Global migrations

DIRK HOERDER

In the tri-continental African-Asian-European World, three unrelated macro- regional and political developments at mid-fifteenth century were to have major impacts on migration and power relations globally: First, in China, the transoceanic outreach epitomized by Admiral Zheng He's ambassadorial voyages between 1403 and 1433 to the “Western” or Indian Ocean and as far as East Africa's thriving port cities were ended by decree of the Imperial Court.

The migratory consequences of these developments were many and included six major ones: first, the emergence of the Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia; second, new patterns of trade and mobility between Iberian and Atlantic Europe and Asia's many regions; third, the importation of bound Africans to Iberia; fourth, a new type of bondage, chattel slavery, with its forced mass migrations in the emerging European-ruled global plantation belt; fifth, population collapse in the Americas brought about by the European intruders' germs, warfare, and exploitation, which emptied the double continent for mass arrival of indentured and free Europeans and enslaved Africans; sixth, the Iberian and Dutch circum-African outreach, which involved few migrants but established a new regime that combined mercantile expertise with armed state power and in which private invest­ments and profits were subsidized by public-funded soldiery and adminis­trators.

Wherever voyagers, migrants, refugees, and bound or free laborers arrived, they encountered functioning societies with knowledge of the region's ecology and with societal-political structures. The newcomers from Europe, “explorers” in their self-deceiving master narratives, came with different knowledge acquired in their own socialization. They coveted the riches of “the Indies” and the labor of “the negroes” - both constructs of white ideologues. When they encountered resident societies, they could opt for co-existence, intermingling, or violence. Each group's “funds of know­ledge” could be supplementary, contradictory, or parallel to others. Those with more guns and with a more aggressive religious, racial, and mercantile ideology imposed direct rule or indirect hegemony. Unarmed trader cultures and regional merchants became middle “men” or, more correctly, mediating family economies, who, because they were bi- or multi-lingual, could trans­late exchanges between local producers and visitors, whether long-distance merchants or self-imposing colonizers without knowledge of languages and exchange practices. In-migrating men with long-distance connections often associated with or married local women of rank to access their networks and social capital. Such partnership-families connected the local and the distant. Wealthy Europeans' demand for spices, silver or gold, porcelain or silk, and for plantation-produced sugar stimulated production and the demand for labor, and thus also stimulated labor and expert migrations. Information feedback about the options (seemingly) available in newly connected distant regions induced men and women of the poorer classes, who could hardly feed themselves and their children, to depart. So-called “free migrants” left unsatisfactory “homes” under severe economic constraints and societies that did not permit sustainable lives.

We will approach migrations by first summarizing in broad strokes the continuities and changes by macro-region across the globe from the earlier centuries to about 1500 and in some cases beyond. Next the penetration of heavily armed mobile Europeans into the societies of the Caribbean and South America, West Africa, the Indian Ocean's littorals and Southeast Asian islands will be analyzed in terms of displacement of and dominance over resident settled or mobile peoples. Motivations were economic: demand for northern furs, Southeast Asian spices, Chinese luxury goods, and - in the emerging plantation complex - mass-produced consumables including sugar, tea, and coffee. Since the European, powerful newcomers lacked knowledge of the languages, cultures, and customs of the economically or politically annexed territories and peoples, they required intermediaries - a further category of migrants. The mobility of intrusive investors and supportive state personnel (“colonial administrators”) resulted in vast, mostly forced, migra­tions of men and women as laborers to produce for the Europeans' demand. The imposed production and labor regimes, in turn, led to depletion of resources and to involuntary departure of original resident peoples deprived of their means to gain their livelihood. In a further section we will discuss the migration of those Europeans who also had difficulty in gaining their liveli­hood - the ideology of European superiority and whiteness discourses veil the poverty endemic in many regions of Europe, forcing rural and urban underclasses to depart. But once arriving in the Americas, southern Africa, or Australia, supported by powerful colonizer states, migrants established them­selves as settlers over resident peoples and imposed “settler regimes.” In conclusion we will offer a comprehensive perspective on migrants and migrations in this period.

Macro-regional migrations: continuities and changes

Migration and cultural exchange, as constituent processes of societies, are not defined by fixed continents or bounded states. Micro-, meso-, and macro­regions that provide economic and cultural options for life prospects set parameters. They are defined by natural and human-made characteristics: plains, littorals, and mountain valleys, contiguous or connectable by camel or horse, by navigable rivers or seas, or by challenging mountain passes or desert-crossing routes. Groups of people, often known by ethno-cultural labeling, developed the knowledge to overcome distances and to use natural resources. By the fifteenth century, all continents had become interconnected spaces. The Indian Ocean's mariners had decoded the monsoon patterns a millennium-and-a-half before this; northern Arab and sub-Saharan black peoples connected along the Nile River valley and across the Sahara. In the sub-Arctic, Norse men and women had migrated in an hemispheric arc westward as far as Vinland and eastward via the Volga River to Byzantium, and had built states in Normandy, Sicily, and Palestine. From mid-thirteenth to mid-fourteenth century, the Mongols, highly mobile horse-borne peoples, expanded by aggression and destruction, then established rule over a trans­steppe realm. Their pax mongolica protected the transcontinental “Silk Road” trading. The tri-continental Mediterranean core of the West, after about 1000 ce, was supplemented by connectivity in Europe's land-centered western, central, and eastern sections. In the Americas, the centralized empires of the Aztec and Inca emerged in the central highlands of Mesoamerica and the southwestern Andean slopes in the 1400s. Trade routes radiated northward into the Plains and crossed the Eastern Woodlands.

Asia

Of the “four Asias” - China, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Japan (with Siberia, the fifth, better viewed in connection with the Russian Empire) - the realm of the Ming and Qing dynasties, like all polities, expanded and contracted. From its early Yellow River core, peasant families and urban people had migrated by the millions southward to the fertile Yangtzi Delta and reached what is now Guangdong province in the thirteenth century, while absorbing resident peoples and adapting their techniques for cultiva­tion of specific terrains. The in-migrant Mongol Yuan rulers (1271-1368) were succeeded by the Ming (1368-1644), who came from among the core Chinese ethno-cultural group, the Han; the Ming were in turn replaced by in-migrant Manchu Qing (1644-1912). The empire expanded as far as western Sichuan where resident peoples and mobile armies of Islamic faith from the south stopped further advance. Intensive cultural exchange ensued. Migrating monks from South Asia induced widespread religious change: Buddhism came to co-exist with the indigenous Daoist beliefs and Confucianism. Though continuously incorporating culturally different peoples by annex­ation and in-migration, the state attempted to exclude northern mobile intruders. The “Great Wall's” construction and maintenance required internal mass migration of workers and soldier-peasant families. The capital, Hangzhou, housed some two million people of many cultures and multiple migration trajectories around 1400. Zheng He's fleets, thirty times the size of Columbus's and carrying up to 28,000 men, exchanged Chinese, Arab, and African products. A conservative court bureaucracy, hostile to innovation and “foreign” imports, ended the outreach to focus on the multiple and mobile land-based populations which produced whatever society needed. In defiance of such restrictions, however, entrepreneurs of southern Fujian province continued their relations with peninsular and insular Southeast Asian societies; artisans and laborers followed, and a permanently settled diaspora emerged.

In Southeast Asia, a productive and integrated macro-region, highly skilled seafaring groups connected island peoples with those of the Malay Peninsula. By the fifteenth century, the Straits' port cities accommodated South and East Asian, Persian, and Arab merchants, along with Indonesian island traders. Arab migrants introduced Islam; Javanese trade missions reached China's Imperial Court; refugees from war-ravaged regions founded new urban agglomerations. After the late-thirteenth-century demise of the Srivijaya Empire, non-state-based mobile entrepreneurs recruited themselves from among migrants, fugitives, outlaws, and escaped slaves of Japanese, Chinese, and African background and became “pirates” or “buccaneers.”^[3] To the mid-sixteenth century they rendered port-city­based trade and migration unsafe. Depending on the strength of a particular polity or on investment strategies of specific merchants, whether Gujarati or Fujianese, the regions' migratory and cultural exchanges assumed a distinctive character in particular periods.^[4]

Japan's rulers, by 1400, had sent soldiers and migrants to annex Hokkaido with its peoples in the north and the northernmost Ryukyu Islands to the south. They also encouraged internal migrations by urbanization. Although in the early seventeenth century they did invade and annex the southern Ryukyu Islands, in general and in contrast to the Southeast Asian societies, Japanese development and migrations remained land-based and extended no further than to neighboring islands and peninsulas.

South Asia, internally highly diverse by regions, rule, and cultures, experienced in-migration and cultural metissage from invaders and others crossing the Pamir Mountains. Merchants from Gujarat, the southwestern Malabar and the southeastern Coromandel coasts connected to Arabian, East African, and Southeast Asian ports and peoples. Monsoon-driven long sojourns resulted in community formation. Internally, South Asia's soci­eties were both mobile and immobile. Earlier, armed Islamic migrants had penetrated the Indus Valley; in the early sixteenth century the Mughal rulers (Timurid Mongols) arrived from the north and established a state that lasted until the nineteenth century; itinerant Muslim Sufi Orders proselytized; elites and common urbanites lived a fusion of Indic, Persian, and Turkish cultures. Southward-migrating peasant and warrior families from northwestern Vijayanagara established Telugu-speakers among native southern Tamil-speakers; westward migrations from upper Burma estab­lished Ahoms in the Brahmaputra Valley. However, Hinduism's prescrip­tions for purity in everyday food challenged mobility since travel necessitated impure eating practices. In addition, separation (purdah) of women into distinct quarters in a family's dwelling restricted their mobil­ity. On the other hand, widespread if regionally specific views of social relations made inhabitants of one (village) community relatives and, in consequence, at marriage women had to migrate to neighboring commu­nities - a short-distance migration which involved adjustment. On the whole, the mobility of common people distant from the littorals was often short-distance; urban cultural fusion hardly touched them, but in­migration, expansion, and religious conversion did.^[5]

Africa

Trade and migration connected South Asia's western with Africa's eastern societies; Madagascar had been settled from both Indonesia and Africa. The several Africas - Egyptian-Nilotic, Mediterranean, the eastern, central, and western sub-Saharan regions, the southern segment - evidenced high levels of mobility. The Mediterranean littoral had been settled from the east by Arab-speaking peoples; in the Nile River valley northern Egyptian and southern (dark) Nubian peoples interacted; agricultural Bantu-speakers of many language variants moved southward and came in contact with the Khoisan. East African trading societies with sedentary urbanites and mobile merchants, using Swahili as Iinguafranca, reached their height in the four­teenth and fifteenth centuries. The savannah's westbound migrating groups brought Islam, and elites of Muslim faith interacted with pastoralists and agriculturalists of animist persuasion. Complex, competing states had emerged before 1400. Each change of rule and societal structures changed opportunities and constraints and induced or forced families and groups to migrate. Muslims' hajj to Mecca, extending over years and funded by trading activities along the routes, resembled temporary migrations. Swahili and Hausa speakers established commercial diasporas. In size and sophistication, cities from the East African Coast to the Niger River compared with Euro­pean ones. Along its Atlantic Coast, from Senegal to Nigeria (modern terms), numerous peoples speaking hundreds of languages moved and mingled; the Kru emerged as a coastal seafaring people.

Various types of bondage were common in Africa. Rights-in-persons practices bound poorer relatives or debtors to wealthier men. Women, knowledgeable agriculturalists, were particularly valued as a rural labor force. In contrast, male war captives were traded over long distances as far as the Mediterranean Arab world. Thus categories of bondage were fluid, ranging from rights-in-persons and short-distance moves to long-distance trade - some 10,000 men were force-migrated northward annually by the fourteenth century. Free, regionally specific migrations included iron- and gold-working craftsmen and women in West Africa and Zimbabwe, ser­vice personnel in urban centers, and students and scholars heading for Timbuktu, which from 1400 to 1600 was the most important Islamic center of learning. Portuguese, arriving from the mid-1430s, established fortified trading posts along the Guinea coast to acquire gold, cloth, slaves, and other valuables. Around 1500 some 10 percent of Lisbon's population was of African origin. Initially such slaves remained persons and could intermarry with Iberians. Migrants carried beliefs: Christian missionaries moved south, others adopted veneration of Black Madonnas originating in West African fertility cults or the Egyptian worship of Isis. As everywhere, the designation of peoples as, for example, Fulbe, Wolof, or Bantu, hid the constant reconstitution of groups through migration, expulsion, flight, and incorporation of male strangers through community- sanctioned marriage with local women.^[6]

The Mediterranean World

In the Mediterranean world, Africa's Arab northern littoral connected via the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean and via the Black Sea and Persia to the trans-Asian Silk Road. Through the economic power of Genoa and Venice but also Amalfi and Greek-founded Neapolis, the European littoral attracted as well as shipped migrants. Their trading colonies, like Kaffa, became nodes of migration and exchange. Seaborne connections to Asia were mediated by Arab, Gujarati, and Turkish merchants. As a center of trade and culture, Alexandria housed Egyptian citizens of standing, in-migrant rural Egyptians, Arabs from many origins, Ottoman administrators and soldiers, Gujarati and Istanbul merchants, Jewish traders and intellectuals, and, among Christians, Sicilian Normans, traders from Pisa, Palermo, Naples, Livorno, Genoa, and Venice, as well as residents of Frankish and English origin. The “Frankish” crusaders' eastbound warrior migrations had been replaced by pilgrim tourism with package tours organized from Venice. Like the hajj, such traveling, though not migration strictu sensu, involved cultural interaction and could last for years. Regardless of their faith, pilgrims returned with new experiences and with new images of the Eastern Mediterranean cultures.

In this West Asian Levant-Anatolia-Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul contact zone, in-migrating Turkic-speaking pastoralists and warriors had transformed their mobile societies into the settled and powerful Ottoman Empire from about 1280. Arriving from Central Asia, the founding migrants adopted Islam and adapted Byzantine Christian institutions. By 1400, the empire was expanding into Southeastern Europe's wooded “Balkans” and into Egypt. The Ottomans had to struggle with state-building Mongol warrior-migrants and confront or cohabit with Venetian and Genoese colonizer-migrants. The empire's leadership designed non-ethnic structures, developing a culturally pluralist polity of multi-religious and many-cultured peoples through free and, on occasion, involuntary migrations.^[7]

To the east, the Venice/Genoa-Trebizond-Samarkand-China route, the trans-Caucasian routes to Russia and Poland-Lithuania, and the cross-Pamir passes to Mughal India, intersected in Safavid Persia (1502-1736), which was powerful economically, culturally, and militarily. Most of its soldiery came from Turkish-speaking groups. Georgians were deported and resettled, and urban Armenians, at immense population loss, were resettled in New Julfa (1605), close to the capital Isfahan. Entrusted with Persia's trans-European silk trade, Armenian migrant families settled in Venice and other centers of commerce. Urban expansion - accommodation for in-migrants, infra-struc- tures, mosques and palaces - required sizable in-migration of specialized craftsmen, often from other societies. The Safavid court recruited artisans and artists in the luxury trades; scholars, calligraphers, and painters were invited or transported to the capital from recently annexed cities. A new porcelain industry - to reduce imports from China - required skilled workers, while silk and carpet production for export to Europe led to a concentration of silk producing and weaving families. European visitors came, and Christian monks and artillery technicians settled. Migrations were fundamental to innovation of local arts, to military expansion, and to long­distance trade.^[8]

In the western Mediterranean, the African-Arab and Kabyl littoral was dotted with highly developed cities experiencing frequent population recom­position, providing a home to Jewish communities and to Muslim urban craftsmen who often produced for Ottoman (formerly Byzantine) and Euro­pean markets. These cities were the terminal of caravan traders and attracted migrants from the sub-Saharan savannah like Mande leatherworking craft families. Each increase or decline in demand, each change of rule and establishment of a new court, each new trading connection to Europe initiated in-migration of skilled artisan families or forced underemployed ones to seek their livelihood elsewhere. From the Christian-Frankish con­quest of Muslim Iberia refugee communities emerged, who - though impov­erished - came with skills and long-distance networks. The expulsion of Muslims after the annexation of Granada in 1492 and the expulsion of all Jews from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1498 brought masses of refugees to the vibrant Maghreb and Egyptian cities. The Ottoman Empire actively recruited Jewish refugees to utilize their human and social capital. In Iberia the economic damage caused by Christian fundamentalist persecutions was partly offset by shifting seafaring and economic activities to the Atlantic ports. This is epitomized by the migration of an underemployed Genoese Mediterranean mariner seeking work in the expanding Atlantic seafaring. His name was Columbus. Tiny Portugal, unable to feed its population, combined stateside resources with mercantile profit strategies: Its vessels traded along the West African coast from the 1430s; merchant migrants established forti­fied trading centers; the Crown forced families of Jewish faith to colonize Sao Tome by establishing plantations and trans-shipment centers for the slave trade.^[9]

Europe and Russia

By the 1400s, the intra-European balance of political and economic power had shifted from the Mediterranean to the northwestern seafaring states. By 1492 the Atlantic was being crossed (though Arab sources indicate earlier crossings from Africa) and the Atlantic economies emerged with their intensive Atlantic settlement and worldwide colonizing migrations. Research and public memory have overemphasized these developments, while under­emphasizing the high level of medieval Europe's internal migrations and cultural exchanges. From medieval mobilities the Renaissance and Early Modern periods emerged, but in these centuries the directions and, to some degree, the character of migrations changed.^[10]

In Eastern Europe, including the regions of Russia, Poland-Lithuania, and Hungary, several distinct long-distance migrations had subsided by the end of the fifteenth century: the Norse expansion, colony-building, and immersion into local populations; the eastward migrations of German-language peasants into neighboring, more thinly settled lands with Slavic-speakers; the expul­sion of German- and Yiddish-speaking Jews, who created the Ashkenazi community's culture. In East Central Europe, the enserfed peasantry belonged to the nobility; thus sovereigns had little revenue and could not encourage craft and mercantile activities because the nobility prevented the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie. To address both problems, rulers attracted refugee and voluntary migrants, including expelled German- language urbanJews as well as urban Christians, by granting them privileges. “Inserted” middle classes, different by language and culture from the sur­rounding rural people and nobles, emerged and remained distinct until, in the nineteenth century, newly nationalist ideologues began to question their loyalty and cultural practices.¹¹

From the mid-fourteenth to the late seventeenth century several population catastrophes caused massive migrations in Europe. At first, dis­persed survivors had to migrate and re-establish settlements viable for economic production, (re-)marriage, and reproduction. Later, when popula­tions began to expand again, regions laid waste could be resettled. The first of these catastrophes was the “Black Death,” which emptied vast territories in the late 1340s. Second, the totalitarian hold of Catholicism led to the persecution of individuals in the various inquisitions and of whole groups suspected of independent thought and heresy: In southern France, the Cathars (also known as the Albigensians) and Waldensians, emerging since mid-twelfth century, were annihilated by “crusades” and with them the culture of the langue d'oc. In the Baltic northeast, a “crusade” against the Old Prussians and other Baltic peoples, labeled “Saracens of the north,” emptied the lands. The aggressors, the military order of the Teutonic Knights, originally composed of men of many cultures who had been expelled from the “Holy Land” when it was reconquered by Muslim forces, had migrated northward in stages. Third, after the Reformation of 1517, century-long religious wars led to the expulsion of Catholics, Protestants, Mennonites, and others depending on who was temporarily victorious, creating a refugee generation and destruction that culminated in the Thirty Years' War, 1618-48. This mass flight and, later, resettlement migrations also involved the eighty-year liberation struggle of the Protestant Netherlands against Catholic Spanish-Habsburg rule. A fourth macro-regional migration­inducing struggle was the Habsburg-Ottoman contest in the Balkans. Muslim Ottoman advances liberated peasant families from (most) Christian feudal obligations; in reaction, to counter this rural awareness of a liberating aspect of Muslim rule, Europe's socio-religious and political elites waged a war of propaganda depicting “the Turks” as bloodthirsty infidels. From among in-migrating Muslims, the modern Bosnian Muslims are the last ^[11] survivors. After the Habsburgs' reconquest of Hungary, re-Catholicization sent Protestants fleeing.

Across Europe, rural-urban migration brought the growth of cities and denser commercial networks, which encouraged producer migrations to satisfy increasing demand. The Atlantic ports experienced large population increases, as did inland nodes of exchange such as Frankfurt/Main or Krakow. Out-migration from rural regions to urban destinations and war- devastated lands resulted from population growth beyond the contemporary capacity to feed people.

