For hundreds of thousands of years we know humans have explored planet Earth.
But even by the time of what we now call the year 1000, that is, 1000 years after the Jesus Christ time, Earth was only populated with 10 million humans.
Between the year 1000 and the year 1250, 90 million more humans were born.
The following 250 years brought another 100 million humans.
That is 200 million people, mooching around the planet by the year 1500.
With ships built, voyages to be had and land to be grabbed, the human pace picked up speed, and over the next 250 years, a further 290 million humans were born into the equation, bringing the planet’s total to nearly 500 million human wanderers by the year 1750.
So that’s 290 million humans, people, born in just 250 years, when, throughout history, until that time, 10 million had been the peak. Mad, right?
Well, something even bigger happened, something changed our lives, and over the next 50 years, between 1750 and 1800, 187 million more people were born. 50 years, 187 million. Staggering to imagine.
The whole rate of human population on planet Earth had dramatically changed during the late 1700’s, a change that doesn't quit. This era I've labelled as The Great Divide.
In Disney’s film about the journey of dinosaurs, “The Land Before Time”, their Great Divide was caused by an earthquake. It created a vast and deep chasm which was the reason the story was created.
It might be useful to keep that in mind when thinking about the human journey. The 1700’s humans had their ‘Great Divide’, a theme that resonates with “The Land Before Time”.
By the year 1800, most humans were occupying the centre zones or the East zones of the planet. But then in just 100 more years, over a billion more humans were born, plus, they had started to develop across the West zones, with North America being born. A whole new space to play in, a billion more people to play with, and it was only 200 years ago when this big boom occurred.
Can you begin to imagine all the different types of people, personalities, joys and woes? Can you feel a sense of what someone might have felt or thought back then? What made them happy or sad, how did they manage to cope with such dramatic life alterations and new situations?
Since then, billions more humans have been born every few decades, and now, we are here, looking back to figure out what on Earth went on ‘the other day’.
Let’s reset and go back so that we can start to understand how to visualise our human boom. So, for hundreds of thousands of years our human populations were rather small compared to today, and they seemed to have existed in a rhythm, a cycle. Eat, Love, Roam and Die, umbrellaed by nature’s skeleton, the need to survive. A term was coined for this, it’s called “The Malthusian Trap”.
There was a finite amount of product that humans could produce. And when the humans produced too many baby humans at the same time of maxing out their product capacity, the products they produced and the energy they put into their efforts, would be spread too thinly and it would drain the human's energy, efforts and health.
The humans would suffer and the populations would decline.
Until, once again, the cycle would resume.
An abundance of products available, enticed the humans to live better and breed bigger, and so on.
The cycle repeated, spanning across the centuries. This long forever-feelinged cycle, this Malthusian Trap, was broken just 250 years ago. How did it break? Who did what and why?
The traditional world is the world in which everything moves at the pace of natural energy. That is; animal power, wind and water. Where everything is overwhelmingly rural and agricultural, with less than 15% of humans living in communities that contained more than 2000 people. Most people, wherever they were located, they lived in groups of 2000 people or less.
These communities had a stable rhythm about them, with each generation being similar to the last. It brought a sense of belonging. Even if their personal life was unstable, the people of that time could rely on their community, their traditions, to bring them a sense of stability and focus.
The communities were brought even closer together by faith and the creation of religions, which would help to calm their fears of the unknown by bringing a unity, a reason to stay together and act together, an explanation as to their purpose, if nothing else, to protect and support each other throughout their life journeys.
People never ventured far from their homelands, most people would live and die within a 50 mile radius. Travelling was very difficult, almost proving impossible for folk to travel long distances.People couldn’t travel, so news couldn’t travel.Even if you lived in a country with a King, it would have been unlikely that you would know anything about that King, perhaps you might have gained a rough idea of what his face looked like on a coin if you were lucky, otherwise, you would just be too far away and there were too many different languages, many, many languages, creating an information barrier.
There were powerful states and empires that managed to form but they were relatively simple, usually consisting of a King, some priests, warriors and some business elite folk.And these guys would go around the lands taking tributes from all that they conquered.The administration and management of these empires were very crude. At best, they only had the ability to give orders and enforce them to perhaps, 300 miles away.
Many, many dynasties stemming from the ways of the warrior horsemen had been created, aged and reshaped, and by the 1700’s, all of Earth’s powerful empires had formed and were located in the centre of the planet, a large zone called Eurasia.
