iuuiaa tw: 3517094 MITTEN Borrower: HLS g $ H 2 g 3 8 S 4 E 2 pS] oO S 5 g = ILLiad TN: 3317934 Lending String: HLS Patron: Officer: Don Ostrowski Journal Title: Journal of Turkish studies. Volume: 9 Issue: MonthiYear: 1985Pages: 37-57 Article Author: Joseph Fletcher Article Title: Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500- 1800 Imprint: Via Scan and Deliver Service ILL Number: 3317634 CNA THIS IS NOT AN INVOICE! Non-IFM libraries will be billed under separate cover. International non-IFM libraries may also pay with IFLA vouchers. If paying with IFLA vouchers, the invoice will be cancelled upon receipt of the vouchers. ‘+ Please remit 2.5 IFLA vouchers for a photocopy request. + Please remit 4.5 IFLA vouchers for an international loan request. If paying by IFLA vouchers, send the invoice and vouchers directly to the Widener ILL office. Call #: WID WIDLC DR401 .J68x Location: HLS Scan&Deliver Shipping Address: Harvard University - Widener Library Interlibrary Loan Harvard University Cambridge, MA 02138 Fax: Ariel: ‘Odyssey: 206.107.43.109 MaxCost:INTEGRATIVE HISTORY: PARALLELS AND INTERCONNECTIONS IN THE, EARLY MODERN PERIOD, 1500-1800" Joseph Fletcher (t) ‘The Early Modern Period ‘The question of China's includibility in early modern history presupposes another, more general and vexing question: is there an early modesn history? Or are there only histories? ‘There is an early modern European history. During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries the Middle East, Central Asia, and India each has a history of its own. China in the late Ming and carly Ching certainly has a history, and one with a continuity that far outweighs the limited number of discontinuities that appear as a result of the change in dynasty. But do the histories of these several areas, not to mention sub-Saharan Africa and the Western Hemisphere, have anything in common? Are there any interconnections, continuities, general trends, common to and linking them all? If not, then the term “arly modern” is largely meaningless except for Europe, and the “arly modem period” has no history, only histories. ‘As you have already guessed (who would write a paper to say that China is not patt of early modem history?) I suspect that early modem history does exist and that China is part of it Interconnections and Continuities ‘At the outset I must introduce two terms that will help us examine the question before us. The fist of these is interconnection, which I use to denote historical phenomena in which there is contact linking two or more societies, as, for example, the spread of an idea, institution, or religion, or the catrying on of a significant amount of trade between societies. ‘The second is horizontal continuity, which denotes an economic, social, or cultural historical phenomenon experienced by two or more societies between which there is not necessarily any communication. An example ofa historical continuity might be popula tion loss as the result of outbreaks of a single disease in, say, two societies which are wholly isolated from one another. But to be a horizontal continuity, the population loss experienced by the two societies must result from the same ultimate source. If one loss is from cholera and the other from bubonie plague, then they do not constitute a horizontal continuity but are simply two parallel events. Horizontal continuities are to be distinguished from vertical continuities, which ate the survival of institutions, patterns, and the like through time, as, for example, the persistence of the institution of ‘emperor in Chinese history. It should further be understood that the discovery of an interconnection between two societies does not necessarily imply the presence of a horizontal continuity, and vice versa, Now back to our problem with history. No one would deny that in the technologized world of the 1970s with its quick communications and its generalized political polarities, what goes on in, say, Vietnam, Rhodesia, or Palestine affects the “Although Mr. Fletcher did not write this for publication as it stood, the ideas presented init remained central to his scholarship, and he hoped to revise and publish it before he died, (Editors) 3738 Joseph Fletcher lives of people in China, che Soviet Union, Western Europe, and the United States. Similarly, itis clear that from at least the middle of the nineteenth century, when the Technological Age began to interweave the historical destinies of the various quarters of the globe, the world grosso modo has been one, touched almost everywhere by European, American, and later Japanese commercial initiatives, colonialism, imperial iam, ideas of nationalism and of several forms of socialism. But what about the early modern periodthe sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Is there any general history there? The early modern world is not easy for the historian to integrate, mainly because the historical work that has been done, especially for the non-Western world, has tended to emphasize political and diplomatic history and, more recently, institutional history. The period from roughly 1500 to about 1800 was a time when the world’s states and societies were very much compartmentalized, and there was litle long-range contact, let alone interpenetration, except for some European, first Portuguese then other, maritime trade, This trade was of great economic importance for the European countries that carried it on, but in that period it had as yet minimal impact on the African and Asian societies whose ports the European ships frequented. America was another matter, of course, for there the European impact had immediate and fundamental consequences. For this reason, the political and diplomatic history of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is not much help in looking at the world as a whole. Similarly, institu- tional history is of limited use for our purpose because it emphasizes the organizational patterns character istic of a given society, focusing our attention on cultural peculiarities and discontinuities between societies rather than on inter societal continuities, in short, on the particular rather than the general To find the interconnections and horizontal continuities of early modern history, one must look underneath the surface of political and institutional history and examine developments in the economies, societies, and cultures of the early modern world. If we do this, it may appear that in the seventeenth century, for example, Japan, Tibet, Iran, Asia Minor, and the Iberian peninsula, all seemingly cut off from ‘one another, were responding to some of the same, interrelated, or at least similar demographic, economic, and even social forces. Integrative History Integrative history is the search for and description and explanation of such interrelated historical phenomena, Its methodology is conceptually simple, if not easy to put into practice: first one searches for historical parallelisms (coughly contemporaneous similar developments in the world’s various s0¢t- ties)! and then one determines whether they are causally interrelated. ‘The value of the enterprise is clemental. Unless we possess some idea of what human societies have in common developmentally (the historian’s work) as well as statically (sociology, anthropology, political science), the history field can have no skeleton, In fact, until modern times, there is no history, only histories. However beautiful the motaic Of specific studies that make up the “discipline” of history may be, without a macrohistory, a tentative general schema of the continuities or, at the least, paralelisms in history, the full significance of the his- torical peculiarities of a given society cannot be seen. In other words, to see the picture in the mosaic of microhistory, one must stand back from it. tm Westem Europe and the United States, the kind of historical thinking that might develop such a tentative general schema, or macrohistory, is strikingly underdeveloped by comparison with the amount of microhistoriography that has gone into producing the books and articles that make up the mosaic. Toynbee's massive Study of History saw history as the rise and fall of certain types of societies but For this use of the term, see Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History, tt. Michael Bullock (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953), esp. Chapter One: The Axial Period,” pp. 1-21, and Chapter ‘Two: “Schema of World History,” pp. 22-27.Integrative History a perceived no horizontal continuities fundamentally linking the world's ceonomies, societies, and cultural lies. Jaspers’ Origin and Goal of History, on the other hand, did make a seach for parallelsms going back to the beginnings of civilization, but these remained merely parallelisms. In other words, Jaspers noted similarities, but he established no causal interrelationships. More recently, McNeill’s Rite of the West the best of the world histories, made an attempt to tie human history together, using the device of the “ecumene” (Afro-Eurasian civilized world), which MeNeill saw as having had three “closures” (instances of contact), in 100 B.C.-A.D. 300, 1200-1400, and finally 1500-1650 (which opened communi cations between Afro-Eurasia and the Western Hemisphere). But MeNeill’s main focus isthe rise, spread, and dominance of West European civilization, as his title implies, and, except for tracing eultural diffu. sions, he neither identifies nor examines common trends in late medieval or early modem world economic, social, or cultural history that might reveal horizontal contin ‘The only systematic attempts to postulate world history on the basis of shared economic, social, and cultural phenomena (which are where history really lies) have been made by Marxist historians. Most of this has been highly tendentious, motivated by the desire to show that all societies have followed a unilinear pattern of development, with the result that Soviet Maexist historians in particular find themselves committed to such strange sights as the concept of “nomadic feudalism.” A few Marxist historians have tried to escape this kind of intellectual straightjacket by arguing that there were exceptions? and the akemative presented by Marx’s “Oriental mode of production” has been considerably developed by Witt fogel, Tokei, and others.® The fact remains, however, that the field of history, as it is cultivated at most European and American universities, produces a microhistorical, even parochial outlook, and from the point of view of the general (or integrative) historian, this has been made worse by the American universities’ introduction of the area studies approach, in which historians talk to social scientists within thie geographical speclty sea but have little contact with other historians working on unrelated societies. Under these conditions, historians are alert to vertical continuities (the persistence of tradition, etc.) but blind to horizontal ones, and historians have tended to relinquish cross-arca work to the sociologists and political scientist, who sate not always the best equipped to carry it on.