ON Independence Day—August 15th—we generally take stock of the path we have travelled since 1947. Today, I will take a different tack and focus on how or why a handful of European countries end up controlling major parts of the world.
Before the rise of colonial empires, India and China were the biggest economies in the world. That is not surprising, as probably 90 per cent of the world’s economy was in agriculture. If India and China constituted about 50 per cent of the world’s population, then it would also contribute about 50 per cent to the world’s economy as agricultural output was proportional then to the number of cultivators. For the global elite population, India provided textiles and spices, while China exported silk and porcelain. The global economy balanced the flows from India and China with bullion, silver and gold.
The change in Asia’s relationship with Europe takes place in the 18th and 19th centuries. Instead of being major producers of goods and exporting them to Europe, they instead become producers of raw materials and importers of manufactured goods. The conventional history of the West—written by the West—is the development of science and technology, the product of the European “Enlightenment”, and was reborn in Western Europe after slumbering for a thousand years. This was the “rebirth”—renaissance in Europe—the enlightenment being its product. Enlightenment led to scientific thinking, which then led to the industrial revolution and the pre-eminence of Europe. In this picture, European dominance was merely the consequence of a mental revolution, and its roots go back to classical Greece, which was reborn after a thousand years. Never mind that Greece and Western Europe are at two ends of Europe geographically and had very little in common.
Serious historians today accept that the Dark Ages of Europe did not affect other continents, which saw no such decline. Asia continued with the development of knowledge and production, both in agriculture and manufacturing. The centres of learnings were in West Asia, called the Middle East by the West and Turkey, again termed as Near East, as well in Central Asia, India and China, all of which were undisturbed by the so-called dark ages in Europe.
Which were the countries that changed the world in which a handful of western countries asserted their dominance? A recent article —Remapping Science—in Science, the journal of the American Society for the Advancement of Science, talks about how, during the past 500 years, only eight European countries colonised 68 per cent of the world. These countries are England, France, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Spain, and Portugal. This transition from being backwaters of the global economy to becoming its overlords took place between the 16th and 18th centuries. The article then talks about the impact of this colonial imprint on our current science and the need to decolonise knowledge.
But decolonising knowledge is not enough. We also need to understand what led to the domination of a handful of countries in the entire world—not simply for historical reasons but also to ensure that we do not become re-colonised again. So, how did these handful of countries manage to enslave the world?
To understand the rise of the west and the fall of the rest, we will have to see what happened in the 16th-18th century. Let us start—as European history also does—with what they describe as the Age of Discovery. The framing is of intrepid explorers setting out to discover the world. The reality was quite different. The Europeans, specifically the West European kingdoms, had discovered the attraction of sugar, spices, textiles, and silk in their encounters with the Arab world during the crusades. The Arabs controlled both the land route from China—the Silk Route—and also the ocean route to India and the Spice Islands of South East Asia known as the Maritime Silk Route. We can also call it the Spice Route. With the Ottoman Empire taking over Constantinople, discovering an ocean route to India was the driver for both Columbus and Vasco da Gama.
While Columbus may have reached the Americas accidentally, Spain, which had funded Columbus, immediately claimed both the continents: south and north America. The dispute between Spain and Portugal was settled by the Vatican in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, with the bulk of the Americas going to Spain with Brazil, Africa and Asia being awarded to Portugal. Of course, the rest of the world was not a party to the Treaty, this being a bilateral one between Spain and Portugal for dividing the world and blessed by the Pope.
The impact of the treaty goes far beyond what happened between Spain and Portugal. This normalised that the indigenous communities had no rights, and if they refused to convert, they could not only be dispossessed of their lands but also enslaved or killed. Even the U.S. Court referred to this treaty on ruling about land rights in the U.S.
Why were the existing population of the Americas unable to resist the European conquerors? The indigenous population in the Americas had crossed over from Asia via the frozen Bering Straits about 20,000 BCE. Though they had built major empires and cities, they lacked some major developments that proved fatal for their civilisation. They lacked any major animal in the continents that could be tamed for the purpose of carrying goods or harnessing to carts. No horses, cows, camels, donkeys, etc. They also had not yet developed iron-based implements or weapons, let alone guns and gunpowder, unlike other parts of the world—Eurasia and Africa—where slow percolation of knowledge, migration of people or conquest had reached virtually all communities. The consequence was the total destruction of the indigenous population and their civilisations. Their cities still stand as witness to the development that the Mayans, Incas, Aztecs, and Olmecs had reached, which the Spanish Conquistadors destroyed.
Though the Spaniards looted silver and gold from the local population, they also discovered that there was gold and silver to be found in Bolivia and Mexico. What is not well known that the Potosi mine in Bolivia and the Zacatecas mine produced about 80 per cent of the world’s silver. (Born with a ‘Silver Spoon’: The Origin of World Trade in 1571, Denis O Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, Journal of World History, vol. 6, no. 2, 1995). It is the silver mines of Meso-America that funded Spanish wars and the buying of ships, guns and gunpowder for its wars. Spain did not develop its industries; by virtue of its control over the world’s silver production, it could buy what it wanted from other countries. It is this silver that reaches India, South East Asia, and China to buy goods textiles, spices, silk and porcelain.
The other change that takes place is the control over the oceans. The Portuguese, Vasco da Gama, sailed around the tip of southern Africa—the Cape of Good Hope—and found an ocean route to India. Effectively, this provided an alternative to the Arabs and the Ottoman’s dominance of trade with Asia. But it did not stop there. The Europeans started taking control of the oceans. Spanish silver, mined by using slaves from Africa, the funding of the trade from Asia, and control over the oceans that the land empires of Asia, particularly India and China had neglected, meant that the basis of European supremacy had been established. None of these developments: control over the oceans or control over silver mines, owed their origins to either scientific knowledge or superior technology over the land-based empires.
The genesis of the rise of the west was the accident of its discovery of the Americas, and the indigenous civilisations there lacking the necessary military technology to resist their attacks. In science and mathematics, the Meso-American civilisations had advanced significantly. Their knowledge of astronomy, mathematics were in many respects ahead of the Europeans. Compared to the cities of Meso-America, most of western Europe would have been considered primitive. But not having guns, steel, and horses meant that militarily, they were no match. It was not simply the destruction of their civilisations and the genocide that marks this encounter of the west with the Americas. The silver mines of the Americas created the global trading system that allowed Europe to dominate global trade and finance its rise. The abandoning of the oceans by the land empires meant that not only global trade but also control of the oceans for military purposes would now rest with a handful of European countries. This could then be used to build their colonial empires. This is the genesis of European colonialism in which eight European countries ended up controlling the globe.