Class 10. Global Empires (3)
I want to convey this because it helps us to see a moment
where we have the Golden Horde,
we have the Europeans in the 14th century,
and we have a very important change,
which is that roughly a third of Western Europe is going
to die of this disease.
So roughly a third of the population
is going to be wiped out.
And this is very important for our Age of Exploration,
which is what we're trying to set up now.
After so much of the European population is wiped out
and avenues are cleared for innovation...
This is an optimistic story
of what happens after a plague, by the way.
So after avenues are cleared for innovation
and social advancement and after traditional barriers
for changing ways of life are broken
because of all of the death and disease,
then you have this incredible European century
of revival after the Black Death.
Meanwhile, dun-dun-dun!
Something very important happens in Byzantium in 1453,
which is that... - The Ottomans take it over.
- Yeah, it falls.
Finally, right? Finally.
Okay, from the West European point of view,
it's a thousand years late, but...
And a thousand years, let's face it, as a long time.
A thousand years late, but it finally falls in 1453.
And it falls to the Ottoman Empire, which is an entity
which we're going to cover in the next lecture.
The Ottoman Empire is very important for Ukraine.
In all these relationships,
which in our reading tend to look like Poland and Russia,
you know, west and east, the hard part
to force into the story is the southern part,
which is the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean Khanate,
and I'm going to try to force that in in the next lecture,
because none of it makes sense without the Ottoman Empire.
But the Ottoman Empire takes over Byzantium,
replaces Byzantium.
Istanbul becomes Constantinople,
and I was reminded by one of, like,
the many people who now email me about this class
that They Might Be Giants did not write that song.
Okay, I know they didn't write the song.
I was looking for, like, some reference
which maybe you guys would possibly get.
Probably failed.
But anyway, Istanbul rather than Constantinople,
and what this means for Europe...
And this is where we get
to our world historical turning point.
What this means for Europe
is that the Ottoman Empire now controls
the standard trade routes to Asia.
And because the Ottoman Empire
controls the standard land routes to Asia,
if you're in a reviving Europe
and you need those trade routes, what do you do?
You do crazy things.
Like, if you're England, you say,
"Hmm, maybe I could find a passage to China
through the Arctic Ocean," right?
And then you find Russia instead.
Oh, and by the way, I mean,
this is another example of globalization.
When the Russians sweep through Asia,
basically in a hundred years,
I mean, it's incredibly fast,
they're doing that in part because they have access
to European technology, namely the musket, right?
The musket. Very simple gunpowder weapons.
They have access to that because they also have contact
with the Atlantic World.
The Atlantic World comes in
and then they make their way all to the Pacific
with a very simple technological advantage.
I mean, summarizing it, they go with muskets
and they collect tribute in furs, mostly sable.
That's simplifying it, but that's a big part of the truth.
And then they sell those sables
to China and around the world.
And so it's the...
And that is, in a microcosm, a big part
of the history of the Age of Discovery.
You have a technological edge
and you use that technological edge
to control a lot of territory really quickly
while that technological edge lasts.
That technological edge will eventually wear itself out,
and when it wears itself out,
then the tables are going to be turned on you,
and all of your stories about how you're superior are going
to turn out not to be so true, right?
It was the technological edge, really. Okay.
So you do crazy things.
Like, you might, like, okay,
so you go over the Arctic Ocean.
Why not? That didn't work out.
But two other things did work out
which you've probably heard of,
like Vasco da Gama going around the Horn of Africa
and finding his way and defeating Arab sailors
and landing in South Asia, in India, right,
for the Portuguese, and Christopher Columbus,
with the even, if possible, wackier idea
of going across the Atlantic Ocean to make his way to China,
or the Indies, rather, and discovering, you know,
something else which he called the Indies.
And so it's now still called the Indies, weirdly,
or it's now called America.
So all of these things, right?
The British, the Portuguese, the...
Columbus wasn't Spanish, but it was a Spanish mission.
All of this is because of Ottoman Empire
blocking trade routes,
and the trade routes then in turn generate new things.
So after these unexpected encounters
with new places in America,
there are new supplies of precious metals,
and of course there are new people
to colonize and to convert.
Now, I realize this isn't really our main story,
but the reason why we have to have this in the back
of our mind is because we are in, as I've said,
we're entering into this world of empires,
and you can't understand Ukraine inside empires
unless we understand what empires are
at this particular moment in history.
Okay, so some of this history is going to be familiar
to you from other classes.
The leading imperial powers
at the very beginning are Portugal and Spain.
They divide the whole world between them ambitiously.