In the land-locked Russian territories, east-west plains and north-south rivers structured mobility. Multidirectional medieval connections trans­formed into early modern patterns. Via the rivers a Scandinavian-Byzantine route had carried migrant Normans who had established themselves as a ruling Kievan group, over Russian, Finnish, Baltic, and Turkoman peoples. Byzantine Greek and Jewish merchants as well as Eastern Christian mission­aries traded in Kiev. This fusion generated the Slavic version of Orthodox Christianity. Russian nobles intermarried with the Byzantine ruling house and later with West European dynasties. Warfare and competition notwith­standing, the nobility - like the merchants - were a trans-European mobile group. From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, rule of the both highly mobile and state-building Mongols changed culture. The multiethnic Mongol Empire began to incorporate steppe peoples and foreign elites. Some were recruited and assigned specific military, administrative, or commercial func­tions. The next phase of expansion by migration, transcontinental exploration of the north and of southern Siberia, began a century later than the Iberians' transatlantic outreach.¹²

The Americas

The peoples of the Americas, north, central, and south, followed a variety of life-ways. In North America they were nomadic in the Arctic and plains, settled and agricultural in the northeast, settled and fishing in the northwest, and pueblo-living in the southwest. Those of the central isthmus and along the Andean Pacific slopes lived in complex states and empires and had developed macro-regional and transcontinental trading and migratory net­works long before European-American contact - earlier contacts with Asia and Africa, suggested by some controversial sources, had left no lasting ^[12]

impact. In the central mesa, southward-migrating agriculturally and scholarly skilled Toltecs joined with Mixtecs, Zapotecs, and others to coalesce into Aztec culture. The imperial Inca and Aztec societies used mobile bound labor of force-migrated war captives and criminals. They raided neighboring peoples to fill labor reservoirs and, it seems, to capture high-ranking persons for sacrificial rites. According to the Spanish - who destroyed all written sources of the conquered peoples to become the masters of historical memory - enslaved people were traded from Nicaragua and Yucatan to Honduras and Guatemala and the Incas uprooted transport workers (tamemes) for long-distance trade.¹³ In the north, across the Sonoran Desert, from the pueblo regions to California, along the Mississippi, and into the northern woodlands, trading routes were traveled by peoples from many regions, and ceremonial and luxury items influenced distant peoples' cul­tures. Whole groups migrated and resettled, some as far as from the Arctic Circle to the south central mesas.

Thus, during the fifteenth century, migrations, cultural exchange and fusion connected cultures in the two transcontinental hemispheres. Early modern migrations continued, adapted, changed, and expanded pre-1400 patterns. Road and postal systems were part of the Inca realm, and of Western Europe, and criss-crossed the lands from the Eastern Mediterra­nean to Japan. Handbooks by an Arab postal expert, an Italian mercantile clerk, a Jewish-Iberian cartographer, and Chinese observers dispersed such knowledge. In China, in addition to roads and rivers, canal systems permitted mobility. Some rulers, including Chinese and Inca, built state granaries to prevent famines and resulting refugee migrations. Migrants traveled established and known routes, even if new to them. During rest stops - encampments, caravanserai, hostels - they interacted with residents of different customs and languages. In-migrating agricultural families learned from and merged with resident peoples. Where, by social conven­tion, migrants were predominantly male and service personnel along the route were female, sexual contacts - consensual, paid, or violent - resulted in children who usually grew up in the mother's culture. Where fathers settled, ethnogenesis, the emergence of a culturally new group, might ensue.

Connecting and changing global mobilities: the coming of armed Europeans

By 1500 Portugal's outreach along the West African coast and Spain's to the Caribbean, as well as European penetration into the Indian Ocean, changed global economic relations; migrations also changed, although this was often delayed. On the one hand, the newcomers' impact was limited, restricted to armed trading forts along the coasts and distinct quarters in port cities. North America was hardly touched, other than a few assumed summer settlements of Basque fishing crews on Newfoundland and, after 1600, of the fur traders at Tadoussac on the Saint Lawrence excepted. On the other hand, in the Amer­icas, the Iberians' unwitting import of Eurasian germs against which resident peoples lacked immunity brought population collapse in the Caribbean and in Central America. Extreme exploitation of the Arawak, Taino, and other peoples' labor resulted in further mass deaths. In Africa, the deportation of c.12 million enslaved men and women, in a ratio of 2 to ι, resulted in population depletion exacerbated by loss of lives during the raids and by the fact that those enslaved were in the most fertile years of their lives.

In addition to population depletions in the Americas and Africa, four economic developments were to have major long-range consequences for migration. First, European territorial states' combination of state power and revenues - tax-paid soldiery, armies, and later administrations - with mer­chants' investment and profit strategies and non-territorial long-distance connections changed the protocols of unarmed trade that had framed exchanges, kept transaction costs low, and kept the state and mercantile, the public and private spheres separate. The newly armed state-commercial complex imposed itself across the globe and left only some sectors to traditionally unarmed, macro-regionally active merchant communities, such as those of Fujian Chinese, Jews, Parsees (Indian Zoroastrians), Armenian Christians, and Muslim Hausa. Second, increased demand, whether for furs from the northern regions of the globe or for porcelain from China, induced numerous migrations of producers to meet demand, as well as of transport workers along the routes from production point to wholesale market and consumer. Third, in tropical and subtropical regions, where European invest­ors annexed territories for plantation regime mass production but did not offer wages to attract free labor migrants, forced labor regimes were imposed through several different methods. These included the immobilization and exploitation of resident peoples, the Dutch model in Southeast Asia, and the transoceanic sale of enslaved Africans, the model of the Portuguese and other powers in the Atlantic and plantation belt extractive economy. In the case of Americans, called Indians or Indios, forced labor was imposed by the Spanish through the systems of repartimiento and encomienda, which involved inter­regional forced migrations for work in mines or immobilization for agricul­tural and service labor. The British and French dynastic states would adopt these practices - migration of colonizer personnel across the globe and forced mobilization or immobilization of colonized labor forces. Fourth, a century or more later, Europe's rural populations without sufficient means of sub­sistence emigrated, either involuntarily when states exported some of their subjects, or voluntarily through self-paid voyages or systems of indenture in which a third party paid for the passage. Thus colonies of agricultural settlement developed parallel to colonies of exploitation and extraction of minerals and mass-produced food items, especially sugar.

Colonizer expansion by migration and power imposition was not that of a highly developed core to less developed regions, as Euro-centric historical lore has asserted. Capitalist developments in Asian and Eastern Mediterra­nean economies - and resulting producer migrations - had occurred inde­pendently, especially if these economies were connected within systems of trans-Asian and trans-Saharan exchange. When Europe's state-commerce complexes came to rule the seas as well as some territories, the worlds of the Indian Ocean and the Asian seas lost some of their inter-regional cohesion but not their vitality.¹⁴ The age of “discovery and exploration,” as this era has long been termed in Western-centered scholarship, was actually an era of the imposition of - increasingly imperial - power on less well-armed people: Columbus's annihilation of Caribbean peoples; Vasco da Gama's atrocities against East African and South Asian ports; the violence of Cortes and Pizarro; or (in the nineteenth century) the British opium wars to force the sale of the drug on China. In the present, such acts of violence are increas­ingly part of public memory and of school texts in formerly colonized societies. Thus, the migrations of aggressive but numerically few men, who emphasized their Christianity and, increasingly, constructed their whiteness as a mark of superiority, still structure interstate and racial memory in modern times. Twenty-first-century migrants arriving in former colonizer societies carry such knowledge.

1 ⁴ Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Alan K. Smith, Creating a World Economy. Merchant Capital, Colonialism, and World Trade 1400-1825 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991); Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Intermediaries and mobilizing and immobilizing labor regimes

Three major types of production with mostly forced and involuntary migra­tions emerged from the state-commercial-investor imposition mediated through migrant colonizer personnel: the global belt of plantation-regime production; globally dispersed but micro-regional mining; and the belt of fur harvesting in the far north.

Intermediaries

In terms of capabilities, colonizer migrants arrived at their destinations without knowledge of conditions, cultures, and languages. Thus, in Asia, mobile Gujarati, Malabar, and Coromandel Coast merchants, as well as the southern and diasporic Chinese merchants, traders, and artisans in Southeast Asia, acted as intermediaries or continued to trade on their own. Along the West African coast, male warrior states emerged, which raided inland societies to supply the European entrepots with slaves; to trade imported goods, navigationally skilled mobile Kru boatsmen connected the large European vessels across shallow waters with coastal populations. To distrib­ute goods inland, some Europeans moved deep into African societies and formed unions with resident women who had the cultural capability to trade. Local peoples, the Hausa in particular, also acted as medium- and long­distance traders thus increasing their own traditional mobility.

Intermediaries or “go-betweens” were central to most cultural exchanges following upon migration. Men - whether Europeans in colonial settings or Chinese in the Southeast Asian trading regions - formed temporary or “secondary” families or unions with women of the receiving culture. In other cases the mere exchange of physical items, plants and animals in the Columbian Exchange between Europe and the Americas, mediated between societies and environments on different continents. All intermediaries inhabited a “middle ground” (Richard White) and, in the case of the Amer­icas with Brazil as an example, Alida Metcalf has distinguished three types: men and women who mediate between societies (“physical go-betweens”), who, however, also carried diseases; the “transactional intermediaries,” translators, negotiators, and cultural brokers whose role we have discussed; and, third, influential “representational” go-betweens who represent Europe to “the locals” or “the exotic” to Europeans (or to the Chinese Court - to use another example) whose powerful imagery created cliches and shaped dis­courses. Adding West African societies to the analysis, a fourth type appears, “landlord-stranger reciprocity,” in which resident groups or the powerful men in these permit valued strangers to marry local women, a privilege that integrates them into the community. In such cases the mixed children may form a third group or be integrated into the culture of their mothers. This process was widespread in many regions of the globe.¹⁵

In the global fur belt from Scandinavia eastward through Siberia to (Russian) Alaska and westward via Labrador and the James Bay region to the Rockies, investor companies in Moscow, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Paris, and London sent men into locally resident communities. Scots came to North America through the Hudson's Bay Company, for example, and French- Canadians through the Northwest Company. Unfamiliar with the terrain, cultures, and hunting possibilities, they formed unions with resident women according to the “customs of the country” and thus pooled resources and long-distance connections with local expertise: language, networks, and connections to hunters. The peaceful, commercial in-migration changed material culture and gender relations: pelt preparation with an iron knife instead of brittle bones simplified women's work, but producing for markets in addition to family needs increased their workload. From these unions, a French- and English-language Metis population emerged; the change from hunting for local demand to harvesting furs for distant markets created inter­tribal rivalries and resulted in dislocations as well as out-migration of whole groups from depleted regions further inland. Already mobile groups thus had to increase the parameters of their migrations.¹⁶

Intermediaries derived a benefit from their activities; those men and women forced to work for Europeans usually did not. Often their standard of living was reduced to subsistence and bare survival. Many died from overwork or undernourishment.

Labor regimes

The colonizers' labor regimes have usually been associated with forced migrations, slavery in particular. Their impact on migration took a variety of forms, however: immobilizing resident men and women as workers, forcing them to move themselves over shorter or larger distances, or trans­porting them to distant “extractive economies,” plantations or mines. At first,

1 ⁵ Alida C. Metcalf, Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600 (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006); George E. Brooks, Landlords and Strangers. Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).

1 ⁶ Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001). the Portuguese warrior merchants achieved control over shipping in the Indian Ocean and blocked trade through Arab and Ottoman ports (and thus through Venice and Genoa) in favor of the circum-African route and Lisbon. From the 1590s, the Dutch colonizer migrants imposed plantation production on the “South Sea spice islands” by immobilizing local populations, forcing them into short-distance, intra-island migrations, or transporting them between islands for enslaved plantation labor (“factories in the fields”). Subsequently, the mass production for European investors secured by Euro­pean states enforced mass migrations on West and Central African popula­tions - Wolof, Mandinka, Yoruba, Songhai, and Hausa among others - as well as on some in East Africa. From about 1500 to the end of the trade in the 1870s, over 3.8 million slaves were force-migrated to the British, French, Dutch, and Danish Caribbean, 3.6 million to Brazil, 1.6 million into Spanish America, and 0.4 million to British North America: a total of 125,000 from 1450 to 1600, 1.3 million in the next century, 6 million 1701-1810, and another 1.9 million from the legal end of the trade to the 1870s. At the height of the trade 60,000 men and women were kidnapped each year. Some were force- migrated repeatedly: Those destined for the (still colonial) United States were “broken in” in the Caribbean and, later, when the US coastal regions' soils were exhausted, slaves were moved to the new production region along the Mississippi. In Brazil, slaves were moved from the declining northeast to the new, southern Sao Paulo plantations or inland to mining operations. Slavery was abolished as late as 1863/65 in the United States and in the 1880s in Brazil and Cuba (serfdom in Czarist Russia ended in 1861). After emancipation, racist exclusion from most economic sectors meant that continent-wide African-Americans' out-migration from plantation regions was slow. Since slaves served terms for life, they had to develop distinct cultures to survive and to socialize their children, even though under extreme constraints. This has best been studied for Brazil to where the voyage from Africa was comparatively short and where men and women from specific African cultures lived in proximity. They re-established religious and social insti­tutions and, given their large numbers, negotiated room of their own from the Portuguese. A population of free Africans, manumitted or self-purchased, added to the vibrant cultures.^[13]

Slaves from Asia were imported to Spanish America via Spanish Manila in a first, brief transpacific migration system, lasting from the 1570s to the 1590s, and free Chinese, extending their practices of diaspora-formation, came as well. Lima, Peru, and Mexico City had Asian-origin populations.

Mining led to various types of migration patterns in different parts of the world. Demand for labor in Peru's silver mines, especially those of Potosi, increased from the 1550s. The new city, temporarily the largest in the Americas, had 120,000-160,000 inhabitants in the seventeenth century. From 1574, the mita system of labor allocation forced resident people in a belt extending 1400 km in length and 400 km in width to migrate to the mines. In the months-long journey, mitayos had to bring families, food, and other supplies. The mita de plaza obliged adult males to work locally or in nearby towns. All mita service was disruptive, the Potosi mita deadly. The labor reservoirs' total population declined from 81,000 to 10,600 within a few decades. In the Malay Peninsula, in contrast, mine laborers were Chinese credit-ticket migrants who, having worked off the cost of passage, were free. They worked for Chinese investors and Chinese markets and, from the late sixteenth century, for European ore traders. Most came from specific loca­tions in the Fujian region of southern China for a period of several months or years and, with their earnings, supported their families in their villages of origin. In Europe, mine labor was free, but mine workers moved over great distances from exhausted veins to new strikes.^[14]

European settler migrations and the expulsion of resident peoples

White settlers, often families, migrated to European colonizer acquisitions as agriculturalists, extending beyond coastal enclaves to ever larger territories: from the later sixteenth century in Spanish America; from the early seven­teenth century in North America and increasingly in Portuguese America; as well as in South Africa, which was founded as a half-way provision station between Europe and Southeast Asia. (Such peasant migrations had taken place earlier in sub-Saharan Africa and in China in far larger numbers, but had not involved backing by state power and conquest.) Regions north of the Black Sea and in the Balkans, acquired when the Romanov and Habsburg empires pushed back Ottoman rule, attracted peasant migrants. Wherever such settlers arrived, they - or the armies of their states of origin - dislodged resident peoples. In formerly Ottoman regions, for example, agricultural producers of Islamic faith were forced to flee, and the oft-used phrase, “the peopling of the Americas,” actually refers to a re-peopling: “First” Peoples were expelled by arriving “Second” Peoples and vast refugee migrations often ensued. The “Second Peoples,” seemingly homogeneous as colonizers, were internally differentiated. They consisted of investors and colonizer personnel, self-funded “free” migrants, larger numbers of men and women migrating under indentures, and deportees.

Despite the traditional emphasis on European “settlement” resulting from an ideology of white superiority, before the 1830s more Africans than Europeans came to the Americas. But since the procreation of Africans was hindered through often deadly labor and prohibition of family formation, white immigrants procreated faster. They imposed their superiority by force and rule and, with the exception of the Caribbean societies and Brazil, achieved superiority in numbers.

It also needs to be reinserted into historical memory that up to about 1800, one-half to two-thirds of the migrants from Europe came under indentures, i.e. were temporarily not free. Depending on the laws of their country of origin reflected in their contracts, they had to work for three to seven years to pay off the cost of their passage - longer than the Chinese in Southeast Asia whose credit-ticket system, under which employers advanced the cost of travel, required several months to three years to work of the debt. Since they redeemed their freedom such “indentured servants” were also called redemptioners.

A further aspect of European migrations involved involuntary exile. The “exile from Erin,” the migration of millions of Irish displaced by British colonization and the resulting famine, has been well studied. Another case is that of European men and “non-white” women forming consensual unions and families. The men and their families could not return. In South Africa, for example, settlement offered income through the provisioning of ships on the Europe-to-Asia or from-Asia-to-Europe routes with fresh food. Dutch men returning from the Southeast Asian colonies with non-white wives and mixed children had to settle there since racist legislation prevented their return to the Netherlands. “Dutch” settlement in South Africa thus involved migrants from the Netherlands and migrants from Dutch-ruled Southeast Asia. A different case is Australia, first settled by deported men and some women, considered criminal under contemporary English law - often for no more than the theft of food - and by men deported for political dissent from other parts of the empire such as Canada. Settlement of Australia began after the American War of Independence when the British Empire could no longer deport its “criminals” to North America. In South Africa such settlers displaced or enslaved the Khoi, in Australia the Aborigines. Thus state policies shape migration, and the migrants, in turn, with the help of the state displace resident peoples thus creating further mobilities.

In the British Empire, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were called the “white” colonies - migration and racialization were closely entwined. Racial- ization has also been part of the historiography of agricultural settlement migration. The focus by historians socialized in Western Europe/North Amer­ica on the thirteen British colonies that became the United States minimizes the number of Africans in the Americas, as only a relatively small share of the people taken in slavery from Africa ended up in North America. In addition, historians' emphasis on the East Coast British colonies overlooks the fact that the European settlement of North America began with the Spanish. In 1565 the Spanish established St. Augustine in Florida. Spanish settlers came to New Mexico in 1598 - nearly twenty years before English settlers came to Jamestown in Virginia - where earlier in-migrating pueblo peoples had lived for five centuries. The focus on English colonies also ignores the fact that from the later sixteenth century a few Russian colonies emerged along the Pacific Coast and that French immigrants settled the St. Lawrence and Mississippi valleys from 1604. Also, the thirteen colonies were not simply British: In addition to English, Scots, Irish, and Welsh, French-, German-, and Spanish-language migrants came, as did Walloons, Dutch, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes, and Finns. In Spanish Florida, men and women from Minorca, Livorno, and Greece made their homes. Religious refugees included Pietists, Moravians, Hugue­nots, Mennonites, and Old Order Amish from many parts of Europe. Lutheran Palatines fled devastations of war and overcrowded crafts, Catholics the dis­crimination in Protestant states. Scholarly simplifications that reduce North America to one Anglo-America or - similarly - talk of “the Chinese” in Southeast Asian cities and mines, reduce diversity to one imagined group, constructed as superior and dominant if white, as inferior intermediaries if “yellow.”

The few and the many: a comprehensive perspective on migrations

This chapter provides a bird's eye view emphasizing major developments in this era: the migrations of armed Europeans, the forced migrations especially out of Africa, and the transatlantic settler family migrations to farmlands, which they emptied of the resident peoples. The “settlers” were, in fact, refugee-generating migrants who resettled lands. The bird's eye view thus shortchanges the myriads of moves in all societies of the globe. It also generalizes resident peoples, often highly mobile, into one essentialized and inferior cultural or genetic group. People, regardless of color of skin, moved to feed themselves, escape from the violence of war, avoid elite- imposed tax and labor burdens, or depart from constraining ecologies. They moved with an expectation of improving their living conditions, and studying their migrations emphasizes the breadth of human agency while providing a perspective different from heroic pioneer stories and the lore of intercontin­ental mass migrations of whites.

In all rural regions across the globe where plots provided subsistence for one single family, only two of all children reaching adulthood could remain on the land. The others had to migrate, whether to less densely settled tillable land or to wage labor in towns and cities. The putting-out system of manufacturing - cloth-weaving, lace-making, small-scale smithery of household utensils - could feed additional mouths, until the centralization of production ended such local income-generation. Rural life and farming families in the Yangzi Valley, in the upper Rhine-Black Forest region, or in Malay society could be sheltering, but such a life was also restraining. Towns and cities permitted increased options and ways of earning a subsistence when land became scarce. Thus rural-urban migrations provided escape from undernourishment or a chance to select between options. Historians cannot trace the multitude of individual migra­tions, but demographic data on urban growth and decline, on mortality rates, and on the share of in-migrants in a central place's expansion - though incomplete - reflect such human agency. While societal traditions and prac­tices - spiritual-religious prescripts, social stratification, ecological constraints or opportunities - limited migration, perceived options elsewhere provided room for agency to implement different life-courses and to pursue plans and projects. Cities attracted - and in periods of economic contraction pushed out - especially adolescent men and women seeking to become independent from parental families. This was the case in London or Cordoba, Isfahan or Samar­kand, Timbuktu or Alexandria, Beijing or Kyoto, Tenochtitlan or Cuzco. Some cities, such as those in the Islamic realm where ritual washings were pre­scribed, provided a healthier environment than did rural areas. Europe's cities, in contrast, were demographic black holes given the death rates caused by unsanitary conditions. Only constant in-migration could keep a (Christian) city from declining in size, while other (Muslim) ones grew.

At propitious locations, traders or rulers developed nodes of exchange or planned cities to advance economic development and dynastic interests. St. Petersburg is one example, as is Edo, the city that later became Tokyo. Two decades after its founding in 1703, St. Petersburg counted 40,000 inhabit­ants, while Edo, a coastal village at mid-fifteenth century, had a population of over one million in the early eighteenth. Istanbul's growth required state- enforced as well as state-supported importation of peasant families to sur­rounding regions to assure food supplies. Such places of exchange required connections: The building of canals in China and of roads in the Inca's realm required mass migrations of earth workers and were utilized to stabilize food supplies between regions and thus reduce need-driven migrations.

Towns and cities - unless destroyed by warfare or expulsion - provide an image of growth and dynamic development, which attracted migrants. By contrast, rural areas have been viewed as culturally immobile - the old “from time immemorial” adage - or, economically, as regions of backwardness and stagnation. Social histories of villages tell a different story, however. In France, for example, few families can be traced for more than three gener­ations in one place; in China young people departed from villages short of land to terrace nearby or distant hills and thus increase usable acreage. Such short-distance migration and terracing also occurred (in an earlier period) among the pueblo peoples in southwestern North America and on the steep Alpine slopes bordering the Mediterranean littoral. The long climatic cooling period from the 1550s to the early 1800s, sometimes labeled Little Ice Age, forced rural families to cope - by adapting grains, reducing food intake, expanding acreage - or to migrate.

