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Earth Tranformed - to Chapter 15
                        July 2023
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The largest and most powerful book by Peter Francopan, The Earth Transformed: An Untold History Story, Bloomsbury Publishing, appeared in Spring 2023. The cover claims the book covers world history from the Big Bang to the present and beyond. It considers the role of the natural environment on human societies and the impact of humans on the environment and on the climate all while telling the human story.

 

I set off into the 680 pages – an introduction then 24 chapters then a conclusion. It reads well giving a lot of information in a measured manner. Evidence of climatic situations is fed into the human history era by era. Drought played a part, but not necessarily the critical part in the demise of human societies. Plagues and diseases played a part.

 

It was hard to read about the plantations that were introduced onto cleared largely unoccupied Caribbean islands and the slave trade that provided plantation workers. By the last six chapters from “Industry, Extraction and the Natural World” to “On the Edge of Ecological Limits” I was gripped and reading some kind of horror thriller.

 

Introduction. The introduction notes Milton’s Paradise Lost, the Genesis account of how Adam and Eve, the first humans, and all who follow are condemned to lives of ecological challenge with an environment not always benign. Today, the way humans work the land, exploit natural resources and treat sustainability are matters of vehement debate. Human activity is so extensive and so damaging that it is changing the climate. This book aims to put climate into human global history and to show how climate had an impact while telling the story of humans and the natural world over millennia. Ocean currents, solar activity, volcanic activity, cold times, floods, draughts or stable temperate periods - all feature.

 

Most histories focus on the big actors in the powerful cities. This book looks at cities because cities and civilization are the biggest factor in environmental devastation and the most important cause of human climate change. (I see cities also as compact and energy efficient.) We see nature reserves free of humans as “natural”, but indigenous peoples lived sustainably in such places for centuries, treating the ecology well. The book aims to present a global picture rather than a focus on Western nations. Human history is presented in twenty-four eras of global events.

 

Chapter 1. The first chapter covers the dawn of time on earth 4.6 billion years ago to around 7,000 BCE. Humans appeared recently - a few million years ago. Human writing appeared 5,000 years ago. For half the 4.6 billion years there was little or no oxygen. Earth was hit by something the size of Mars. There were massive volcanic eruptions, periodic glaciations and warming periods. The single supercontinent broke up 250 million years ago beginning today’s continents. Tectonic plates collided, mountains were pushed up, ocean levels rose and fell. Several times spectacular events wiped out all but a small fraction of the then living organisms.

 

The shaping of the continents created giant hydrocarbon deposits worldwide. This put in place coal that powered the industrial revolution. It put oil in the Middle East whence it impacted the politics and wars of the 20th century. Earth itself and other species impacted the long pre-human history. Humans are unique. They developed the capability of creating an impact like that asteroid the size of Mars. The use of nuclear weapons today would create a “nuclear winter”.

 

Chapter 2. The second chapter includes the arrival of humans around 3 million bc and the emergence of our particular species, homo sapiens, between 7 million and 12,000 bc. Africa was a melting pot for the various human species but by about 2 million bc, several of the homo species had migrated to the Caucuses, China and then to Europe.

 

Sometime between 1 million and 500,000 bc some of the human species had learned to control fire and use its benefits – cooking, warmth and protection from predators. This helped the development of greater brain size, language and more cognitive skills. There was a pivotal genetic mutation in Homo Sapiens that dramatically increased the number of brain cells. And this may have brought cognitive advantages of far-reaching impact. Sapiens all came from a single small population in Africa by a highly effective and successful expansion. All human species were challenged by enormous shifts in climate over thousands of years – including arid and glacial conditions and a major eruption of Mount Toba.  Neanderthals inhabited Western Eurasia for many millennia and some reproduced with Sapiens. Both species shared many characteristics.

 

The changes in the last 200,000 years greatly impacted the several human species. Populations in the Levant died out.  Australia was largely depopulated. About 40,000 years ago Neanderthals died out. The Last Glacial Maximum began around 30,000 bc with falling temperatures and falling sea levels. Movements of sapiens into the Americas across the islands that appeared in the Bering Straits took place around 22,000 bc. The Glacial period began ending around 19,000 bc with more huge changes but over thousands of years – massive floods in North America; huge ocean rising shrinking Australia. Another cooling period occurred before the present stable Holocene era began.

 

Chapter 3, Human Interactions with Ecologies, 20000 – 3500 bc. Humans found warmer conditions in certain favourable ecologies. In the Fertile Crescent and Zagros mountains Iran, Egypt, Anatolia there was domestication of some crops and animals with a women’s role. Diets with wheat, barley, lentils and peas developed. Rice cultivation began likely in the Yangtze River 8000 bc. More sedentary life began generally and in the Americas. Monuments like the Göbekli Tepe indicate interests in cosmology and unseen forces. Ceramics appeared and diffused - some from Japan and some from Mali. By 5500 bc forms of farming had reached around the Mediterranean basin to Europe.

 

Around 6200 BCE a climate shock from the artic cooled the Northern Hemisphere for around 200 years causing sea level rises and a drying of the Sahara region and South Asia. Around 6150 BCE a 190km shelf of sediment fell off Norway creating a giant tsunami that swamped and submerged “Doggerland” – the area that linked the UK to Europe. The separation was completed by rising sea levels. The tsunami would have killed everything in its path. By around 6000 bc domesticated maize spread in the Americas together with use of irrigation canals and of terracing on higher ground.

 

Climatic shifts came towards 3000 bc possibly from the 2400-year Hollstatt cycle or from a weaker El Nino South (ENSO). There was a weaker Asian Monsoon and arid conditions. The Sahara started to desertify and Northern Chad began to dry causing migrations to oases and to the Nile valley. Mauritius continued to have rainfall. The desert barrier split Africa and genetic differences developed between the two parts. When ENSO returned 5000 years ago there were changes: droughts in North America, the Mediterranean climate of today; more rainfall in Northern India and Indo China. Parts of East Asia got wetter. Most such climate changes took place over centuries.

 

Chapter 4, The First Cities and Trade Networks, 3500-2500 bc. More land suitable for agriculture was used with pastoralism spreading beyond that land. A human impact on earth was beginning. CO2 levels were rising in China and Europe likely from deforestation and wet rice farming.

 

Mega sites in Eastern Europe disappeared by 3,300 bc possibly by cooling climate or plagues. Other areas showed great activity. Links between populations, cultures and languages in southern China, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, Melanesia and the Pacific developed over the centuries around 3,000 bc. Atlantic and Gulf coast North America developed settlements around shell rings. Commonalities in languages across Eurasia were likely spread by migrating farmers.

 

New pottery styles travelled in 2 centuries over an area between Europe and West Africa. A population turn-over of 90-100% indicates a large comprehensive movement of people. From 3,500-3,000 bc in Mesopotamia, the Nile valley and the Yellow and Yangtse area of China arrivals resulted in more villages with more people in them. The growth links to a locally bountiful area hemmed in by hostile geographic features like mountains or a desert. Cities and ‘civilization’ began here.

 

Increasing trade brought social interaction, exchanges and some harmonisation of pottery and settlements across the Fertile Crescent by 4000 bc. The developments spread to other areas led by metal industries. New crops and luxury items were exchanged across Europe and the Middle East. Similar trends in long range trade routes were occurring in the lower Yellow River, the Indus valley, along the Nile and the “Norte Chico” valley in Peru. The settlements brought ideas of possessions, access to land and its control, social hierarchy, ownership, transmission of wealth and elites. Wealth inequality became a feature. Issues of kingship, religion, bureaucracy and slavery arose.

 

Some very large egalitarian settlements developed in northern Mesopotamia such as Brak in Syria around 3000 bc. Southern Mesopotamia was different. Large hierarchical settlements developed, described later in some of the oldest writing in the Old Testament and in Sumerian texts. Enmerkat founded Uruk and the 3000-year-old text says he and his wife could make bricks, build towns with pavements, irrigation canals and ditches. They could make wooden ploughs, yokes, cables and threshing sledges. Elites developed. Some see elites as useful. Through their land and herd ownership and coercive power they built temples and lavish buildings. Temples were controlled by priest hierarchies who regulated, monitored and controlled trade.

 

These developments occurred in other areas such as the Nile Valley where city kingship emerged by 3500 bc and centralization developed into an overall area and one king. China developed large cities. In all these, the rulers and priests explained events. Around the world all groups at some point used human sacrifice to placate the supernatural.

 

In Mesopotamia workers depended on institutions, temples and the wealthy for rations or a share of wealth. Landholdings of the temples were huge so that maintaining a workforce was important. Food distribution and cooking was done with ovens and hearths in the temple. There were few settlements outside the city. The city walls seem to be for prestige or to hold a population rather than for defence. Cities depended on a workforce for food supply. Given the risk from disease and poor sanitation there needed to be constant new arrivals in a city. There is evidence of slavery in southern Mesopotamia. By around 3000 bc there were several large cities, the largest being Uruk with its 250 hectares and 20 to 40000 people. With development came needs for more oversight.

 

Emerging bureaucracies standardized and harmonized and so sent more gains to the elite at the centre. Writing systems emerged as clay tokens for units of goods. By 3500 bc cylinder seals were used to mark produce. Two hundred years later there were clay tablet signs with numbers and goods inscribed by stylus. These developed over centuries into phonetic signs which became alphabets and opened new horizons.

 

In Mesoamerica, the Nile, Indus Valley, regions in China these stages to writing were remarkably similar if at different times. The patterns from Mesopotamia with elites, bureaucracies and tied workforces were followed with variations by the Qin dynasty in China where workers were registered, tied to the land and unable to leave.

 

City growth encouraged neighbouring areas. In Nubia, now Sudan, Kerma began to develop leading to the Kush Kingdom that rivalled Middle Kingdom Egypt.

 

Larger populations lead to social stratification. The Indus valley developments were different with less elaborate monuments and evidence of more egalitarianism. That is also true of the Norte Chico developments in Peru – marine, inland valley cities and highland cities, with Caral seemingly the centre for a wide region. There is little sign of social stratification and no sign of war or violence. But population and settlement densities are lower along the Indus and in the Andes than in Egypt and Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia there was competition for resources with trade networks developing for supplies with gifting amongst kings leading to a kind of brotherhood of kings. Trading led to development of elites in China and elsewhere.

 

Patriarchy was the norm. Group violence increased with the more complex societies. Rewards and prestige went to those proficient in combat. Bureaucracies and improvements in agriculture led to larger populations but greater vulnerability to loss of workers to controlling violence or climate events. That meant famine and disease. The earliest writing was about the origins of the earth and the perfect original conditions for humans: the Epic of Creation, Ninevah, Rig Veda, South Asia, and Genesis, the Bible. History has shown that large complex empires can collapse rapidly, chaotically and decisively.

