Globalization of disease, 1300 to 1900

JAMES L. A. WEBB, JR.

During the long era from the fourteenth century through the nineteenth century, the global webs of human commercial and social interactions extended and thickened.

The deep contexts of human disease history

Human beings have never lived free from disease. Our earliest human ancestors were subject to a broad range of bacterial, helminthic, viral and protozoan infections in tropical Africa. These infections could inflict severe suffering or death. Yet, from an epidemiological point of view, they were episodic and transient, because early human groupings were too small to circulate the infections on an ongoing basis and there were only intermittent contacts between them. The dynamics of infectious disease transmission could not change until human groups grew in size, and this could only happen as a result of technological innovation that helped them to extract more resources from their environments.

As early as 87,000 bce, groups congregated seasonally along tropical African riverbanks to use new fishing technologies.

The vegeculturalists who planted tubers and the agriculturalists who sowed grain increased their numbers with difficulty. They harvested calories sufficient to sustain slow growth in population, yet their increasing popula­tion densities and the ecological transformations that these denser popula­tions provoked created new vulnerabilities to disease.

The nature of these vulnerabilities varied. In tropical Africa, human beings had long had to contend with diseases transferred from wild animal popula­tions by insect vectors. There were a plethora of such infections, including the trypanosome that causes sleeping sickness, the virus that causes yellow fever, and the plasmodia that cause different kinds of malaria (including vivax). The initial disease burden of the African tropics was probably higher than elsewhere in the world, and over time, as populations grew, this disease burden increased.^{[54] [55]} The vulnerability to malaria intensified when vegecultur- alists expanded into the forest zones and inadvertently opened up breeding habitat for the anopheline mosquitoes that transmitted malaria.

The expansion of the disease-experienced populations, at the expense of the non-disease-experienced populations, was not confined to tropical Africa. It was repeated elsewhere in the river basin societies of southern Eurasia and northern Africa. Yet, there the mix of pathogens was consider­ably different. In southern Eurasia and Northern Africa, there was neither sleeping sickness nor yellow fever. The intensity of malaria transmission was lower, and the mix of malarial parasites caused fewer deaths. Yet, by approximately the fifth millennium bcb, the Eurasian and Northern African disease environment had begun to take on entirely new properties. As early agriculturalists began to domesticate animals, some of their pathogens leaped across species to infect human beings. These zoonoses - diseases that pass from animals to humans - were virulent and wreaked havoc on the settled communities.

The zoonoses were varied, and the survivors of measles, mumps, chick­enpox, and several other major zoonotic killing diseases acquired lifetime immunity. This produced a paradox, similar to that in tropical Africa. The settled communities were the most unhealthy and epidemiologically danger­ous places in the world, yet the survivors were disease-hardened. And when they encountered non-disease-experienced populations, they transmitted their diseases to them. Thus, the immunologically-naιve populations, rather than encountering the pathogens exclusively during their childhood years, met them across the entire age spectrum, with devastating results.

The disease environments of tropical Africa and those of Northern Africa and Eurasia were profoundly different from that of the Americas. Human beings had entered the Americas well before the era of the domestication of animals and agricultural revolutions. They entered an environment pro­foundly altered by glacialization, and insect-borne disease was a far smaller burden in northern climes. Small human groupings, even when they first turned to agriculture in what is today central Mexico, developed sedentary societies without large working animals, because with the exception of the llama and alpaca of the high Andes, there were no large animals in the Americas that were amenable to domestication.^[56]

The result was not a disease-free paradise. Intestinal diseases were rife, and syphilis and tuberculosis were among the important infectious diseases. In the American tropics, there were also indigenous vector-borne diseases, such as jiggers and Chagas disease, which could be fatal. Yet, the New World disease environment was less deadly than those in the Old World. Human populations in the Americas did not have to deal with the major vector-borne diseases of tropical Africa or the zoonoses of Eurasia and Northern Africa.

Major disease environments of the world, c. 1300

Over millennia, the major civilizational areas of the world achieved epidemi­ological distinctiveness within the three disease meta-regions described above - tropical Africa, Northern Africa and Eurasia, and the Americas. Their differences were in part a function of the environments in which they were centred, because the soil endowments, growing seasons, and regional flora and fauna shaped in fundamental ways the systems of agriculture and vegeculture, upon whose success all else rested.

The practice of agriculture and vegeculture entailed the refashioning of landscapes to make them productive. This meant extensive environmental change - particularly deforestation to produce arable fields for grains and tubers. This involved extensive habitat change for the local faunal popula­tions. It tended to drive out the large mammals from the sedentary commu­nities, opening up lands for the tending of small stock animals, and it transformed the environments for insects and small mammals that found stable food sources in the sedentary communities.

Some of this environmental transformation of the microfauna had pro­found implications for human disease. One of the most clear-cut examples, from the world of insects, is that of human malaria. Across the arable lands of the Old World, malaria became established among the sedentary commu­nities. Malaria is a parasitical disease, borne by mosquitoes of the genus Anopheles. There are scores of anopheline species with different capabilities for transmitting malaria, and these species breed in a wide variety of habitats. For this reason, malaria became an endemic disease across virtually the entire expanse of the temperate and tropical Old World, and in the core areas of human settlement it became an intensely transmitted infection. Malaria can debilitate and kill, and in the face of this selection pressure human beings who had inherited genetic mutations that reduced the possibility of lethal complications from malarial infections had better chances for survival. Some mutations, such as sickle-cell trait, were haemoglobinopathies that produced incorrectly functioning globins. Others, known as thalassemias, produced too few globins. Across the Old World, these haemoglobin muta­tions became one of the most important and widely expressed genetic conditions, lessening the bearers' susceptibility to death from malaria, but also rendering them vulnerable to anaemia and other conditions that could severely compromise health.

Other risks to health blossomed within the farming systems. Seed crops in particular were at risk from wind-blown fungal blights that could reproduce easily in mono-cropped fields, where the host plants were clustered. The rice blasts, wheat rusts and other pathogens that preyed upon domesticated cultigens were a scourge of agricultural communities. Outbreaks of plant disease could in turn compromise the nutritional status and thus the health of the agriculturalists whose lives depended directly upon the success of their harvests.

Nor was famine the only major risk. Nutritional diseases were the conse­quence of a deep dependence upon a staple crop. In the maize-producing regions of the Americas, this staple was frequently eaten in combination with beans to produce a diet with a full complement of essential amino acids. When beans went missing from the diet, agriculturalists fell prey to pellagra, a nutritional deficiency disease. In the rice-farming systems of Southeast Asia, the husking of the rice harvest removed vitamins, and there were outbreaks of beriberi, a disease caused by a deficiency of the vitamin B12. In the Mediterranean world, the cultivation of fava beans produced valuable vegetable protein, but for those who carried a genetic mutation known as G6PD eating fava beans could result in severe anaemia. Forest and dry-land gatherers and hunters had far less exposure to these diseases, because their diets were more varied.

In 1300, the infectious disease environments of the three macro-regions were not static. This was particularly the case in Eurasia. Across the temper­ate expanses of Eurasia where domesticated animals became a critical com­ponent of the regional ways of life, diseases circulated. The pathogens were not continuously shared among the peoples living in densely settled regions, and thus there was always the ongoing threat of a pilgrim or travelling merchant introducing a ‘new' disease into a settled community.

This threat was multiplied by the development of long distance trade across the grasslands and borderlands of Afro-Eurasia. This was, in part, a function of the caravan rest stops that made long distance trade more feasible. The caravanserai provisioned the travellers and their animals and thereby helped the caravans to cover great distances in relatively short periods of time. This meant that settled population densities no longer were the most important constraint on the transmission of infectious disease. The archipelago of caravanserai meant that it was possible to transfer human disease, and insect vectors that attached themselves to the caravanning animals, across great distances. In this sense, long distance trade facilitated the most catastrophic outbreaks of epidemic disease in world history.

The early outstanding example of this long-range transmission of insect vectors and human disease was the transportation of the rat flea (Xenophylla cheopis) that carried the plague bacillus (Yersina pestis) to western Eurasia from another region of that continental land mass. The species of black rat that carried the plague bacillus appears to have lived originally in India, and it may have made its way from India to the Mediterranean with the opening of sea communications.^[57] The first major catastrophic outbreak of bubonic plague across the Eurasian steppes took place in the sixth century ce. Many historians consider it to be an historic marker of the integration of eastern and western Eurasia. It had broad consequences. It accelerated the decline of Roman cultural synthesis in the Mediterranean basin, and it likely had far-reaching effects elsewhere in Eurasia. It is possible that its influence was transmitted into the Nilotic Sudan, although the expanse of the Sahara Desert and the difficulty of overland travel within humid regions to the south may have acted as a barrier to the extensive transmission of the plague into sub-Saharan Africa.

The convulsions of Afro-Eurasian reintegration in the fourteenth century

During the first half of the fourteenth century, an even more catastrophic epidemic struck many of the peoples of Eurasia. The epidemic may have been the result of the expansion of Mongol hegemony across eastern and central Eurasia. In several respects, it seems to have been a replay of the disaster of the sixth century ce, when bubonic plague broke out across much of the Afro-Eurasian land mass north of the Sahara. It was, however, a broader disaster because the agricultural regions of Eurasia had become more extensive, reaching into more northern latitudes, and it was more destructive in terms of the number of lives lost. Moreover, the epidemic struck repeatedly over succeeding decades and centuries. Serial convulsions shattered the affected Eurasian communities repeatedly.

There is much that is not known about the black plague of the fourteenth century. Medical historians are not agreed that the disaster can be solely attributed to Yersina pestis; it is possible that other pathogens were involved, and that the extent of the population loss was a result of multiple infections or the synergy of co-infections. It is impossible to determine its precise origins. The imaginative reconstruction of William H. McNeill, who located the origins of the epidemic in China in 1331 and its subsequent spread along the trade routes between China and southwest Asia during the rule of the Mongol Empire (1206 to 1368 cb), is broadly accepted. In McNeill's view, horsemen within the Mongol domains likely acquired the infection some­where on the northern or southern reaches of China (Manchuria or Yunnan); fleas infected with the plague bacillus (Yersina pestis) burrowed into their animals and at length made their way across central Eurasia, reaching the edges of the Mediterranean world.

Microbiological evidence also supports the thesis that the epidemic ini­tially arced across Eurasia, from east to west.^[58] The historical evidence, however, is scant for the bubonic plague epidemic in China and central Eurasia, and more is known about the progress of the pandemic on the western steppes. There, in the 1340s, Mongol armies attacked the Black Sea port of Caffa in the Crimean region, and from that point on the infection spread into the Mediterranean, and then north into Europe, reaching Scandi­navia within two years, and east and south into the Muslim societies of the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. The spread of the plague in Europe is best documented; and on the basis of the microbiological evidence, it is now understood that two distinct bubonic plague infections entered Europe via Mediterranean ports. The infections spread through the bites of fleas that lived as a parasite on the common black rat throughout the Mediterranean. The flea vector was highly mobile, because the black rat was a common feature of farm, town and ship.