Beyond the simplistic rural-urban dualism, variations between regional economies explain patterns of migration. Port cities, mines, and lumbering belts attract differently skilled people. Mining families would not select seafaring jobs in port cities. They might transit ports when being recruited from their region of birth and training, e.g. from the German-language area to sixteenth-century Venezuela or nineteenth-century Australia. Transporta­tion nodes, like ports, are places of transit permitting cultural exchange or a stopover to earn the funds for the next leg of the migration. The construction of migrants as defined by ethnicity, created in the nineteenth century under the national identity paradigm but still in use today, does not reflect actual transcultural interaction often based on craft or religion. In the early eight­eenth century in recently founded St. Petersburg, for example, one large building housed an Armenian priest, a German pastor, and artisans of German, English, and French background. In Lima, Peru, a ship arriving in 1544 brought the Corsican owner, the Greek captain, and a crew of Genoese, Corsican, Greek, and Slavic men - mariners' skills rather than ethnicity counted. A city's skilled artisans and merchants often were foreigners: In St. Petersburg, for example, silversmiths and tailors, came from Flemish towns, while traders included English and French.

Thus physical environment and natural conditions provide a frame for settled or mobile life-courses; elite-imposed exactions or development projects expel or attract people; and societal as well as spiritual norms have an impact on migration decisions. The position of women under Confucian, Christian, and some other religions' prescripts reduced their options to migrate. Norms were not always followed, however. Among Christians, the dogma enjoining a passive acceptance of conditions in this world for a paradise in another could be questioned by a realization that better living conditions could be achieved in this world: Migration to a different place and space would not bring paradise, but it would bring more bread. Migrants left local and regional constraint structures in the frame of larger ideological, religious, political, and social-hierarchical discourses. They never left aggregate or generic entities, mere figures of speech - like “China," “England,” or any other polity.

Since settler and urban artisanal or laboring migrants had to be able to provide for their subsistence immediately after arrival, they selected destin­ations where their human capital, skills or lack of them, would be usable without intermediate periods of adaptation (and lack of income). Their “inter­mediaries” or, better, “facilitators” were earlier migrants from their commu­nities or broader culture of departure. Thus they connected economic regions rather than polities or followed craft routes rather than heading for famous cities. Since realization of human capital requires networks, i.e. social capital, they would head to where fellow craftsmen, sister domestics, kin or immediate family had settled before. Their migration decisions were translocal and trans-regional. Mercantilist states, whether China or the Ottoman Empire, Prussia or Persia, might offer stimulus funds to attract migrants. But their insertion occurred on the regional, local, craft, or agricultural level. Migrants looked for options, rather than for, as nineteenth-century US expansionist propaganda termed it, unlimited opportunities. They left constraining struc­tures for option-providing ones. Such goals could require short-, medium-, or long-distance migrations, with the latter more costly than the former.¹⁹

1⁹ Christiane Harzig, Dirk Hoerder with Donna Gabaccia, What is Migration History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).

Migration both of agricultural families and of colonizer men was to some degree interrupted during the wars for independence in the Americas, 1776-1821, and the revolutionary-imperialist-antirevolutionary wars across Europe. The Enlightenment and revolutionary concepts of human beings and the rights of men - together with economic cost calculations - would come to influence and change forced labor regimes and migrations in the nineteenth century.²⁰

FURTHER READING

Abu-Lughod, Janet L., Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

Ajayi, J. F. A. and Michael Crowder (eds.), History of West Africa, 2 vols. (1st edn., 1974; London: Longman, 1987).

Andrews, Kenneth R., Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480-1630 (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Bakewell, Peter, “Mining in Colonial Spanish America,” Cambridge History of Latin America (ed.) Leslie Bethell, 9 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1984-2008), vol. ii, chap. 4. Bennassar, Bartolome and Pierre Chaunu (eds.), Vouverture du monde, xιve-xvιe siecles (Paris: Colin, 1977).

Bentley, Jerry H., Old World Encounters. Cross-Cultural Contacts and Exchanges in Pre-Modern Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

Blank, Inge, “A Vast Migratory Experience: Eastern Europe in the Pre- and Post­Emancipation Era (1780-1914),” in Dirk Hoerder et al., Roots of the Transplanted, 2 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), vol. I, pp. 201-51.

Borgolte, Michael, Europa entdeckt seine Vielfalt: 1050 - 1250 (Stuttgart: Ulmer, 2002).

Borgolte, Michael, ''Migrationen als transkulturelle Verflechtungen im mittelalterlichen Europa. Ein neuer Pflug fur alte Forschungsfelder," Historische Zeitschrift 289 (2009): 261-85.

Bosma, Ulbe and Remco Raben, Being “Dutch” in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500-1920, trans. Wendie Shaffer (Singapore: NUS Press, and Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2008).

Brooks, George E., Landlords and Strangers. Ecology, Society, and Trade in Western Africa, 1000-1630 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993).

Chaudhuri, Kirti N., Trade and Civilization in the Indian Ocean: An Economic Historyfrom the Rise of Islam to 1750 (Cambridge University Press, 1985).

Crosby, Alfred W., The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492. 1973, new edn. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003).

Curtin, Philip D., Cross-Cultural Tradein World History (Cambridge University Press, 1984).

Curtin, Philip D., The Atlantic Slave Trade. A Census (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969).

Hoerder, Cultures in Contact, chaps. 7.5, 8.5, 9.3-9.5.

Curto, Jose C. and Renee Soulodre-La France (eds.), Africa and the Americas: Interconnec­tions during the Slave Trade (Trenton, NJ, and Asmara: Africa World Press, 2005).

Falola, Toyin and Okpeh Ochayi Okpeh, Jr. (eds.), Population Movements, Conflicts and Displacement in Nigeria (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2008).

Falola, Toyin and Paul E. Lovejoy (eds.), Pawnship in Africa. Debt Bondage in Historical Perspective (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1994).

Gibson, Charles, “Indian Societies Under Spanish Rule,” Cambridge History of Latin America (ed.) Leslie Bethell, 9 vols. (Cambridge University Press, 1984-2008), vol. ii, chap. ιι.

Harzig, Christiane, Dirk Hoerder with Donna Gabaccia, What is Migration History? (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).

Ho, Ping-to, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Cambridge University Press, 1959). Hoerder, Dirk, Cultures in Contact: World Migrations in the Second Millennium (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002).

Kasaba, Resat, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees (Seattle, WA: University of Washington, 2009).

Kuhn, Philip A., Chinese among Others. Emigration in Modern Times (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008).

Meilink-Roelofsz, Maria A. P., Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago between 1500 and about 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962).

Metcalf, Alida C., Go-Betweens and the Colonization of Brazil, 1500-1600 (Austin, TX: Univer­sity of Texas Press, 2006).

Parthasarathi, Prasannan, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India 1720-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Queiros Mattoso, Katia M. de, To Be a Slave in Brazil, 1550-1880 (1986; 4th edn., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers, 1994).

Reid, Anthony, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce: The Lands Below the Winds (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1988).

Richard, Francis, Le siecle d’Ispahan (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).

Rossabi, Morris (ed.), China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and Its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).

Saad, Elias N., Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1983).

Sanchez-Albornoz, Nicolas, The Population of Latin America: A History, trans. W. A. R. Richardson (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974).

Sarkar, Jagadish N., Studies in Economic Life in Mughal India (Delhi: Oriental Publishers, 1975).

Sherman, William L., Forced Native Laborin Sixteenth-Century CentralAmerica (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).

Simkin, C. G. F., The Traditional Trade of Asia (Oxford University Press, 1968).

Sleeper-Smith, Susan, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001).

Smith, Alan K., Creating a World Economy. Merchant Capital, Colonialism, and World Trade 1400-1825 (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991).

Thornton, John K., Africa and the Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800, rev. edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Patterns of warfare, 1400-1800

JEREMY BLACK

War was important. It transformed societies, moulded states, destroyed communities and struck deep into the experience of families. War was also complex as a phenomenon and varied as a means of activity and experience. In trying to provide an overview, some historians prefer unitary arguments, tying seemingly disparate military events, settings, cultures and develop­ments into a coherent theme or superstructure. Although such an approach provides coherence and clarity, thematic descriptions and accounts, notably the established ones, such as the ‘Military Revolution', the ‘gunpowder empires', or the advent of the ‘fiscal-military state', raise many questions. Moreover, there were events and processes that can undermine storylines of technological determinism, Western global dominance and bureaucratic centralisation.

History, indeed, is a messy process, and an understanding of the diversity of conflicts around the globe offers important correctives to the well- established, but overly simple, narrative of modernisation, with its stress on the decline of cavalry and the rise, in contrast, of infantry, artillery and fortifications. Moreover, success and failure were the result of local condi­tions and demands, rather than reflections of the ‘inherent' benefits of certain technologies or formations. These points underline both the more general difficulties in establishing the relative capability of protagonists, and the need for more fresh work in the subject. The latter is especially required for Southeast and Central Asia, for sub-Saharan Africa, and for Iran after 1750. In some cases, there are serious problems with the availability of evidence, but there are always opportunities for more work and for integrating this work into general accounts.

In the period 1400-1550, there were important struggles between the Ming Chinese and the Mongols, as well as the establishment of the Mughal, Safavid, Ottoman and Habsburg empires. In the eighteenth century, the Chinese greatly extended their power over non-Chinese peoples, while the Mughal (Indian) and, even more, Safavid (Persian) dynasties collapsed, and the fate of North America was largely settled, as was the struggle between Britain and France in India. The claim that supply problems made achieving strategic objectives only rarely possible is not vindicated by the campaigning, much of which delivered results in terms of victories won and territory conquered. Russia became a great power, the Turks were pushed back in Europe, and, in the 1790s, French hegemony in Western Europe was restored, albeit temporarily. War led to the rise of a number of other powers in the eighteenth century, including Afghanistan under the Durranis, Burma under 'Alaung-hpaya, and Gurkha Nepal. The means available could deliver many of the results required.

Some of the consequences of this military activity have lasted to today. British success over France ensured that North America would have a political culture derived from Britain. A French-dominated transoceanic world would have looked to Catholicism, civil law, French culture and language, and to different notions of representative government and politics from those of Britain.

Alongside differences between particular types of conflict and specific contexts, there were fundamentals to warfare throughout the period and across the world. An overall matrix of military activity, in which scale, political development, social characteristics, and environmental constraints were linked and mutually interacting, produces transcontinental parallels.

First and most obviously, but so taken for granted that it was (and is) scarcely subject for mention, the conduct of warfare in all societies was very much the duty of men. The direct involvement of women as fighters was exceptional, although women were closely involved with conflict: their agricultural labour was crucial to the economic survival of societies at war, and they were war's victims, directly or indirectly, sustaining physical, mental, social and economic injuries. In particular, the rape and enslavement of women were habitual in raiding warfare.

Second, the relatively low level of applied technology, even in the most developed societies, ensured that the patterns of warfare worldwide remained subject to common environmental and physical constraints. The absence of any real understanding of the causes and vectors of infectious diseases in humans and animals, combined with low agricultural productivity and the limited nature of industrial activity, ensured that population and productivity figures were low everywhere, by modern standards. The poten­tial pool of warriors was thus lower than what it would be in 1900, and the predominance of agriculture in the world economy meant that fighting men were most available outside the harvesting season. When compared with the armies deployed today, however, early modern armies were often larger, and represented a much larger percentage of the population.

Third, power sources were limited. Most military labour was probably exerted by generally malnourished human or animal muscle, which greatly restricted the effectiveness of military operations, notably in the ability to move rapidly. In addition, other power sources were natural and fixed: water and wind power and the burning of wood, a bulky and immobile product. These power sources, which did not change during the period, could not be moved with armies or fleets, which further limited their mobility. Military operations were dependent on resources obtained en route, such as the wind to power ships, food raised by contributions or confiscation, and the forage secured for animals.

Fourth, there were no rapid communications on land or sea, which affected both planning and operations. The movements of soldiers, sup­plies and messages were far slower than after the transformations brought by steam power and telegraphy in the nineteenth century. Messages moved by courier and boat, which caused problems in terms of speed and appropriate responses, and also difficulties in verifying information and instructions.

‘Little' wars and ‘big’ wars

The standard distinction between settled societies and nomadic or semi- nomadic peoples captures contrasts in the scale and organisation of warfare. Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, who generally relied on pastoral agri­culture or slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, were less populous and their governmental structures were less developed. These people did not there­fore tend to develop military specialisation, especially in fortification and siegecraft. While the agricultural surplus and taxation base of settled agrarian societies permitted the development of logistical mechanisms to support permanent specialised military units, nomadic peoples generally lacked such units, and had far less organised logistical systems. Examples include the peoples of North America, highland Southeast Asia, and those of New Guinea and most of Borneo.

The lack of specialisation did not mean that their response to circum­stances was in any way primitive. In war, these peoples, and others also lacking a defined state system, often relied on raiding their opponents, and generally sought to avoid battle, although there was also frequently endemic violence between villages, clans and tribes, as in North America. As a result, many, if not most, settlements were fortified.

Most history of warfare does not include such conflicts. In part this is because written sources about non-agricultural peoples are generally limited, but also because the standard emphasis in the history of war is on warfare between states and battles between specialised military units. As a result, much of the discussion fails to give sufficient weight to the alternative ‘little war' of raids, skirmishes and small-scale clashes that were far more frequent aspects of war, both for nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples and for settled societies with specialised units. Moreover, this ‘little war' was an important feature of ‘big war' that could undermine or undo the consequences of victory in battle. This level of conflict was one in which the mobility of cavalry and light infantry proved especially valuable, while the slower- moving formations and tactics of the battlefield were largely irrelevant.

As yet, there has been no systematic or global study of ‘little war', although distinctions between the regular forces of the state engaged in such fighting and irregulars were often far from clear. Moreover, irregular forces could be very substantial, and several represented bodies with some of the attributes of independent statehood. Although the Chinese over­came the Zunghars of Xinjiang and the Russians conquered and annexed the Khanate of the Crimea, the Cossacks were only really subjugated by Russia in the eighteenth century. Such forces were to be subjugated across the world in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but, prior to that, should not be regarded as necessarily less effective than the ‘high end' of warfare.

The assessment of raiding war suffers as well from the extent to which military cultures have been constructed and greatly simplified by outsiders, frequently in a form of Orientalism. This process has involved misleading categorisations in terms of militarism or passivity, sophistication or primitiv­ism, and innovation or conservatism. War-making was in practice culturally specific in particular societies. Moreover, the culture and society of war could change in its characteristics and/or manifestations, as when Japan in the early seventeenth century essentially gave up war while maintaining many of the cultural and social attributes of bellicosity.

Military capabilities and actions were framed in accordance both with the tasks or goals that political and military contexts gave rise to, and with the possibilities they created. These pull-and-push dynamics could be seen in terms of strategies, operations and tactics, each of which reflected tasks and possibilities.

The ‘Military Revolution'

Perhaps the most influential general concept of warfare in this period, first posited by Michael Roberts, has been that a ‘Military Revolution' occurred in Western Europe during the early modern period from a combination of new weaponry (particularly weapons using gunpowder), new tactics and much larger armies. This revolution, as the argument goes, then spread outward. There are problems with this conceptualisation, however. Many of the changes used to define the military revolution discerned in the early modern West, such as larger armies, greater military expenditure and new tactics, all had medieval precedents. The combined armed tactics - in which different types of weapons were used in the same battle - of the Military Revolution were far easier to discuss in training manuals, which emphasised drill, and to attempt in combat than they were to execute successfully under the strain of battle (Figure 2.1). Moreover, the contrasting fighting characteristics of the individual arms - muskets, pike, cavalry and cannon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries - operated very differently in particular circumstances, which posed added problems for coordination. So also did the limited extent to which many generals and officers understood these characteristics and problems, which affected the ability to triumph in battle.

These issues of coordination help explain the significance of the move in the 1690s-1700s away from the musket-pike combination, in which soldiers carrying muskets were accompanied by soldiers carrying pikes, to the fusion presented by firearms-mounting bayonets, in which each foot-soldier carried a similar weapon. The simultaneous shift from matchlock to flintlock muskets improved their reliability, and thus also increased the ability to rely on firearms to offer protection against cavalry and infantry attack. These changes possibly increased the effectiveness of Western armies more than had the earlier changes to gunpowder weapons by themselves.

The technology of gunpowder may also have had less of an impact than theories about the Military Revolution attribute to it, as it was introduced into a very varied and dynamic global military environment. These variations helped influence, if not determine, the response to gunpowder weaponry, and thus affected its impact at the tactical, operational and strategic levels. Moreover, the thesis of a gunpowder revolution faces other questions, particularly when approached on a global comparative scale. If the earlier introduction of gunpowder in China did not lead to revolutionary changes, why should the situation have been different, or be regarded as different, in the West? Furthermore, although gunpowder provided the basis for different

Figure 2.1: An illustration of the tactical use of artillery from the military manual ‘L'Art de TArtillerie' by Wolff de Senftenberg, late sixteenth century

forms of handheld projectile weaponry and artillery on land and sea, the technique of massed projectile weaponry was not new. Leaving aside models from the ancient world, such as those of classical Greece, Macedonia and Rome that were revived in the Western Renaissance of the fifteenth century, the large, disciplined, trained infantry armies created in China were a basis for subsequent developments in weapons use. Gunpowder weaponry was thus an agent by which changes in warfare were effected, rather than a cause of those changes. Changes in weapons (technology) were important in so far as they were marshalled by doctrine and cultural habit of use (technique).

The timing and rate of change are also issues in assessing whether there was a Military Revolution in the early modern period. The standard account posits one period of revolution from 1560 to 1660, followed by a period of conservatism, indecisiveness and stagnation, then a second period of revolu­tion that began with the outbreak of the War of American Independence in 1775, and continued with the French Revolutionary Wars to 1815. However, if military revolutions are sought, then nothing in the West in the period 1560-1815 matched the early sixteenth-century deployment of gunpowder weaponry in long-range warships and on the battlefield, nor the sweeping organisational and technological changes of the last half of the nineteenth century. And if major technological innovations occurred prior to 1500 and if until the nineteenth century change was essentially incremental and fre­quently at a sluggish rate, then the pace of change was not exactly revolution­ary, either.

In addition, the thesis of a Military Revolution that spread as a piece from the West has limited traction. There was a borrowing of certain types of European military technology in parts of the world beyond Europe, for example in Japan in the sixteenth century and in northern India by the late eighteenth century. However, the paradigm-diffusion model of military progress, which proposes that there was an ideal model of activity, and that its methods spread as a piece, has serious problems, not least because it argues for a clear ranking of military powers. Instead, borrowing, where it occurred, was often only effective because it fitted in with, or could be made to appear to fit in with, existing practices and force structures and the related cultural assumptions. This process of fitting in encouraged a borrowing of totemic aspects of foreign practices in the early modern period, rather than a transformation of the military system such as that seen in Japan in the late nineteenth century. For example, Western artillery experts in China in the seventeenth century, notably Jesuits such as Ferdinand Verbiest, provided effective cannon, but these were essentially an add-on to existing structures and practices, and did not transform the nature of Chinese war-making. Indeed, add-ons were the most common form of diffusion and help explain the success of the process. In addition, the close-order tactics employed in battle in Western Europe were not very serviceable in many contexts around the world. The Safavids and the Uzbeks used gunpowder weapons, but not the tactics that have been viewed as an important part of the Military Revolution.

The extent to which the expansion of Western power can be attributed to the Military Revolution is questionable. Other factors played a major role in this expansion, notably the disunity of opponents and the ability to win local support, as in the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. This process was also seen with non-Western expansion in which gunpowder weapons played a role, notably that of the Mughals in India in the sixteenth century, in which their ability to win local Rajput support was important in their success. It is far from obvious that Western superiority existed in India until the 1750s, and perhaps not until the 1790s and 1800s; it may not have existed in China until the 1830s or, more clearly, i860. Prior to that, it is more appropriate to note the more complex, contingent and varied nature of relative military capabil­ity, and also to give due weight to the non-military factors that help account for differences in success in particular regions. There were other dynamic powers in the world whose success is not necessarily explicable in terms of a Western-style Military Revolution, or, indeed, of developments that parallel those in the West. If a common pattern is to be discerned across the world, it is one in which there was also a considerable measure of continuity with earlier circumstances and practices. Moreover, if military revolution means an abrupt change and a fundamental development in capabilities, organisa­tion or goals, then none occurred in this period; but such revolutions anyway are much less common than is frequently argued. Rather, it is more common for change to occur incrementally, not least in response to the pressure of circumstances.

The Ottomans

One area in which significant changes in warfare developed outside of Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was the Ottoman Empire, which created a highly effective military system. The Ottoman army, and even more the navy, of 1600 were very different from those of 1450, such that there was a sustained transformation in Ottoman war-making. While not as far-flung as the military ventures of Portugal or Spain, the range of large-scale Ottoman campaigning on land was not matched by any other power. The principal opponents were the Safavids and Habsburgs, and Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-66), who personally led his army on thirteen campaigns, responded pragmatically to the challenges they posed. The list of opponents also included Venice, Moldavia, Malta and Portugal, as well as rebellions in the Ottoman lands.

