By 13,000 years ago, most of the hospitable globe was inhabited, but not densely, about five to ten million people. Nor had migrant’s maintained close contact with each other. But this changed between 10,000 and 6,000 years ago, when the first societies in the Middle East moved from hunting and gathering based on stone-age technologies to farming the first crops and domesticated animals, and living in villages. From this point until the time of Pythagoras and Aristotle, humans were at their most divergent, with tens of thousands of clans, tribes and languages, and a process of genetic isolation that created discernible differences in appearance. Thanks to crop-growing and village life, the inhabitants of the world known to Ptolemy numbered 225 million - more numerous and more diverse than today's inhabitants of Zaire, Vietnam and Turkey.
Two thousand years ago, Europeans outnumbered stay-athome Africans for the first time, by 25 million to 17 million. There were another seven or so million people spread throughout the Americas - and a lesser number in Australia and elsewhere. A third of the world's population lived in India, and another quarter in China. The Romans thought all roads led to Rome, but three in every four people lived in Asia, and the Asians had a higher standard of living, too. China was industrially far in advance, mass-producing iron at levels not reached in the West for hundreds of years.
The world population grew little from the time of Ptolemy to the ninth-century Baghdad world map to the first global contraction of the 1490s. But if the overall population was static, individuals were increasingly mobile, trading in multicultural bazaars like Bantam, plying the, long-distance Indian Ocean maritime trade, and running overland caravans across the Sahara and along the Silk Road, which operated along its full length from 100 BC. Intrepid travelers like William of Rubruck (c.1220-93), Marco Polo (1254-1324) and Ibn Battuta (1304-68) - and no doubt many explorers coming from east to west whose names and exploits have been lost started to reconnect the disparate populations in Europe, North Africa and Asia.
Growing and increasingly interconnected populations became vulnerable to the destructive forces of warfare, famine and plague. The period 1200-1350 saw violence of unprecedented scale and violence between the nomadic Mongols and sedentary peoples of Persia and China, drawing in peoples from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east. Starvation was the frequent companion of the bloodshed in China. Famine also appeared on a continental scale in Europe, a result of climatic changes known as the Little Ice Age (1315-22), causing widespread crop failures. In 1337 France and England became embroiled in vicious provincial fighting (which was to continue sporadically for 116 years).
War and famine left city-dwellers, farmers and soldiers in no fit state to resist the plague that originated in central Asia and took root in China in the early 1330s. The Black Death spread west along both commercial and military routes, to Constantinople, Kaffa and Sicily (1347), through the Mediterranean countries (1348), reaching Mecca, Germany, Scandinavia and the British Isles in 1349 and from Russia to Yemen by 1351. The plague spread so fast because inter-regional migration was reaching new heights. In Europe, the pre-plague population of some 80 million was reduced in two years to 50 million. The European mortality over these years is estimated as being one third to one half; similar proportions probably apply to the Middle East, Asia and North Africa.
The overall
impacts are complex. The Black Death increased serfdom, spread fatalism
and limited international trade, but it also strengthened the hand of surviving
peasants, increased labor mobility and made economies more reliant on money.
The impacts varied regionally, but in human terms the European and Asian
worlds in the 1350s were much smaller than they had been a few years before.
Perhaps the experience of plague lay behind the medieval quest for luxury.
One spice in particular, sugar, generated one of the darkest episodes in
global mobility. Out of sweetness came forth slavery.
By 1500, the
world population had recovered from the catastrophic losses of the Black
Death and other plagues to reach nearly 440 million people. Two-thirds
of the world's people remained in Asia, while the African population was
catching up with Europe. But for those with global intent, the populous
planet suffered from labor shortages, and slavery became the solution.
Slavery had been widespread in Greek and Roman times, and had continued in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and Asia through to the tenth century. The victims were as likely to be Spaniards or Poles as Africans or Arabs. Lovejoy, P. in Transformations in Slavery(2000), argues that 2.2 million Africans were enslaved and shipped to Asia in the years between 650 and 1500 while another 4.3 million were transported across the Sahara.
In medieval Europe, Christian norms made enslaving other Christians morally unacceptable; serfdom was considered a pragmatic solution to labor shortages. During the first global contraction, however, the traditional distaste for enslaving one's own subjects crumbled. Columbus was comfortable with slavery his home port of Genoa was a major receiving point for slaves from the Black Sea. But when he asked the Spanish crown for permission to enslave some Caribbean natives, he was refused. When he ignored these orders and shipped slaves back to Spain in 1495, he was required to return and release them. But early colonists found an alternative to slavery: the infamous encomienda system of forced labor in exchange for religious instruction. By 1550, the merits of slavery were being widely promoted. Slavery would lead to religious conversion - an argument used to secure Papal blessing - while providing household servants, sex partners, miners, galley-rowers. Most of all, slaves would cater to the European sweet tooth.
