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C H A P T E R
O N E
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
The Material and Trading Worlds,
circa 1400
We are born and raised under circumstances neither of our own choosing nor
of our own making, and those include both the human and natural worlds.
The human world we confront is composed of social, economic, political,
and cultural structures. These large structures usually change very slowly, seldom as a result of conscious action on the part of a single person, and mostly
only as a result of huge processes that are hardly detectable, by large and
sustained social movements, or, as we will see, during historical conjunctures.
Moreover, the world in 1400 consisted of a biosphere that contained life on
Earth, humans included, extracting sufficient energy and nutrients from their
environment not just to survive but if possible to increase their numbers,
thereby changing and increasingly humanizing the environment.
To understand the vast changes that accompanied the origins of the modern
world, we thus need to start with some of the natural and human structures
into which people in 1400 were born, lived, and died. Of course, we cannot
possibly examine every facet of human life at that time, so we must be quite
selective. What I have chosen to emphasize are but two of the major structural
aspects of the world in 1400: first, the material and natural conditions under
which most people lived, an overwhelmingly agricultural world, or what can
be called the biological old regime, and second, the trading networks that
connected most of the Old World together. This chapter thus introduces two
kinds of worlds, the material and environmental one in which most people
lived quite restricted lives, and the trading or commercial world, which brought
the parts of the world into increasingly greater contact. To show how these
are interrelated, the chapter concludes with an examination of the causes and
19
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
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PAGE 19
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20
Chapter One
consequences of the mid-fourteenth-century Black Deathone of the great
catastrophes to befall human societyin western Europe and East Asia.
This chapter also introduces key concepts that will be used throughout
the book. Most of this chapter focuses on the material world, in particular
the size of the human population and the economic, social, and environmental conditions under which most people lived. The concepts that will be
introduced in this chapter include the rise of civilization and the agricultural
revolution, the relationships between towns or cities and the countryside,
between ruling elites and peasants, also called agriculturalists or villagers,
between civilizations and nomadic pastoralists, and between people and the
environment. Taken together, these relationships constitute the biological old
regime, the working out of which is examined in the Black Death of the midfourteenth century.
We will also examine the world system as it existed around 1400. Today,
there is much talk about the benefits and dangers of globalization. In this context, many people apparently consider globalization to be a new phenomenon, whether or not they think its impact is on the whole beneficial or
harmful. However, I hope readers will take away from reading this book the
idea that globalization is hardly new: it has been unfolding for a very long
time. Key concepts in this chapter will include polycentric (to describe a
world system with many centers), and core and periphery, whether applied to
a single or a polycentric world system.
Another major point about the fifteenth-century world is that most of its
peopleregardless of where they lived, their civilization, or even their various folk customsshared a basically similar material world. The reason is
that people had to eat, and after the transition to farming between 11,000
and 4,000 years ago, the way most people have obtained their living has been
from agriculture. To be sure, whether the main crop was wheat, rye, or rice
mattered, but all of the agriculturists faced similar challenges in dealing with
nature, the ruling elites, and one another. For this reason, much of this chapter will deal with the social, economic, and political structures and environmental constraints essential to understanding the material world from about
1400 to 1800. The following chapters then take up the story of what happened after 1400; in this chapter we establish a baseline in terms of material
life against which changes in the world can be assessed.
The Biological Old Regime
The number of people on Earth is an important indicator of the relative success humans have had in creating the material conditions under which the
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
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PAGE 20
The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400
21
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
human population can either increase or decline. Of course, there are tremendous variations in time and place of population dynamics, and we will
consider some of them here. As a first approximation, though, we can start
with simple global totals.
The Weight of Numbers
Here we look at the weight of numbers1 to get an overall picture. Today, there
are over 7 billion people on Earth. Six hundred years ago, in 1400, humankind
was just 6 percent of that, or about 380 million people, slightly more than the
2010 population of the United States of 310 million. By 1800, the population
had more than doubled, to 950 million.2 Moreover, in that 400-year period
from 1400 to 1800, as much as 80 percent of that population were farming
peasants, people who lived on the land and were the direct producers of food
for themselves and the rest of the population. The world was overwhelmingly
rural, and the availability of land and nutrients to produce food was a constant
constraint on the number of people alive at any given moment. For most of
that period, the population rose and fell in great waves lasting for centuries,
even if the very long-term trend was very slightly upward and the declines
came sharply and swiftly. In very broad terms, we can see three great waves of
population increase and decrease over the past one thousand years. Beginning
about 9001000 CE (probably simultaneously in China and Europe), the population rose until about 1300, crashing precipitously around 1350 as a result of
the Black Death. Another period of increase began about 1400 and lasted until
a mid-seventeenth-century decline. The third advance, beginning around
1700, has yet to halt, although population experts expect it to top out by about
2050 at 9 to 9.5 billion people.