Ottoman strength was based upon the resources of a large empire, especially of Egypt and the Middle East, on an ideology that saw war against the non-believer as a duty, and on a society structured for the effective prosecution of a war. Troops were deployed in accordance with a grand strategy based on a considered analysis of intelligence and policy options, and drawing on a formidable and well-articulated logistical system. The nucleus

Figure 2.2: Ottomanjanissaries armed with guns attack the fortress at Rhodes in 1522, in a miniature from the Suleymaname, a court chronicle prepared at the court of Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent

of the Ottoman army was the Janissary Corps - from the Turkish yeni cheri (“new troops”) - a group of professional soldiers recruited originally from non-Muslim war captives from newly conquered areas, and later primarily from the sultan's Christian subjects in Greece and the Balkans (Figure 2.2). Boys who became janissaries were taken away from their families at a young age, raised in Turkish foster homes, and sent to schools for military and other training. They were legally slaves of the sultan, but they could gain power and prestige through their service; the most capable became senior officials and ambassadors as well as admirals and generals. The highest janissary often held the office of grand vizier, second only to the sultan. In times of war, the janissaries were supplemented by paid troops recruited from throughout the empire; in the early sixteenth century, Suleyman regularly fielded an army of 150,000 troops every year, equipped with huge siege cannons.

Numerous Western observers commented on the discipline and organisa­tion of the Ottoman army on the march. Its effectiveness included the use and organisation of firearms. Although the majority of the janissaries did not carry firearms until the mid-sixteenth century, the Ottomans made stronger and more reliable musket barrels than did their Western counterparts. Western musket barrels were constructed with longitudinal seams, whereas the Ottomans used flat sheets of steel coiled into a spiral, which produced great strength in the barrel. As was noted during the siege of Malta in 1565, their musket fire was more accurate than that of their Christian opponents. As far as organisation was concerned, the Ottomans had a separate corps of gunners, and another of gun-carriage drivers, leading to a cohesion and continuity in the artillery that was largely absent in Western armies. Benefit­ing, moreover, from their self-sufficiency in workmen and raw materials, the Ottomans proved a crucial source of firearms technology in the Islamic world. This provision was linked to the impressive and planned effort that enabled the Ottomans to mount naval efforts in the Indian Ocean. These efforts have been presented as part of a globally informed political response to Portuguese power, although the extent of this commitment has also been questioned.

Along with changes in offensive technology, fortifications also changed in the sixteenth century, but the impact of these changes is also not always clear. During the Thirteen Years' War (1593-1606) between the Ottomans and the Austrian Habsburgs, for example, the Ottomans were able to capture many of the fortresses, including Gyor in 1594, Eger in 1596, Kanissa in 1600 and Esztergom in 1605, that had recently been modified by the Austrians using the cutting-edge Italian expertise of the period (Figure 2.3). Thus advances in fortifications did not provide a paradigm leap (or revolution) forward in the defensiveness of Christendom, but were only as good as their defenders and logistical support. Thus it is necessary to consider the advances in fortification, like other developments, in terms of particular circumstances. The Ottomans had no equivalent to the trace italienne, the star-shaped fortification designed by Italians, or to the extensive fortifications built in the Austrian-ruled section of Hungary or along the coasts of Naples and Sicily against Barbary raids, but they did not require any such fortifications, as they had not been under equivalent attack. They had a realistic perception of the

Figure 2.3: Ottoman armies besiege the fortified city of Neuhausel (now Nove Zamky) in Slovakia in 1663, in an engraving from a book on the Ottoman campaigns in Europe

potential and might of the adversary, and judged they would not need elaborate fortifications (Figure 2.4).

Nevertheless, it would be mistaken to suggest that there was not a change in the balance of advantage in some respects. The Austrian combination of firepower and battlefield fortifications proved particularly effective. Ottoman reports admiring Austrian cannon captured in the Thirteen Years' War suggest that a technological gap in cannon-casting had begun to open by then, although recent work has corrected the earlier view that the Ottomans concentrated on large cannon, rather than larger numbers of more manoeuv­rable smaller cannon, and has, instead, emphasised that their ordnance was dominated by small and medium-sized cannon. It has also been shown that they were able to manufacture an adequate supply of gunpowder.

At the same time, the Austrians had improved their military response to the Ottomans not least by regularising the transfer of funds from the empire (Germany) and the Habsburg dominions and by establishing a new adminis­trative system for the frontier. For example, armouries were transformed into arsenals; the activities of military architects were coordinated in the Border Fortress Captain Generalcies by a Superintendent of Construction

Figure 2.4: Plan of the Citadel of Turin in 1664, showing trace italienne, the star-shaped fortifications designed to withstand cannon

and, after 1569, by the Fortress Construction Commissioner; a new post, the Chief Provisions Supply Officer for Hungary, was established; and in 1577 a military conference in Vienna produced an informed plan for the adminis­tration and improvement of frontier fortresses.

At the same time, the improvements in the Austrian military did not match Ottoman capability: there was a lack of standing forces, and the central administration and logistical underpinning of war were overly dependent on the support of the local Estates (Parliaments). The Ottomans were far stronger, which helps explain their earlier conquest of Hungary. The Aus­trians, indeed, required a formidable effort in order to stem the Ottoman attacks that followed this conquest, and during the Thirteen Years' War they continued to rely on the subordinate parts of their empire, including the Wallachians, for assistance. No clear superiority on land was to be demon­strated until the defeat of the Ottomans by the Austrians and their allies in the 1680s. Thus the effectiveness of any Western transformation of the culture of war on land is unclear, and should not be exaggerated, in so far as the West's ability to expand at the expense of other powers was concerned. Indeed, while the pace of the Muslim assault on European Christendom by land and sea greatly slackened in the last two decades of the sixteenth century in part because of the strength of the response, this reduction was also due to the Ottoman focus on war with the Safavids and, to a lesser extent, Moroccan expansion across the Sahara. In the early seventeenth century, the Ottomans suffered their greatest military humiliation not at the hands of Austria or Poland, but from Persia, which did not enjoy any structural, material or tactical superiority, but, rather, the military and political skill of the energetic Shah Abbas. The ability of armies to fight on while under pressure was a key factor, as were experienced troops, other fighting methods alongside fire­power, leadership, and unit cohesion, all of which permitted an adaptation to the circumstances of the day, notably terrain and weather, as well as the moves of opponents. Muslim assaults also resumed with the eventually successful invasion of Venetian-ruled Crete in 1645, followed by offensives against Austria and in Ukraine, campaigns that do not fit with the habitual stress on Western expansion.

Warfare at sea

In the European world, it was British naval mastery and the use to which it was put that brought the most significant changes. This mastery was clear in the War of the Spanish Succession (1702-13), when it was devoted largely to the support of power projection in Europe, as exemplified by both the major British presence in the Low Countries and large-scale intervention in Spain and the western Mediterranean.

In the War of the Austrian Succession, the Royal Navy also focused on European waters, in part because of the French invasion attempt in 1744 and French invasion preparations in 1745-6. The British did not gain a clear position of naval mastery until 1747. Two impressive British victories off Cape Finisterre revealed that the French navy was unable to protect its long­distance trade. Having failed to fulfil expectations in the early stages of the war with Spain and, later, France (1739-48), the Royal Navy became an effective strategic force by 1747. By then, however, French successes in the Low Countries were the focus of British concern and planning.

The British position was challenged by the Bourbons in 1746-55, as France and Spain then launched more warships than Britain. Fortunately for Britain, Spain did not join the Seven Years' War until 1762, and, by then, her ally France had been seriously defeated at sea. The crucial campaign was that of 1759. Choiseul, the leading French minister, planned a naval concentration to cover an invasion of Britain, prefiguring Napoleon's plan in 1805. However, the division of the French navy between the far-apart bases of Brest and Toulon made a concentration of strength difficult, and the British benefited from this division to defeat the French squadrons separately in bold attacking actions at Lagos (Portugal) and Quiberon Bay. All possibility of a major French invasion of Britain was now gone, and the British were confirmed in their view that they were the naval power. The way was now fully open for the projection of power. In 1762, Havana, the leading Spanish naval and military base in the West Indies, was captured by a major amphibious operation.

The greater effectiveness of the British navy was largely due to its having more ships, to its extensive and effective administrative system, to the strength of public finances, and to good naval leadership. Britain had a more meritocratic promotion system and a more unified naval tradition than those of France, and a greater commitment of national resources to naval rather than land warfare, a political choice that reflected the major role of trade and the character of the national self-image. The French financial system lacked the institutional strength and stability of its British counterpart, and this lack badly affected French naval finances in 1759. The French also did not have an effective chain of naval command, and trade was less important to their government and their political culture.

Britain's commercial position was enhanced by the protection offered by the Royal Navy. Similarly, the ability to wreck the foreign trade of rivals could cripple their imperial systems and greatly hamper their economies. Even if it was not possible to inflict this degree of damage, higher insurance premiums, danger money for sailors, and the need to resort to convoys and other defensive measures, could push up the cost of trade. Vessels were seized by warships and by privateers - private vessels given licences to take enemy ships. Privateers were smaller and less heavily gunned than ships of the line, but they were more manoeuvrable and of shallower draught, and were thus more appropriate for commerce raiding. French privateering bases, especially St Malo and Dunkirk, proved difficult to contain, and the British suffered from the guerre de course (privateering war). At the same time, Britain's relative success against French and Spanish privateers owed much to the size of the navy.

In contrast to differences in size, Western navies were similar in their ships and weapons. Indeed, the thesis of the contemporary British historian Edward Gibbon that a similarity in weaponry would prevent any one West­ern power from achieving a position of hegemony was inaccurate as far as the

Figure 2.5: Oil painting by the Franco-British artist Dominic Serres (1722-93), the official naval painter for King George iii, shows a French man of war surrendering to a British ship

maritime world was concerned, and also with regard to the transoceanic rivalry between Britain and France. For example, Sir Thomas Slade, Surveyor of the British Navy from 1755 to 1771, designed a series of two-decker 74-gun warships that were both manoeuvrable and capable of holding their own in the punishing close-range artillery duels of line of battle engagements, and he did so working from French and Spanish warships captured in the 1740s (Figure 2.5). Benefiting from the general increase in long-distance naval capability that stemmed in part from changes in ship design, the British used weapons and tactics similar to those of their Western rivals. That does not mean that there were no contrasts in effectiveness that help explain British success, however. Superior gunnery was a key point. Britain had an advantage in technology and industrial capability, as well as having good seamanship and well-drilled gun crews who could deliver a formidable rate of fire.

The eighteenth century: Which West? Which East?

Although the standard story of the Military Revolution does not pay much attention to the eighteenth century, this was actually an important period, not only for determining the relative position of the West, but also for determining ‘Which West?' and ‘Which East?'

In the West, the struggle between Britain and France (and Spain) domin­ates attention. In particular, fighting from North America to West Africa, the West Indies to the Philippines, and Europe to India made the Seven Years' War (1756-63) into what is often termed the first global war. However, the relevance of such a description for a conflict that excluded East Asia, an area that is of much greater significance if the world is remapped in terms of population, is unclear. Within India, moreover, the key issue was Afghan expansion, not conflict between Britain and France or British expansion in Bengal. Focusing on Britain and France means emphasising the maritime dimension of the Western account, notably the British perspective, and underplaying the landward dimension of Asian warfare.

The latter, indeed, came to a head in the 1750s as Manchu China finally won its struggle with the Zungars of Xinjiang and then pressed on to conquer part of Muslim Central Asia. This conflict is generally underplayed in military history and is certainly ignored in accounts of the Seven Years' War, but there are some interesting comparisons. One of the most important is that of the role of organisational sophistication and logistical capacity in the case of both the Manchu and the British. The Manchu army advancing into Central Asia required the application of resources in order to project power. This was particularly because food was moved from settled arable regions to the less- populated, nomadic, pastoral interior.

The nature of resource-transfer and power-projection was different in the case of Britain and the combination of the Royal Navy and amphibious forces as they operated across the oceans. Indeed, one of the key problems in the use of force was the ability to deploy it at a distance. This was an important constituent of the global dimension of conflict. Again, the naval component provided a geographical range not seen on land. Thus, there was a contrast between the extension of British power in the New World and the projection of both Manchu power into Central Asia and Russian power into both modern Germany and the Balkans from the 1710s.

Accepting the caveat, therefore, that the Seven Years' War was not global, it is appropriate to consider its range both in Europe and further afield. Within Europe, this was a war incorporating an interacting range of conflicts that stretched from Portugal to Russia (Figure 2.6). That did not mean that all of Europe was involved, however. Indeed, whereas the Italian states had played a major role in the European wars of the seventeenth century and the first half of the eighteenth, this was very much not the case for the Seven

Figure 2.6: The bombardment of Prague by the Prussian army in 1757, during the Seven Years' War, in an engraving by the English engraver Peter Benazech

Years' War. That may not seem an important exclusion, but Italy was politically, economically and culturally more significant in this era than in the following quarter-millennium. Moreover, the war did not extend to include conflict between Denmark and Sweden, conflict that had been so common over the previous two centuries. Nor did the Ottoman Empire play a role. Indeed, the grand vizier of the period helped ensure a peaceful direction to Ottoman policy.

Beyond Europe, naval strength facilitated power projection, but a key element in North America was the determination of the British government to act there well before naval superiority was clearly achieved in 1759, which led to the adoption of an offensive strategy in North America and to the dispatch of major British forces. The political atmosphere in government also favoured defending British interests, so British failures in North America in 1755-7 encouraged greater commitments rather than withdrawal. Political priorities, therefore, were very important in the global dimension of the British struggle, and because the British took the initiative, this helped ensure that, as a world war, the Seven Years' War reflected the dynamics, exigencies and contingencies of British politics. There was nothing inevitable about the choice to focus on North America, however, and this remained the case once large-scale campaigning in North America had begun. At every stage, there were alternative actual or possible commitments, both in Europe and across the oceans.

This result was also not inevitable. If, in 1815, Britain was the strongest state in the world ruling the most powerful empire, the situation had been very different seventy years earlier, as Jacobite forces under Bonnie Prince Charlie (Charles Edward Stuart) advanced on Derby, outmanoeuvring the regular armies sent to defeat them, while the British government feared a supporting French invasion of southern England, which indeed was planned. If, by 1815, Britain was the dominant military power in India, in 1746 the British had lost Madras (Chennai) to the French, who were then the leading Western power in India and who seemed most likely to win co-operation from Indian rulers. Indeed, a Jacobite success in 1745-6 would have altered Britain's position in the world, and the character of the ‘West', not only with regard to political alignments but also with reference to the nature of public culture, economic interest and social dynamics.

Choices were also involved in conflicts in Asia, which have been charac­terised as the question of ‘Which East?' The most important of these was debate within China over how far to pursue expansionism and on which frontiers. The question of ‘Which East?' was actually less important an issue than in other periods as there was no real challenge to the unity and cohesion of the Chinese state. The situation was very different as far as the wider Manchu Empire was concerned, however, for the Zunghar challenge threatened Manchu control over the eastern Mongols. China's total victory over the Zunghars in the 1750s helped settle the related questions of China's conflict with challengers from the steppe and its dominance of ‘near-China'. In contrast, Japan's complete quiescence in international relations meant that the crisis of the 1590s over control of Korea did not recur.

South Asia passed through more profound changes, notably with the near­total collapse of the Mughal Empire in the eighteenth century. Whereas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mughals, Ottomans and Safavids had been generally successful in linking their frontier areas with their imperial objectives, and also in controlling interregional trade routes, in the eighteenth century they failed to meet the challenge. By 1740, the Marathas had become a major power in India, although not further afield and not across all of India. They remained a key force in 1800, but were now joined, in eastern and southern India, by Britain. Furthermore, Britain's total victory over Tipu Sultan of Mysore in 1799 demonstrated the extent of change since

1740 and indeed since the early 1780s, when the British were under heavy pressure from Mysore in campaigns that showed the effectiveness of cavalry. Similarly, in 1779, Maratha forces had inflicted a significant defeat on British forces in Western India.

At the same time, there is the major question of relative significance, both to contemporaries and in terms of subsequent developments. The British victory over Tipu Sultan was only one of many important developments in the 1790s, including the White Lotus rebellion in China, the Russian suppres­sion of Polish independence, the successful rising against French rule in St Domingue (Haiti), and the conflicts in Western Europe, the French Revo­lutionary Wars, which broke out in 1792. By the end of the eighteenth century, a range of effective and dynamic military systems was present around the world. It was far from inevitable in 1800 that the systems of the Marathas and Revolutionary/Napoleonic France were to succumb speedily; the Chinese understood by i860 that their system was in need of radical change, but this was not clear in 1800.

However, Britain and Russia were clearly impressive powers by i700 and, even more, by 1800. They and China were the key military successes of the eighteenth century, and that helps attract attention to the period, because, albeit with the USA succeeding Britain as the leading maritime force, this triumvirate still constitutes the world's leading military powers, having fended off a series of challenges, and adapted successfully to a number of key changes.

Thus, the eighteenth century excites attention, not only as the last age of a truly diverse and varied global military situation, but also because the century sees the onset of a modern international system. In contrast to China and the Western states, the Turks, the Safavids and their successors in Persia, and the Mughal successor states all lagged in creating the infrastructure of institutional politics and in establishing stable civil-military relations. The Turkish failure to maintain the strength of their earlier system was particu­larly notable, for by the second half of the eighteenth century many provin­cial governors were ready to rebel. The political culture of the Ottoman court and public finances also failed to support the enhancement of Turkish military capability.

Throughout the early modern period, then, warfare in much of the world was planned and waged quite effectively and decisively without reference to Western methods, technology and politics. Moreover, conflict between Western and non-Western powers proved the basis for mutual innovations that shaped war-making in later centuries.

FURTHER RBADING

Agoston, Gabor, Gunsfor the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

Andrade, Tonio, Lost Colony: The Untold Story of China's First Great Victory over the West (Princeton University Press, 2011).

Barfield, Thomas J., The Perilous Frontier: Nomadic Empires and China, 221 BC to AD 1757 (Oxford: Wiley-BlackweU, 1989).

Baugh, Daniel A., The Global Seven Years War 1754-1763 (Harlow: Routledge, 2011).

Black, Jeremy, Beyond the Military Revolution. War in the Seventeenth-Century World (Basing­stoke: Macmillan, 2011).

War and Technology (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013).

War in the Eighteenth-Century World (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2013).

War in the World, 1450-1600 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2011).

Contamine, Philippe (ed.), War and Competition between States (Oxford University Press, 2000).

Dai, Yingcong, The Sichuan Frontier and Tibet: Imperial Strategy in the Early Qing (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2009).

Davies, Brian L., Warfare, State and Society on the Black Sea Steppe, 1500-1700 (London: Routledge, 2007).

Glete, Jan, War and the State in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2001).

Warfare at Sea, 1500-1650: Maritime Conflicts and the Transformatian of Europe (London: Routledge, 1999).

Gommans, Jos, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and Highroads to Empire 1500-1700 (London: Routledge, 2002).

The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire, c. 1710-1780 (Leiden: Brill, 1995).

HaU, Bert S., Weapons and Warfare in Renaissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Harding, Richard, Seapower and Naval Warfare, 1650-1830 (London: Routledge, 1999). Imber, Colin, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009). Lorge, Peter A., The Asian Military Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Lynn, John A., Women, Armies, and Warfare in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Mortimer, Geoff (ed.), Early Modern Military History, 1450-1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2004).

Murphey, Rhoades, Ottoman Warfare (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). Parker, Geoffrey, The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1996).

Parrott, David, The Business of War: Military Enterprise and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Peacock, A. C. S. (ed.), The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Oxford University Press, 2009).

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

Rogers, CliffordJ. (ed.), The Military Revolution Debate: Readings on the Military Transform­ation of Early Modern Europe (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

Ruff, Julius, Violence in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Starkey, Armstrong, European and Native American Warfare, 1675-1815 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998).

Stevens, C. B., Russia's Wars of Emergence, 1460-1730 (London: Routledge, 2007).

Storrs, Christopher (ed.), The Fiscal-Military State in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).

Tallett, Frank and D. J. B. Trim (eds.), European Warfare, 1350-1750 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Thornton, John, Warfare in Atlantic Africa, 1500-1800 (London: Routledge, 1999).

Trim, D. J. B. and Mark Fissel (eds.), Amphibious Warfare, 1000-1700: Commerce, State Formation and European Expansion (Leiden: Brill, 2006).

Waley-Cohen, Joanna, The Culture of War in China: Empire and the Military under the Qing Dynasty (London: I. B. Tauris, 2006).

The first global dialogues: inter-cultural relations, 1400-1800

JOHN E. WILLS, JR.

By 1400 CE, interactions among cultures had a very long and intricate history, but none of them had been global because none had involved the peoples of the Americas with those of Eurasia and Africa. By 1800 people of European and African origin had brought their cultures to the Americas, and a complex and instructive web of interactivity and creativity among them and with Native Americans can be traced. But it seems to be useful to begin elsewhere, with the post-1400 changes in some of the longest interactions, those in Inner Asia. This essay then goes on to look at interactions centered on China, on Islam, on South Asia, and on the eastern Mediterranean, before discussing the new global interactions of the Europeans with the great civilizations of the Americas and of Africans with Europeans in Africa and the Americas.

