Part 23 (2/2)
China:
Meet the New Boss, Same as the Old Boss
For native Chinese, the revolution of 1644 was a terrible case of deja vu, as northern barbarians poured into China and established an oppressive government, just like the Mongols had done a few hundred years before. But this time it was a different group of barbarians-the Manchu. Originally the Manchu were forest people, but Chinese immigrants taught them about farming and engineering, causing a population explosion, a technological revolution, and a newfound desire for power. Oops.
The Manchu likely killed millions of Chinese as they established the Q'ing (p.r.o.nounced ”ching,” meaning ”clear”) Dynasty. The new emperors also enforced strict rules for social and economic life, as well as simple things such as appearance. Native Chinese couldn't occupy senior government positions, Manchu were forbidden to do manual labor, and intermarriage was illegal. The Manchu created an unusual dual bureaucracy in which Chinese clerks were responsible for keeping written records, while Manchu officials kept watch to ensure the clerks' ”loyalty.” The Q'ing also inst.i.tuted a ”literary inquisition” (wenziyu, or ”imprisonment for unorthodox thought”).
On the foreign-relations front, the Q'ing emperors adopted a policy of preemptive expansion, conquering Mongolia and other neighboring countries that might present a threat. But they were surprised when unwanted European merchants began showing up at China's seaports in greater and greater numbers throughout the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century the Q'ing emperors could no longer dismiss them as a nuisance. One group, the English, even insisted on recognition as China's equals-an idea that struck the Chinese emperor as absurd. Worse, the English were selling a highly addictive drug, opium, to the emperor's subjects. Trouble was brewing.
j.a.pan:
Voting Everyone Off the Island
After a series of strong military commanders tried to unify j.a.pan in the sixteenth century, in 1600 a lord (daimyo) named Tokugawa Ieyasu defeated all his rivals at the Battle of Sekigahara. Tokugawa won by adopting modern European weaponry, including muskets and cannons, but these would be the last European inventions j.a.pan saw for a long, long time.
After making himself Shogun, Tokugawa ordered the country closed to prevent European merchants from contaminating j.a.panese culture with foreign influence, disarmed the j.a.panese peasants, and decreed that henceforth only the samurai warrior cla.s.s would be allowed to carry swords. With the country locked down, in 1633, Tokugawa's successor, Iemitsu, forbade j.a.panese subjects from leaving the islands. j.a.panese s.h.i.+ps could no longer leave j.a.panese waters, and any j.a.panese sailor caught working on a foreign s.h.i.+p would be executed.
Dutch merchants were still allowed to visit j.a.pan to trade, but from 1641, the Dutch were confined to a small artificial island in Nagasaki Harbor that the j.a.panese had originally built to house the Portuguese (who never moved in).
WHO'S UP, WHO'S DOWN
The House of Hapsburg: DOWN DOWN
The defeat of the Spanish Armada was just one of several body blows suffered by the House of Hapsburg, a sprawling dynastic family, partly descended from Ferdinand and Isabella that ruled Spain, Austria, and the Holy Roman Empire. One hundred years after the glory days of Charles V, the Hapsburg Empire was torn apart by religious dissent and ambitious n.o.bles.
The Thirty Years' War was actually a series of wars between the Hapsburgs on one side and basically all the other European states, including France, England, Sweden, Denmark, and Holland, on the other. As Protestant and Catholic n.o.bles battled one another for control of the Holy Roman Empire, they ran rampant in Germany, killing an astonis.h.i.+ng 20 percent of the population between 1618 and 1648-around seven million people!
The war began when Protestants in Bohemia (the modern Czech Republic) rebelled against the Holy Roman emperor Ferdinand II. The uprising began with some rough Bohemian justice, when two leading Catholic n.o.bles were charged by Protestants with violating religious freedom, found guilty, and without further ado chucked out the windows of the castle (the famous ”Defenestration of Prague”-actually the second famous event of this name, as chucking people out windows was apparently a popular punishment in Bohemia). The lucky n.o.bles landed in a pile of horse manure and survived; meanwhile, Ferdinand II called on his wealthy Hapsburg relatives in Spain for a.s.sistance and soon crushed this uprising.
But the trouble was just beginning: now a Protestant rebellion against the Hapsburgs began in western Germany, with support from nearby Holland. Soon Denmark, England, and Sweden got involved, too. Ferdinand beat these alliances, but in 1634, France decided that the water was fine and it jumped in feet first. The last part of the Thirty Years' War (the ”French” or ”Catholic-vs.-Catholic” phase) was the longest and bloodiest, continuing for fourteen years, until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.
When all was said and done, everything pretty much ended up back where it started. True, the Holy Roman emperor did lose authority in Germany-but this was a cosmetic change, as his had been mostly pretend power to begin with. The most significant result was the decline of Spanish influence in Germany and the bankrupting of the Spanish Empire. After the destruction of the Spanish Armada, defeat on mainland Europe spelled the beginning of the end. Spain, and the Hapsburgs, now entered a long, slow decline.
