“Exhausting the Earth”: environment and history in the early modern world

ROBERT B. MARKS

Exhausting the Earth and The Unending Frontier are the titles of two books that capture different but related aspects of the environmental history of the early modern world.

But of course the idea of “the unending frontier” was ironic, for although the New World appeared to offer unlimited abundance well into the nine­teenth century, resource shortages and environmental challenges cropped up around the world towards the end of the early modern period. “Conser­vation, minimal consumption, and eventually, population restraints,” Richards observed, “became a necessity in societies across Eurasia in the eighteenth century.”^[22] Indeed, those constraints may well have continued to get ever-more severe as early modern societies more intensively used and exhausted the resources available to them.

The early modern world as an “advanced organic” or “biological old” regime

Environmental history examines the mutual relations and interactions between humans and nature over time. Humans have always been part of nature, and like all other animals depend upon it for survival. But unlike other species, we have developed the increasingly powerful ability to alter the environment, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not, mostly locally where we have lived, but increasingly on a global scale.

The environmental history of the early modern world, defined in this volume as the period from 1400 to 1800, is bounded by several important historical developments. During those four centuries, the world's human population more than doubled from about 380 to 950 million. In terms of global epidemic disease, the early modern world falls after the disasters of the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, but before the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slowing of smallpox epidemics and the last bubonic plague outbreak. Climatically, the early modern world unfolded at a time of global cooling so severe at times, especially in the mid-seventeenth century, that climatologists label the period of the fourteenth through the nineteenth centuries the “Little Ice Age.” Politically, the fourteenth-century collapse of the Mongol empire opened space for new states and empires to arise throughout Eurasia, while in the Americas two large empires - the Aztec and the Inca - arose. Propelled by military confrontation among themselves, Eurasian states increased their grasp over their subjects and extended their rule into frontiers, setting off as well an era of seafaring and empire building across the globe.

“Exhausting the Earth:” environment and history in the early modern world of the world's economy, and natural products gathered from around the globe satisfied a fast-growing consumer demand.

Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, the early modern world was “organic” in the sense that humans got energy mostly by tapping and concentrating solar flows to grow food for themselves and their animals, and to heat their homes and to make other industrial prod- ucts;^[24] farms and forests thus constituted the most important sources of energy to support human populations. To the extent that nearly all work (with the exception of some use of wind and water) was done by the exercise of human or animal muscle, the early modern world was, in J. R. McNeill's terms, “a somatic society.” It was, in Fernand Braudel's estimation, a world of biological limits, obstacles, and restrictions - the biological old regime.^[25] This was the world before the release of vast amounts of energy from fossil fuels propelled industrialization in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and dramatically changed nearly everything about the world, including the number of humans living on Planet Earth and the very nature of the relationship of humans with the natural environment.^[26]

The world in 1400 consisted of a biosphere that contained life on Earth, humans included, extracting sufficient energy from their environment not just to sustain their species, but if possible to increase their numbers. In the twentieth century, biologists came to understand the differences among the various environments which sustain life in terms of ecological principles that differentiated among terrestrial and marine “biomes” or “eco zones,” such as broadleaf forests, grass savannah, arid desert, or freshwater lakes, with the number of biomes varying depending on the taxonomical scheme. Those biomes in turn include over a thousand ecoregions, each with specific kinds of ecosystems.

ecosystems into farms where favored grains, such as maize in the Americas, wheat in Europe, and rice in East and South Asia, and other plants and animals were raised for human consumption.

Long-term environmental changes

The human population was not distributed evenly over the Earth, but concentrated in some fifteen more densely populated regions that some have called “civilizations.” The total dry land area of the world is about 150 million square kilometers (today as in the early modern period), of which forests and grasslands in 1400 comprised approximately equal amounts of about 65 mil­lion square kilometers each (see Table 2.1); arid deserts and mountain ranges covered perhaps 10 million square kilometers; and about 16 million, or about 10 percent of the Earth's dry land surface at the beginning of the early modern period, was farmed at varying levels of intensity.^[27]

Table 2.1 documents the long-term transformation of forests and grass­lands into farmland - a rough gauge of global deforestation, if you will. Excepting deserts, what these data show is that in 1400 at the beginning of the

Table 2.1 Global land use (millions of ha) and world population (millions), 1400-1850

Sources: Land use based on John F.

early modern period nearly all of the world's forests and grasslands were intact; just ι percent of the world's land surface was given over to cropland. In 1400, China, South Asia, and Europe accounted for 60 percent of the world's cropland, most of which was in the temperate parts of the world. By 1850, those areas accounted for 70 percent of the world's cropland, indicating that agricultural expansion in the early modern world occurred mostly in regions controlled by existing central states, expanding the sown area by 360 million hectares, or about 300 percent more than what there was in 1400 (see Table 2.1). As we will see, some climatologists think that that increase in farmland at the expense of forest and grassland released sufficient amounts of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere to have an effect on the global climate system.

Not all humans in 1400 gained their livelihood by farming. Some gathered, hunted, and foraged in forests or fished in lakes and along coastlines. Others were nomadic pastoralists who had learned to exploit the vast Eurasian steppe or African savanna to sustain their herds of cattle, horses, sheep, goats, or camels. Still others combined some form of simple farming using hoes or sticks with husbandry and hunting and gathering, sometimes as upland specialists exploiting ecosystems abandoned or overlooked by low­land farmers.