 

Chapter 5, On the Risk of Living Beyond One’s Means, 2500 – 2200 bc. Sargon, ruler of Akkad, created an empire in Mesopotamia, now Iraq, with centralized power and resources and trade routes. There were on-going revolts. His grandson, Naram Sin, features in an old text The Curse of Akkad. Arid ground yielded no grain, there was no yield of fruit or fish leading to starvation and depopulation. Nomadic tribes invaded.

 

Climatic changes around 2200 bc caused a mega drought, but it was not global. Social and economic activity continued in south Spain/Portugal, Sicily, Africa and the Indus Valley. There was no immediate effect on Indus Valley settlements. Over time, Indus Valley groups moved to the Himalayan foothills. There was population growth but it was disorganized and unplanned. That led to settlements with poor sanitation which encouraged diseases. The closer dirtier living conditions led to thinning populations by 2000 bc. Then there are signs of increasing violence and within a century there was dispersal of population to the south and the end of the Indus Valley civilization. Climate was only part of a complex evolution.  In China the Xia dynasty emerged in 2070 and is linked to responding to a devastating flood. The signs from across China do not indicate a major climate change.

 

The Sumerian writers may have exaggerated the catastrophe to tell how the gods retaliated against Naram Sin for desecrating a temple. The theme of punishment by the gods features in antiquity and major events are remembered – like the great flood that appears in various ancient writings. God(s) rewarded those who lived well and obediently with environmental stability. Surprising events of natural disaster like the turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt were remembered whereas starvation and disease that were far more frequent and more deadly for many people get little mention in early writing. The finely balanced societies were unstable. A single bad harvest could lead to starvation and social upheaval. The challenge was to respond to mitigate things quickly. Uprisings and tumult occurred in Egypt around 2200 bc with signs that an old order had passed away. Controlling elites needed to respond to these situations.

 

Part of the success of these early citiy societies was their trade interconnection with other city groups in Mesopotamia, Egypt and along the Indus, spreading foods and providing access to metals. Unrest in one part affected all the others. There are signs of a slow down around 2000 bc. It is wiser to find out how these societies struggled with things than to glibly dismiss causes as “climate”.

 

Chapter 6. The First Age of Connectivity, 2200 – 800 bc. Fractured trade connections and new ones formed after the turbulence around 2200 bc and led to an inter-connected area from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean and beyond.

 

City states blossomed after the empires. There was political centralization with bureaucracies working over big geographical areas and there was a new feature – laws for rulers and subjects like the code of Ur-Nammu ruler of Ur ~2050 bc. The best known is that of Hammurabi for the Babylonian empire ~1900 bc – a code that influenced all Mesopotamia. New states appeared. The Assyrians formed their own state centred on Nineveh and Assur and built colonies that became the Hittite state. Assyria rivalled other great states like the Kassites that took over Babylonia with the fall of Babylon in 1600. Trading states developed on Crete and in Greece and with these came new technologies – boats and sailing.

 

Following the weakening of Egypt, states developed in Nubia where the Kush state came to dominate large parts of the Nile and to influence as far as the Horn of Africa. Trade led to states in West Africa that became a heartland for Kush and encouraged consolidation of mobile pastoral elites in the Libyan Sahara.

 

Migration made changes in India following the Indus Valley decline. A significant 18% of today’s population in India relate to migrations of Harappa from Europe, Scandinavia and Siberia.  They brought ideas of caste and Vedic Religion. These became modified in the Sanskrit written language beginning 1500 bc. The Rig Veda and other foundational texts of Hinduism set out an eternal order. There are duties and a relationship between humans, animals and the earth.

 

New ideas reached Egypt with the Hyskos Dynasty in 1,640 bc. It ruled a territory stretching from the Nile delta to Cusae and controlled western trade routes linked by oases to Nubia. Innovations included clothing, ceramics, burial practices and likely also a written alphabet, the composite bow and the horse drawn chariot. These new ways remained when the dynasty fell. A Mitani kingdom in northern Syria showed evidence of Vedic ideas as well as those of Mesopotamia. In the Andes from 1800 bc on there were increasing cultural and economic exchanges between the coast, the valleys and the highlands in temples, ceremonials, ceramics and foods. By 1000 bc Chavin de Huantar was emerging as a ceremonial centre for most of north and central Peru.

 

By 2000 a large walled settlement had been established at Shimao in the central plains of China, with human sacrifices. After the city of Erligang, from 1200, a state emerged under the Shang dynasty in north and central China. An overarching political structure standardised cultural styles, religious practices and social structures. Writing on bones emerged. There was stabilization of settlements in all the areas after 2200 bc. It does not appear to have been climate, but they were all suitable for settlements and for supporting populations with or without canals and irrigation. The mild disease environment, without malaria, helped.

 

Settlement growth in Africa was slower on account of malaria until, over centuries of exposure, populations gradually included enough people who had Duffy Negativity, the genetic mutation that provides resistance to vivax malaria. Major climatic events could have dramatic effects, including diseases. Such was the case of the massive Thera/Santorini volcanic eruption whose tsunami engulfed Crete and reoriented Mediterranean civilizations. It possibly led to the variola virus and smallpox – a scourge of humanity into the middle of the 20th century. Dramatic as such events were, the greatest risk was population load. A poor harvest, hoarding and price inflation could become a disaster. Pressure for authority and wealth from the centre exploited resources so that by 2000 bc timber in Mesopotamia was largely used up and it had to be brought in from as far as Oman, India. The Shang dynasty needed networks to supply metals for weapons and ritual vessels.

 

The linking of states could cause problems. Widespread calamities took hold in 1200 bc in Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Near East including food shortages. At first grain shipments from Egypt helped, but Egypt and Assyria had harvest problems and by 1170 there was an 8-fold price inflation. In addition disruption came boat arrivals, the biblical “Philistines”, who brought chaos to the eastern Mediterranean. This was a period of lower rainfall, with other factors like disputes among Hittite elites involved. Then between 1125 and 1175 came a series of earthquakes in the eastern Mediterranean. A problem in one part of a network could cascade into an interruption or even a system breakdown of the whole. For example, when the Roman Empire ended many centuries later, modest pressure led to a downward spiral into the “Dark Ages”. Climate and weather were just aggravating factors.

 

Difficult times from poor harvests were not easy for ruling regimes because they were then ripe for exploitation by rivals. The trick was to make sure no rivals existed. However, in 1046 bc the Shang dynasty was overthrown by the Zhou. That introduced new practices but was largely a management change. Egypt was slower to build back. It depended less on others. The Greek city states benefitted and grew stronger.

 

The period around 1200 bc involved population movements into near and remote Oceania in the Pacific – into islands like New Caledonia, Fiji, Tonga and Samoa. Three thousand years ago people were willing to strike out by boat away from big populations and fragile trading networks to seek another way.

 

 

Chapter 7, Regarding Nature and the Divine, 1700 – 300 bc.

Environmental degradation, overconsumption of resources and unsustainable population load are issues that arise in an old Babylonian text. The great flood stories say the gods faced too many people and a need to reduce them. When food production went down in the Akkadian empire. Bureaucrats pushed farmers for higher food production, but the land yields went down from mixtures of overworked soil, irrigation salinity or lack of rain. The Epic of Gilgamesh is aware of the dangers of over exploiting nature and of forces beyond nature bent on eliminating humanity.

 

A new Assyrian empire emerged after the Bronze Age with rapidly growing centres like Nineveh during the reign of Sennacherib 705-681 bc. This involved massive systems of canals and irrigation to bring snowmelt from the mountains and rivers to the major cities and the fields around them with a network of roads and tracks and way stations. Kings dispersed populations but brought back the captured from war to build roads and canals. Empires rose and fell. Assyria fell to Babylon in 612 bc and that fell to the Persians. Assyrian script and language largely disappeared. Cosmology continued.

 

Astronomical diaries recorded the ongoing and the anomalies. Interpretation in Mesopotamia was by seers and priests. Animals were sacrificed to win favour of gods. In Shang dynasty China, the king or diviners interpreted cracks caused by hot rods on tortoise and other shells. The Shang ruler acted as Sharman intermediary with the god Di in rituals and ceremonies. Sacrifices offered could be substantial. As elsewhere a range of questions were explored especially whether Di would bring rain or other desired weather. Sacrifices for rainfall and a full harvest extended to the new Zhou rulers of 1046 bc who introduced a concept of Tian - a welding of the god Di into a cosmic moral force governing nature with an interest in human affairs. The ruler had to fulfill the “Mandate of Heaven” - protecting everyone. A poem “Yunhan” expresses the ruler’s anguish about a drought in 800 bc when famine was a problem.  Rulers had astronomers observe natural phenomena with lunar and solar calendars to seek an understanding of causes of draught, heavy rains and other events. The documentation of eclipses and other events occurred in Mesopotamia too. Signs were used to predict future events like success in battle.

 

A mix of benign climate, divine favour and reward for good leadership was deeply rooted in many parts of the world. The merging of natural order and power became a key part of politics and religion in China. The emperor was tied to good outcomes, but had to rule well. So many in the eastern Zhou dynasty of China had ideas on this from the 6th century on that it was known as the time of the Hundred Schools of Thought. Confucius saw people living moral lives, filial devotion, respect for ritual and benevolence towards others as reflecting celestial order. This was for rulers to protect. Laozi and Zhuangzi conceived Dao, “the way”, as a force that unified existence in harmony. The virtuous gave up luxurious living, denounced war, lived simply and innocently. Mozi argued those in authority should set examples of this behaviour.

 

Debates occurred in India around the Vedas and epic poems composed c.1500 to c.1000 bc explored the relationship between the terrestrial and the celestial. There is practical advice in the Vedas too - herbs to ward off disease and herbs to deal with foul smells. There is also guidance on a relationship with the natural world: don’t pollute water or kill useful animals. Later texts built on these around 600 bc. The whole sets up a framework for making sense of the universe as well as advising on religious practices and providing complex theological explanations. Authority was vested in a priestly class – Brahmans. It is not clear how all this was perceived by the population at large.

 

Rival cosmologies appeared. That of Buddha is regarded as largely assembled after his death in 400 bc. The path to enlightenment was personal and based on the four truths: life si a journey of suffering; suffering stems from desire and craving; supressing desires removed suffering; that is achieved by meditation. Personal actions mattered and were practical – how a husband treated his wife. However not everything was left to the individual – there are texts and there is guidance. The Jain religion rethinks humans, the world and nature. The lover of possessions is deluded and falls into pain. Humans are part of a panoply of living entities – earth, water, fire, wind, grass, trees, plants and moving animals. Hurting any of these, people hurt themselves.

