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March 1, 2019
Stable countries are trading countries. Commerce between Rome and East Asia took off after Octavian’s victory at Actium and ushered in nearly two centuries of relative peace throughout the Mediterranean and Red Sea trade routes.
Without the domestication of the camel, the trans-Asian silk and trans-Arabian incense routes would have been impossible.
The advent of the refrigerated ship late in the nineteenth century changed all that and gave the Continent access to cheap steak.
Native American seed stock, particularly potato and corn, changed the diet of Europe. Both crops produce far more calories per acre than wheat;
“Globalization,” it turns out, was not one event or even a sequence of events; it is a process that has been slowly evolving for a very, very long time.
In plainer English, the incentives and equal opportunity afforded by free trade simultaneously improve the overall welfare of mankind and increase socially corrosive disparities of wealth.
Even if trade slightly improves the real income of those at the bottom, they will feel the pain of economic deprivation when they fix their gaze at the growing wealth of those above them.
First, trade is an irreducible and intrinsic human impulse, as primal as the needs for food, shelter, sexual intimacy, and companionship. Second, our urge to trade has profoundly affected the trajectory of the human species. Simply by allowing nations to concentrate on producing those things that their geographic, climatic, and intellectual endowments best enable them to do, and to exchange those goods for what is best produced elsewhere, trade has directly propelled our global prosperity.
The Greeks also colonized Sicily in order to take advantage of the rich volcanic soil around Mount Etna on its eastern coast.
Syracuse itself was founded south of its peak in the late eighth century BC by colonists from Athens’s powerful rival just to its southwest, Corinth.
In the centuries following the Peloponnesian war, Athens became the first in a long line of senescent Western empires to suffer the ignominious transformation from world power to open-air theme park, famous only for its arts, its architecture, its schools, and its past.
The ancient incense trade was thus no different from the modern cocaine and heroin trades: relatively safe around the raw agricultural source, but highly risky around the finished product and its ultimate consumers.
In 1255, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, Mongke, sent his brother Hulagu (whose ambassador had invited the Polo brothers east) to conquer the Muslim world. Hulagu destroyed Baghdad in 1258 and massacred hundreds of thousands in the process, a tragedy still mourned in the Muslim world today.
Kublai, distrusting the preexisting Mandarin bureaucracy, hired into his service many foreigners, whose numbers included all three Polos.
For about a century, beginning around 1260 after the conquests of Genghis’s grandchildren and ending with the dissolution of Mongol dynasties from internal strife and the plague, the Silk Road lay unobstructed. Large numbers of Europeans and Muslims exploited this relatively brief opportunity and shuttled with ease between China and the West, but the names of two burn brightest in the light of history—Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.
Ibn Battuta, on the other hand, was not even a trader, but rather a qadi—a Muslim judge. Born into a scholarly family in Tangier, Morocco, in 1304, he studied Islamic law, as had generations of his male relatives. On completion of his studies he made the mandatory hajj to Mecca in 1325, one year after the death of Marco Polo.
Around 1300, a vigorous line of Turkic Muslims wrested northern and central India from its ancient Hindu dynasties and established their sultanate in Delhi.
The most famous of these early Muslim masters of India was Sultan Muhammad Ibn Tughluq, who ruled from 1325 to 1351, a period roughly corresponding to the span of Battuta’s epic journey.
In many regards, the Genoese Polo and the Moroccan Battuta provided mirror images of the epic medieval wanderer: Polo was Christian, intensely curious about the peoples, customs, and places he visited, and almost completely dependent on the goodwill of the Mongol khans of China and central Asia. By contrast, Battuta was Muslim, profoundly uncurious about the non-Islamic world, and achieved his greatest degree of wealth, fame, and influence in the Muslim court of Delhi.
In Battuta’s obsession with sharia and the Muslim world and in his lack of interest in nearly everything outside it (besides the comforts of Chinese junks) we clearly see the double-edged sword of Islam so visible in today’s world: an ecumenical but self-satisfied faith capable of uniting far-flung peoples under one system of belief and one regime of law, but also severely limited in its capacity to examine and borrow from others.
The Portuguese of the sixteenth century were perhaps the most outrageously chauvinistic of the Western intruders in Asia and the Americas. Pires’s observation that his countrymen had much to learn from the heathen Gujaratis thus spoke volumes about the scope and sophistication of the indigenous Asian trade.