Dynamics of the biological old regime

Epidemic disease, famine, war, and other disasters kept human life expectancy much shorter than it is today.^[28] In many of the richest and most advanced parts of the pre-modern world, from China and Japan in East Asia to England and Holland in Europe, life expectancies at birth were 30 to 40 years, or half of what they are today for most of the developed world. Of course, those life spans were short largely because infant and childhood mortality were high: women bore many children and were lucky if half survived to the age of 15. Once through the dangers of death from childhood disease, many people could expect to live into their 60s—under good agricultural conditions, that is.

Famine

Food shortages, dearth, and famine were an all too real part of life (and death) for most of the people living in 1400. It is of course easy to blame such disasters on “natural causes” alone. But the fact of the matter is that 80 to 90 percent of the world was composed of one vast farming peasantry, rural people who produced food and industrial raw materials and who were obligated to give up a certain amount of their harvest each and every year to agents of the state in the form of taxes and, unless they were in the small minority lucky enough to own their land free and clear, in the form of rent and labor services to the landowner. Throughout much of the most densely populated part of Eurasia (that is, in China, Europe, and India), peasant families gave up as much as half of their harvest to the state and landlords. In the pre-Columbian Americas, the Aztecs extracted tribute from subject peoples in central Mexico, and in Peru the Incas organized a mountainous “vertical” empire to bring resources to Cuzco high in the Andes. In Africa, states were more interested in controlling people and their labor as a source of wealth than in “owning” the much more plentiful land.

In good or improving times, farming families might be able to make ends meet, providing for their own subsistence needs and also meeting their obligations to the tax man and rent collector, and to produce a surplus that might be sold in the market. But what about those times when the harvest fell short? A “good” government or a “good” landowner might recognize that to take their regular share would push the peasant family below subsistence levels, and thus would lower or cancel taxes and rents for that year. But if the government or landowners either could not or would not be lenient—if they had debts to pay others, for instance—then the squeeze would be on. Indeed, Japanese landowners in the eighteenth century said of peasants that they were like sesame seeds: the more you squeezed, the more you got. So, famine was not so much a “natural” as a “social” phenomenon. The supply of food thus was a constraint on human population growth.

Epidemic disease

The 80 to 90 percent of the world that was this vast farming peasantry— whether in China, India, the various parts of Europe, or Mesoamerica—sup­ported the elites, who governed, warred, ministered, and traded. The peas­antry, in the words of one historian, thus made it possible for various forms of human “macro-parasites” to live off them. Additionally, the entire human population was subject to epidemic disease carried by micro-parasites—for

“Exhausting the Earth:” environment and history in the early modern world example, the plague bacteria of the Black Death, the smallpox or influenza viruses, the bacteria causing dengue fever or dysentery—and all the other germs and pathogens that caused diseases we now cannot identify because they have since mutated or died away.¹⁰

To be sure, the wealthy in both town and countryside had more ways of avoiding death from epidemic disease than the peasants or the poor of the towns and villages, but epidemics could—and did—affect entire populations. Epidemic diseases also traveled the world, slowly at first because of the slowness of trade and contacts between the centers of civilization, as in the period just after the collapse of the Roman and Han Chinese Empires, when smallpox and the measles spread from their point of origin in Europe to China. As the world became even more linked together in the thirteenth century by long-distance trade, a single epidemic disease could—and did— move much more rapidly from one end of the Eurasian continent to the other: the Black Death spread from China to Europe in a matter of years, and once in Europe it engulfed nearly the entire region within three years from late 1347 to 1350. And as we will see below, wave after wave of epidemic disease carried off vast numbers of Amerindian peoples after 1492.

The balancing act of people fending off or dying from both macro- and micro-parasites—elites living off farmers, civilizations fighting off or losing to horse-riding invaders, and germs multiplying inside of and then killing pastoralists or foragers and city dwellers alike—is key to what Braudel meant by the “biological old regime.” Human populations were limited in size and environmental impact by these very material constraints. In this world—the world not just of 1400, but the world for millennia before and then afterwards until well into the nineteenth century—the human population lived very much in the environment and had to be very mindful of the opportunities and limits it placed on human activity.

Farming

Agriculture not only provided the food for the entire society, but most of the raw materials for whatever industry there was, especially textiles for clothing. In China, silk and cotton reigned supreme; in India, cotton and silk; and in northwestern Europe, wool. The raw materials for these all came from farms. Fuel for processing these materials, as well as for keeping warm, also came from forests. To this extent, the biological ancien regime was

10 William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976).

organic, that is, it depended on solar energy to grow crops for food and the stored biomass in trees for fuel. The biological old regime thus limited the range of possibilities for people and their history because virtually all human activity drew upon renewable sources of energy supplied on an annual basis by the sun.

All living things need food for energy to live, and increasing amounts of both to sustain larger populations. What agriculture allowed people to do, in effect, was to capture natural processes and to channel that energy into the human population. In the biological old regime, agriculture was the primary means by which humans altered their environment, transforming one kind of ecosystem (say, forest or prairie) into another (say, rye or wheat farms, rice paddies, fish ponds, or eel weirs) that more efficiently channeled food energy to people. The size of human populations thus was limited by the amount of land available and the ability of people to use the energy from that land for their purposes. The most productive agricultural systems supported the densest human populations, and those were the Aztec's milpas, and in parts of China, Japan, India, and Southeast Asia, wet-rice paddies.