Popular for thousands of years among Asian elites, sugar gradually migrated westwards to the Levant and Egypt. European crusaders developed a taste for sugar in the Holy Land, and its cultivation spread to Cyprus, Morocco, Andalusia, Sicily and the Algarve. The Portuguese took sugar to the recently settled islands of Madeira, the Canaries, Cape Verde and Sao Tome. Apart from their hotter and wetter climate, these Atlantic islands enjoyed a crucial advantage over the Mediterranean for growing sugar - they were close to Africa and away from prying eyes. Europeans rapidly discovered that sugar is back-breaking work. But if the Portuguese were going to use slaves, they wanted it out of sight and out of mind. The Atlantic islands were far enough away; Brazil even further. Between 1450 and 1600 the Portuguese shipped 175,000 slaves from West Africa, transforming what had been a series of regional slave markets into a transatlantic trade where the tickets were one-way.
The French pharmacist Nostradamus made one uncharacteristically clear prediction: there was a great future for sugar (Traite des Confitures, 1557). When the Doge of Venice entertained Henri III of France to dinner in 1572, every single item of the dinner service - cutlery, glasses, plates, chandeliers, the works - was confected from sugar. Within decades it was transformed from dazzling novelty into everyday commodity. Sweetened coffee and cocoa became the breakfast beverages that fuelled industrious European households and coffee shops provided the focal points for early stockbrokers.
By the late eighteenth century, the population of Western Europe was around 100 million and getting richer. To cope with spiraling demand for sugar, the Spanish, English and French set up plantations in their Caribbean and Indian Ocean colonies - St Domingo, Jamaica and Mauritius - while the Portuguese expanded sugar plantations in Brazil. In 1700, world sugar production was around 60,000 tones, and by 1787 it reached 300,000 tones. Sugar, rum, and tobacco, are commodities which are nowhere necessaries of life, noted Adam Smith sourly, but “are become objects of almost universal consumption.”
The growth of the sugar trade democratized luxury, but with it came a dangerous tolerance for brutality in production. The Dutch spice traders had been considered ruthless, but the scale and ethics of sugar and tobacco plantations were at a different level. At least 11 million Africans were shipped to the Americas as slaves from 1500 - greater than the combined populations of Portugal, Spain and Britain at the time. The impact of this unparalleled human transplantation was to shift the world's centre of gravity irrevocably, with the French and British Caribbean receiving at least 3.8 million slaves, Brazil 3.6 million, Spanish America 1.5 million and North America another 400,000. The surviving slaves made a huge contribution to the economic vitality and social. diversity of the New World. Every tone of sugar consumed in Europe came at the cost of one slave's life. (S.O'Connell, Sugar: The Grass That Changed the World, 2004.)
In the eighteenth century, Britain's maritime and commercial supremacy saw it become the leading slave nation, responsible for shipping over three million Africans to the Americas. The story of the abolition of slavery is often told as one of British moral leadership after what Niall Ferguson has called an 'astonishing volte-face' in the late eighteenth century.l72 Led by the Clapham Sect of abolitionists and a nationwide mass-movement against slavery, the trade was abolished by parliament in 1807, followed by the abolition of slavery altogether (1833). The British started shipping slaves back to West Africa and setting them free. After an abrupt switch in the national psyche, the British Empire became a progressive global force.
This account is unsatisfactory for a number of reasons. The achievements of English Methodist and parliamentarian William Wilberforce (1759-1833) and fellow abolitionists are real enough. The Royal Navy captured hundreds of slave ships run by many other nations. But the idea of a rapid and profound change in national ethics is misleading. The reality is that most Europeans, North and South Americans only gradually and grudgingly accepted that slavery would have to be abolished. 'Slavery,' noted Edmund Burke, 'is a weed that grows on every soil.'
In the sixteenth century the English had criticized Spain for its enslavement of native Americans, and slave-owning had never become widespread within England. By the late eighteenth century, slavery was under fire again on both pragmatic and moral grounds. Adam Smith decried the 'dreadful misfortunes' that befell the native peoples of the Americas and East Indies as a result of growing links with Europe. Though he omitted Africa, like Turgot he disapproved,. of slavery, mainly because he believed it was inefficient. His fellow-Scot William Murray, Lord Mansfield, judging the case of an escaped slave in 1772, found slavery 'so odious, that nothing can ,be suffered to support it but positive law'. In Enlightenment Europe and the Americas, there was growing repugnance to slavery based on principles of natural rights which had been slowly developing after the pioneering work of Dominican friars in Spain described in the last chapter.