* The happy exception to this bleak picture is the Feench school of “‘conjuncturalist” historians, scholars like Braudel, P. and H. Chauna, and Dermigny, whose work points to a less insular historiographical future. History, for understandable reasons, has been divided into a number of geographical areas, and the practitioners in each of these find remarkably litle to say to the practitioners in any ofthe others. Historians confer on questions of methodology, and students are required to have & touch of historiography and a smattering of social science, but historians, as historians, usually ack a common basis forthe useful exchange of ideas. The only bases on which they are readily able to communicate with profit are on the *See, notably, S. E, Tolybekov, Obshchestvennoskonomichestii strot kazakhov » XVILXIX sekakh (Alima-Ata: Kazakhskoe Gosudarstvennoe Izdatel’stvo, 1959), and Kochewoe obshichestvo kazokhov » XVII nachale XX veka: Politiko-zkonomicheskil anal: (Alma-Ata: Nauka KazSSR, 1971), who argues, essentially, that nomadic society was an exception. > Witefogel’s tal Despotism is, of course, well known; Tokei Ferenc, Az azsiai termelesi mod (Budapest, 1965); G. F. Kim et al, Obshichee j osobennoe » istoricheskom razvitistran Vostoka: Matrialy dickussit ob obshchestvennykh formatsiiakh na Vostoka (Aziatskit sposob proizvodstva) (Moscow: Nauka, 1966), In the 1960s there was also some Chinese reconsideration of the “Asiatic mode.” A notable exception for the early moder period is Gilbert F. Rozman of Princeton, whose work on eighteenth-century modernization in China, Japan, and Russia will conteibute materially to our under- standing of the subject discussed in this paper.40 Joseph Fletcher theoretical bases provided by non-historians. Marxist historians of all areas can confer on the tailoring of, istorical data to fit the requirements of Marxist science, and non-Marxist historians can and often do reexamine the theories of, say, Weber in the light of current historical research. One can easily imagine 2 historian of Ch'eng China discussing the ideas of S. N. Eisenstadt, for example, with a historian of the Ottoman empireevery student of Ming-Ch'ing China should be required to read Norman Itzkowits’ concise Ottoman Empire and Islamic Tradition (Studies in World Civilization; New York: Knopf, 1972) But, although historians do talk across area lines, to do so they normally need help from outside history, and even in the case of comparative history, with no social scientists involved, the result is not so much history (the dynamics of change through time) as itis social science (patterns of collective behavior). If we want to gain a sufficient idea of history’s gross morphology so that we can see the signifi cance of the mosaic’s individual pieces, social science theory and comparative history will not be enough. One must also have integrative history charting those sub-surface trends and developments that the world’s societies have shared, because without it there is no general history until the mid-nineteenth century, only separate regional histories ‘The Starting Point of Global History ‘This brings us to the question of the time limits within which integrative history is possible, and it is here that the significance of the early modern period appears. From the mid-nineteenth century, a8 has been mentioned above, the interconnected character of the histories of the various regions of the globe is by and large generally conceded, and it is certain that future historians will have little trouble in finding horizontal continuities in the world of today. But how far back can history, as opposed to separate his tories, be pushed? Even if we assume that much ean be done to reconstruct the pre-modern history of sub-Saharan Africa and other areas where literary sources are either fragmentary or wholly nonexistent, there is no getting around the fact that, notwithstanding theories about Irish, Viking, Arab, and Chinese explorations, the civilizations of the New World were totally cut off from Afto-Eurasia until the end of, the fifteenth century. Ie is not completely out of the question that, when more is known about such sub- jects as the history of climatic patterns,® it might just be possible to tie in a few aspects of pre-Columbian ‘American history with developments in the Old World, but short of such intellectual gymnastics, global integrative history is not possible before the sixteenth century. ‘The period in which general history isto be sought, then, is what has been called the early modem period. At 1500 I see nothing but compartmentalized histories. By the second half of the nineteenth century everybody sees interconnections. When do these begin? And of what interconnections and hori zontal continuities might such pre-nineteenth-century general history consist? The purpose of this papet is to propose a hypothetical “early modern history” in answer to these questions and then to suggest in particular the ways in which China's experience in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries may seem to fit it. Macrohistory (Dlane's-Eye-View of the Mosaic) Imagine for a moment that we are on a plane trip. Our flight is around-the-world with no stop- overs allowed, and the plane, flying above the temperate zone of the northern hemisphere only, maintains am altitude that carries us back in time.® ‘The technology of such flights is still in its infancy; so itis impos *See Fernand Braudel, La Métditerran‘ée et le monde mé'diterran'éen a U'époque de Philippe I 2nd ed. (Patis: A. Colin, 1966), Vol. 1, pp. 245-252: “3. Le climat ati change depuis le XVle sitcle?” A device adapted, with modifications, from Robert Heilbroner and Peter Bernstein, A Primer ‘on Government Spending (New York: Vintage Books, 1963), who use it to help explain macroeconomics and the concept of gross national product to their readers,Integrative History a“ sible to go back and circle the globe on, say February 13, 1573, or February 13, 1773. Instead we are forced to see the image of the world superimposed upon itself a thousand times, day after day, for the three centuries (sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth) of early modern history. Beyond this, we can see just enough more for us to be able to observe this period in the context of the periods that precede and follow it. It is possible, therefore, to see general patterns and to tell whether they fall roughly atthe beginning, middle, or end of our period, but we are unable to distinguish specific dates, events, o locations ‘As we ciccle the globe we notice that political history has been almost entirely swept away but that the configurations of institutional and cultural history (vertical continuities) remain. ‘This is impor- tant, because terrains differ and cultures differ. A single horizontal continuity may not look quite the same in France as it does in Morocco; so our ability to distinguish cultural peculiarities will help us to understand the permutations that we observe in the broad shapes before us. Parallelism I: Population Growth The first broad shape that we see is a marked rise in population that seems to hae its beginnings in the fifteenth century and that inereases more or less steadily through the sixteenth century everywhere, except in those areas of the New World (especially Mexico) where the Spanish have gained a foothold 1m Mexico the sixteenth century witnesses « rapid decline in the Indian population (because of dieaes from Europe?),” but in North America the general trend is similar to that in the Old World® and in South America losses in the Indian population are offset by the importation of Affican slaves. As Braudel hat predicted,? we see a clear population growth in Castile, Italy, the Balkans, Anatolia, indeed the entre Mediterranean zone, including North Africa (about which there is as yet a lack of demographic information for the sixteenth century) and apparently even Syria and Egypt (about which qualified scholars have their doubts)! It may be that we are even seeing a doubling of the Mediterranean population in the sixteenth century, with a rapid rate of increase in the period roughly 1450-1550 and a slower rate in roughly 1550- 1650. This sixteenth-century population growth, visible also for Europe north of the Mediterranean,'' makes an interesting contrast with Europe's preceding period of population stability, but nowhere isthe "Findings of the “Berkeley school,” P. Chaunu (1964), and Braudel (1967) cited in Perre Guillaume and Jean-Pierre Poussou, Démographie historique (Collection U; Paris: A. Colin, 1970), pp. 105- 106, where doubts are expressed. See also Marcel R. Reinhard and Andté Armengaud, Histoire générale de lt population mondiale (Paris: Montchrestien, 1961), p. 112. For a specific study of the Mixteca Alta region of Mexico, see Sherburne F. Cook and Woodrow Borah, The Population of the Mixteca Alta 1520. 1960 (Ibero-Americana, 50; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968). tn the sixteenth century, North America was, however, “practically empty” (quasiment vide), See Guillaume & Poussou, pp. 108-109 * Braudel, La Meditérranée, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, esp. pp. 299-300 and 368, ce, e.g T. H. Hollingsworth, Historical Demography (The Sources of History: Studies in the Uses of Historical Evidence; Ithaca: Comell University Press, 1969), p. 311. There isan interesting discus sion in J. C. Russell, Late Ancient and Medieval Population (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series, Vol. 48, Pt. 3; Philadelphia, 1958), pp. 129-131. On the other hand, Charles Isawi, “The Decline of Middle Eastern Trade, 1100-1850” in D. S. Richards, ed. Islam and the Trade of Asia: A Colloquium (Papers on Islamic History: Il; Oxford and Philadelphia: Bruno Cassrer and University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), p. 245, seems to take it as generally accepted that there was an economic rally in northern Syria in the sixteenth century. " See Guillaume & Poussou, pp. 111-115, and Reinhard & Armengaud, pp. 82.95.2 Joseph Fletcher sixteenth-century rise more striking than in Syria and Egypt, where it contrasts sharply with what, viewing the Middle Ages as a whole, can only be described as a protracted era of decline.'? On the northern shores of the Mediterranean, population pressure, defined as ‘the ratio of the size of a population to the level of its resources," seems also to have increased, for in the sixteenth century we see large emigrations, of Jews, Italians, and others to North Africa and the Ottoman empire, of Spaniards to America, and of others redistributing themselves within Europe. # The sixteenth-century population rise is followed by a setback everywhere in the seventeenth century, after which the population begins to grow again. In the New World, the population of Mexico is, of course, aleady in decline, but the seventeenth-century setback stands out in sharper relief in North America,'* where the sixteenth century has been a period of growth. In Europe, the population regression hits city and countryside alike, except for certain major centers, notably London, Paris, Madrid, and Istan- bbul. In some places the setback is very serious. The population of Denmark, for example, falls more than one-fifth between 1650 and 1660.'