The initial wave of mortality in the affected areas of Europe killed approximately one-third of the population. Historians have estimated com­parable mortality in the Muslim world of the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Thereafter, successive waves of the plague, beginning in the 1360s and continuing into the late seventeenth century, killed large numbers, but never as high a percentage as in the initial wave. European populations may not have regained their pre-plague size until the eighteenth century, and Muslim populations may not have done so until much later, if at all.

What was the extent of the spread of the black plague elsewhere in Eurasia? It seems likely to have been a broad demographic disaster, but the documentary evidence outside of the Mediterranean world is scant. It seems likely that the population of China was hard hit; and it is possible that the population of China decreased by as much as 50 per cent, although the Mongol invasions may have also been a major contributor to the decline. A major lacuna in our knowledge is the extent of the population loss in other major densely populated areas such as Persia and India. Some historians have advanced estimates of the loss of population at 30 per cent or so, but the evidentiary basis of these estimates is not robust. On the basis of an absence of confirmatory documentary evidence from the Arabic language texts of the western Sahel, it appears that the plague was not transmitted extensively across the Sahara.

The Christian and Muslim societies of Eurasia took the arrival of the black plague as a sign of God's judgment upon them. The literatures of the Christian and Muslim world are replete with references to this divine judgment, and in the Christian world, visual images of human suffering illuminate these cultural perspectives. As yet, little is known about the cultural responses to bubonic plague in South Asian, Southeast Asian and East Asian civilizations.

Within the Christian and Muslim civilizations of western Eurasia, the long­term impacts of bubonic plague differed greatly. In Muslim societies, the plague did not engender any fundamental reordering of social, economic or political institutions. In Europe, by contrast, the devastations of the bubonic plague remade basic institutions. In the aftermath of the first waves of the plague, with the dying off of clerics who were masters of the Latin script, vernacular languages - French, Italian, German, English, Dutch - emerged as languages of written communication. The population losses of European peasants unbalanced the fundamental relations between land and labour. With fewer hands to labour in the fields, landowners gave over their arable lands to livestock herding, which had lower demands for labour. The loss of manpower stimulated a burst of experimentation with wind, water and mechanical sources of power.

The upshot was that although European Christian societies had suffered demographic losses at least as great as those of the Muslim societies of the greater Mediterranean, the black plague shifted the balance of power in the Mediterranean region. Before the mid-fourteenth century, historians

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3.1 Spread of Black Death through Afro-eurasia

are agreed that the more powerful and dynamic societies in the region were Muslim. Historians disagree on when the definitive shift in the balance of power took place, with some arguing for 1400, 1500 or 1600, but most are agreed that by the later date a basic transformation in power relations had taken place. The Christian West had emerged as the more dynamic and inventive Mediterranean cultural zone. The sources of the transformation were, of course, complex and numerous. Yet, one of the most important factors - indeed, perhaps the prime force behind these profound shifts - was the plague pandemic.

Other power balances on the Eurasian continent shifted as well. This was most noticeable on the steppes of central Eurasia, where the power of the nomadic confederations was fractured and would never be integrally restored. Mongol hegemony collapsed, and the horse-riding successors to the great Khanate could not project their power beyond their regional domains. Neither the Ming Dynasty (1368 to 1644) nor its successor the Qing Dynasty (1644 to 1911) had to contend with serious challenges to authority from pastoral nomads from central Eurasia.

The great epidemiological disaster left in its wake European societies that set about processes of internal transformation. Economic competition became more extensive, and the exercise of political power became more dependent upon alliances with merchants. Merchants who sought personal enrichment made common cause with nobles who sought to improve their positions through trade. The net result was not only an increase in regional commerce. Some merchant visionaries and their political backers were emboldened to make direct contact with distant Asian and African societies with whom they had previously been linked by long distance overland caravan trade via intermediaries. The political disorder on the Eurasian steppes and in much of Northern Africa made the prospects of maritime trade more attractive. By the early fifteenth century, Portuguese vessels had begun to venture progressively down the Atlantic coast of Africa. Some European adventurers began to look across the Atlantic in search of a passage to the East. These initiatives would inadvertently trigger even larger epi­demiological disasters in the western hemisphere.

The first wave of global integration, c. 1500 to 1650

Following the first landfalls of European ships in the Americas, the crews began to spread Old World diseases among New World peoples whom they encountered, and the epidemiological integration of Afro-Eurasian disease into the Americas began. The introductions were limited initially to those diseases that could remain infectious or dormant during the long ocean passage across the Atlantic. Some of the first introductions were relatively minor. The common cold was almost certainly among the first of the Old World viruses to infect individuals in the Caribbean, and among the first bacilli was almost certainly gonorrhea, a sexually transmitted infection.

The transfer of some of the other common infectious Old World patho­gens, including measles, rubella, mumps, smallpox and chickenpox, was hampered by the fact that most of the crew members had been exposed to the diseases in childhood and had thereby gained immunity to them. The number of non-immunes on board the first ships to make the Atlantic crossing was likely very small or perhaps zero. Indeed, it is striking that the first recorded transfer of disease in the ‘Columbian Exchange', a phrase coined by Alfred Crosby to refer to a broad range of biological exchanges between the eastern and western hemispheres, was from the Americas eastward across the Atlantic. In 1495, an outbreak of syphilis, apparently previously unknown in Europe, erupted in Naples and was quickly dissemin­ated to France and the rest of Europe. Thereafter, the ‘French pox', as it was widely known, continued to infect, disfigure and kill widely.^[59]

Syphilis quickly spread beyond Europe. It travelled overland via long­distance trade caravans and through religious pilgrimage throughout Eurasia and from North Africa across the Sahara into tropical Africa. It was dissemin­ated from every caravanserai and commercial node across the overland routes that criss-crossed the Old World. And syphilis became a quintessen- tially mobile pathogen as the Portuguese and Spaniards established their imperial networks of maritime trade. Syphilis rode the high seas of oceanic commerce and imperial colonization from the late fifteenth century onward. It was disseminated in every oceanic and inland sea port of call, and it became one of the first truly globalized infectious diseases.

The linking of the eastern and western hemispheres involved the biological exchange of animals from the Old World to the New World, and some of these faunal transfers brought disease. Eurasian sheep intro­duced new pathogens to the Americas that wreaked havoc on the llamas and alpacas. In some regions, the die-off was so extensive that the sheep replaced them. And yet other pathogens could not successfully be transferred across the Atlantic Ocean. This was the case with rinderpest, the classic viral disease of cattle and other cloven-hoofed animal populations in Eurasia and Africa. The virus, transmitted rapidly between the animals on board ocean-going ships, left the survivors with immunity. No cattle, sheep or goats infected with rinderpest sank their hooves in the soils of the New World. Rinderpest never established itself in the Americas.

The Columbian Exchange also involved the transfer of cultural practices, some of which left in their wake profound morbidity. Consider, for example, the habit of tobacco use. Tobacco was native to the Americas, and yet the addictive quality of nicotine in the tobacco plant ensured that populations introduced to the leaf as chewing or smoking tobacco or as snuff would crave more, and in the centuries following the early European voyages to the Americas, an international demand developed. Tobacco became a staple of exchange along the coast of Western Africa during the era of the Atlantic slave trade and a passion among those who frequented the early coffee salons of Europe. It took root in the soils of Africa and Eurasia. The early transfers of tobacco smouldered and eventually ignited a global conflagration of morbidity and mortality.^[60]

The most immediate and profound chapter in the globalization of disease in the first 150 years of the Columbian Exchange was the transfer of infectious disease from Europe to the Americas. Within the first decade or two after 1492, infectious disease began to take a deep toll on the Carib, Arawak and Taino peoples who inhabited the Caribbean islands. The surviving documentation does not allow identification of the pathogens, and it is likely that death arrived in a swirl of infections. The diseases took hold while the Spanish conquistadores enforced a brutal labour regime on the indigenous peoples, and overwork and physical abuse undoubtedly accelerated the destruction. Within a few generations, virtually all of the indigenous peoples in the Caribbean Basin had died. This disaster was a harbinger of what would occur in the aftermath of the Spaniards' mainland conquests of Mexico and Peru.

Beginning in 1519, the Spanish conquest of Mexico introduced Eurasian killing diseases to the mainland. As in the Caribbean, a number of virulent diseases including measles, typhus, mumps and rubella, must have wreaked their havoc, but in Mexico the evidence for the centrality of smallpox as the disease that was the most destructive of the Aztecs and other peoples of Central America is unambiguous. Smallpox produced a case fatality rate of about 30 per cent and terrible suffering and disfigurement in survivors. The catastrophe was compounded by the fact that smallpox is highly contagious. It can be spread through tiny droplets in breath, and in the densely settled urban areas of Central America it was communicated broadly. Moreover, those infected by smallpox are able to infect others for several days before they themselves become symptomatic. Thus, many who fled the epidemics, warfare and terror in the conquered towns inadvertently visited the suffering on the communities in which they sought refuge. This expanding catastrophe was felt throughout the densely populated regions of Central America and probably far beyond. It undoubtedly played a significant role in the collapse of Aztec power.

The epidemiological assault was not confined to Central America. The Eurasian pathogens reached the Andean world at least by the 1530s, when a population crash comparable to that in Central America took place. As in the Aztec areas, the Spaniards established political control. In areas with lower population densities, it was more difficult to sustain and transmit the patho­gens, but even so, populations collapsed throughout most regions in the Americas. The general estimate is for population decline of around 90 to 95 per cent by the end of the first century of contact. The psychological impacts of the onslaught must have also been overwhelming. All of the Eurasian infections were previously unknown, and they must have sown terror. None of the indigenous therapeutics was efficacious. A profound spiritual and cultural crisis engulfed the survivors of the American holocaust.^[61]

In the aftermath of the demographic collapse, Europeans sought ways to wring profit from the widowed lands. A new era of more focused biological transfers began, and some of these transfers established new disease pro­cesses. The cultivation of sugar cane on NewWorld plantations, for example, involved brutal work regimes that visited early death on workers in the prime of life. In the early decades of plantation agriculture, indigenous peoples from Brazil made up most of the enslaved labour force. But by the middle of the seventeenth century, the work forces on the burgeoning plantations had become increasingly Africanized. This transformation was accompanied by a new racial ideology that held that Africans had a lower moral and intellectual potential than did Europeans, and justified the brutal­ity of the labour system. This racist ideology was one of the foundations of new disease patterns in the South Atlantic in the post-1500 era: it underwrote suffering, torture and early death for millions of Africans held in the New World systems of racial slavery.

The second wave of global integration,

c. 1650 to 1850

Beginning in the middle of the seventeenth century, a second wave of infections from the Old World crossed the Atlantic and opened a new chapter in the global integration of infectious disease. The wave inundated the American tropics and sub-tropics, the regions in which Portuguese colonizers in Brazil and the principally British, Dutch and French colonizers in the Caribbean Basin focused on export-oriented plantation agriculture. By the mid-seventeenth century, the centre of plantation activity had moved from northeastern Brazil to the islands of the Caribbean, with peripheral extensions along the northern coast of South America and the eastern coast of North America.

