1 03.

European Expansion, Colonialism, and World System Theory

The dominant force in the shaping of a global society has been the expansion of European society and culture throughout the world following the voyages of Columbus. Some have seen the explosive movement of Europeans throughout the world as a consequence of centuries of repression and cultural darkness that had kept Europeans from exploring the world beyond Europe. One of the most striking examples of that perspective is Washington Irvings biography of Columbus, in which Irving identified the expansion of Europe as one of the fundamental elements of modernity and Columbus as the first modern man, the one who cast off the blinders that had limited European development.

The Ancient World

In fact, however, the expansion of Europe and of European culture has a history that long precedes Columbuss first voyage. The post-1492 expansion of Europe built upon the expansion of the previous five centuries and reflects a characteristic of ancient European culture as well. The ancient Greek city-states expanded, establishing colonies in Sicily and southern Italy, to which they brought Greek cultural values and practices. The conquests of Alexander of Macedon (35623 BCE) spread Greek cultural values throughout much of the Middle East and then into the Roman world. According to his biographer, Arrian, Alexander came to see his conquests as the beginning of a world-city, a worldwide community within which all mankind would live in harmony under the guidance of the Greeks. The Roman Empire also generated a wide cultural community as it expanded from its home in central Italy. Its influence extended well beyond the formal boundaries of the empire, as the barbarian societies along the frontiers adopted elements of Roman culture in the course of their contact with Roman soldiers and merchants. Greek and Roman expansion was not worldwide, however. The Asian goods that the Romans desired traveled to Rome via ancient trade routes, so that there was no need

2 to seek direct access to the Asian markets. Although Alexander of Macedon was said to have believed in some kind of world community, this was not a concept of much significance in the ancient world. Stoic philosophers did have some sense of a universal human community, but this was view of a small elite and had little practical consequence.

Medieval Christendom Expands

The beginning of the great era of European overseas expansion associated with Columbus is sometimes linked to the desire to have direct access to the markets of the East, and the creation of a world system beginning in the sixteenth century is often discussed in primarily economic terms, a world economic system. However, the desire to preach the Christian Gospel to all mankind was another spur to expansion. The Christian conception of mankind as a single family descended from Adam and Eve and redeemed by Christ motivated missionaries to spread beyond Europe and into regions inhabited by infidels. Christians, echoing the Stoics, could conceive of a universal community embracing all mankind, but they envisioned an institutional structure provided by the Church. The role of Christianity in the expansion of Europe stretches back to the Byzantine imperial governments support of missionary efforts to convert the Goths in the third century CE. From the imperial point of view, such an effort was in keeping with the older tradition of acculturating barbarians to the Roman way of life. The expansion of Christianity could thus go hand in hand with the expansion of the Byzantine Empire, a kind of relationship that was to have a long history. The Latin Church in the West was slower in getting involved in expansion beyond the boundaries of the Roman Empire. Initially it was individuals who went forth to preach the Gospel in the lands of the barbarians. Saint Patrick (fifth century), for example, went to preach to the Irish, a people who had never been subject to the Romans. The first pope to authorize a mission to a non-Christian society was Gregory I (c. 540 604) who sent a team of missionaries to England, where Christianity had virtually died out after having been introduced during the Roman occupation of the island. The missionaries were followed by other figures who brought England into regular contact

3 with the continental world. During the eighth and ninth centuries, missionaries from Ireland and from England in turn went to the borders of the Carolingian empire with the support of various Carolingian rulers and with papal blessing to preach to the Germanic peoples, bringing them into the Church and under Carolingian domination. This union of spiritual and temporal goals was to be a characteristic of subsequent European expansion.

The Internal Colonization of Europe

With the decline of Roman power and the population decline that accompanied it, only churchmen were at all concerned with expansion until about the middle of the tenth century. The end of the long series of barbarian assaults on the Roman and Carolingian societies and the beginning of a period of warmer climate from about 950 to 1300 contributed to population growth that reignited pressures to expand. This period began with what the historian Archibald Lewis described as the colonization of the internal frontier of Europe. Forests were cut down and new farming villages and trading towns established. Many of the techniques later used to organize migration to new frontiers on the edge of Christendom and to establish new communities overseas were first developed in the course of this process of internal European colonization. From the tenth to the fourteenth century Europeans moved aggressively in all directions with varying degrees of success. To the east, the twelfth- and thirteenthcentury Crusades to regain the Holy Land ultimately failed, but German expansion eastward into the lands of the Slavs that had begun in the early tenth centuries was successful. In the north, during the tenth and eleventh centuries Christian missionaries succeeded in converting the Scandinavians, bringing them into the European Christian cultural orbit, eventually leading to the settlement of Greenland from the eleventh century and the establishment of Christian churches there. Around 1000, Scandinavian adventurers even reached the mainland of North America. To the west and south, the Portuguese and the Spanish were pushing the Muslims back, and further to the west, the English were advancing into the Celtic lands that bordered England, reforming the Celtic branch of Christendom and bringing those churches into conformity with Roman practice.