 

Scholars suggest the burst of new ideas extending to grammar, literature, law, drama,   

social and political change stems from agricultural surplus from a wave of new urbanisation in the 6th century bc. There was centralisation and consolidation of small kingdoms, then merging into 16 large kingdoms and then merging into one. This process led to tensions between the Brahmans’ control of ritual sacrifices and the thoughts of Buddha and the Jains. Perhaps out of the tensions came thoughts on reincarnation that were not in the Vedas but in one of the Upanishads. Perhaps humans were trying to make sense of fortunes and misfortunes in this life by looking to events outside their control in an earlier manifestation.

 

Similar thinking occurred in the Eastern Mediterranean from Herodotus in the 5th century bc who noted both Greeks and Egyptians held the notion of a soul in humans that continued after death in another being that is being born. This raised questions of how one’s actions should be judged in this life and after death. Philosophers like Plato felt one would be rewarded or punished. Reincarnation raised approaches to all living things. One should not eat them because that involved killing them. These thoughts seem contemporary! But these ideas were not mainstream and other philosophers had other schemes. Nonetheless issues of environmental degradation and pollution had champions in 6th century bc - individual and institutional. Cyrus of Persia conquered neo-Babylonian rulers and established a kingdom from the Mediterranean to the Indus valley in mid 6th c. BC and he promoted Zoroastrianism. This religion held a profound reverence for nature embodied in its texts. The earliest were hymns called Gathas. As in other empiresm the religion - Zoroastrianism - provided the elites with a powerful tool for interpreting the cosmos and making spiritual intercessions. It gave rise to new hierarchies and spurred new dialogue in and between peoples and regions – including Judaism.

 

Judaism had been influenced by experience at the hands of Assyrian and Babylonian empires in the 7th and 6th centuries. With the Persians came release from captivity in Babylon and the rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem - leading to Isaiah regarding Cyrus as anointed by God. These experiences had a profound impact. The narrative parts of the Torah were all written after the fall of the temple to the invading Babylonians and the exile. That included the relationship between nature, God and humankind in Genesis, the enslavement and departure from Egypt of the people of Israel in Exodus, the breaking of the covenant with God agreed to by Moses in Deuteronomy. Texts of Jewish experiences were first written at this time emphasising devotion, obedience and following priestly teaching.

 

The writers had a collection of stories reaching far back Noah and the flood, the tower of babel and they wove other events into them. The story of Joseph may relate to a chancellor Baya of 1200 bc. The writers had disdain for urban space. The desert was where people could get to know God and be tested – as in Christianity and Islam. Polytheism was rejected, animal sacrifices condemned and idol worship banned. The Garden of Eden was paradise lost. God was served in the cultivation of the earth and stewardship of its resources. There was avoidance of urban settings and favouring of pastoral – the lord is my shepherd. Key figures are farmers and pastoralists. The Covenant was fertile productive land in return for following commandments. God mixed with nature – in a cloud, a rainbow sign. Those who saw themselves masters of earth – Pharaoh – would be brought down.

 

Several religions have been tied into an ‘Axial’ period, but the more significant commonality was the arrival of writing and texts and these went beyond religion into philosophy, mathematics and science. Increasing urbanisation relates to movements away from material rewards to self-discipline and selflessness, moderation suppression of desires and self-denial. This led to advice for rulers and criticism for adverse natural phenomena. And rulers led ceremonies at the start of the agricultural year. In the Classic Period ~1250 bc in the Maya lowlands of Central America rain rituals became particularly important. Everywhere these rituals tended to link to cosmological interpretations and those with this knowledge revealed the secrets with risk of death – as the Eleusinian mysteries in Greece.

 

Awareness resources were limited occurred. In 524 bc Duke Mu of Shan warned the Zhou king of the dangers of cutting down the trees in the mountains. In other cases laws were passed as in 243 bc Emperor Ashoka in Northern India forbade setting fire to forests, linked to a philosophy towards animals and plants, with medical herb treatments for humans and animals. The royal household became largely vegetarian. In the 1st century ad text Arthasastra by Kautilyra, the major thinker of classical India, the author declared rulers should protect and manage all key resources of state, domesticated animals, human crafts, mining commerce, wildlife, forests, forest produce and water. Damage or overexploitation should be punishable by death. Good governance gives optimal outcomes and there is virtue in social, economic and environmental sustainability. These thoughts echoed the idealised nature in Han dynasty poetry in China of the same time such as The Songs of the South.  

 

Chapter 8, The Steppe Frontier and Formation of Empires, c.1700 – c.300 bc.

 The domestication of sheep, goats then cattle brought mini-revolutions as stable sources of protein and also for wool and leather and technologies for clothing and storage. Animals could work for enhanced agricultural output. But domestication of horses allowed humans to travel 10 times faster and were essential for creating the empires of the classical age and later in the Americas. In the Halocene horse populations found less favourable habitat as forests grew in Europe than in the steppes of Central Asia where the conditions were better. The Botai people in Kazakhstan c. 3500 – 3000 bc. Domesticated horses for milk and riding.

 

Horses were soon in Mesopotamia but were not widely used. However, horse drawn chariots became crucial to control of the lands of the pharaohs ~1550-1050 bc. and were used by the Zhou in China. Horses were used as gifts between rulers and were objects of sacrifices in the Rig Veda. Horse culture and sacrifice spread rapidly. By ~ 1200 bc. there was sophisticated herding and training across Kazakhstan, China and Mongolia. In Mongolia and across Central Asia there was significant horse raising and riding that took place at a time when the steppes were particularly dry.  Dryland grasses and big areas are particularly good for horse grazing.

 

Dispersed settlements and grazing over big areas created networks of long-distance contacts that encouraged shared beliefs, crops and technologies. By ~ 1500 bc millet wheat and barley spread into mountainous Inner Asia. Horse-riding and competition for pastures and water brought more contact. Agriculture was a part of the pastoralist lifestyle and the engagement with the environment on the steppes helps account for the rise of the nomadic empires – an important part of global history. Steppe societies were efficient, structures and highly successful. They could harass a big Persian army, then retreat into the steppe and live to return another day. And there was trading with city communities. It is not quite true that there were no permanent nomadic settlements. Groups like Xiongnu, Uighur and Liao rose to prominence, controlled vast territories all had large urban areas with gardens, monuments, orchards and irrigation.

 

People living in cities described the nomads in derogatory terms. The interdependence between sedentary and mobile societies is surprising and it is important. Nomads had diary, meat and leather to exchange for luxury goods used for prestige or gifting. Interaction was intense in certain areas. In northern and western China animals were in demand because horses, and also grooms and trainers were all needed. And there was demand for animal products. These were exchanged for silk, gold and bronze ornaments and ceramics. Nomads were able to carry customs technologies and goods over big distances.

Nearness of expanding nomad pastures stimulated sedentary societies to rethink their situation to protect arable land, labour forces and water supplies with fortifications. War and threat of war push the people in their particular society together.

 

Rapid changes occurred across Asia with interplay between agrarian and nomadic societies shaped by sophisticated cavalry techniques and the invention of saddles and stirrups and compound bows. Other parallel developments were bureaucracies, writing systems, education and religions.  Constrained by the limits of the lands, cities grew and merged as nomads grew and developed confederations. War as a benefit for cohesion applied to both groups.

 

Eighty five percent of large empires developed in or close to the Eurasian steppe. Empire in China came almost exclusively from the flat plain steppe that provided the source of all but one major unification event over 3,500 years. In contrast, large states in Europe were rare and short lived. The steppe lands also show where empires did not develop. Herding is successful on those arid grasslands, but not in tropical areas where there is poor pasture and food sources and livestock diseases. Empires struggled to take hold in India. Ecological factor played a role. Rivers were unstable given changing climate patters. Deltas shifted. There was silting up. Quite a number of cities, even major ones, were abandoned in South Asia. There are reports of villages built rapidly and abandoned rapidly in Hindustan. Also, the monsoon climate gave rise to large tropical forests that were difficult to clear. The lack of grasslands made getting horses for military purposes a preoccupation! And the empires tended to centre around the steppes and the lands adjacent to them. Another difference was the disease environment. Tropical climates were crucibles where infectious diseases flourished. The understanding of pathogens in Asia is limited so that work has to rely on studies in Europe and the Americas. Nevertheless, differing geography, ecology and climate provide a backdrop that helps explain how societies developed.

 

There were variations in the S American structures that emerged 2000 years ago with Andean cultures driven by rivalry for resources where war religion and social norms allowed social elites to create overarching identities. Across the gulf og Mexico the Olmec cultures emerged with La Venta as its key city centred on the maize god – food and the basis of intelligent life. Here there was not much interaction between cultures.

 

In West Africa urbanisation developed without capital cities, absorption of states, elites and administrative machinery for centralized power. The Sahel was distinctive. The Tichitt Tradition had dozens of settlements along the escarpments of southern Mauritania by c. 1000 bc. A key environmental change was the drying of the Sahara and the migrations c. 500 bc linked to the Ghanaian empire of c. 300 to c. 1100 bc which had intense local and regional trade interactions.

 

However, the scale of the networks linking the Mediterranean to the Gulf and Red Sea to Central and South and East Asia were a whole different scale – a kind of globalisation. Ancient Jewish texts, for example, feature elephants, pomegranates, ivory and flora and fauna from Asia with Indian wisdom and folktales. Solomon’s resolution of the dispute between two women around parentage of a child appears in a Tibetan translation of the Buddhist Tripitaka. The Song of Songs has loan words from South Asia. Influences from Asia are important in Judaism, Christianity and later in Islam. And trade linked economies. Alexander the Great’s campaigns led to higher prices for two decades.

 

An interwoven maritime world developed. Large shops crossed the Bay of Bengal from 300 bc. But the Austronesians of SE Asia and Oceania mastered the monsoons, sailed the Pacific as far as Easter Island eventually building ~500-ton vessels of ~ 50 metres and transformed the environment with clearing and bringing new plants and animals. The DNA lineages can be traced and also the languages. Humans were not alone. Animal movements too had a major impact on global natural history. It was not just political systems and human society that centralised and consolidated – it included crops, fruits, flowers and animals.

 

Chapter 9, The Roman Warm Period c. 300 bc to c.500 ad. The Roman Empire began with the fall of Egypt led by its Queen Cleopatra who had thrown her lot in with Mark Anthony. In the civil was that followed the murder of Julius Caesar, Octavian, who became Augustus, triumphed over Mark Anthony. Rome built an empire because it was able to outmanoeuvre all competitors. And Rome emerged in a warm and moist 300- year period that was the most intensively productive in the Mediterranean during the last four millennia. This period followed the Okmok volcanic eruption. In China, the Han Dynasty increased centralization and agricultural expansion. In the Mississippi valley techniques for more intensive agriculture began, including water management, crop selection and food storage. In Central America changed river courses brought villages together that led to the astonishing growth of Teotihuacan – a city the size of Rome. A trigger for migration to the city was the eruption of Xitle volcano. This was a time for empires in many places!