Spain destroys some other really important states,
the Aztecs, the Incas,
kill maybe 10 million people in the New World.
The Dutch rise and replace
to a large degree the Portuguese in Asia.
They take over the Cape of Good Hope in 1652.
The Portuguese are pushed back to Brazil. Okay.
And then this brings me to a theme which I'm sure
you've kept in mind the entire time, which is slavery.
So the nature of slavery...
Again, you know,
it's not like I'm going to ask you this on the exam.
It's just that our history fits into this larger history
and it helps the larger history make sense.
So if you remember,
our history is partly about how slavery
in a certain part of the world comes to an end.
The conversions to Christianity
are about slavery coming to an end.
When you convert to Christianity,
that is one of the first things that happens.
Other Christians...
I mean, rules are broken, but in principle,
other Christians are not going to enslave you
and your neighboring Christian powers are not going to think
they can raid your country and enslave the population.
It's not the most glamorous thing about Christianity,
and this is not the thing that rises to the top
in the narrative of conversion, right?
But it's perhaps the fundamental thing.
If you create a Christian state,
other Christian states are not going to enslave your people.
You've decided not to enslave your people.
You're going to tax them instead.
Very important, very important transition.
So our class in a way starts with this riddle of slavery,
because you have to, like...
You can't get away from slavery.
If you're going to study human history,
you can't get away from slavery,
because at any moment where you try
to start history almost anywhere in the world,
you then have to ask the question
of when you get from this form of economic organization
to another form of economic organization and why
and under what ideological and political premises
and auspices, which is a way of understanding
the first few lectures of this class.
This doesn't mean that slavery comes to an end, of course.
What it means is that the slave markets,
like the Genoese one that I mentioned in Kaffa,
the slave markets are trading different people,
from the Caucasus, for example, from Asia,
and then, of course, from Africa.
The Ottomans are increasingly going
to be getting their slaves from Africa,
not that they won't enslave Europeans occasionally,
but increasingly, they're going
to be getting their slaves from Africa.
And so this all connects, right?
Because the demand for slaves, it's going to be present,
but where the slaves are coming from is going to change.
And so again, I realize I've, like,
pounded this point into the ground,
but the language can help you remember something
which subsequent events will then bury.
So our word for slave, right, the English word for slave,
which comes from the German Sklave, Sklave,
which comes from the Arabic (speaking in Arabic),
and (speaking in Arabic) comes from Slav, right?
Following the language can remind us
of an origin of something,
or an early phase of something, let's call it,
that we might otherwise forget.
So this is connected to our class
because of the formation of states
and because of the spread of Russian power southward,
which is going to be in the next lecture.
But as the Russian state moves southward,
enforcing serfdom, to be sure,
it becomes harder and harder to raid
for slaves in that direction.
So the slave markets or the source of slaves,
in general, it's going to move southward.
And this coincides, this shift coincides with the emergence
of the demand for slaves in the New World, right?
And so then the slave markets are going
to shift to the New World.
The demand for slaves is coming from the New World
as the slave trade in general has moved
southward towards Africa.
So again, this is not a connection
that we need to push too far.
It's just that I want you to see that there is a kind
of logical chain of events,
and this larger question of who belongs to the state
and who can be enslaved is a question
which you can follow if you want.
You don't have to.
I'm not going to make you do this.
But it's a question that you can follow
from the 10th century in Eastern Europe
to the 18th century in the United States
if you want to, right?
It's not just a logical question.
It's not just a kind of similarity.
It's also a chain of events over time that one can follow.
Okay, so the African slave trade...
Yeah, so of course, like, the expansion
of the slave trade to Africa involves massive death
and trauma, including by suicide,
the destruction of local states and local cultural groups,
the destruction of the position of women.
It slows down.
The trade slows down in the late 18th century,
early 19th century, as first the French
and then the British end the African slave trade.
The slave trade in the Ottoman Empire comes
to an end in 1882.
The Civil War in the United States is in 1863.
Okay, so what I...
The last thing that I want to do
is to try to bring the history of empire
through the period where we are now
a little bit into the 18th and 19th centuries
so that you can then, as we do the 17th,
18th, and 19th centuries in Ukraine,
you'll have a kind of world perspective of what's going on.
I'm going to again pause and ask if I'm going too quickly
and see if there are any questions.
Just taking the feel of the room here.
Okay, you're all at the edge of your seats. That's good.
The camera can't see
whether you're on the edge of your seats or not,
so I can just, like, say stuff like that.
Okay, so after Spain...
So the first wave, Spain and Portugal,
are the most important,
and then the Netherlands is the most important,