4 Medieval thinkers developed legal justifications for expansion and conquest that supplemented the military and missionary justifications; these were later used during the Spanish conquest of the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. First developed in the course of Christian encounters with the Muslims and the Mongols during the thirteenth century, these legal justifications forced those who supported the Crusades and other forms of armed force against nonbelievers in the process of expansion to justify their actions in legal terms. During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, as the climate turned colder and the Black Death reduced the European population by at least one-third, and as the Ottoman Turks moved further up into the Balkans, dominating more of the Mediterranean, the era of medieval expansion slowed but did not entirely stop. At the western edge of Europe, the Portuguese continued to have a strong interest in expansion as they sought to find a sea route to the markets of Asia that would circumvent the traditional Muslim-controlled routes through the Near East. This required establishing settlements to refit and resupply ships that would make the long journey to the East. The Portuguese were also anxious to protect themselves from Muslim counterattacks and were interested in reconnecting with Christian communities of Asia that, it was thought, might join in a last great crusade. Finally, the Portuguese were interested in converting the non-Christians of the East to Christianity.

Europeans Expand Overseas

All of these motives for a renewal of European expansion, this time well beyond the geographical boundaries of Europe, appear in the literature of the fifteenth century. Portuguese expansion into the Atlantic and along the west coast of Africa, popularly associated with Henry the Navigator (13941460), led to the rediscovery of the island chains of the Atlantic, Canary (13401341), Madeira (14181419), Azores (14271431), and Cape Verde (14551457) and to the establishment of trading posts on the coast of Africa. Portuguese interest in finding a water route to Asia was encouraged by Genoese financiers, merchants, and seamen who had suffered financially when the Muslims had conquered the Genoese settlements along the Black Sea.

5 The Age of Columbus

It is, then, no coincidence that it was an ambitious Genoese sailor who had lived and worked in Portugal who initiated the great age of European expansion that eventually led to the development of an international society, if not a true world community. In addition to the motives for expansion mentioned earliera desire to find new routes to Asian markets, to preach the Gospel to nonbelievers, and to find Eastern Christian communities to join in a last crusade, Columbus sought personal social and economic advancement. He bridged the two periods of European expansion, employing the motives and experience of medieval expansion in the course of his encounter with the New World. Columbuss great significance is that he began the process that opened up not only water routes to the already known Asian world but also to entirely new worlds, the Americas and the Pacific Ocean in particular, as well. The novelty of these new worlds was not, however, initially appreciated. Until his death Columbus claimed to have reached the outer edge of Asia, a belief rooted in the medieval theory that the surface of the earth was almost entirely land and that the Ocean Sea was a narrow band of water, rather like a river, separating the various landmasses. That being the case, the islands of the Caribbean would have to be the outer edge of Asia. Likewise, Columbus initially identified several plants found in the Americas with the spices associated with Asia, although later he changed his mind. From 1492 to about 1600, Europeans tended to perceive the New World in terms derived from the experience of the Middle Ages, approaching the peoples of the Americas as if they were at a stage of development similar to that of the barbarians who had invaded the Roman empire. The European discovery of the Pacific Ocean by Vasco Nuez de Balboa in 1513 and then the circumnavigation of the earth by Magellans fleet, 15191522, stimulated the reexamination of European theories about the surface of the earth and the peoples who lived there. One result was the realization that the Ocean Sea was not an obstacle to direct access to Asia but a highway that would enable Europeans to sail to all parts of the earth, a viable alternative to traveling overland. A second result was a growing realization that there existed a wide variety of peoples and societies throughout the world, ranging

6 from the most primitive to the most sophisticated. This experience challenged traditional biblically based theories about mankind, eventually leading to the development of anthropology.

The Beginnings of a European World Order

The long-term consequences of the European encounter with the rest of the world can be illustrated graphically in several ways. By 1763 European powers were rising stars among the great imperial powers that politically dominated, at least nominally, the bulk of the globe. Seen in economic terms, the European encounter with the rest of the world generates a map showing the major trade routes that, when taken together, outline what the sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein has labeled the modern world system, a series of cores and peripheries linking all parts of the world in a single economic order. Less easy to illustrate graphically is the interpenetration of cultures that was also occurring. In physical terms, this included the importation of a wide variety of products into Europe from elsewhere, products ranging from the traditional Asian spices and silks to such new items as tobacco and potatoes from the Americas. This latter was part of what the historian Alfred Crosby termed the Columbian exchangethe massive movement of flora and fauna (including agents of disease) in both directions across the Atlantic after the European discovery of the Americas. Above all, the importation of a large amount of precious metal, especially silver, from the Americas had a significant impact on the European economy. Perhaps even more interesting was the fact that so much of that specie passed through European hands and on to Asia. Some recent scholarship has suggested that in fact the drain of silver to the East has been one of the major forces shaping the world economy.