This second wave of infections originated from the coastal regions of Western Africa. It was a direct result of the depopulation of the Americas. The trade in African captives constituted the largest transoceanic movement of people in the pre-industrial era, and an epidemiological process drove its exponential growth. African captives introduced the principal killing diseases of tropical Africa to tropical America. Two major infections - falciparum malaria, caused by a single-celled parasite, and yellow fever, caused by a virus - made the journey, and once established in the Americas, these pathogens brought about dramatic change in the demographic make-up of the South Atlantic populations.

The two pathogens were exceptional in that most of the vector-borne tropical African diseases could not be transmitted across the Atlantic, either because the New World ecologies were unsuited to the African vectors or because the vectors could not survive the oceanic passage. For example, the biting flies of the genus Glossina - and the parasites that they can host - which cause trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness) never found an ecological niche in tropical America.

Falciparum malaria did. The advantage that falciparum malaria held was that the parasites could travel across the Atlantic in human bodies. Falciparum parasites were present in the Mediterranean Basin, as well as in sub-Saharan Africa, but around the Mediterranean Basin, they competed with other malaria parasites for their ecological niche. The Mediterranean mosquitoes were also far less capable of transmitting malaria than were the sub-Saharan African mosquitoes, and thus the levels of parasitization were lower. In sub-Saharan Africa, falciparum constituted the lion's share of more than 90 per cent of all malaria infections and the parasites were transmitted by the most efficient vectors in the world. For these reasons, the arrival of African captives in large numbers provided the critical element - a densely parasitized human population - in the transformation of the malarial envir­onments in the New World tropics and sub-tropics. In a stroke of bad luck, the anopheline mosquitoes of the South Atlantic proved highly capable as vectors; the transfer of an African mosquito was unnecessary to establish malaria in the New World.^[62]

The arrival of the yellow fever virus in the South Atlantic added to the makings of the highly dangerous disease environment. In tropical Africa, yellow fever was an endemic infection. Many Africans got sick with yellow fever in childhood, and some evidence suggests that childhood infections may have been less virulent than infections acquired later in life. The virus made its way across the Atlantic via both infected humans brought as captives and infected monkeys brought as pets and curiosities. But unlike malaria infections, the establishment of yellow fever transmission in the South Atlantic basin depended upon the biological transfer of an African mosquito, Aedes aegypti, across the Atlantic and its successful colonization in the New World.^{[63] [64]} The date of the transfer can be inferred by what appears to be the first outbreak of a yellow fever epidemic in the mid-seventeenth­century Caribbean. Thereafter, yellow fever, which conveyed lifelong immunity to those who survived an initial bout, became a notorious scourge of the South Atlantic. Its presence tended to support the Spanish hold on its New World Empire, because when the British, French and Dutch sought to gain control of Spanish territories, they generally had ferocious encounters with yellow fever (and malaria), and few non-immunes were left standing.¹¹

9

10

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The transformations in this period extended far beyond the Americas. The development of new global networks of oceanic commerce, pioneered by the British, French and Dutch commercial joint stock companies that supple­mented and in some regions replaced the earlier Portuguese and Spanish global maritime networks, were integrated with older regional trade webs of exchange around the globe. They increasingly drew larger populations into the webs of exchange.

These networks facilitated the transfer of infectious disease, as had taken place during the first era of the Columbian Exchange. Some were extensions of established diseases that reached new populations. This was true, for example, of the spread of tuberculosis from European immigrants who crossed the Atlantic and settled in the urban centres of the New World, syphilis that reached Native American populations in the trans-Appalachian west, and a new round of smallpox that travelled north from Mexico and devastated Native American populations on the Great Plains.

Other transfers of infectious disease, however, were entirely new and unprecedented. This was the case for cholera, a bacillus transmitted by a faecal-oral route of contamination. It burst forth from Bengal in 1817, even­tually striking down populations far beyond the subcontinent of South Asia, and reaching the Americas in the 1830s in the first of seven cholera pandemics that continue to the present day.¹² The destructiveness of cholera (and the terror that it provoked) was the principal impetus to the establishment of the first international agreements to impose quarantine to limit the spread of disease. These first efforts at the control of infectious disease were the precursors to the League of Nations and United Nations in the twentieth century.

The thickening webs of exchange also introduced new populations around the world to new drugs and addictive recreational habits. They spawned new sets of disease consequences that have profoundly influenced global health up to the present. The two principal drugs were distilled alcoholic spirits and tobacco. The availability of distilled alcohol increased alcoholism among all populations in which it found purchase. Among observant Muslim com­munities, the damage from alcohol was largely foregone through religious proscription. Elsewhere, particularly among European Christian populations, alcoholism became a familiar and entrenched curse. In Russia it reached epidemic proportions, in part because of the inexpensiveness and easy

1 ² Myron Echenberg, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). availability of distilled spirits made from potatoes or grain. Perhaps the worst consequences of all were among some non-European populations with a genetic predisposition to alcohol addiction. Cheap gin and grain alcohol accelerated the abject decline of some indigenous peoples that European settlers plied with hard drink. Such was the fate of the Khoi of South Africa, aboriginal peoples in Australia and some of the Native Americans in the United States and Canada.

Tobacco had a wider if less immediately deleterious impact. During the era 1650 to 1850, it moved far beyond its initial aficionados in the Americas, Europe, the Muslim Mediterranean and the western coasts of Africa. It spread globally through the new European maritime commercial networks, and in short order tobacco dug footholds outside the Americas. Tobacco began to be cultivated in sub-Saharan Africa and in the moderate climes of Eurasia. Populations took enthusiastically to smoking, chewing and using snuff, and thereby laid the groundwork for new patterns of lung, mouth, tongue, throat and nose cancers. Yet, because these cancers typically emerge only after long-term use, and because life expectancies had yet to dramatic­ally lengthen, these conditions lurked in the backgrounds and would emerge fully only in the twentieth century.

The third wave of global integration, c. 1850 to 1900

From the seventeenth century into the middle of the nineteenth century, the networks of international exchange continued to thicken and reached into previously unaffected regions. This growth was facilitated by new maritime technologies that allowed for larger ships and lower per-unit shipping costs. During the period 1650 to 1850, it remained quite expensive to move an array of common goods, such as grain or meat, over great distances. All this began to change during the transport revolution of the mid-nineteenth century: overland transport costs dropped precipitously, as railroads began to spread over the hinterlands; and on the high seas, new steamships and larger sailing ships brought about steep declines in shipping costs. The result was the ability to move new classes of goods longer distances. Lower shipping costs also meant that, after the illegalization of the transoceanic trade in human captives by the European states that had pioneered it, poor, mostly male, individuals in their millions began to traverse long distances looking for work. The epidemiological consequences were to accelerate the global mixing of genetic inheritances and more rapidly to globalize disease than ever before.

One of the outstanding examples is that of bubonic plague. It had been confined for centuries to the expanses of Eurasia, breaking out periodically. After the disastrous fourteenth-century pandemic, the outbreaks had been regionally contained, in part through the practice of quarantine. But with larger and faster ships, it became possible to transport larger numbers of people, greater quantities of bulk foodstuffs and larger populations of attendant vermin over greater distances more rapidly. This superseded the biological constraints that had previously limited the transmission of plague across the oceans. Instead of burning themselves out during the long ocean voyages, plague infections now could continue to circulate on board ship even as they arrived at distant ports of call. During the early years of the third plague pandemic, from 1894 to 1901, plague called at ports around the globe, and bubonic plague became a global disease.¹³

Everywhere, infectious diseases found new homes, as European, African and Asian labourers sought out new opportunities or were coerced into new working environments. Millions of workers migrated overseas and across land.¹⁴ The rigours of long distance travel took a sizeable toll in mortality and morbidity. Many who survived these rigours encountered new disease environments. Tuberculosis became entrenched in the squalid, overcrowded urban neighbourhoods peopled by recent immigrants around the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean basins. Other increases in infectious disease were the direct result of development and infrastructure projects. In the massive irrigation projects in the Punjab region of British India, for example, new environments were created for vector mosquito breeding. Malaria infections soared, and malaria deaths reached epidemic levels.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, other disease processes followed in the wake of the European colonial conquests that accomplished the ‘second great expansion of Europe' that brought nearly all of the Old World tropics under European colonial administration. Some processes were linked directly to colonial warfare and imperial troop movements. Meningitis was largely confined to some European populations before it was inadvert­ently introduced to Egypt during the Napoleonic Wars, and to Northern Nigeria in the early twentieth century. Thereafter, it became endemic in the Sahelian regions. Many scholars believe that the ‘childhood diseases' of Eurasia, such as measles, mumps and rubella, were introduced into Western Africa during the era of the slave trade and that an increase in infectious disease, as a result of new introductions of pathogens and the destruction and dislocation of warfare, took place during the ‘Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century.

Other disease processes were epizootic - limited to animals - yet still produced disastrous consequences for human populations. An outstanding example is the inadvertent Italian introduction of rinderpest, the great scourge of Eurasian cattle and other cloven-hoofed animals, into Eritrea in 1881 during a campaign of imperial expansion. From northeast Africa, rinderpest travelled south through Eastern Africa, from Eritrea to South Africa. It killed about 90 per cent of the cattle populations on which East African pastoral peoples depended for their livelihood. During the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the disease produced famine, impoverish­ment and death.

The more rapid movement of peoples and new commodities also opened up possibilities for the transmission of plant diseases, and these diseases in turn had health consequences for those dependent upon the cultivation of susceptible plants. In 1869, one of the world's premier coffee economies in the highlands of colonial Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) was struck by an epidemic of a fungal blight known as coffee rust that sickened the coffee plant, rendering it unproductive. This drove plantation labourers out of the highlands, either to return to even greater poverty in south India or to search elsewhere for agricultural work. In short order, coffee planters and coffee plantation workers inadvertently transmitted the coffee blight throughout the coffee plantations of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This was the beginning of the first global plant disease pandemic. It had the effect of increasing the importance of the slave-produced coffee in Brazil and in driving the extension of coffee production elsewhere in the Americas.¹⁵

The nineteenth century also saw the development of international efforts to block the expansion in epidemiological processes. One major thrust was in the extension of quarantine, long practised to prevent the spread of contagious disease from shipboard to land and across national boundaries. Beginning with the first International Sanitary Conference in Paris in 1851,

1 ⁵ Stuart McCook is currently writing a book on the global history of coffee rust. On the outbreak in colonial Ceylon (Sri Lanka), see James L. A. Webb, Jr, Tropical Pioneers: Human Agency and Ecological Change in the Highlands of Sri Lanka, 1800-1900 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2002), pp. 108-16. new international regimes of quarantine linked signatory nations in joint efforts to coordinate their policies. The regimes were difficult to enforce, however, and did not enjoy broad success.

