Western Dominions

Posted on by wanderer

To understand the networks that can establish this project’s question, it would be interesting to reflect on how such networks were created. And for that, one has to reflect on the dominance of the planet by the Western European powers by the end of the 19th century. This dominion, as described before, started with the parallel events of the arrival in the Americas, wiping out about 90% of their pre-contact population, and conquering Malacca after the circumnavigation of Africa. These two events were achieved by two small powers, inhabiting a medium-sized peninsula at the end of the Earth (Finisterre, the end of the land, is in Galicia, north of Portugal). The peninsula lies between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic and was shared with two more kingdoms, Navarra and Aragon, which did not participate in these events. Other Atlantic-facing small powers soon joined the party, with France, the Netherlands and England taking over the lion’s share the century after, and some other colonising efforts conducted by Denmark, Scotland, and even Poland. Once Germany and Italy were created, they eagerly jumped into the “game” as colonial administrators. But beyond the administrations, emigrant European populations, mostly from the western and central portions—but in reality from all over—had huge influences all over the world. And last but not least, Russia, which still holds its colonial land-based empire, conducted overland the same land conquests that the rest of the powers were conducting over the oceans.

To see the effect that about 10 nation-states had over the world, you can go to the modern world political map and start crossing over the countries and territories that at some point fell under their control, be it nominal or real, where they had actual power in deciding much of their political and economic actions.

Colored are 8 Nominally non-colonized modern nations. Turkey is in dashed lines because it can be considered a “European” power. In black is all the parts of the world where a imperial European power or their ex-colonies, plus Japan and China, took over the administration of the land in the last 500 years. Antartica is in white, under the Antarctic Treaty.

All the “New World”—i.e. America—fell under the actual or nominal control of these states or their post-independence nations controlled by European elites.

In Africa, with the exception of present-day Ethiopia (which was occupied for 4–5 years under Fascist Italy), the entire continent was nominally under the control of the Western European nations by the end of the 19th century. The African continent’s political map now bears the scars of that colonisation in the form of the terrible borders left over by the Europeans, which still today force historically antagonistic communities to share a state, while others that were historically unified are now split by an invisible line.

Oceania was swept away by the Europeans, with the Kingdom of Hawaii—one of the last remaining independent archipelagos—losing its sovereignty and most of its population to the US by the end of the 19th century.

In Asia, Portuguese, Dutch, English, French and Russian powers took over most of the land. Only six sovereign administrations were never actually controlled by the Europeans. These were the isolated Japan, large parts of mighty China, Thailand, Afghanistan, Persia (now called Iran), and the Arabian desert now controlled by the Saudis. It is debatable whether the Asian Ottoman Empire controlled parts of Europe, or the European Ottoman Empire controlled parts of Asia, but whichever it is, it had strong European influence in its administration, which can still be seen in modern Turkey. However, unlike Russia, Ottoman rulers did not intermarry with the rest of European aristocracy, in part limiting European influences in the ruling class. Other territories not controlled by the Europeans include Mongolia, which was under Qing Chinese dynastic control and then briefly independent as a puppet state under Soviet influence. Similarly, the two Koreas were under Chinese and then Japanese dominion and colonisation, and then divided in two—with the US influencing the South, and the Soviet Union and China influencing the North. The British had a mixed dominion policy. Oman (with Muscat being a Portuguese trading colony) formerly controlled great parts of the coast of present-day Tanzania due to its lucrative slave trade; that control was destroyed by the British, who then took over most of Oman’s government and internal affairs until the 1970s. Similarly, other sovereign lands—like Bhutan, Nepal, many Indian kingdoms, and Oman—at one point or another left their external political affairs and some internal ones in the hands of the British. Finally, Japan began imitating the European powers and took colonial control over Korea and large parts of China, even creating a puppet state called Manchukuo in Manchu lands in China’s northeast.

