Notes and References

Notes and References Introduction 1. T.H. Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1965), p. 72. 1 The Asian Order 1. They captured the last of the Abbasid caliphs and, to avoid offending heaven by shedding the blood of princes, put him in a sack to be trampled to death by horses. They also destroyed Mesopotamia’s ancient irrigation systems with effects lasting to the present day. 2. Meaning ‘divine wind’. The same word was used, almost seven centuries later, for the suicide flyers who tried to stem attacks on Japan in the closing months of the Second World War. They caused heavy losses to the US fleet. 3. The Serb military aristocracy quickly became a standard part of the Ottoman forces – quite contrary to later south Slav mythology. 4. Trade took time to develop, as the Mongols had destroyed the trading cities of Central Asia and slaughtered their inhabitants, except for useful artisans who were carted off to the Far East. 5. cf. Louis Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne 1403–33 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 6. Clearly, if China’s 1980s and 1990s policies of one-child families succeeded, within a couple of generations Chinese children would have no brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles or cousins. The inherited structures of Chinese society would disintegrate. 7. Was that cultural imperialism? V.S. Naipaul has commented that: A convert’s world view alters. His holy places are in Arab lands; his sacred language is Arabic. His idea of history alters. He rejects his own; he becomes, whether he likes it or not, a part of the Arab story. The convert has to turn away from everything that is his. The disturbance for societies is immense, and even after a thousand years can remain unresolved; the turning away has to be done again and again … Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions among the converted peoples (London: Little Brown, 1998). 8. cf. Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed; religious development in Morocco and Indonesia (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1968). 9. It was a folk Islam that first spread in Java, Borneo, Sumatra and the Celebes. Scriptural Islam only came in the nineteenth century, with the 225 226 Notes and References to pp. 13–22 advent of steamships, pilgrimages to Mecca and the possibility of elite education in religious schools and seminaries in Cairo. In the meantime, many Moslem converts in Java practised their traditional mysticism while Chinese Christians continued with ancestor worship. 10. It is estimated that China’s population was probably some 100–150 million in 1650, 200–250 million in 1750, over 300 by 1800, 400 by 1850 and 500–650 in 1950. 11. People could be moved around like cattle. They still are, as demonstrated in the 1990s removal of villagers to make way for the Three Gorges dam. In the orgy of Chinese ship-building of 1404–07 hundreds of carpenters, sailmak- ers, smiths and other artisans were simply ordered to move to the shipyards and dry-docks (which Europe did not have until several centuries later). 12. Joseph Buttinger, A Dragon Defiant (Newton Abbott: David and Charles, 1972), p. 31. 13. Ibid., p. 55. 14. Derived from bushi or military gentleman. 2 Explorers, Soldiers, Priests and Traders 1. The Black Death, in 1346–49, killed off a quarter to half of Europe’s population. 2. In the twenty-first century Chinese and Italians could still debate which of them had invented spaghetti. 3. Some scholars say this is exaggerated: what Martel beat was not much more than a raiding party. 4. Paul Bairoch, Economics and World History: Myths and Paradoxes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 101–10; Thomas McCraw (ed.), Creating Modern Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 1. 5. Europe’s peasants could not yet store winter fodder for cattle. Many peasants kept one male and one female of each species in their huts and slaughtered the rest in the autumn. A month or two later, even dried or salted meat had gone off and spices were needed to disguise the taste. Demand was naturally high. Proper refrigeration came much later. In the middle of the seventeenth century Francis Bacon experimented with it by stuffing a chicken with snow: he caught a cold doing it, and died. Refrigeration apart, pepper was used as a physic, ginger to aid digestion, and cloves to strengthen the liver, the heart and eyesight. Even more helpfully, in small quantities and with milk, cloves were thought to be an aphrodisiac. 6. cf. A report by James Pringle in The Times, 23 May 1998, p. 17, on a rare visit by Western reporters to the Xanadu site, which turns out to be in the Inner Mongolian grassland, some 170 miles from Beijing. 