 

Rome united many diverse peoples into a single entity. It prospered and extravagant feasts and circuses were noted. Success of empires, states and cities comes at a high ecological cost – the oppressive smoky atmosphere of Rome and the ice core evidence of lead pollution. Deforestation reduced wood supplies in many regions like Tuscany raising concerns of sustainability. Concerns were a tradition around the Mediterranean but also in 3000 year old Vedic texts, 9th century commentaries on the Torah and early modern neo-Confucian scholars. On the other hand, there is some evidence of Roman landowners considering the environment. Yet the logistics of supply for a mega-city like Rome were demanding. Developing new lands for food was difficult and limited by manpower and a slow persuasive process.

 

The Wei Dynasty in northern China attempted to create new farming lands around 386 bc. protecting them with military. They also attempted to upgrade pig farms and drain marshland, but ran into unwilling landowners and theft. Infrastructure worked more easily. In Kush, today’s Sudan, water-supply management and storage plus wells worked to help populations as well as the regime and its taxable revenues. A similar infrastructure around water featured as part of Roman Emperor Constantine’s development of the new capital Constantinople in 330 ad. Tikal in northern Guatemala is another example. It provided an elaborate system of water traps feeding large lined storage tanks. Despite pressures on land usage and exploitation, environmental stress remained surprisingly low and the world 2000 years ago remained remarkably resilient.

 

The time 165 ad to c. 650 ad brought the most dramatic climate change of the Holocene and coincided with Antonine and Cyprian plagues. These sent the Roman Empire into a tailspin and ended the Han dynasty in China with the abdication of emperor Xian in 220 ad. starting a break up into smaller units. In the Persia of 224 ad Ardashir I established a new dynasty with expanded territorites. India began a consolidation that led to the Gupta empire, pre-eminent in South Asia with great scholars, scientists and mathematicians. Climate was not identical across these and usual factors played a big role – like inefficiency and corruption among bureaucrats in the Han dynasty case. Similarly for Rome, the slowdown in economic and cultural activity was not purely climate-caused. Large states could break down with remarkably small pressures from cascading consequences – like the linking of supplies to the Rhine to military presence and military spending. When supply and trade weakened, and grain failed to reach the army, regional economies collapsed and the defence evaporated. The Western empire depended on a strong central management and as it weakened the Western part of the empire collapsed. In the East, where markets had grown organically there was a capacity to deal with difficulties.

 

Climatic changes were more dramatic on the steppes and three periods of drought from 350 – 550 ad , the worst in 2000 year, are linked to large waves of migrations of nomads led by the Huns westward north of the Caspian and Black seas towards the Roman frontier and also south to Persia. These overran Germany, France and Spain reached into Africa and sacked Rome in as 410, with an impact from Egypt to Britain. Changes in the 5th century were less violent that adaptations in diet, lifestyle and farming techniques. Urban centres were suffocated rather than battered in the disappearance of the state and its former central authority. Yet nomads can adapt rather than migrate and climate is not the whole answer. The western pastures of the steppes were known to be gentler. So the move was shift to better lands for survival in a time of crisis. It was not an attack on the bordering empires. It also seems that the El Niño southern oscillation played a role and that between drought there were periods of rain that could be good for nomads. The combination was the phenomenon. The issue becomes a question of what rural populations do when put under pressure.

 

The northern Wei dynasty that ruled norther China from ad 386 faced problems from response of populations because the population moved to the cities. The problem for the Wei was dealing with an unpredictable population in Pingcheng. In ad 486 half the city’s population left in a panic over shortages. Predicting demand was a huge issue. The Wei moved the capital for political reasons as well as to a more ecologically favourable site south. The move was major 6000 temples and 80,000 monks and nuns with heavy investments in Luoy and the Longman complex of caves and shrines to Budha. The breakup of the dynasty, allegedly from too many Budhas, is a warning to keep the balance. Balancing running the state, collecting taxes and protecting the power of elites is important amongst challenges like uprisings, crop failure and climate change.

 

Chapter 10, The Crisis of Late Antiguity, AD c.500 – c. 600. In addition to climate are the related issues of locusts that appear in ancient records including the bible and diseases especially the Justinianic of the 6th century and the Black Death of the 1340s and the Plague of the 17th century. Other pathogens like malaria need examination with climate, hydrology and human activity on a local level. It was not always easy to stay ahead of climate changes. A shift from the favourable conditions in the Andes led to indications of contraction of agriculture. In the SW US water availability in the Second Century Drought affected plans and animals and humans were reduced to melting cave ice for water. Other regions had higher than average rainfall, helping irrigation agriculture links with a boom in monumental architecture in Teotihuacan in the basin of Mexico. However, the end of building and desecration of the Feathered Serpent pyramid in AD 250 seems to be from a reset of the political system. Enhanced rainfall is not a benefit in tropical regions where clearing and maintenance is important for human settlement. The Congo rainforest appears to have been settled in 400 BC but was hard to maintain in AD 1 leading to population decline.

 

The rise of empires could change the landscape, but so could their demise. Rome’s former western empire changed and cultivation of rye grew from 4th to 8th centuries – an ecological change in parallel societal changes like the collapse of trade networks and lower mobility and literacy. Artists regard nature in an idealized managed form. Creating gardens intended to mirror a heavenly paradise – in Constantinople, Byzantine capitol, in Syria, Jordon and Iraq following the Muslim conquest and in Agra, India during the Mughal period. They also reflected the status of the person able to afford such a luxury. The ambiguity of an idealized yet natural environment contrasts with some Buddhist texts that are anti-nature and pro taming nature!

 

Remote deserted places, mountains and caves were where Gods voice could be heard in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  Secluded sites and caves were also important in Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. The fame of individuals who separated from the rest of humanity tended to attract others creating monasteries or complexes of cells that became communities making the isolation and dedication to God more difficult! Indic literatures were poetic about the seasons, especially those bringing rain and they provided some rain-making spells and some spells protecting against crop destroying weather.

 

Yet the idea of controlling the weather belied the experience. The mega-harbour at Caesarea was damaged four times by tidal waves between AD 115 and 1202. Earthquakes and tsunamis like that in AD 365 were devastating. So too were volcanic eruptions like Tierra Blanca Joven in El Salvador AD 431 where everything within 80 miles of the vent would have been destroyed and the global temperature fell 0.5C. There is an open question on what effect climate had on a new wave of human consolidation and the migration of pastoralists like Atilla the Hun a decade later. Some wrote stoically that human populations grow again, yet the period of eruptions AD 530-540 must have seemed apocalyptic at the time – causing the coldest decades of the Holocene. Crop yields, especially on high elevations, are very sensitive to temperature. But there was also the dust that widely dimmed the sunlight needed for growth.

 

There are estimates of a more than 70% population decline north of the Yellow River in China. Extreme cold in south-west North America likely caused the rapid population dispersal at the time which together with warm wet conditions that came later in the century caused major re-organization on the Colorado plain which gave way to new agricultural activities making way for the Ancestral Pueblo culture. There was the greatest change in settlement for 6,000 years as villages were abandoned in Scandinavia and Norse myths on the end of the world evolved. Scholars have seen the impact as related to change in the eastern Roman Empire, the end of the Sasanian Empire, movements in the Asian steppe and Arabian peninsula, the spread of Slavic peoples and political upheavals in China. There were impacts in the Americas, Afica, across South Asia as well as paving the way for the rise of the Muslim Empire.

 

However the transformations are best seen as coming from existing problems that were aggravated. Cities were vulnerable and not only the climate but to flooding, changes of external trade routes, external pressure or a combination. The city of Pätaliputra was considered the greatest in India. By AD 600 it was in ruins from flooding of the Ganges. The ties that had held the Gupta empire together gradually frayed during the 6th century. Those who emerged were those resourceful to take advantage like the Angles and Saxons transitioned from mercenaries in Roman Briton into political dominance. Several other former marginalised groups like the Huns became significant or dominant in their own right. Despite regional variations, communities became more localised and self-sufficient. Hierarchical cities were generally vulnerable.

 

Gupta era scholars wrote about the impacts of dust veils and there is a Jain text of apocalyptic visions. Food shortages and policies featured in Chinese writing at the time of the transition to the Tang dynasty. A ruler must plan for shortages and distribute emergency aid when needed was essentially the advice of Wu Tang around AD 600. Building stopped in Maya Central American territories indicating a big impact and there is evidence of social upheaval in Teotihuacan that left the great city a shadow of its former self by AD 600. Other societies also show decline as people drifted to smaller settlements with a big drop in distribution networks for exchanging goods.

 

In South America the eruptions came with climatic changes complicated by more frequent and more severe El Niño events that seem to have reduced marine supplies, irrigation systems overwhelmed, fall in food production and competition for food and water led to fortifications. Here too there seems to have been reaction against elites and a reversion iconographic motifs linked to their ancestors. However, Wari and Tiwanku expanded from the Andes highlands at the end of the 6th century developing cultural supremecy over much of coastal Peru, Bolivia and northern Chile.

 

Elsewhere, the Christian Aksumite kingdom of Aksum that had dominated the horn of Africa and even sponsored churches in the Arabian peninsula, showed signs of decay by AD 550 with grand buildings in disrepair and abandoned quarries. Scholars point to over settlement, unsustainable depletion of resources and collapse of trade. Climate may have played a role: the dust veil from volcanic eruptions puts pressure on food production and interacts with other social and political factors. However, there is another problem. The cold favours rat survival and flea reproduction so that shipments of grain across the Mediterranean provided networks for transmission of disease. Finally, lack of sun reduces human  vitamin D production that is critical for the human immune system.

 

A written report of plague came from the Egyptian port of Pelusium linking the Mediterranean with the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. In summer AD 541the desease spread to Gaza, across North Africa to Byzantium and then “to the world” according to author Procopius, killing 10,000 people per day in the imperial capital. This Justinianic plague is purported to have killed half the population of the Mediterranean as a whole. But that is questioned and the impact said to be inconsequential. Others say population loss was localized. However, despite some guesswork there are reasons to suspect the plague caused substantial damage because multiple plague strains from this date can be found in France, Spain, Bavaria and Cambridgeshire in the UK. Moreover, there were consistent emergency measures taken in Constantinople relating to shortages of lalbourers. However, it is not clear whether the plague was involved in population loss in the Congo. What seems clearer is that wherever it began this plague seems to have begun around the Mediterranean, arriving only later in Persia and that epidemic disease struck decades later in China.

 

It is clear the climate impact and the plague did not bring down the Roman Empire or even Justinian. Also, there was continuity in many regions in the Mediterranean economy – notably the Sasanian Empire which expanded in the 6th century. Major transformations came from the pandemic. The middle of the 6th century saw major changes in other parts of the world. For example, in Scandinavia and the Baltic there are many cases of land abandoned and a shift from agriculture to animal husbandry. In the complex mix of cold, plague, collapse of trade networks and waning Roman authority, everything changed. Over time this brought a rise of large-scale land ownership and a new super elite setting the stage for the later Viking Age.