Wilberforce first raised the issue of slavery in parliament in 1789, and in 1791 his first bill to make slave-trading illegal was roundly defeated; in 1805 it was blocked in the House of Lords. Slavery had already been banned in Haiti and France before the 1807 British abolition of the trade. The British tolerated the existence of slave owning for a whole generation after banning the trade. Nearly two million more Africans were shipped to the Americas after the British abolition, suggesting the naval effort to stamp out the trade was far from comprehensive; a substantial part of the Royal Navy was on other duties like defending imports of opium into China. When a second movement for total abolition gathered steam in the early 1830s, plantation owners demanded - and received compensation of 2.6 billion USD in today's money from tax payers for the loss of their slaves. The move against slavery was slow and halting, as much driven by economics as morals.
The issue was equally murky elsewhere. From the 1820s the USA was literally split in two over the issue of abolition, down the demarcation line drawn up in the 1760s by English geographers Mason and Dixon. In France, planters convinced Napoleon to overturn the abolition and slavery returned until 1848. It continued unabated in Cuba and Brazil until the late 1880s, despite the enormous economic leverage that Britain and France could have exercised to stamp it out. Little was done to improve work conditions on the plantations after abolition, and sugar production in 1894 was actually two and a half times higher than it had been in 1787.
If Europeans had genuinely switched against slaving, would they so quickly have devised the barbaric system of 'indentured labor' to replace it? Using account books instead of manacles, indenture trapped millions of Asian 'coolies' in debt slavery from which they could not escape. As we will see, the reliance on cheap sugar - as well as other plantation commodities like tobacco, cotton, tea, rubber, cocoa and coffee created an ethical callousness on the part of consumers towards distant producers that continued long after the abolition of slavery. (Anthony Wild, Black Gold: The Dark History of Coffee, 2005.)
In 1820, the world population was one billion. By the eve of the Great War in 1913, it stood at 1.8 billion. Over 100 years, 100 million people - African, Asian, European, American migrated to all corners of the planet. It was an unparalleled experience directly affecting one person in ten around the globe. Never before had there been such an exchange of goods, culture, religion and genes. Historians tend to capitalize this period as 'The Great Migration' not just because of its scale but because of its supposedly universal benefits. But there were many losers from global migration.
When Pedro Alvares Cabral was dispatched to India in early 1500, he took with him from Portugal a force of 1,200 men. The Chinese fleets that roamed the oceans in the early fifteenth century had up to 30,000 people aboard. In the first global contraction, people with global intent moved across the world in thousands, but most intended to return home. In the early modern period, millions of Africans were permanently uprooted, and hundreds of thousands of Europeans ventured to the new colonies - where life expectancy was short but financial rewards were great for the survivors.
In the seventeenth century, 700,000 English people emigrated, mainly to North America and the Caribbean, with 50,000 more each decade through the whole eighteenth century. Over a million Germans and Swiss went to North America and the West Indies between 1689 and 1815. When French colonial boosters proposed a utopian settlement at Kourou in Guyana in 1763, 17,000 would-be emigrants rapidly assembled at Atlantic ports. Of the 13,000 who set sail, 9,000 died in Guyana.
But the nineteenth
century saw a one-way global migration that dwarfed all previous movements
of people. Over 25 million Europeans migrated, especially after steamships
slashed the cost of a one-way third-class berth. The main destination was
the United States, but they also left for Argentina, Brazil, Australia,
New Zealand and many other destinations across the entire globe. Many migrants
were those on the economic periphery, looking for better opportunities.
In
1820, the USA
already had a slightly higher average standard of living than most European
countries, and by 1870, the US had become even more alluring for all except
Dutch, Belgian and British workers.
Emigrants were pushed as much as pulled. As European states became more powerful and sensitive to the risk of revolution, they actively created a stream of political migrants. Many were indentured laborers or convicts, while others were religious or political refugees, especially after the failed rebellions and desperate famine of 1848-51. It was in this period that the passport, previously a privilege grant~ by the Persian court, the Indian village headman and the odd European monarch, began to be used by paranoid states as a way of controlling the movements of subversives. 'The creation of the modern passport system', writes John Torpey signaled the dawn of a new era in human affairs, in which individual states and the international state system as a whole successfully monopolized the legitimate authority to permit movement within and across their jurisdictions. (Torpey, The Invention of the Passport, 1999, p. 9.)