Climate Change
It now appears that climate change was a general cause of the premodern
population increases around the world. Given the interest in our current
problem of global warming, historians and climatologists have reconstructed
past climates and have indeed found significant variations in temperatures
and rainfall.3 The connections between climate change and human population dynamics are complex, but the major linkage, especially in a world
where 8090 percent of the population made their living from the land, had
to do with food production. Variations in temperature, radiation, and rainfall
affect all growing things, trees as well as wheat or rice. Warmer climatic conditions improved harvests, while cold- or drought-induced harvest failures
could spell disaster. Long-term cooling trends could thus seriously shrink the
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
…………….. 18685$
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PAGE 21
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Chapter One
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
food supply and hence the ability of a society to sustain a given population,
leading to population declines. On the other hand, generally warming conditions could mean larger harvests and a growing human population.4 As we
will see, though, climatic changes count less for population growth in the
period since 1700, when New World resources and industrialization began to
ease prior constraints on population growth.
Population Density and Civilization
The 380 million people living in 1400 were not uniformly distributed across
the face of the Earth, but rather clustered in a very few pockets of much
higher density. Indeed, of the sixty million square miles of dry land on Earth,
most people lived on just 4.25 million square miles, or barely 7 percent of
the dry land. The reason, of course, is that that land was the most suitable
for agriculture, the rest being covered by wetlands, steppe, desert, or ice.
Moreover, those densely populated regions of Earth corresponded to just
fifteen highly developed civilizations, the most notable being (from east to
west) Japan, Korea, China, Indonesia, Indochina, India, Islamic West Asia,
Europe (both Mediterranean and West), Aztec, and Inca. Surprisingly,
nearly all of the 380 million people alive in 1400 lived in a handful of civilizations occupying a very small proportion of the Earths surface. Even more
surprising, that still holds true today: 70 percent of the worlds seven billion
people live on those same 4.25 million square miles.5
The densest concentrations of human population were (and still are, for
the most part) on the Eurasian continent: China in the east, Europe in the
west, and India in the south, with the populations of China and Europe
about equal over large periods of historical time. So large are those three
populations relative to the rest of the world that China alone represented
2540 percent of the worlds population (the latter percentage attained in
the 1700s), Europe was 25 percent, and India was perhaps 20 percent. In
other words, those three centers alone accounted for about 70 percent of the
population of the world in 1400, increasing to perhaps 80 percent by 1800.
Those amazing figures go a long way toward explaining why what happened
in China, India, and Europe plays such an important role in this book.
The fifteen densely populated and highly developed civilizations shared
several features, the most important of which was the relationship between
those who lived in the countryside producing the food supply and those living in the cities consuming surpluses from that food production, even though
the elites in the cities may have devised different means by which to ensure
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
…………….. 18685$
$CH1
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PAGE 22
The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400
23
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
that food produced in the countryside made its way to the cities. This extractive relationship between town and countryside has a long history, going
back to the emergence of farming.
The Agricultural Revolution
About 11,000 years ago, first in the part of the world aptly called the Fertile
Crescent (todays Iraq), people learned how to grow their own food and to
raise their own animals, thereby increasing the amount of food available.
This change, from a hunting-and-gathering society to a sedentary agricultural society, occurred over long periods and independently in at least seven
parts of the world: about 11,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent along the
Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, in northern China about 9,500 years ago,
around 5,500 years ago in what is now Mexico in Mesoamerica, and around
4,500 years ago in what is now the eastern United States. It may have happened independently in parts of Africa, Southeast Asia, and New Guinea as
well, although it did not happen everywhere: grasslands suitable for animal
pasture retained that character until well into the twentieth century.6
Although some have objected to the term revolution because the development of agriculture took such a long time even in the areas where it began,7 it
was nonetheless a revolutionary change in the way people lived, socialized, and
died, for what agricultural advances made possible was ever-greater amounts of
food than the direct producers could consume in any given year, in other words
an agricultural surplus, giving rise to social groups who did not have to
produce their own food: priests, rulers, warriors, and outside raiders, usually
nomadic people. The existence of this agricultural surplus meant that others
could take it, either by force if necessary or more regularly as taxes. In either
case, a major schism opened in society between the agriculturists and the nonproducing ruling elite: the job of the agriculturists was to produce the food and
the surplus, the role of the priests was to explain how and why the world had
come to exist in the first place, and that of the rulers was to protect the agricultural surplus from invading outsiders.
