The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (3 page)

Early Modern Europe

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Asia and the Pacific at the Turn of the Millennium

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No one can write a world history without support and advice from a diverse crew of colleagues, friends, and relatives. Foremost among my creditors is John Wright, friend, colleague, horseplayer, opera buff(a), and literary agent, without whom this book would have remained nothing more than an interesting idea. Once this project was launched, he kept at the pumps to make sure it—and I—stayed afloat. He has my deepest thanks.

Many people generously made time in their own schedules to read and comment on large portions of the manuscript at various stages in its development: Al Andrea of the World History Association; my doctoral advisors, Leonard Blussé and Femme Gaastra, Leiden University; Kelly Chavez, at the University of Tulsa; Martina Duncan, of the Southern Maine Community College; the peripatetic Felipe Fernández-Armesto, now of the University of Notre Dame; John Hattendorf, Naval War College; Joshua Smith, United States Merchant Marine Academy; and Jim Terry, Stephens College.

Others who have offered advice on individual chapters or sections include Nick Burningham; Arthur Donovan, United States Merchant Marine Academy; Matthew Edney, Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine; David Kalivas and his fellow editors of and subscribers to H-World; Kris Lane, Tulane University; the late Ken McPherson; Nathan Lipfert, Maine Maritime Museum; John C. Perry, Tufts University; Louis Sicking, Leiden University; Tom Vosmer; Lodewijk Wagenaar, Amsterdam Museum; Cheryl Ward, Coastal Carolina University; and the subscribers to MARHST-L, among many others.

I first tried out many of the ideas developed in this book at conferences and in articles, and for the opportunity to do so I thank the organizers of the International Maritime Economic History Association conferences (Fremantle and Greenwich), the World History Association (London), the North American Society for Oceanic History (Manitowoc and Norfolk), and the Maine Maritime Museum in Bath, as well as Lewis R. “Skip” Fischer, of the
International Journal of Maritime History,
and Faye Kert, with
The Northern Mariner/Le Marin du Nord
.

Librarians are indispensable in more ways than they know, and I am privileged to have had the help particularly of Phyllis McQuaide, Hawthorne-Longfellow Library, Bowdoin College; Loraine Lowell, John Plante, Matt Lajoie and Noah Burch of the Glickman Library, University of Southern Maine; Yolanda Theunisssen of the Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine; Norman Fiering at the John Carter Brown Library, Providence; Kathryn Wellen, of the KITLV in Leiden; and the staff at the libraries of Columbia University and Leiden University.

Picture research is a distinct enterprise altogether, and I have been helped by many individuals and institutions, especially David Neikirk, Adinah Barnett, and Ron Levere, Osher Map Library; Paul Adamthwaite, Naval Marine Archive, the Canadian Collection; Chip Angell; Jennifer Belt and Peter Rohowsky, Art Resource, New York; Anandajoti Bhikkhu; Joe Bonney and Barbara Wyker,
Journal of Commerce;
Sue Hao, US-China Business Council; John Harland; Murari Jha; Zip Kellogg, University of Southern Maine; Betsy Kohut, Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery; Pamela Long; Anthony Nahas; Kim Goulet Norton and Alex Agnew, Navigator Publishing; Des Pawson, MBE, Museum of Knots and Sailors Ropework; Bob Poole; Pamela Quick, MIT Press; Ulrich Rudofsky; Sila Tripati, Marine Archaeology Centre, National Institute of Oceanography, Goa; Andreas Weber; Zhang Ying, Palace Museum, Beijing; and Herwig Zahorka.

The Bibliography offers a more complete record of my academic indebtedness, although I must and do take full responsibility for the errors of fact and interpretation that have undoubtedly bored their way into the hull of this fragile vessel.

Laboring on this book has made me keenly aware of the enormous debt I owe to teachers from grade school through college. I have forgotten more of them than I remember, but three may stand for the others: John Pariseau, Allen-Stevenson School; Allan Wooley, Phillips Exeter Academy; and the late Steele Commager, Columbia University.

Research on this project took me repeatedly to New York, where I freely availed myself of the hospitality of Georgina Walker and Hal Fessenden, and Madeleine Tramm and Philip Newell, and I am grateful for Caroline and Jim Clark’s bed and board in London, and the redoubtable Hôtel Garni Blussé in Amsterdam.

I have been sustained by great friendships in addition to those I have mentioned already, especially Wendell and Soozie Large, Nathan and Eleanor Smith, and Elizabeth Mitchell and Alex Krieckhaus. I applaud Valentina von Klencke for surviving her brief abduction from Köln to the Museum für Antike Schiffahrt in Mainz, and thank Nicole von Klencke for driving the getaway car.

The late Ashbel Green took a great leap of faith in signing this book, and I am indebted not only to him but also to his successor, Andrew Miller, and especially Andrew Carlson, a fair and forthright editor of enormous patience, tact, and goodwill. Nicole Pedersen has also pointed out countless errors great and small and added immeasurably to the quality of the finished work. And it was a great pleasure to entrust the drawing and lettering of the beautiful maps to Rosemary Mosher in this, our fourth cartographic collaboration.

My parents were kind enough to read and comment on early drafts of the manuscript. My daughters, Kai and Madeleine, will have my gratitude if they never write a world history of their own and ask the same of me, but I thank them for their long-suffering good humor and support as I made my way through this project.