In effect, farmers selected a favored few of the plants and animals from their ecosystem, and lavished time, energy, and nutrients on their propaga­tion. To be sure, some of the plants and animals that flourished were unintended—weeds and vermin came along with planted crops. Other unfavored species, though, declined or disappeared. Humans and their farms simplified nature into fewer and fewer ecosystems.

As the human population more than doubled from about 380 to 950 million during the early modern era, something had to change in terms of the relationship of people with the availability of land and their efficiency in working it. On the one hand, Europeans encountered a whole new world, the Americas. While this New World was already quite populated in 1400 and the land already used by native Amerindians, a massive biological exchange radically altered those relationships, making the Americas a relatively depopu­lated world by the year 1600, but providing new crops to greatly increase the food supply across Afro-Eurasia and increase the human populations there. In addition, truly global trading relationships were established, allowing a consid­erable increase in overall production and productivity as specialization allowed people in one part of a regional trading network to produce goods that their environment was especially suited to, and to trade via markets with countless others who were doing the same thing. Market specialization spread, thereby allowing economies throughout the world to produce more than they ever had in the past, yet without escaping the limits of the biological old regime.

Wildlife

As in other historical periods, including the modern and ancient worlds, in the early modern world there was an inverse relationship between the population size and density of humans and the population size and density of other animals. We cannot possibly survey the entire wild animal popula­tion of the early modern world in this chapter, although we will encounter numerous species as they were hunted or displaced. Animals inhabit eco­logical niches and relate with one another in trophic chains where energy moves up to larger and more dominant species as others are consumed. The idea of ecosystems of plants and animals cycling and recycling energy is more complex than a system of “prey and predator,” although it is in part that. But ecologists recognize that ecosystems do have “star species” such as tigers, elephants, wolves, and lions that can serve as indicators of entire functioning ecosystems down to the soil bacteria and earthworms that break down organic material so it can be taken up again in the roots of other plants, as well as “keystone species” like beavers that hold ecosystems together.

In the early modern world, the 16 million square kilometers of terrestrial land taken by human farming populations still left more than 130 million square kilometers for all kinds of other animals to flourish, not to mention the vast aquatic life of the oceans. But even in their densely populated early modern civilizations, humans were not walled off from contact with “nature” or from the rather fierce creatures we can now call “star species.” There was indeed a human-“wild” animal interface that struck fear into human minds.

Even though most of the weight of the world's population lived in just a few highly developed islands of human civilization, the intervening expanses were inhabited by people, differently organized people to be sure, but people nonetheless. Indeed, by 1400 humans had migrated through or to virtually every place on the globe: if not full, the Earth was known, at least to those who lived there. Of course, the foragers and pastoralists who lived in the vast spaces outside the densely populated farming civilizations were very few and far between, leaving much room for wildlife of all kinds.

Wolves roamed throughout most of Eurasia and the Americas, as can be attested by Grimm's Fairy Tales.¹¹ Tigers at one time inhabited most of China, 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 ^[29] boar.¹² Grassland wolves constituted a “keystone species” in the Mongolian grasslands, keeping down populations of gazelle, marmots, and mice, as well as the Mongols' own horses. The greatest natural bounty, though, was in the New World, particularly North America, where the first European visitors described “unbelievable” numbers and sizes of fish, birds, deer, bear, and trees (the surpris­ing historical reasons for that abundance will be discussed below).1³ In Africa, large animals from elephants to rhinos, giraffes, and lions had evolved with humans, and learned to keep their distance. So did Africans know the dangers of those large animals, as well as the diseases that came with the tsetse fly that infected humans and livestock alike with sleeping sickness, thereby keeping humans out of the fly's extensive bush environment. Like the Americas but for different reasons, Africa in the early modern era supported vast animal populations.

Thus, from 1400 to 1800, when the human population of the world 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 taste 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, fox... the list goes on... for their hides, their meat, 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 Columbian Exchange and its environmental consequences

The “Columbian Exchange” refers to the exchange of plants, animals, and pathogens between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia following Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492 (see Chapter 5, “The Columbian Exchange,” volume VI, part 2). The importance of the Columbian Exchange cannot be overstated. Over the course of world history, the Neolithic agricultural revolution and the Industrial Revolution wrought the most significant changes in the ways in which humans related to the natural world. But the Columbian Exchange, around which much of early modern world history turned, runs a close third in significance.

The Columbia Exchange is often portrayed as interactions between the “Old World” of Eurasia and the “New World” of the Americas. But as Shawn Miller perceptively points out, the “New World” was already quite “old” when encountered by Europeans. Humans had migrated into the Americas perhaps as early as 40,000 bce, probably wiping out large mammal popula­tions by 10,000 bce, thus even before a wide range of agricultural practices (albeit without draft animals) sent human populations soaring to perhaps 70 to 100 million by 1491. Then when Europeans and Amerindians came into contact, wave after wave of communicable diseases that had incubated among Europeans—especially smallpox, measles, and influenza—raged among the native peoples of the Americas who had never experienced these diseases, killing 90 percent by 1600.¹⁴

The removal of nearly the entire Amerindian population had dramatic environmental consequences. Without human hands to maintain the cul­tured landscapes, forests returned, as did resurgent wildlife populations of all kinds. For Europeans who came to the Americas in the century after conquest, the “New” world appeared to be a cornucopia, stocked with nature's bounty there for the taking—“immeasurable forests, abundant wild­life, and few people.”¹⁵