The agricultural revolution also gave rise to two additional defining characteristics of civilization: cities and writing. Since priests and rulers did not
have to produce their own food, they could live separate from the villagers,
in their own compounds as it were. Rulers also gathered around themselves
artisans to produce needed clothing, weapons, and buildings, giving rise to
the larger concentrations of people we have come to call cities. From there,
the elite could rule their lands while keeping track of the number of agriculturists, the amount of food they produced, and in particular the amount they
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
…………….. 18685$
$CH1
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PAGE 23
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Chapter One
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
owed the rulers in taxes, developing systems of accounting and writing.
Besides keeping count of population and taxes, writing was also useful for
priests to record their origin stories, to compute calendars for agricultural and
ritual purposes, and to forecast the future.
A city and its surrounding agricultural area typically was not selfsufficient, so people traded with other cities or with nomads or other pastoralists for raw materials (e.g., metals such as copper and tin, the makings of
bronze, or later iron ore) or animals (especially horses). If the required goods
were also strategic, that is, related to military sources of power, ruling elites
tended to distrust trade and wanted to secure the strategic materials by bringing the producing region under their control, through the use of force if necessary. This dynamic gave rise, over time, to empires: geographically large
political units ruled and controlled by a single ruling elite in which the subject population offered up their agricultural surplus to the ruler and the landowning elite, usually in the form of taxes and rents.
Towns and Cities in 1400
Although most of the worlds population lived in the countryside, towns and
cities of various sizes and functions did exist, and we can use the number and
sizes of towns and cities as a very rough indicator of the overall wealth of a
society (or to put it differently, of the ability of the peasantry to produce a
surplus large enough to support those who did not grow their own food). A
list of the twenty-five largest cities in the world in 1400 produces few surprises, in that most remain large cities today, but the worlds largest urban
populations in 1400 amounted to little more than 1 percent of the worlds
population.8 What may be surprising, however, is that nine of the worlds
largest cities, including the largest, Nanjing, were in China. The secondlargest city was in south India (Vijayanagar), and the third was Cairo. Only
when we get to the fourth-ranked city (Paris) do we get to Europe, which did
have five cities in the top twenty-five. Other large cities included Constantinople on the Mediterranean; Samarkand, the Central Asia link in eastwest
trade routes across Eurasia; Baghdad, likewise an important trading city; and
Fez in Morocco, which played an important role in African trade routes.
Of course, these largest cities in 1400 (which ranged in size from 80,000
people to nearly 500,000 at the top) represented but 1-plus percent of the
world population, while another 9 percent or so (or thirty million people)
lived in towns and cities ranging in size from 5,000 to 75,000 people. Not
surprisingly, most of these too were in Asia, with China, Japan, and India
accounting for the most. In Europe, by contrast, the largest city in Germany
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
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The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400
25
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
was Cologne at just 20,000 people. The wealth of the world in 1400, as measured by the number and size of cities, was thus concentrated in Asia.
To villagers, these towns and cities were somewhat magical places where
people with great wealth ate foods peasants could only dream of and wore
clothing of such quality that it put their coarse cloth to shame, all without
most of the elite doing any visible work. Of course, the taxes, tithes, and
rents the peasants paid supported these towns and cities, and they knew it.
This transfer of food from producing farms to consuming cities also had an
environmental aspect: the nutrients taken up in the growing of crops were
removed from the soil and, if not replaced, could result in the depletion of
soils, the collapse of farming, and crisis for the humans in those societies.
Nomadic Pastoralists
The agriculturally based civilizations occupied the best land for agriculture
throughout the Eurasian continent. The great grassland known as the steppe,
stretching east to west across the continent, as well as the deserts and wetlands,
while not amenable to agriculture because of too little (or too much) water,
were not uninhabited. On the steppe especially, groups of people obtained
their living from the land by hunting and gathering and following their herds.9
For these pastoral nomads, mobility on horses was a way of life, taking their
herds of horses, sheep, cattle, and goats wherever the grass was green. Their
way of life was not completely self-sufficient, for they needed things that cities
hadsalt, pots and pans, textiles, other manufactured goodstrading in
return horses, meat, honey, or other products they could gather and that people in the cities prized. Civilizations and nomads across the Eurasian continent
thus had a symbiotic relationshipthey depended on each other.