A substantial advance in military health was accomplished with the estab­lishment of routine medical practices. In the 1850s, the use of cinchona bark to treat malaria became standardized on British ships sailing in malarial regions. Also in the 1850s, modern epidemiology made a major advance with the researches of the physician John Snow, who determined that a contamin­ated water supply was the cause of cholera in London. New understandings of the efficacy of sanitation to reduce or eliminate the contamination of water supplies with faecal matter eventually helped to drive down the number of deaths and illnesses from this source in the developing nations that made these investments. These were the most successful investments in public health that have ever been made.

Sanitation could also be practised in the colonial field. When new public health practices were adopted by European armies in the colonies, deaths of European troops and native troops under European command in these areas dropped accordingly. Covering and liming latrines and rudimentary water filtration systems paid large dividends in improving the health of the troops.¹⁶

The second half of the nineteenth century also saw a paradigm shift in thinking about disease processes that had substantial consequences for human health. The gradual acceptance of the germ theory of disease and the practice of pasteurization reduced the incidence of tuberculosis from cow's milk in the late nineteenth century in France, which presaged a broader revolution that would make significant gains in reducing the transmission of pathogens from contaminated food supplies. These practices began in the industrialized nations in the late nineteenth century and only gradually made their way to the rest of the world.

Conclusion

The major chapters in the globalization of disease processes in the period 1300 to 1900 can best be appreciated through a comparative, macro- contextual approach. In tropical Africa, populations had long suffered from a broad range of bacterial, helminthic, viral and protozoan infections. In Northern Africa and Eurasia, the disease burden was substantially different,

1 ⁶ Philip D. Curtin, Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). because many of the tropical diseases could not be transmitted in other ecological zones and because the domestication of animals and dense human settlement brought about the transfer of animal diseases to humans. In the Americas, human populations carried a different and generally lighter burden of disease.

In the year 1300, no human populations enjoyed robust health. Human populations were subject to a wide variety of diseases of which many were endemic and others had been introduced from beyond their immediate ecosystems. Food was frequently in short supply, and accidents often opened the door to bacterial infections that proved fatal. These, in addition to the killing diseases of the densely settled areas, were the main reasons that life expectancies across the globe were brutally short by the standards of the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Human beings suffered from nutri­tional disease, vitamin deficiencies and genetic disorders.

Before the early trans-Atlantic voyages that linked the eastern and western hemispheres, major disease processes were regional and, only occasionally, as in the case of the bubonic plague, continental in extent. Beginning in 1492, the European trans-Atlantic voyages carried Eurasian diseases to the Americas and initiated the most extensive human demographic disaster on record. In the aftermath, a massive slave trade from Africa to the Americas took place for centuries that changed the disease environment of tropical America.

Since 1492, there have been complex and ongoing global ecological exchanges that have affected human health around the globe. These exchanges have involved the transfer of plants, animals, drugs and cultural practices, as well as infectious pathogens. The extent of this globalization was limited by the time, risk and cost of transport, and by ecological factors, such as the disease barrier that prevented Europeans and other non-natives from entering the interior of Africa. In the late nineteenth century, some of these ecological impediments were surmounted, through the use of quinine to reduce the malaria burden and sanitation measures. These advances, in conjunction with new military technologies that reduced the costs of con­quest to industrialized nations, underwrote the epidemiological changes of the second half of the nineteenth century.

FURThbr Rbading

Carpenter, Kenneth J., The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Courtwright, David T., Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

Crosby, Alfred W., Jr, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972).

Curtin, Philip D., Death by Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

Echenberg, Myron, Africa in the Time of Cholera: A History of Pandemics from 1817 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

Plague Ports: The Global Urban Impact of Bubonic Plague, 1894-1901 (New York University Press, 2005).

Fenn, Elizabeth A., Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-1882 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001).

Gottfried, Robert S., The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: The Free Press, 1983).

Kiple, Kenneth A. (ed.), The Cambridge World History of Human Disease (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

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

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

Riley, James C., Rising Life Expectancy: A Global History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

Stannard, David E., American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).

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

Technological transitions

FRANCESCA BRAY

The history of the early modern era is often told as a story about how technology drove the rise of the West. This is a Europe-centred history of key inventions and great inventors; of the emergence of distinctively Western attitudes to ‘useful knowledge'; of the professionalisation of tech­nical expertise; of steady improvement in investigating, understanding and applying the scientific principles that govern the material world; of accelerat­ing innovation and of increasingly efficient and profitable manufacturing, culminating in the Industrial Revolution and the birth of a modern, machine- made world.

Although inherently Europe-centred, the narrative of progress no longer excludes other regions of the world. The flowering of world history as a discipline since the 1990s coincided with a heightened interest among histor­ians of technology in how social context shapes technological systems. From the perspective of world history, the story of Europe's rise to supremacy is no longer presented as largely autonomous, an inevitable outcome of super­ior European brains or culture, but rather as the outcome of continually shifting global and regional flows, exchanges, networks, encounters and competition, accommodation and appropriation, adoption and rejection. Recent studies address the stimulus and challenge of differentials in technical knowledge across the world, examining imitations, improvements and bor­rowings in every direction.

In an increasingly close-knit world of trade and conquest, local techno­logical exchanges or encounters frequently had repercussions much further afield. It is not surprising that some of the earliest and most influential world histories took weapons and warfare as their theme, nor that these technologies continue to stimulate fertile research and debate. Sources for many regions of the world are rich enough to address broad comparative questions about the relation between war and imperialism, or how military

technologies travel;¹ and such detailed questions as how guns contributed to the birth of the Comanche Nation, or who borrowed which gunpowder technology from whom during the wars along the Vietnam-China border in the fifteenth century.^{[65] [66]}

Few other domains of technology are as well documented. On building, food and clothing, hygiene, ceramics, metal-working, mechanics or hydraulics, sources for different parts of the world vary greatly, and most are very patchy. Some societies did not have writing: what we know about technology in pre-conquest Peru, for example, has to be pieced together from Spanish docu­ments, archaeology and ethno-history. The literate classes of Indian society had little interest in crafts or technology; even in the case of the textile industry, early-modern India's foremost economic sector, we rely almost exclusively on foreign observers for information. Chinese records of technological practices are as rich as European sources, but Chinese accounts by policy makers, administrators, encylopaedists, craftsmen and connoisseurs provide views of which technologies mattered, to whom and why, which are very different from the European corpus of documents left by monarchs, prelates, crafts­men, patent officers, French Encyclopedistes, entrepreneurs and engineers.^[67]

Despite the historiographical challenges, following a ‘global commodity', whether it be indigo dye, porcelain, raw cotton, muslin or muskets, proves a fruitful method for investigating technologies, the social and cultural systems in which they are embedded, and patterns of change. Through the early- modern era new tastes and desires, as well as the lust for power, drove history: we see the first traits of consumer society emerge in Ming China, Edo Japan and the Dutch Republic. The historians of commodities rightly insist that production and consumption cannot be treated separately: a commodity has meaning as well as utility, a machine produces goods whose value is not always best calculated in terms of labour efficiency or profit margins.

The concern for meaning brings recent global histories of commodities like textiles or porcelain closer to anthropological approaches. Societies have characteristic technological cultures: ideas about which technologies are important and why; about their significance, nature and impact; about the forces they mobilise and the sources of technical skills. The artefacts that technical action produces have different meanings in different societies, and so do the actions themselves. The value attributed to a certain kind of work, or skill, or product, will usually combine a sense of economic worth with beliefs about its symbolic, political or social value. In rural India, the humble female task of butter-churning constitutes a daily renewal of the cosmic order; the Incas' dazzling palanquin was made of an alloy of precious metals that symbolised political unification; designing software is more prestigious than gutting chickens, and thus contemporary governments do more to keep software designers than chicken-gutters within their borders. In tracing the impact of technological change, whether indigenous or trig­gered by external encounters, and how it was construed and experienced, it is important for world historians to ask not only how technologies performed materially, but also how they contributed to building a political, social and symbolic order.

Several of the grand themes in the world history of technology are addres­sed elsewhere in this volume, so this chapter proposes a linked sequence of vignettes, chosen to highlight some typical early-modern forms of encounter and transition, while suggesting the diversity of responses. Silver provides the link. All along the emerging world circuit of commerce, in mines and mints, banks, dockyards, arsenals, state factories and humble farmyards, silver quickened the pace of life and heightened the levels of financial risk, bringing now prosperity, now ruin. The silver circuit brought all the regions of the world into contact, confronting societies and their material worlds, and ushering in an age of true world-systems (see Chapter 9, ‘Silver in global context, 1400-1800', volume VI, part 2). This chapter asks how the rise of the early-modern silver trade affected technological practices and meanings at different points along the global network it helped to create. It begins with the great silver mine of Potosi in Peru, untouched by the Incas, but opened by the Spanish in 1545. What did silver-mining mean to the vanquished and to the conquerors, and what was the impact of this clash of technological cultures?

Second, we turn to China, the country that absorbed so much of the early- modern world's silver supply, to consider transitions in its biggest industry, textiles and the impact of China's own ‘cotton revolution', which began around 1300. Technological developments supported a huge expansion and diversification of the whole textile industry, and transformed the gendered division of labour. Imperial China was hardly unique in this respect, but official reactions were unusual, largely because of the moral and cosmic significance attributed to work and technical skills.

The next link in the silver chain is Europe, where economic historians have identified ‘import substitution' as a key motive for the transformations of European production technologies that culminated in the Industrial Revo­lution. World historians argue that in fact a tangle of motives and strategies were involved. The third section contrasts two cases of import substitution, where European technicians learned to imitate Asian technologies that were draining silver from national coffers. Porcelain was reinvented de novo in eighteenth-century Europe, without any direct transfer or even understand­ing of the Chinese technology. Calico-printing, in contrast, involved a slow infusion of Asian skills, materials and experts into Europe. But advances in chemistry and mechanical science triggered technical improvements that by 1800 had so transformed the industry, that it was now seen by contemporar­ies as a thoroughly European creation, owing much to the scientific method and nothing to Asian craft roots.

The concluding section asks how successfully world-history approaches challenge master-narratives of Western exceptionalism, pointing to some troublesome limitations.

Purity and lightning: technological cultures of silver-mining in the Andes

In 1545, the Spanish discovered a mountain of silver, Cerro Rico, at Potosi in the Viceroyalty of Peru.^[68] The new silver mine proved to be the richest ever known, supplying as much as two-thirds of world output between 1570 and 1610. On a hitherto deserted and barren mountainside sprang up a town that rivalled Paris in size and wealth, dominated by the magnificent stone faςade of the Casa de la Moneda, the mint where the silver ingots and coinage were cast that bought Spain an empire.

Silver was a key symbolic and material resource for imperial rule under both the Incas and the Spanish. Andean technologies and organisation of silver production were transformed under Spanish rule, as were the meaning and powers of the precious metal. Splicing Spanish accounts and Inca codices, archaeological finds and ethnography, we can piece together an account of pre-conquest and colonial silver-mining practices that reveals the social and symbolic impact of technological change under Spanish rule. The Spanish exploitation of mineral treasures in the Americas transformed the material and social landscape, but while new technologies threatened indigenous cosmologies and identities, some Andean technological traditions survived alongside imported practices, expressing indigenous identity in ways that were invisible, or appeared trivial, to the colonial conquerors.