 

The traumas of the times led to religious changes. The Virgin Mary emerged as protector of Constantinople. Gregory of Tours wrote of such bad floods that grain could not be sowed, earthquakes, possible meteorite strikes, hailstones and fires. He saw these as signs of the coming of the end of time. However, other sources do not talk of the end of time and rather reveal a rethinking of the divine. Buddhism moved into Korea. Christianity moved into Central Asia and the steppe people. The strengthened authority of the church was significant in the early 7th century when a swift downturn in temperature across the steppes affected another set of revolutions.

 

Chapter 11, The Golden Age of Empires, AD 600 – 900. The early 7th century was constant war between Roman and Persian Empires. In AD 626 Roman emperor Heraclius crushed a huge Persian force at Nineveh and went on to the Shah’s castle at Dastagerd where he extracted booty and took back important Christian items, but at a price. He had entered a humiliating alliance with the western Türkish empire that extended across the steppe.

 

By AD 550 the Türks held a dominant position on the steppes as far as the Korean peninsula. In AD 618 an uprising in China led to the beginning of the Tang dynasty. In the 620s the Türks were plundering northern China and in 626 threatened the capital Xian, one of the largest cities in the world. Chinese emperor Gaosu paid a huge ransom for their departure. However, things changed over 4 years and the Chinese inflicted a devastating defeat – a vast confederation collapsed. In the west also, the Türkish empire collapsed following the murder of the key figure on the steppes. The Chinese had received intelligence from their commander in the northern city of Daizhou of divisions and weakness among the Türks.

 

t seems that a volcanic eruption in the northern hemisphere produced considerable temperature drop on the steppes and a dust veil that slowed vegetation growth. The impact of greater snow falls on the steppes is big for livestock. These problems are worse when they follow a drought. It is likely that there were significant losses of livestock. That produces social consequences and fragility of nomadic political systems – and rapidly. The surprise attack by the Chinese led to heavy casualties and prisoners and the breaking of the Türkish empire in the east that was the making of the Tang empire that expanded into Korea and to the west. Adopting the approach of nomads, the Tang adjusted ceremonies to welcome new members of their empire as equals. The Tang dynasty ruled for 3 centuries.

 

The Roman and Persian wars in the west had disrupted trade and economies reaching into the Arab world. Mohammed’s warning of doomsday struck a chord in the challenging conditions along the trade routes. A world transforming moment came in 628 when Mohammed and his followers reached agreement with the ruling elite in Mecca that prayer was to be directed to Mecca and the Ka’ba shrine within it, paving a way for reconciliation among the various factions in Arabia and a common identity. Mohammed and his followers emerged into a world scarred by war and became the prime beneficiaries of a vast new empire.

 

Around AD 630, Rome and Persia were economically and militarily exhausted. The Türks held the fate of Rome, Persia was on the brink of collapse from a crushing defeat, and the Tang were essentially vassals to the Türks. The timing of the sudden collapse of the Türkish empire in the steppes stalled the creation of an empire bigger than that of the Mogels in the 13th century. Instead, much of the prize fell to Mohammed and his followers who spread Muslim beliefs and Arab culture bonding together the Persian Empire and the most important parts of the Roman – the breadbasket of Egypt, the Harbours of the Levant and the influence of the Mediterranean.  Monuments in the Iberian Peninsula made it more Arabic than Arabia. It underpinned the environmental and ecological changes that had far reaching consequences. It was irrigation techniques and agricultural technologies but also the diffusion of crops and cultivation that knitted together a world culturally joined and linked by tastes for specific foods, flavours and recipes. But apart from crops  and techniques the Arab empire offered peace and manpower.

 

Although succession in the caliphate was a bloody affair, the new masters largely left the populations alone so long as they paid taxes. For the most part transitions were smooth and uncontested. Relying on administration familiar with market and agricultural practices was part of success. Roman and Persian provincial bureaucrats were retained and populations seemed sanguine so long as property rights and beliefs were left alone. In Central Asia the Arabs left untouched the Türkic practice of relying on urban elites to use their positions to protect their own interests. Despite internal friction, there was little competition or threat from outside. The loss of the battle of Talas to the Tang in AD 751 is seen as marking the end of Muslim expansion, but the Pamirs and Himalayas protected the Caliphate from serious pressure from the East. Expeditions into France found little fruit worth taking. The only pushback came from the Byzantine empire that was clinging onto life and made occasional shows of bravado. However, in Anatolia from the mid 7th century regular raiding and rising costs of military defence led to economic decline and lowered living standards that took centuries to correct.

 

In contrast, in territories run by the Arabs a boom time followed as cities swelled, civic life flourished and economic and demographic growth in and between cities. This sparked change in adjacent lands like the steppe to the north. Indian Ocean trade networks began to flourish. Śrīvijaya state on Sumatra grew to control the Melaka strait and by the 7th century was a leading centre for Buddhist scholarship, but a complex body – empire, state or chiefdom. Levels  of exchange grew along the Indonesian islands. Contacts rose and increasing volumes of goods moved linking coastline peoples of the Mediterranean, Red Sea, Indian Ocean, South China Sea, Pacific. New states mushroomed along this route in the 8th and 9th centuries that developed in ‘strange parallels. The Arabs used climate to crudely characterise the many new people with whom they made contact.

 

The conquest of North Africa opened links beyond the Sahara for the Muslim empire and access to trans Sahara gold trade from rich deposits at the headwaters of the Niger and Senegal rivers. The idea that black skin colour was connected to divine punishment caught hold and played a toxic role in justifying slavery. The development of the slave trade went hand in hand with demeaning caricatures. By the 9th century Arab and Berber merchants were active in Goa on the Niger for trade in gold, textiles and ivory.

 

Pressures on the caliphate came from within. The Abbāsid dynasty replaced the Umayyad in the middle of the 8th century but Umayyad rulers continued in Spain from a capital in Córdoba. The golden Islamic age came in waves from different rulers. Science texts were translated into Arabic. Expertise was gained in astronomy and astrology. They were champions of knowledge. Giving support and priviledges to non-muslims was smart politics. Transfer of information, knowledge and technical expertise between China, India , the Middle East and Constantinople was the hallmark of the rivalry of these interlocking Empires. There was an explosion of literacy from the mid 8th century linked to the introduction of paper from China. Wealth and leisure helped create an interest in book production and paying scribes. The blessing of wealth and culture related to a benign climate and the availability of food. Mohammed had been told by God that the obedient would experience gardens of perpetual bliss. Also for Jews and Christians God has a role of provider of benign environment and enough food – indeed mana. God provided resources.

 

Naturally, the bounty of plenty was not only the result of a benign God, but the sign of a good ruler. There was an expansion of irrigation and the oasis settlements and their area rose dispute some resistance to the Muslim arrival. Crop growing developed helped by the arrival of cooler more humid conditions around AD 650 which also helped livestock raising. In the increasing wealth ‘high cuisine’ mattered beyond the rich and powerful to an urban bourgeoisie. There was demand for the best ingredients, where to get them and how to prepare them. There were good hygene practices.

 

Maintaining agricultural sustainability was essential. Climate mattered, but so did water. Also land tax was important and higher than that from trading. Muslim rulers continued surveys of land, made records of hydraulics, irrigations systems and water to maximise returns for the crown. Warmer drier conditions in many parts of Eurasia began around AD 800 which reduced the number of oasis settlements. In addition there was salination not only in central Asia but in the Euphrates floodplain. In addition around 800 wealthy elites used status to increase landholdings and political pressure to reduce tax and increase water allocations. Short term gains hurt long term economic and environmental sustainability. Land tax revenues from Iraq fell 80% undermining undermining leadership ability to build monuments and show largesse.

 

By early 10th century 1/3 of revenue went on the Caliph’s harem, eunuchs and senior court officials. In Baghdad 1019-20 food riots required distribution of grain at subsidized prices. Two decades a serious famine struck with accounts of severe effects on economy and population. These are not always climate or productivity but market expectations. Things could be offset by buying grain from Egypt. But this could command a price above sellable and speculation led to attempted hording to push prices up. One caliph threatened death on hoarders! Reforms to stabilize a secure income by devolving tax gathering rights  further empowered the elites, aggravated dissatisfaction and increased inequality.

 

There was a similar story in Tang dynasty China. Bad climatic events didn’t help, but what resulted in the overthrown of the last Tang emperor in 907 was violently anti-aristocratic feeling and hatred of old families and high officials. It was a closed shop. The wealth did well and the expense of the rest. Appointments were not on merit, but on family connection. By the 870s waste and extravagance at court became more extreme and corruption and dishonesty rife among officials as the poor wandered about looking for food. These gathered into gangs of bandits swarming and often able to defeat soldiers. Weakened by rebellions in the 870s and 80s, strengthened provincial warlords splintered the Tang territories after the murder of Emperor Daizong creating the period of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms.

 

The Maya culture in Central America Had blossomed for many centuries reaching a Symbolic peak with the AD 747 building of Temple IV at Tikal in Guatamala – the tallest building in America before the Spanish. Tikal was an urban centre, one of many cities and polities knitted by trade networks that allowed movements of luxury goods and obsidian. The networks were also linked by political authority held by individuals and family groups Who had some degree of autonomy from each other. There was reciprocal contact with Teotihaucan – 1000 kilometers away but a source of cultural reference. Alliances were held together by officials and diplomats travelling between locations. With ups and downs long term demographic growth was substantial – some city states numbering 10,000 and overall likely over 10 million Maya. Tikal’s importance arose from military victories around the very end of the 7th century.

 

Settlements required significant invested in sophisticated irrigation networks with engineering to maximise water capture from dams to sand filtration. Sophisticated forestry and soil management was necessary to prevent erosion. However there was a protracted drought in the mid 9th century lasting for several decades. This exacerbated rapid deforestation for agricultural land and for wood to bake limestone for quicklime. It helped that the Maya cultivated a range of plants, many of which were drought resistant but there was also rising summer temperature – and that causes a falling yield of maize.

 

Rising violence in the 8th and 9th centuries created instability and put pressure on trade networks. Pressure on rulers led to elaborate rituals and elite competitions with decline in functional state apparatus. There are also questions as to whether the widespread use of cinnabar – which contains mercury – could have placed the poison in water supplies.

 

However, a transition from a highly connected network of densely populated settlements was patchy and slow. The Maya world did no collapse as a whole, rather the framework or skeleton. There were a number of Maya polities when the Spanish arrived 800 years later. Today there are around 9 million Maya. Such changes or declines from a golden age may not be a catastrophe for the population involved. Moreover, long term shifts in climate need not always unravel connections – they can sometimes lead to seizing an opportunity and creating new worlds.

