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Empires, C.1350–1650

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Empires, C.1350–1650 M01_GETZ4099_01_SE_C01.qxd 5/21/10 7:57 PM Page 16 Part I The Rise of Early Modern Empires, c.1350–1650 CHAPTER 1 ࡯ Empire: The Emergence of Early Modern States and Empires in Eurasia and Africa The world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was shaped by “modern” empires that spanned the globe or dominated great regions of it. Emerging from industrial societies such as Britain, the United States, France, Japan, the Soviet Union, and more briefly Germany and Italy, these states were constructed and maintained by vast armies and navies with military superior- ity over the peoples they conquered. Their empires were sustained by enormous industrial economies whose managers and profiteers benefited from empire. They were justified by con- temporary ideologies of race, technology, and religion that proclaimed a duty to dominate and to “civilize” other peoples. These empires have often been studied as part of a “new” imperialism that resulted from great transformations in the nineteenth century. They are described as the products of the changes wrought by modernity upon Europe: industrialization, new sciences and scientific racialism, liberalism. In future chapters, we will explore exactly these connections. However, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires were, in fact, rooted in long-term trends that con- nected them to earlier eras of history and to the history not just of Europe but of the entire world. Perhaps most significantly, the empires of our recent past faced remarkably similar challenges to those of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. These empires of the early modern period—as it is often termed—also struggled to centralize power in the hands of the state, to con- vince merchants and the general populace of the metropole to support their policies of imperial- ism, and to find ways to rule the culturally, spiritually, and economically diverse people of their empires and to bind them together. Can we connect the technologies and strategies of these early modern empires with those of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century empires? Geographically, the imperial cores of the two periods do not match up. The largest empires of the early modern period were centered in Asia and North Africa: the Mongol state, Ming China, T¯ım¯urid (Mughal) India and Central Asia, and the Ottoman Empire. The only comparable European empires were those of the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and Portugal. The great imperial centers of the modern era in northern Europe, Japan, and the United States were either politically fragmented or politically peripheral in this earlier period. The longest direct geographical continuity that existed was the Russian 16 M01_GETZ4099_01_SE_C01.qxd 5/21/10 7:57 PM Page 17 Chapter 1 • Empire 17 state centered upon Muscovy, which expanded largest of these empires blossomed first in almost unceasingly from the fifteenth to the twen- Eurasia: the Iberian Peninsula (Portugal and tieth century. Spain), eastern Europe (Russia and the Austrian Yet as the first four chapters of this book Habsburgs), Central Asia (the Ottoman and will show, the early modern era was a period of T¯ım¯urid Empires), and China. Together with a increasing globalization and the building of constellation of smaller states, their emergence economic and intellectual connections between reversed a period of political and economic frag- regions of the world. This rising interconnect- mentation following the Black Death of the edness made it possible for states like England 1340s–1380s and the collapse of the Mongol (later Britain) to begin to learn techniques of Empire. Within a century, for the first time in colonial rule from established powers like the human history, they began to connect all of the Mughals. The migration of peoples and ex- world’s continents in commercial, intellectual, panding trade gradually enriched established and biological ties. Although each empire was states like France and built new nations like the unique, and each emerged in the context of dis- United States. The flow of technologies spread tinctive local events, nevertheless their expansion military expertise and equipment to regions like reflected similar attempts to control the resurgent Japan where they could become tools of empire. inter-continental commerce of the fifteenth and In this chapter, we explore the rise of early sixteenth centuries and to mobilize new technolo- modern empires in Eurasia and North Africa gies and equipment. during the period 1380–1650. We suggest that a These great Eurasian empires were merely number of large, cohesive imperial states the largest manifestations of a trend of state- emerged during this period—partially as a building that stretched across Eurasia and parts of result of a sharing of ideas and technologies, Africa from the end of the fourteenth century which itself was made possible by the Eurasian onward. At the beginning of the early modern system created by the Mongol Empire. We