Where there may have been 70 to 100 million people in the Americas in 1491, as late as 1750, there were only 12 million humans in the Americas, and most of those were enslaved black Africans because they tended to survive malaria and yellow fever—environmental diseases unwittingly imported from Europe and Africa that became embedded in the Americas as part of the Columbian Exchange.¹⁶ The “Great Dying” had removed a source of labor for European colonizers who then turned to the African slave trade for labor to work sugar plantations in Brazil and the Caribbean. The sugar plantation complex ecologically transformed forested islands into deforested plantations, starting with Barbados and then moving on to Montserrat, Martinique, St. Vincent, Antigua, and St. Kitts. Once wood needed to boil their sugar had been removed by the eighteenth century, English planters began to import coal from England.¹⁷ This deforestation of islands for sugar

1 ⁴ David Noble Cook, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 13 and 206.

1 ⁵ Shawn Miller, An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 57.

1 Miller, Environmental History of Latin America, pp. 50-5.

1 ⁷ J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 25-8. plantations (and later coffee in Brazil) contributed to massive erosion, most spectacularly and enduringly in Haiti. It also apparently had local climatic effects, in particular by decreasing rainfall in some locations.¹⁸ But on balance, the depopulating of the Americas resulted in the regrowth of a great amount of forest. Some climatologists have argued, in fact, that this removed so much carbon dioxide (which we now see as a “global warming gas”) from the atmosphere that it contributed to the onset of the “Little Ice Age,” an early modern climatic change to be discussed in the next section.¹⁹ Beside sugar plantations and enslaved Africans, Iberians brought horses, cattle, and sheep to the Americas, and the populations of these animals exploded in Latin America. In part, those ungulates had the grasslands created by the Amerindians on which to graze (the Argentine pampas, etc.), and no competition from other large mammals—those had been eliminated thousands of years earlier. As Miller summarizes the outcome: “The biological conquest of America is more accurately seen as the replace­ment of Indians not with Europeans [or Africans] or microbes, but with cows, sheep, pigs, chicken, and hundreds of other new nonhuman species, in addition to the resurgence of native wildlife.”²⁰

The effect of the Columbian Exchange on New World human populations and ecologies certainly was dramatic. But in the view of the scholar who developed the idea of the Columbian Exchange in the first place, Alfred Crosby, more significant was the explosive growth of human numbers in the Old World, fueled by the spread of New World food crops, “which is the most impressive single biological development of this millennium.” By and large, New World foods (in particular maize, white and sweet potatoes, yams, and manioc) produce more calories per sown area than wheat, barley, or oats; only rice rivals maize and potatoes. According to Crosby:

The great advantage of the American food plants is that they make different demands of soils, weather and cultivation than Old World crops, and are different in the growing seasons in which they make these demands. In many cases the American crops do not compete with Old World crops but complement them. The American plants enable the farmer to produce food

1 ⁸ Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 184-99.

1 ⁹ Robert A. Dull et al., “The Columbian Encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use Change, Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 100 (2010), 755-71. For a readable overview, see Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (NewYork: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), pp. 25-35.

²⁰ Miller, Environmental History of Latin America, p. 58. from soils that prior to 1492, were rated as useless because of their sandiness, altitude, aridity, and other factors.

Not surprisingly, farmers throughout Afro-Eurasia added New World foods into their cropping patterns as soon as they got their hands on them, and that was very quickly. Europeans especially adopted potatoes and beans, but also maize (mostly as animal fodder); manioc became the food staple of many African peoples, who also raised maize, beans, and peanuts; and in China, which was perhaps the fastest adopter of New World foods, by the early sixteenth century farmers were planting peanuts and sweet potatoes in otherwise marginally used land.²¹ Farmland throughout the temperate world expanded rapidly at the expense of forests, and human populations surged.

Farming and global climate change in the early modern world

During the early modern era, the natural environment both provided resources that allowed humans to increase their numbers, but constrained that growth within limits set by the dynamics of the biological old regime. Nonetheless, people had dramatic impacts on the environment, mostly through activities necessary for farming, starting with the removal of forests to make way for farms. But besides simplifying complex natural ecosystems into agro-ecosystems and removing habitats for many animal species, some scholars now think that humans were affecting the global climate system through farming.

The very act of removing forests through girdling, felling, and burning released carbon dioxide (CO₂) into the atmosphere, while the subsequent farming (especially of wet-rice paddy) and animal husbandry released large amounts of methane (CH₄) into the atmosphere. Both carbon dioxide and methane are among the most significant greenhouse gases. Several scholars, led by William Ruddiman, think that farming itself released sufficient green­house gases into the atmosphere prior to the modern era (with its release of those gases from burning fossil fuel) to have had an impact on the Earth's climate system. Ruddiman thinks that impact began with the first emergence of farming some 8,000 years ago,²² while John L. Brooke thinks that the

²¹ Alfred Crosby, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003), pp. 165, 175, 177-85, and 198-201.