For these seven or eight places on the map that can be painted as outside direct colonial control, each suffered, to some extent, imperial influence. Saudi Arabia was mostly empty desert land with few resources until the discovery of oil, and its existence is linked to British foreign policy—to create a Saudi force as a counter-power to the Ottoman Empire at the end of the 19th century. Iran was divided into spheres of influence by the Russians and British, and its modern borders were mostly decided by them. For Afghanistan, its borders were drawn by the British and the Russians, including the strange northeastern “corridor,” which was made the width of the most powerful cannons at the time, so that British and Russian artillery could not shoot each other over Afghan territory. Most of Afghanistan’s external political affairs were controlled by the British. Thailand suffered a similar fate; being between French and British-controlled territories, it was used as a buffer state. The British and the French drew its current borders and split the country into spheres of influence, as in Iran. China was defeated first by the British, and then by a coalition of the British, French, Russians, US, Japanese, and Germans. Though they did not take full control, the British strongly influenced China’s foreign policy for decades, and China was divided into spheres of influence. Japan won several wars against Chinese administrations and took control over large parts of the land before the end of WWII. Japan itself was forced to open its borders and commerce to foreign powers when Tokyo was bombarded by a US armada in the late 19th century, and later—after some mushroom-shaped explosions—was occupied by the US and the British. It was forced to adopt an army for self-defence only and to remain aligned with US interests.

Antarctica was claimed only by European nations, and the Antarctic Treaty, which theoretically reserves these lands for all humanity, was drawn and signed by six European nations. Currently, most of the scientific bases that exist there are European ones.

Out of the roughly 200 sovereign administrations now covering the land masses of the Earth, plus Antarctica, only about seven or eight experienced little direct control by European powers. This simple map illustrates the extent to which European powers exerted near-global influence over the planet 100 years ago. Even today, of these eight territories, only Japan, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran can be said to have—or have had—notable autonomy and influence beyond their borders. Turkey may also be included, depending on which continental perspective is used. Therefore, the world remains dominated by European nations and their administrative legacies. Alternative sovereign administrations with global influence emerge only from four or five distinct cultural backgrounds. These numbers highlight how five Western European nations, and one Eastern European one, took over most of the world.

To illustrate how the Europeans went about conquering the world, let’s go back to the spice islands. The interaction between three European powers and three native sovereign powers provides three different examples of forms of dominion: by annihilation, by trade, or by playing European powers against each other. We can centre the native powers in the two islands of Tidore and Ternate, and the Banda archipelago. Similarly, we can focus on Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands as the three European powers. As we have seen, the lucrative trade in the spice islands centred on cloves, mace, and nutmeg. Cloves are the dried flowers of a tropical tree found only in Tidore and Ternate (and some other nearby islands). Nutmeg and mace are inside the seeds of another tree, which was only present in the Banda archipelago.

As described, Tidore and Ternate are two small volcanic islands neighbouring each other at a distance of less than two kilometres. To this day, both have rival sultans. At the time of the Portuguese and Spanish arrival, each controlled its respective island and the cloves trade, plus claimed rival control of most lands east of them, all the way to western Papua. Perhaps luckily for them, the Portuguese allied with the Ternate sultanate, while the Spanish soon after allied with the Tidore one. These two sultanates had been long-term neighbouring rivals, but also intermarried, not unlike the Spanish and Portuguese aristocracies. The European powers never conquered the sultanates, although they allied with them and built forts on their territories. The Ternateans were able to expel the Portuguese after a few decades. The Tidoreans used the Spanish as convenient allies against the Ternateans.

Claimed dominions of Ternate (1, upper circle) before the Dutch appeared on the area. Tidore is just slightly south to Ternate, also circled, difficult to see. The Banda archipelago is the small islands (lower circle). Credit to https://apaitukerajaan.blogspot.com/2018/07/sejarah-kesultanan-ternate.html

Things became more complicated after the Dutch East India Company (VOC, founded in 1602 and with authority to declare wars!) took over the nearby Banda islands (Ambon), home to mace and nutmeg.

Soon after, the Ternateans placed themselves under Dutch influence to fend off the Tidoreans allied with the Spanish, who controlled half the island and even captured the sultan. After the Spanish left the area, the sultan rebelled against the VOC but instead lost independence and came under VOC rule. Ternate became the capital of the Moluccas and the wider Indonesian possessions until the Dutch founded Batavia (now Jakarta) in 1619. Today, Ternate is the capital of the North Maluku province of Indonesia, with a population around 200,000. The sultanate continued until 1975 and has now been restored by the royal family in a ceremonial role.