Consequences of European Expansion

The desire of Europeans to acquire goods from elsewhere, sometimes meant, the restructuring of other economies to meet those needs. The demand for sugar that had originally led to the creation of sugar plantations on the islands of the Mediterranean in

7 the Middle Ages led to the creation of similar plantations on the Cape Verde Islands and then on the islands of the Caribbean. This development generated a demand for labor, a demand that the European population could not (or would not) meet, thus generating a market for slaves. Eventually, Europeans turned to Africa as the source for such labor, redirecting the long-standing African slave trade to the New World and away from its traditional markets in the Muslim world. There were other consequences of European expansion, as Christian missionaries accompanied merchants and adventurers around the world, preaching the Gospel to new ears. The impact of these efforts varied widely, from the mass baptisms that Catholic missionaries often employed in the initial stages of conversion efforts in Latin America to the tiny number of converts that the Jesuits made over several decades of sophisticated missionary efforts at the highest levels of Chinese society. Another result was the development of cults that blended Christian and local beliefs and practices, as well as the incorporation of local beliefs into the Christian context. There also emerged new populations, mestizos and creoles, who reflected the movement of peoples, voluntarily and involuntarily, around the world. Such peoples reflected not only new mixtures of physical characteristics but new languages and dialects as well. The final consequence of European expansion was the gradual development of a conception of mankind as a community. This is reflected quite clearly in the development of a body of international law designed to regulate relations among the states of the world. This legal order was linked to a conception of mankind rooted in an anthropology that saw a progression from primitive hunter-gathers through pastoralists to agriculturists and from life in the fields to life in urban communities. On the basis of this anthropology, the powerful imperial states were able to assert their superiority, culturally as well as militarily, to all the other human societies and to restrict leadership of the worldwide legal order to the Christian nations of Europe. They could also justify their conquest and domination of large parts of the world on the grounds that they were assisting the development of peoples still at the lower stages to reach their full human potential, an attitude that evolved into racism.

8 The Decline of Empires

The overseas expansion of Europe that began in 1492 was not an abrupt change in the course of European history. It was an integral part of a process that had developed between 1000 and 1300. In that period, many of the intellectual and institutional structures associated with post-1492 expansion were first created, structures upon which the explorers, missionaries, and settlers who followed Columbus built. The ironic consequence of the success of European expansion was that by the late eighteenth century, the oldest European colonial possessions in the New World were on the verge of a series of revolutions that were to overthrow European political domination without separating the new states from the European economic and cultural world. This in turn was the first stage in a process that only ended in the late twentieth century in a wave of decolonization that destroyed the great European empires. In their place, to an extent not always appreciated, the modern conception of an international order with a legal and institutional structure as an armature has implemented the Stoic and Christian conception of an international community. The empires faded away, but the cultural legacy remained.

Further Reading

Barker, E. (1956). From Alexander to Constantine. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press. Bartlett, R., & MacKay, A. (Eds.). (1989, 1992). Medieval Frontier Societies. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Cary, M., & Warmington, E. H. (1963). The Ancient Explorers. (Rev. ed). Baltimore: Penguin Books. Crosby, A. (1972). The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Boxer, C. (1965) The Dutch Seaborne Empire. New York: A. A. Knopf. Boxer, C. (1969). The Portuguese Seaborne Empire. New York: A. A. Knopf.

9 Etemad, B. (2000). La Possession du Monde: Poids et Mesures de la Colonisation (XVIIIe-XXe sicles) [Possession of the World: The Weight and Measure of Colonization (18th20th centuries)]. Brussels, Belgium: Editions Complexe. Flynn, D. O., & Girldez, A. (2002). Cycles of Silver: Global Economic Unity Through the Mid-Eighteenth Century. Journal of World History, 13(2), 391427. Grafton, A., Shelford, A., & Siraisi, N. (1992). New Worlds, Ancient Text: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Hanke, L. (1949). The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Hay,D. (1957). Europe:The emergence of an idea. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. Hodgen, M. (1964). Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lewis, A. R. (1958).The Closing of the Mediaeval Frontier 12501350. Speculum, 33(4), 475483. Muldoon, J. (1977). The Expansion of Europe: The First Phase. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Muldoon, J. (1979). Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the non-Christian World, 12501550. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Parry, J. H. (1966). The Spanish Seaborne Empire. New York: A. A. Knopf. Penrose, B. (1952). Travel and Discovery in the Renaissance, 14201620. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Phillips. J. R. S. (1998). The Medieval Expansion of Europe (2nd ed). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Russell-Wood, A. J. R. (19972000). (Ed.). An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 14501800. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate-Variorum. Verlinden, C. (1970). The Beginnings of Modern Colonization (Y. Freccero, Trans.). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wallerstein, I. (1974). The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth century. New York: Academic Press.