Until 1858, British passports had been issued only in French, the diplomatic language, but after this point, a British passport - in English and French - could no longer be issued to foreigners. The passport became for the first time a proof of national identity. The UK was the largest source of European migrants, exporting around two million people per decade from 1870 to the 1920s. Almost half of the 12 million UK emigrants from 1820-1913 were Irish, fleeing the effects of famine from the mid-century. Millions more were impoverished Scottish and Welsh. The Italians and Germans also .migrated in large numbers. The rate of emigration was highest in countries like Sweden: one in a hundred people left every year. Sparsely populated France was a rare European recipient of migrants in this period.
Despite the migration, periodic wars and disastrous cholera epidemics, the population in Europe continued to rise rapidly, doubling from 82 million in 1700 to 165 million by the rebellious year of 1848 and topping 230 million by the end of the century. For those who remained, another migration was also underway, from countryside to the burgeoning cities when industrialization gathered pace. In the early 1880s, 44 per cent of the British workforce was employed in industry; in Germany it was already over a third. Urbanization and a declining agricultural workforce enabled or necessitated greater dependency on food imports, creating a further cycle of industrialization.
Despite growing incomes, work conditions were notoriously bad in the new cities. Liverpool sugar refiners were forced to recruit hundreds of Germans because locals would not accept suffocating conditions that were known to lead to early death. In London, Henry Mayhew, editor of the humorous magazine Punch, wrote four distinctly unfunny volumes about London Labour and the London Poor (1851-61). Mayhew exposed in lurid detail the extremes of poverty among an underclass of 30,000 street vendors, laborers, prostitutes and criminals in the Empire's capital. The London streets were at the centre of a global trade network, with thirty boys specializing in gutta-percha, and tea, sugar and spice stolen from the docks being 'things in excellent demand'.
I can't make it out how it is, one man told Mayhew, but I remember that I could go out and sell twelve bushel of fruit in a day, when sugar was dear, and now, when sugar's cheap, I can't sell three bushel on the same round. Perhaps we want thinning, he added - an ominous echo of Thomas Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population (1798). Efforts to tame the impacts of industrialization, like the 1833 Factory Act in Britain banning the employment of children under nine, and later legislation in France banning under-fives (1841), were part of the same cautious and contested reforming trend as the abolition of slavery. Sixty-hour weeks in harsh conditions remained the norm for older children and adults through the nineteenth century. For those who could afford it, emigration to less industrialized lands was an attractive proposition. Despite the bucolic dreams of many immigrants, especially from Eastern Europe, they found themselves sucked into urban industries, notably Chicago's Packingtown and Pittsburgh's iron and steel foundries. Driven by poverty and politics as much as aspiration, European emigration nevertheless raised living standards all round. (Kevin O'Rourke, The Era of Migration: Lessons for today, Centre for Economic Policy Research Paper DP4498, July 2004.)
From 1870 to 1913, average incomes in Western Europe almost doubled; in the receiving countries of North America, Australia, New Zealand and Latin America, incomes more than doubled. Elsewhere, however, this period of migration was far from great. In Africa and Asia, the standard of living was stagnant. In terms of numbers, destinations and distances, the Asian global diaspora was the most dramatic. From 1834 to 1937, 30 million Indians dispersed right across the British Empire, from Australia and Malaysia to Mauritius and the Caribbean. Another 12 million migrants left China for South-East Asia, South Africa, Cuba and the USA. The motivations of these migrants are explained by the fact that incomes in India and China had fallen in real terms between 1700 and 1870.
The creation of railways and canals also relied on immigrant labour. The Suez Canal opened in 1869 at the cost of an estimated 125,000 Egyptian lives. Fearing the threat to its established routes to India, the canal was vehemently opposed by the British - until they grabbed an opportunity to buy out the Egyptian half-share from a heavily-indebted Isma'il Pasha in 1875 for a knock-down price. See also:
The global commodity trade pushed these countries backwards economically; the global trade in muscle pulled them apart socially. Some Asian indentured laborers managed to send money home, and some even returned home themselves. But for the most part, the Asian migration, like the European, was irreversible.
Few places were untouched by the migrations. One was Tierra del Fuego, where living standards were so primitive that a shocked Charles Darwin, visiting on the Beagle in 1832, began to devise a theory of evolving civilization. 'Whilst observing the barbarous inhabitants it struck me that the possession of some property, a fixed abode, and the union of many families under a chief, were the indispensable requisites for civilization. Such habits almost necessitate the cultivation of the ground, Darwin mused in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), before concluding that “The problem, however, of the first advance of slaves towards civilization is at present much too difficult to be solved.”