The relations between the two groups were for the most part peaceful, but
the nomads could constitute fearsome fighting forces. As hunters, they were
expert horsemen and archers. And when climate changes desiccated their grazing lands and threatened their food supplies, they were not averse to raiding the
food supplies stored by the civilizations, whether they were cities or empires. Of
course, ruling elites of civilizations had armiesand a dutyto protect the
food supplies from raiding nomads. To those within the centers of the civilization, these nomads appeared to be the opposite of civilized: they had no cities,
were crude and illiterate, and were probably superstitious as well. In short, they
were barbarians. And when the civilizations themselves weakened, for various reasons, they became susceptible not just to nomadic raids but to invasion,
destruction, or conquest, all of which happened. Notable examples include the
fall of the Roman and Han Chinese empires (300600 CE; not discussed in
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
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Chapter One
Copyright © 2015. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. All rights reserved.
this book) and, as we will see shortly, the Mongol invasions of China and
Europe in the thirteenth century. Of course, when the centers of civilization
weakened, rulers sometimes incorporated nomadic warriors into their frontier
armies, further weakening the civilization and opening it to conquest from
within by partially acculturated nomads.10
Nomads were not the only ones to challenge the civilizations. In the forests, wetlands, brush, and mountains there were other groups, who, unlike
the nomads, were often quite self-sufficient and could obtain everything they
needed from their environment. They did come into contact with the forces
of civilization though, especially during periods of population growth when
peasant farmers or the empire sought new land to accommodate the larger
population. The Chinese, for example, had a long history of contact with
these kinds of peoples, and in fact had come to classify non-Chinese barbarians into two groups: the cooked, or those willing to accept some of the
trappings of Chinese civilization, and the raw, or those who were not.11
Wildlife
Even though most of the weight of the worlds population lived in just a few
highly developed islands of civilization, the intervening expanses were
inhabited by differently organized people to be sure, but people nonetheless.
Indeed, by 1400 humans had migrated through or to virtually every place on
the globe. Of course, the hunters and nomadic pastoralists who lived in the
vast spaces outside the densely populated civilizations were very few and far
between, leaving much room for wildlife of all kinds. Three examples will
suffice.
Wolves roamed throughout most of Europe, as can be attested by Grimms
Fairy Tales. But even more grimly, when human populations declined or hard
winters made food precious for both humans and wolves, packs of wolves
couldand wouldenter the cities, as they did in Paris in 1420 and 1438,
and even as late as the 1700s, when the French went on a campaign to annihilate the species there as they did in England six hundred years ago,
according to a contemporary writing about 1779.12 In China, tigers at one
time inhabited most of the region and periodically attacked Chinese villages
and cities, carrying away piglets and babies alike when humans disrupted
their ecosystem by cutting away the forests that provided them with their
favored game, deer or wild boar. Tigers remained so plentiful in Manchuria
that the emperors hunting expedition could bag sixty in one day, in addition
to a thousand stags, and reports of tiger attacks on south China villages continued until 1800.13
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
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The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400
27
The two areas of Earth with the greatest diversity and density of animal
species in the period we are now considering, from 1400 to 1800, were Africa
and the Americas, albeit for very different reasons. In Africa, humans and
animals had evolved together. Despite relatively nutrient-poor soils, Africa
has more plant and animal species, and total biomass, per unit of area than
anywhere else on Earth. Because large animals, from elephants to rhinos,
giraffes, and lions, had evolved with humans, as humans became efficient
hunters, these animals learned to be wary and keep their distance.14 Large
animals thus continued to exist in Africa into the modern world, where in
many other parts of the world, especially those where large animals had no
experience with humans, they were quickly killed off after humans migrated
into these spaces, in what scholars call megafaunal extinctions.15
In the Americas, the explanation for the large number of animals involves
the story of what happened to the native human inhabitants in the century
following Columbuss 1492 voyage. This story will be taken up in more detail
in chapter 3, but briefly, Europeans brought numerous communicable diseases with them to the Americas, and the native peopleswho had no experience with these diseasesdied off in staggering numbers. Where there may
have been as many as seventy million people in the Americas in 1491, by
1600 there only about eight million left. And when those people vanished,
forests returned to overtake the abandoned farms, and animal populations of
all kinds, from fish and fowl to wolves and deer, exploded in numbers in the
reconstituted natural environment. Not knowing about any of this, the first
English visitors to North America in particular described unbelievable
numbers and sizes of fish, birds, deer, bear, and trees,16 a condition of natural
bounty that continued through the nineteenth century.