10 Empires

Empire is one of the most commonly used terms in world history. It appears in reference to a long list of powerful states and societies, ranging from the ancient Akkadians to contemporary America. Many of the leading themes in world historywar, migration, and trade, for examplearose in conjunction with empires, which touched the lives of immense numbers of peoples. To write the history of empire, Dominic Lieven has observed, would be close to writing the history of mankind (2002, xiii). The very pervasiveness of empire as a historical category makes its meaning difficult to pin down. Definitions abound. Typologies proliferate. The term is often used interchangeably with dynasty and civilization. While most historians are likely to agree that empire refers to the political power exerted by a state or its agents over a culturally diverse group of peoples, this understanding of the term is so vague as to accommodate any number of different historical phenomena, ranging from the continental-wide conquests of the Mongols to the transoceanic extortions of the Portuguese. Moreover, even this definition may not be broad enough to account for the meaning of empire associated, for example, with the Holy Roman Empire, a loose affiliation of central European states that shared a common allegiance to the Catholic faith. In the end, empire can be seen a kind of palimpsest on which historians have written about various subjects associated with the consolidation of communities into large political units.

Etymology and Uses

The term empire derives from the Latin imperium, which originally meant the sovereignty held by a magistrate, but later evolved to refer to the authority that the ancient Romans established over much of Europe and the Near East. Its etymology indicates the main source and standard for its usage. The Roman Empire became the archetype of what an empire should look like and how it should behave, a positive model for the Europeans who sought to emulate its achievements. In the east, the Byzantine Empire kept its heritage alive for nearly a millennium. In the west, the Carolingian

11 empire, the Napoleonic empire, the British empire, Hitlers Third Reich, and various other expansionist European states consciously evoked the Roman empire in their iconography and ideological claims to legitimacy. The Roman model made its mark on European historiography as well, acquiring a prominent place in literature that sought to discern the patterns of history and distill its lessons. Edward Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (17761788) is arguably the most influential work of history ever written. Empire also carries negative connotations, evoking charges of political and cultural oppression. This use of the term has its origins in the classical Mediterranean world as well, though its principle source is probably the Achaemenid Empire of Persia, which threatened the independence of the Greeks. The same connotations are attached in Western historiography to its successors, the Sasinid and Safavid empires, as well as to neighboring states that came in collision with Europe, notably the Ottoman and Mugal empires. The term is used less consistently in other geographical and historical contexts. While the closest counterpart to the Roman Empire was in many respects the contemporaneous Han polity of China, it is more often called a dynasty than an empire. The same is true for its successor statesthe Tang, the Song, the Ming, the Qing, and others. Some historians have shown similar reservations about using the term empire in reference to the Abbasids and Umayyads, who consolidated political authority across much of the Near East and North Africa under the banner of Islam. In sub-Saharan Africa, indigenous polities rarely receive the appellation empire, the main exceptions being the West African states of Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, whose indirect association with medieval Europe gave them mythic reputations. Similarly, the only polities in the Americas commonly characterized as empires are those that fell to Spanish conquerors, the Aztecs and the Incas, even though archeologists have determined the earlier existence of other large states in the same locations and in other parts in the western hemisphere. The ambivalence and inconsistency that have characterized the use of empire serve as a reminder that words and their meanings are no less embedded in the particularities of history than other aspects of human experience.

12 Empire Building as State Building

For all the semantic uncertainty surrounding the term empire, there can be little doubt that the phenomenon it signifies was a consequence of the rise of states. Empires appeared on the scene soon after the first states came into existence in the densely populated river valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, and elsewhere. Indeed, the association between the two is so close that it is not entirely clear when state building becomes empire building. Every successful state soon expanded its reach well beyond the real or fictive lineage ties and ethnic bonds that supplied its original claims of sovereignty, relying on conquest and other coercive methods to bring additional peoples under its control. The demands for labor and tribute, the reliance on armies and bureaucracies, and the insistence on hierarchy and hereditary privilege were common to both types of polities. As David Armitage has stated, Empires gave birth to states, and states stood at the heart of empires (2000, 15). The distinction most often drawn between empires and other states can be characterized as functions of intent and degree: Empires are those states that seemed especially aggressive in their expansionist ambitions and especially accomplished at extending their sway over other peoples. Yet the same state could fluctuate quite dramatically in terms of the policies it pursued and the territories it controlled, thus exhibiting more or fewer of the characteristics of an empire as its aims and fortunes varied. It is impossible, for example, to know how to classify Pharaonic Egypt, which expanded and contracted repeatedly over the course of its long history, conquering others and being conquered in turn. Part of the problem derives from the fact that we tend to look at the intentions and actions of individual states to determine whether or when they were empires, whereas it was their spheres of interaction with neighboring peoples that often determined this outcome (Barfield in Alcock et al. 2001, 40). In modern times, the rise of the nation-state presents what seems at first sight a much clearer typological contrast to empire, since its reliance on linguistic and/or ethnic homogeneity and the claim of popular sovereignty stand at odds with the foundational premises of empire.