® Bubonic plague in Spain and Italy and also the political and economic difficulties of these two countries may account for demographic contraction there,!7 but contraction in other areas is less easly explained. Our view of the Ottoman empire is clouded somewhat after the frst decade of the seventeenth century by the Ottomans’ political and administrative difficulties, but at some point the population growth seems to have been checked. In the second half of the seventeenth century there is a recovery to be seen in both hemispheres, ‘even in Mexico, where the population decline pulls out of its rapid drop (the development of antibodies?) In Europe, cities and towns recover more quickly than the surrounding countrysides, but the population begins a visible rise that continued, in both Europe and the Americas, throughout the eighteenth century, *27The Ph.D, thesis of Basim Musallam (Harvard, 1973) attributes this stability /dectine in the ‘Arab Middle East to the recurrence of epidemics and the generalized use of contraception (mainly coitus interruptus), which, he shows, was sanctioned by Islam. (Cf. the case of Japan, n.29 below.) Musallam’s work, therefore, has implications that will require revision of the theory of demographic transition in gen- eral, as applied to the cultural area covered by his thesis, and, in particular, of the “natural fertility” con- cept formulated by Louis Henry (although the contrast between the demographic experience of Europe and that of the Arab Middle East might be used to confirm the Henry concept for Europe-the question is difficult to approach because the Henry concept has recently been questioned, even for Europe, by Demeney, Livi-Bacci, Goubert, Eversley, and Hollingsworth). If the Musallam thesis is correct, and if the population of Syria and Egypt did, along with the population of Europe, experience a marked rise in the sixteenth century, then it would appear that during that century, for as yet unexplained reasons, the Syrian and Egyptian populations were less anxious to limit the number of births, or else that there was a marked drop in the death rate. For a quick sketch of the medieval economic decline in the Arab countries, sce Charles Issiwi, ed., The Economic History of the Middle East 1800-1914 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 338. "3M. A, Cook, Population Pressure in Rural Anatolia 1450-1600 (London Oriental Series, Vol. 27; London: Osford University Press, 1972), p. 9. Braudel, La Méditerranée, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, pp. 380-383. * * Following Europe, perhaps, because North America’s population growth is tied to agricultural colonization. See Guillaume & Poussou, pp. 108-109. *A, Lassen (1965), cited in E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (World University Libra London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969), p. 63. "*Guillaume & Poussou, pp. 116-117.Integrative History 43 although in eighteenth-century Furope it would appeat that the countryside grows more quickly than the cities’® In South America, the importation of African slaves, which has increased throughout the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries, reaches its culmination in the eighteenth century, when some 7,000,000 slaves are imported, and is a factor in the population growth. Slaves are also a factor in North America"? In a few places, notably Normandy?® and the Ottoman empire, plagues account for high mortality in the eighteenth century, but the general European pattern is clearly upward, and in the second half of the century even badly hit Asia Minor has overcome the plagues and is experiencing a rapid economic growth and a population rise. By contrast, however, the populations of Syria and Egypt do not recover and remain low until the nineteenth century. Moving east, it is impossible to decide much about the broad shape in front of our eyes on the basis of the uncertain population conditions in Iraq because the region has become the Ottoman Safavid battlefield. There seems to be an upswing in numbers at the beginning of our period, but, after that, all that can be said is that population pressure (as defined above) is probably high asa result of the degeners tion of the irrigation systems, whereas population figures are certainly low and probably declining. To the north, on the other hand, in Muscovy, the population increases substantially in the sixteenth century,?! although in the second half of the century population pressure in the heavily settled central and north- ‘western territories brings about a movement mainly to che cast and south, The period of Muscorte- Russian expansion has begun. The figures are highly conjectural, and ic is posible that the population continues to grow and that Muscovy does not witness the seventeenth-century demographic contraction, but on the face of it this would seem unlikely, since epidemics hit Muscovy from 1655 on, and between 1659 and 1667 something like 700,000 or 800,000 people die of sickness. In any ease, the population continues to rise markedly in the eighteenth century.?? Continuing eastward, we find mists over Iran, Afghanistan, and Cental Asia, but a sixteenth century population rise is by no means implausible, Safavid, Urbek, and Mughal military maneuvering take the picture uncertain, but by the middle of the seventeenth century itis clear that inthe sixteenth and carly seventeenth centuries there has been a noticeable economic growth and prosperity in Iran. To the east, the number of Afghans appears to have been increasing, and in Transoxania the eaty years ofthe Ashtarkhanid dynasty witness relative stability, agricultural expansion, and economic growth. In Eastern Turkestan (the Tarim basin and Uighuristan) the urban and agricultural populations find increased strength visavis the nomads. With the middle of the seventeenth century, this rosy picture fades. Iran experiences a sharp drop in urban population resulting, at least in pact, from wars and plagues. Like the Arab Middle East, the country fails to recover during the eighteenth century, with southern Iran suffering more than the northern part of the country. The same is true of Afghanistan (which, of course, doesnot exis as such in the seventeenth century) and Transoxania, where there are famines and civil chaos after 1650, with lange cities like Samarkand suffering most heavily. Similarly, a seventeenth-century economic decline, * *Draudel, La Méditerranée, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, p. 300. * See Reinhard & Armengaud, pp. 203204, The slave trade does not seem to have tippled the population resources of Africa in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 20Sse Michel Bouvet and Pierre Marie Bourdin, A travers la Normandie des XVI et XVile sideles (Cahier des annales de Normandie, No. 6; Caen: Univesity of Caen, 1968). 21 Sce Jerome Blum, Lord and Peasant in Russia from the Ninth to the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), pp. 120-124, 72 See Guillaume & Poussou, p. 115, and Reinhard & Armengaud, pp. 149-150. For estimated deaths from the epidemics, see R. Mousnier, Peasant Uprising (bibliographical detail in 2.38 below), p. 213.44 Joseph Fletcher which must have included a demographic regression, also strikes Eastern Turkestan, which is stricken with internal political upheavals at mid-century and is overrun by a nomad invasion in 1679. The Manchu (Ching) invasion of 1758-1759 allows Sinkiang a measure of political stability and economic recovery {although not a sense of social and religious well being) after the initial shock, but western Central Asia, like tran and the Arab Middle East, does not begin to recover from its seventeenth-century slump until the nineteenth century. Looking north of Central Asia, to the steppe, we see the nomads, but they are in motion, in their ‘usual fashion, and we are unable to judge the growth and decline of population by what we see. ‘There ate ‘no census data, and there ate only the most fragmentary historical records. The Kazakh, Oirat, and eastern Mongolian populations (both humans and livestock) seem to have been growing. ‘The Kazakhs, formed at the end of the fifteenth century, spread into the Kazakh steppe. The Oirats expand into Tibet and East: ‘em Turkestan, conduct raids into the Kazakh steppe and against western Central Asia, and some of them, at the beginning of the seventeenth century, migrate as far west as the region of the Volga. ‘The movements of the eastern Mongols are less dramatic, but here again it has been argued that there isa significant growth in the amount of livestock? It is likely that this is paralleled by a growth in the human population. In any case, in the second half of the sixteenth century there is a Mongolian population movement toward the south and southwest and a search for more pasture, and the Mongols never recover from the disorders {accompanied by much loss of life) that begin in Outer Mongolia in the 1660s, nomad economic decline being the norm from then on. South of Afghanistan and Eastern Turkestan lie the Indo-Pakistan subcontinent and Tibet. India's population cannot be seen very clearly for the sixteenth century or even for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the demographic trend over the course of the period between 1500 and 1800 is unmistakably fone of growth. Whether there is a dip in the curve during the seventeenth century we cannot be sure, but a breakdown in the Indian economy does appear to occur at roughly that time.?* In Tibet, high up in che mountains, we see only that the number of monks has risen since the seventeenth century, and we are ‘unable to tell about the population as a whole. An estimate in 1885 had the monks constituting twenty 24 5ee 1. Ja, Zlatkin, Istoriia dzhungarskogo khanstva (1635-1758) (Moscow: Nauka, 1964), esp. “1, Zapadnaia Mongolia v vtoroi polovine XVI v.,” pp. 99-116. 