²² William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate, Princeton Science Library edn. (Princeton University Press, 2010), chs. 9-10. Ruddiman thinks the emission of CO₂ and CH4 probably was sufficient to prevent the Earth from slipping into a cold climate. In his view, the warm period over the past 8,000 years is a result of human activity. tripling of farmland during the early modern era itself was sufficient to affect global climate.^[30]

Interestingly, the likelihood that humans affected global climate through farming is confirmed by the conjuncture of the demographic disaster that befell the native American populations following the European arrival with a natural cycle of slight climatic cooling. The “Little Ice Age,” variously dated from 1400 or 1550 to 1750 or 1850, started with natural perturbations that may have made life difficult enough for native American populations. But the massive die-off caused mostly by diseases spread from Europeans to native Americans by 1600 had removed the tens of millions of people who had tended their farms and gardens. Ruddiman argues that the regrowth of American forests, resulting in the sequestering of massive amounts of carbon dioxide, is what was responsible for the drop in atmospheric CO₂ levels that caused the climatic cooling of the Little Ice Age.^[31] And that early modern climate shift had dramatic consequences for human populations.

Without delving into the potential anthropogenic contributions to the Little Ice Age, historian Geoffrey Parker has detailed its impact on human societies in Global Crisis: War, Climate Change & Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century. This very large book looks at what he calls the “fatal synergy” between climate change and state breakdowns around the world in the seventeenth century, and the disasters that befell entire populations that resulted in mass deaths and global population declines of as much as one-third. Although some places on Earth apparently escaped the worst effects of the cooling climate, or—more interestingly—had states that took actions to mitigate the impact of cooler temperatures on farming and harvest yields, most notably in Japan and India— most other states in the world had short-sighted rulers who chose not just to continue their local or regional wars (the worst being the Thirty Years War in Europe, 1618 to 1648), but to increase taxes at the same moment that harvest yields fell because of the cold, piling misery upon misery. In a hopeful note to what otherwise is a horrifying chapter in human history, Parker shows how people and states around the world did learn some lessons from their near­death experiences, and began in the eighteenth century the processes of rebuilding more compassionate and climatically resilient states and societies even while the cooling climate continued for another century or more.^[32]

Processes of early modern environmental change

Besides population growth and the spread of farms, other human forces driving environmental change included the growing ability of states to extend their power beyond their territorial borders, the closer knitting together of the world by sailing vessels, and the growth of global markets for all kinds of natural products, including animals and their skins obtained through a “world hunt.” The early modern period also saw the extension throughout the world of a particular kind of legal framework for human interaction with nature, built on the idea of private ownership of property.^[33]

Private property and environmental change

in a global perspective

Processes transforming land previously held collectively or by customary use into private property unfolded across the early modern world, especially when and where taxable farming marched across the landscape. This happened across Eurasia and throughout the Americas, and in some cases (in Africa) has endured to the present day. For instance, in colonial New England, as William Cronon has argued, such transformations underlay the European land grabs from Indians. Private property did not exist among people who followed the seasons and their game: “English colonists could use Indian hunting and gathering as a justification for expropriating Indian land” because they did not use the land “properly... This was, of course, little more than an ideology of conquest conveniently available to justify the occupation of another people's lands.”^[34]

In an important essay, “Toward a Global System of Property Rights in Land,” John F. Richards sketched out these processes. Richards argued that “every human society has moved toward a similar regime of rights in landed property. Bewilderingly complex, particularized, local systems of property rights in land have been altered, transformed, or replaced by simplified, more unified sets of rules in a remarkably similar fashion across all world regions.” Since the fifteenth century, processes involving centralizing states, population growth, and technological change “have imparted economic value to a greater and greater share of the earth's land surface. In spite of the vicissi­tudes of political struggles and shifting ideologies, the long-term trend is toward more transparent, accessible markets in private property rights in land. In these markets, land use shifts rapidly and suddenly to meet economic incentives,” setting up struggles over land and land use, particularly over the rights to exploit or use natural resources.^[35]

This fixedness of private property gives the appearance that farming was settled and that hunting and gathering peoples were nomadic wanderers. But Hugh Brody suggests that the opposite was true:

A look at how ways of life take shape across many generations reveals that it is the agriculturalists, with their commitment to specific farms and large numbers of children who are forced to keep moving, resettling, colonizing new lands. Hunter-gatherers, with their reliance on a single area, are profoundly settled. As a system, over time, it is farming, not hunting, that generates “nomadism”... In the history of... agricultural cultures, the combination of settlement, large families, and movement has resulted in a more or less relentless colonial frontier. An agricultural people can never rest—as farming families, as a lineage—in one place.^[36]

From this perspective, as farming populations in central states throughout Afro-Eurasia produced more people than could be supported by the available land, pioneers set out for frontiers inhabited by others, but with their states' power at their backs, imposed settled farming techniques and ideas of private property on these others who had had rather different ideas about the land and its proper uses.

Exhausting the Earth

Certainly, there is compelling evidence that early modern states across Eurasia and in the pre-Columbian Americas depleted natural resources in their core areas as farmland replaced forests. Throughout much of Northern Europe, the combination of interstate competition, economic growth, and population growth put a strain on natural resources. For instance, as the population of France increased from 14 to 25 million from 1550 to 1789, the amount of forest shrank from 18 to 9 million hectares.^[37] Most of this

deforestation was for farming, but manufacturing needed charcoal, and navies (not just the French, but also other European states) consumed 3,500 mature trees for one ship. According to Whited et al.: “Overexploitation of the land was one sign of environmental stress in northern Europe in the eighteenth century.” Erosion of farmland led to the build up of sandy plains and dunes from Denmark to the Netherlands, England, Sweden, Central Europe, and the Atlantic coast of France.³¹ “[B]y the end of the eighteenth century... the people in northern Europe lived, from an environmental perspective, in an impoverished world. In comparison to the Middle Ages, Europe was home to less wildlife and fewer forests. Climatic conditions had become unfavorable. The landscape showed severe signs of erosion.”³²