East Asia had been governed by the Ming Dynasty and was a really powerful region around the mid-1700’s.
The Ming Empire had a very powerful navy during the 1400’s and had excelled in historical voyages around the Indian Ocean, but they decided to cut back on sea exploration and defund the navy in order to focus on their mainland trades with Southeast Asia, a zone where they saw the most opportunities, and enemies.
Their downfall came when faced with attacks from the Northern warrior horsemen tribes. Groups of people merged across the lands which led to the creation of a new, Qing Dynasty, that would rule China from the 1640’s onward.
The new dynasty was made up of hundreds of groups of people, there were many different languages spoken within the dynasty groups, so they were only part-connected to each other. However, they all seemed to share an ideal vision for their future civilisation, and by building this idea together, they started to expand towards the West, their influence and powers reaching towards the centre zones where the humans populated most densely.
The humans had created a meritable trade network across their lands, and despite fights and outbreaks, many people were excited to learn, and the constant discoveries led them to desire more than ever, the understanding of themselves, their existence and their opportunities and dreams.
As everyone headed for the centre of the trade networks, religions collided and wars were fought as everyone tried to establish themselves and their ways of living.
But in between the rough parts of enduring, people were coming together, opportunities were created through shared information, which led to even more new experiences and plenty of different tastes of future choices and dreams.
The sailing ships of the 1600’s and 1700’s couldn’t carry very much. Perhaps no more than 80 tons.
Cinnamon and black pepper, and many other exotic spices had been traded across East Asia for thousands of years. The word 'spice' breaks down into meaning ‘Kind’ and ‘Sort’.
The ancient Egyptians even used them in their mummification processes.
Herbs were also well traded and much desired, with China, Korea and India zones learning the most about how to use them and what to do with them. This opened up a whole range of industries for food flavours, medicines and preservation. Most spice trades were done on land with Egypt's port city of Alexandria being the world’s main trading centre for spices.
The Europeans started dabbling in spices around 2600 years ago when nutmeg was introduced to them. About 600 years later, the discovery of the monsoon winds across the Indian ocean really ramped up sailing abilities and thus the spice trades.
If a ship could hook onto the winds from a monsoon at sea, it was much easier and quicker to sail across without the need to rely on oar power. Before that discovery, it was questionable as to whether you and your ship of foods and spices would arrive at your destination in time before the rot set in. The monsoon winds ensured predictability and boosted global trade.
Over the next 1000 years between the year 400 and the year 1400, spices became one of the most demanded and expensive products in the world. Spice plantations were gradually set up, with the main hubs being Asia and Africa. But their locations ensured prices for the goods remained high. A cargo of spice was worth its weight in gold because of how much could fit on their limited capacity ships. It means a trip to Northern Europe for a trade deal was always worth it. This is one of those big trade examples that started to changethe world, and all the different groups of people in it. Spices had a big impact in the setting up of trade outposts.
Europe was located on the Western fringe of Eurasia and since the 1500’s at least, had been a rather complicated land to live on with France being the most dominant force. The Ottoman Empire had long controlled the majority of domains in Europe and beyond, but by the 1700’s, Europe was in the initial stages of taking a different development pathway than the rest of the big empires and land folks around the globe. But why?
It could be said that changes in the quality and character of the European nations, the people’s personalities, their desires and expectations in those zones, caused some alternative perceptions and ideas which lead to an enormous consequence, the Great Divide.
Europe saw a rise in the German-speaking language in the early 1700’s in what was then labelled Prussia. Some wars later, by 1740, the Prussian zones had been reduced as the new German-speaking societies gained power and land. Similar stories were found all over the globe, especially in the developed zones where people were finding new products and powers. At the same time things like music and religion was ever changing and ever developing, and each community, would take a piece and adapt it. So whatever angle you look at, change pace of the globe was getting faster and faster. Humans were evolving at rapid rates. Mostly in their minds.
But overall, one the main boosts for the Europeans were their far flung oceanic activities during the mid-1700’s. The European’s explorations and land grabs had placed them at the centre of the Atlantic world.
The ancient Egyptians had been recorded using the sun to tell the time on sundials. The ancient Islamics had mastered how to tell the time with water clocks and the Indians had invented incense clocks by the year 600. It took until the 1500’s for the sand clock, the hourglass, to be invented by the Europeans, and by the 1700’s, the Europeans had figured out that clocks could be controlled using harmonic oscillators which led to the most productive era of clock making.