24xingsley Davis, The Population of India and Pakistan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951), pp. 24-26, argues for a total population of 125,000,000 in 1600, rejects “a false notion of stagna- tion between 1600 and 1845,” and assumes that the population of India remained at the 1600 figure (125,000,000) “for one and a half centuries more, after which a gradual enhancement of growth began, accelerating as 1870 approached.” S. Chandrasekhar, India’s Population: Fact and Policy (New York: Asia Press, 1946), p. 14, accepts the estimate of 100,000,000 for 1600 given by W. H. Moreland (1927) and the estimate given by Shirras (1931) of 130,000,000 for 1750. G. Findlay Shirras, “The Population Problem in India,” Economic Joumal 43 (1933) 61, estimates India’s population in 1650 as 80,000,000, in 1750 as 130,000,000, and in 1850 as 190,000,000. If we accept Moreland’s or Davis’ figure for 1600 and Shirras’ figures for 1650 and 1750, then the population curve is similar to that of Europe, with a dip in the seventeenth century. This is not a legitimate approach because the various estimates were arrived at on different bases. On the other hand, the fact of the matter is that we do not know anything about the Indian population of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Data do exist, however, in particular for northern Indi and may be expected to yield approximate results when the methodology of historical demography is further developed and applied. Issawi, “The Decline of Middle Eastern Trade,” p. 246, posits Indian economic “breakdown” for the latter part of the seventeenth century, or even the eighteenth.Integrative History 4S percent of the Tibetan population. A recent estimate for Central Tibet gives the monk population a8 teen percent of the whole, But we do not know what to make of these figures, and we are not able to assume, on the basis of the present evidence, that the proportion of monks to the Tibetan population as a whole has remained roughly stable for the period between the Fifth Dalai Lama's census of 1663 and the Chinese census of 1953.25 As we continue to fly eastward, we note with regret that populous Southeast asi, lying in the tropics, is beyond our field of vision,?® but we can see China, immense in territory, although its population is concentrated in the east. China’s population curve is strikingly lke that of Europe forthe entire period from 1500 to 1800. The Chinese population continues a fifteenth-century rise steadily throughout the sixteenth century, falls back severely in the second quarter of the seventeenth (no net gui in this century) and then rises in the eighteenth century at an accelerated pace.*” Korea, although politically a separate entity, presents a similar picture, with a rise coming from the fifteenth century and continuing throughout the sixteenth century, a drop in the seventeenth century, then recovery, and sustained demographic growth continued throughout the eighteenth century and into modern times.?™| 25Se0 R.A. Stein, La civilisation tibétaine (Collection SIGMA, 1; Pais: Dunod, 1962), p. 111, and Pedro Carrasco, Land and Polity in Tibet (American Ethnological Society; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1959), p. 78. The longterm demographic trend for Tibet, lke that ofthe Arab Middle East, appears to have been one of decline from the levels of the carly Middle Ages (seventh century)-see W. D. Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p-6. Another clue to Tibet's medieval population may be found in V. A. Bogoslovskii, Ocherk istri tibetskogo naroda (Stonovlenie klassovogo obshchestva) (Moscow: Isdatel'stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1962), p.128. Sufficient records exist for Tibet so that, with the application of the methods of historical demog- raphy, it will probably be possible to develop relatively good figures for Tibetan population during the Period 1500-1800, and perhaps earlier. The data are at present difficult of access, however, because they are mostly in Tibet. 28Bat not beyond the vision of the historical demographer. Continental Southeast Asian coun- tries lke Vietnam, for example, have data which will make historical population studies posible. Even for Indonesia, data exist from which inferences can be drawn concerning periods prior to the last quater of the eighteenth century, when the Dutch began making estimates in Java. See Widjojo Nitisastro, Popule tion Trends in Indonesia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), pp. 1 and 11-17. 2 See Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368-1953 (Harvard East Asian Studies 4; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 23 and 277-278, Ho's reasoning has been found acceptable by at least one economist, Dwight H. Perkins, Agricultural Development in China 1368-1968 (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), who essentially follows him for the period we are reviewing. 2 See Cho Piljay, “Growth of Korean Populations,” Korea Journal (Aug. 1964) 2. The popula- tion “statistics” are, of course, as in the ease of China, merely taxation data and therefore do not reflect the true population size. Underregistration, without question, continued throughout most of the Yi dynasty. “This would seem particularly clear as regards the seventeenth century, after the Japanese inva sions had destroyed the land taxation records, for reports indicate a phenomenal rise, the impossible jump from a population of 1,500,000 to one of §,700,000, i. almost a quadrupling in one century. In fact, however, there is very little room for doubt that Korea’s population rise suffered a set back in the seventeenth century. In the fifteenth century, immediately following the establishment of Yidynasty rule, the government had resettled large numbers of people from the populous south into the sparsely populated north; more land had been brought under cultivation; and there had been a clear demo- graphic increase. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, there began to be difficulties. The Japanese46 Joseph Fletcher Finally, across the sea in Japan only the most general outlines of the demographic curve ae visible, The sixteenth century cannot be seen, but the Japanese population grows rapidly during the sever teenth century, levels off after the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and remains stable into the nineteenth, although the economy as a whole continues to expand.” The last word has probably not yet been said on Japan's demographic history of the seventeenth century, but on the face of it there seems to be no reason to predicate any dent in the upward curve. Population growth may have been retarded in the late sixteenth century by the ravages of Oda Nobunaga and Hideyoshi, but the Tokugawa campaigns of 1614-1615 against Osaka and the Christian revolt of 1637-1638 in the Shimabara peninsula were too limited to have had any demographic effect. In other words, Japan's population curve somewhat resembles that of the Middle East in the eighteenth century in that it does not rise, but it is atypical of the genen! Eurasian pattern for the seventeenth century in that it does not dip. Viewed as a whole (impossible from our plane window, which is limited to the period from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century), the demographic curves of the globe’s various populations would look quite unalike, except, pethaps, for a fairly universal rise in the nineteenth and twentieth cen turies. Furthermore, even between 1500 and 1800 the various populations rates of increase and decrease vary widely. China grows faster than Europe, and Europe grows faster than India. If population sie i wealth, after the demographic shocks (or shock) of the seventeenth century, the rich get richer and the Poor get poorer, everywhere except in Central America, where the poor get richer. But except in Central America and in Japan, the shapes of the various population curves in the sixteenth and first part of the seventeenth century are similar to a remarkable degree. And even Central America shares the seventeenth century global dip in the curve, invaded Korea in 1592 and 1597, calling forth Chinese military intervention, with the result that between the Japanese invaders and the Chinese and Korean defenders the country was ravaged, and the economy ‘was disrupted. An important military revolt shook the north in 1624, and the Manchus invaded Korea in 1627 and 1636. In 1671 famine and disease are said to have carried off more people than had died during the whole of the Japanese invasions. ‘The government had no socially effective system to stave off famine, although Korea did have “ever-normal granaries” patterned after the Chinese model; so famine was endemic in the seventeenth century, producing both pestilence and disorder. For a sketch in English, see EO. Reischauer and J. K, Fairbank, A History of East Asian Civilization, Vol. 1: East Asia: The Great Trad tion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), esp. pp. 443-446. I am indebted to James K. Ash (Fort Lewis College), whose participation in my seminar on early modern history at Harvard University in 1970 intro- duced me to the problems and interest of Korean demographic and economic history. 297he population stability of the eighteenth century, which may be somewhat misleading (the first census was in 1721) because at this time the Japanese were still filling in thei southern and western territories, is generally explained as resulting partly from famines and epidemics and partly from active population limitation on the part of the Japanese themselves (abortion and infanticide)—see Guillaume and Poussou, pp. 110-111, Note the direct parallel between this explanation and the explanation for the demographic stability decline in the Arab Middle East given by Musallam (see n.12 above), who sees the recurrent epidemics of the Middle Ages coupled with widely practiced contraception as the primary limiting factors. (Islam approved of contraception, tolerated abortion, but condemned infanticide.) Dare 1 invoke the sterilizing effects of a hot Japanese bath? When do the baths become a widespread custom in Japan? ‘The principal study of Japan’s population is Irene B. Taeuber, The Population of Japan (Prince: ton: Princeton University Press, 1958). See esp. pp. 16-21.Integrative History 47 Parllelism I: Quickening Tempo ‘The second observation that we make from our plane window is dificult to describe, let alone measure, for we lck the scales or yardstick with which to quantify i in meaningful way, but ove the course of the three centuries in view we cannot help noticing an inereased bustle, more n more buying and selling, more travel, more curiosity, a wider range of interests, more acts of lif. More historical “events” following on one another in more rapid succession. We sense an accelera- tion of pace which, if it were to be reduced to its lowest common denominator, we might sum up a faster rate of historical change, (Is it simply that we know more about the period 1500-1800 than we know about earlier history and the acceleration that we think we see is more apparent than real? 1 do not think so.) Certainly there is more commercial activity than there was in the period immediately before 1500. In the political and intellectual spheres, too, are there not more changes, more new ideas, more people questioning time-honored values and institutions? Not only is there more activity, more change. ‘The tempo is also faster. ‘The pace accelerates as i approaches the nineteenth century. Everywhere. Parallelism HI: Growth of “Regional” Cities and Towns A kind of urbanization trend is also apparent, and we see a growth in the number, tance of towns and medium-sized cities, ‘There have, of course, always been cities and many of them, functioning mainly as nexuses of trade routes or depots and watering- and provisioningplaces along trade routes just before or after an obstacle or some particularly long or difficult stretch—port cities on the coasts, oases in the deserts, portage points between river systems, caravanserais at the feet of mountain ranges on the approach to passes. Other cities have grown out of military garrisons