Ming Dynasty of China
In 1402 AD the Ming Dynasty of China had a new emperor… the so-called Yongle emperor Zhu DI had overthrown his nephew and now set about an ambitious program of projecting China’s power around the world via maritime trade in order to legitimise his rule… in 1403 the Ming began construction of a gigantic fleet of warships and merchant vessels that dwarfed anything else in the world at this time… it is worth remembering that due to a larger population of potential innovators, China still enjoyed a significant lead in technological accumulation over the rest of the world, including other states in Afro-Eurasia, even despite some stagnation in the Mongol Yuan era and earlier Ming rulers… the fleet was led by the eunuch Zheng He, a political acolyte of the Yongle Emperor, who aided the Emperor’s rise to power… numerous expeditions were launched… they sailed around Southeast Asia and to India on several occasions… they sailed down and conducted trade in Indonesia… they made landfall in Arabia and East Africa on several occasions… the maritime operations of Zheng He were partially commercial and partially military in nature… thousands of troops were brought along with the flotillas in order to make a show of force in several regions, and the warships were used to enforce the idea that Ming China was the pre-eminent naval force of the age… in essence that they ruled the waves of the Indian Ocean… in terms of commerce, the goods brought back proved lucrative, and it appeared these voyages more than paid for themselves… they also opened up trade in various ports which allowed other merchant expeditions to enrich themselves… the voyages lasted until 1433, if they had continued it is not unreasonable to speculate that the Chinese would have sailed round the southern tip of Africa… perhaps even achieved direct trade with Europe… it is also possible the Chinese could have moved further south from Indonesia to Australia, and perhaps the Chinese could even have navigated the Pacific, taking them to the Americas… the Imperial implications of all this are open to question, but it is possible that the unification of the world zones may well have been achieved by China and not Europe… a global unification under Chinese naval power was not to be… the Yongle Emperor died in 1424, his son and successor died a year later… the grandson – the Xuande Emperor – presided over a fairly peaceful and prosperous reign in China but at the same time, the eunuch faction that advocated for a strong naval presence in the Indian Ocean had fallen from government and the voyages were discontinued… thereafter China fell back into the isolationism and traditional modes of production that had ended the industrialization and commercialization of the Song Dynasty 150 years earlier…
the small kingdom of Portugal had fully freed itself from Islamic rule in the 13th century… being a small Kingdom on the Atlantic, the best way to protect its growing power was via the Navy rather than the army… the Portuguese began to strike back at the Moors in the early 1400s with several skirmishes and small conquests on the North African coastline… around the same time the Portuguese began their colonization of the islands of the Madeira and the Azores, the route to the lucrative trade in the east via the Mediterranean confronted Portugal with some obstacles… the Straits of Gibraltar and the North African coastline were perilous places notorious for Muslim pirates who would take a European ship’s cargo and enslave its crew by dint of their being the wrong religion… even if a Portuguese ship made it as far as the eastern Mediterranean, they would still be faced with the perilous overland routes through equally hostile territory in the Middle East… [unique_solution]instead Portuguese naval efforts were exerted along the West African coastline… by the 1470s and 1480s the Portuguese had made it as far as the Gold Coast, Congo River and Cape of Good Hope… a decade later and the Portuguese were regularly rounding the tip of Africa and were exploring the East African coast, making landfall in Arabia and were beginning a lucrative trade in India, Indonesia, Southeast Asia and of course China… Europe firmly began to fill the naval power vacuum in the Indian Ocean left by the Chinese in 1433… passing from one European country to another, Europe would not relinquish its hold for many centuries… meanwhile Spain, newly unified from the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon and in the final days of reconquering Iberia from Islamic rule, had begun its own maritime Empire… in 1492 the Spanish had become the first European peoples to reach the Americas since the Vikings made landfall in Canada in the early 11th century… Spanish occupation in the Americas quickly devolved into waves of deadly disease, genocide, brutal warfare enslavement and sexual abuse of native peoples… the Portuguese quickly followed suit in Brazil… while not rich with luxury goods like the Eastern trade, raw materials – particularly silver – were abundant… it catapulted Spain forward as a major world power and unification between Spain and Portugal in 1580 made it the world’s pre-eminent Imperial force even though the actual majority of desirable trade goods and the bulk of wealth still existed in China… Spain flooded China with silver, which enhanced Spain’s own coffers until inevitably the silver ran low… the Iberian Empire eventually grew to hold much of Central and South America, Mexico and good chunks of the south of the modern US… not to be out competed, the French, English and Dutch soon entered the imperial game with slightly less impressive gains at first but with sizeable colonies in North America and trade ports in Africa and Asia… the ugly game of tooth and claw, the policy of war, peace and more war had just gone global… slavery had existed since the inception of agrarian states 5500 years ago… it is possible that