In China, New World food crops, especially maize, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and tobacco, enabled farmers to exploit land that previously had been marginal at best. Throughout East and South China, erosion of hills and mountains bedeviled lowland farmers and officials alike. “Economic growth based on highland reclamation was clearly unsustainable.”³³ On the other hand, India's Mughal emperors transformed much of swampy Bengal into rice paddies that produced so much food that much of the subcontinent's forests remained standing into the nineteenth century.³⁴

Among all the most advanced parts of the early modern world, Japan was among the first to begin to experience shortages of natural resources, to fear the consequences, and to begin to take actions to avoid going over an ecological cliff from which there might have been no recovery. By the end of the seventeenth century, forests in Japan's three major islands had been depleted. Cultivatable land probably reached its limit by 1720. Rice yields stagnated, even as some cash crops such as sugar and sericulture displaced paddies. Famines in the eighteenth century, although brought on by cold snaps that shortened the growing season, heightened awareness that Japan may have been getting close to the edge of sustainability and going down into a vicious cycle, depleting more and more resources to support their society until nature's storehouse was emptied.

In these circumstances, individuals, families, daimyo lords, and the central Tokugawa state began to take a number of measures that reduced human demand on the natural environment. Sumptuary laws limiting the size and

³¹ Whited et al., Northern Europe, p. 89. ³² Whited et al., Northern Europe, p. 101.

³³ Anne Osborne, “Barren Mountains, Raging Rivers: The Ecological and Social Effects of Changing Landuse on the Lower Yangzi Periphery in Late Imperial China,” unpub­lished PhD dissertation, Columbia University (1989), p. 229.

³⁴ Richards, Unending Frontier, pp. 36-8. construction of houses and feasting at weddings and funerals were aimed at the elite; timber shortages prompted changes in building styles; diets incorp­orated more seafood, including whale meat and blubber, freeing land for plants that had supported farm animals; and perhaps most significantly, families chose to reduce family size, and their progeny followed similar birth strategies, giving Japan a virtual zero population growth from the eighteenth into the nineteenth century.

Perhaps most remarkably of all, Japan began conscious policies of reforest­ation and then the protection of those forests. First, the central government and the daimyo lords issued numerous edicts protecting existing stands of forest and controlling the use of forest resources. But that was insufficient. Foresters developed the abilities to select, plant, and raise seedlings; daimyo lords requisitioned labor each spring to plant seedlings and then to care for them. “Widely accepted and applied, protective and regenerative forestry halted deforestation in Tokugawa Japan. Afforestation replaced exploitative overcutting.”^[38] Using the title of Conrad Totman's seminal book on this transformation, Japan became “the green archipelago.”^[39]

Japan may have been exceptional in the early modern world in terms of conscious conservation and active reforestation, but forests and their wildlife communities elsewhere also survived the early modern world, albeit for varying reasons. In India, the transformation of the Bengali “swamp” into productive rice paddies saved the Deccan forests. In the Americas, as we have already seen, the dying off of 90 percent of the Amerindians—itself the result of a combination of historical acts and accidents—led to the vast reforestation of North and South America. And in Africa, the tsetse fly, elephants, and lions helped preserve both forest and savannah, while malaria kept European slave traders to a few outposts on the West African Atlantic coast.

The world hunt

European sailing ships not only knit the Atlantic world together in increas­ingly tighter relations and extensive biological exchanges, but they also carried with them the lust for wealth that had driven Diaz, Columbus, da Gama, Cortez, and Pizarro, among others. Gold and silver were not the only New World natural products that scratched that itch; increasingly the bounty available in the forests, rivers, and oceans—furs and pelts from fur-bearing animals and oils and bone from whales—did as well. The first wave of wealth building in the Americas (following the plundering of silver and gold stocks) centered on the sugar plantation complex and all the environmental changes around the world that this spawned, with especially horrific consequences for the native peoples of the Americas. As Beinart and Hughes note, "[t]he indigenous population... had no place in this system and was largely destroyed or its remnants absorbed.”^[40] But in what John Richards has called “the world hunt,”^[41] in contrast to the experience in the Caribbean, “Native Americans had a major role in supplying imperial markets.”^[42] This was especially true for extracting the furs and pelts from North America and Siberia.

Fur-bearing animals

Throughout North America, the native peoples had hunted animals for their own uses and sometimes for barter with other tribes, in particular fur-bearing animals such as beaver, fox, and marten, and deer for their pelts and horns. European demand changed that relationship of Indians with their environ­ment. Pushing into North America up the St. Lawrence seaway and overland into Pennsylvania, European traders brought iron and other metal tools, woolen blankets, as well as alcohol and tobacco, to trade for the furs and pelts. As a consequence, Indian hunting and killing of the wildlife of North America became linked to European demand, which was already large and growing. There were 60 to 100 million beavers in North America prior to the arrival of Europeans, but their populations were severely depleted already by the mid-seventeenth century. Because the beaver was an ecological “key­stone” species, its removal led to the decay and drying of their ponds and to declining biological diversity. The marten was hunted to extinction in the nineteenth century, and wolves and wolverines were pushed to the brink. According to Richards, “the cumulative record of the fur trades in North America is clear and unambiguous. Once Indians were touched by the stimulus of market demand, any restraints they had previously maintained eroded rapidly.”^[43]