In the 1530s, the conquistadores had taken over the biggest silver mine of the Inca empire, Porco, dividing it up into huge estates, encomiendas. Ignorant themselves of mining techniques and metallurgy, the Spanish initially relied on the expertise of local Caranga Indians whom they set to work as tied encomienda labourers, prospecting and mining the ore using traditional tools and techniques, but smelting in Castilian-type ovens. When the Spanish opened Cerro Rico, the first workers were yanaconas, Indians with indigenous mining expertise but free of encomienda obligations, who leased galleries of silver ore quite profitably from the Spanish owners. The yanaconas used traditional tools and techniques for prospecting and extracting the ore, but, unlike the Porco workers, they also used indigenous ovens for smelting. Guayras (or huayrachinas) were cylindrical single-chamber furnaces of rock and mortar less than ι metre high, pierced with holes to channel the draught. Unlike Castilian ovens, they reached temperatures high enough to smelt Potosi ores. No bellows were needed: the guayras were lit at dusk when the night breezes rose and burned untended until morning. In 1585, a Spanish mill-owner reported over 6,000 guayras lighting up the night sky over Potosi. The ore was ground and mixed with galena (lead sulphide), then fired using charcoal. The resulting alloy, more lead than silver, was then separated using an Andean cupellation hearth, a small, dome-shaped muffle-furnace called a tocochimbo.

For the first few decades of operation, then, the huge wealth of Potosi was produced using indigenous technologies, under indigenous control. But by the 1570s wood supplies were running out and the proportion of high-grade ore suitable for smelting with guayras was declining. Many yanaconas left. Meanwhile, flooding was hampering work at Porco, and the Porco mine­owners looked to Potosi for new opportunities.

A technology that successfully extracted silver from low-grade ores reani­mated the Potosi industry: mercury amalgamation, the ‘patio process' (prob­ably developed in Saxony), was introduced from Mexico in 1572. It consisted of grinding the ore, mixed with water, to a fine paste using a stamping mill (Figure 4.1). The paste was spread out on a large patio, sprinkled with mercury and trodden for hours or even weeks until the silver was thoroughly mixed, after which the amalgam was rinsed, squeezed and heated to extract pure silver. In Mexico, mules turned the wheels and often trod the amalgam. In barren Potosi it was difficult to keep livestock, so on the order of the Viceroy, Francisco de Toledo, a hydraulic system of lakes and channels sufficient to run 300 mills was built (no doubt mobilising the fabled Andean hydraulic skills)^[69] and completed in 1575. Treading out the amalgam was done by human workers, as was the extraction of mercury, supplied by the Peruvian mine of Huancavelica.

When processing at Potosi shifted to these ingenios - large-scale milling refineries which only Spaniards could afford to build and run - the yanaconas lost the advantage of their technical and managerial skills. Some continued to work as miners extracting ore, but the bulk of the new workforce was coerced labour. Viceroy Toledo established a system of compulsory labour­service, the mita, loosely based on Inca practice, which every year brought in around 13,000 workers and their families, drawn from across the Andes, to work in the mines. It is not surprising that few people voluntarily engaged in work involving mercury, which could prove lethal after only a few weeks or months. The mita was a continual point of friction between the colonial government, the local headmen responsible for selecting mita workers and their communities; many men fled their homes to avoid the mita, regional populations were decimated and legislative changes to guaran­tee mita numbers often provoked revolts.

Between the 1580s and the 1750s, no technical improvements occurred in the silver mines of Peru. Capital became scarce after the collapse of silver prices in China in the 1630s, when the Ming state began to crumble, and incentives to invest in improvement were few until the early 1700s, when renewed demand from China (now stabilised under Qing rule) coincided with a gold boom in Brazil to restore the world value of silver. In 1703, production in Potos^ began a period of slow recovery, peaking in 1805 at around half the output of 1600. No technical improvements were

Figure 4.1 Overshot water wheel turning the cam-shaft of a stamping mill being used to turn the crush ore to begin the process of extracting metal from the ore won from a mine. From De re metallica by Agricola, pseudonym of Georg Bauer (Basle, 1556), woodcut (Universal History Archive / UIG / Bridgeman Images).

involved: any increases in production or in profits were the outcome of processing more ore, using the hated system of mita labour.

The Incas had also used forced labour to mine precious metals and to build vast imperial projects including temples, palaces, roads and irrigation systems. Nobody would argue that the Incas were considerate employers. Yet, in drawing together workers of many ethnic groups from across a vast territory that they had conquered in a matter of decades, the Incas intended mita to build a sense of common purpose among their subjects. Most Inca state-building projects mobilised pan-Andean religious beliefs or cosmo­logical symbols as vehicles of political assimilation. In the case of mining, Andean peoples shared the belief that the hills containing precious metals, and the mines within them, belonged to - or rather were - huaca (deities). They could be opened for human use only if the deity gave permission. In that case a shrine (also huaca) had to be set up and consecrated before mining began. The huaca of Porco had given permission to mine for silver, but the Incas refrained from opening up Cerro Rico because when a dedica­tion ritual was attempted the deity spoke in a thunderous voice, declaring that the mine was reserved for himself. The whole process of extraction was sacralised: miners drank, danced and offered coca to the huaca guarding the entrance to the mine and to the huacas inside the galleries that they were working, smelters prayed and offered coca before lighting the guayra. When Inca workers migrated to fulfil their mita duties in the mines, not only were they fulfilling a compulsory duty, they were also performing sacred work for the common good.

Silver and gold played a key role in Inca government, not as inert metals, but as living forces creating wealth and strength. The ruler of the Inca Empire, also known as the Inca, was carried through the streets on a palanquin made of silver alloyed with gold, glittering like the sun. Alloys were more highly prized than pure metals, for they symbolised the blending of peoples under Inca rule. Ritual exchanges of objects in precious metals between the living Inca and his feudatories mirrored and fed an underworld network of exchange. Just as lightning struck the mountains, fertilising germs of metal beneath the soil so that they grew into rich deposits of metal and ore, so precious objects buried with members of the ruling class germinated in the tombs, bringing fertility to their lands and victory to their armies. The Incas valued the silver of the Porco mine especially highly for its ‘extremely white' colour. But this should not be taken as a measure of metallic purity such as the Spanish would have valued. The ‘white' Porco silver was especially precious because whiteness betokened lightning, the weapon of the supreme deity who bestowed fertility, wealth and military success.

The Spanish saw nothing as the Andean peoples did. They considered that burying objects of precious metal in tombs was a scandalous waste, a perversion of Christian values. They equated value with purity and weight: the worth of the Inca regalia was assessed by melting it down, weighing it and assaying the metal, in the process ostentatiously destroying the most powerful symbols of Inca rule and cosmology. Fearless of the wrath of pagan spirits, the Spanish ripped open the silver lodes of Potosi. Catholic priests banned the mining rituals of drinking and dancing and demolished the huacas that had crowned the silver-mountains, replacing them with shrines to the Virgin. Andean miners duly paid homage at the new shrines, a transfer of loyalty doubtless eased by a fortunate ambiguity: the Quechua name given to the Virgin, Coya (Queen), coincided with that of the Andean deities of the mine galleries (koya). Ostensibly Catholic though the miners now were, it seems that numerous huacas, especially those located safely out of sight underground, continued in use well into the seventeenth century. Moreover, recent ethnographic studies record that in modern Andean vil­lages where traditional metal-working survives, offerings of coca or animals are still made before entering the mines or firing the guayra. Metallurgy is just one example of a craft-skill that served to keep Andean cosmology and identity alive through centuries of European rule.^[70]

To the Spanish, the silver of Potosi was money, pure wealth. The Spanish crown levied a 20 per cent tax on the silver produced in Peru and used it to build an empire. The treasure that flowed from the American silver mines into the coffers of Madrid had no aura, nor (unlike gold) was it specially valued as a material. Economic historians observe that the Spanish, unlike the Dutch or the Japanese, did not spend their silver wealth wisely. They did not invest in technical or institutional innovations, nor did they finance improvements in agriculture or industry. Instead of using capital to generate wealth by develop­ing the means of production, the Spanish monarchs of the Golden Age fostered what Thomas Misa calls ‘technologies of the court',^[71] technologies that con­sumed rather than generated wealth. American silver paid for Spanish palaces, cathedrals and roads, for bureaucratic salaries, patronage of the arts and royal regalia, but above all for soldiers and sailors, ships and guns. The Spanish monarchs thirsted for glory: their mission was to stamp out the Reformation and to rule as the foremost power in Europe. To this end they went deeply into debt for wars that they lost. High silver prices in Ming China, where the exchange rate with gold was twice the level in Europe, kept Spain afloat until the 1630s, but thereafter, when the collapse of the Ming state led to a short-term but serious drop in silver values, ‘Spain vanished as a serious Western power'.^[72]

China's ‘cotton revolution’: work, gender and cosmic order

In China, by contrast, silver wealth brought substantial long-term gains. Ming China lacked silver of its own, but purchased it with manufactured goods.^[73] The imported silver fuelled technical improvements, economic growth and a rise in consumption.^[74] The Ming cotton industry in particular was a silver-driven engine of growth, and its technical development cata­lysed significant changes in gender roles. The responses of the ruling class highlight the political and cosmic significance attributed to technological practices.

By the late 1500s, cotton merchants were among the wealthiest and most powerful people in China, treated like princes wherever they went. The merchants bought raw cotton in the north, shipped it south for processing, then re-exported the cloth across China and East or Southeast Asia, supplying the government as well as selling on open markets. Since they controlled the whole chain of production, setting local prices for raw cotton, yarn or cloth, their profits were immense, and so too was their need for liquid capital. Cotton merchants embodied early-modern China’s insatiable thirst for silver, carrying thousands of ounces with them as they went about their business.

The Chinese cotton revolution had begun under Mongol rule, in the 1270s. Until then, cotton was an exotic luxury. Hemp was the coarse fibre worn by commoners in the north; ramie was everyday wear in the south. Rich people wore silks, ranging in quality from simple under-and-over tabby-weaves to elaborate damasks or brocades. Every household had to pay taxes in cloth, and all women wove. Peasant women raised silkworms or processed the hemp that their husbands grew, weaving cloth on cheap and simple looms small enough to fit in a cottage. In richer families, women might use draw­looms to weave patterned fabrics. In urban or imperial workshops, where the very finest silks were woven, some workers were men. But generally speaking, textiles were women’s work: women were responsible for every stage of cloth processing, from hatching silkworm eggs and splicing ramie fibres to weaving the cloth and making the clothes. All this was to change dramatically.