 

Chapter 12, The Medieval Warm Period, c. 900 – 1200. Overall, for Europe circulating warm dry air in the northern Atlantic that resulted in less wet cold summers and less bitterly cold winters. The climate condition had different consequences in other parts of the world. Rainfall in Iran, Armenia and Palestine was below average, but not for part of Syria or Anatolia. Impacts varied even over small areas. In northern China there was rising cultivation of citrus trees, and subtropical plants in Henan province to the south. Globally, six of the ten warmest decades of the last millennium were AD 950 to 1250. Scholars attribute these to sea current oscillations, solar radiance and low tropical volcano activity. Warming Indian and Pacific oceans induced shifts in monsoon rainfall patterns in Africa and South Asia affecting dryness in subtropical Eurasia. San Francisco Bay and coastal Peru had drier than usual conditions. Longer periods of hydrologic drought California to Patagonia and the upper Colorado basin.

 

In the Southern Mediterranean changes were modest. Parts of the Roman Empire that had survived Arab attacks regrouped and centralised control from Constantinople sustained integration and a Roman identity but went through a time of contraction with smaller cities. Exchanges between Middle East, Levant, North Africa and Spain were on a political structure that protected property, administered justice and collected taxes- with difference in scale. Arab Damascus, Cordoba and Frusta were larger centres with more numerous cities than those of the Byzantine world centered on the Aegean, Balkans and Greece.

 

Both areas contrasted with northern Europe where the fall of Rome brought fragmentation. There were brief periods of consolidation most notably during the reign of Charlemagne who France, the Low Countries, Germany and northern Italy that peaked with his coronation as Emperor by Pope Leo II, Christmas Day, AD 800. Otherwise, a lack of long-distance trade and narrowing horizons lasted hundreds of years.

 

Instead, isolated regional emporia such as Verdun, France, developed as trading zones with an internal market. Commerce was between local producers and local consumers. A new baronial class emerged that established authority over labour and land. They faced challenges from each other and competitors like the church. They were a super class trying to keep power in their own hands with kinship groups by marriage that kept assets away from kings.

 

With the barons came innovations that consolidated power as they developed assets and status that was transformational. But medieval society developed many other actors: guilds, urban groups, parishes, regional assemblies and universities. The role of the church evolved to include recipient of endowments and distributor of alms, patronage and influence. The result was a profound transformation of society creating the most significant agricultural expansion since the Neolithic. New technologies such as the horse collar and heavy ploughs that turned heavy clay improved weed control and drainage, boosted yields and required less effort from farmers. The breaking up of larger estates into smaller resulted in social changes for peasantry as well as the baronial class. This set off a chain reaction boosting the size and number of towns, causing specialization and migration, and new comers who were exposed to new customs, fashions and tastes. As long-distance trade networks opened, horizons expanded with concepts like a pilgrimage to Jerusalem –long, risky and expensive it gave kudos to those able to visit sites where Jesus Christ had lived, died and risen.

 

The warming period may have played a role in the move of the Bulgars into the middle Volga around AD 800 when a Volga Bulgarian state opened trade routes fanning to Scandinavia, Byzantium, the Middle East and Central Asia spreading goods and ideas.

 

There were moves elsewhere. Scandinavian people spread across the Atlantic to the Faroe Islands, Iceland and Greenland in the 9th century as the polar ice cap retreated allowing ice free sailing to the northerly migration of fish stocks. Colonization was not easy – there were dozens of volcanic eruptions AD 850 – 1250 some very damaging to plants and animals. Although Norse women were involved in expansions to the Shetlands, Orkneys and northern Scotland, settlers in Iceland were lone men who brought enslaved women from the British Isles. Some went as far as Newfoundland although settlement there was unsuccessful. Trade was high value items - walrus hides and ivory tusks. This changed ecosystems and the impact on finite resources was severe. The local Walrus population of Iceland was wiped out.

 

Starting around AD 800, climate change brought drier conditions to Vanuatu, Simoa, Tonga and Fiji whose inhabitants had arrived 1,500 years before. The climate change brought winds that facilitated exploration to Polynesia’s margins and deliberate and systematic settlement of new locations now took place to the Cook Islands, East Polynesia and the area from Hawai’i, Rapa Nui and New Zealand. Settlement transformed vegetation as land was cleared for crops. But these had greater rainfall than the lands where life was becoming difficult. Projects for rain capture require levels of high cooperation and long-term energy to build and maintain, requiring larger stratified and hierarchical societies.

 

Lifeways changed in other parts of the South during the climate anomaly. Populations of hunter gatherers grew in Australia as benign conditions allowed more people to live safely together. Lake Calabonna was filled by 10-12 times more water than its highest known historical level AD 1050-1100. Higher moisture also arrived in the Caribbean. Because sea levels were also rising, people moved inland but both food surplus and interactions with islands in South America and new plants and animals were introduced and so changed diets. In the American Bottom with the confluence of Mississippi, Missouri and Kaskaskia rivers, one of small settlements and farmsteads, Cahokia, exploded in size and importance with a efflorescence of pottery and other arts.

 

The Anomoly contained differences in region and time and disruptions – the ‘Millenium’ eruption of Changbaishan now on the border of China and Korea 940-50 and some tropical eruption linked to early 12th century crop failure across Europe.  In 1048 the Yellow River breached its bank causing a cataclysmic flood and gouging a 700 km channel to the Gulf of Bohai drowning millions and leaving a terrible famine.

 

Higher rainfall transformed the Pueblo culture in the Four Corners region of the American south-west. With greater food came elite control of resources and ritual, regional trade and political and social centralisation – typified by the Great House system of the Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. Macaw feathers were prized and used in ritual and were imported from Central America.

 

Expansion put pressure on resources but this could be offset. In parts of the Andes near Cuzco fast growing trees that do well in poor soils were planted to reduce erosion and supply timber and hydraulic systems were built. When the Wari arrived they brought new ideas as they expanded their control, building terraced agriculture in the High Sierra, coupled with advanced canal systems to meet demands for water of the Tiwanku, allies of the Wari at Chou Chou. Shifting climate and competition for water become problems. The sack of ChouChou and the collapse of Tiwanku in the 10th century show the dangers. The Chimu, heirs to the Wari, had major infrastructure projects. The biggest canal in the western hemisphere supplied Chou Chou and surrounding areas so that they began to flourish again. The southern highlands of Brazil saw expansion of trade networks and ceramics and a demographic boom between 800 and 1000.

 

The expansions came with falling life expectancies from conflict - reflecting competition for resources. As well, close living spreads disease. It is made worse by domestic animals, rodents, parasites, poor drainage and unhygienic conditions. Those that survived childhood slowly allowed immunity to be built up. There are indications in writings along the Silk Roads, the trading routes from China and India, that small pox was linked to increased contact. From the 5th and 6th centuries there had been a range of ties between India South East Asia and China and evidence of maritime links like Indian communities in Chinese ports. From 900, ties and exchanges increased dramatically with regular monsoons and consistent rainfall for 300 years but for a short interlude 1030-70. More rice production meant demographic growth and a new era of centralised states. A set of empires grew. By mid 1oth century the Song dynasty in China had pulled together large parts of lands from the collapse of the Tang. They forged relations with the Dali kingdom. Merchants joined political decision making. Improvements were made to education and monetary policy. Vibrant market towns formed that were networked nationally and internationally.

 

Dynasties appeared elsewhere: the Chola in India; Pagan in Burma; Ankor of Cambodia; Srivijaya in archipelago Indonesia; and Dai Viet in Vietnam. These linked by trade exchanges and even envoys to China, Arabs lands, Chola India, Srivijaya Sumatra and Champa south-central Vietnam. Chola India played a key role. Their territories were transformed mid-tenth century with grandiose religious institutions and they urged merchants to promote maritime trade. Monetisation was a key step in bureaucratic control over the agrarian economy. Common identity came from the cult of Śiva and efforts to link their genealogy to ancient past and sacred texts. Given heavy dependence on Monsoon rains, they built tanks for water storage and shifted their capital. In Angekor too, massive storage facilities were constructed and hydraulic systems for the huge influx of inhabitants. The city centre was studded with magnificent temples.

 

The interlocking worlds of the Indian Ocean were not new, but the scale was, and the goods shipped spurred interest in other parts of the world as well as trends of standardisation in things like ceramics. Cultures on the coast of Botswana flourished from 8th to 12th century. The Great Zimbabwe flourished in South Africa from the 11th century centred on a settlement surrounded by massive sets of stone walls with soapstone figures of birds with human lips on perimeter columns. The Island of Kilwa was a link to East Africa for ships in the Indian Ocean sailing down the coast in Monsoon winds. Located off Mozambique and its gold mines, Kilwa was a beautiful trading town, but just one of many Muslim towns from Somalia to northern Madagascar.

 

Around the world 800 to 1200 was a period of profound change with migrations, new technologies and lack of major volcanic activity. The drought resistant Champa rice helped protect from climate shocks. These brough landscape changes in East Asia. Cities were homes to millions who brought needs for food water and fuel. Technologies required maintenance and labour demands and costs. Climate changes happened and could change a Judea famous for its rains in Roman times to be arid in mid 12th century when there was also drought in many parts of Central Asia and the Mongolian plains.

 

Climate change could cause population collapse, but so could political infighting and instability. The latter is most likely the central cause of decline of Cahokia in North America, although exhaustion of wood and changes to summer precipitation around 1200 was likely a factor. For Ankor renewed strengthening of maritime connections may have persuaded elites to relocate closer to the benefits and rewards of trade. That left Ankor with a lack of labour, leadership and oversight. Heavy expenditures on temple building and public services was a strain. Moreover, although the impressive hydraulic networks could overcome intense Monsoons and decades long droughts but the variability between these two made planning very difficult. Finally, the excessive construction program of Jayavarnan VII 1181-1218 required enormous funding. By early 14th century Temples were desecrated, artifacts destroyed in a collapse not from climate change. The decline of the Pagan kingdom in South Asia followed the same path. Monastery and temple building shifted power and revenues from secular authorities to religious devotees. It was not just these excesses that ended Pagan and Ankor and better to say they became victims of their own success.

 

For the Norse communities in Greenland ended with shifting consumption patterns in trade, inability to adapt and cooling in the early 14th century. Climate brought shorter growing seasons and conditions demanding for domestic animals. New sources of furs walrus hides and teeth arrived with the linking of Novgorod and Russian cities to the White Sea and demand fell from tastes and cultural changes. The Norse failed to adopt the Inuit Arctic -adapted technologies like  toggle harpoon and kayak and failed to interact with them. Indeed the Inuit attacked the Norse communities in demoralising raids.

