The Origins of the Modern World: A Global and Ecological Narrative from the Fifteenth to the Twenty-first Century

The world began to change in drastic ways upon the creation of two new “links.” The first such link was the establishment of contact between Eurasia and the Americas with the voyage of Christopher Columbus. The second link was forged when the Spanish established a colony on the Philippines, which provided a gateway between the Americas, Europe, and East Asia. These links created what Marks describes as the “first globalization.” In addition, empires grew across Eurasia, though the European nation-state eventually replaced empires as the predominant form of government. Influencing these developments was the Little Ice Age, a cooling climate event that began sometime around the 14th century and probably lasted until the 19th century. The colder weather strained agricultural production, forcing governments to do more to extract wealth and in turn worsening social conflicts and tensions. In this environment, five great empires grew: the Ottomans, Russia, Safavid Iran, Mughal India, and China. Their systems were “expansive and successful forms of organizing political economies over vast territories in the period from 1550 to 1775” (73). Nomads, historically the major threat to empires, were completely crushed by the 18th century.

The empire model likewise existed in Africa and the Americas (specifically the Aztecs and the Incas). In Central and South America, the Aztec Empire depended on tribute from subjugated peoples. The Incan political system required them to frequently expand. Both empires by 1500 were successful. The capital of the Aztec Empire, Tenochtitlán, was one of the world’s largest cities and had a population of 250,000. Nevertheless, the Spanish conquistadors Hérnán Cortés and Francesco Pirazzo overthrew the Aztec and Incan empires, respectively. Marks attributes the conquistadors’ success to a combination of superior weaponry such as steel swords and guns as well as the spread of smallpox. Nonetheless, the conquest was not a singular event. Indigenous American resistance continued and “has not ended” (78).

During the Columbian Exchange, people and natural products came from the Americas to both Europe and Asia. This exchange had some positive impacts, such as potatoes coming to China from the Americas and allowing peasants to sell rice instead of just living off of it. However, it also spread European diseases like smallpox, cholera, influenza, and chicken pox, which decimated Indigenous populations in the Americas. So many people died in the Americas and stopped tending to their own farms that it may have reduced greenhouse emissions and contributed to the Little Ice Age. In addition, the Spanish also found massive amounts of silver in South America. Silver was needed for two reasons. One, because Spain was ruled by the Hapsburg dynasty, which claimed not only Spain but territories in Austria, the Netherlands, and Italy, Spain had to fight many wars such as against Dutch rebels in the Netherlands. As Spain spent its supply of silver on wars, that silver went to Dutch arms merchants, then to Italian and English bankers, and was next spent on trade expeditions in East Asia. As a result, “three-quarters” of silver from the Americas from 1500 to 1800 ended up in China, which needed silver for its currency.

However, Marks argues that this trade went both ways. Clothing made in China was more common in the Americas after European colonization than clothing made in Europe or locally. Indian cotton textiles likewise posed a serious threat to Britain’s own textile industry. Meanwhile, in the Americas, Europeans developed a plantation system, originally to produce sugar on an industrial scale but later to produce tobacco and cotton. Unable to secure enough labor from European migrant workers or from Indigenous Americans, whose familiarity with the terrain made it easier for them to escape and whose numbers were low because of disease, European plantation owners, starting with the Portuguese in Brazil, enslaved African people. The plantation system caused lasting ecological damage, deforesting several Caribbean islands and inadvertently creating wetlands that helped spread malaria and yellow fever, brought to the Americas from Africa. By the time the slavery trade was outlawed in the 19th century, an estimated 12 million enslaved people had been brought from Africa to the Americas. Slavery and the plantation system created two trade triangles. One sent raw materials to England, which used them to make processed items to trade in Africa for more people to enslave. In the other, rum produced in North America was traded for African people to enslave on Caribbean sugar plantations, which produced the molasses that North America needed to make rum.

Colonization encouraged massive migrations around the world. Many migrants were single men who formed relationships and had children with native women, establishing new cultures and communities. A major exception were the English colonies in North America, to which entire families migrated. Meanwhile, the Little Ice Age caused crops to fail, which continued to feed into political and social unrest across Eurasia, especially in the 17th century. In Europe, this culminated in the Thirty Years’ War, which lasted from 1618 to 1648 and involved almost all European nations. The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the war, “defined what it meant to be the ‘sovereign’ of a state and began the process of institutionalizing the multistate system—albeit one defined by ‘the rules of war’—that came to define Europe” (91). Thus, Marks argues that in Europe warfare led to the rise of the nation-state and, as stronger states expanded and consolidated, to the disappearance of smaller countries.

The need of European nations, which were still generally poor, to pay for these wars led the states to develop large bureaucracies and to build up banks. Throughout this period, the idea of government legitimacy in Europe shifted from a monarch appointed by God to a more democratic state where political legitimacy came from the nation’s citizens. Additionally, the state became more involved with traders, banking, and manufacturing industries and vice versa. This fed into the economic theory of mercantilism, which held that governments should accumulate resources and manipulate trade in a way that benefits only their nation as much as possible. Mercantilist policies included putting taxes, called tariffs, on all imported goods and requiring that colonies trade only with their mother country. By the 1700s, Spain went into decline, and the dominant powers in Europe became France and Britain. The competition between these two powers resulted in the Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763. This war ended in a French defeat, which greatly strengthened Britain’s colonial empire. However, India’s Mughal Empire and China were still richer and stronger than Britain.