Tibetans, Mongols, and Manchus

High, arid, thinly populated Tibet was not likely to attract the attention of the Mongols on their way to conquering Iraq, Persia, and China, nor to pose any military threat to them. But there was a logic of political advantage and cultural content in the interactions between Mongols and Tibetans. In Tibet many isolated Buddhist monastic centers claiming supremacy of their own incarnate emanations of the great bodhisattvas could easily slide into warfare with each other that disrupted trade and farming and forced herders to flee the best pastures. A modest Mongol military intervention could give major support to claims of supremacy of a particular lama or sect. Conversely, the Mongol realms were always ready to shatter in fratricidal war at each succession, and the supernatural powers and visual splendors of a great lama's visit could bolster one contender, especially if the lama declared the khan to be a reincarnation of the great Chinggis. The two sides embraced this logic at a remarkably early stage of their relations. In 1244-5 a distinguished monk brought two of his own nephews to the camp of a son of the Great Khan. He wrote to other Tibetan leaders urging submission to the Mongols, and left in the Mongol camp the nine-year-old Pakpa and his seven-year-old brother.¹ The boys must have had an excellent staff of Tibetan minders and teachers; Pakpa moved to the camp of the Great Khubilai in 1253, and received full monastic ordination in 1256. In 1261 Khubilai gave him the splendid title of Teacher of the Realm, guo shi, with authority over all Buddhists ruled by the Mongols. Pakpa devised a new script, still known as the Pakpa Script, which was supposed to be usable for all the languages of the Mongol realms but never caught on, probably because its letters are hard to distinguish from one another.

The early Ming rulers understood the importance of Tibetan Buddhism for relations with the Mongols, although they made no effective use of that knowledge. Would-be Mongol leaders had to prove that they were blood descendants of Chinggis and now also had to have the recognition of some great lama. The next important turning point in the development of the Mongolia-Tibet cultural connection was the meeting in 1578 of Altan Khan (1507-82), the ruler of the western Mongols, and Sonam Gyatso (1543-88), the current superior of the important Yellow Sect of Tibetan Buddhism. At this meeting Sonam Gyatso declared that he was a reincarnation of an earlier lama, and Altan Khan conferred on him the title Dalai Lama, Lama of Oceanic Wisdom; the title was retrospectively conferred on his two prede­cessors, so Sonam Gyatso was the third Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama in turn recognized Altan Khan, then aged 71, as a Cakravartin King of the Dharma, a Turner of the Wheel of the Law, Alms-Master to the Dalai Lama's Offering Site,^{[15] [16]} and reincarnation of Chinggis Khan.

Ligdan Khan (1588-1634), the last substantial contender to Chinggisid central power, was crushed in 1632 by Hongtaiji,^[17] the ruler of the rising Manchu power, which already was involved with Tibetan Buddhism. Of course the Manchus could not claim Chinggisid ancestry, which made the legitimation of connections with an important lama all the more vital for their efforts to control the Mongols. In 1642 the Mongol Gushi Khan sent troops into Tibet during a period of civil war and supported the establish­ment of the Great Fifth Dalai Lama (1617-82) as the temporal ruler of central Tibet, with his capital in Lhasa. The Manchus, established in Beijing as the Qing dynasty, did not leave the challenge unmet. The Dalai Lama was invited to Beijing in 1653 and splendidly received, but explicitly as a subordin­ate bearing tribute. In Beijing the first new Tibetan temple was built to house the Dalai Lama and his suite in 1653. Eventually there were thirty-two Tibetan temples in Beijing. The most famous of them, the Yonghegong, still a major tourist sight today, at its peak housed 500-600 Mongol, Manchu, and Tibetan monks.^[18] Major projects were supported for the printing and translation of Tibetan texts.

The Qing effort to control Tibet was intensified in response to the rise of the Zunghar Khanate in central Asia in the seventeenth century. The Dalai Lama conferred a title on the Zunghar rulers, but the Qing sought to deny them any form of Tibetan Buddhist legitimation. In 1717 the Zunghar invaded Lhasa in support of a candidate to the Dalai Lama succession, but they were driven out by the Qing in 1720. Qing power, with a resident garrison of 1500, was more firmly established there in 1750. The Mongols were drawn into a web of Qing legal administration and division into “banners,” units of household registration and military organization; another important factor in the decline of the Mongol threat to China in the 1700s was that 30 percent of Mongol males were monks living in monasteries.^[19]

The solidity of the new reality of Mongols-of-the-Qing and the power in it of Tibetan Buddhism was stunningly embodied in the creation, largely in the reign of the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1736-96), of the great complex of buildings and parks at the “Mountain Estate for Avoiding the Heat” (Bishu shanzhuang), still to be seen at Chengde, northeast of Beijing beyond the Great Wall.^[20] The Qianlong Emperor was personally a serious student of Tibetan Buddhism, and had a congenial companion in these studies in Rolpay Dorje, a thor­oughly multilingual and multicultural successor in a line reaching back to Pakpa. Rolpay Dorje had been educated in the palace school with the imperial princes in Beijing, and was resident in Beijing for over fifty years. The high point of this connection was the visit of the Panchen Lama, the highest-ranking lama after the Dalai Lama, to Chengde and Beijing in 1780, cut short by his death from smallpox.

China absorbing and influencing

Chinese elite culture in the early Ming was marked by the final victory of the long Neo-Confucian campaign for values and practices sanctioned by the Chinese classics, reinforced by a vehement reassertion of traditional practices and institutions after the great trauma of Mongol Yuan rule, with its radically alien ruling house, wide variety of foreign clients, and limited opportunities for traditional Confucian scholars. A neat three-level systematization of the “ladder of success” of the examination system - with exams at the county, provincial, and national level - was the key to the reproduction of a large elite of ambitious and idealistic conformists. Especially in times of commer­cial prosperity and widespread commercial printing after about 1500, there was plenty of room for innovation and controversy within the Confucian tradition, however. This was accompanied by lay interest in Buddhism, court interest in religious Daoism, assertions that the three teachings (Confucian­ism, Buddhism, Daoism) were all one, acceptance and condemnation of urban non-conformist lifestyles, and many more trends, none of them drawing heavily on stimuli from outside the empire of Great Ming.

In Neo-Confucian theory all foreign rulers were potentially tributaries of the Son of Heaven, and in the long run the civilizing influence of the Chinese tradition would awe and pacify the barbarians; their envoys were so treated if they sent an embassy to the capital. This attitude did not require much attention to cultural realities outside the empire. Nonetheless, in these centuries there were cultural interactions that stretched beyond China's borders. Within China, people from commoners to local elites to an occa­sional high official found that they could stay respectable, not in trouble with the authorities, and committed to the core of the Confucian tradition while giving their allegiance and much of their intellectual and emotional energy to

New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004). an obviously foreign teaching, Islam or Roman Catholicism. Korea and Japan experienced dramatic and idiosyncratic responses to Neo-Confucianism, which in Japan blended with anti-Christianity.

Turning first to foreign teachings in China: There had been Muslim sojourners in China, especially in the emporia of its land and sea connections with western Asia, since 700 ce or earlier; the first evidence for mosques is from around 1000. Muslims had been especially numerous and influential under the Mongol Yuan. Foreign Muslims might come with an embassy, spend some years trading, or settle permanently, but the Muslim presence in Ming China was largely Chinese-speaking. Many Chinese Muslims had no competence in Arabic or Persian beyond their basic prayers, and, in striking contrast to the always-foreign Catholic missionaries, they felt themselves to be Chinese. The question of how to be both a good Muslim and a good Chinese was not a simple one.^[21] From the mid-1500s on, there was an energetic multi-centered effort to make important Muslim texts available in Chinese and to teach them in mosque schools to many boys and young men, not just to future imams. The scholar Hu Dengzhou made the long trip from the Xi'an area to spend years in Mecca and Medina, brought back texts, and had many students who carried on his work. Careful recording of lineages of teacher-student relations was of course important both in Islam and in other Chinese traditions, Confucian and Buddhist.

By about 1600 these activities had spread to the great cities of eastern China, where abundant printing, overheated consumerism, and a range of options inside and outside Confucianism - even the first Jesuits! - must have motivated many Muslims to seek a firmer grasp of their heritage. An extensive “genealogy” of teacher-student lineages, compiled about 1635, included many stories of more or less miraculous discoveries of previously unknown texts, of scholars with prodigious memories, and of major trans­lation projects. Nanjing emerged as a major center of Muslim learning, where many Persian Sufi texts were translated. Many of the scholars involved were fully trained in the Chinese classics; the Muslim scholarly effort must have been especially attractive during the massive dislocations and limited opportunities for Confucian scholars of the Ming-Qing transi­tion. Some now wrote original texts summarizing basic Islamic teaching in ways that made them complementary to the Confucian mainstream.

Ma Zhu, a descendant of the prince who consolidated Mongol rule over Yunnan and himself a Sayyid, a descendant of the Prophet, took his elegant Guide (Zhinan) to the basics of Islam on a long tour of all the major Muslim centers in China, and secured many greetings and endorsements from local scholars and teachers. In the next generation Liu Zhi (1660-1739) wrote three widely read and admired works on Muslim beliefs, institutions, and the life of the Prophet.

In these books and quite a few more that followed, Muhammad is called a Sage (sheng), not a Prophet, Islam is called a way (Dao), and mosques are described as centers of teaching and study, not of worship. Sagehood and prophethood both can be thought of as states of ordinary human beings, but very different; the Sage draws on his own moral and mental resources to build on the actions and teachings of earlier Sages and create a Way, a set of values and social practices, while the Prophet transmits to his people God's words and commands. Sages may devise Ways to realize human moral potential in different ways in different times or places, but these Ways will be fundamentally the same. The great classical teacher Mencius had noted that sage rulers of antiquity had come from the east and the west, and their ways had fit together like the two halves of a jade tally. Thus, Liu Zhi argued, the Way of Muhammad was the ultimate way for his time and place, and could be practiced even in China without damage to the central Confucian Way. In fact, it contained some possibly useful supplements to it, especially in explaining the origins and nature of the universe. This scholarly construction of a Way of Muhammad flourished throughout the 1700s. Sometimes Chinese Muslims called the core books they treasured Han Kitab, combining an assertion of inheritance of great Chinese traditions all the way from the Han Dynasty with kitab, the Arabic word for “book.”

The Tibetan Buddhist “Mongols-of-the-Qing” were less interested in dia­logue with Muslims than some of their ancestors had been. In the late 1700s, in a time of great stress and many rebellions, some in western border areas involving Muslims, a high official in an eastern province reported to the Qianlong Emperor on some Chinese Muslim books, which he found hetero­dox and dangerous. The emperor replied calmly that these books praised the good qualities of a great teacher and were the works of Muslims of China proper, not of dangerous frontiersmen.

Along with Muslims, there had long been Christians in China, first Eastern rites Christians and then a few Orthodox and Roman Christian monks. In the middle of the sixteenth century the first Jesuits arrived, first to islands and then in the 1580s to the mainland. Their arrival was most propitiously timed.^[22] To many thoughtful Chinese it seemed that traditional values were being violated by a society in which lavish spending and governmental corruption were more important than conscientious scholarship and public service. As some Chinese scholars became acquainted with the Jesuits, they were impressed by two kinds of “substantiality” (shi): first, a selfless commitment that had prompted them to voyage so far from home, and second, the solidity and usefulness of their knowledge of astronomy, geography, and much more. The Jesuits, especially the brilliant Italian Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), came to respect the scholars' moral quest, and to argue that Christian teachings in fact supported and supplemented Confucian teachings and helped to combat the tendency to “irresponsibility” that had come from Buddhism. They spent a great deal of time studying the Chinese language, and aroused some interest among Chinese scholars in their maps of the world and their astronomical skills. As they studied the ancient classical texts of the Chinese, the Jesuits began to argue that the ancient sages had known the True God, only to lose that knowledge later as a result of Buddhist influence.

In all this the Jesuits were pupils of some remarkable scholar-officials, several of whom became Christian converts. The most important was Xu Guangqi (1562-1633), a major scholar and compiler of an important encyclo­pedia of agricultural techniques. When Xu became a high official in the late 1620s he opened the way for the Jesuits to demonstrate their skills in observational astronomy at the Imperial Court, where the astronomical calibration of the annual calendar was an important function of government. The Jesuits' methods were found more accurate than those then in use, and from the 1630s until after 1700 Jesuits were employed at the Imperial Board of Astronomy. Their position at court provided political cover for missionaries and converts in the provinces, even though Christianity was not formally granted toleration until 1692. Under the new Qing Dynasty established in 1644, the Kangxi emperor himself learned bits of astronomy and mathematics from them. Their positions at court survived a misguided Roman effort in the early eighteenth century to legislate the ceremonies Chinese converts were permitted to perform to their ancestors, generally termed the “Chinese rites controversy,” but the Qing forbade their subjects to follow the foreign faith, which survived largely in remote rural areas.

Given the centrality of ceremony and family in Chinese understandings of culture, it is especially interesting to find intricate “interweavings” of Catholic and traditional Chinese practices in the funeral practices of Chinese converts. Missions in Fu'an County, Fujian, stimulated by Spanish Dominicans based in Manila, rejected many of the adaptations to Chinese tradition worked out by the Jesuits. This community survived persecution from the 1720s to the 1850s, and has been reported in recent years alive, well, and not in commu­nion with the state-sponsored Patriotic Church.^[23]

Turning to the spread of Chinese teachings out of China: In the 1400s and 1500s the kings and high ministers of Choson Korea devoted much ink and paper and many hours of vehement argument to sorting out which of two or more disputants was the primary heir in an aristocratic lineage. There were some financial advantages to being primary heir, but more important were his social status in a rigid hierarchy and preferential access to high office. The elaborate kinship system gradually imposed in these struggles was acknow­ledged to be of Chinese origin, the product of the Neo-Confucian movement of Song times. Chinese texts were regularly consulted and survivals of Korean tradition deplored. This strenuous imposition of a foreign pattern on the most personal relations of an elite is one of history's strangest and most instructive cases of cultural interaction. It resulted in a symbiosis of a rigid kinship system and a narrowly centralized aristocratic state that sur­vived past 1900 and has echoes in Korean society and politics today. The imposition of the Neo-Confucian family pattern began with the founding of the Choson Dynasty in 1392, after about 200 years of internal disorder followed by nearly complete subordination to the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. Some aristocrats had already been studying Neo-Confucian texts. Now they were convinced of the urgency of re-building an order that would sanction their dominance of politics, strengthen the state, and reduce or eliminate the power and wealth of the Buddhist monasteries and the prevalence of Bud­dhist ideas and practices. Chinese Neo-Confucian texts gave abundant sup­port to anti-Buddhism, from metaphysics to funerals. The simultaneity of the cultural and intellectual novelty of Neo-Confucianism in Korea and the intense effort to rebuild political order produced this remarkable transformation.^{[24] [25]}

The remarkable story ofJapan's “Christian century” began with the rather accidental arrival of the great Jesuit Francis Xavier in 1549.11 Catholic preach­ing fell on the fertile ground of moral and political chaos. The God of the foreigners at first sounded like another of the bodhisattvas to whom some gave total devotion, who of course were also of foreign origin. Neither emperor nor samurai nor Buddhas nor the Way of the Gods (Shinto) were producing a humane society. Regional military rulers in western Japan quickly realized that Portuguese ships were more likely to come to the ports of rulers who had accepted the new faith. Subordinate samurai and com­moners followed their lords out of various mixtures of obedience, opportun­ism, and fervent conviction. There were several near misses at the establishment of all-Christian cities or territories. But in 1587 Hideyoshi, the second great builder of new forms of political order, explicitly compared the Christians to the followers of the Buddhist sects, crushed in the 1560s, that had been most menacing in their rejection of all hierarchy and samurai authority. He revoked Jesuit privileges in the port of Nagasaki and banned the missionaries from Japan. From 1612 on, persecution of Catholicism was brutally thorough. Many missionaries and thousands of Japanese died for their faith, sometimes under terrible torture. The martyrs proved that Catholic teaching had fallen on fertile soil in Japan, and that the Jesuits had known what they were doing. By 1640, however, there were only tiny remnants of Japanese Catholicism deeply hidden, the Portuguese had been expelled from Japan, and Japanese had been forbidden to leave their country in order to avoid renewed Catholic contacts.

At the same time that Christianity was being banned, Japanese interest in Chinese models of government and the values and worldviews that sup­ported them grew rapidly. Confucianism was obviously foreign but thor­oughly hospitable to political hierarchy. Some daimyo (regional lords) were interested, and the shoguns (military dictators) of the Tokugawa family who were building a new order of central control eventually became major patrons. More important still was the rapidly growing demand for new forms of education as members of the large samurai class sorted out their lives now that they were expected not to forget swordsmanship and loyalty to the death but to sublimate them in lives devoted to keeping order and keeping records. By 1700 it is likely that almost all samurai were literate. Some teachers were supported by the daimyo in their domains, but some of the most successful were purely commercial.¹²

10

11

We can trace a succession of these teachers who attracted hundreds or even thousands of students, wrote a lot, and gave a tone to Japanese intellectual life that still was important in the 1800s and early 1900s. Until about 1860 they did this without ever visiting China. Some had trouble finding a particular Chinese book, but in general Chinese trade to Nagasaki made it possible for them to draw on a wide range of Ming-Qing thought. Their responses to what they read were striking in their range of variation and in their emotional intensity, which were easier to maintain as a solitary reader than in the dense high-culture interactions of a major Chinese city. For example, Itδ Jinsai (1627-1705) bluntly criticized the dominant Neo­Confucian teachers for their obsessions with hierarchy, ceremonial detail, and the metaphysics of the Song scholar Zhu Xi. Insisting on reading the Chinese classics and early histories for himself, not as summarized by Zhu Xi and other Song and Ming scholars, he asserted that ancient China offered an example that could be followed of a society built on benevolence and on open-hearted responsiveness to the needs and feelings of others. His school at one time had over 200 students, and was carried on successfully by his 13 son.

Itδ and the others discussed here saw themselves as offering “substantial­ity” or “practicality” (Chinese shi, Japanese jitsu, the same virtue some Chinese sensed in the Jesuits) in contrast to the “emptiness” offered by Buddhists and some Neo-Confucians. Yamazaki Ansai (1618-82) was as vehement as Itδ; his target was Buddhism. His range of “substantial” interests and studies was very wide, from astronomy to famine relief. The school he founded at one time was reported to have 6,000 students.¹⁴ Ogyu Sorai (1666-1728) was able to draw on another generation or two of Chinese classical scholarship and confronted times when “substantial” solutions to the political and economic problems of Japan were more urgent and less obvious. Accurate understanding of ancient Chinese texts revealed a world, kept in harmony by music and ceremony, which was so different from his own times that there was no way back to it. ButJapan had its own spirits to be reverently served by music and ceremony, and Japan, like ancient China, was feudal; its moral and economic stability, he thought, could be restored by getting the samurai away from big spending in the castle towns and instead living in the villages.¹⁵

The most surprising interaction of Japanese intellectuals with a foreign culture, and one of the most instructive cases of inter-cultural interaction in the early modern world, was Rangaku - “Ran” from “Oranda,” Holland, “gaku” meaning “studies.”¹⁶ In ways not altogether different from responses to Confucianism, scholarly samurai, making futures for themselves in a country at peace and worrying about the future of that country, seized on modest stimuli and struggled to understand and translate Dutch books which provided useful information about science, technology, medicine, and a complicated world that sometimes threatened to intrude on Japan's self­imposed isolation. A sense of wary isolation intensified the responses. So did the ease with which some clues to the outside world could be brought to Nagasaki by the Dutch, sold there, and wind up in the collection of some regional lord or the Shogun himself - books, maps, but also telescopes, microscopes, static electricity generators, magic lanterns, and more. A very important focus of exchange was in medicine, on the two important occasions when an intelligent man with medical knowledge was in charge of the Dutch trade at Deshima, at other times when a Japanese sought treat­ment from a Dutch doctor at Nagasaki, or when a physician accompanying the annual homage trip to Edo was consulted by a physician treating important people at the shogunal court. In 1774 Japanese scholars had in hand a European book of anatomy as they watched the dissection of an executed criminal, and found that the plates matched perfectly what they saw; they worked for years to translate the book into Japanese, and its account of human anatomy was widely accepted within a generation.

These were still fairly narrow Dutch windows on a wider world, affecting small numbers of the literate elite. But the basic structure ofJapanese politics, society, and culture continued, under great stress to be sure, after 1800, and Russian probes to the north of Japan led to more urgent debates, in which the Rangaku experts argued for the relevance of their peculiar knowledge to the dangers facing the country; some of the pioneers of Japan's energetic opening to the world in the mid-1800s had studied in Rangaku academies.

Muslims among the unbelievers

Islam had appeared on the world stage in the shape of conquering armies, but for centuries Muslim rule had not led to massive forced conversions of conquered peoples. Especially for Christians and Jews, “People of the Book” sharing Semitic monotheist fundamentals with Islam, there was a well- defined and stable pattern of autonomous administration of marriage, inher­itance, and so on by elders of a community who were acceptable to the Muslim rulers. Christians and Jews were also exempt from military service, and instead paid a separate jizya tax. For Muslims what mattered was not forcing unbelievers to become Muslim, but not being compelled to live under the rule of unbelievers.

By 1400 there were many areas into which Islam had spread by peaceful means, however, especially long-distance trade, and Muslims had to adjust to living under non-Muslim rule. If some measure of communal autonomy could be negotiated with the non-Muslim ruler, the Islamic integrity of the community could be preserved by finding learned men to lead prayers, administer Islamic law, and teach Arabic and the Quran to the next gener­ation. Adventurous travel in search of such employment was common, as seen in the life of the great North African traveler Ibn Battuta. The require­ment that every believer who was able to do so make the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, where he or she would encounter the full power and rigor of the Islamic way of life, re-enforced tradition far more effectively than, for example, the bureaucratic centralization of the Roman Catholic Church. The Muslim community also grew as members converted their neighbors or as they married local women and sent their children to the Quranic school.