13 Yet archetypal nation-states like Britain and France established huge empires that stretched around the globe. They resolved the apparent contradiction between their dual roles as nation-states and empires by maintaining strict institutional and ideological boundaries between the metropolitan sphere, where the principles of the nation state applied, and the overseas possessions, where they did not.

Land-Based Empires

The vast majority of empires until the last four or five hundred years consisted of states that extended their power into contiguous territory, either through conquest or composite monarchy. A key dynamic in the rise and fall of these land-based empires was the sometimes complementary, sometimes adversarial relationship between the sedentary agricultural societies that gave rise to states and the pastoralists and other mobile peoples who operated outside the boundaries of those states. The two groups usually kept their distance from one another, coming together mainly to trade goods, but environmental changes, demographic pressures, and other forces provoked periodic clashes between them. States and their agrarian populations enjoyed the advantages of concentration, central direction, and sheer numbers over their widely dispersed, frequently fissiparous adversaries, and their demand for land, labor, and tribute gave them motive to encroach on the domains of the latter. Even when states merely sought to secure their frontiers against raids by nomads, their efforts often sucked them further and further into the hinterland in an unending quest for security. Given the right circumstances, these dynamics could lead them to absorb an immense amount of territory: Two classic examples are the Roman and Han empires. The significance that these empires attached to their troubled relations with pastoralists and other unpacified peoples is evident in the way they represented themselves and their actions as advancing the cause of civilization against the barbarians on their borders. One of the standard tropes of empire would become this dichotomy between civilization and barbarism. Pastoralists were by no means the mere victims of empires, however. A perennial theme of world history is the sudden breakout by nomadic invaders

14 whose mobility, weaponry, and warrior ethos overwhelmed sedentary agricultural societies. These events had several quite different outcomes. One was the destruction of the conquered state and the fragmentation of political authority. Examples include Western Europe after the fall of Rome in the fifth century CE and West Africa after the invasion of Songhai in 1591 CE. In other instances, the barbarian invaders preserved the lineaments of the state, but placed themselves at its head. Although they ran the risk of cultural absorption by the host society, they also gained access to its immense resources, which they were able to mobilize to carry out still more conquests. Two of the largest empires in Eurasian history were the work of pastoralist peoples, the Mongols and the Arabs. Both burst out of their natal lands (the central Asian steppes and the Arabian desert), crushed the states that stood against them, created new state structures on the foundations of the old, and used them in the task of empire building with astonishing success. After about 1450 CE, however, the pastoralist threat to agrarian societies began to disappear. As William McNeill and others have argued, the gunpowder weapons that came on the scene around this time proved to be more than a match for nomadic warriors on horseback. They gave an irreversible strategic advantage to large sedentary states, which had the fiscal, technical, and logistical means to produce these weapons on a large scale and put them into use with devastating effect. The result was the rise of new gunpowder empires in Europe, Russia, China, India, and the Near East which hemmed in their nomadic neighbors and put an end forever to their depredations on agricultural communities.

Transoceanic Empires

The mid-fifteenth century marked a related shift in the history of empiresthe rise of Western European transoceanic empires. The projection of power by sea was not in itself a new phenomenon. The Greeks and the Phoenicians had used their seafaring skills to plant their peoples and spread their influence across the ancient Mediterranean world, though neither found a way to knit their scattered communities together into a single powerful state.

15 The Vikings faced the same problem despite their remarkable success in raiding and settling coastal zones from the North Sea to the Mediterranean. The Persian Gulf, Indian Ocean, and the South China Sea all sustained their own series of seaborne traders and raiders, some of whom established polities of considerable size and sophistication. By sitting astride the Malaccan Strait, a chokepoint in the Asian seaborne trade, Srivijaya became the dominant power in Southeast Asia in the seventh century. Oman, a small citystate on the southern Arabian coast, controlled trade along the east coast of Africa through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the estimation of some historians, both states became empires. The transoceanic empires established by Western European states shared some features with the cases mentioned above, but they differed in crucial respects as well. Like most of their sea-borne predecessors, they set out in search of trade, not of the tribute that sustained land-based empires. Trade would remain an integral feature of these empires, so much so that many theorists and historians have concluded that modern European imperialism was driven first and foremost by the demands of commerce and capitalism. But Western European states also established the sort of centralized political control over their overseas possessions that was more characteristic of land-based empires than of previous seaborne polities. This can be explained in part by the fact that they were at the forefront of the military revolution precipitated by gunpowder weaponry, allowing them to exercise power over greater distances than ever before. Above all, however, it was due to the contemporaneous consolidation of strong centralized states at home, which provided the incentivesand the blueprintsfor the extension of these policies and institutions abroad. Portugal, the earliest and least developed of the European states that sought an overseas empire, had the least success in establishing a political foothold in foreign lands. Its larger and more powerful neighbor, Spain, effected a far greater transformation on the territories it claimed. And although France, England, Holland, and other European states each had its own distinct imperial style, all of them sought to subordinate the colonies they established to the political will of the metropolis. Most historians agree that these European overseas empires had an unprecedented effect on world history. By bringing together parts of the world that had been effectively