then period, for example, Europe possessed 500–600 go on to explore several ideas about the ways in co-existing polities. By the late nineteenth cen- which these empires came into being and oper- tury, this number was reduced to 25. Across east- ated: the rise of gunpowder military economies, ern Europe and Central Asia in the same the emergence of alliances between different timeframe, Russia swallowed 30 independent sectors of society, and the development of states and khanates. In mainland South-East Asia, unique but interestingly interconnected cultures 22 independent states that existed in 1350 were of imperialism. This leaves for chapter 2 the reduced to 3 by 1823.1 Similar consolidations larger issues of early modern imperial interac- took place in South Asia, where large states like tion and colonialism. Alone, however, these Vijayanagar and especially the Mughal Empire chapters do not give a global picture. Thus in rapidly overcame fragmented princedoms. On chapters 3 and 4 we expand our scope to include Eurasia’s southern fringe, the Ottoman Empire the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and the came to span three continents, fusing together Polynesian Pacific: early modern imperial sys- South-West Asia, the Balkans, and North Africa. tems that themselves grew from earlier Eurasian Nearby, the Horn of Africa was consolidated in and North African roots. the hands of a few large states of which the most expansive was Abyssinia (Ethiopia). Gradually, THE EMERGENCE OF THE EARLY MODERN STATE SYSTEM 1 Victor Lieberman, “Transcending East-West Dichotomies: Beginning in the late fourteenth century, a rush of State and Culture Formation in Six Ostensibly Disparate empire-building washed across the world. The Areas,” Modern Asian Studies, 31 (1997), 463–546. M01_GETZ4099_01_SE_C01.qxd 5/21/10 7:57 PM Page 18 18 Part I • The Rise of Early Modern Empires, c. 1350–1650 MoscowMoscow ViennaVienna MadridMadrid Constantinople Beijing Nanjing Delhi Agra TimbuktuTimbuktu Gao Mughal Empire Habsburg Empire in Europe Ming China Principal directions of imperial expansions, late 16th – early 17th c. São Salvador Ottoman Empire Songhai Empire 0 500 1000 miles Russian Empire Kongo Kingdom 0 500 1000 km Early Modern Empires of Eurasia and North Africa, c. 1550 M01_GETZ4099_01_SE_C01.qxd 5/21/10 7:57 PM Page 19 Chapter 1 • Empire 19 the process was extended to areas beyond the safety and stability across vast stretches of older Eurasian trading zone to new regions of Eurasia.4 Cities in a band across Eurasia and sur- sub-Saharan Africa. There, however, the inde- rounding the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean pendent consolidation of large states was over- and China seas—London, Bruges, Genoa, Venice, taken by the extension of European maritime Constantinople, Cairo, Bukhara, Samarkand, empires and especially by the effects of the Hormuz, Kilwa, Cambay, Calicut, Malacca, and Atlantic slave trade. In the Americas, the large Guangzhou—flourished in these conditions form- states and independent communities that had ing a vast “archipelago of towns.”5 Each city was formed a political and commercial network of a center of commerce and production, connected their own were overcome by European armies, to surrounding agrarian regions and to long-dis- settlers, and diseases after 1492. tance trading partners by economic, political, and While the political regimes of each state social links. were unique, they were all characterized to vary- The causes of the mid-fourteenth-century col- ing degrees by three linked processes. The first lapse of this network are debated, but the very was centralization, by which both power and nature of its connectedness may have been one authority tended to become consolidated under a key culprit. Like a two-edged sword, the connec- single state authority, usually a ruling monarch tions that enabled societies across the Old World or dynastic family and a royal or imperial court. to share wealth and innovations also made them The second was rationalization, by which dependent upon each other. The collapse of one authority and power in the state became increas- prop of the system was bound to affect the others. ingly subject to a permanent, organized bureau- In this context, a series of diseases, bad harvests, cracy at the center of the state. The third was and political upheaval across the Mongol domains expansion, by which states increased in size and signaled the beginning of a commercial decline. in some cases developed imperial institutions Perhaps the most significant was the outbreak of and relationships. epidemics that stretched far beyond the borders of The context in which these processes took the empire. The best known of these was the place was the disintegration of the Mongol dreaded Black Death, which spread rapidly along Empire.2 From about 1220 to well into the late both overland and maritime trade routes, devastat- fourteenth century, the great bulk of Eurasia had ing both commercial towns and the surrounding come under the control of this single political countryside from China across the vast expanse of entity.
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