It came alongside a great desire to navigate the oceans. It was easy to navigate horizontally, back and forth using the stars and the sky to map your latitude journeys. But to navigate up and down, North and South, the skies failed to help and it was the knowledge of time that was needed to know where you were exactly at sea, and how you could save time travelling by mapping and using all directions.
By the early 1700’s, the chronometer, a clock that uses a vacuum chamber had been made possible, and as that century drew to a close, the chronometer had become a superior capability for long oceanic voyages, and it made a big impact around European zones in a short amount of time.
This new invention allowed for new ways to sail, thus new ways to trade and bargain with others. It brought that part of the world into a new age, a new situation that had never before been lived on record, it provided thousands upon thousands of humans with new opportunities, but it also came with a package of new problems that they had yet to understand.
Colonies of the Atlantic World could sail afar, find some land which is either unoccupied or inhabited by quiet humans. Humans that had very little security and protection from anything other than traditional means. Ones that would have no choice but to surrender or die, as they had nothing to fight with. Or, ones that were desperate to develop themselves beyond tradition and welcome new forces and ideas.
However it happened, extraction became a big part of human growth.
Mines were built wherever vital and valuable goods could be found, so silver, gold, minerals, these were all precious goods, desired throughout the entire human world. And still are to this very day.
The old mines would be worked by the local inhabitants, mostly because they had better knowledge of their land and better skills that came with that knowledge.
One way or another, often by force or desperation, they allowed foreigners to set up their business and trade. The locals became practically enslaved, if not actually out-loud enslaved.
Plantations were established so that things like sugar, coffee or tobacco could be extracted for wealth and demands. The plantations were usually worked by actual slaves, mainly Africans who had been brought over in their millions during the previous century or so. The African's ability to survive hard labour and endure outdoor crop work was one of the main reasons they were so highly sought after as slaves.
The birthplace of our current species of human. But by the era of the Great Divide, Africa was thinly populated.
Clustered along the coasts were traditional societies, some organised into tribes while others had formed more elaborate kingdoms in places like Ethiopia and the West of Africa. Most African societies had been relatively isolated from the outside worlds. Africa was a really difficult continent to sail to, and a really hard place to land, and a super hard place to survive as a stranger, which more often than not resulted in death by disease, with a higher risk of disease and death the more inland you dared to venture.
The North African muslim world had been doing some overland trades, perhaps some of Southwest Asia too, but not much. Contact with Africa was very minimal.
The interactions with the European Atlantic world however, changed this.
Over time, the Europeans had managed to set up outposts along the edge of the African coast. By the 1700’s the slave trade is enormously lucrative and humans existing as their own commodities is common in many developed nations across the world.
For the Kings and Chiefs of Africa, the European trade posts provided a great opportunity. Not only could they trade their people for desired goods, they could kidnap people from other tribes and sell them for profit too. So raids were launched, enemies were captured and sold, and the kings and chiefs that were successful in this, would become more powerful and more dominant across the African lands.
The dramatic impact on Africa’s social, economic,and political development created significant change. Particularly in how weapons could be more easily acquired now that these small time Kings and Chiefs had become big time players. People in their millions were displaced, millions more were sold out of Africa and into the Atlantic world, causing terrible demographic and social turmoil.
The value of trade was enormous for all Kings involved because of the relatively small amounts of very high value goods that enriched their key merchants. The merchants would be connected to the Kings courts, and thus the states that controlled the trading monopolies.
The Mughal Empire was an early modern empire that came to exist in South Asia during the 1500’s. Kind of like predators, they learned how to extract from farmers, and soon developed ways to extract whatever they wanted from whoever lived on their lands. With each war fought and each new conquerer that came into power, more and more stuff was desired for extraction. But for many decades, people’s lives didn’t really change much. Providing for one leader was similar to providing for another. For the people, these changes of power and ownership, the wars that were fought around them, didn’t seem to affect them too much, they just got on with life.
The Mughal Empire survived for around 200 years, but as the Great Divide was taking hold during the 1700’s, the Mughals couldn’t keep up with the new commercial trading systems and the new ways of living they brought with them.
The commercial revolution created interactions that echoed down to the people and directly impacted their way of life.
It changed the way folk made money, it changed the ways they made a living. It changed their societies. Social changes, cultural changes, it even changed how people would eat and drink every day. Perhaps it could be said that this caused a deeper change in humanity than any rise or fall of an empire.