16 isolated from one another since the dawn of civilization, they set in motion a series of changes that rippled around the globe. They brought about a transfer of diseases, plants, and animals which transformed environments and societies almost everywhere. One of the most immediate consequences was the sharp reduction of indigenous populations in the Americas, Australia, and other regions where the arrival of deadly new microbes generated virgin soil epidemics, while over the long term the spread of new food crops supported an unparalleled growth in the worlds population. European overseas empires also facilitated the transfer of peoples from one continent to another. Streams of emigrants from Europe settled in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and other mainly temperate lands, laying the foundations for what Alfred Crosby has aptly termed neo-Europes. At the same time, millions of Africans were sent as slaves to New World plantations, while large numbers of indentured servants from India, China, and other lands sailed across the seas to meet the labor demands of European-owned economic enterprises. These enterprises were integral to the global transfer of goods that also distinguished the transoceanic empires of Western European states. By orchestrating the operations of this system, Europeans became its main beneficiaries. This was especially true after industrialization at home skewed the terms of trade in favor of European manufactured goods, creating a growing disparity of wealth between Europe and much of the rest of the world. Although the United States, Japan, and other countries worked their way into the column of industrialized countries, the fissure between rich and poor peoples remains a lasting legacy of European overseas empires.

Ideologies of Empire

While the drive for power and wealth may have been the basic motive behind imperial expansion, no empire lasted very long if it didnt develop an ideological claim on behalf of its own legitimacy. Quite apart from inspiring the empires agents or easing their consciences, this claim sought to make conquered peoples more acquiescent to their own subjugation.

17 The key to accomplishing this goal was the dissemination of an idea or doctrine that overcame ethnic or cultural particularisms, offering in their stead integration into a larger imperial identity. The Romans were famous for their promise of citizenship under Roman law. The Han and their successors embraced Confucian principles and perpetuated them through the efforts of a relatively open bureaucratic elite. Although rulers also relied on religion to bolster their authority, they ran the risk that their official faith would alienate subject peoples who worshipped different gods. Most empires took care to respect religious diversity. The relationship between empire and religion did, however, undergo a significant shift with the emergence of Christianity and then Islam. Both were universalist creeds that welcomed all converts, irrespective of their origins. This made them attractive to empires seeking ways to incorporate newly conquered subjects; by the same token, empires were attractive to them as instruments for the propagation of the faith. Though forced conversions were uncommon and counterproductive, both Christianity and Islam often worked hand-inglove with empires, supplying them with important ideological rationales for their rule. Christianity was integral to the early modern European empires, which found especially fertile grounds for their missionary endeavors among the demoralized and much diminished peoples of the Americas and the deracinated slaves shipped from Africa. Once they came into possession of large tracts of South and Southeast Asian territory in the late eighteenth century, however, they had to develop alternative justifications for their presence, since Christianity simply antagonized the regions Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist populations. The introduction of stable government and the rule of law, the promotion of prosperity through international trade, the advancement of scientific knowledge and its application in modern medicine and technology, and various other claims were made in justification of European imperial rule. Underlying all of these claims was the assertion that empire brought the benefits of civilization to colonial subjects. Whether expressed in secular or religious terms, a belief in the superiority of its own way of lifewhat it characterized as civilizationlay at the ideological heart of every empire.

18 Costs, Benefits, Consequences

Whether for good or ill, empires were crucial engines of change in world history. They were the paramount institutional expressions of the human will to power, exerting greater authority over greater numbers of people than any other system of rule. Their armies and ambitions caused untold human suffering and destruction. At the same time, they brought culturally diverse and geographically scattered peoples together, providing the political framework for the rise of those large, vigorous societies that often go by the name of civilizations. They also served as the nurseries for the acquisition of skills, the invention of products, and the origination of ideas that spread far beyond the physical boundaries and the temporal existence of the empires themselves. Lastly, their relentless drive for expansion supplied much of the impetus for those everenlarging systems of interaction and exchange that eventuated in what we now know as globalization, with all its attractions and drawbacks.