The reach of Islam into the unbelieving world was very strongly sup­ported by the broad trend we call Sufism, and eventually by impressive continuities of Sufi lineages and lodges.¹⁷ Muslims who were impressed by the passages in the Quran on the Divine Light, the Prophet's trip to Heaven, and other intimations of a more vivid and personal relation with the Divine than simply obeying His commands might seek out a teacher or leave home and wander in search of one for years at a time. The teacher would draw on everything in his own experience and the student's, including Greek, Persian, and eventually Hindu and African, heritages. As pupils were initiated into higher spiritual levels and became teachers themselves, Sufi orders emerged with different practices, including ecstatic singing and dancing, and became widespread. A Sufi arriving in a new city would hope to find a lodging house of his order. As stories were passed on of the spiritual powers of a great teacher they might include miracles at his tomb, and tombs of Sufi saints became the sites of teaching and celebration and the goals of pilgrimages.

The organizational power of the great Sufi orders has continued from their origins in the 900s to our own times, and has been especially conspicuous on the fringes of the world of Islam. Here Sufi solidarity and lodging of travelers combined with teachers' openness to all forms of the search for God, as they worked patiently to find ways to make local practices compatible with Islam. Sufism was important, for example, in the spread of Islam into the port cities of the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra, and Java, including the densely populated rice-growing plains.¹⁸ One Javanese story of the beginnings of Islam there told of a man who was so impressed by the lack of interest in riches of a passing Muslim holy man that he followed the teacher's orders and sat in a trance for years or decades until the holy man returned and told him that he now knew more than his teacher. Power and knowledge gained through trance has its place in Sufi teachings and connects with the world of Islam,

1 ⁷ Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization, 3 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1974), vol. ii, pp. 201-54.

1 ⁸ The extent of Sufism in the spread of Islam in these regions is a matter of controversy among specialists; M. C. Ricklefs, A History of Modern Indonesia Since c.1300, 2nd edn. (Stanford University Press, 1993), pp. 10-13. Named Sufi orders are hard to find until after 1800; the broader personal/mystic style seems unmistakable in many stories. but here the Hindu-Javanese accent is also unmistakable.¹⁹ In the early 1800s Prince Dipanagara, a Javanese ascetic who led the last futile uprising of the old Javanese order, held long vigils in caves and had visions of a patron goddess, but at the same time insisted on being called Pangeran Ngabdulhamit, after Abdul Hamid ιι, the reigning sultan in Istan­bul.²⁰ Near the other end of the world of Islam, Sufi lineages in Senegal can be traced to 1500 or earlier.²¹ The tombs of the great Sufi masters who brought Islam beyond the Sahara have long been centers of pilgrimage at Timbuktu in modern Mali, and in the spring of 2012 were attacked and partly destroyed by Islamic extremists who saw them as pagan corruptions of the true faith.²²

Neither Hindu nor Muslim: Sufis, sects, and Sikhs

Between 1400 and 1800 Muslims ruled most of the northern river valleys of the Indian sub-continent and gradually extended their power into the south. Within the Delhi sultanates Muslims ruled, but Hindus were the vast majority of the population. At first sight Islam and Hinduism might seem the most unlikely of partners in cultural exchange, Islam's austere mono­theism and prohibition of religious imagery confronting the exuberant polytheist imagery of Hinduism. But there was a great deal of intense dialogue, of which the most impressive product was the Sikh religion. From the Hindu side, some of the conditions for dialogue were created by the bhakti movement. Beginning in south India with its variety of languages and cultural backgrounds, bhakti centered on the ecstatic quest for closeness to or union with a god, often expressed in singing in a vernacular, not in Sanskrit, accessible to anyone regardless of caste or learning. The old Brahmin dominance and learning might not flourish without a Hindu king as patron, but bhakti movements continued to spread under Muslim rulers, and occasionally the leader of such a movement could win the toleration of a Muslim ruler or even, if the legends of Sri Krishna Caitanya, first guru of the still lively “Hare Krishna” movement, are to be believed, turn him into a devotee of Krishna.^[26]

19

20

21

22

Clifford Geertz, Islam Observed: Religious Developments in Morocco and Indonesia (Univer­sity of Chicago Press, 1968), pp. 27-9.

Peter Carey, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785-1855 [Verhandelingen van het Koninklijke Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, and Volk- enkunde] (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007), pp. 150-2.

Ira M. Lapidus, A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 506-8.

The Economist, July 7-13, 2012, p. 47.

This mixing of different forms of emotional personal devotion was also characteristic of Sufism, which was important throughout the Delhi sultan­ates. In Bijapur, for example, new lines of transmission of Sufi teaching emerged as masters studied in the Arab world or Persia and then returned, and as Sufis found favor at the courts of Muslim rulers. They began to compose sermons, songs, and poems in the local vernacular to guide their followers along stages of the path toward God. They began to attract many Hindu devotees, who might gradually absorb their teachings and eventually become real converts to Islam. When they asserted their own closeness to God, their own mediation between their disciples and God, and when many of their most devoted disciples were women, these Sufi teachers moved to the very limits of Islamic orthodoxy or beyond. Their tombs became centers of veneration and pilgrimage; they transmitted their spiritual powers, their devotees, and their grants of land from the rulers to their sons.^[27]

Imperial patronage of interaction among traditions reached one of its greatest peaks in the reign of the Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605). Akbar had very wide interests, and particularly enjoyed hearing the repre­sentatives of various religions debate their beliefs - Sunnis, Shii, Sufis, Hindus of every kind, and even Christians, including Jesuit missionaries from Portu­gal and Italy. Goa-based Jesuits found in his court and that of his son Salim, later the Emperor Jahangir, discerning and enthusiastic admiration for Cath­olic paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts. The Virgin Mary, treated with reverence in the Quran, was especially cherished. Jesus was treated as something like the greatest of Sufi teachers, and Akbar presented himself as such a teacher for a society of his most powerful courtiers, the Divine Faith (Dιn-i TLahT), but seems to have had no interest in propagating such a mixture outside his court.^[28]

The Mughal emperors and ministers were witnesses of a great religious movement that rose far from the court. Nanak, who became the first guru, or great teacher, of the Sikh religion, grew up in northern India. He was brought up a Hindu, of a much less bookish kind than Caitanya; his songs and teachings are full of simple images drawn from the lives of ordinary people and the ceremonies that mark their stages. Islam was all around him, as a source of religious insight as well as of conquest and repression. In 1496 he had a deep religious experience that led him to proclaim, “There is neither Hindu nor Muslim.” As he and his first disciples traveled around northern India they preferred to stay with low-caste friends even when they had elite supporters. Rules about sharing food with other groups are very important in the caste society, and Nanak challenged them directly, eating with everyone, organizing charitable kitchens that fed anyone who was hungry. The gathering of Sikh followers for a common meal has remained one of the central features of this teaching. In the succession of great gurus that followed, many composed poems and songs in simple language, using both Hindu and Muslim vocabulary. While many Hindus believed they had to withdraw from ordinary life to devote themselves entirely to their pas­sionate spiritual quest, the Sikhs from Nanak on believed that the ordinary life of business and family was the best form of a religious life. Their teachings are full of sharp criticisms of the corrupt power of Muslim judges and the fakery of Hindu holy men.

Gobind Singh, the last in the succession of gurus in the late 1600s, taught his followers to “let divine wisdom be your guru and enlighten your soul” not in a forest retreat but in the busy life of a city. In his time the Islamic orthodoxy of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and the Hindu revivalism of the Marathas seemed to leave less and less room for people who were “neither Hindu nor Muslim,” and Gobind Singh had to assure his followers that it was lawful to take up the sword. By 1690 the Sikhs were fighting full­scale battles against Mughal forces. They have remained some of India's finest warriors as well as some of its best businessmen. And they have a different kind of guru; at the end of his life, Gobind Singh took a compilation of the songs and teachings of the gurus compiled around 1600, and pro­claimed that this book, the Granth, would be the teacher of the Sikh people from then on. And so it is down to today.^[29]

Texts and science in the eastern Mediterranean

The eastern Mediterranean was the scene of the most dramatic “clash of civilizations” in the world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The rising Ottoman power had settled into the rule of much of southeastern Europe by 1400. Their final occupation of Constantinople/Istanbul in 1453 was a huge shock to Western Christians, perhaps a sign of the apocalyptic coming of the Antichrist. Muslims simply inverted the apocalyptic values; the fall of Con­stantinople would be followed by the fall of Rome, universal Islam, and the Last Days. And surely it was significant that 1591-2 in the Christian calendar would be the year 1,000 after the Hegira. For some Jews, especially the Sephardim, the expulsion from Spain and Portugal beginning in 1492 was a sign of the impending coming of the Messiah. But somehow merchants, artists, and students of nature and of sacred texts found ways to trade, make friends, and learn from each other. Individuals who settled in a foreign city, learned the language and the culture, and made personal connections might become very important intermediaries in trade and negotiation. Some of them converted to the other religion. In Istanbul they might become “dragomans,” placed in charge of trade or negotiations with their old home place. Venice adopted and adapted the dragoman institution in appointing converts from Islam as brokers for Muslim merchants. Wonderful documentation on their conversions, appointments, and arguments about privileges and commissions help us keep in mind the complex webs of personal connection that underlay the intellectual connections.^[30]

Traders from Venice and other Italian ports had long seen Constantinople, Alexandria, and other ports at the eastern end of the Mediterranean as their key sources of spices, silk, and other goods from more distant parts of Asia. It is easy to compile quotes from their writings after 1400 on the opulent supplies of spices, fine textiles, rugs, and so on in these cities, and some of their paintings are full of fine goods, exotic animals, people in striking costumes, and much more. The countervailing appeal of the Christian west to the Muslims owed a good deal to the Greek and Roman heritages of Istanbul and much of the territory the Ottomans now ruled. Mehmet the Conqueror had passages from Greek texts read to him regularly as he besieged Constantinople, and was delighted to hire Italian builders to put classical columns and arches on the new Topkapi Palace he began building in 1460.^[31] The authorities of Venice were delighted to loan him Gentile and Giovanni Bellini to paint his portrait. Italian effects in oils were superior to anything Ottoman painters produced, partly because Italians had sharpened their skills in depth and shading by reading in Latin translation the theories of light and perspective of the great Alhazen (Abu Ali al-Hasan Ibn al-Haytham, d. after 1041).^[32] Some time before 1480 either Gentile Bellini or the Neopo- litan court artist Costanzo da Ferrara - who was also in Istanbul - painted with deep humanity and delight in luxurious fabric a seated Muslim scribe, a very fine Arabic calligrapher added a short text, and some time later an unknown Ottoman painter copied the pose and attitude, with equal attention to a fine fabric and a change of the subject from scribe to figure-painter (Figures 3.1 and 3.2).^[33]

Much harder to follow in surviving texts and art but at least as instructive for the study of cultural interaction was a fitful series of exchanges from the 1400s through the 1600s of astronomic and geographic data and ancient texts among Christians, Muslims, and Jews.^[34] Cordial personal connections were possible across the confessional divides, especially because the intellectuals of all understood, in a general “textual-deductive” mindset, the importance of getting the best astronomical and calendrical tables, which put together with the sacred texts would determine the exact dates of the Creation and the end of the world. Muslim astronomers had engaged steadily in checking and improving theories and data from Greek texts, some of the best of it recorded in the form of commentaries on commentaries on Ptolemy and others.^[35] Some of the best tables still were those prepared at Ulugh Beg's observatory in Samarkand in the 1420s; they had been used by Copernicus. All were aware of the shaky state of Ptolemaic astronomy, the intriguing possibilities of the Tychonian system, and the daunting dangers of the Copernican. And did the Book of Job (9:6) really proclaim that God “shaketh the earth out of her place, and the pillars thereof tremble”? The best and oldest version of that book might yet turn up, for example among the dissident Jews called Karaites, who stuck strictly to written texts and rejected Rabbinical oral traditions, and such a scriptural authority would give the support of God's Word to Copernicus' rejection of an immovable central earth.

Figure 3.1: Gentile BeUini (c.1429-1507) Seated scribe, 1479-81 (pen and brown ink with watercolour and gold on paper)

This web of interactions reached from Goa to Amsterdam. In 1623 Pietro della Valle, supported by wealthy intellectuals with Copernican and “Pythag­orean” interests in Naples, met by chance in Goa Christoforo Borri, SJ., on his way back from his efforts to establish a mission in what is now central

Figure 3.2: Ottoman portrait of a painter, late fifteenth century

Vietnam.^[36] Della Valle, in his quest for ancient manuscripts, especially Jewish and Samaritan ones that could provide older and thus more reliable versions of the Old Testament than either the Vulgate or rabbinical transmissions, had been especially delighted by the leisure, learning, and hospitality of Muslim and Jewish scholars at Lar, near Isfahan. Borri claimed that his explanations of the cosmology of Tycho Brahe, accepted by the Jesuits at that time, had contributed to the conversion of some Vietnamese intellectuals. Della Valle went to work translating a short summary by Borri into semi-adequate Persian, and sent it off to the Lar scholar he thought most likely to be impressed by the superior astronomy. His text mentions warily the new European sightings through telescopes and some of Galileo's ideas, but not his name, and reminds his friend to ask Jews at Lar about ancient texts, especially of the Book of Job. The text somehow wound up in the Vatican Library; we don't know if it made any impression on anyone in Lar or even if it got there.^[37]

Another example of open and many-sided intellectual exchanges on very exacting subjects is a book in Hebrew by a Jew of Cretan origin, Joseph Solomon Delmedigo, Sefer Elim, that was published in Amsterdam in 1629 by Menasseh Ben-Israel, much sought-after by Christian intellectuals as an expert on the traditions of his people and at one time the teacher of Benedict de Spinoza. Delmedigo had studied with Galileo at the University of Padua and had traveled widely in the Muslim lands around the eastern Mediterranean. Modern scholars have been baffled by his combination of commitment to the new astronomy and his passion for the ancient and esoteric traditions of his own people - Karaite texts of Scripture, the Cabala, and more. But in the mindset of many participants in these dialogues it was vital to get the astronomy right for the exact First and Last Days and to find the best ancient texts to support the best new astronomy.^[38]

A final startling example of cultural interchange: One of the many reso­lutions of Ptolemaic anomalies Copernicus lays out and charts is an explan­ation of how the apparently oscillating motion of a heavenly body could be derived from circular motion. Copernicus' diagram published in 1543 exactly matches a diagram by Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (d. 1274); even the lettering matches, with one probably explicable variation, with Copernicus putting a capital A where Tusi had an alif, a B for ba, and so on. There is no evidence that Copernicus knew any Arabic, and so far no copy of Tusi's text has been discovered that got to Italy, where someone might have helped him read it.^[39]

It is important to pay attention to these examples of mutual respect and mutual learning across the ongoing clash of civilizations, but also to recall that for all their intensity they were episodic and fragile. Scientific pioneers as important as Brahe, Kepler, and even Newton, and the rulers and aristocrats who funded their work, often were interested in the astrological and apoca­lyptic implications of astronomy. In the Ottoman world, orthodox hostility to astrology was intensified by deep unease over weak rulers after the death of the great Suleyman, and the combination led to the demolition of a new observatory in Istanbul in 1580. New techniques of perspective, despite their roots in the work of Alhazen and others, did nothing to encourage Muslim participation in the new fascination with pictures of people, places, and nature that was shaping empirical trends in European culture at the expense of the older shared “textual-deductive” culture.^[40]

Spaniards, Aztecs, Mayas, Incas

The Valley of Mexico was the scene in 1518-22 of one of the greatest confrontations in the history of peoples of utterly different cultures, ending in the shattering of the Aztec Empire and the destruction of the great temples and palaces of Tenochtitlan. But out of the ruins emerged one of the most enduring cultural syntheses, still very much alive in our own times; I write in southern California, where I have no trouble finding a statue or mural painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The wonderful story of the apparition of the Virgin to Juan Diego on the site of an old temple to an Aztec goddess has been found highly dubious,^[41] but there is no question that the energetic and idealistic friars who set out to convert the people of the Valley after 1522 understood the powers of sacred places and the appeal, shared by so many peoples, of feminine forms of holy power. The missionaries learned Nahuatl thoroughly and wrote extensively in it in the Latin alphabet, wrote much about the history and beliefs of the peoples of the Valley, and educated the sons of important people in Latin and Nahuatl, not Spanish. The gener­ation they educated in the new faith was the key to political control at the local level of the native population. Missionary priests and their local helpers did not hesitate to borrow the name or feast-day of an old Mexican god for a Catholic feast or saint's day. Local people of all classes delighted in the creations of artists using inherited styles and skills to express the new faith; the missionaries' focus on schools to train local artists was impressive.^[42] Bernardino de Sahagun supervised devoted American scholars and artists in the compilation of a twelve-volume “General History” that preserved much knowledge of the pre-conquest past and was beautifully illustrated in a style that draws on American and European heritages; the images of the much- admired feather-work are stunning. Later local community leaders preserved much local myth and history in “titulos” compiled to support community land claims.^[43] Constructions of space melded in powerful ways. Both Span­iards and Aztecs built cities on rectangular grids. Many churches incorpor­ated open chapel spaces suited to local festival traditions. Many were built on old sacred sites, none more impressively than Nuestra Senora de los Reme­dios at Cholula, built on top of the largest pyramid in America.

These encounters in the Valley of Mexico involved a great deal of local conflict, a few executions for heresy, and some larger conflicts on the frontiers of Spanish rule. Conflicts in the Maya lands and in the highland Inca Empire had more dramatic phases. The Maya explained Spanish domin­ation in terms of their highly developed cosmology and theory of time, and concealed continued worship of the old gods in a landscape full of hiding places; when they were discovered in the 1560s, at least 158 died and more were crippled under ruthless interrogation.^[44] But the visitor to Yucatan or highland Guatemala today is a fascinated spectator of the most intricate syncretic practices.

The encounters between Spaniards and Inca began in stunning brutality and thorough destruction of the temples and ceremonial practices of the imperial center at Cuzco.^[45] Still some were pleased when the great festival of Corpus Christi was at about the same time of year as the Inca Inti Raimi harvest festival, and many of the old songs and dances became part of the new celebrations. A few intellectuals, especially Guaman Poma and Garcilaso de la Vega, held out hopes for preservation of the best of the old ways in a new synthesis. In Cuzco and other major cities, Spanish insistence on extirpation of old ways advanced steadily, but away from the cities the old ways survived. Mummies of priests and ancestors were worshiped and consulted. The Spanish destroyed them when they found them, but they were easy to hide. The burdens of mita labor service in the mines were severe. There was recurring resistance in outlying areas; the last great episode, of Tupac Amaru ιι around Lake Titicaca in 1780-1, attracted no support from mestizos or the old nobility. The tensions and ambiguities of cultural interaction did not intensify the political upheaval.

There are many paintings of the Virgin Mary, done in Europe and in the Americas, in which the broad triangular expanse of her richly decorated robe expresses a somewhat remote majesty. One such painting, from Potosi, the most important node of the impact of the Americas on the early modern world, makes this majesty American as well as Christian. The patrons in the foreground - king, bishops, priests - are European. God the Father and the Son are placing a crown on the Virgin's head, which is within a great brown triangle of the Cerro Rico of Potosi, with paths, tunnel entries, and a small figure in Inca royal dress receiving the homage of his people.^[46]

Neo-African cultures from Kongo to Brazil

The history of the “Black Atlantic” centers on some of the great horror stories of world history, the “middle passage” and the brutal work and short life expectancy of slavery on a sugar plantation. But it produced creole languages that are alive and spoken in the twenty-first century; a vibrant range of religious expression from Africanized Christianities to explicitly African forms like Cuban Santeria, Haitian Vodun, and Brazilian Candomble; and modes of music from rumba to post-modern jazz.^[47] How did people create so much under such dire circumstances? To answer this question, it is important to keep interactions on both sides of the Atlantic in focus.^[48]

In a surprising and instructive first phase, the Portuguese opened a connection with the kings of the Kongo. A contender for the royal succession converted to Catholicism. He may have had some Portuguese help in defeating his rivals and emerging as king about 1506. He and others who became Christian seem to have sensed that the Portuguese had some previously unknown sources of power, which they saw when a missionary destroyed a traditional religious shrine, when Portuguese masons built solid stone houses, and not least when the soldiers fired their guns. Over the forty-year reign of Dom Afonso, the Christian king of the Kongo, he exchanged many letters with the kings of Portugal, and the pope appointed one of Afonso's sons, educated in Europe, bishop of the Kongo. The Portuguese royal court seems to have taken this relation very seriously and sent advisers, masons and other craftsmen, and more missionaries.

But even before Dom Afonso died in 1545 some grim realities were undercutting this dream of unforced conversion and cultural transformation. Slave trading and raiding spread inland and undermined the unity of the kingdom; it fell apart completely in the 1660s after a war with the Portuguese caused by their interference in Kongolese civil wars. It should be no surprise that Kongolese conversions had not usually involved complete breaks with old beliefs and practices. For ordinary people, there was considerable overlap of comparable attention to omens, dreams, and curing by supernatural powers.