situated in some strategic spot that dominates a region ‘or controls access to one. Some cities, once strategically or economically well located with reference to conditions that are now obsolete, have nonetheless remained important because they are associated with the government and traditions of a cult, a culture, a state, or an empire, ‘There are also centraly- located cities and towns that function mainly as the centers of economic activity for surrounding regions. ‘These might be referred to as “central place” cities, but I shall call chem “tegional” cites, since the term “regional” carries less specific overtones.2° In the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, longdistance trade continues, and Euro- pean maritime trade increases. It is by no means certain, however, that the seafaring Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and English merchants of early modern Europe—except pethaps those trading after about the mid- dle of the eighteenth century—are carrying on trade of greater commercial value or that they are more active, not to speak of being economically more sophisticated, than the Arab and Italian merchants of the lter Middle Ages. The important thing is not the substitution of one set of long-distance traders for another, because at least until after 1700 European maritime trade is probably of no greater economic importance to Aftica and Asia than the trade of the Arabs and Italians was inthe thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. The important thing is the difference in the amount of regional short-distance trade, not just in the coastal cities but inland and everywhere. Regional markets have begun to grow. sand impor- 3 An idea of the development of “central place” theory may be had from Brian J. L Berry and Allen Pred, Central Place Studies: A Bibliography of Theory and Applications (Philadelphia: Reyional Science Research Institute, 1965). ‘The article chat has brought home the relevance of this subject to su dents of China is William Skinner, “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China," Journal of Asian Studies 14, nos. 1-3 (November 1964-May 1965).48 Joseph Fletcher Fairs, held at regular intervals, become more important and take on an increasingly urban character. More partnerships are formed, more businesses opened,>* The old type of city, the city whose primary function is associated with long-distance trade, continues to exist, but during the three centuries in view such cities do not appear to multiply. Instead we see a growth in the number and size of cities and towns of the “regional” type—central market towns acting as the hub of intraregional exchange, cities serving as the economic (and cultural) centers of thei surrounding agricultural districts, often in connection with the development of a local industry. Cities like these have, of course, as already mentioned, always existed, but after 1500, very gradually at frst bit perceptibly, there begin to be proportionately more and more of them. ‘The trend can be seen collapsed, and therefore most cleatly, in a region like Siberia which, atthe beginning of our period, is settled, and sparsely so, only by comparatively primitive forest peoples. Here,at 1500, trade is for the most part north-south trade, mainly furs, grain and other Siberian foods and certain crude manufactures in return for the animals and animal products of the steppe nomads to the south and in return for a few more sophisticated manufactures from China, Central Asia, and perhaps also India, At first the trade is carried on between the forest peoples and the nomads directly, but by the early seven teenth century long-distance traders from Central Asia known as “Bukhariots” (although they are not necessarily from Bukhara) seem to have gained a near monopoly, carrying on a kind of triangle between the sown (China, the Muslim khanates, and Muscovy), the steppe, and the forest. By the 1670s, however, the Muscovites, in developing the fur trade, have expanded through Siberia and have established well-defined east-west trade routes, which they have supported by building fortified towns at strategic points along the way. Not content to deal with Chinese, Central Asin, and nomad markets through Bukhariot middle-men, the Muscovites begin opening trade routes of their own and gradually squeeze out the Bukhariots, but one of the main reasons why it is possible for them to dosois the fact that the handicraft, agricultural, and livestock-raising economy of Siberia has developed to such an extent that local Siberian consumption has less demand for the commodities that the Bukhariots have been bringing. In the meantime the number of Slavs moving into Siberia, taking up residence in the new towns and founding others, and carrying on agriculture, light industry, and the like, has steadily increased; the source of furs has been diminishing and moving farther east; and political troubles have come to bar the way of developing the full potential of Sino-Russian trade. Regional Siberian economies increasingly develop lives of their own without much dependence con longdistance trade, and foreign longdistance traders (Central Asians and nomads) stop coming to the 314 difficult question to study, even in the more limited area of commercial activity. Of the major civilizations, Europe, with its fuller historical sources, provides the happiest hunting grounds, and Indian commerce, except for maritime trade, is probably the most difficult to research. As regards the Near East, Abraham Udovitch has pointed out that probably for the entire medieval period, “such ques tions as the volume and velocity of goods exchanged, relationship between exports and imports, total stt fof monetary resources, etc... will of necessity remain unanswerable, or at best vaguely answerable simply because of the lack of sufficient and suitable documentary and other sources from which we can draw the requisite data”—A. L. Udovitch, “Commercial Techniques in Early Medieval Islamic Trade,” in D. S. Richards, ed., Islam and the Trade of Asia: A Colloquium (Papers on Islamic History: Il; Oxford and Philadelphia: Bruno Cassirer and the University of Pennsylvania Press, 1970), p. 37. How much better the possible source basis becomes through the availability of Ortoman records in the sixteenth and seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries remains to be determined. The feasibility of quantifying commercial activity in late Ming and early Ch'ing China is also debatable because of the offici extra legal (often illegal character of much of Chinese commerce. ly disesteemed andIntegrative History 49 Siberian cities altogether and do their business instead at periodic border matkets like the lamysh f ‘Treaties with China in 1689 and 1727 fail to open the way to a secure and flourishing Sino-Russian trade, and at the tum of the century the caravan trade is, in any case, largely in the hands of the gost (official merchants of the tsar), thus lying outside the regional Siberian economies, but by the midsighteenth century the Russian demographic presence in Siberia is so pervasive, o many new lands have been opened by the plough, so many new towns have been built, and so much economic development (mining in particu: lax) has taken place, that the Siberian cities have become principally regional economic centers, and their life's blood no longer consists of long-distance trade. Even if the fur supply gives out altogether, even if the dispppointing Kiakhta trade dries up, the Siberian cities will continue to thrive, either because they are the centers of a local industry or simply because they are the focal points of a surrounding regional economy. Major seventeenth-century transshipment points like Tiumen', Tobol’sk, Tomsk, Krasnoiarsk, and Irkutsk, which connect the flow of Siberian trade with European Rusia are stil as important as ever, but their functions are no longer essentially limited to longdistance trade? Trans-shipment points like Verkhotur’e, that have not developed a regional importance have lapsed into comparative oblivion, But what is mainly noticeable about the eighteenth-century Siberian map is that now itis dotted with towns that exist primarily as regional centers of theie surrounding economic areas, not merely as service and junc- tion points along a trade route leading to Moscow. What is also noticeable is that it isin these cities that all the “important” people have taken up residence. In many respects, of course, the pattern of urban development in Siberia in the period 1500-1800 is atypical of the trend in other areas of the world where the population i les sparse and lss primitive in the sicteenth century, and where there is no such wave of immigration. But, with this proviso well in mind, we may nonetheless find the case of Siberia useful as a microcosm of the process that we see taking place from our plane window: an increase in the number, size, and importance of “regional” centers. Jn Burope,*® India, and China the process is more difficult to disezn than in Siberia, where there ate no true cities or towns at all in the sixteenth century and where there are many thriving ones in the eighteenth century. In more civilized and heavily settled parts of the world, the major sixteenth-century cities are still on the eighteenth-century map, and the regional centers that have grown to prominence in the eighteenth century are also to be found-they are smaller then, but they are to be found~on the sisteenthcentury map. But from the vantagepoint of our plane window the fact thatthe ls of city names is much the same does not mislead us, because there has been a shift in function, a shift in weight. Pats is til Paris. Delhi is still Delhi, But they are different. In the period 1500-1800 they grow more impor- tant, The high and the mighty who once lived in the country have moved into the city, and the city plays >? For urban and general economic growth in Siberia in the period under review, see A. P. Oklad- sikoy, et al, eds., Istoriia Sibiri s drevneishykh vremen do nashykh dnei, Vol. 1 (Leningrad: Nauka, 1968), Ch. 8 and Vol. 2 (1968), Pts. 1-2, For western Siberia, see 0. N. Vilkov, Remeslo i torgoulia zapadnoi Sibini v XVII veke (Moscow: Nauka, 1967), and for Trans-Baikalia, see V. A. Aleksandrov, Rosia na dal nevostochnykh rubezhakh (vtoraia polovina XVII v.) (Moscow: Nauka, 1969). See also 0. N. Vilkov, “Problema vserossiiskogo rynka i sibirskaia torgovlia i promyshelennost' XVII ¥,." in A. P. Okladnikov, et aly eds., Itogi i zadachi isucheniia istorii Sibiri dasovetskogo perioda (Novosibirsk: Nauka, 1971), pp. 76.101. Lenin's notion of an “sll-Russia” or “national” market beginning in the seventeenth century seems overdrawn. 