Darwin himself was vehemently against slavery, but his most troublesome legacy was 'Social Darwinism', developed by followers like Francis Galton. Although slavery had been largely abolished, the belief that human groups ('races') were evolving at different speeds - even in different directions - led to the renaissance of the concept of the savage. This had devastating consequences for Africa. From an already depleted population of some 70 million in 1800, five and a half million more Africans were enslaved in the nineteenth century, with 3.3 million going to the Americas. By 1870, Europeans outnumbered Africans two to one; were five times as wealthy; and were hundreds of times better armed. Slaving had weakened Africa's economies and societies, but it was only after the abolition of slavery that Europeans developed a strong racist superiority complex.
Coupled with rising strategic and commercial tensions, this led to the Scramble for Africa, the period from 1884 when Europeans raced each other to annex African territory at an astonishing rate. The Scramble was not just military, but commercial and religious, and was facilitated by European superiority in weaponry, transport and communications. By 1913, Britain had nearly 30 per cent of Africa's population under its control, France 15 per cent, Germany a tenth, and Belgium another seven per cent.
The great migration brought precipitous declines in native populations. Indigenous peoples had already been devastated by the unintended result of introduced diseases (as in the 1520 smallpox epidemic in Mexico), or brutally harsh treatment (as in the seventeenth-century Bolivian silver mines). In Mexico the pre-conquest population of five to ten million was just 1.6 million in 1618. In the future United States, the native population shrank from two million in 1500 e-v 750,000 in 1700 and just 325,000 in 1830.
In the late nineteenth century, however, colonization was accompanied by systematic attempts at extermination, as in Van Diemen's Land where the very last inhabitant died in 1876, or the 1904 German campaign against Herero herdsmen in Namibia. In the US, the native American population fell by half between 1850 and 1890 as land-hungry settlers and railroad builders lobbied government to restrict the survivors to reserves. There was also a marked hardening of attitudes in India after the Mutiny and Rebellion of 1857.
Then in 1889, eleven European powers and several others, including the emperor of the Ottomans, signed a British-initiated anti-slavery convention. And as Diane Robinson-Dunn recently described in The harem, slavery and British imperial culture(2006), her Majesty's officers were motivated by the belief in the essential immorality of slavery, a belief which had become a part of English society and culture through the work of anti-slavery activists even before this specific campaign. (Robinson-Dunn, 2006, p.197.)
By the same token, “as the idea of imperial greatness was based on both a duty to reform and a certain amount of respect and admiration for occupied peoples, the British officer could call himself a pasha while working to undermine the existing power structures in Egypt, and see no contradiction.” (Robinson-Dunn, 2006, p.207.)
But even the humble bicycle, as much as the steamship, refrigerated railroad and telegraph, was central to assimilating the population upheavals of the great migration. It was a bridge between the global contraction of the 1880s and modern globalization. In the 1890s, Frank Bowden's Raleigh Company in Nottingham was churning out 30,000 bicycles a year. The proliferation of easy-to-ride bicycles like the Rover enabled workers to get to factories, farmers to markets, urban socialists to bond with each other, women to throw off their corsets. The bicycle facilitated the globe-trotting exploits of Phileas Fogg and created the oldest international sporting fixture: the Tour de France (1903).
Crucially, it ended the social isolation of remote communities, enabling an unprecedented degree of genetic mixing. In effect, says geneticist Steve Jones of University College London, the bike slowed the pace of natural selection. (BBC/Open University, http://www.open2.net/truthwillout/ evolution/article/evolution-iones.htm.)
Some epidemiologists and geneticists disagree, citing HIV as an example of a disease which still exerts formidable selective pressure on people, especially in the developing world. And for all its benefits, one innovation in bicycling comfort and safety - the pneumatic tire invented by Dunlop in 1888 relied on the most brutal abuse of human labor ever recorded: wild rubber tapping.
But no doubt, the global contraction of the 1880’s and 90’s was notable for the dramatic rates of economic growth in Europe and the Americas, enabled by unparalleled labor migration and the surging demand for commodities. But this contraction also saw the emergence of a liberal movement increasingly critical of the violence and exploitation lying not far beneath the surface of the late nineteenth-century global system. Facilitated by telegraph and newspapers, eyewitness accounts of European battlefields, New York sweatshops and colonial plantations led to widespread calls for a more responsible model of trade and diplomacy centered around new global institutions.
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