Kongolese local gods frequently were identified with saints. But while Kongolese relations with another world were more or less continuous and recent relations with the spirits of remembered ancestors were very import­ant, Roman Catholicism assumed the basic authority of events long ago and of the right of a present-day hierarchy founded in those events to distinguish the works of God and the saints from those of the Devil. Missionary destruction of idols and spirit houses and rejection of local identities of saints were constant. The risks of such identification peaked in the prophecies of the young woman who channeled teachings from Saint Anthony, drew many followers, and was burned at the stake in 1706.^[49] The struggle against Kongolese syncretism was strengthened by the participation of Italian Capu­chins, not allied to the Portuguese projects in the area, the authors of our best sources on the religious practices they were trying to stamp out. But by that time the practices and conflicts had been transferred to the far larger stage of Brazil.^[50]

In Brazil in the 1600s many slaves succumbed to the brutal work and the diseases within a few years. Most slaves were fairly recent arrivals from the ports of modern Angola, and the culture and language of the Mbundu people of that region made it across the Atlantic and were preserved intact for generations. Practices of curing and divination are especially well docu­mented. In the eyes of the Roman Catholic clergy they all were works of the Devil, but quite a few whites turned to them when their own cures and divinations produced no results. Whites as well as slaves wore around their necks amulets (bolsas in Portuguese, often called “fetishes” in many European languages) containing herbs, ashes, and perhaps a written Christian prayer.^[51] Nominally converted slaves demanded innovations of European priests, such as a hollow stone with a relic of a saint inside it that was thought indispens­able for transubstantiation. Pieces of the stone or of a consecrated host might be placed in an amulet. But all these mixings were opposed by most clergy and by planters and officials who feared their power to mobilize the slave majority. Most of the people who sought the services of African-tradition healers were women, and only a minority were white. We can follow the adventures of an adept and charismatic African healer named Domingos Alvares, thanks to his 600-page Inquisition file, and see all the ways in which his efforts were undermined, ending in his exile to Portugal, where he still found people eager to use his healing services but had no African community.^[52]

The identification of saints with powerful spirits and ancestors had already been apparent in the Kongo, and supported new forms of social solidarity vital to slaves ripped out of native place and kinship. Especially in the towns, men formed brotherhoods devoted to a particular saint and marched in festive processions with music and dancing that owed a great deal to Africa. Often a brotherhood was limited to people who shared an African native place and language. Devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary was especially popular; the rosary, like the amulet worn around the neck, was at once a sign of devotion and a defense against a world of cruelty and danger. In the 1700s Angola declined as a source of slaves and most came from the coasts of modern Togo, Benin, and Nigeria, bringing new languages and new gods, which shaped vital cultures in Brazil and around the Caribbean.

Europe and the world

If we ask how these encounters with other cultures affected the energetic and polycentric cultural life of Europe in these centuries, we open up a range of issues and scholarship that would require another essay the length of this one to summarize. Much but not all of that activity was mediated by the spread of printing, including works enlivened by the special powers of engravers, artists, and print-makers (Figure 3.3). For our studies of extra-European interactions, this was not the case. Even in the Mediterranean much depended on manuscript, and especially in the Americas much was entirely rooted in oral exchange. Islam made almost no use of print until after 1800. The variety of fruitful and creative exchanges in which Muslims were involved was a result of the geographic position straddling Eurasia and Africa, of principled tolerance of “People of the Book” and more ambivalent toleration of Hindus, and of the openness of many Sufi masters to non­Muslim metaphors for universal spiritual truths and experiences. In all our case studies we confront major consequences of startlingly contingent con­nections, like the decision to leave the future Pakpa in the Mongol camp and the Arabic diagram whose lettering Copernicus somehow made his own, but in every case the consequences had underlying logics - the advantages to Tibetans and Mongols of good relations, the common problems and mental­ities of Muslim and Christian natural philosophers. We find no barrier of cultural difference that was unbreachable. The natural world made some openings: curing, celebrating place, the heavens. Above all, we sense the power of intense emotion and spirituality - African gods and healers in Brazil, apocalyptic excitement in the Mediterranean, Pietro della Valle charmed by the intellectual life of Lar, and most potent of all for the world down to 2013, when peoples of so many different heritages try to understand and build bridges to each other's ways of thought and spirit, the future Guru Nanak on the day of opening he never could explain that led him to a way that was “neither Hindu nor Muslim.”

Figure 3.3: Frontispiece from Bernard and Picart's Ceremonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723-43). European printed works included many that depicted other cultures visually as well as in words, such as this engraving of religious practices around the world.

FURTHER RBADING

Bailey, Gauvin Alexander, Art of Colonial Latin America (London: Phaidon, 2005).

Art on the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542-1773 (University of Toronto Press, 1999).

Bakewell, Peter, A History of Latin America, 2nd edn. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).

Belting, Hans, Florence and Baghdad: Renaissance Art and Arab Science (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011).

Ben-Dor Benite, Zvi, TheDao ofMuhammad: A Cultural History of Muslims in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, Harvard University Press, 2005).

Ben-Zaken, Avner, Cross-Cultural Scientific Exchanges in the Eastern Mediterranean, 1560-1660 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010).

Brockey, Liam Matthew, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (Cam­bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Brotton, Jerry, The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo (Oxford Univer­sity Press, 2002).

Carey, Peter, The Power of Prophecy: Prince Dipanagara and the End of an Old Order in Java, 1785-1855 [Verhandelingen van het Koninklijke Instituut voor Taal-, Land-, and Volk- enkunde, 249] (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007).

Clendinnen, Inga, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517-1570 (Cam­bridge University Press, 1987).

Cole, W. Owen, and Piara Singh Sambhi, The Sikhs: Their Religious Beliefs and Practices (London: Routledge, 1978).

De Bary, Wm. Theodore, and Irene Bloom (eds.), Principle and Practicality: Essays in Neo-Confucianism and Practical Learning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979).

Deuchler, Martina, The Confucian Transformation of Korea: A Study of Society and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Press, 1992).

Eaton, Richard M., Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medieval India (Princeton University Press, 1978).

Elisonas, Jurgis, “Christianity and the Daimyo,” in John Whitney Hall (ed.), James McClain (asst. ed.), The Cambridge History of Japan (Cambridge University Press, 1991, vol. iv, pp. 301-72.

Elverskog, Johan, Buddhism and Islam on the Silk Road (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

Our Great Qing: The Mongols, Buddhism, and the State in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006).

Foret, Philippe, Mapping Chengde: The Qing Landscape Enterprise (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000).

Hodgson, Marshall G. S., The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civiliza­tion, 3 vols. (University of Chicago Press, 1974).

Lapidus, Ira M., A History of Islamic Societies (Cambridge University Press, 1988).

MacCormack, Sabine, Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru (Princeton University Press, 1991).

Menegon, Eugenio, Ancestors, Virgins, and Friars: Christianity as a Local Religion in Late Imperial China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asian Center, Harvard Univer­sity Press, 2009).

Millward, James A. (ed.), New Qing Imperial History: The Making of Inner Asian Empire at Qing Chengde (London: Routledge Curzon, 2004).

Murphy, Joseph M., Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994).

Ooms, Herman, Tokugawa Ideology: Early Constructs, 1570-1680 (Princeton University Press, 1985).

Peterson, WillardJ., “Learning from Heaven: The Introduction of Christianity and Other Western Ideas into Late Ming China,” in John E. Wills, Jr. (ed.), China and Maritime Europe, 1500-1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 78-134.

Saliba, George, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007).

Standaert, Nicolas, The Interweaving of Rituals: Funerals in the Cultural Exchange Between China and Europe (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2008).

Sweet, James H., Domingos Alvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003).

Thornton, John, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

The Kongolese Saint Anthony: Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita and the Antonian Movement, 1684-1706 (Cambridge University Press, 1998).

Totman, Conrad, Early Modern Japan (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993). Wills, John E., Jr., The World from 1450 to 1700 (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Witek, John W., SJ., “Catholic Missions and the Chinese Reaction to Christianity, 1644-1800,” in John E. Wills, Jr. (ed.), China and Maritime Europe, 1500-1800: Trade, Settlement, Diplomacy, and Missions (Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 135-82.

Legal encounters and the origins of global law

LAUREN BENTON AND ADAM CLULOW

In 1636, the Dutch East India Company official Joost Schouten sat down to pen an account of the kingdom of Ayutthaya, or Siam. In a section devoted to “ordinary Justice,” he described what he saw as an exotic and utterly unfamiliar legal system, characterized by despotic excesses and unfathomable customs.¹ The overall picture, duplicated in dozens of European accounts from this period, was of an unbridgeable legal divide separating sojourners like the Dutch from their hosts. And yet an examination of the history of the Dutch factory in Ayutthaya tells a very different story, revealing myriad legal interactions, some marked by disjuncture but many others proceeding rela­tively smoothly across a shared legal terrain. The goal of this chapter is to propose a way to reconcile these two positions by showing how law was woven into routine cross-cultural exchanges, conflicts, and negotiations in the early modern world.

The study of law has been slow to develop in world history. One reason is the tendency to formulate questions of legal history within the framework of national histories. A second reason is the way the history of international law has been recounted largely as a European story. Historians have recently addressed the first problem with a greater focus on transnational legal processes and on the law of empires in world history. It has proven trickier to broaden the chronological and geographic scope of “international” law to lessen the emphasis on Europe's role. One attempt is found in the work of C. H. Alexandrowicz, who argued in an important and still frequently cited 1967 study that a universal international law, formulated primarily by ^[53] European scholars such as Hugo Grotius but drawing heavily on Asian practices, was in fact already present in the early modern period.^[54] This hybrid law of nations supposedly allowed European and Asian powers to operate with a shared set of legal concepts that provided for ready compre­hension of treaties and other legal instruments across cultures. Critics pointed to the lack of evidence for this rosy view of cross-cultural legal understanding and also attacked the shakiest part of Alexandrowicz's argu­ment by challenging the notion that European legal scholars had deliberately modeled key legal concepts, most notably the freedom of the seas, on Asian practices.^[55]

More recent, and less sweeping, arguments about the global dimensions of international legal history have tacked in a different direction, emphasizing the centrality of the colonial encounter to the formation of international law. Historians have suggested that attempts to account for the “dynamic of difference” between Europe and the territories it ultimately colonized focused the attention of European jurists on a series of problems presented by imperial rule.^[56] Connections between colonialism and European legal thought cut across several centuries, from late-medieval Christian debates about the legal status of infidels to arguments by the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic Francisco de Vitoria about the legal basis for the Spanish conquest of the Indies to nineteenth-century efforts by international lawyers to reconcile the persistence of empires with the emergence of a global system of sovereign nation-states.^[57]

This chapter outlines a third approach that builds on some of Alexandro- wicz's insights without embracing his conclusions about the emergence of a comprehensive law of nations and that recognizes the importance of empires to the international order without defining non-European law and sover­eignty as problems that Western jurists and international lawyers had to solve. We analyze common practices in many different kinds of political communities between 1400 and 1800 that helped to structure relations across polities. These practices fell noticeably short of constituting a universal law of nations and instead reflected “a crude parallel morphology” in which diverse political communities shared some basic characteristics that allowed legal actors to rely on analogies, rather than elusive cross-cultural understandings, as they engaged with other peoples and polities.^[58]

The foundational elements of what we are calling “interpolity law” consti­tuted a repertoire that was available in most, if not all, world regions in this period and to a range of different groups. Regardless of their location and their cultural origins, political communities sought to develop “proper and peaceful relations” with one another, and in order to do so, they had to be able to communicate and to some degree predict others' actions and motiv­ations.^[59] Rather than focusing on the writings of legal theorists or the intellectual problems thrown up by global expansion, this chapter is con­cerned with sets of commonly occurring legal practices that organized certain settled expectations. We discuss and illustrate three categories or rubrics of legal practices that existed widely in the early modern world and generated regional or global legal order: protocol, jurisdiction, and protection. Other categories of legal behavior that could span regions and polities included practices surrounding legalities of war, contract, and property. But the rubrics of protocol, jurisdiction, and protection correspond to especially wide-ranging patterns. Protocol structured diplomatic negotiations and pro­vided a guide to advancing legal claims in strange places. Jurisdiction pro­vided a framework for merchant communities to arrange to manage their own affairs and to sustain connections across states and regions. And agree­ments about protection represented a way to share legal authority between rulers.

The sum of these parts was not the shared law of nations so confidently outlined by Alexandrowicz or a legal script forced on the rest of the world by Europeans. Instead, the sets of practices that fall under these rubrics provided a loose scaffolding for cross-polity interactions involving a wide range of parties, some European, many not. The resulting framework of interpolity law was global in reach but also geographically uneven. And if Europe was not the progenitor of these practices, it was the unquestioned beneficiary of their wide recognition. The success of European overseas enterprises in the early modern period rested in part on European agents' ability to manipulate existing legal concepts and routines in order to establish and maintain legal footholds. Elements of interpolity law, too, tended to change over time from parts of a legal repertoire accessible everywhere to instruments of European rule over disparate and distant lands and peoples.

Protocol

The ability of rulers to perform properly and publicly certain clearly desig­nated rites was central to the internal production of power. The significance of such practices could also extend beyond the domestic realm. Ritualized protocol - a complex set of highly stylized actions and behavior that had to be performed correctly in order to derive a result - provided a basis for cross­polity interactions in the early modern world. Put more simply, a wide range of officials could agree that a prescribed set of actions performed at the right time in the right place in the right way was necessary to confirm authority in a variety of settings even as opinions differed as to the proper content of these actions. As straightforward as it may appear, this expectation worked to facilitate a range of interactions by providing both a form and an implicit standard. Not all such practices related to law, but many did, legitimating legal authority or reinforcing legal claims. Particularly important were diplo­matic protocol, which undergirded sovereignty, and protocol surrounding the exercise of legal authority, which supplemented other evidence in support of imperial agents' authority over lands and peoples.

Diplomacy was - and of course remains - bound up with ritualized protocol. In Europe, the “civilities and ceremonies” attached to diplomacy were the subject of elaborate codification and lengthy manuals.^[60] In the great hierarchical courts of Mughal India or Ming China, the staging of diplomatic interactions - down to the most minute details of dress and action - was precisely regulated, and in Japan, the first Tokugawa shoguns spent the opening decades of the seventeenth century drawing up “canons of protocol” to regulate interaction with overseas partners.^[61] In the Americas, an equally complex system prevailed, characterized by regional variations but also widespread consensus among Indian polities that diplomatic interactions should be “carried out at a specific place and follow a specific sequence of actions.”¹⁰ Such attention to protocol pervaded Indians' interactions with Europeans and powered a system of “diplomatic reciprocity.”11

Failure to follow protocol could have disastrous consequences for individ­ual representatives. Captain Cook's murder in the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) shows what could happen when, if we follow Marshall Sahlins's interpretation, even a foreigner received as a god failed to follow designated rituals.¹² More generally, host officials regarded the capacity of ambassadors to adhere to protocol not only as a concrete sign of the sponsoring sover­eign's wealth and power but also as a key index of legitimacy. According to Abraham de Wicquefort, the great interpreter of seventeenth-century diplo­macy, there was no better “Mark of Sovereignty than the Right of sending and receiving Ambassadors.”¹³

Distance could strain the ability of ambassadors or other agents to perform ritualized protocol correctly. The opening of new sea routes in the early modern period transported agents to unfamiliar courts where the status of their sovereigns was far from clear. Thrust into contact with an array of rulers and officials, ambassadors nervously rehearsed what was expected of them. One English envoy dispatched to the Ottoman capital anxiously played through the sequence of actions needed to secure appropriate recognition, explaining to his companion how he must enter the court - “betwyxte tow men holdinge my handes downe close to my sides" - and once “lede into the presence of the Grand Sinyor... muste kiss his kne or his hanginge sleve."1⁴

When knowledge or performance of protocol faltered and things went wrong, they could go very wrong, very fast. One Mr. Edwards, an early English representative dispatched to Mughal India, failed to properly act out the “title and state of an ambassador" and was “kicked and spurned by the King's porters out of the courte-gates, to the unrecoverable disgrace of our Kinge and nation."¹⁵ The threat of failing the protocol litmus test was not limited to European interlopers, and even the representatives of established powers with a long history of diplomatic exchange could stumble. This was the fate of a mission sent to Japan by the king of Siam in 1634. Arriving in Nagasaki, the ambassador acted with such arrogance and offered such incomplete explanations that local officials refused to “convey the royal letter to the Emperor ofJapan [Shogun], and sent the envoy back to his country.”¹⁶ While the monetary costs associated with failed embassies were substantial, the legal repercussions could be far more damaging, particularly since they could last for years on end. The effect of removing a ruler's legitimacy could be to strip subjects of status and protection: Sailors became pirates, soldiers were turned into bandits, and ambassadors were reduced to the status of free agents, or even, to quote one outraged Japanese official confronted with an incompetent Dutch envoy, nothing more than “swindlers” armed with meaningless pieces of paper. 1⁷

Hybrid organizations such as chartered companies proved especially sus­ceptible to such pitfalls. Awarded a set of state-like capacities, including the right to make war and form agreements with foreign rulers, by their European sponsors, companies often moved aggressively into the business of diplomacy, maritime violence, and, territorial dominion. In Asia and elsewhere, their success hinged on rulers' recognition that the companies wielded sovereign powers in the same way as conventional states, but their failure to master protocol could, and sometimes did, deny them the dispen­sation they required to operate freely. The result was a period of diplomatic probation in which different strategies were tried and discarded. Some companies opted to bring in diplomatic pinch hitters, specialists familiar with European diplomatic protocols who were expected to transfer their expertise seamlessly to Asia. Perhaps the most famous example was Thomas Roe, who was hired by the English East India Company to restore status to the position of ambassador, which had “become ridiculous, so many having assumed that title, and not performed the offices.”¹⁸ Having decided that an “Embassadour of extraordinarye Countenance and respect” was needed, company officials dispatched Roe, “a gentleman of a pregnant understandinge,” who would, so the theory went, be able to use his close connection to the English throne and long experience of court politics to successfully navigate the maze of Mughal protocol.^[62]

16

17

18

Iwao Seiichi, “Reopening the Diplomatic and Commercial Relations Between Japan and Siam During the Tokugawa Period,” Acta Asiatica 4 (1963): 8.

14 October 1627, Daghregister van de reijse gedaen bij Pieter Nuijts ende Pieter Muijser, oppercoopman, als ambassadeurs aen den keijser ende rijcxraden van Japan van 24 Julij 1627 tot 18 Februarij 1628, VOC 1095: 472v.

Thomas Roe, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India, 1615-19, (ed.) W. Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899), p. 45.

In other cases, European agents, when faced with these kinds of chal­lenges, sought not to learn but to deceive. As part of its overall diplomatic strategy, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie or VOC) tacitly encouraged its agents to represent themselves not as the agents of a private company based in a republic but as the envoys of the “king of Holland,” a tactic designed to enable them to claim the same status as their competitors.^[63] The logic was simple: If protocol demanded a monarch, then a monarch would be provided. On other occasions, the company responded to the demands of diplomatic protocol with bizarre delegations designed to muddy the waters in such a way that judgment was rendered impossible. In 1649, the company dispatched an unconventional mission to Japan headed by a dying ambassador who was sent with the expectation that he would succumb to his illness before he reached Japan, thereby rendering him incapable of answering questions as to his mission or status. Once his superior had at last departed this world, the deputy ambassador proceeded to carry out his instructions to prepare the body with “drugs and spices and sewn back together” so that it could be shown to Tokugawa officials as gruesome proof that protocol had been met.^[64]1

Deception was not the only way to use or abuse expectations about protocol. Envoys sometimes purposely insulted courtly audiences as a way of repaying perceived slights or even provoking violence. In the sixteenth century Deccan, insults, delivered by and to envoys, became part of the fabric of diplomacy and frequent catalysts for war.^[65] In places without a long history of contact where it was more difficult to craft subtle insults, repre­sentatives sometimes looked for ways to demonstrate their rejection of diplomacy. After Pizarro's band offered gifts to Atahualpa, the Incan ruler paid a return visit to the occupied town of Cajamarca, where, according to several chronicles, he threw a Bible (or a breviary) on the ground. Even taking into consideration the difficulties of language and lack of familiarity with the Spaniards, it is difficult to imagine that the act was intended as anything other than an insult - or a counter-insult to the insufficient defer­ence shown by the Spaniards.

19

20

21

22

Imperial agents did seek to master aspects of recognized legal protocol that they knew might support claims to the control or conquest of new territor­ies. The European adventurers who departed for overseas reconnaissance and colonizing missions came from societies where kingly authority was routinely bolstered by legal rituals, including show trials, public executions, and proclamations of mercy designed to signal the majesty of sovereigns. Agents carried such practices with them, improvising as they went, using rituals to hold together fragile political communities far from home and also to represent the political power of expedition leaders or colonial officials to local populations. On early voyages in the Atlantic world, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and English subjects prosecuted traitors in their midst in effective demonstrations that they were acting on behalf of distant but powerful monarchs.^[66] On his 1609 expedition to New France, Samuel Cham­plain ordered the hanging of a locksmith, Jean Duval, who was accused of plotting to hand over the fort to Basque or Spanish fishermen in the area. By following the dictates of legal protocol, Champlain turned the execution into a demonstration less of force than of political authority backed by the French crown and into an explicit message capable of being understood by multiple audiences, including not only French soldiers but also other European groups as well as indigenous residents.^[67]

By marking jurisdiction, rituals of judgment and punishment served to communicate imperial claims to rival powers. Europeans followed a flexible but relatively stable protocol to claim possession or mark occupation in territories they sought to control, seeking proofs of their acquisition of territory according to modes derived from Roman law.^[68] The symbolic vocabulary of possession included founding settlements, mapping, perform­ing ceremonies with bits of soil and plants, and building stone or wood structures. To hold a trial or pass judgment was itself an act of symbolic marking that could support claims to territory. It is not surprising that the royal instructions carried by Juan Diaz de Solis on an expedition of reconnais­sance and settlement in the Rio de la Plata region in the early sixteenth century included the directive to have “somebody bring a complaint before you, and as our captain and judge you shall pronounce upon and determine it, so that, in all you shall take the said possession.”^[69] In colonial Taiwan, where the Dutch engaged in a long struggle with Chinese sojourners for influence over aboriginal villages, the execution of “the [Chinese] robber Twakam” had to be “done altogether properly” in front of an assembled audience of “Formosans, who had already been informed of the event” in order to illustrate the company's sovereignty over the island.^[70]

As with diplomatic protocol, legal rituals had to be performed well; they also had to be widely reported and enduring to be effective. The Portuguese ritual construction of padroes, stone and wood columns, to mark their presence along the West African coast unraveled when Vasco da Gama reached the coast of East Africa. In one place, local residents “demolished both the cross and the pillar” the day after they had been erected, and further along the East African coast, the Portuguese captains would not hazard a trip to shore to raise the columns without first taking hostages.^[71] Here and elsewhere, it was not just rival Europeans who could read the significance of such legal ceremonies. Local rulers often tolerated such acts precisely because they understood them to be open to interpretation, potentially supportive of their own positions and claims. When the Portuguese estab­lished a fort at Sao Jorge da Mina in 1482, for example, the local ruler attended the founding ceremony and approved it as a symbol only of his cession of the fort grounds and Portuguese control within it, not as evidence of more expansive Portuguese claims.^[72]

Across these examples, the ability to follow protocol helped make inter­polity relations possible, but it did not translate necessarily into cross-cultural understanding, which proved far more elusive. Rather it was the case that ritualized protocol, for all its costs, dangers, and sometimes evident absurd­ity, was widely accepted as a basic building block of cross-polity exchange. The reliance on protocol persisted despite the confusion created by multiple standards for diplomatic and legal ritual, each complete with its own set of guidelines.

