 1529, the conquests of other states had made the Europeans nervous, but a siege set on the Austrian capitol at Vienna made them quake in their boots, raising the very real possibility that Europe could be conquered by Muslims. This Islamic state was powerful for a number of reasons, not all of them specifically military in orientation.

Albert Hourani has noted the vast diversity in the Ottoman empire, and he proposes that this diversity, in people, languages, products, agriculture, all made for a vast secure market over large distances - in other words, the Ottoman Empire was economically powerful in part because it incorporated massive supplies and huge markets within its own boundaries, and was able to provide security for merchants in their trade.

Of course, the diversity also helped the Ottomans in another area. With large numbers of non-Islamic people inside its borders, the Islamic stricture against taxing Muslims caused less worry. Christians, Jews, and others could be taxed to support state ventures, there were plenty of them, and they were allowed freedom to trade and make money within the Ottoman empire. There were also taxes that could be, and were, levied on Muslims.

The government of the Ottoman Empire was also dedicated to justice, and took this job very seriously, which provided a legitimacy among the commoners of the empire that allowed for the heavy military burden it placed upon its people. This moral style of rule also created an air of trustworthiness in which business could thrive.

So the Ottoman economy was, in the 16th century, quite strong. The army was strong, as well. In fact, Ottoman society was military at its base, and divided into the **military (//asker//)** and the **common people (//reaya – the flock//)**. The //asker// included the rulers and the soldiers. The //reaya// was everyone else. Therefore, everyone in a government post had a military rank, and Ottoman bureaucracy operated as a military administration. Within the //asker// were other major subdivisions again – the **//timars//** – holders of grants of land from the sultan, and high officials, and the soldiers and others involved with administration and warfare. Also a part of this system were the **//janissaries//**, a force of men purchased from their families in the Christian parts of the empire (Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, etc., conquered by the Ottomans sometime before their conquest of Constantinople in 1453) and converted to Islam to become soldiers loyal only to the Sultan. While they were slaves, they were also paid, and trained in languages, administration, and soldiery. They were a formidable set of soldiers, and to top off their intelligence, skill, and unity, this was the only force in the Ottoman Empire which the sultan allowed to use gunpowder weapons.

This sophisticated and highly centralized state was, in the 16th century, the very pinnacle of human social organization. While Islamic law was its base, confidence in itself allowed for a great diversity in thought and learning. The Ottoman empire was open to influences from around the world, and had contacts with most of Eurasia, allowing it to have access to, or create, some of the most important inventions of the age. Its army was humane – unlike other armies worldwide, the //janissaries,// at least, were forbidden to requisition supplies from subjects of the Sultan anywhere within its borders. The Ottoman justice system was the centerpiece of the administration, and considered the personal responsibility of the Sultan. Its trade was far-flung and successful. It lay between Europe and China, strategically, geographically, and in terms of the major routes of trade.

This powerful state, then, could certainly have been seen at the time as the potential inheritor of global dominance.

So, In the 15th and 16th centuries, Europe was powerful, and clearly becoming competitive with the other two great societies, but there was no clear evidence that Europeans would eventually come to dominate the globe. Europe was one of three major growing global powers. From this point until we reach the Industrial Revolution, in 1730, our quest will be to compare and contrast changes occurring in as many pre-modern societies as possible, with a primary focus on these three. The last part of the semester will be devoted to uncovering and demonstrating the effects of Europe's (the West's ) hegemony, and the changes that have led to up to our own time.


 * Bibiography:**

Allen, J. Michael, and James B. Allen. //World History from 1500//. HarperCollins College Outline, no. . New York, N.Y.: HarperCollins, 1993.

Braudel, Fernand. //"Towns & Cities," in Worlds of History: A Comparative Reader, Vol I, to 1500//. Edited by Kevin Reilly. 2nd ed. Boston, Mass.: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2004.

Cooke, Jean, Ann Kramer, and Theodore Rowland-Entwistle. //History's Timeline: A 40,000 Year Chronology of Civilization//. Edited by Fay Franklin. New York, N.Y.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1981.

Hourani, Albert. //A History of the Arab Peoples//. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991.

Kennedy, Paul. //The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers//. New York, N.Y.: Random House, 1987.

Spence, Jonathan. //The Search For Modern China//. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, Ltd., 1990.

[1] Fernand Braudel, “Towns and Cities” in Reilly, Kevin, ed., //Worlds of History, Vol. I, 2nd Edition// (Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2004).