Further Reading

Abernethy, D. B. (2000). The Dynamics of Global Dominance: European Overseas Empires 14151980. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Adas, M. (1989). Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press. Alcock, S. E., et. al. (2001). Empires: Perspectives from Archaeology and History. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Armitage, D. (2000). The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Bayly, C. A. (2004). The Birth of the Modern World, 17801914: Global Connections and Comparisons. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Crosby, A.W. (1972). The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492.Westport, CT: Greenwood. Crosby, A.W. (1986). Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 9001900. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

19 Doyle, M.W. (1986). Empires. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Frank, A. G. (1998). ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gibbon, E. (2003). The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (abridged ed.). New York: Modern Library. Hobson, J. A. (1938). Imperialism: A Study. London: Allen and Unwin. Hopkins, A. G. (Ed.). (2002). Globalization in World History. New York: W.W. Norton. Howe, S. (2002). Empire: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Kennedy, P. (1987). The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House. Kiernan, V. G. (1982). European Empires from Conquest to Collapse, 18151960. London: Fontana. Kroebner, R. (1961). Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Lenin,V. (1939). Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. New York: International Publishers. Lieven, D. (2002). Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Mann, M. (1986). The Sources of Social Power: Vol. 1. A History of Power From the Beginning to A.D. 1760. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. McNeill,W. H. (1982). The Pursuit of Power: Technology, Armed force, and Society since A.D. 1000. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pagden, A. (2003). Peoples and Empires: A Short History of European Migration, Exploration, and Conquest, From Greece to the Present. New York: Modern Library. Wallerstein, I. (1974, 1980, 1989). The Modern World System (Vols. 13). New York: Academic Press.

20 World System Theory

World system theory (WST) is an explanation of the way in which the world has developed since 1500. The sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein (b. 1930) invented this concept in his 1974 book The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century and later followed up with two more volumes, taking the story to the nineteenth century. WST divides the world into a core, peripheries, semiperipheries, and external regions as a means of elucidating why certain regions in the world have developed to a greater extent than others. Many others, including sociologists and historians, have used this paradigm to understand economic, political, and social developments in the world. Most world histories in one way or another refer to this paradigm. Wallerstein used WST to explain world development up to the twentieth century in a series of subsequent volumes, though his work on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries remains the most influential.

Antecedents

Although WST was the first theory to encompass most of the world, there are a number of similar theories that preceded Wallersteins paradigm. Fernand Braudel (19021985), a French historian, published various books on regional economic networks, including the rise of capitalism in the world. His The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, first published in 1949, presaged the largescale regional economic history that transcended political boundaries. Likewise in the mid-1960s, dependency theory emerged from Latin America, where a number of neo-Marxist authors argued that the economic development of that region had been distorted by the dependent relationship between the metropolis and satellites that continued beyond the colonial period. Dependency theory, like WST a bit later, argued that the underdevelopment of former colonies was the logical outcome of a capitalist world system that favored Western Europe and, later, the United States. To a large extent, it was an answer to modernization theory, which developed after World War

21 II and which posited that the underdeveloped world was at an earlier phase of economic development and simply needed to catch up to the industrialized nations.

The Mechanics of World Trade

World systems theory has as its basis the assumption that unequal trade patterns have significant economic, social, and political consequences. Wallerstein created WST to explain the rise of Western Europe as the major player in world history in the modern era and to show how Europe and, later, the United States remained in a dominant position since then. Wallerstein hypothesized that all regions within the world fell into one of his four general categories. Core regions are those that have strong states, manufacturing, freelabor regimes, and are able to take advantage of peripheral regions through the trade of manufactured goods for raw materials. Peripheries are the politically weak regions that produce the raw materials for the core. They are characterized by poverty among the majority of the population, based in part on the coerced cash-crop labor systems that are needed to provide the core with cheap raw materials. Semiperipheries are regions that are either on their way up to becoming core regions or core regions that have declined. Although they may wield significant military might, they are relatively weak economically vis--vis the core and mainly have sharecropping (tenant farmers paying rent in the form of crops) within their own boundaries. External regions are those that have not yet been integrated into the world system.