As European global power rose, Europeans began gradually to refer more confidently to a single standard of diplomatic discourse and behavior and to propose adherence to this as a durable marker of international status. In North America, the withdrawal of the French in 1763 allowed the English to “abandon the protocols that had shaped Native-European interactions for generations.”^[73] Increasingly, Europeans surveyed Indians' diplomacy and warfare for evidence of their “savagery.”^[74] In Asia, a similar shift happened later, with one of the more dramatic moments of rupture occurring in 1842-3, when English India Company representatives - the successors of Thomas Roe - appeared before the Mughal emperor.^[75] Having consulted the records to see what “etiquette [should be] followed” in order to secure Mughal recognition, they resolved to offer up a ceremonial gift of gold. Presented before the emperor, the envoys made a “low obeisance” after which the sovereign “ordered us to be robed in dresses of honour, and to have turbans bound round our heads.” The envoys were then mounted on elephants and “paraded through the chief streets of Delhi as those whom the King delighted to honour.” Whereas in past centuries this outcome would have been deemed a success, the Governor-General was furious when he received the news, immediately ordering that no further British representatives should be compelled to participate in such ceremonies. Two centuries of British obser­vance of Mughal protocol were coming to an end.

Jurisdiction

The performance of protocol was often closely related to efforts to establish or challenge jurisdictional arrangements. “Jurisdiction” refers broadly to the scope for exercising legal authority - over persons, places, or categories of activity. Early modern polities typically had plural jurisdictions that were overlapping or parallel; for all its power the state did not possess anything approaching a monopoly on legal authority, which was divided among a jumble of often competing jurisdictions. The key example of persisting jurisdictional tension for Europe was a familiar division between church and secular law. Ecclesiastics claimed jurisdiction over clergy as well as categories of especially vulnerable people such as orphans, widows, and travelers, and they also insisted on their legal authority to regulate certain behaviors (for example, marriage, adultery, and blasphemy) and their power to keep secular authorities out of churches and away from church business in general. Similar segmentation existed in other parts of the world. Even in apparently centralized states like China, which has historically been associated with a single, unified legal system, there was ample evidence of legal pluralism.^[76] Because of both their size and diverse ethnic makeup, empires were naturally multi-jurisdictional, the overlay of imposed law serving to supplement rather than to erase indigenous or local legal forums. The result was legally commodious political formations, with space within them for communities permitted by the sovereign to have jurisdiction over certain matters and members. Jurisdictional complexity was, in short, a typical feature of politics in the early modern world; the quip by Bishop Agobardus of Lyons that “five men, each under a different law, may [often] be found walking or sitting together” would not have seemed strange in many, or even most, parts of the world.^[77]

The unprecedented movement of people in the early modern period exacerbated jurisdictional complexity by injecting new foreign groups into already complicated domestic milieux.^[78] The opening up of long-distance sea routes, which gradually stretched out to encompass the globe, enabled thousands of mariners, merchants, and migrants to venture into new regions. Jurisdictional claims traveled with delegated legal authorities and followed subjects around the globe. On the sea, European ships operated as both “islands of law" - floating territories of the realm - and as “vectors of law” carrying sovereigns' legal authority into the ocean world.^[79] Ship captains and military commanders overseas operated as delegated legal authorities, con­ducting inquiries on the ships or forts under their command and meting out punishments for subordinates. In Asia, the maritime laws of Melaka gave the captain absolute power, explicitly designating him sovereign over a tiny floating kingdom: “The captain [Nakhoda] is as a king on board his ship. The steersman [Jurumudi] is as the Prime Minister [Bendahara]. The officer in charge of casting anchor and taking soundings [Jurubatu] is as the chief of police [Temenggong]."^[80]

As jurists, ship captains, and advisers to sovereigns struggled to ascertain the law of maritime spaces that churned with long-distance traders, pirates, privateers, and quasi-naval forces, they returned repeatedly to jurisdiction as a key structuring element. Jurisdiction was not the same as ownership; as the Dutch legal writer Hugo Grotius pointed out in his 1609 tract Mare liberum (The Free Sea), the sea could not be possessed.^[81] It could, however, be controlled, and travelers on the sea could exercise jurisdiction not only over their own ships but also over many others that crossed their paths. This view matched well with the Portuguese sale of passes (cartazes) to ships in the Indian Ocean and the Japanese shuinjδ.^[82] Such systems established the ships of pass-giving sovereigns as mobile outposts of state authority. They also marked vessels carrying passes as clients, with the result that they were often given a wide berth by other potentially predatory fleets. In 1618, for example, a Dutch fleet allowed a Japanese vessel carrying such a document to run its blockade of Manila, prompting Spanish observers to note that because the vessel “carried a chapa, or license, from the Japanese emperor it feared nothing.”^[83] The result was a tangle of jurisdictional corridors, the complexity of which offered both protection to individual merchants who were able to find security by maintaining or claiming connections to multiple sovereigns and opportunities for raiding by maritime predators who also found ways to game the system of overlapping jurisdictions.^[84]

On land, a different jurisdictional patchwork took shape. Most polities allowed foreign merchant communities to regulate their own affairs, except in the punishment of serious crimes or other threats to order. The result was the visible legal pluralism of multi-ethnic port cities such as Melaka, which hosted a bewildering array of foreign traders including but not limited to “Moors from Cairo, Mecca, Aden, Abyssinians, men of Kilwa, Malindi, Ormuz, Parsees, Rumes, Turks, Turkomans, Christian Armenians, Gujara- tees, 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, [and] Lequeos. ”^[85] The widespread expectation that merchant communities would retain some judicial power over their own members facilitated the movement of traders into new territories. Portuguese agents established trading factories in West Africa by negotiating with local rulers who agreed to allow the Portuguese to maintain jurisdiction within their settlements so long as they did not attempt to extend their legal authority over neighboring African subjects.^[86] Communities of Armenian and Jewish traders operated in both Catholic and Ottoman territories in the Mediterra­nean by depending on the widespread recognition of a degree of legal purview over co-religionists. In the port of Calicut on the Indian coast, incoming Muslim merchants were placed under the control of a “Moorish Governor of their own who rules and punishes them without interference from the [Hindu] king.”^[87]

Plural legal orders - that is, those comprising multiple and even compet­ing jurisdictions - were ubiquitous, and their commonalities helped to regulate interpolity relations. Jurisdictional arrangements were frequently referenced in treaties such as those negotiated between the Dutch and English East India Companies and Indian Ocean states that granted Euro­peans “authority to execute justice on their owne men offending.”^[88] Such clauses were not forced at gunpoint; to the contrary they were frequently volunteered by officials attached to regimes like that of Tokugawa Japan, which wielded military and economic resources far in excess of the most powerful European states.^[89] By the same token, conquerors often allowed and even encouraged conquered subjects to retain jurisdiction in their own communities. Spaniards in New Spain allowed Aztec legal forums to

Legal encounters and the origins of global law continue to function after the conquest, a situation that shifted more as a result of Indian participation in Spanish legal forums than Spanish insistence on Indians' legal incorporation.^[90]

Understandings about the routine nature of jurisdictional arrangements did not in any way preclude conflict. In general, the decision to uphold or to violate widely accepted jurisdictional boundaries was often a highly political one, with the result that the subsequent controversies could be bitterly contested. In the VOC factory in Ayutthaya, for example, the question of jurisdiction was relegated to the sidelines until 1636, when two inebriated Dutch merchants were arrested for attacking the servants of the king's brother. The retaliation for the incident was swift; rather than allowing the Dutch to try and punish their own men, the king of Siam moved to execute the offenders. The subsequent storm of protest orches­trated by the local VOC representative led eventually to a compromise after both sides agreed that a symbolic affirmation of guilt would suffice if the Dutch pledged to obey “all the laws and customs of the realm.”^[91] In this case, relative Dutch weakness in the area led the company to agree to recognize Ayutthayan jurisdiction over its agents, even while keeping the door open to future challenges should the balance of power shift in favor of the Dutch.^[92]

Challenges also emerged because jurisdictional divisions often corres­ponded to religious or ethnic differences, themselves unstable and contested. In contexts such as the Pays d'en Haut in North America, where French traders were traveling into areas in which no single authority held a monop­oly of violence and where they could not appeal to established diplomatic circuits to sort out conflicts, disputes about blurred jurisdictional lines were sometimes resolved on the spot, in ad hoc ways that split the difference between culturally different legal procedures. For example, when a group of Indians killed two Frenchmen in an area that neither Algonquians nor Frenchmen held securely, an initial standoff - the Algonquian offer of slaves to compensate the loss and the French demand to punish all participants in the attack - was followed by a negotiated resolution that defied legal logic for

both sides: the execution of two Indians.^[93] In other standoffs across legal divides, uncertainties about whether rival groups would turn over accused wrongdoers often led to hostage taking to ensure motivation to negotiate about alternative punishments.

Other variables affecting jurisdictional politics included the differential energies and actions of consuls - agents of distant sovereigns charged with legal oversight of subjects in foreign territories. In the sprawling Ottoman Empire, where a “‘customary' diplomatic law” centered on the familiar principle of special jurisdiction for foreign groups, the local consul could influence the way the plural legal order evolved.^[94] One commentator noted that some British consuls “had doubts as to their powers, were perplexed and embarrassed in the administration of their authority, feared to give due protection, and left the complaints of British subjects entirely without redress; whilst, in other cases, Consuls exercised their power with a most despotic and an almost intolerable authority.”^[95] Yet a degree of studied ignorance about complex legal orders also seemed routine and matters seemed to function best when not committed to paper. According to one experienced consul based in Tripoli, any attempt to provide a written record would simply “perplex and embarrass the question, and lead to unnecessary correspondence and much trouble.”^[96] He was not the last official to appreci­ate the paradox of a legal system well understood by insiders but difficult to explain, precise enough to be used to resolve complex cases but permissive of an eclectic use of sources and sometimes procedures, and subject to treaty terms but shaped more powerfully by the improvisations of local actors.

These qualities placed jurisdictional politics at the center of key shifts in ideas about sovereignty that began to take shape at the turn of the nineteenth century. The jurisdictional complexity of early modern societies had sup­ported an understanding of sovereignty as divisible - that is, as a bundle of capacities distributed in different combinations within irregular spaces rather than as a monopoly power exercised over bounded territories. A cluster of jurisdictional conflicts reflecting increasing global imperial power began to undergird a shift toward a view of state legal authority as positioned at the apex of a hierarchy of jurisdictions. Such shifts developed within a world of empires rather than as a result of the rise of a global order of nation-states. Europeans in settler colonies formulated claims to local territorial control and legal hegemony in response to clusters of jurisdictional conflicts with indigenous societies.^[97] Conflicts over extra-territoriality - jurisdiction over subjects living in foreign territories - sharpened in several world regions, benefiting from the enforcement of militarized empires and prompting local regimes to respond by ratcheting up their own claims to control over legal affairs within defined territories.^[98] Such shifts were subtle and in many places gradual, but it is clear that jurisdictional orders were changing, with far- reaching effects.

Protection

Protocol and jurisdiction are categories that describe form and function. But what was the substance of interpolity negotiations? Much of the talk across political communities centered on protection - services of protection against enemies that might be traded and the protection of subjects traveling in or through foreign territories. The theme of protection pervaded treaties, informal negotiations, the militarization of trading post empires, and ration­ales for aggression against other states in the early modern world.

In interaction after interaction, protection came paired with its indispens­able twin, tribute. The Ottoman relationship with its European vassal states was predicated on the exchange of “obedience” or “submission” in return for the “mighty protection of empire.”^[99] In the case of Wallachia and Moldavia, this took the form of tribute (cizye or harac) offered up in recompense for protection (himayet or siyanet), a transaction that found clear expression in a 1586 document issued by Murad iii to Wallachia stating that “this country is under our due protection, and its subjects pay me tribute.”^[100] On the other side of Asia, a similar exchange animated the Chinese tributary system, which allowed distant states to petition the imperial center not only for recognition but also, as is less frequently discussed, actual protection. In 1403, for example, the sultan of Melaka requested precisely this from the Ming state in return for appropriate submission. The result was an imperial decree that the “Western mountain of the country [Melaka]... be enfeoffed as the protector mountain of the country, and a tablet erected upon it.”^[101] Melaka prospered in the shade of Ming protection, which proved highly effective, even across great distances. In 1419, a possible attack by nearby Siam was warded off by a stern warning from China that the “king of the country of Melaka has already become part of the within [the empire], and he is a minister of the Court.”^[102]

Protection was ubiquitous in Southeast Asia, where it provided the logic for hierarchical arrangements among states. Individual kings claimed author­ity over vassals and tributaries that made up a shifting cast, one that might “expand and contract in concertina-like fashion” as tributaries entered and exited spheres of influence.^[103] Both sides maneuvered strategically. Strong rulers were always looking for new tributaries capable of buttressing their power, and weak rulers sought new benefactors capable of ensuring security in a dangerous world. The ability of individual tributaries to claim multiple overlords at any one time intensified the continual legal and political jostling.

The interior logic of the exchange between overlord and tributary was predominantly one of reciprocity. A smaller, weaker state would seek shelter from a dangerous neighbor by striking a deal with a potential overlord. But there were also many circumstances in which one paid to protect oneself against the so-called protector - that is, where “oppressive protection” or “mafia-like protection” did not respond to an obvious outside threat, other than the danger created by the one peddling protection.^[104] In all cases, protection came attached to genuine concessions, both material costs and the surrender of partial sovereignty by the weaker partner. The most obvious requirement of such arrangements was political submission, which gave the overlord rights to various degrees of legal intervention, effectively extending jurisdiction across borders.

European overseas enterprises made full use of the protection rubric. When the Dutch arrived in Asia in the seventeenth century, they had come, so they claimed, to offer protection to sovereigns and people against the rapacious Iberian empires. In some cases, the Dutch emphasized mutual protection, asserting that the company stood as a brother pledged to support its equal partner in times of need. But the relationship was more frequently couched in hierarchical terms, with the offer made to a weaker party in return for a set of specific concessions, in particular access to precious spices over which the company was seeking monopoly rights. In 1607, for example, the sultan of Ternate accepted the Dutch as his “protector” (beschermheer) in return for an agreement “not to sell any cloves, to any nation or people” aside from his new allies.^[105] In this way, protection provided a mechanism to share authority, affording legal rights to one party while eroding those of the other.

This case and many others suggest that protection functioned as a gener­ally accepted rubric shared by European and Asian powers. Small states in Asia easily traded allegiance to a familiar overlord for a more exotic one when the change served their interests. In the early sixteenth century, Kedah, a strategically located polity on the northern end of the Malay peninsula, attempted to gain the protection of Melaka against the influence of Siam, then fell back into the arms of Siam after an attack by the powerful Sumatran state of Aceh, then rebelled and sought protection from a new power, the Dutch East India Company, which was enthusiastically snapping up allies in the region and had clearly grasped the possibilities of protection peddling.^[106] In the late eighteenth century, the British East India Company founded its policy of “subsidiary alliances,” designed to extend its influence and control among Indian states, on protection paid for by Indian rulers and guaranteed by the Company.

Increasingly, “protection” carried a double meaning, as it signified shelter from both external enemies and the arbitrary power of petty despots. The term was invoked by British abolitionists who favored extending imperial jurisdiction in the West Indies in order to check the power of colonial elites over slaves and freed blacks by bringing subordinate subjects of the empire under the “protection” of British law.^[107] It was cited, too, by officials advocat­ing war against rulers accused of tyranny. After the British took control from the Dutch of the coastal provinces of Ceylon in 1785, for example, British officials developed an elaborate rationale for attacking and annexing the Kingdom of Kandy in the island's interior. A series of governors wrote to convince London that the king was a brutal tyrant, while exhorting selected Kandyan elites to “solicit the protection of England” on behalf of the people and invite an invasion that would allow Kandy to be folded into a broader project of legal reform on the island.^[108]

As with protocol and jurisdiction, the long nineteenth century brought important shifts in the way protection functioned internationally. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, protection featured prominently in the most important European treaties. Key clauses in the 1774 Treaty of Kuςuk Kaynarca between the Ottoman and Russian empires defined the legal protection of Russian Christians living in Ottoman territories. In 1815, the Treaty of Paris made Britain the “protecting sovereign” in the Ionian Islands, stipulating in language so vague that it would result in decades of conflict that the islands would regulate their own “internal organization,” subject to the “approbation of the Protecting Power.”^[109] Such agreements engendered legal conflicts and attempts at revising imperial policies in ways that prepared the ground for later attempts to define “protectorates” as special categories within the international order and to define a doctrine of humanitarian intervention premised on a universally recognized “responsibility to protect.”^[110]

Conclusion

As large and small polities jostled against one another with a new intensity and frequency in the early modern world, interpolity relations drew from shared expectations about legal behavior. A quality of imprecision in such basic understandings could provide valuable flexibility and prevent conflict. It sometimes also sharpened conflict by introducing new jurisdictional tensions, creating opportunities for flawed performances of protocol, or exposing the fictions embedded within offers of protection. Yet for all this, such rubrics of legal behavior helped diverse political communities structure and sustain interactions and provided the foundations for regional and even global legal regimes.

Over the course of the long nineteenth century, intensifying legal conflicts accompanied a broad set of changes in the global order. Conflicts over jurisdictional boundaries intensified, contributing to increasingly robust claims by states to a monopoly on legal authority. Extra-territoriality, long a feature of interpolity law, became more closely associated with the rise of European and US global power. And protection developed into a recognized element of international law, first in relation to the formal designation of European protectorates, later in debates about the obligations of all states to act to uphold certain universal standards of human rights. We cannot make sense of such trends without first understanding the elements that formed the foundations for interpolity law between 1500 and 1800.

FURTHER READING

Alexandrowicz, C. H., An Introductian to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies (Oxford University Press, 1967).

Anand, R. P., Confrontation or Cooperation? International Law and the Developing Countries (New Delhi: Banyan Publications, 1984).

Anghie, Antony, Imperialism, Sovereignty, and the Making of International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Banner, Stuart, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous Peoplefrom Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

Belmessous, Saliha (ed.), Native Claims: Indigenous Law against Empire, 1500-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Benton, Lauren, A Searchfor Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge Univer­sity Press, 2002).

Benton, Lauren and Richard Ross (eds.), Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (New York University Press, 2013).

Borschberg, Peter, Hugo Grotius, the Portuguese and Free Trade in the East Indies (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2011).

Cassel, Par, Grounds of Judgment: Extraterritoriality and Imperial Power in Nineteenth-Century China and Japan (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Clulow, Adam, The Company and the Shogun: The Dutch Encounter with Tokugawa Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).

Fassbender, Bardo and Anne Peters, The Oxford Handbook of the History of International Law (Oxford University Press, 2012).

Ford, Lisa, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

Ghachem, Malick, The Old Regime and the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Hair, P. E. H., Africa Encountered: European Contacts and Evidence, 1450-1700 (Farnham, UK: Variorum, 1997).

Hulsebosch, Daniel, Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutional­ism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830 (Studies in Legal History) (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

Keene, Edward, Beyond the Anarchical Society: Grotius, Colonialism, and Order in World Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2002).

MacMillan, Ken, Sovereignty and Possession in the English New World: The Legal Foundations of Empire, 1576-1640 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

Morgan, Philip and Molly Warsh, Early North America in Global Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2013).

Muldoon, James, Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-Christian World, 1250-1550 (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979).

Muthu, Sankar (ed.), Empire and Modern Political Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Northrup, David, Africa's Discovery of Europe (Oxford University Press, 2013 [2002]).

Owensby, Brian, Empire of Law and Indian Justice in Colonial Mexico (University Press, 2008).

Pagden, Anthony, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).

Richter, Daniel, Facing East from Indian Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Stern, Philip, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India (Oxford University Press, 2011).

Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, Courtly Encounters: Translating Courtliness and Violence in Early Modern Eurasia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Suzuki, Shogo, Yongjin Zhang, and Joel Quirk, International Orders in the Early Modern World: Before the Rise of the West (New York: Routledge, 2014).

Tomlins, Christopher and Bruce Mann (eds.), The Many Legalities of Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

Travers, Robert, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Van Ittersum, Martine, Profit and Principle: Hugo Grotius, Natural Rights Theories and the Rise of Dutch Power in the East Indies, 1595-1615 (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006).

Ward, Kerry, Networks of Empire: Forced Migration in the Dutch East India Company (Cambridge University Press, 2008).