Читать книгу Global Political Cities - Kent E. Calder - Страница 30

The city-centric trading systems of the Middle Ages generated remarkable levels of prosperity for their participants. They also supplied a remarkable range of products and knowledge over long distances, considering the primitive technology of the times. Well over a thousand years ago, such products as Baltic amber, Red Sea pearls, Central Asian grape wine, and, of course, Chinese silk were exchanged along the Eurasian trade routes.²² A major reason for the prosperity and diversity of supply was the remarkably unregulated nature and city-centric character of commercial transactions, which exploited the power of proximity innate in urban communities, uninhibited by coercive intervention from above.

Ironically, however, interdependence also brought new dangers to the city-centric world system of the early Middle Ages. One of the most dramatic and substantive in political-economic terms was the Black Death of the mid-fourteenth century, which killed an estimated 75 million to 200 million people—up to half of Europe’s population.

Medieval Europe also experienced the Great Famine of 1315–1317, weakening the continent ahead of the subsequent plague-related demographic collapse. Northern Europe sustained severe winters and rainy, cold summers for several successive years, which led to crop failures, livestock deaths, surging food prices, and ultimately famine. In 1317 the weather returned to normal, but only eight years later did a stable food supply resume. Approximately 10 percent to 15 percent of the continent’s people perished during this severe famine period, even before the intense sufferings of the Black Death itself.²³ Cities did, however, prove remarkably resilient in the aftermath of these dual tragedies, as they have proven so often to be over the ages, with dynamic new actors emerging to fill the vast political-economic vacuums opened by the famine and the ensuing pandemic.

Political and religious upheaval also wracked the late Middle Ages. In the West the Roman Catholic Church was beset with schism and papal succession challenges, while the Holy Roman Empire lost legitimacy as nation-states began to rise in Britain and France. In the East, Mongol raids and Ottoman incursions also caused turbulence and stimulated the rise of nation-states such as Russia, Poland, and Albania.²⁴

As in the Mediterranean, it was the rise of nation-states across northern Europe, as well as transatlantic commerce, that brought the era of the Hanseatic League and the civic prosperity accompanying it to an end. Rising nation-states began to appropriate urban surplus through enhanced taxation. And they channeled much of the growing revenue toward weapons of war.

In 1466 Poland, one of the early modern nation-states to rise, defeated the Teutonic Knights, who had been major sponsors of the Hanseatic League in Baltic trading ports such as Riga and Talinn, in a harbinger of things to come. In 1478 the Duke of Muskovy, pressing for greater centralization within Russia, forced closure of the League’s Novgorod kontor, or foreign trading post. A century later, Queen Elizabeth I, pressing for state sovereignty in England, similarly forced closure of the Hansa’s kontor in London. Although the league continued formally until 1862, it had shriveled in its final days to only three northern Germany members—Lubeck, Bremen, and Hamburg. By the end of the sixteenth century, the Hanseatic League of trading cities had effectively relinquished its international role to nation-state rivals.

Half a world away in East Asia, the battle between cities and larger competitors for political-economic resources and preeminence was also raging. As in Europe, cities were advantaged in time of peace by the rise of commerce and by social connectivity. Nations and empires, by contrast, benefited from war and colonization, with the quality and inclination of leadership at various levels also periodically tipping the scales between city and nation.

Trans-Eurasian trade has venerable roots, dating back at least two millennia. The rise of coherent, cosmopolitan cities with global contacts and identifiable relations to the present is, however, a more recent phenomenon. It dates in Asia from around AD 1200—remarkably close to the time that the maritime republics of the Mediterranean in the south and the Hanseatic League in the north began to emerge in Europe. As in Europe, the period from 1200 to 1500—following the decline of empires such as Sri Vijaya and preceding the voyages of discoveries of Vasco da Gama, Columbus, and Cabral—was a golden age for cities in Asia and for their commercial yet cosmopolitan perspective on social organization.

The cosmopolitan, outward-looking orientation of the early Ming dynasty in China was one major catalyst to the age of cities in medieval Asian history. Surabaya in Java, for example, was established around 1200 not by locals but by overseas Chinese settlers.²⁵ Zheng He and other Chinese explorers ventured outward from the Middle Kingdom to Southeast Asia and beyond, encouraging commerce and establishing local Chinese settlements that, in turn, became future catalysts for trade.²⁶ The seven voyages of Zheng He led to new Chinese outpost cities in foreign locations, scattered across Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean. The wide range of cities that Zheng He is known to have visited include Champa (Vietnam), Malacca (Malaysia), Calicut (India), Hormuz (Iran), and Malindi (Kenya).²⁷ Indeed, he is believed to have set sail at least once from the same Sri Lankan port (Hambantota) that China is developing as a comprehensive maritime facility today.²⁸

Japan’s openness and decentralization during the Muromachi period (1336–1573) also fostered the rise of cosmopolitan cities across Asia. Within Japan, Sakai on the Inland Sea, Maizuru on the Sea of Japan, and Shuri on Okinawa all prospered from their international contacts. Their positive support of trade, in turn, encouraged the rise of Southeast Asian trading centers such as Ayutthaya in Thailand, which had deep commercial ties with medieval Japan.²⁹

An era of discovery, enriched and empowered by the plundered gold and silver of the New World, and followed by the global emergence of European colonialist nation-states, brought the medieval era of trading-city ascendance to an end. In Asia, the European colonialists first appeared as traders, establishing entrepôt settlements at Malacca, Calicut, Macao, and Nagasaki. By the nineteenth century, however, they had broadened their regional involvement into full-scale colonialism, leaving only free ports, such as Hong Kong and Singapore, as semiautonomous trading centers, albeit as cities fully subordinate in political and legal terms to the colonial sovereign.

As in Europe, then, it was the rise of militarism and parochialism, often with strong domestic origins but with a defensive, parochial, and anticolonialist cast, that ultimately constrained cities in Asia, leading to their subordination at the hands of nation-states. In China, late Ming era emperors decided that promoting an overseas presence, including maritime commerce, was too expensive and politically destabilizing, especially when it meant potential confrontation with the incoming Europeans. Coastal security and enforcement of a state monopoly on foreign imports further intensified Ming incentives to ban overseas trade.³⁰ External factors, such as Tamerlane’s closure of the overland silk route and the general decline of Indian Ocean trade, compounded Chinese disincentives to look outward.³¹

In 1420 the Ming fleet was defeated in Annam. The dynasty had to choose between strengthening its naval forces and promoting international commerce, on the one hand, and retreating into parochialism, on the other, with economic difficulties making the latter China’s only viable option.³² Similarly, in Japan, the religious and social pluralism brought through foreign contact led to domestic conflict, epitomized in the Sengoku Jidai (Warring States period, 1467–1603).³³ Chaos finally led to the triumph of the Tokugawa military dictatorship in 1603, followed by the gradual closing of Japan to the broader world between 1633 and 1639.