7. Long before the Europeans came to Africa there was a lively slave trade among local chiefs, as well as with Arabs, who ran their sugar industry by slave labour. African states and tribes went to war with each other often enough to have lots of prisoners to sell. (Classical Greece and Persia had similar habits with prisoners taken in war.) The Portuguese therefore had no difficulty buying slaves from West African or Arab traders. See, for Notes and References to pp. 23–33 227 instance, Murray Gordon, Slavery in the Arab World (New York: New Amsterdam, 1989), esp. pp. 105–27. Also Hugh Thomas, The Slave Trade; the History of the Atlantic Slave Trade (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997). 8. Even though Moorish commanders may have been more hindered than helped by some of their North African Berber mercenaries. 9. When its last Moorish ruler, Boabdil, withdrew from the city, he wept. His mother commented coldly: ‘You weep like a woman for a city you could not defend like a man.’ 10. Quoted in G.F. Hudson, Europe and China (London: Arnold, 1931), p. 201. 11. The Portuguese, whom the locals quaintly called ‘white Bengalis’, had ships and cannon, while the locals only had pikes and bows and arrows. Furthermore, though Malacca could call on 100 000 men, most of them were poorly paid Javanese with no love of the ruler. 12. Magellan reached Guam and the Philippines, where he died in an encounter with natives. Of his fleet, the Vittoria reached home in 1522, three years after setting out, with eighteen survivors out of the several hundred who had left home. 13. Named after the prince who would become King Philip II of Spain. 14. The title of Oscar Spate’s splendid book The Spanish Lake (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979). 15. By the sixteenth century, Spain had agreed that Portugal should have the lands of the future Brazil. 16. Trading between Malacca, China and Japan was said to carry profits of up to 2000 per cent. 17. At first, Castile, like Portugal, looked west rather than south–North Africa looked difficult and unprofitable – while Aragon tended to go east into the Mediterranean. The westward thrust began by making money in the Canaries. 18. Fifty years later Portuguese carracks sailing to India might displace 500–1000 tons. 19. The classic account is by Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas, Bishop of Chiapa 1474–1566, Brevísima relación de la destrucción de last Indias (Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies) (1552) (Madrid: Anjana, 1983). 20. T. Todorov, La Conquête de l’Amérique (Paris: Seuil, 1982). 21. Quoted in Hubert Deschamps, The French Union: history, institutions, economy, countries and peoples, social and political changes (Paris: Berger- Levrault, 1956), p. 3. 22. Drake was a fairly typical figure. Probably a preacher’s son, brought up in Plymouth by a family of freebooting traders, he became a slave trader and graduated into piracy. He became respectable only much later, as a naval commander in the Queen’s service. 23. The equivalent September 2000 purchasing power would be some £103 mil- lions. Time series on purchasing power parities made available by courtesy of the Bank of England, hereafter referred to as BoE tables. 24. Fernand Braudel quotes the historian Selaniki Mustafa Efendi, who reported in astonishment on the arrival of the second English ambassador to the Ottoman court, the Sublime Porte, in 1593: ‘A ship as strange as this had never entered the port of Istanbul. It crossed 3700 miles of sea and carried 83 guns, besides other weapons. The outward form of the firearms was in 228 Notes and References to pp. 33–56 the shape of a swine.’ La Mediterranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II (2 vols) (Paris: Armand Colin, 1986). 25. Queen Elizabeth’s intelligence system was so good that the invasion plans were studied in London before the armada even sailed. 26. It was part of the dowry of Catherine of Braganza, whose marriage to Charles II consolidated an Anglo-Portuguese interest in opposing the Dutch. 27. G.H. Wilson, ‘Trade, Society and the State’, in H.J. Habakkuk and M. Postan (eds), The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, Vol. IV, The Economy of Expanding Europe in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, E.E. Rich and C.H. Wilson (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 522. 28. With all its familiar risks. In the 1630s the Dutch tulip ‘bubble’ burst after the issuing of options very like some financial instruments of the 1990s. 29. C.R. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire 1600–1800 (London: Hutchinson, 1965), p. 4. 30. He held office twice: from 1618–23 and from 1627 to his death in 1629. 31. A Moslem Malay group in the Southern Philippines.

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