There had been a reconfiguration of global climates in 800 and things changed 4 centuries later. By the late 12th century these reached the pacific rim. Wetter conditions coincided with a new wave of migrations and settlements from Polynesia to Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. Also there was a contact between Polynesian and South American population  groups. Reasons were complex but climate was one of the factors. Settlement brought ecological change: deforestation; collapse of animal species; damage from domestic animals and Pacific rats. Many Pacific islands were becoming precarious by the late 13th century  - growing storms; falling sea levels and rapid reduc tion in food sources in coastal areas. Trading in pearl oysters came to an end for Cook Islanders. Fishing declined sharply on Easter Island. In New Zealand the drop in temperatures meant sweet potatoes brought by the first settlers would no  longer grow. Living spaces that coastal embayments had provided became lakes or swamps on the Solomon Islands.

 

So globally, the Middle Ages means more than the European perspective of kings, barons, peasants churches and guilds. Taken as a whole, 800-1250 was a time of profound deepening of connections within interlocking independent worlds in Asia, Africa and Europe or with communities in the Americas that emerged as central if independent hubs, One could argue that as dynasties, empires or states rose and fell new competitors emerged that could supply goods more quickly and more cheaply. Ecological equilibrium and environmental sustainability underpinned kingdoms, states or regions. Reliable food and water supplies were at all times central.

 

Chapter 13, Disease and the Formation of a New World, 1250-1450. The 12th century saw the Song dynasty and other states emerge across East, South and South-East Asia benefitting trade as well as competition. Relationships could be unstable. In 1127 Kafeng, one of the largest cities in the world, was sacked by Jürchen nomads and disruption extended to the steppes where the Mongols were treated very badly. That changed in the late 12th century with the rise of Temüjin who consolidated power 1180-1190. By 1206 he called an assembly of the mongol elites and groups he had defeated and was proclaimed the supreme ruler with the title Genghis Khan. By his death in 1227, he had toppled states and dynasties in China, Korea, Central Asia, but not Japan. A decade later Mongols had reached Europe.

 

Mongols relied on extreme violence to control and intimidate, mobile scouts for identifying targets, brilliant information gathering, new battle techniques and innovation in battle. Part of this may have been the rainy period 1211-1225 in Mongolia giving abundant grasses and allowing enormous increases in their livestock herds. Also, multiple “machine-gun” type eruptions of successive volcanoes in the late 1220s caused drops in temperatures causing food shortages in Korea and Japan followed by an epidemic. Around the same time in Novgorod, Russia, crops were destroyed by frost leading to starving. In that light, the Mongols victories seem less glorious.

 

The Mongol administrative and bureaucratic structures put in place to manage the territories assembled were impressive in scale and efficiency, for example a post service. They incorporated local elites. The climate dryness gave them an urban demographic contraction, especially in Central Asia. The Mongols “Pax Mongolica” saw an intensification of trade across Europe and Asia, and they built many new cities – notably Karakorum. However, the rise of the Mongol Empire is linked to the expansion of pathogens and disease. There were many casualties in their assaults on Kaifeng 1232 and Baghdad in 1258 to establish control of East and West Asia, that could have involved diseases. The spread of Mongol fashions and dietary preferences through things like rodent marmots that could have moved pathogens from their natural habitat into eventual contact with humans.

 

The eruption of the Samalas volcano in Indonesia in 1257 caused intense monsoons in Asia, drought in the western flank of the Americas and unusual and unpredictable conditions of strong storms and intolerable heat in England where Henry II faced a food crisis. The mid decades of the 13th century had more volcanic activity that coincided with low solar magnetic activity, an El Nino and Asian Monsoon and North Atlantic Oscillations. Higher moisture levels in the Pacific South American coast and North America, ended droughts in both areas. From the 1280s, a sudden drop in monsoon rainfall in South and Southeast Asia played a role in harvest failures. Weather became unsettled in north-western Europe risking food supply and the spread of disease. Repeated reports of crop failure and famine came from Scotland, England and Ireland in the 2nd half of the 13th century. The sea was unfruitful. There was a fall in revenues from English fairs and overseas trade fanning dissent against Edward I of England.

 

The century following 1260 in East Asia saw drops in temperature and harsh conditions in the 1270s, 1310s and 1350s. For China 1300-60 had almost constant disasters like super typhoons. In 1308 snowstorms in the Mongolian steppe killed numbers of livestock leading a million people to migrate south. The Chinese emperor’s power was affected by this and its consequences - a huge fall in imperial revenues. Many parts of the Middle East had freak weather like intense destructive storms in Damascus and Aleppo. A huge food crisis came from back-to-back harvest shortfalls 1315-17 in northern and central Europe from cold temperatures. An estimated 10-15% of the population died from hunger and related diseases. Such shocks produced unrest. In 1320 a mob of men women and children gathered and rampaged across France attacking castles, crown officials, priests and lepers before targeting Jews in particular across Languedoc. Antisemitism had a long history, notably visible during the passage of members of the First Crusade in cities on their way to Constantinople and Jerusalem in the mid 1090s.

 

Pogroms in 1320 follow a pattern of persecution linked to shorter growing seasons!  In Egypt in 1321, churches and monasteries were attacked. Christians were accused of trying to set fire to mosques. Despite the Traumatic 2nd and 3rd decades of the 14th century, urban populations were surprisingly resilient. Florence, Pisa and Lucca were hit repeatedly with food shortages, inflows of country people and food cost increases between 1314 to the 1340s. Ironically, the climate was not the worst of the early 14th century. A bovine pestilence flowed along the Mongol roadways to ravage Europe from 1315 -1320 throughout Germany, France, Holland Denmark and Britain killing 2/3 of the livestock. This added to food shortages but also affected the economies and work demanded of farm labourers. It is possible that climate conditions and the bovine pestilence weakened resistance for the Black Death. When bad weather, crop failure and disease came in the 1340s it struck with a vengeance.

 

The Mongol expansion reorganised the ecology in the steppes and beyond to meet increased demands for pasture. Settlement areas that had grown mulberry trees and vines with grain fields were now pastures. Damp mild weather encourages grass growth and that expands populations of rodents. Lack of rainfall 1336-39 sharply reduced vegetation and put pressure on rodents. It made them more susceptible to fleas carrying pathogens. A sharp spike in Syriac Christian burials marked “death through pestilence” in the Chu Valley, Kazakhstan, 1338-9 is evidence of a zoonotic crossover from rodents to humans by fleas seeking new hosts to spread the bacterium.

 

It was not easy for plague to spread when so far removed from human population centres. Many vectors likely combined – including animals that live with humans around their tables, rats, rabbits, cattle, camels, goats and sheep as well as predator birds and scavengers. The bacterium can survive in flea faeces in soil and plants for plague transmission and can persist in rat colonies for a hundred years. Cities like Constantinople experienced more than 320 outbreaks in the years following the 1340s.

 

The biggest spreaders were humans using the world trade routes created by the Mongols. Grain shipments likely played a part in the Black Death getting to Europe, Africa and the Middle East in the 1340s. Worsening growing conditions in Italy including a 1338 locust infestation 1338 led to grain imports from the Golden Horde on the Black Sea. Trade had just resumed with the Golden Horde in 1337 after years of suspension. For Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, 40-60% of the population died – the highest mortality of any large-scale known catastrophe - save for small pox and measles for indigenous peoples on first contact.

 

The plague spread in Europe unevenly- high in France, low in Netherlands and Belgium. The impact was terrible in Alexandria and Cairo. Preventative efforts and better dealing with waste disposal and burials did little. Moreover, the plague came at a time of wars: France-England, Florence-Pisa, Byzantines-Ottomans, Golden Horde-Persia and Levant. China, East Asia, South Asia, Central Asia the Middle East, North Africa and West Africa were all affected although records outside Europe are more limited.

 

The Egyptian labour force for irrigation and canal maintenance was devastated, but elites protected their interests stifling social mobility and innovation and leading to long-term stagnation. In Europe generally a social revolution began as peasants and labourers were in a better bargaining position. That translated into better living conditions. England’s emerging elites built bigger houses and enclosed lands. Ironically, a genetic mutation that helped save survivors is now associated with autoimmune conditions like Crohn’s disease. Systems to detect the plague had mixed success. Milan monitored. Northern Italy had a devastating outbreak in the 1360s. In 1524 half the population of Milan was killed – a setback for 200 years.

 

Chapter 14, On the Expansion of Ecological Horizons, 1400-1500. The aftermath of the Black Death saw new states, new worlds and new interactions. There was almost incessant fighting like the Hundred Year’s War between England and France in Europe. with military and bureaucratic innovation like centralisation of power and professionalism in raising taxes and armies and controlling budgets. The Dukes of Burgundy expanded politically and territorially into a commercial and culture powerhouse in western Europe forging treaties with England and companies and magnates across the low countries like Bruges and Ghent. In the East the Grand Duchy of Lithuania’s pre-pandemic victories were complimented by Kulikovo in 1380, territory south to the Black Sea and invasion of Crimea in 1398. A Serbian empire took shape in the 1340’s leading to Bosnia and Dalmatia.

 

The Ottomans established a foothold in Europe in the early 1350s which opened the Balkans to them with Maritsa 1371 and Kosovo in 1389 and finally, the taking of Constantinople in 1453. By 1529, they were poised to assault Vienna, but the city was saved by heavy rain. This seems to have shortened conflicts by half from the early 16th century to 1600 – remarkable considering this was the time of the Reformation and separating of Protestant and Catholic communities. The Ottomans may have helped establish a coherent Protestantism, profoundly influencing the religion, politics and economy of Europe. The Ottomans also conquered the Safavids of Persia at Tabriz in 1514 going on to take Egypt in 1517 building an empire spanning three continents – Europe, Africa and Asia. The Ottomans expanded to the East and into Europe with maritime routes into the Red Sea and Indian Ocean occupying Aden, Mocha and Basra and controlling the coast of Sudan and Eritrea. TheIny gathered information on people and places like Sri Lanka and Melaka.

 

The Solomonic dynasty in Christian Ethiopia expanded and consolidated the largest political entity in the Horn of Africa at the time, sending diplomatic missions to Venice Rome Valencia Lisbon and other cities. In the 1440’s a delegation met the pope and others at the Council of Florence.

 

This was also a time of discovery for others. Sailors from Oceania in double hulled sailing canoes leap frogged across a sea of islands that connected people ecologies and resources.

 

In East Asia, with climatic pressure from the 1320 there was famine, disease and drought so bad that Anhui province in China split as uprisings grew against the Yuan dynasty criticized by a poor peasant Zhu Yuanzhang who galvanised the despairing so that by 1350 he was a leading force in a growing revolt.By 1368 he had deposed the Yuan and become head of an empire and dynasty named Ming – brightness. Hongwu as Zhu named himself banned seaborne commercial traffic, reserving that for the imperial court and officials. For the first half of the 15th century fleets sailed under the command of Zheng He, among other activities, guaranteeing the safety of Muslims. Zheng He travelled coasts of India and Sri Lanka, South East Asia including Java and even East Africa. In Java the Ming exchanged diplomats with the flourishing Majapahit kingdom that had developed its our links throughout a region from the tips of Thailand and Malaya to Sumatra and across the Sulu archipelago.