Sometime around 1400, a Hindu sultan, Parameswara, the local ruler of the Sumatran city of Palembang (which lies about halfway between modern Singapore and Java) defied the Hindu Majapahit ruler of Java and was forced to flee north toward Singapore and the strait. After first conquering Singapore, Parameswara then settled in Malacca, which derives its name from an old Malay word, malaqa, meaning “hidden fugitive.”63
What Singapore is to the modern world—a sprawling entrepôt commanding one of the world’s key maritime choke points—Malacca, which lies 130 miles northwest of modern Singapore, was to the Middle Ages. Just as Singapore does today, medieval Malacca connected India, the Arab world, and Europe to its west with China and the legendary Spice Islands to its east.
Pires counted eighty-four tongues being spoken, in a city as multicultural as London or New York, by the likes of: Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Hormuz, Parsees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomens, Christian Armenians, Gujaratis, men of Chaul, Dabhol, Goa, of the Kingdom of Deccan, Malabars and Klings, merchants from Orissa, Ceylon, Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Siamese, men of Kedah, Malays, men of Pahang, Patani, Cambodia, Champa, Cochin China, Chinese, Lequeos, men of Brunei, Luçoes, men of Tamjompura, Laue, Banka, Linga (they have a thousand other islands), Moluccas,
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The most prized of Indian commodities was cloth, of which he documented thirty types, as well as opium and incense from farther west. More varied goods—mace, nutmeg, cloves, sandalwood, and tin, as well as Chinese silk and porcelain—flowed west, some bound for India, some for the Gulf, and some for Egypt and Europe.
Rather, the city’s wealth and prominence can be credited to the institutional genius of Parameswara and his heirs. Alone among the many trading cities that lined the strait, Malacca had found the answer to the question of whether to trade, raid, or protect. The Malaccans levied import duties less onerous than those prescribed by traditional Islamic custom, the maximum being just 6 percent (instead of the usual 10 percent), payable on imports from “the West”—that is, those brought by Indians and Arabs. If a Westerner and his wife were both settled in the port, they paid only 3 percent.
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That Muslim commerce proceeded ahead of conversion in Southeast Asia was no accident; whereas theology is the primary driving force behind Christianity and the great Eastern religions, Islam’s backbone is a system of law covering all areas of conduct, including commerce. Thus, the new monotheism from Arabia was especially attractive to those engaged in any organized economic activity that flourished wherever rules were plainly visible and vigorously enforced by disinterested parties—again, as in the more secular English common law.
The conversion of much of Southeast Asia was accomplished not by conquerors roaring out of Arabia and Persia, but rather by cloth and spice merchants from Cambay and Calicut, who often married native women. Their mixed-race offspring, regardless of their mother’s religion, were almost always raised as Muslims and served to spread the word of the Prophet among their peers and their mothers’ friends and families.
Did the Europeans produce any other commodity that could be traded at Alexandria and Cairo for the spices they so intensely desired? Indeed they did: slaves to fill the insatiable appetite of the Muslim armies for soldiers. Between roughly 1200 and 1500, Italian merchants became the world’s most prosperous slave traders, buying humans on the eastern shores of the Black Sea and selling them in Egypt and the Levant.
Long-distance trade in the medieval period thus revolved around three stories: the spice trade, the slave trade, and the age-old struggle for mastery of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles.
As had the Romans, Europeans became infatuated with spices. Physicians treated all manner of ailments with them, and Chaucer versified about fantasy forests filled with cloves to fumigate clothes chests and with nutmeg for flavoring ale.
It is more likely that rare spices found use as pharmaceuticals precisely because of their prestige. Superstitions die hard; even today, the rhinoceros has been hunted nearly to extinction because of the supposed aphrodisiac qualities of a powder made from its horn; such is the magic of rare animal and plant products that it is doubtful that the advent of Viagra will save the species.
Like any other scarce commodity, soldiers had to be imported from places where they were hungry, ferocious, and abundant. The historian Daniel Pipes notes that these fighters would of necessity hail from “marginal areas” with no strong tradition of central government. The inhabitants of such places were forced by dire conditions to protect themselves by grouping together and reinforcing the bonds of mutual trust…. Elaborate codes of honor and vigilante acts developed to ensure order. The total effect was to sharpen each person’s wits and military capacity. Raiding for booty and feuding were
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During the medieval and ancient periods, slavery was not a racial phenomenon; as a practical matter, the mamluk system was largely a brown-on-white affair. In the words of one historian, “African slave markets were disregarded as far as Mamluk cadres were concerned.”19
The females went into households and harems; the males were sent off to training camps and into military units where “they were turned from infidels into Muslims, from boys into grown men, from raw recruits into full-fledged soldiers, and from slaves into free men.”