Meanwhile, the Tidorean aristocracy descended into infighting, ditched the Spanish and allied with the Dutch. The VOC convinced the sultan to eradicate all clove trees in his realm to strengthen their monopoly. In compensation, the VOC gave generous donations to the sultan. With the obvious impoverishment that followed losing control of the spices, Tidorean rebels allied with the British, who soon conquered it. Later, the Dutch took back control of the territory—but not before the British took seeds from the clove trees and began planting them elsewhere, beginning the end of the monopoly. The Tidore sultanate lapsed in 1905 and became a regency, but was revived to counter Indonesian independence claims over West Papua. Today, it holds a ceremonial role in the Indonesian state.

Unlike Tidore and Ternate, the Banda Islands—a small archipelago of a maximum 15.000 inhabitants south of Halmahera—were run by orang kaya, or “rich people”. As said, Banda was the only source of nutmeg and mace. These were sold by Arab traders to the Venetians at exorbitant prices. The Bandanese also traded cloves, bird of paradise feathers, massoi bark medicine, and salves. The Portuguese tried to build a fort in the central island but were expelled by the locals and did not return often, buying nutmeg and mace through intermediaries. Initially, the Bandanese were left to their own affairs, but they were unprotected by any other European powers and their artillery.

By 1609, the VOC arrived. To put it mildly, the Bandanese were not exactly enthusiastic about these slightly different Europeans, who brought only wool and odd Dutch crafts in exchange for a monopoly. Like the Portuguese, the Dutch wanted to build a fort. The Bandanese responded in the best way they could—by ambushing and decapitating the VOC representatives. The VOC retaliated, levelling random villages. In the resulting peace treaty, the Bandanese finally allowed a fort.

Meanwhile, two of the islands, the westernmost ones—sadly named Ai and Run—allied with the British East India Company, who began trading with them. The VOC launched an annihilation campaign, first against Ai (Ay in the opening post map), killing all men, while women and children died fleeing or were enslaved. On Run (Rhun in the opening post map), the natives, with the help of several Englishmen, held out for over four years but ultimately lost. Again, the Dutch killed or enslaved all adult men, exiled the women and children, and chopped down every nutmeg tree to prevent English trade. Run is the famous island that was exchanged for Manhattan (New Amsterdam) in 1667. Incredibly, the British did not replant nutmeg trees elsewhere at the time. They would only do so in 1809, during the Napoleonic Wars, ending the Dutch monopoly and making the tragedy of the Bandanese even more sorrowful.

By 1821, the VOC wanted a renewed monopoly so badly that they decided to annihilate the remaining Bandanese. They assembled an invading force of thousands of Dutch and hundreds of Japanese soldiers and launched it on the islands—then home to only a few thousand people. After a failed peace treaty, the invading commander declared that “about 2,500” inhabitants died “of hunger and misery or by the sword,” and that “a good party of women and children” were taken, with not more than 300 escaping. The original natives were enslaved and forced to teach newcomers about nutmeg and mace agriculture. At the cost of genocide—and facilitated by natural plant endemism—the VOC had a monopoly for about 180 years. The British effortlessly invaded in 1796 and 1808, and this time decided to plant nutmeg trees in another former Dutch colony: modern Sri Lanka.

Sadly, Tidore, Ternate, and the Bandas illustrate the fate of many other European colonial efforts until the 20th century: bare survival by cleverly playing European powers against one another, becoming important administrative centres at the loss of complete autonomy or independence, or facing total annihilation and repopulation of blood-stained lands. Despite these different destinies, the outcome was the same: being utterly dominated by Western European administrative frameworks, as we will see in what follows.

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Commerce – Mercantalisation

From the neighbours to the oceans

Posted on by wanderer

Olía a orines de mico. 'Así huelen todos los europeos, sobre todo en verano', nos dijo mi padre. 'Es el olor de la civilización'.
She smelled as money piss, that the smell of all Europeans, specially in summer" our father told us "that is the smell of civilization"
Gabriel García Márquez, Doce Cuentos Peregrinos

With the previous examples of failed connections, we can see the limits of the system presented earlier—just linking neighbours allows goods to flow only as far as they can be afforded.

The key point we will focus on now—and simplifying immensely complex human relations—is cost versus affordability: who is able to establish and maintain long-distance links that are worth the effort, over long periods of time?

