To many Western observers at the time, the ease of the
European conquest provided a clear affirmation of the innate
superiority of Western civilization to its counterparts
elsewhere in the world. Historians in Europe and
the United States began to view world history essentially
as the story of the inexorable rise of the West, from the
glories of ancient Greece to the emergence of modern Europe
after the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
The extension of Western influence to Africa and
Asia, a process that began with the arrival of European
fleets in the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century,
was thus a reflection of Western cultural superiority and
represented a necessary step in bringing civilization to
the peoples of that area.
The truth, however, was quite different, for Western
global hegemony was a relatively recent phenomenon.
Prior to the age of Christopher Columbus, Europe was
only an isolated appendage of a much larger world system
of states stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.
The center of gravity in this trade network was not
in Europe or even in the Mediterranean Sea but much
farther to the east, in the Persian Gulf and in Central
Asia. The most sophisticated and technologically advanced
region in the world was not Europe but China,
whose proud history could be traced back several thousand
years to the rise of the first Chinese state in the Yellow
River valley. As for the transcontinental trade network
that linked Europe with the nations of the Middle
East, South Asia, and the Pacific basin, it had not been
created by Portuguese and Spanish navigators but, as we
have seen, had already developed under the Arab empire,
with its capital in Baghdad. Later the Mongols took control
of the land trade routes during their conquest of
much of the Eurasian continent in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries. During the long centuries of Arabic
and Mongolian hegemony, the caravan routes and sea
lanes stretching across the Eurasian continent and the
Indian Ocean between China, Africa, and Europe carried
not only commercial goods but also ideas and inventions
such as the compass, printing, Arabic numerals, and gunpowder.
Inventions such as these, many of them originating
in China or India, would later play a major role in the
emergence of Europe as a major player on the world’s
stage. Only in the sixteenth century, with the onset of the
Age of Exploration, did Europe become important in the
process. For the next three centuries, the ships of several
European nations crossed the seas in quest of the spices,
silks, precious metals, and porcelains of the Orient.
In a few cases, Europeans engaged in military conquest
as a means of seeking their objective. The islands of
the Indonesian archipelago were gradually brought under
Dutch colonial rule, and the British inexorably extended
their political hegemony over the South Asian subcontinent.
Spain, Portugal, and later other nations of western
Europe divided up the New World into separate colonial
territories. For the most part, however, European nations
were satisfied to trade with their Asian and African counterparts
from coastal enclaves that they had established
along the trade routes that threaded across the seas from
the ports along the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea
to their far-off destinations.
World History