Those mamluks who were bought and set free by the ruling sultan constituted the chief support of his rule. The Mamluk system of servitude instilled in the mamluk a feeling of profound loyalty toward his master and liberator on the one hand, and for his fellows in servitude on the other…. The sultan and his mamluks formed a tightly-knit association, whose members were united by strong bonds of solidarity. There existed between the sultan and his mamluks a sort of double bond: they were in power only so long as he ruled, and he ruled only so long as his power was based on them.21
The mamluk slave system, as already noted, began at most a century or two after the initial Arab conquests, then built slowly under the Abbasids, Buyids, and Fatimids, who thus had a constant and voracious appetite for fresh slaves.
Prior to his 1187 conquest of Jerusalem, the Kurd Saladin had already toppled the last Fatimid ruler of Egypt and would establish his own short-lived Ayyubid dynasty. Besides being skilled horsemen, Saladin’s Turkish and Caucasian mamluks wielded the bow and arrow to devastating effect, especially during the crusades. At the Battle of Hattin, the predominantly mamluk archers were provided with four hundred loads of arrows, with reserves of additional missiles packed onto seventy camels and placed “in the thick of the fray.” Without their mamluk core, Saladin’s Kurds would surely not have
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The Venetians had long traded with Egypt, even during the height of crusades, all the while supplying ships, troops, and arms to the various Christian kingdoms of the Holy Land, particularly those, such as Acre, that held large Venetian merchant communities. Saladin famously boasted to his caliph that the Europeans were happily selling him arms to use against other Europeans; soon enough, they would be selling his descendants soldiers as well.29
Throughout the Muslim world, to “resemble the merchants of the Karimi” carried the same meaning as “rich as Rockefeller” in the early twentieth century. Many Karimi fortunes were estimated in excess of a million dinars, and one merchant—Yasir al-Balisi—was worth about ten million dinars, or nearly a half billion dollars in today’s money, an almost unimaginable amount of wealth in the preindustrial world.
But by far the largest flows of Karimi money went to the state for military operations. When the Syrians rose against the Mamluks in 1352, and when the murderous Tamerlane threatened the Levant in 1394, three leading Karimi merchants financed Egyptian victories.38
During the medieval era, ignorance about the mechanism of the plague condemned tens of millions of Europeans, Africans, and Asians to death from a largely preventable infection. The lack of scientific knowledge also fanned the flames of anti-Semitism and consigned Jews to man-made fates arguably worse than the disease itself. Theories abounded as to the source of the pestilence. Punishment for corporeal or theological sins was a perennial explanation, as were the evil eye and the “miasma” (poisoned, if colorless, air). But by far the most pernicious theory held that Hebrews were poisoning
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Until the modern era, even in time of war, the microbe has usually proved a deadlier weapon than the sword against both soldier and civilian, and it seems most reasonable to blame the plague for the decline in population in China between these two dates.
The nearly total destruction of Egypt’s trading and industrial structure, the disappearance of the Mongols from the world stage, and the withdrawal of China from the Indian Ocean created a vacuum that Europe—the last man standing, if just barely—filled only too happily. Yersinia pestis, which had helped smooth the way for the rise of Muslim power by attacking the Byzantine and Persian empires in the sixth and seventh centuries, greased the skids of Islamic decline in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Although the primary objective of the crusades was not commercial (unless one was Venetian or Genoese), Christians clearly recognized the Muslim command of the spice trade for the money machine it was. During their campaigns in the Holy Land, the crusaders interrupted the caravan traffic between Egypt and Syria with a chain of fortresses that ran from the Mediterranean down to the Red Sea’s northeastern extremity at the Gulf of Aqaba.
Everyone in Europe who was discontented with his means and his position, everyone who felt himself thrust into the background and was too impatient to wait; younger sons, unemployed officers, bastards of the nobles, fugitives from justice—one and all wanted to go to the New World.25
Modern economic historians have described a striking correlation between the economic development of the native peoples, their initial population densities, disease rates among white settlers, and subsequent economic development.