Allison has supported this undertaking in every conceivable way since before its inception. She shares no blame for its faults, but all credit for its achievement.

LINCOLN PAINE
       
Portland, Maine
    
July–October 2012

I want to change the way you see the world. Specifically, I want to change the way you see the world map by focusing your attention on the blues that shade 70 percent of the image before you, and letting the earth tones fade. This shift in emphasis from land to water makes many trends and patterns of world history stand out in ways they simply cannot otherwise. Before the development of the locomotive in the nineteenth century, culture, commerce, contagion, and conflict generally moved faster by sea than by land. The opening of sea routes sometimes resulted in immediate transformation, but more often it laid the groundwork for what was later mistaken for sudden change. The best example of this is the trade networks of the Indian Ocean, the oldest of which were pioneered at least four thousand years ago by navigators sailing between Mesopotamia and the mouths of the Indus River. By the start of the common era two thousand years ago, the Indian subcontinent was a point of departure and destination for merchants and mendicants from across the
Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. This is all but unnoticed in the written record, which boasts of no figure comparable to a Gilgamesh or
Odysseus, and despite a growing body of archaeological evidence, these undertakings remain largely unrecognized. As a result, the later arrival
in Southeast Asia of Muslim traders from the Indian subcontinent and Southwest Asia, of Chinese merchants of various faiths, and of Portuguese Christians seem like so many historical surprises. Only the last were absolute newcomers to the
Monsoon Seas that stretch from the shores of
East Africa to the coasts of Korea and Japan. The others were heirs to ancient, interlinked traditions of seafaring and trade that long ago connected the shores of East Africa with those of Northeast Asia. This book shows many similar examples of maritime regions that were quietly
exploited before events conspired to thrust them into the historical limelight.

Two questions merit consideration before taking on a maritime history of the world as either writer or reader: What is maritime history? and What is world history? The answers to both have as much to do with perspective as with subject matter. World history involves the synthetic investigation of complex interactions between people of distinct backgrounds and orientations. It therefore transcends historians’ more traditional focus on politically, religiously, or culturally distinct communities seen primarily in their own
terms at a local, national, or regional level. As a subject of interdisciplinary and interregional inquiry, maritime history is a branch of world history that covers obvious topics like shipbuilding, maritime trade, oceanic exploration, human
migration, and naval history. Considered as a perspective, however, the premise of maritime history is that the study of events that take place on or in relation to the water offers unique insights into human affairs. The maritime historian therefore draws on such disciplines as the arts, religion, language, the
law, and political economy.

An alternative and perhaps simpler way to approach the question, What is maritime history? is to tackle its unasked twin: What is terrestrial history?—the view from the land being our default perspective. Imagine a world of people bound to the land. The ancient Greek diaspora would have taken a different character and been forced in different directions without ships to carry Euboeans, Milesians, and
Athenians to new markets and to sustain contacts between colonies and homelands. Without maritime commerce, neither Indians nor Chinese would have exerted the substantial influence they did in Southeast Asia, and that region would have been spared the cultural sobriquets of
Indo-China and
Indonesia (literally, “Indian islands”)—in fact, the latter would have remained unpeopled altogether. The
Vikings of medieval Scandinavia could never have spread as quickly or widely as they did and thereby altered the political landscape of medieval Europe. And without mariners, the history of the past five centuries would have to be reimagined in its entirety. The age of western European expansion was a result of maritime enterprise without which Europe might well have remained a marginalized corner of the Eurasian landmass with its back to what Latinate Europe called
Mare Tenebrosum
and Arabic speakers
Bahr al-Zulamat,
“the sea of darkness.” The Mughals, Chinese, and Ottomans would have overshadowed the divisive and sectarian polities of Europe, which would have been unable to settle or conquer the Americas, to develop the
transatlantic slave trade, or to have gained an imperial foothold in Asia.

The past century has witnessed a sea change in how we approach maritime history. Formerly a preserve of antiquarian interest whose practitioners
lavished their efforts on “
ancient ships and boats, ship models, images, ethnography, lexicographical and bibliographical matters and flags,” maritime history once focused chiefly on preserving and interpreting material that was readily available. This directed historians’ attention to European, Mediterranean, and modern North American maritime and naval history. Maritime accomplishment was almost always viewed as a peculiarly European phenomenon that only attained real importance with Columbus’s epochal voyage to the Americas in 1492. In this telling, the story proceeded directly and exclusively to an explanation of how Europeans used their superior maritime and naval technology to impose themselves upon the rest of the world.

Taking Europe’s “
classic age of sail” from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as a model for the rest of maritime history is seductive but inadvisable. While the global change wrought by mariners and the dynamics of maritime Europe are of unquestionable importance to a proper understanding of the world since 1500, maritime achievement is more broadly spread and its effects more complicated than such a narrative suggests. European supremacy was far from inevitable. More important, the concentration on Europe’s past five centuries has distorted our interpretation of the maritime record of other periods and places and our appreciation of its relevance to human progress. No parallels exist for the almost symbiotic relationship between commercial and naval policy—what we might call a “naval-commercial complex”—characteristic of Europe’s maritime expansion. There is nothing like it in classical antiquity, in Asia, or in Europe before the Renaissance, and by the twenty-first century the close ties between national naval strategy and maritime commerce so prevalent in this age had all but vanished. The period of western Europe’s maritime dominance was critical, but it is a misleading standard against which to measure other eras.