Thus from 1400 to 1800, when the human population increased from 380
to 950 million, there was still plenty of room for wildlife of all kinds. Nonetheless, the relationship between the two populations clearly was inverse: the more
people, the less wildlife, especially as those in the civilizations developed a
desire for wearing furs (in China, Europe, and North America) or eating exotic
fish and fowl. Great hunting expeditions to kill whales, tigers, bison, beavers,
homing pigeons, sharks, foxesthe list goes onfor their hides, their meat,
and their various other body parts started then and continue to this day, except
for those species already extinct or, in some parts of the world, protected.
The expansion of the human population on Earth thus meant less land
and hence habitat available for other species. Although we depend on the
environment for our survival, our species has been willing to sacrifice others
for our Lebensraum.17 Sometimes the end for other species has come like a
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
…………….. 18685$
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Chapter One
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rifle shot, with the species wiped out without altering the rest of the physical
environment, as when wolves were eliminated from England, France, or Wisconsin, or bison from the Great Plains, leaving the forest or the plains
intactimpoverished, but intact. At other times, the end of a species comes
as a holocaust, where expanding human populations have burned and slashed
entire ecosystems to turn them into agricultural fields, as happened to the
south China tiger. However, with each of the great human population
declines in the mid-fourteenth and then in the mid-seventeenth centuries,
wildlife populations reestablished themselves and once again expanded. But
since the mid-1700s, the human population of the world has steadily
increased, putting pressure on all remaining wildlife.
Population Growth and Land
Population growth and decline each brought certain benefits and difficulties
to a society. On the one hand, and as with any living organism, an increase
in human numbers is an indication of our species success in obtaining
greater food energy from the ecosystem. Higher populations and greater densities made possible civilizations, cities, education, and trade, as well as a
growing awareness and understanding of the human and natural worlds. Population growth thus could accompany improving conditions and rising standards of living for most people, at least up to a certain point, where the limits
of land and soil nutrients constrained the ability to feed the growing population. In those instances, the human population could overshoot the capacity
of the land to feed them, leading to deteriorating living conditions and
greater susceptibility to death from disease and famine. As the population
fell back, a better balance between the numbers to be fed and the amount of
land available to feed them was reestablished.
A growing human population requires additional food and energy supplies
to support it, and given the agricultural technology available in 1400, those
increases could come from but three sources: bringing more land under cultivation, increasing the labor inputs on a given plot of land (including selecting better seed), or increasing the amount of water or fertilizer. In China
over the period from 1400 to 1800, for example, the population almost quadrupled, from 85 to 320350 million, the increase being sustained almost
equally by increases in the land under cultivation and by more intensive tilling and fertilizing of the land already under the plow.18
Of course, bringing new land under cultivation implied human migration
to new lands, fighting and displacing the wildlife as necessary, and also battling the uncivilized people of the mountains, forests, and bush. Some
Marks, Robert B.. The Origins of the Modern World : A Global and Environmental Narrative from the Fifteenth to the
Twenty-First Century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2015. Accessed October 6, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central.
Created from brown on 2017-10-06 11:35:19.
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PAGE 28
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The Material and Trading Worlds, circa 1400
29
migrations, though, were easier than others, especially if the new lands were
sparsely populated and poorly defended or the migrating people had the military might of their empire backing them (as was the case in China). Some
areas, though, were for all intents and purposes off limits; Europeans, for
example, could not look too far east because the lands were already occupied
by various strong nomadic peoples: Turks, Tartars, and Mongols all sent shivers of fear down the spines of most Europeans and Asians.
In summary, nearly all of the worlds 380 million people living in 1400
were rural people producing food and raw materials for handicraft industries
to sustain both themselves and a small ruling elite that took a portion of the
harvest as taxes (to the state) and rent (to landowners). Peasant families
often spun and wove textiles that they used both for themselves and traded
in local markets for goods they themselves could not produce, and at times
their textiles entered into some very long-distance trade circuits, as we will
see shortly. With good climatic conditions and hence better harvests, peasant families might look to increase their size,19 especially if additional land
were available nearby, or if their government encouraged more distan
