The Iberian expansion did not pass unnoticed in northwestern
Europe; if
the Spanish could join in, why not others? The English king was already
backing expeditions across the Atlantic in the late 1490s, and his
French counterpart followed suit in the 1520s. Although their initial
efforts did not have much effect, by the seventeenth century the
northwestern Europeans—the French and, still more, the English and the
Dutch—had taken over much of the commercial and naval role of the
Iberians. This was based in part on a new and more effective naval
technology ancPin kart on economic advantages. Though the Portuguese
retained some of their outposts, naval dominance on the Indian Ocean
was largely lost to the newcomers. In the New World the Spanish held on
to their territorial empire, as did the Portuguese in Brazil; but the
English and Dutch played an increasing role as interlopers, whether as
pirates or as traders.
The participation of these new peoples in the European
expansion
certainly increased its impact on the non-European world. The
establishment of colonies in temperate North America and eventually
Australia greatly extended the range of European settlement (the former
were remarkable not only for their early attainment of independence in
1776-83 but also for their proceeding to constitute themselves a
republic). At the same time the non-European parts of the Old World
were exposed to empire builders better able, or eventually more
disposed, to conquer indigenous territorial states. But the fact is
that down to about 1800—which is as far as we need look in this
chapter—the only part of the Old World where this had actually happened
on a large scale was India. Here in the second half of the eighteenth
century, against the background of the collapse of the Moghul hegemony
and the rivalries of the European powers, the British laid the
foundations of the first western European territorial empire to appear
in Asia or Africa. They also set about the first serious study of
Indian culture since Binini (the Bhagavad Gatti was translated into
English in 1784).
All in all, the Eurasian maritime expansion was a clear
instance of an
accident waiting to happen. Sooner or later, some Eurasian people was
bound to intrude into the New World and the Antipodes, with shattering
effects on their existing populations. In the event, the intruders were
western Europeans; but we should probably not think of this outcome as
deeply determined by the course of Eurasian history. Nor should we see
the gap between the western Europeans and other Old World populations
of this period as a chasm. In the middle of the seventeenth century the
Omanis, the Muslim tribal population of southeastern Arabia, happened
to capture some European ships at the end of a long struggle against
their infidel Portuguese enemies. At their ruler's behest, they used
the ships to establish an Omani navy, and went on to engage in
commerce, warfare, and colonization in the western Indian Ocean; they
did so with a zest that put them at least in the same league as the
Portuguese.
If the inhabitants of an arid corner of Arabia could
join the maritime
club in this fashion, then surely the denizens of more favored lands
could have done so too. As we have already seen, the extent of Chinese
and Japanese maritime activity in the sixteenth century was
considerable. There were many more Chinese than Spanish in Manila when
the Chinese rebelled against their Spanish rulers in 1603; there were
also a good many Japanese, who played their part in suppressing the
Chinese rebellion but themselves threatened revolt in 1606. Indeed, one
nightmare scenario entertained by a Spanish governor in Manila in 1605
was that the Japanese would update their navigation and gunnery through
contact with the Dutch, and then mount an invasion of the Philippines.
This did not happen, though in 1616 one rich Japanese made an abortive
attempt to conquer Taiwan. For in contrast to the rulers of Oman, those
of China and Japan did not throw the weight of the state behind an East
Asian maritime expansion. In 1567 the Chinese state finally abandoned
its policy of trying to suppress Chinese participation in overseas
trade, and instead began to tolerate it; but it did not go so far as to
support it. In Japan feudal anarchy through much of the sixteenth
century meant that merchants and pirates could find a variety of local
patrons; but the restoration of central government led in due course to
the suppression of Japanese maritime activity, not to its
encouragement. Although such policies can be explained in terms of the
geopolitical structure of East Asia and the traditional agrarian focus
of Confucian political culture, the fact remains that at least in the
Japanese case the outcome was by no means inevitable. The point is not
trivial. Had East Asian mariners received the vigorous backing of their
rulers in the early modern period, the world we live in today would be
a significantly different place. For a start, the ethnic makeup of the
Pacific Rim might be overwhelmingly East Asian (a type of impact the
Omanis could not have had in the purely Old World environment of the
western Indian Ocean). The plain truth is that a large part of the
world was up for grabs. That the western Europeans got so much of it is
a distinctly contingent fact.