slavery existed in places even earlier, either in the world of agrarian villages and in some isolated cases in forging interactions between groups… but both of those depend on what we are defining as slavery… what is clear is ever since humans began existing in ancient States, slavery was an ugly part of that complex societal web… in that sense, the expansion of slavery to the Americas, where local empires also had held slaves was a continuation of a foul trend that had reigned for millennia… Europeans themselves had a legacy of enslaving each other in classical antiquity and also in the early medieval period, and Western Europe in the 1400s was slowly emerging from a world of serfdom which wasn’t much better… in fact serfdom was an early medieval perversion of older systems of slavery… even the name “serf” being derived from the Latin “service” (slave)… to the east, Russia did not abolish serfdom until 1861… the Atlantic slave trade kicked off with the Portuguese… in their explorations of the African coastline in the 1400s, they opened trading relations with African rulers… the kingdoms of West Africa had been engaging in the Arab slave trade – the transport of people in bondage across the Sahara – for several centuries already… in war between African states the defeated peoples were often enslaved as well… when the Portuguese opened up trading relations with African rulers once again came the slaves… the thing about the Americas was that aside from mineral wealth, there was a great deal of land that could be converted to agriculture, particularly to grow crops that weren’t easily nurtured in the climates of southern and northern Europe… the problem is who would perform the back-breaking labour involved in producing sugar, cotton, and later tobacco… the Spanish and Portuguese had attempts at enslaving the Native Americans but they frequently died from a cocktail of European diseases that they were exposed to… those who survived knew the landscape well and could escape back to their people and never be found again… European colonists could also be imported but showed little enthusiasm for the back-breaking labour and absconded to other professions as soon as humanly possible… and so the Spanish and Portuguese and shortly thereafter the English, French and Dutch began to turn to African slave labour… the horrors of transportation killed 10 to 50 percent of African slaves, depending on the route… whether it was being packed in inhumane conditions in the Atlantic by Europeans or the route march across the Sahara, only to be potentially perish during castration by the Arabs and the Ottomans… for the survivors in total 11 to 13 million Africans were taken west across the Atlantic, and 15 million Africans were taken east across the Sahara into lives of bondage… meanwhile in Asia, from India to Vietnam to China to Korea, the enslavement of tens of millions carried on as it always had for thousands of years… the Aztecs of Mesoamerica when not engaging in massive human sacrifices enslaved individuals for debts, crimes and being defeated in war… this was not a nice world… slavery was the rule, absence of slavery was the exception and abolition of slavery on moral grounds was practically unheard of… from the perspective of the powerless across the globe all told it had been a very ugly 5,000 years… the Portuguese were the first and most overzealous slavers in the Atlantic trade despite being such a small country, or perhaps as a result of it… they were responsible for 45% of all slaves taken during the Atlantic slave trade… their former colony Brazil was the destination of 35% of all slaves and also one of the last of these countries to abolish slavery in 1888… the Spanish account for roughly 15% of all African slaves, transporting most of them to South America and their Caribbean island holdings… they also made more determined use of Native American slavery, particularly in their mining operations, thus Spain and Portugal – briefly an empire of the Iberian Union from 1580 to 1640 – account for 60% of all African slaves transported to the Americas… between the 16th and 19th centuries… this is not entirely surprising given their early arrival in the game and their massive territorial holdings in South and Central America… the French transported 10% of African slaves to their holdings in the Caribbean – mostly plantations… the Dutch did the same for their Caribbean holdings, enslaving about 5% of the total number… the British imported 15% of the total number of African slaves to their Caribbean plantations and approximately 10% were imported to lives of bondage in the future United States… in the 1500s an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 people were sold in sub-Saharan Africa, primarily Angola, and transported into hellish lives of servitude… the majority of this was to the Portuguese and Spanish empires in the 1600s… the other Imperial rivals gradually increased their share and about 1 million to 1.5 million souls were taken to the Americas in this time… the 1700s were the worst for slavery in the Americas… the power of the Spanish and Portuguese empires had faded on the world stage during this time, but the importation particularly by the Portuguese continued… meanwhile the British and French became rivals for world domination and took the slave trade to all new heights… the plantations of the Caribbean grew to huge scales and the demand for slaves took off in the 13 colonies of the future United States… approximately 5 million to 8 million slaves in the 1700s were bought, bound, packed into appalling conditions and ships and sent to the Americas… it was the excesses of this period that sparked the abolitionist movement… in Great Britain, a thirty year public and parliamentary campaign led to the British abolition of the slave trade in 1807 making further purchase and transportation illegal and the British Navy became actively engaged in stopping