The Mongol rulers introduced cotton to North China from Central Asia. Long wars had devastated the silk industry, but the state still needed vast quantities of tax-cloth to pay civil servants, clothe the army and bestow upon neighbouring rulers. Qubilai himself commissioned technical instruc­tion manuals and established Cotton Bureaus around the country to teach people how to grow and process the new crop; as a further incentive, taxes on cotton cloth were set at favourable rates compared to other textiles. The Ming government, which used 15 to 20 million bolts of cotton a year, initially continued the cotton tax. Even without these fiscal pres­sures, the rapid success of cotton would have been assured. Cotton cloth was light and fine, softer than hemp and cheaper than silk, warm in winter and cool in summer, and a bolt could be woven in a single day on a simple loom. It could also be used for fancy weaves, dyed in rich colours and calendered (pressed with a heavy stone roller) to a shine that approached the gloss of silk.

The new crop grew well almost everywhere in China. In the northeast, cotton could be interplanted with wheat; it throve in the subtropical south; in the Shanghai area it replaced rice in many higher fields. It did especially well in the dry and sunny north, provided it was watered from a river or well. But processing was more tricky. All traditional Chinese textiles were made from long fibres, and in order to process short-stapled cotton the Chinese had to become familiar with a whole new technological kit. Local historians of Songjiang district, near Shanghai, claimed that the cotton kit was first introduced to China in the 1290s, by a woman, a certain Auntie Huang. After spending her girlhood years in the remote southern island of Hainan, where cotton had long been grown and processed using technology that was presumably Indian in origin, Auntie Huang moved to Songjiang and taught the locals to make and use the cotton-processing tools. Male writers sang her praises as the woman who had single-handedly transformed a rural backwater into one of the most prosperous districts in China.

The new equipment included the cotton gin, which eliminated the seeds; the technique of bowing, which untangled and fluffed up the fibre ready for spinning; and the multiple-spindle, treadle-operated spinning-wheel, which allowed one woman to spin several threads simultaneously (Figure 4.2). All this equipment was illustrated, and its construction and function explained, in a comprehensive treatise on agriculture composed by a Yuan official, Wang Zhen, in 1313. It was small and cheap enough to be used in peasant households; with a treadle-wheel one could spin 4 to 6 Chinese ounces of cotton in a day, so it took only two days to spin the pound of thread needed

Figure 4.2 Triple-spindle wheel for processing cotton from the Nongshu (1783 edition) (courtesy of the Needham Research Institute).

to weave a bolt of cloth.¹¹ Wang Zhen wrote that these tools were still little known, despite state efforts to propagate them, and he expressed the hope that their use would spread rapidly.

The use of the new technology was, however, circumscribed by climatic factors. The north was so dry that thread came out brittle and uneven, whereas the humid summers of Jiangnan (the lower Yangzi region) were ideal for spinning cotton. A regional division of labour quickly emerged. Merchants bought raw cotton in the north and exported it to Jiangnan, which grew less cotton than it could process. The merchants distributed the cotton

Over time, the Chinese ounce varied between about 30 and 40 grams; there were

10 ounces in the Chinese pound or catty. A bolt for tax payment measured 2.2 by 40 Chinese feet, roughly 50 cm by 10 m. to peasant households to spin and weave, then carried the cloth north and sold it in the same markets where they bought the raw cotton. Songjiang, the Jiangnan district blessed by the legacy of Auntie Huang, became the centre of a national trade. Jiangnan peasant families wove not only plain cottons, but also patterned cloth and twills, and special sizes of cloth for export to Yunnan and the northwest.

‘Raw cotton is cheap in the north and cloth is dear, while in the south the contrary is true', wrote Xu Guangqi, a high official and expert on cotton production, in the 1620s. By setting relative prices in their favour, cotton merchants became extremely wealthy. Their power was further enhanced by the Ming state's shift towards commuting household taxes from grain and cloth to payments in silver. By the 1580s, all taxes in kind were abolished. The state now relied on the market for its textile needs, providing merchants with a further opportunity for profit. Canton began to rival Jiangnan as a centre of commercial production. These southern districts were the hubs of the internal and overseas trade in fine cotton cloth. They imported raw cotton from north China, inland provinces and even India. They also imported rice, as growing numbers of farming households switched entirely to textile production. In Jiangnan, for instance, it was not uncommon for the husband to sit at the loom while his wife and daughters worked frantically to spin the thread and reel it onto bobbins fast enough to keep him supplied.

As in Europe some centuries later, the advent of cotton in China triggered dramatic growth and also fundamental technical and social changes through the whole textile industry. Cotton almost eliminated hemp textiles, now used only for mourning garments, and largely replaced ramie, which was more complicated to process. Simple silks also lost out in competition with high- quality cottons, especially after the 1580s when they no longer served as tax payments. Yet, the demand for fine silks continued to grow, for both internal and export markets. As with cotton, silk output was increased by a combin­ation of technical innovations and organisational changes. The net effect was to marginalise women's status as the primary producers of silk textiles.

A series of improvements in silk technology through the later Song, Ming and Qing dynasties (around 1200 to 1800) had the cumulative effect of shifting most silk reeling and weaving to specialist households, or to commercial or state workshops. The most important innovations were in yarn production. Some new machines improved the quality of thread; others increased output; others broke down yarn production into a series of separate stages, further facilitating specialisation. Some reeling-machines were a boon to sericultural households in a region like Huzhou, famous for the quality of its cocoons and its yarn: the machines were relatively slow, but they incorporated processes of rolling and twisting, allowing skilled workers to produce yarn of excellent quality for highly competitive markets. In contrast, the elaborate and expensive ‘complete silk-reeling frame', which became standard in urban workshops between about 1600 and 1800, was a treadle-operated machine that enabled one worker to reel between 600 and 1,000 grams of thread a day (see Figure 4.3). Its sophisticated design automated the adjustment of rollers, guiding-eyes, etc., so the operator had only to concentrate on the reels. This machine greatly increased efficiency and facilitated mass-production; indeed, it was easily converted to steam power in the nineteenth century.¹²

While the breeding of silkworms and some reeling and winding of silk continued to be carried out in specialist rural households, silk weaving disap­peared from the countryside. Even in regions like Huzhou, where the quality of silk yarn was superb, once taxes in kind were abolished the incentives for household weaving of simple silks declined drastically. The draw-looms used for patterned silks had always been beyond the resources of ordinary house­holds. Up to 6 metres long and 5 metres high, draw-looms were very expensive to make and required specialist skills to dress, operate and maintain them (Figure 4.4). Satins, gauzes or brocades each required special looms and skills. From the early 1600s, most quality silk weaving and finishing was concentrated in southern cities like Hangzhou, Suzhou, Nanjing and Canton. The imperial manufactures that had initially relied on state service from specialised artisans of both sexes to produce the most splendid silks gradually lost out in expertise and flexibility to the private sector. As the silk trade became more competitive and equipment more costly, the advantages of owning capital increased, exploitation intensified and skilled artisans who would once have run their own small family workshop were reduced to hired hands. Since respectable women did not work outside the home, much silk reeling and weaving became a male preserve.

The textile industry was a powerful engine of economic growth and market integration, contributing to monetisation, occupational specialisation and rising living standards. Affordable and attractive cotton cloth allowed even modest families to indulge in occasional fashionable splurges, like the pretty kerchiefs in which one duster ofJiangnan villages specialised. But specialisation and economic interdependence also brought risk and vulnerability. By the late Ming there were always more skilled workers than day-jobs in the urban silk

Figure 4.3 Complete silk-reeling frame as illustrated in the Tiangong kaiwu of 1637 (1929 edition) (courtesy of the Needham Research Institute).

Figure 4.4 Chinese draw-loom with pattern tower as illustrated in the Tiangong kaiwu of 1637 (1929 edition) (courtesy of the Needham Research Institute).

industry. If the silk-weaving shops ran out of orders, then a whole class of quillers, reelers and weavers went hungry. Writing during the period of the Wanli emperor (1573 to 1620), a gazetteer of Songjiang district deplored its excessive dependence on cotton weaving, which ‘pays for [the villagers'] taxes, their food and clothing, their equipment, their entertainments and ceremonies, all the costs of living and dying'.

Officials and statesmen were worried by the risks and the social tensions that accompanied growth and rising prosperity. While admitting that the clock could not be turned back to an innocent and idyllic past when peasants supposedly were really peasants, they worried about the dangers of shifting from cereal farming to commercial crops and crafts. They fretted whether enough rice was being grown to feed the army and protect the frontiers; they feared that by turning to crafts and trade the common people were betraying their proper roles as subjects of the state, and as men and women. In the Confucian ideal, farming and weaving were the most honourable occupa­tions after ruling. The classic fiscal system of taxes in grain and cloth had symbolised a direct interdependence between peasant families and the state, unmediated by merchants. Many officials, while admitting the practical aspect of paying taxes in silver, felt this shift from use-value to exchange­value threatened the moral and cosmic coherence of the polity.

One point of special concern was the masculinisation of the textile industry. The classic gender division of labour in China was encapsulated in the for­mula ‘men till, women weave'. Right through the imperial era China's ruling elite considered women's productive labour as just as fundamental to social welfare and to the political and moral order as men's. For centuries, household taxes were levied in kind, and men and women contributed equally. Husbands and sons paid taxes from the grain they grew, wives and daughters from the cloth they wove, contributing directly to the cohesion and prosperity of a state that, just like a family, needed both food and cloth.

By the late Ming, taxes in kind had vanished and women were no longer weavers. Most silk cloth and almost all the cotton cloth that entered the market was woven by men. In the new division of labour, raising silkworms, reeling the cocoons and spinning cotton were still performed by women, but many women did no textile work at all. Moreover, the essential transform­ation of yarn into cloth, its transformation into a saleable commodity with a value expressed in a monetary price, was now in the hands of men. This was a radical transformation of women's work.

The official Hu Juren (1434 to 1484) was among the first to lament that commercialisation and the spread of artisanal activities had turned weaving into a man's job. When men and women no longer performed their proper work, the cosmic balance of yin and yang was upset and the very fabric of society, its fruitfulness and its natural hierarchies were threatened. Through­out history, when the Chinese state conquered new territory it taught the inhabitants Chinese methods of farming, not just to increase output (sometimes the new methods proved unsuited to local conditions), but as a potent method of acculturation. Since spinning and weaving inculcated proper feminine virtues, teaching women in far-flung border regions to weave on Chinese looms was also considered an effective method of indoc­trination. By learning this work and the bodily and mental habits which went with it, barbarian women would abandon their loose ways, learn proper family values and help their families pay their taxes. In China proper, we find many cases of late imperial magistrates or provincial governors complaining that the women in their district ‘had no occupation' or ‘did not work'. Often, these women were contributing significantly to family income by curing tea, brewing, raising livestock or making handicrafts. But this work was invisible to officials: only weaving counted in their eyes as true womanly work.