Tulips: UP, UP, UP! THEN DOWN, DOWN, DOWN UP, UP, UP! THEN DOWN, DOWN, DOWN
Sometimes sensible people (like the Dutch) do crazy things, such as obsess (and we mean obsess) obsess) over flowers. Yes, in the 1630s, Holland's economy was almost destroyed by irrational financial speculation in...tulip bulbs. How irrational? Consider this: in 1635, at the height of the tulip craze, one bulb was sold for a bed, four oxen, twelve sheep, four pigs, four tons of wheat, eight tons of rye, two tons of b.u.t.ter, a silver drinking cup, a suit of clothes, two barrels of wine, four tons of beer, and one thousand pounds of cheese! In 1635 another bulb sold for 6,000 florins-at a time when the average yearly income in Holland was about 150 florins. People sold houses, businesses, and large landed estates to raise money to buy tulip bulbs, which were traded on the Amsterdam stock exchange. over flowers. Yes, in the 1630s, Holland's economy was almost destroyed by irrational financial speculation in...tulip bulbs. How irrational? Consider this: in 1635, at the height of the tulip craze, one bulb was sold for a bed, four oxen, twelve sheep, four pigs, four tons of wheat, eight tons of rye, two tons of b.u.t.ter, a silver drinking cup, a suit of clothes, two barrels of wine, four tons of beer, and one thousand pounds of cheese! In 1635 another bulb sold for 6,000 florins-at a time when the average yearly income in Holland was about 150 florins. People sold houses, businesses, and large landed estates to raise money to buy tulip bulbs, which were traded on the Amsterdam stock exchange.
What was going on here? Had the Dutch all lost their minds? Well, kind of. Tulip bulbs were imported from the Ottoman Empire in 1559, and the flowers quickly became popular for their beauty. At first, tulip bulb prices rose because of demand from wealthy collectors who genuinely appreciated different breeds of tulip, including rare varieties with unusual coloration. But soon this growing demand caught the attention of speculators-businessmen who were in it just for a buck, buying up rare tulip bulbs on the a.s.sumption that prices would continue going up. For a while this was a safe bet, as increased demand pushed prices even higher, which drew more speculators to the market, which pushed prices even higher-and so on.
But at some point the bubble had to burst, and in 1636 it did. Eventually everyone seemed to realize, ”Wait, I just sold my house to buy flowers! What the h.e.l.l?!” and the bottom fell out of the market, with prices plummeting by 90 percent. Many of the wealthiest men in Holland, not to mention middle-cla.s.s investors, were ruined by the tulip game.
Africans: DOWN DOWN
One of the worst crimes against humanity on record was entirely the product of human greed (shocking, we know). Indeed, African slavery was central to the colonial economies of North and South America. The first Africans were imported to work as slaves on Spanish and Portuguese plantations and in mines. Before this, Arabs had been taking large numbers of slaves from the east coast of Africa, facing the Indian Ocean, but there are few numbers doc.u.menting this trade. The English expanded the market with their settling of North America, importing tens and then hundreds of thousands of slaves to work the tobacco and cotton plantations of the south.
The slave trade worked by kidnapping and splitting up families, erasing names and languages, and stealing any possessions that might indicate rank or achievement. In North America, slaves were forced to communicate in broken, pidgin English; those caught speaking their native languages were a.s.sumed to be conspiring and were hanged.
By 1680, England's Royal African Company was transporting five thousand African captives every year, a figure that rose to forty-five thousand in the eighteenth century. Conditions aboard slave s.h.i.+ps were unspeakable, and once the captives arrived, masters could whip, rape, and murder them at will. Overall, Europeans probably imported about ten million slaves to North and South America. And the slaves who made it to the New World were the lucky ones, at least four million captives are believed to have died in transit. (Few merchants bothered to count dead slaves.) Slavery's effects weren't limited to the kidnapped slaves themselves. Slave-taking was almost entirely an African enterprise, in which coastal princes raided inland tribes for prisoners to sell to the Europeans. There were two main areas where coastal princes denuded the inland population: the ”Slave Coast” countries of West Africa, and Central Africa, from Cameroon to Angola. In both places the demand for slaves led to constant warfare, and the loss of labor probably impaired economic development in Africa for centuries to come.
Sultans: DOWN DOWN
The Ottoman Empire just managed to muddle along, for the most part suffering under lazy, incompetent sultans until their chief advisors, the viziers, took over. This fixed things for a while-but once the viziers became lazy and incompetent, too, there was only one direction to go (guess which one). Of course, there were still ”good times.” The last really dynamic Ottoman sultan was Mehmet IV, who ruled from 1648 to 1687. Mehmet IV gave Europe a run for its money in 1683, when he besieged Vienna with an army of 140,000 soldiers.
Except, he lost. After his catastrophic defeat, the Turkish rulers withdrew more and more from world affairs, isolated from the real world by self-interested courtiers with no higher goal than personal profit. The Ottoman Empire basically became a cash cow supporting a small and intensely disinterested ruling cla.s.s. In fact, it was labeled ”the sick man of Europe.” Britain, France, and Russia decided they'd let this sick man live, but only because chopping him up meant they'd have to fight each other over the pieces.
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