33The main point of departure for study of the growth of European cities in the late Middle ‘Ages and early modern period is Roger Mols, S.J., Introduction a la démographie historique des ces ciles Europe du XIVe au XVIlle sitcle, 3 vols. (University of Louvain, Recueil de travaux dhistoite et de Philologie, Series 4, Fasc. 1-3; Louvain, 1954-1956).50 Joseph Fletcher a much more important role in the life of the country. New cities, like Fatehpur Sikri that fal to find a regional importance fail to grow; others, like Madrid, that sticceed, grow apace. This phenomenon isto be distinguished from the decline, during our period, of cities that depend on long-distance trade patterns that are changing, like Venice and Novgorod, and from the growth of others, like Seville, Goa, and Canton, that find new long-distance trade patterns to enrich them, Another observation as we fly: just as it was with the population rise in our demographic over view, the seventeenth century is a time of crises for the world’s cities and for the growth of “regional” cities and towns in particular, But after the seventeenth-century crises are ended, especially in the eigh- teenth century, che regional centers recover at a more rapid rate than other urban centers, with the excep- tion of a very few fortunate ports and politcal capitals nourished by a heavy flow of trade or one of the heavy-handed absolutisms of the eighteenth century. Parallelism IV: Rise of the Urban Commercial Classes (renascences) We have already noted that cities have always existed, and it follows that city-dwellers have always existed too, In medieval times city inhabitants were government and religious officals, garrison soldiers, a limited number of menials, a tiny substratum of prostitutes, thieves, and beggars, but mainly merchants and artisans. All of these social groups continue to inhabit cities in the sixteenth through the cighteenth century and probably in about the same proportions, although two new groups begin to make their appearance in unprecedented numbers: the social and cultural elites (aristocrats) and the poor laborers or would-be laborers—in other words, both ends of the social scale. ‘As we examine the terrain below us from our plane window, we note not only the influx of these ‘two groups into the cities, accompanying the cities’ increased regional trade and industrial activity, but the fact that the merchants and artisans, far from being dominated and overpowered by the arrival of the tradi- tional elites, find themselves in an increased position of strength. As our time period progresses, the sharp distinctions that once separated the urban commercial classes from the traditional social and cultural atistocracies gradually become blurred. There are more financial understandings, more business deals, ‘more alliances, more overlappings of function between aristocrats and merchants, between aristocratic families and merchant families. In cultural life also this is to be seen. Artists and writers who once had to satisfy the traditional ‘esthetic requirements of a more rural cultural elite must now satisfy the city-dweller, with the urban man's tastes and concerns. Urban patrons of high culture are nothing new, as can be seen in the Italian cities, in Herat, and in China and Japan prior to 1500, and the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century it noteworthy even for merchant patconage of the visual arts, but with the sixteenth and seventeenth cen tries the urban character of the arts is more apparent. Islamic attitudes toward the fashioning of images make the urban influences on the visual arts difficult to compare during the period in view. It is possible, for example, that the growth of genre painting in’ Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries or, say, in Korea, is to be compared wi the fact that Awrangzeb terminates Mughal patronage of painting altogether in 1659, for Awrangzeb is responding to urban Mustim sentiment, spearheaded by the Naqshbandiyya, which holds that infidel prac tices at court have gone too far. In the performing arts and in literary and intellectual history, however, the picture is clearer. As patrons, as appreciators, and as ercators, the urban commercial classes begin playing a cultural role that they have not played before, and their tastes and their support leave a distine- tive mark. Take, for example, the seventeenth century. In Japan, Kabuki begins to entertain the spectator, and Saikaku’s literary portraits of city life in Osaka sum up the spirit of the age. In China, the so-called “novel” comes out into the open; popularizations of classical literary and philosophical works begin to appear; intellectuals like Ku Yen-wu look with new eyes at the traditional Neo-Confucianism that has dominated Chinese thinking for five centuries; and there are fresh developments in social thought. InIntegrative History st Muslim India, the seventeenth century sees the development of vernacular literatures (Ghawwasi in Urdu, Sultan Be Hu in Punjabi are pertinent examples) at the expense of Arabic and Persian; gees like the tadhikra, increasingly popular in Central Asia also at this time, reflec the interests and tastes ofthe com- mercial classes, In Central Asia, the decline of Chaghatay literature is to be seen, at least in part, as the dedine of belles lettres at court and the popularization (vulgarization) of literature. For Arabic and Persian literature and thought, the seventeenth century is also a low point. The significance ofthis fac, however, is unclear. In the Ottoman empire the seventeenth century sees the development of pure pro writing (the travels of Evliya Celebi and the histories of Katip Celebi and Pecevi) and popular literature catering to the tastes of a readership that has not been steeped in the traditional education of Ottoman high culture, In Europe, and especially in Europe, the seventeenth century is a watershed in inelletus history. Iehas been said that “in a very real sense the modern world as we know itis a seventeenth-century creation; modern science, modern philosophy, and the modem state . . . all emerged during this age. And these three great developments are, in turn, manifestations of an underlying common core. This core isthe new sense of power, the power of man to shape his own society, his own destiny.’ This power is the dynamism and restlessness of the urban commercial classes who have finally come into theie own and whose minds are less the captives of traditional culture than were the minds of the olde traditional elites. Their presence is certainly to be found in literature, and the now abated controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare's plays shows how loath we are to believe our eyes. Lope de Vega and Moliee are harder to deny. In intellectual history, Hobbes, Pascal, Spinoza, and Locke also reflect the impact of the rising turban classes. It isa time of secular social thought. But these men and their remarkable intellectual achievements are only the topmost and most glittering layer of a trend which, as we see from our plane window, is much deeper. Great writings repte- fent high culture, There is almost invariably some relationship between the high culture and the popular culture of an age, and there is here, but the real substance of what we see below us lies in the domain of popular culture, a subject less easily studied and therefore less visible to the historian’s eye than intellectual and literary history. Of more importance for our trend are the public entertainments—Punch and Judy in England, Karagoz shadow plays in Turkey, K'urch'u “opera” in China, puppet shows in Japan—and popular books and booklets, often popularizations and adaptations of “classical” works made for an urban readership, not for the literate intellectual elite but for the semiliterate townsmen, Note also the increased use of printing and advances in movable type in Europe and East Asia in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries and in the Ottoman empire in the early eighteenth century. Also the development of hran'gul in Korea. In the seventeenth century are there not more popular entertainments and writings, nore written, more published, more read, and do they not help in the awakening and selfawareness of the urban commercial classes who consume them? Parlllism V:_ Religious Revival and Missionary Movements (reformations) ‘As we fly along, another congruence of global historical behavior, « quite astonishing one, mects ur gaze. The urban classes reexamine the religions and religious values of their societies. Everywhere reform movements have come earlier, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries they fully saturate society, often creating great social upheavals, and they become linked with vast and trly far-flung mis tionary movements and activities, commonly moving hand in hand with trade and carrying 23 an ingredient the values of the urban commercial classes. ‘The new urban man is not content with the decayed spiritual content of his religious institution. He believes more fismly than did his medieval forerunner inthe validity carl J. Friedrich and Charles Blitzer, The Age of Power (The Development of Western Ci tion; Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1957), p. 1.52 Joseph Fletcher of his own perceptions. He wants personal rather than vicarious religious experience. He is not content with the religious forms, no matter how theologically sophisticated or rich and grandiose they may have become. He wants to get back to the essence of his religion. Reformation, Counter-Reformation—Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Protestantism—these distinctions have confused us. Now, from our vantagepoint in the sky, we can see that Pierre Chaunu was right when he insisted that the Reformation be seen as a whole, as Protestant anid Catholic.?® We should add Orthodox. Some make their reforms inside the Church; others break free. But all, although they respond in different ways, are responding to a common change that is in the ait. In 1516 rasmus estab lishes a new text of the Bible, The decline (through schisms) and corruption and worldliness of the Renais sance papacy produce a response. In 1517 Lather nails his ninety-five theses on the door in Wittenberg, translates the Bible into German, and insists on justification by faith, rejecting the priesthood asan inter mediary between man and God. There is a renewed ingredient of mysticism. There are liturgical changes masses in German and English, Zwingli, Calvin, and John Knox appear. Sects in hiding lke the Anabap- tists, come out into the open. Within the Church, the Jesuit order is founded, and the Council of Treat makes reform official. Missionaries, accompanying maritime trade, carry Christianity to the New World, to India, to East Asia, Europe is seized by the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). ‘The Russian ritual and liturgy ate revised, and the Old Believers secede in 1667. Christianity spreads into Siberia. And what about the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi that runs through world Jewry in the seventeenth century from Europe to Persia and the Yemen? Jn the Muslim world, central Islamic authority has utterly disappeared. In 1500 the politic eemergence of Shitism, embodied in the Safawiyya, a Sufi (mystical) order, splits Islam in half. The worlé- liness and moral laxity of the high ulema at the prineely courts offends the average man, and the intricate ins and outs of Islamic jurisprudence seem baffling and irrelevant to him. The