When Lu Kun (1536 to 1618), the author of a famous work on womanly virtue, was governor of Shanxi he ordered all female adults ‘without occupa­tion' to be taught silk spinning and weaving. Shanxi had been famous for its silk tabbies in earlier times, but by the mid-Ming the industry had been abandoned, since there was no market for what were now seen as mediocre textiles. After Lu was transferred, the Shanxi women sensibly let the weaving drop. But officials and emperors continued throughout the Ming and Qing to invest in costly and often fruitless projects of this kind, intended to bring both economic and moral benefit to impoverished rural districts by restoring women to their proper productive roles. Not coincidentally, all the officially commissioned or approved treatises and handbooks that illustrate textile technology through the early-modern period show women operating the equipment, even though many were produced long after these tasks had shifted to men. One single maverick study of crafts, published by a disgrun­tled and very minor official at his own expense in 1637, accurately portrays textile machinery operated by men.

Porcelain and calico prints: Asian technologies remade in Europe

The cotton industry was an engine of growth and prosperity in early-modern China, stimulating economic activity within and beyond the frontiers and absorbing, investing and circulating vast amounts of the world's silver. But most Chinese cottons were consumed within China and were thus not seen by Europeans as a drain on their national wealth. Chinese porcelains and fine Indian cottons were quite a different matter. By the eighteenth century, porcelains, printed calicoes and muslins, tea, silks and other Asian luxuries were pouring into Europe. They drove fashions and created crazes. Monarchs, ministers, moralists and pamphleteers all agreed that something must be done to stem the inflow of Asian goods and the outflow of European wealth. Many ineffectual attempts were made to ban imports. More effective, certainly in the longer term, were various projects to copy, adapt or reinvent Asian luxury manufactures in Europe.

The perspective of global history has stimulated enlightening new research on these complex processes of import substitution and the extent to which they involved technology transfer, whether direct or ‘remote'. Recent scholarship on ‘global commodities', for instance, raises some inter­esting challenges to assumptions about European exceptionalism and the goals and defining technologies of the Industrial Revolution. Porcelain and calico prints, two high-value global commodities that were successfully recreated as manufactures in Europe in the eighteenth century, offer an instructive contrast: porcelain was effectively reinvented from scratch in Europe, while the development of calico printing involved successive phases of knowledge transfer and appropriation between Asia and Europe.

The alchemy of ‘white gold’

Chinese potters began producing high-temperature ceramics (ci) in the Neolithic period. By Tang times (618 to 907), the elegant forms and beautiful glazes of these Chinese proto-porcelains were prized throughout Asia and the Islamic world.¹³ By the early Song dynasty (960 to 1279), local experi­ments with different combinations of china clay (kaolin) and china stone (petuntse), different kiln forms and glazes allowed connoisseurs to choose between a range of local porcelains, each famous for particular qualities and colours (Figure 4.5). Subtle green celadons were especially appreciated. The Song kilns at Jingdezhen in South China specialised in a lustrous pure-white porcelain. During the Yuan period (1279 to 1368), Jingdezhen potters began to apply blue decoration to their wares. The cobalt oxide they used may have been introduced from Persia by the Muslim merchants from the nearby port of Quanzhou, who handled the already substantial porcelain trade to the Middle East. The new Chinese blue-and-white ware took the world by storm, and was coveted, collected and imitated from Damascus to Delft.

The first Chinese porcelains to reach Europe, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, came as gifts from Asian or Islamic rulers to kings or popes, who set off these treasured gifts, like religious relics, in mounts of gilt or enamel. The material itself aroused considerable curiosity. Some believed that porcelain was a precious stone, others that it was made of ground eggs or seashells. Spanish missionaries to Southern China had written one or two quite accurate accounts of porcelain production in the 1580s, yet in the Novum Organum of 1620 Francis Bacon still described it as made of a ‘magic mixture' buried underground for decades to mature. European rulers - Lorenzo de Medici, the kings of Portugal, England's Queen Elizabeth, the tsars - all caught the fatal passion. By the seventeenth century, kings and dukes were spending fortunes on their porcelain collections, and commoners too had

1 ³ Note: this section is based on Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press, 2004), vol. 5, pt 12; Robert Finlay, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History', Journal of World History 9 (1998), 141-87; and Lothar Ledderose, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Figure 4.5 China-stone was pulverised by water-driven trip-hammers before being made into bricks and transported to the potteries for processing. This painting is one of a set of twenty-four depicting the porcelain industry in China. Produced between 1770 and 1790 by an unknown artist, these images were typical of a genre depicting Chinese crafts or industries, produced specifically for a European clientele (Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum).

acquired an expensive taste for ‘china-ware'. In 1600, the East India Com­panies, first the Dutch then the English, French, Danish and Swedish, began importing hundreds of thousands of pieces of porcelain every year, commissioning Chinese merchants in Canton to organise mass production and individual orders of novel wares like dinner services, tureens or coffee sets. Almost all the imports were blue-and-white wares from the kilns of Jingdezhen.

How were the Jingdezhen manufacturers able to respond so efficiently to the explosion of European orders? One key factor was the Chinese system of ‘modular production'; another was Jingdezhen's centuries-long experience of innovation in response to imperial and foreign demand.

Modular production significantly shaped Chinese material culture and technological problem-solving. The system was already used in Neolithic China for the high-temperature ceramics that were the ancestors of porcel­ain. Thereafter, it was applied to the manufacture of both precious and utilitarian objects: Shang-dynasty ritual bronzes, the terracotta army of the First Emperor, cast-iron ploughshares and cooking pots, casings for shells and mines, fine lacquer-wares and imperial porcelains. Modular production involves breaking down the production of complex artefacts into multiple components and processes. A typical teapot, for instance, consists of a body made in two moulded halves, spout, handle and lid, each produced by a series of specialised workers; the components are then assembled and trimmed, the pot is dipped in glaze, decorated, fired and polished. From pounding the clay to polishing, the manufacture of a typical Jingdezhen pot involved 72 separate steps.

Modular production requires centralised management, design and coord­ination, and the standardisation of components; it facilitates quality control and mass-production; variations are easily produced through different combinations of components or scalar variation to produce matching sets in different sizes. While modular skills and procedures discourage creativity or innovation at an individual level, the system can quickly operationalise the results of successful experiments.

Jingdezhen had supplied imperial orders since the eleventh century. In the 1370s, it was designated an imperial factory, but ‘popular kilns' also flour­ished, with workers moving back and forth between the two. The world's largest industrial operation, sixteenth-century Jingdezhen had over 1,000 kilns and 70,000 workers, supplying orders of up to 100,000 pieces to the court, and responding rapidly to new fashions and tastes.

Technicians at the factory were subjected to repeated demands for innovatory products, many of them stimulated by receipt of tributary artefacts from beyond the borders of China. New shapes were potted, often with immense difficulty and high failure rate. Glaze recipes were improved, while trials were conducted [in coordination with the imperial workshops of Beijing] with a palette of overglaze enamel colours... The massive support that central government procurement of ceramics guaranteed gave technological superior­ity to the whole Chinese ceramics industry.¹⁴

New designs and technical improvements circulated freely between the ‘official kilns' at Jingdezhen, which depended on court commissions, and the ‘popular kilns', which supplied other Chinese consumers and - from 1600 - met the huge surge in European orders.

The earliest European attempts to recreate porcelain were the projects of royal collectors. The desire to produce the miraculous translucent substance

1 ⁴ Kerr and Wood, Science and Civilisation, p. xlvii. in their own court was partly motivated by economy, but also by the typical wish of sovereigns - in China as well as Europe, as we have just seen - to have nature at their command, to patronise ingenious skills and lavish displays.

Since porcelain was still regarded as a mysterious or even magical mater­ial, it is not surprising that alchemists were often tasked with recreating the ‘white gold'. The first known attempt was by a Venetian alchemist, Maestro Antonio, in the late fifteenth century; the first success was at Meissen in 1708. In 1705, Augustus of Saxony, a fanatical collector, set two people to work on his porcelain project: Johann Friedrich Bottger, an alchemist, and Ehrenfied Walther von Tschirnhaus, a mathematician and physicist who had spent some time surveying the soils and minerals of Saxony. Adding alabaster and quartz to local china-clay, and firing at ι,350°C, together they succeeded in producing a translucent, tough porcelain which equalled Chinese porcel­ains in quality, although it was made quite without knowledge of Chinese techniques.

In 1712, the French missionary Pere d’Entrecolles sent a detailed descrip­tion of Jingdezhen production, along with a sample, to the chemist Rene Reaumur. Reaumur successfully analysed its composition, but his results were not taken up by French manufacturers who chose to substitute soft pastes in their recreations of porcelain designs. In Britain, however, several experimenters pored over d’Entrecolles’s descriptions. The invention of bone-china, an extremely successful porcelain look-alike that combines clay with calcined animal bones, may be the product of a misreading of d’Entrecolles’s remark that the Chinese distinguished between kaolin and china-stone as the ‘bone and flesh’ of porcelain. One experimenter who followed d’Entrecolles attentively was the pharmacist William Cook­worthy, who successfully located china-clay and china-stone deposits in Cornwall and developed reduction-firing kilns and Jingdezhen-type glazes in the 1760s. By the early nineteenth century, European and espe­cially British factories were producing on an industrial scale a range of porcelain-style wares, which completely displaced Chinese porcelains for everyday use in Europe.

Although European manufacturers successfully harnessed new techno­logical and scientific knowledge to reinvent china-wares, this entailed no disparagement of Chinese achievements in porcelain production. Indeed, from the mid-nineteenth century to the 1920s, government scientists in France, Germany and Britain continued research on Chinese porcelain samples in the hope of reproducing their special qualities.

Coping with the ‘calico craze’^{[LXXV] [LXXVI]}

The case of Indian printed textiles offers a striking contrast. In the seven­teenth century, European travellers and craftsmen alike expressed admir­ation for Indian dyeing skills, acknowledging their superiority to European techniques. Between 1670 and 1740, the transmission of methods originating in India played a key role in the advancement of cotton-printing in Europe. Yet, by the 1770s, ‘the very idea that... India possessed - or had possessed in the past - skills and knowledge unknown to Europeans on how to produce printed cotton textiles was... considered blatantly false’.¹⁶ From admiration, Europeans had moved to disdain. Indian printers were disparaged for their ignorance of science, lack of creativity and slavish adherence to tradition: progress in calico-printing was held up as an irrefutable demonstration of the superiority of European civilisation and the scientific method.

As early as 1500, the delicate patterns, glowing colours and lasting brilliance of cottons from Gujarat, Coromandel and Bengal, their ‘finenes and cunning workmanship’, made them ‘better esteemed than silke’, a fitting exchange for precious spices along Asian trade routes.¹⁷ With the influx of Japanese and American silver from the 1580s, demand rose, the industry expanded, and new credit and joint-capital institutions emerged to handle increased flows of raw materials and finished products. With the rise of the East India Companies in the 1600s, Indian calico-prints (along with other fine Indian cottons like muslins, and Chinese silks) made their way to Europe (Figure 4.6). Unrivalled for quality by local wools and linens, the exotic textiles became wildly popular, stimulating new fashions and novel forms of consumerism (Figure 4.7). Expenditure on these luxury goods (the so-called ‘calico craze’) rose to such alarming levels that by around 1700 most European governments had banned imports.