 

Global climate records for the 2nd half of the 14th century and early 15th are quiet. It seems this was a long period of stability with few upheavals or big shocks. Black Death had lowered land usage and it was a time of continuity in Asia, Europe and Africa.

 

In Polynesia, the Togan island of Tongapatu centralised authority making social changes – essentially serfs under a small group of elite under the Tu’i Tonga. New mounds altars and a massive tomb complex. Other islands saw changes of material culture and rising levels of imports, new chiefly lineages and new rituals – at least a spread of Tongan culture. Hawai’i, first settled in AD 1200, stopped receiving voyages at around the 15th century, leaving it isolated until the 18th century.

 

In the early 15th century the Aztecs built a new empire in central Mexico by war and diplomacy. The empire was built around water control with a network of canals around the capital Tenochtitlan on Texcoco lake then across central Mexico. In the 1450s a decade of climate problems – frosts, droughts, locusts, crop failures – led to terrible starvation. That led to upgrades in canals and aqueducts and more land for cultivation. Drought in the Yucatan linked to collapse in 1461 at Mayapan, then the largest Maya city. In South America the Chimu increased control over more people and territory in the early 1200s. In 1310 they moved to Farfan establishing a provincial capital at Manchan. A mass sacrifice of around 1450s just north of Chen Chen on the western Peruvian coast. These were typically to appease gods after bad weather events. From around 1400 the Inca were successful in building the largest empire in the Americas before the Europeans. They used alliance building, intimidation and force, overcoming the Chimu in the 1470s. Warm weather helped open up farming in higher altitudes like their capital, Cuzco. Investing in agricultural terracing, agroforestry techniques and crops of high seed protein and oil helped. They developed regional exchange networks and also an enormous road program with a royal highway complete with way stations and relay runner posts. The roads played an important role following the Spanish conquest.

 

The 14th and 15th centuries there were transitions, expansion and exploration. However Cahokia in the fertile lands of the American Bottom had begun a decline by 1400. Among many suggestions, it is most important to note that its use as a political centre declined over the decades of cultural and socio-economic changes. A decentralization of power led to local elites with their own residential areas and group mounds and rivalries and conflicts. In Brazil and southern Africa there were similar changes.

 

Then Timur emerged as successor of the Turco-Mongols, masters of much of Asia. In the turn of the 15th century, he assembled a centralised empire based at a capital in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, that was filled with architectural jewels. His brutal sack of Delhi in 1398 caused the breakup of a sultanate controlling much of the Indian subcontinent and enabled a blossoming of city states with regional interactions. The fall of the Yuan Dynasty in China similarly allowed reform in 1390s Korea to more equitably distribute land. In 1428 a similar more equitable land distribution to protect peasant and public lands following the Dai Viet defeat of the Ming in Vietnam.

 

The trade expansions were not by royal command but were led by merchants and a desire to own so that portraits in the European renaissance could be viewed as a celebration of ownership – seeds of a capitalist worldview and important for ecology and the environment. Clearing forests for agriculture and fuel wood is an ancient example but concerns emerged over renaissance Europe.

 

Portuguese horizons expanded with voyages down the Western coast of Africa and to Atlantic island groups like Madeira, the Canaries and the Azores. Sugar plantations on Madeira used Muslim then African forced labour and slaves. The voyages were for trading and the king supported them. Columbus failed  to get their backing for  a trip across the Atlantic, but got it from Ferdinand and Isabella of Castile and Aragon and said from Spain in 1492 discovering Hispaniola and Cuba. Venetian John Cabot sailed from Bristol in 1497 found Canada and the rich fishing waters of the North Atlantic. By 1502 cod had been brought to Europe and sold profitably. However, conditions in the Americas were harsh – even the American tropics were cooler than the African latitudes.

 

Myths about the Americas developed. European travellers and settlers paid no attention to indigenous people but saw virgin lands ripe for exploitation. Some of the earliest, conquistadors were motivated by rewards of moveable wealth – gold, silver and jewels pillaged from Aztecs and Inca. Later, the Americas became landscapes for exploitation. That was done rapidly and cruelly with slavery and shipment. Plantations could have been developed in West Africa more cheaply and in a less harsh climate. A likely reason why Africa was not developed was the deadly fevers of malaria and yellow fever that Europeans had immunity to, and that the political systems in West Africa were highly developed so incursions could be resisted and colonization not easy. Add to these misinformation, elevated expectations and the push to further discoveries and there was colonisation of the Americas.

 

Chapter 15, The Fusion of the OId and the New Worlds, 1500-1700. Within 5 years of Columbus’ trip West, Vasco da Gama had sailed around the tip of southern Africa then across the Indian Ocean to Kerala India. Others followed further into Asia. Intended or not plants and animals were planted into new locations. Todays European and Asian meals feature tomatoes, paprika, pineapple, chillies, peanuts and potatoes from America in a revolution that harnessed and exploited resources that changed landscapes, ecosystems and human settlement patters. Global empires emerged. Vast sugar plantations crept around the world with colonisers: Madeira, Brazil, Caribbean islands like Cuba, Java, Taiwan, Mauritius, Fiji. And this was repeated for cotton, coffee cacao, rubber, timber, furs and others.

It began with forcibly seizing terrain, turning it to cash crops, finding labour to plant, grow and harvest - or extract resources. It needed to set up transportation logistics and institutions to protect rights at source and in transit and to create markets with growing appetites and increasing discretionary spending power. The motor for this was merchant capital in interests and the colonial expansions brought misery and injustice to so many. Those benefitting determined to protect their assets, minimise tax and minimise the interference of the king to interfere with “trade”.  Northern Europeans were more effective politically and so economically.

 

The first arrivals aimed for moveable wealth gold jewels and fine objects and quickly turned to Aztecs and Incas that had the most lucrative spoils. These empires were dismantled by small numbers of men looking for fame and fortune. Their success came from military technologies honed by centuries of European warfare – firearms and horses. Thy were also able to exploit differences with rivals among the ruling elites and to forge alliances. Precious metals flooded out of the Americas. After this initial plundering, a different model was required to extract revenue through crops or mining such as from Pelosi that accounted for half global silver production for more than a century – based on mass labour.

 

Although not much discussed and disapproved by the Queen and clerics, many millions of the local population were put into bondage to work for the Europeans. Despite edicts of the King and a papal bull, there was a disconnect between the colonial theory and practice on the ground.

 

Some fierce local resistance to newcomer settlements in Hispaniola resulted in food shortage and the bringing to the Americas of familiar crops and familiar domestic animals, especially pigs. In addition to the impact soil erosion from forest clearing and overgrazing on the quality of the land, the impact of new plants and animals on local species was enormous. Also were the seeds and weeds. Then there were pathogens.

 

Local populations had n experience with a range of diseases brought by Europeans leaving them immunologically defenceless. Smallpox and measles were devastating. Then there was a variety of salmonella that also killed some Europeans. The outbreaks were periodic. That in the 1540s killed 80% of the population; that in 1576 45%. Moreover, the diseases were compounded with enforced labour and malnutrition.

 

Vast regions were devastated by greed leaving no record of their previous inhabitants. Expeditions into New Mexico in the 1540s involved violence, rape and torture. Competition for shelter between new arrivals and local peoples resulted in displacement of local people, burning of homes and pillaging of fuel. Invaders were ill-equipped for extreme cold with food shortages and looting of blankets and turkeys. In 1599 soldiers and auxiliaries massacred close to a thousand men, women and children at Acoma Pueblo. Extremely cold weather in the 1540s played a part, while alternativng droughts and storms filled the last decades of the 16th century when eruptions of several volcanos brought cooling across Eurasia and North America. 1601 was the coolest summer in 2000 years.

 

The late 17th century brought one disaster after another to North America. The Spanish wondered whether the territories were worth holding onto – Florida was a wasteland. The first English colony at Roanoke North Carolina failed and colonists were massacred or starved or fled. Not everywhere was the same. The Iroquois in the east shifted from cold sensitive beans to deer hunting – with some competition for hunting grounds. Othe Iroquois migrated relying on clan and kinship links. Algonquin and Potomac concentrated power in the hands of a hereditary elite departing from earlier organisation. The histories of indigenous populations were not framed by interactions with Europeans. However in regions conquered or dominated by settlers the scale of demographic collapse was astonishing. The population of the valley of Mexico was home to 1.5 million around 1500, was 325,000 by 1570 and 70,000 in 1650. The massive reduction in land use had an effect on CO2 levels, global surface air temperatures in the 16th and 17th centuries. However, climate change theories from the human deaths rely on more assumptions that the more likely reasoning based on the volcanic eruptions.

 

The dividends from the new world were the foods such as sugar so that settlement was not an accident but a desire to exploit the new landscapes for wealth. That required a workforce to plant, grow harvest and process cash crops year-round. From the beginning Europe saw forced labour and slavery as the solution. In Brazil, thousands were enslaved to work on sugar plantations, some enslaved by expeditions into the interior of Bahia. The large-scale population loss of those living in the Americas posed a problem. The Italians and Portuguese had learned to use Africans on islands in the Atlantic like the Canaries. By the early 16th century Africans were being transported from one side of the Atlantic to the other. With this came fears of Muslim Africans who might play roles in indigenous uprisings.

 

North American lands were considered valuable and a potential source of profits For England and protection against Catholic rivals and other enemies by Queen Elizabeth I.  After early attempts in the 1580s, colonists established themselves in Virginia, New England, Bermuda, Barbados and the Leeward islands. Populations were small. More travellers at sea became captives of the Moors in North Africa! However, the flow of settlers rose throughout the 17th century. The rewards of agriculture came not through forced labour, but by cooperation and trade. Another wave of disease fell on the indigenous population made competition less intense and cooperation easier. Much commentary on the New World was whimsical and wrong.

 

The use of indentured labour went alongside slavery to solve the labour shortage – especially for the plantation areas. For England and  somewhat for Frnace, the availability of a labour force willing to cross the Atlantic was part of a wider socio-economic story. Improvements in agriculture and gains in production meant shortages of work for the peasantry. Merchant capital connected the surplus to the demand for workers offering opportunity and travel with 5-year indenture contracts and a lump  payment at the end. Some wrote of this as filling the New World with the scum of the people, others thought it desirable to have potential trouble makers from the British Isles overseas. For those who went, the indenture provided a credit mechanism – to borrow against future returns for labour. Planters were pleased with the mix of  slaves and indentured. In Barbados the whites outnumbered the slaves. But some of the Africans were valued for their special skills – like managing livestock, or mining, or metalwork. The use of slaves, indentured or otherwise unfree characterised Europe’s engagement with the worlds they had found in the Americas. The extraction .....


TO BE CONTINUED ...  

 

 
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