traditional religious edifice does not answer his spiritual needs; so he turns instead to the Sufi order affiliated with his trade guild. Sufi mysticism provides a more satisfactory route for him to have direct experience of God. Pre-Islamic and heretical sects and currents, long underground, surface again under the protective coloration of Sufism. Sunnis (Ottomans and Urbeks) fight Shiites (Safavids). At precisely the same time that Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican missionaries are coming on the trading ships of Europe to convert the heathen of Afrcs, India, China, and Southeast Asia to Christianity, marabouts and missionaries of the Qadiri, Naqshbandi Chishti, Shattari, Suhrawardi, and Shadhili orders, on trade caravans and trading ships, are arriving in those same quarters of the globe to convert the infidels to Islam (and they are making far more converts) ‘This is precisely the period when Buddhism, worldly and decayed in Tibet, is revived and under goes great changes and reorganization as a cesult of the reform movement of the Yellow sect (dGe-lugs-p2)- New texts are “discovered,” and the strict monastic discipline and spirituality of religious life are reat firmed. ‘The Yellow reforms stimulate a new self.criticism and reorganization of the “unreformed” mons tic communities under the leadership of the Red sect (Karma-pa). ‘The contest between the Red and the Yellow is accompanied by an enormous missionary effort carried on by both sides. During the late six teenth and seventeenth centuries Buddhism is spread throughout Mongolia, Zungharia (northern Sinking) Manchuria, and many places in northwest China. Tibet and Mongolia are racked by religious war. Isnot this period-the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries~also the time of the Rawshaniyya among the Afghans the Mahdawiyya among Indian Muslims, the Sikh movement in northern India, and the “high tide” of the 3Sce Pierre Chauna, “Le XVile sidcle religieux: Reflexions préalables,” Annales E.S.C., Année 22, No. 2 (March-April 1967), pp. 279-302. 31 have in semi-final stages of preparation several articles and a monograph dealing with the Naqshbandiyya asa reform and missionary movement.Integrative History 53 Bhakti movement among the Hindus of the entire subcontinent? And do these new movements not ori: inate and develop among the urban commercial classes and spread hand-in-hand with trade?” : Religion in China is not easy to compare with Christianity in Europe or Islam in the Middle East, but it would seem that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries China witnesses developments that have much in common with contemporary reformations elsewhere. The re-examination of Confucian orthodoxy, notably by Wang Yang-ming, at least in its motives, has much that is similar to the new look of the Buropean Reformation. The purposes of Yen Jo-chu have much in common with the critical scholar ship of Erasmus. Other parallels are found in the growth of Chinese messianic Buddhism. ‘The rebellion of the White Lotus (founded in the twelfth century) does not occur until the end of the eighteenth century, but has not the pot been boiling since the sixteenth century? The Hsu Hungju revolt of 1622 numbers something like a million rebels. Although the White Lotus sends out no foreign missions, the sect’s mit sionary efforts among the huge population of China appear prodigious. We ly on. Parallelism VI: Rural Unrest ‘The next broad historical congruence that comes to view has already been noticed and imaging tively described by Roland Mousnier in his Peasant Uprisings in Seventeenth-Century France, Russia, and hina,?* so that there is little here we need do other than give our testimony that the rural upheavals he describes are occurring, that there are even more of them and in more countries than Mousnier reports and that the heavy period of uprisings is not so much the seventeenth century a3 such as it isthe last quarter of the sixteenth century and the first three-quarters ofthe seventeenth, In addition to the peasant revolts in England (the Revolution), Catalonia, Portugal, Naples, Holland, the Ukraine, Ireland, Switzer land, Germany, Bohemia, Japan, Mughal India, and Mexico. From our plane we se also the Cell revolts (1595-1610) of the Ortoman empire, spreading south into Syria and as far east as Transcaucasia, Kurdis tan, and Iran, and accompanied by revolts in the Balkans; uprisings in Georgia in 1615 and 1625 and Armenia in 1624-16255 an insurrection of some 30,000 persons in Gilan in 1629. There are surely more. But peasant revolts are merely symptomatic of something more basic—peasant discontent. In some places peasants may revolt; in other places peasants equally aggrieved may simply flee from the fields, or practice passive resistance, or else suffer and do nothing. What is it that we ae seing from our plane window? Of what disease are the rebellions symptomatic? Mounier seems inclined tothe vew that, if there is a common cause, it is the climate, which shifts, making times harder forthe peasant all the way around the world, and this view appears to be fairly widely held.?? Are there not other possibilities as well? Of particular interest for the study of the religious movements in India at this time ate K. A. Antonova, Ocherki obshchestvennykh otnoshenit i politicheskogo stroia mogol'sot Indi vremen Akbara (1556-1605 gg.) (Moscow: AN SSSR, 1952); A. A. Rizvi, Muslim Revivalist Movements in Northern India in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Agra: Agra University, 1965); and Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir: An Introductory Study in Social Histor, 2nd impression (Delhi: Mun- shiram Manohatlal, 1969). ‘Antonova, pp. 162-165, sees both the Bhakti movement and the Sikh movement as made up nainly of urban commercial-industeial elements until they become popular (peasant) movements inthe seventeenth century, although the Sikhs continue to be dominated by atisas and merchants, 2 First published as Fureurs paysannes: les paysans dans les révoltes du XVUlesitele (France, Russie, Cine) (Paris: Calmann-Levy, 1967). English tr. by Brian Pearce (New York: Harper and Row, 1970; paperback ed. Harper Torchbooks, 1972). **Maurice Pianzola, Les Renaissances et les révoltes: 1500-1700, le temps de rois (Les métamnor- phoses de Vhumanité; Paris: Planete, 1966), for example, a daring book that tres to tie together worl34 Joseph Fletcher For the Mediterranean, Braudel speaks of a refeudalization by a rich aristocracy (réaction seignew. riale) to which new members are added, the importance of usury, and the investment of commercial money in land by rich merchants who set themselves up as landlords (trahison de la bourgeoisie), accompanied toward the end of the sixteenth century by mounting misery and banditry in the countryside, which develops into full-scale revolts in the seventeenth century.*® Even the Ottoman empire follows this pat- tern, Is not a similar development to be seen in Russia during this period? ‘The estates granted in return for service (pomest'ia) increasingly resemble the old hereditary estates (votchiny), and officers of state including many “new men,” are becoming a hereditary landed nobility. Serfdom grows. Usury grows. A money economy is developing, and the landowners—the tsar, the monasteries, the aristocracy-all engage in tade.*" Are there not similar developments in the relationship between landed property and the Mughal government and aristocracy in India? Along the Ganges, even Portuguese merchants are buying up lands {in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and ruling them as lords under Mughal dominion.*? In all of Central Asia we see an increase in the amount of private landed property and the putting together of huge landholdings, bought with commercial profits and often veiled as wagf endowments in the hands of such powerful religious leaders as the Juybari shaykhs of Bukhara and the Kasani khojas of Eastern ‘Turkestan, Also the growth of usury. In China too, as the Ming dynasty nears its end, do we not see the development of increasing ties between the merchants, moneylenders, and the gentry? The rebellions that actually bring down the dynasty are in the north, where gentry-merchant ties seem weaker, but even here there are similarities to the réaction seigneuriale, and the annexation of peasant lands by the latifundia of the Ming princes and powerful families is often cited as one of the causes of generalized rural unrest. This configuration does not end at the Chinese border. In Korea the powerful landowning classes, aided by the destruction ofthe land tax records during the Japanese invasions of the 1590s, also amass large tax-free latifundia. Usury sains in importance, as in Europe and the Ottoman empire. Also Japan. ‘The condition of the peasantry deteriorates. Everywhere there seems to be heavier taxation on the peasants who actually pay. The sich, in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, find ways to escape, keeping their lands off the tax rolls Perhaps it is increasing population pressure. Michael Cook maintains, in the abstract at least, that “2 growth of usury and dispossession, and perhaps even a tendency to large landholding” could be explained asa natural consequence of inereasing population pressure.*> Perhaps the increased circulation of money. thas worsened the peasants’ lot. Is there a general economic recession in the seventeenth century, of not? ‘There seems to be a parallelism here, but what is it? We see clearly only the peasant revolts, the symptoms. Parallelism Vit: Decline of Nomadism What else do we see, all the way from Morocco to the Sea of Japan? Nomads. If we pass our gaze across that whole expanse, along the North African coast, through the Middle East and Russia, through the northern marches of the Mughal empite, Central Asia, the steppe, across north China to Manchuria and the sea, we sce nomads the whole way, interacting with the settled civilizations. We see far more of them and find that they are far more important and powerful at 1500 than at the end of the eighteenth century, a fact that has been attributed to gunpowder. By mid-sixteenth century, when nad cavalry historical congruities on the basis of the European maritime expansion, takes for granted a global climatic change in the seventeenth century, referring to glacial movements (p. 46). 