To answer that, we will skip through 320,000 years of history, from the “first hints of exchange” to the onset of globalisation. I will place the beginning of our current globalisation trend at the breakdown of the ocean navigation barrier, accomplished by Western Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries. In between these two time points—separated by more than 300,000 years—there is the accumulation of regional innovations, the constitution and entrenchment of increasingly diverse networks and hierarchies, which expanded and intensified the use of resources and energy. These “merely” 300,000 years have been widely studied elsewhere, and the reader may be familiar with the traditional “linear” narrative: from hunter-gatherers to agriculturalists, to city-states, to kingdoms, to empires, to nation-states. This image has been widely discredited, as the previous section shows, with many failures and non-linear trends. It has also been demonstrated repeatedly that no group is inherently more “advanced” than another. What people do exceptionally well is adapt to their environments—and the simpler the environment, the more efficient they tend to become. However, across these 300,000 years, there is an unmistakable increase in the scale of connectivity. This reflects episodes of creation and stabilisation of ever more distant networks, as seen in the previous section. These serendipitous mechanisms anchor larger-scale connections and reinforce otherwise fragile or unaffordable links.

So, if you will pardon me for glossing over 300,000 years of history, in the next section I will focus on the integration of all these networks into one worldwide system of connectivity—an unprecedented moment in human history—which leads us to the main question of these writings.

We all know the story of how European societies reached the shores of the Americas, changing the map of the world forever—quite literally, by creating modern mappae mundi and placing Europe at the centre. What you might be less familiar with is why that happened—why did Columbus sail west at that particular time?

Starting with cost versus affordability, we first needed something of high cost—in this case, we can focus on the spice trade. Specifically, the costliest spices were cloves and nutmeg (plus mace—the red aril of the nutmeg seed). Unlike silk, pepper, cinnamon, and ginger (other highly valued goods that travelled long distances), in the 15th century, nutmeg and cloves could only be found in two very small archipelagos the reader may be unfamiliar with. These are Tidore and Ternate for cloves, and the Banda Islands for nutmeg and mace. Today, they are part of Indonesia, in the Maluku Islands area. These spices were highly aromatic and highly valued in European markets, where they arrived in refined forms such as oleoresins, butter, essential oils, and powders. For Europeans, it was impossible to know the exact origin of these spices—some even thought they were of mineral origin. They did indeed come from faraway lands, often erroneously attributed to India, which was a genuine source of cinnamon and pepper. These species had a high cost relative to their volume and therefore represented a strong incentive to bridge the distance between Western Europe and India. In fact, these very spices were the reason Western Europeans—starting with Portugal and Castile—eventually bridged that 14,000-kilometre gap.

But why were these spices so costly, and why did people at the opposite end of the Eurasian continent want them so badly? Nutmeg and cloves had many uses. You may be familiar with their use in recipes—they did enhance the taste of food—but even today, with their lower price, ever-present in European cuisine, unlike other ingredients like tomatoes or potatoes, not present before the European expansion over the world. Another major use of these species was in perfumes. By the 15th century, European hygienic practices had changed significantly. In the 14th century, public baths were common throughout Europe, as it is quite typical for human beings across cultures to enjoy being clean and having clean people around them. However, the Black Death waves of the 14th century caused many bathhouses to close. Though some reopened, European aristocracy had, by then, begun adopting new fashions—such as undergarments and tight-fitting tailoring—which, in turn, created new ways to “trap the body’s evacuations in a layer above the skin”. At the same time, certain strands of the Catholic Church increasingly viewed bathing, nudity, and hygiene as contrary to chastity.

In the Iberian Peninsula, the Christian aristocracy—especially in the north—was gradually reclaiming land from Muslim rulers. Bathing and hygiene were (and still are) highly valued cultural practices in the Muslim world, and often also served as forms of social interaction. Therefore, part of the Christian Iberian aristocracy cemented its identity by rejecting cultural practices closely associated with their Muslim subjects, neighbours, and slaves. All of this led parts of European and Iberian elites to adopt habits that amplified body odour: less bathing, less washing, and tighter clothing. In warmer climates, this likely made body odours more intense. Consequently, rare, expensive, highly perfumed spices could help mask these natural human emissions—while also signalling wealth and status. This helps explain why the Iberian aristocracy, in particular, was motivated to fund direct expeditions to distant lands.

