The world in 1500 and the emergence of global consciousness

Richard Drayton, Professor of History at King's College London, walks us through the interconnected world in 1500.

Richard Drayton

Rhodes Professor of Imperial History

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Richard Drayton

Rhodes Professor of Imperial History

20 Sept 2021

Key Points

In the 1500s, the world was connected by land, waterways and stories, but materially disconnected, with a large part of the population and economy centred in China.
Europe lagged technologically, despite having a few strategic advantages; however, in accessing Asia and Africa’s wealth, it began to transform and expand.
A new global consciousness began to develop while trade increased, leading to new forms of industrial power, transport and warfare. The result was unprecedented forms of unequal military encounters and productive capacities.

Connected and separate

Photo by Vadim Petrakov

When we think about the world, we have to begin in our first experience of time, which is in the pulse of our own bodies – the ways in which our heartbeat and the rhythms of our body take us on a journey, from the very beginning of our consciousness through our stages of development, towards death. That experience of rhythm is always entangled with that experience of other bodies: first of all, the rhythms of our mother’s body, and then the rhythms of those that surround us. Human beings, from the very beginnings of language, have been telling stories about how this particular experience of embodied consciousness was connected to nature – that cycle of day to night, through the seasons, through the year – and that experience of living with other people.

The world in 1500 was one that was already profoundly connected by the ways in which people walked across land, where it was possible; where they followed the flows of water; and where they moved across water in pursuit of high-value commodity. If we think about how human beings lived in the world in this period, most tended to live very, very close to where they were born and where they grew up – but with an awareness of people living very far away. So, they accepted that this was a world which was disconnected, in terms of material connections. It was already deeply connected in terms of the stories which travelled with people across the space of the world. The global population in 1500 was about 500 million; probably around 60% of the world’s population lived in China at that time. If we looked at the world’s economy, again, probably more than half was in China at that time. The forms of connection which existed in Europe and Asia, following the river systems, following the valleys between the mountains, also existed in Africa and the Americas.

Two key advantages

One of the peculiarities about that pimple on the backside of Asia, which we call Europe, is the way in which it is penetrated by systems of rivers that allow for the hinterland of that continent to be very quickly connected to the sea. What seems clear is that if one looks at the world in 1500, the people who live in that continent called Europe have, in technological terms, only two key advantages: navigation of the sea and artillery. However, in terms of manufacturing, skilled production and technologies, Asia was far, far ahead.

Indeed, a set of connections built around the expansion of the Mongol Empire in the 14th century shows that there was a world economy before the contemporary period. We talk about an Asia-centred world system, in which the luxury goods – the textiles, the cottons, the silks, the porcelain, the tea – produced in Asia were, in fact, the most sought-after goods in trade in Eurasia. All of the European powers, connected as they were by Christianity and by the legacies of the Roman Empire in the midst of their own forms of competitive struggles, attempted to achieve some kind of connection and access to that wealth of Asia.

Transformations are taking place within the continent of Europe which are leveraged on American precious metals and African gold, and in particular, on the basis of enslaved African labour. At the same time, in Africa, this is setting in motion a variety of changes, forms of state building around this new trade, as weapons and new commodities came in; but the corollary of the state building was the proliferation of war into the interior of Africa. An experience of war, the disruption of everyday life, the collapse of settled society, the loss in particular of people of reproductive age to the African slave trade – all of these led to this pattern of relative depopulation within Africa, which, indeed, relative to its size, was quite an underpopulated continent. China fits into Africa several times; China’s population was as large as Africa’s combined population in 1500.

Paving the way for expansion

This emergence of a kind of mercantile economy within Europe is connected also with the expansion of European interests into Asia. When we think of the East India Companies – Portuguese, Dutch, English, French – these were essentially attempting to nibble at the edges of this wealthy Asian trading system. Yet, over the course of time, they would become entangled in the politics of Asia – in particular, in South Asia – and would create these bridgeheads from which later colonial Empires would be based.

Photo by Fabian Plock

If one turns to the African continent, we see areas such as Senegambia and Angola, and later Elmina and the Bight of Benin, becoming the main centres in which Europeans and, more importantly, Eurafrican and Brazilian actors become enmeshed. The Atlantic slave trade and the commodity trades which surrounded this were very much connected with the forming not just of new commercial connections but also of new kinds of people. People who were of mixed race, who had come from the Cape Verde islands, who themselves had been born in Brazil, provide the brokers through which this European mercantile system acquires its toehold in the African continent.

Emergence of a global consciousness

Many of the phenomena which we study and think of as being quite distinct from the history of Empire – the European Renaissance, the scientific revolution, even the wars of religion – are entangled with the history of Europe’s new interconnections with Africa, the Americas and Asia. However, the consequence of this is the development in Europe of increasingly sophisticated and articulate ways in which collective information is shared and distributed, and is regulated through forms of dispersed cognition.

We see the emergence of new kinds of “global consciousness”, and these forms of global consciousness take the form of maps, of course: these new kinds of orbs, maps which attempt to describe the world as a whole, and human difference within it. But they also contain a whole reconstruction of what it meant to actually belong to that peninsula of Asia.

The idea of Christendom is, of course, much older than 1500, but the transmutation of Christendom into the idea of Europe – the idea of Europe which is defined by a particular racial consanguinity and difference from Africa, Asia and the Americas – is a modern historical phenomenon which emerges in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. So, as much as I’ve been talking about forms of material interconnection based on commodity flows, and with it, the flows of people to different parts of the world, what we also are seeing are the flows of new kinds of information, specimens, objects, ideas and collective consciousness.

The most dramatic shift

People living in Europe were beginning to imagine themselves as having particular kinds of associations, affinities and differences. People who had been brought from the kingdom of the Congo, from Dahomey, from Guinea Bissau, from Senegambia, and who found themselves in the predicament of the American plantation and the American mine, also came to discover themselves as something new.

By the time we come to the 19th century, we’re looking at a world in which, increasingly, the trade which connects parts of Africa and the trade which connects parts of Asia is being mediated by European actors. Much of this turns on, arguably, the most dramatic shift that happens in that period from 1500: the emergence of new forms of industrial power, production and, with it, transport, warfare and connection, between c.1750 and 1900.

Projection of power

Photo by Marzolino

Before 1750, Europeans were essentially water-borne parasites, quick to command trade on the coasts of continents or in the mouths of great rivers, but very slow to penetrate inland, where, in fact, they had very few military advantages, and where the disease environments, the landscape and the resistance of the people on the ground posed insurmountable problems.

What we see, however, over the course of that century and a half, is new tools emerging which allow for the projection of power at a distance and for the construction of highly unequal military encounters; and it’s on this infrastructure of unequal violence and unequal productive capacities that a wholly new world is constructed. Much of the world we know, in terms of inequality and human difference, was constructed in this period.