Western Europe as the Principal Actor

Wallerstein posited that the world system began in the 1400s as the result of the peculiar historical circumstances of Europes late medieval period. In addition to commercial dynamism, some of the small states that emerged from feudalism during this period, including Spain, Portugal, France, and England, became highly centralized and thus were able to expand and compete for colonies on a worldwide scale. Through mercantilism (which for Wallerstein is a type of capitalism), they protected their own

22 workers in a free-wage system and created a colonial system in which the colonies provided raw materials in return for manufactured goods. England and France evolved into core states that dominated commercially, whereas the Iberian countries declined into a semiperipheral status, with little manufacturing and sharecropping becoming dominant. In turn, the colonial regions became peripheral; trade patterns favored the western European core regions. To pay for the manufactured goods (always more expensive than raw materials because of the value added through manufacturing), the peripheral regions had to coerce labor to keep costs down. The colonial elites aided in this endeavor by helping to repress workers through systems such as, in the Spanish Andes, the mita, which supplied indigenous labor to silver mines. Under the mita, colonial officials obligated the chiefs of Andean Indian villagers in a swath from Cuzco to Potos to send a seventh of all adult males to the mines and spend a year working in the mine shafts. The western European core was able to take advantage of other regions without dominating them militarily. Eastern Europe, for example, became peripheral after the recession of the fourteenth and fifteen centuries resulted in a manorial reaction and a second serfdom for the peasantry there. In the sixteenth century the eastern European aristocracy cultivated grains to export westward and so gain access to western European goods; to do so, they forced free peasants into serfdom to work on their estates. Up until the nineteenth century, a number of regions, including most of Africa, Russia, and China, remained largely unaffected by western European penetration. These regions developed their own, noncapitalist systems that at times also relied on coercive labor practices. During the period of imperialism in the nineteenth century, however, even these regions were pulled into the world economic system, though Russia and later China became external after their Communist revolutions. WST has been used to explain a number of other phenomena, such as the dynamics of frontier regions in the Americas, the environment, or gender relations in developing countries. WST has also proven fruitful in disciplines beyond historical sociology and history, such as geography (looking at product flows in regional perspective) and archaeology (in which the types of trade goods found from different

23 regions provide a kind of economic hierarchy and make possible suppositions about social systems beyond the region being excavated).

Criticisms of World System Theory

There are a number of criticisms that have been made of WST, some of which have been answered by Immanuel Wallerstein and other scholars in his camp. First of all, external regions were probably never quite external. Even Russia and China were involved in the world system before the nineteenth century (though China perhaps less so).The sociologist Janet Abu-Lughod, for example, showed that there was a world system in the thirteenth and fourteenth century dominated by Arab traders before western Europe became dominant. One might make similar cases for systems centered on China as well. Likewise, the semiperiphery is a fuzzy category, more a catch-all for examples that do not fit in other categories than a true analytical category in its own right. Spain and Portugal werent quite part of the core, but they clearly did dominate their colonies. They prohibited the manufacture of certain products in their colonies (Spain, for example, prohibited the manufacture of wine and olive oil) and thereby hindered their possessions development. WST does not take into account sufficiently the actions of subalterns in the peripheries. Western Europe is seen as the actor and the rest of the world as the acted upon. But subaltern activities had important consequences. For example, in the plantation economies of the Caribbean, a quintessential peripheral region, slave resistance and rebellion were important factors that mitigated and changed the kind of exploitation that took place. The successful slave rebellion of Haiti created all kinds of changes in the rest of the Caribbean and eventually helped bring about the end of slavery in the region. The world system, as conceived by Wallerstein, is too static. The model is too simplistic to take into account the complexities of economic interactions. In theory, unequal trade keeps peripheral regions in their place. The unequal terms of trade continue to siphon off capital from the peripheries, making it impossible for them to become core regions. But this has not been the case historically. The United States, for example, was a

24 peripheral region of England, but it later emerged as an industrial power. Likewise, South Korea was a periphery until the mid-twentieth century but has since become a successful industrial power. Lastly, WST, true to its Marxist roots, assumed that the only way to leave the world system was through socialist revolution. This may be the case, but it appears that the Communist utopia is, at least for the present, dead. Overall, WST has been very useful for understanding worldwide processes. It has showed how economic systems (and particularly trade regimes) affected politics, social structure, and labor systems. Archaeologists have been able to use its insights about coreperiphery relations to think about how to read the existence and frequency of trade items among archaeological remains. It has probably been most useful for explaining the processes and effects of European expansion in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Further Reading

Abu-Lughod, J. (1991). Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 1350. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Braudel, F. (1995). The History of Civilization. New York: Penguin. Braudel, F. (1996 ). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cardoso, F. H., & Faletto, E. (1979). Dependency and Development in Latin America. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Cooper, F., Stern, S., Mallon, F., Isaacman, A., & Roseberry,W. (2000). Confronting Historical Paradigms: Peasants, Labor, and the Capitalist World System in Africa and Latin America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Frank, A. G. (1969). Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press. Hall, T. D. (2000). A World-Systems Reader. New York: Rowman &Littlefield. Shannon, T. (1996). Introduction to the World-Systems Perspective (2nd ed). Boulder, CO: Westview.

25 Sklair, L. (1994). Capitalism and Development: Immanuel Wallerstein and Development Studies. New York: Routledge. Wallerstein, I. (1980). The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I. (1980). The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 16001750. San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Wallerstein, I. (1988). The Modern World-System III: The Second Era of Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 17301840s. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.