4¥Sce Braudel, La Méditerranée, 2nd ed., Vol. 2, pp- 49-94 See Mousnier, Peasant Uprisings, p. 164, *75ee Raychaudhuri, Bengal under Akbar and Jahangir, p. 111. “cook, Population Pressure, p. 39.Integrative History 55 has put the Safavids on the throne in Iran, has made the Uzbeks masters of Transoxani, and has given the Mughals a foothold in north India, the balance of military power has already begun to shif in favor of al those whose settled existences are protected by walled fortifications. In the whole southern and eastern Mediterranean area, for example, nomads are able to move unhampered by sedentary governments only in parts of North Africa** Sedentary Muscovy, once a pos session of the nomad Golden Horde, takes over its remains, setting up the puppet Kasimov khanate in the fifteenth century, and taking Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1554, ‘The only important segment ofthe Horde that escapes Muscovite control is the Crimean khanate, which survives by throwing init lot in the 1580s with another great non-nomadic descendant of a once-nomadic tradition, the Ottoman empire, (The Crimea is not annexed to Russia until 1783.) Are the nomads being infected by sedentary clture? To be sure, the Altan Khan of the Tumed (s. 1543-1583) wins resounding victories against the Chinese, but he also builds a walled capital (Bayishing) and superincends agriculture. And what has become ofthe Usbeks, once so fierce and nomadic? Not to speak of the Mughals. The Afghans are making the transition to agriculture (but then it has been argued that they were never true nomads anyway). The Safavids may have ridden to power on the backs of the Turkmens’ horses, but by the second half ofthe sixteenth century the Turkmen is the Safavid stable boy. ‘There are a few areas that seem exceptional, notably the Arab counties, where, 8 result ofthe weakened control of the Ottoman government, bedouins make trouble off and on in the seventeenth and cighteenth centuries, but, seen as a whole, by mid-seventeenth century the day of the nomad is done. In 1666 the Altin Khan of western Khalikha begins building his own towa,** and in 1667 he asks the Mux covites to build a town with a Muscovite agricultural population and says that he, using this town and its population, will put many peoples under the tsae’s control.*® The spreading use of money has made its appearance in the steppe. The Manchus, who understand the nomads very well have utterly destroyed theit power in East Asia by the end of the seventeenth century, and by this time the Zunghars (the Man- chus' last adversaries) are no longer the “uncooked” and unreconstructed nomads of an ealir time. They have farms, orchards, and industries and an empire with towns and cities and are only too awate of the strengths of the Muscovites and Manchus, ‘The eighteenth-century states of Nadie Shah in Iran and Ahmad Durrani in Afghanistan are not nomadic. Is the explanation of the decline of nomad power really to be found in firearms inthe early sx- teenth century? We have our doubts. Certainly the idea chat European maritime trade replaces the trans ‘Asa caravan trade and thus undermines the power of the nomads (an idea based on the unlikely ssumption that nomad power depends on long-distance trade) is not very persuasive. But an idea of Andrew Hess stikes us as provocative of thought: “Cannons, firearms, and galley flets, together with all ofthe urban- based organizational techniques necessary to command and sustain complex military units, heralded an end to the long dominance of the mounted archer . ... Not only did the large-scale use of these new weapons shift the technological balance . . . but the modern implements of war cteated extraordinary new financial requirements for imperial politics . . . . Here also neither small Centeal Asian polities nor steppe sates based ona herding economy could compete... "*7 *4See Braudel, La Méditerranée, 2nd ed., Vol. 1, pp. 8791, 161, and 165. *#Sce N, P. Shastina, Russko-mongol’skie posol’skie otnosheniia XVI veka (Moscow: Indatl'stvo Vostochnoi Literatury, 1958), p. 99. See Aleksandrov, Rossiia na dal’nevostochnykh rubezhakh, p. 75. *7Andrew C. Hess, “The Ottoman Conquest of Egypt (1517) and the Beginnings of the Sixteenth: Century World War,” Intemational Journal of Middle East Studies 4, No. 1 anvary 1973) 8,56 Joseph Fletcher But the nomad tradition, as distinct from the nomads themselves, may have survived as a powerto be reckoned with, Perhaps itis not merely a coincidence that the great empires of the sixteenth to eigh- teenth centuries emerge, at least in part, from Turco-Mongolian cultural origins: the Ottoman, Museory, the Safavids, the Mughals, and the Manchus. Omeljan Pritsak is fond of pointing out to his students the sesoey between nomadic and seafaring peoples. Perhaps even the Hapsburgs deserve an honorary place on our list. ‘And other parallelisms? Are there not more? Unhappy Landings Our plane now begins its descent, and we must reflect quickly on the implications of what we have seen, for there are certain things that we will not be forgiven for saying once our feet are on firm ground. let us make an even wilder assumption than some of those that we have already been making, Let us assume that the parallelisms that we have seen are not merely parallelisms. Let us assume that they are horizontal continuities and that therefore there is an early modern history. How then do we sce this erly ‘modern history? We see it as needlepoint. ‘The horizontal continuities (the weft of the web) run from left to right. From top to bottom run the various vertical continuities of successive societies (the warp). Light i shining toward us from behind the web. We note that each of the different translucent threads of the warp is made of a distinct and different kind of fiber, so that, if we run our eye along a yellow translucent thread of the weft, for example, it looks green where it crosses the blue thread of the Ottoman system of land tenure, and it looks orange when it crosses the red thread of the system of monastic landed property in Tibet. If the web were even a touch more closely woven and if we could not see tiny bare segments of the welt between intersections, we would recognize no continuities at all in the series of differently colored crose hatchings. Finally, to complicate the structure further and, more important, to create the pattern of the needlepoint itself, is the thicker and more brightly colored yarn of the historical interconnections running in all directions through the web: the lavender of Jesuit missionary activity around the world (as distinct from the historical continuity that produces it), the puce of European maritime trade, the cerise of spread- ing advances in military technology, the mauve of European or New World diseases, the magenta of food crops from America, the silver of Spanish billlion, the chartreuse of shifting patterns of trade, the beige of coffee- and teacdrinking. ‘The subtle translucent hues of the warp and the dazzling colors and patterns of the needlepoint yarn almost totally conceal the horizontal continuities of the weft. But without the weft we have no needlepoint at all. Only a bag of threads. ‘As we fasten our safety belts, we may as well hazard a certain order for what we have seen. We begin with population growth (parallelism 1). It is hard to find the cause or causes of that. Could it be, as McNeill suggests,"® that epidemics, the old levellers of population, had lost their effectiveness? Plagues and famines have continued into the twentieth century, but they do seem to have lost their power.*? Cer tainly the sixteenth-century population rise comes too carly even in Europe to be satisfactorily explained by the theory of demographic transition, which places the essential factor of declining mortality in the cighteenth century. ‘There seems, of late, to be a return to explaining the synchronic population rise, even of the eighteenth century, in terms of a change of climate, ‘Thus Braudel in his new broad study, **William H, MeNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), pp. 572-573. “For this subject see L. Fabian Hirst, The Conquest of Plague: A Study of the Evolution of Epidemiology (London: Oxford University Press, 1953).Integrative History 57 Grilisation matérielle et capitalisme: “It is the synchronism that makes the problem .... For this unison, more or less perfect, one can imagine only a single general answer: changes of elimate [for in the eighteenth century] the world is still only an immense peasantry." ‘Then again, new crops, light techno- logical or other advances hardly apparent om the surface of history may have combined to give men a greater adaptability to their physical environment and thus may have brought on demographic growth, Per- haps the seventeenth-century dip on the global population graph comes as a dieect result of the sixteenth. century rise: too many people for the existing socio-economic institutional framework. The population growth isa vast puzzle, but also one of enormous importance for the modernization of mankind.*! mn any case, more people could have meant more activity of every sort and the general speed-up of history (parallelism II). More economic activity could have led to “tegional” urbanization (parallelism It) as well as to a growth in the great cities of the earlier types, and urbanization could have added to the power of selfassurance of the urban classes (parallelism IV) and thus to an assertion of ther religious values (parallelism V). Domination of the countryside by a new urbanized status quo could have led to tural unrest (parallelism VI), and the enormous growth of urban power and the kinds of states that it produced could have redressed the age-old balance between steppe and sown (parallelism VI). We do not mean ¢o imply that all of the parallelisms that we have noted ate new or unique to the petiod 1500-1800. When we see “more” economic activity, we do not necessarily see more, for exam ple, than in the Roman empire or in Sung China. But the early modern period has a pattern that tes it together, suggesting that the lives and histories of the globe's peoples were mote interrelated than historians have hitherto realized, and perhaps also in ways that historians have not yet perceived. ‘This pattern di tinguishes it from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On our plane ride we have emphasized continui- ties in early modern times. With the nineteenth century continuities persist and increase, but by 1850 we ae struck more by the great discontinuity of modem times: the phenomenal development of the West that soon enables it to dominate the globe. ‘The plane is approaching the runway. We make one last observation. Marion Levy sees mode sation as increasing interdependency, within states and in the world at large. He does not believe that modernization is “as old as Eve” and does not sce it as emerging “fullfigured at all until sometime into the nineteenth century.” As an “adult,” he says, “Modernization is no more than 150 years old by any- one’s estimate.”*? Can we not see the adolescence of this interdependency in eatly modern times? SBraudel, Civilisation matérielle et capitalisme, Vol. 1 (Paris: A. Colin, 1967), p- 32- Quoted also in Guillaume & Poussou, p. 158. $1 We have a long way to go in this subject. I suspect that most of the data of historical demog- raphy, ie., chat cited above under Parallelism I, are highly inexact. Even general questions of demographic rise or decline are very much open to dispute. Attempts to establish figures prior to the nineteenth cen tury, the crudest example being Minami Ryozabur, et al, eds, Jinko daijten: Population Encyclopacdis (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1957), pp. 243-250, are not to be taken seriously. 5See Marion J. Levy, Jr., Modemization: Latecomers and Survivors (New York: 1972), p. 4. atic Books,