The outcome was similar in Siberia, although the main animal hunted was the sable, and the extraction of the furs was organized differently. Whereas the North America fur trade was based on trade and mostly cordial relations with Indians, in Siberia the expanding Russian state in the seventeenth century imposed quotas called iasak—a requirement that each adult pay tribute of a sable pelt each year (as well as vow loyalty to the Russian tsar)—on the peoples they conquered. The result was predictable: sable populations declined and sable were locally extirpated.⁴¹

Another result of contact between Europeans and the native peoples of the cold northern climates was the introduction of epidemic disease. Smallpox brought by the French swept through Algonkian territory in the St. Law­rence region in 1639 to 1640; epidemics laid low the Hurons between 1634 and 1640; the English brought smallpox to the Connecticut valley in 1633 to 1634; Chinese-borne smallpox threatened Mongols and Manchurians; and Russians spread smallpox to native Siberians, who, “when they are stricken with smallpox... die like flies.”⁴²

In East Asia, after capturing Beijing and settling in to the Ming imperial palace, China's Manchu rulers relied on Manchuria to supply them and the imperial household with all kinds of foods and furs. Indeed, David Bello argues that although the Manchu state was initially dependent “on the region's biodiversity for its very existence,”⁴³ over the first half century or more of its rule, it developed hunting and gathering policies for Manchuria that were linked with Manchu identity, policies that Bello calls “imperial foraging.” The Manchus established an entire bureaucracy to oversee the procurement of game and supplies from specially designated enclaves throughout Manchuria, as well as licensing foragers and imposing tribute quotas on them. Tigers, bears, leopards, fish, feathers, storks, and pine nuts, among other forest products, were foraged from Manchurian forests and sent to Beijing.

By the early 1700s, “elite demand approached mass consumption,” and shortages began appearing, raising concern among China's Manchu rulers. “[T]here are indications that intensification of hunting and gathering [to meet that demand]... as well as illicit poaching and environmental degradation related to [illegal] Han migration, seem to have contributed to the depletion

⁴¹Richards, Unending Frontier, pp. 517-37.

⁴² Richards, Unending Frontier, pp. 474-5, 479, 502, and 539.

⁴³ David Bello, “The Cultured Nature of Imperial Foraging in Manchuria,” Late Imperial China 31 (2010), 3.

of resources.” But rather than seeing these “shortages” as possibly indicating that the wildlife populations were being ravaged to the point of collapse, the rulers “interpreted shortfalls in anthropogenic terms that were centered on human idleness, incompetence, or greed,” and so intensified the foraging. Where pine nuts earlier had been easily gathered, as low-hanging fruit, as it were, by the late eighteenth century, “the only way to obtain pine nuts and pinecones was to cut down trees.” Bello concludes that although the Manchu imperial foraging, intensified by Han in-migration, did not permanently exhaust the most valuable resources of the northeast, the “extractions proved unsupportable by the early nineteenth century.”^[44]

China's ecological shadow reached across the Pacific to the American northwest. American and British traders newly arrived at the Columbia River and the access that it gave to the vast natural wealth of what is now the states of Washington and Oregon in the United States were so taken with the idea of the “China market” in the 1820s that they launched several ships loaded with furs from the northwest directly to China's port of Guangzhou. The problem was that the sellers found no market for furs in subtropical south China, and by 1828 the beaver pelt trade failed. What emerged instead was a much more complex system by which American ships traded north­western furs, timber, and fish among the Pacific islands, including Hawaii, ultimately winding up in Guangzhou with items acquired along the way, including sandalwood, the demand for which deforested many Pacific islands.^[45]

Sea animals

But a fur that did meet a significant Chinese demand was the pelt of the sea otter, obtained from animals whose habitat stretched 4,000 miles along the American west coast from Alaska to Baja California. Whereas the sea otter's sleek black coat brought a high price of 40 Spanish dollars in Guangzhou near the end of the eighteenth century, 30 years later they were selling for two. The reason for the drop in price wasn't a drop in Chinese demand, but an explosion in the supply. “Killing sea otters... was a very specialized skill and demanded the labor of native hunters,” in particular the Aleut and Kodiaks from Alaska. In a very nasty business, Russian procurers held these natives' women and children hostage to force the men to work up and down the American west coast for British and American traders. “The entire coastline soon became an extended killing field [and]... the region's sea otter population soon faced extinction...”⁴6

Exploiting the oceans did not require indigenes (except for a brief time when the Dutch traded with Inuits in Greenland), but the vast cod fishing and whaling fleets did require lots of capital, technological expertise, and skilled labor to build, sail, and operate increasingly sophisticated equipment. Cod is high in protein, and the stocks in north Atlantic and Arctic waters were prodigious. So much cod was taken and its price was so low that it was a staple food for African slaves laboring in American sugar plantations as well as ordinary urban laborers in Europe.^{[46] [47]} Hundreds of European ships took nearly 200,000 metric tons of cod annually for sale in Europe. The take appeared to be sustainable during the early modern period, although there are indications that the size of the fish and of the catches had declined by the mid-eighteenth century. Nonetheless, “[s]o numerous were codfish and so resilient... that it took five hundred years for human fishing to cause stocks to crash—as they did in the 1980s.”^[48]