European attempts to develop textile-printing techniques to compete with Indian imports began in the 1620s, but local knowledge of mordants (fixatives) and dyes was still too primitive for success. Producers were reduced to painting linens in imitation of Indian cottons. Although several European observers provided quite detailed accounts of sophisticated Indian

Figure 4.6 Early eighteenth-century Indian chintz (dyed cotton) fabric from the Coromandel Coast, part of a set of bed-hangings made for export (Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum).

printing and dyeing techniques, they had no impact on their home industries. One likely reason is that Europeans were still ignorant of many key principles involved, and thus unable to apply the information properly. Another is that alum, the main mordant in Indian processes, was scarce in Europe. One further obstacle, since dyeing recipes and processes involve great precision, was that Indian craftsmen neither wrote down what they did, nor provided quantitative descriptions of their techniques.

Instead of any direct transfer of Indian dyeing and printing expertise, the necessary knowledge filtered in via the Middle East. Indian cottons were extremely popular in the Ottoman Empire. Armenian craftsmen based in Anatolia had become expert reproducers of the prized textiles, which Arme­nian merchants sold throughout Asia and imported to Europe through depots in port-cities like Marseilles, Genoa and Amsterdam. During the 1670s, Armenian entrepreneurs established calico-printing workshops in sev­eral European cities, in partnership with local craftsmen, and the Anatolian techniques spread like wildfire through the continent. Because of problems

Figure 4.7 English bed-hangings, crewel-work embroidery, 1680 to 1700. European dyers were not yet able to produce prints with the vivid colours and sharp patterns of Indian chintzes, but embroidery could be used to produce similar effects (Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum).

with procuring suitable dye-stuffs and mordants, however, the quality remained crude, uncompetitive with Asian imports, and European manufac­turers still sent cloth to Turkey for dyeing.

By the 1760s, however, a new, truly distinctive European cotton-printing technology was emerging, based on experiments with mordants and the development of new dye-mixtures, in particular for the two key colours, indigo blue and Turkey red. In the early eighteenth century, Europeans experimented with processes unknown in Asia, such as the use of cold vats (cuves afraid) that dissolved indigo using iron sulphate. Perfected in England in 1734, this rapidly replaced the more wasteful procedure of hot fermenta­tion. Numerous types of blue and red dye were concocted, using different mineral additives and application techniques. In the late eighteenth century, Claude Flachat, a French chemist and dyer, analysed the composition of alum and developed an industrial process for synthesising it. Perhaps the most dramatic transformation came with the application to cotton-printing of contemporary innovations in printing and engraving on paper. The use of copper-plate, pioneered by Francis Nixon of Dublin in 1754, permitted a level of detail and precision that matched engravings on paper. The new toiles transformed consumer tastes. Gone was the passion for Asian patterns: now customers clamoured for life-like depictions of Waterloo or French shepherdesses (Figure 4.8). The final transformation of cotton-printing into a thoroughly Western, modern mass-industry came in 1783, when Thomas Bell of Preston in England developed a rotary printing machine with engraved cylinders that produced 200 to 500 pieces of six-colour prints a day.

The late-eighteenth-century European cotton-printing industry was a true hybrid, a complex weave of Asian craft-knowledge and European mechanical and chemical innovation; of dye-stuffs, fibres and minerals from colonies and trading-partners around the globe; and of dense international networks of financial, entrepreneurial and technological expertise. Skills were diffused by a cosmopolitan array of experts. Between 1650 and 1750, Armenian craftsmen and entrepreneurs played a key role, mediating between Asian and European skills. By the 1730s, however, the informal nature of the common knowledge base was changing, as professional chemists, technicians and colour-makers built up a public, scientific domain of analysis, experimental results and precise measurements and designs. The term ‘experimental researches' features in a number of publications on dyeing and printing by the 1790s; chemistry, moreover, had now advanced sufficiently to explain the processes in terms of scientific laws. Since the Indian dyers never recorded their efforts at improvement, nor did foreign observers attempt to investigate changes in

Figure 4.8 Toile de Jouy depicting manufacture work at the factory, after designs by Jean Baptiste Houet, 1784 (De Agostini Picture Library / G. Dagli Orti / Bridgeman Images).

the industry as opposed to its routines, it is hardly surprising that European textile-experts could no longer conceive of any debt, past or present, that their industry might owe to India. Charles O'Brien, in his Treatise on Calico Printing, Theoretical and Practical (1792), was typical in attributing Indian accomplishments to ‘accidental discoveries'.

Beyond ‘European exceptionalism'?

Cotton-printing is an excellent example of how Europeans ‘invented inven­tion'.¹⁸ Even in 1800, many of its processes still owed as much to craft-skills as to scientific research, but it was well on the way to becoming a modern, research-driven industrial process, where skills and knowledge were (at least in principle) standardised and transferred from the human operator into machines and procedures that (again, in principle) would work as efficiently in Potosi as in Preston. Cotton-printing was already regarded as a European creation, the product of a characteristically European propensity for scientific method. Indians slavishly imitated, Europeans innovated: although the Industrial Revolution was still just unfolding, competence in the ‘mechanical arts and sciences' already signified the superiority of Western civilisation.

The development of cotton-printing embodied the spirit of what Joel Mokyr calls ‘Industrial Enlightenment', the conviction that social progress is furthered by applying scientific understanding to the processes of production - and that innovation should be encouraged, for the public good, by protecting inventors' intellectual property rights through patents and scientific publica­tions. It is often argued that the first stages of industrialisation were geared towards the mass-production of cheap, poor-quality goods. But world-history approaches usefully emphasise that many early industrial innovations were initially designed to improve quality rather than increase output. The case is clear for luxury goods like printed cottons and porcelain. But what of ordinary cotton-yarn? Here, too, world historians have shown that European inventors initially sought to improve quality, not quantity, with Asia setting the stand­ards. Crompton's mule, patented in 1779, was considered to have matched Indian quality for the first time, thus opening the way for British manufactur­ers to compete against Indian producers.¹⁹

1 ⁸ David S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999), pp. 45-59.

1 ⁹ Maxine Berg, ‘Quality, Cotton and the Global Luxury Trade' in Riello and Roy, How India Clothed the World, p. 405.

As we see, world history brings useful correctives to grand historical narratives about technology. Instead of accepting that Europe was unique and its rise to world precedence inevitable, world historians document the high levels of technological efficacy elsewhere around the globe that built an early-modern ecumene of manufactures, commerce and ferocious competi­tion. They trace the travels of technological skills that created wealth in other civilisations like India, Persia and China, and show how they were first inserted into a European repertory of craft-skills, then reworked and transmuted into science, the miracle ingredient of modern Western technological culture.

World historians have successfully challenged standard eurocentric accounts of phenomena like the ‘rise of the West' and the Industrial Revo­lution, and persuaded us that we need to rethink not only the contributions of non-Western technological cultures to modernity, but also the nature and processes of technological change in Western societies. Yet, current approaches do not resolve all the problems of eurocentrism and teleology in the history of technology. Periodisation, for example, is a knotty problem. World history still largely depends on Western historical landmarks to structure its accounts. Yet, the very definition of an ‘early-modern era' that begins and ends with vital changes in Europe imposes chronological cut-off points, comparisons and teleologies likely to distract us from vital features of the technological cultures and historical trajectories of other societies. Some of the most interesting arguments about technology in the Andes depend on tracing evolving traditions back (through archaeology) to the pre-Christian era and forward to the ethnographic present. The same is true of African metallurgy. The rise of the Indian Ocean trade and of the porcelain and calico industries long pre-dates 1400 and the Iberian voyages of discovery. The history of the ‘traditional' textile sectors in China and India did not grind to a halt with industrialisation: they persisted in parallel, adapting technically, socially and symbolically to the new environment.

Another weakness in the world-history approach is its emphasis on circulation and encounters, on interfaces between societies rather than the matrices within which local technological cultures took shape. Encounters or flows directly involving Europe typically attract more attention than those involving only non-Western actors, although this is beginning to change. But we also need more studies that focus on technological landscapes, the circulation of knowledge and historical changes within specific non-European societies or regions, if we are to account satisfactorily for patterns of trans­mission or adaptation between societies, or to compare how technology was construed at different points around the world.

Finally, world historians of technology have tended (understandably) to organise their arguments around the domains of activity like textile production, warfare or transportation, which helped to knit the modern world together. But a broader, more anthropological approach towards which technologies mattered in other societies, and why, enriches our understanding both of local matrices and of the encounters, flows and disruptions placed in the foreground by world historians. Fortunately, as this chapter has suggested, an emerging corpus of richly detailed and thought­provoking studies of local technological cultures suggests that the time is now ripe for creatively rethinking the place of technology in world history.

FURTHER READING

Berg, Maxine, ‘Quality, Cotton and the Global Luxury Trade' in Giorgio Riello and Tirthankar Roy, How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 391-415.

Bouysse-Cassagne, Therese, ‘Las minas del centro-sur andino, los cultos prehispanicos y los cultos cristianos', Bulletin de l'IFEA 34 (2005), 443-62.

‘Le palanquin d'argent de l'Inca: petite enquete d'ethnohistoire a propos d'un objet absent', Techniques et cultures 29 (1997), 69-111.

Bray, Francesca, Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

Buren, Mary Van and Barbara H. Mills, ‘Huayrachinas and Tocochimbos: Traditional Smelting Technology of the Southern Andes', Latin American Antiquity 16 (2005), 3-25.

Chao, Kang, The Development of Cotton Textile Production in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977).

Finlay, Robert, ‘The Pilgrim Art: The Culture of Porcelain in World History', Journal of World History 9 (1998), 141-87.

Flynn, Dennis O. and Arturo Giraldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571', Journal of World History 6 (1995), 201-21.

Hamalainen, Pekka, ‘The Politics of Grass: European Expansion, Ecological Change, and Indigenous Power in the Southwest Borderlands', William & Mary Quarterly 67 (2010), 173-208.

Headrick, Daniel R., Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2010).

Kerr, Rose and Nigel Wood, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press, 2004).

Kuhn, Dieter, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Laichen, Sun, ‘Military Technology Transfers from Ming China and the Emergence of Northern Mainland Southeast Asia (c. 1390-1527)', Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (2003), 495-517.

Landes, David S., The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1999).

Ledderose, Lothar, Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art (Princeton University Press, 2000).

Lorge, Peter A., The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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

Misa, Thomas J., Leonardo to the Internet: Technology and Culture from the Renaissance to the Present (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).

Nagahara, Keiji and Kozo Yamamura, ‘Shaping the Process of Unification: Technological Progress in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-CenturyJapan', Journal of Japanese Studies 14 (1988), 77-109.

Riello, Giorgio, ‘Asian Knowledge and the Development of Calico Printing in Europe in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', Journal of Global History 5 (2010), 1-28.

RieUo, Giorgio and Tirthankar Roy, How India Clothed the World: The World of South Asian Textiles, 1500-1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2009).

Schafer, Dagmar (ed.), Cultures of Knowledge: Technology in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

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