the transportation of African slaves by other European powers and the United States, even at the frequent risk of ships and personnel… nevertheless the remaining slave holding powers of the Atlantic succeeded in transporting an additional three to four million slaves from Africa in the 1800s… the British Empire abolished slavery itself in 1833 in its dominions and slowly either by brutal war, gruesome revolution or peaceful legislation the rest of the Atlantic nations followed suit in the subsequent decades… after 5,000 years of this cruel and disgusting practice, we had successful and lasting abolition for the first time and a revolutionary step forward in world history and a shift in how different cultural groups view their fellow human beings… increasing numbers of activists, ideologues and generally decent people became willing to lay down their lives to the eradication of the practice of slavery and the mission was far from over… in Africa itself, slavery continued particularly in North Africa where slavery was given a religious and ethnic justification… in the late 19th century, European imperialism and intervention attempted to expunge slavery from Africa itself, but very slowly and often very ineffectively or, depending on the colonial power, even half-heartedly… even today in the post-colonial era, slavery in Africa is still a problem… in modern Nigeria there are 700,000; in Ethiopia, there are 650,000; in the Congo 500,000 and in total, roughly 5 to 12 million people leading lives effectively as slaves in Africa… beyond Africa, there are 12 to 14 million de facto slaves in India, 2 million in Pakistan, more than 3 million in China… the scourge remains and must be destroyed…
you are living in a small village of a few dozen people in the Aztec empire… your family comes from humble farming stock… life has carried on the same way for generations, but panic and chaos have erupted amid the quiet of village life… there is word of foreign invaders arriving on the coasts of your native land… though few in number, they are ruthless, violent and well-armed… the invaders have taken part in political intrigues, divided your people and in the resulting instability, slaughtered and maimed most of the prominent figures of your civilization… while this is troubling news, the invaders have not yet reached you and your village in the Aztec empire… as of right now these are just tales that have arrived by word of mouth… while alarming, your family hopes that it may ride out the storm until these invaders are driven back… they are after all only a few hundred men… the Spanish may have not reached you but their curse has spread ahead of them as a vanguard… disease has arrived from Afro-Eurasia… the exchange of plagues and pathogens has preceded there for thousands of years building up a cocktail of illnesses to which the inhabitants of the Americas have no immunity… before the invaders even arrive, your village is awash with death… pustules erupt on people’s bodies from head to toe… they are painful at the touch and afflict even a person’s private parts… movement with these open sores was so painful that almost overnight the entire village was immobilized… nobody could walk or work they just lay in their beds… even the act of turning over was one of blinding and immense pain… a few days later you have contracted the disease yourself… you lay in agony, starving to death because there is nobody well enough to work the fields, much less feed and care for the sick… you have gone blind, you are coughing up blood… the pox has disfigured your face… once a fairly youthful and attractive figure, you are now roughened and unrecognizable and you know it is only a matter of time before you will die, along with the rest
of your village… given your pain it will be a release… it was there lying in bed that the second law found you and soon after, the Spanish will discover your body, lifeless and wracked by disease… and traveling from silent village to silent village, the Spanish will have no better idea of the true cause of this catastrophe than you did… such was the slaughter of the Colombian exchange – without a shot being fired, without a battle being lost, up to 90% of the Mesoamerican population was wiped out… between 1500 and 1600 the pre-Columbian population of the Americas is estimated to be about 36 to 55 million people, though the empirical basis for any sort of estimate is sketchy at best, mostly relying on some population samples and expanded over a wider area… with some easy math some estimates put the total population closer to 100 million, but these sources are generally deemed less reliable and heavily politicized… today most scholars agree on a population of 55 million people with a death toll of about 50 million from the ravages of disease… that’s more people killed than those murdered by Genghis Khan in his conquests and nearly as many lives lost in the Second World War… and bear in mind that is 50 million dead in a century where the world population was only about 500 million… 10% wiped out and the historical trajectory of the Americas altered forever… for those that survived things didn’t get much better… Columbus himself landed in Haiti where his colleagues imposed forced labour… acts of sadism, cruelty, sex slavery, and eventually succeeded in wiping out the entire native population of the island… on the mainland… the Aztec and Incan civilizations were destroyed and thereafter followed centuries of European domination of the American supercontinent… the British, French and Dutch soon after got busy in their own colonies and until the 1920s, the dramatic decline of all Native American populations seemed to indicate that their entire populations might disappear, and it is only more recently that those populations, much altered by the history of the past few centuries, have begun to recover… this is one of the legacies of rising complexity in the early modern world