Ironically, Europeans not only brought diseases to the Americas, but also carried American diseases back to the continent. The most infamous of these was syphilis. Once syphilis began ravaging Europe, bathhouses once again closed—this time because baths were associated with libertine behaviour, and syphilis was primarily sexually transmitted. Additionally, beliefs grew that disease could be carried through water, and that open pores (caused by bathing) allowed sickness to enter the body. Within a few decades, bathing had largely disappeared from European daily life. Few households had running water, so opportunities to bathe were almost non-existent. Coupled with aristocratic customs and religious identity-making, this gave rise to figures like Louis XIV, who famously claimed to have bathed only twice in his life.

This cultural environment turned humble botanical species like nutmeg and cloves into commodities capable of financing multi-year expeditions—risky ventures where many ships and sailors might be lost. In the case of the Magellan expedition, only one of five ships completed the circumnavigation—without Magellan himself—but it returned so full of spices (including pepper) that it paid off the entire venture and paved the way for Spanish colonisation of the Philippines. From the association with perfume and the abandonment of bathing, we derive the enduring stereotype that Europeans don’t smell especially pleasant—particularly in summer. That this has anything to do with “civilisation” is now a running joke used by formerly colonised peoples to poke fun at their colonisers—whose domination was often justified on the basis of “cleanliness”.

Let’s now focus on the affordability of finding an alternative route to the spice lands—ultimately disrupting existing sea and overland trade networks by bypassing dozens of intermediaries. The process of making that circumvention possible was itself the result of 300,000 years of innovation, technological development, and skill acquisition. Crucially, as with the Austronesians and Vikings, it was the development of highly reliable navigational skills that enabled this. By the 15th century, Mediterranean and Atlantic ships were sturdy and autonomous enough, and the Iberian Peninsula had become a melting pot of maritime knowledge, making it affordable to attempt reaching India via new routes that bypassed the Levant.

Columbus believed his own (incorrect) computation of the Earth’s diameter—around a third smaller than it actually is—and convinced the Castilian crown to fund his westward voyage to reach “India”. His proposed route was reckless and misguided. But, as previously mentioned, there were hints that land existed across the Atlantic—not so far away. For instance, the Portuguese were aware of pau-brasil (or firewood) drifting from the west. Columbus, Castile, and luck all converged when they stumbled upon the Americas.

For the Portuguese, finding an alternative route to the spice islands was far less reckless. It took them over a century to circumnavigate Africa, learning gradually and establishing trading posts and outposts along the eastern African coast. Each expedition went a little further. By 1488, they reached the Cape of Storms (later the Cape of Good Hope), and in 1497, Vasco da Gama became the first European to reach India by sea—just five years after Columbus’s voyage.

At that point, for the first time in history, humans had the means to connect all the major landmasses in a way that was both affordable and repeatable. Just 20 years later (1519–1522), the first circumnavigation of the world was completed. For the first time, a human could potentially reach the shores of almost any land within a few years.

In the 15th century, the world changed dramatically due to the technologies and navigational expertise accumulated in the Western world over millennia—coupled with the high cost and demand for spices in Iberia. Within a few decades, the world transitioned from having vast disconnected landmasses to a planet where the first movers—Western Europeans—gained the upper hand. These few kingdoms, and later much of Europe, changed the existing order, wiping out tens of millions of people and cultures in the process, and subjugating nearly every major power on the planet.

That change forever transformed both ends of the lands reached by the Iberians. In the Americas, in less than half a century, a few thousand Europeans—mainly Castilians—overthrew two massive empires ruling tens of millions. In the East, in present-day Malaysia, the Portuguese seized Malacca in 1511 with just 18 ships—then the commercial hub of East Asia. It was the furthest territorial conquest in human history up to that time. To grasp its magnitude: imagine a fleet of advanced vehicles from Malaysia travelling 20,000 km to conquer Rotterdam—Europe’s major transport hub—and controlling it for centuries thereafter. This event had immense geopolitical implications, shifting the balance across Eurasia and reshaping global self-understanding until the present day.

Control of far-flung lands, trade routes, and global connectivity was taken over by small elites from a few North Atlantic coasts. These elites, supported by large home populations, had more resilience than earlier seafarers like the Vikings or Austronesians. Those earlier explorers made equally bold journeys and had the skills and knowledge—but little margin for failure and limited rewards. In contrast, the North Atlantic nations had the means, knowledge, and desire. They could afford the long-distance connection, and more importantly, its coercive and commercial control.

Pandemics, repression, and colonisation enabled long-term European settlement. As Eduardo Galeano famously wrote: “They came with the Bible and we had the land; we blinked, and now we have the Bible and they have the land.”

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