Whales were not so fortunate. Taken for their oil that had both domestic and industrial uses, and their plastic-like whalebone that also had industrial uses, in the eighteenth century Basque, Dutch, German, and Danish whalers hunted, killed, and processed several tens of thousands of bowhead and right whales. By the mid-nineteenth century, when state-subsidized British whaling had pushed aside competitors and the bow whale went extinct, over 160,000 whales had been taken to meet European and North American demand.⁴⁹

Conclusion

The dynamics of the early modern world were not necessarily leading to the modern world, but just as likely to the depletion of natural resources, the culturing of nature, vast environmental change, and an increasingly intensive use of the land. Joachim Radkau concludes that by the eighteenth century, the world “entered into a new era... in the history... [of] the environment” as resources became scarce and limits were reached. In his view, “the urge to exploit the last reserves possesses an epochal character in environmental history. It led to a fundamental shift in strategies of sustainability. Until then, the sustainability of agriculture was in many cases guaranteed not only by fertilizer and fallow, but also by the fact that one could make use, as needed, of semi-wild outlying areas: commons, forests, heaths, moors, and swamps.” The Columbian Exchange of New World crops throughout Afro-Eurasia, especially of maize, manioc, and the potato, “promoted population densities that led to overuse of forests and pastures.”^[49]

Continuous farming of the same land required the development of strat­egies to maintain the fertility of the land, from laying fallow part of it in Europe, to massive fertilizing using animal and human manure in China and Japan. Even then, evidence suggests a declining fertility of all of these lands, especially a decline in critical nutrients such as nitrogen, by the later early modern period. Further indicators of declining fertility of early modern farms are found in the growing global demand for guano and nitrates,^[50] and the push into frontier areas where new farms could—for a while—tap the land's natural fertility.

To be sure, the Americas continued to hold a vast treasure trove of natural resources as late as 1800 (or as early as, from an American perspective). But as we have seen in this chapter about other places on Earth, a Jeffersonian vision of an America of smallholding farmers armed with iron axes and plows would have rapidly mowed down the North American forest to make way for farms. And although repeating rifles may well have been an artifact of the nineteenth-century industrial era, the massive bison herds approaching 30 mil­lion animals roaming the North American Great Plains in 1800 were cut down to a few thousand by 1900.^[51] The frontier everywhere on Earth was ending as the modern world was emerging, and that process was more than well on its way in the early modern world. Climate change and the human and environmental responses to it also constitute an important chapter of the early modern era.

Finally, it is apparent that the dynamics of the early modern world did not originate in Europe and emanate around the world. States, markets, product­ive agriculture, and rising populations moved environmental change in the Americas before 1492, in East and South Asia, and in Africa. Those apparently independent developments around the world eerily recall the simultaneity of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, for which we also lack a unified explan­ation.^[52] So future generations of historians will have to tackle the questions of what connections there are between the early modern and modern worlds, and why there were so many “strange parallels” across the early modern world.^[53]

FURTHER READING

Beinhart, William and Lotte Hughes, Environment and Empire: Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Braudel, Fernand, The Structures of Everyday Life, Sian Reynolds (trans.) (New York: Harper & Row, 1981).

Cook, David Noble, Born to Die: Disease and New World Conquest, 1492-1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Cronon, William, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).

Crosby, Alfred W., Jr., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003).

Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Elvin, Mark, Retreat of the Elephants: An Environmental History of China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004).

Grove, Jean, The Little Ice Age (London: Methuen, 1988).

Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600-1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).

Hill, Christopher V., South Asia: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2008).

Maddox, Gregory H., Sub-Saharan Africa: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2006).

Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus, 2nd edn. (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

Marks, Robert B., China: Its Environment and History (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012).

Tigers, Rice, Silk, and Silt: Environment and Economy in Late Imperial South China (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

McNeill, J. R., Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620-1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

“The State of the Field of Environmental History,” Annual Review of Environment and Resource 35 (2010), 345-74.

McNeill, William, Plagues and Peoples (New York: Anchor, 1976).

Melville, Elinor G. K., A Plague of Sheep: Environmental Consequences of the Conquest of Mexico (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

Miller, Shawn William, An Environmental History of Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Perdue, Peter C., China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).

Exhausting the Earth: State and Peasant in Hunan, 1500-1850 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Council on East Asian Studies, 1987).

Pomeranz, Kenneth, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Ponting, Clive, A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations (New York: Penguin Books, 1991).

Radkau, Joachim, Nature and Power: A Global History of the Environment (New York: Cambridge University Press; Washington DC: German Historical Institute, 2008).

Rangarajan, Mahesh, India's Wildlife History: An Introduction (New Delhi: Ranthambhore Foundation, 2001).

Reader, John, Africa: The Biography of a Continent (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).

Richards, John F., The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003).

Thornton, John, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Totman, Conrad, The Green Archipelago: Forestry in Preindustrial Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989).

Turner, B. L., W. C. Clark, R. W. Kates, J. F. Richards, J. T. Mathews and W. B. Meyer (eds.), The Earth as Transformed by Human Action: Global and Regional Changes in the Biosphere over the Past 300 Years (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

Webb, James L. A., Jr., Desert Frontier: Ecological and Economic Change along the Western Sahel, 1600-1850 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995).

Humanity's Burden: A Global History of Malaria (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

Whited, Tamara L., Jens I. Engels, Richard C. Hofimann, Hilde Ibsen and Wybren Verstegen, Northern Europe: An Environmental History (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005).

Williams, Michael, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2003).

Wrigley, E. A., Continuity, Change, and Chance (Cambridge University Press, 1990).