The Commercial Revolution is so interesting because it has to do with the way people saw certain kinds of opportunities and solved their problems in ways that had a really interesting historical impact. If you really get into the problems they were trying to solve and the significance of how they solved them, I think you'll find this a pretty interesting human development.
The Europeans had mastered farming the Atlantic world and had fingers in pies in some of the South Seas where the spices could be found. Sugar, coffee and tobacco had started to work their way into the lives of millions of Europeans. This is the era where breakfast originated.
The Europeans are interested in a lot of stuff. They had a range of new opportunities to make money, they had a keen interest in winning honour and prestige for their own families, for their king, and they were excited to create new markets for trade, for goods they could make themselves from home such as furniture, clothing, even luxury items that could be made in their own country instead of having to import. And they also saw opportunities for simple discovery, new knowledge.
There was a big increase in the demand for ships, good ships, really reliable ships that can make long oceanic voyages with very low risk of floundering.
Scientific navigation systems were needed, as well and new things that could help extract the resources of these new worlds they were about to discover.
Finance. At this time, people didn’t rely on, or carry cash. Significant amounts of money were needed for mounting expeditions, planting colonies, building new mines and starting new plantations.
If ventures were successful, the new desire became labourers. Many, many labourers were required to take advantage of the global opportunities. And following labourers, protection then became the focus. It was the age of rival trading monopolies sniping on each other, trying to steal each other’s stuff. So anyone involved in taking advantage of these new goods and resources, needed protection.
The interaction with the new world had a big cultural effect on the old world.
The Europeans developed some interesting solutions to their problems. Building better ships was highly in their interests, so some of the European countries decided to make that their main focus, creating some of the most elaborate and complex ships and industries in the world. War ships became a desire to help with protection.
Science was really coming into the light at this time after centuries of fighting with religion. Science had started to answer long ago asked questions, science was bringing this new age to life. So Royal Academies were created to help recognise the achievements and innovations of science. Universities were established to help find the sorts of people who are able to come up with things that will help to resolve these new age problems.
The financial solutions came from banks, by making them stronger and more powerful in order to cope with larger trades and transactions. These banks then had to align themselves with the private companies, the businesses that could manage all these new opportunities, and certainly the companies that worked in favour towards the government in charge, such as the British East India Company which accounted for over half the world’s trade during the 1700’s and 1800’s.
Getting enough labourers to help build all these big ideas relied on a global mixture of tactics and prices to pay. There were places that were prosperous, a desirable place to live and work, and such places gave rise to voluntary colonists. But there were also stressful, horrible places which nobody would choose to go. The mines and the sugar plantations were a hard and disagreeable place to live and work. So slaves were sent in their millions to work in these harsh business environments.
As deals were made around the world, people started to understand each other’s capabilities. Some people such as the American Indians, did not fair well being forced into hard labour and died too quickly when imprisoned in their work zone. They just weren’t used to such a way of life after coming from quiet, traditional lifestyles.
Because of this, there was an extensive reliance on the African slaves and the 1700’s became the great century of importation. The vast majority of African slaves were sent to Brazil and to the West Indies. But over the century that followed, the slaves that had numbered in their millions, were reduced to their hundreds of thousands in most prime places.
However in other places such as the British North America, the slaves had increased in number. That means, not only did they tend to survive, but they had children, and their population grews in line with the rest of the British North America populations. Perhaps they weren’t as badly treated in that zone, and certainly the conditions of work there were not as extreme as some places therefore the methods of extraction were perhaps not as mean.
So all that remained to resolve was protection. Really expensive. That's why a lot of these solutions blend together to create a pretty distinctive kind of state.
The structure of the 1700’s starts with a King, a central ruler. Before the 1700’s these rulers were not very strong as they relied heavily on money which came from others. So the power was always shared and often spread thinly.
Land owners provided the ruler with the most money, thus allowing him to buy and build an army. These land owners became the King’s nobles. But as the King develops his military and his friends and family swoon around him in the central courts, the nobles are working with business folk in order to keep generating the money. The nobles and business folk are also working to recruit people to be in the military and help to defend the kingdoms.
The King and the nobles cannot afford to pay money to everyone, but they can incentivise. And so the King would grant trade monopolies, land and exclusive trade rights, to his nobles, companies and supporters. Eventually the nobles, companies and supporters would start to get their own followers. People who realised they were one or two connections away from the King, saw opportunities, created jobs and reasons to be involved, so they too can maybe get their own piece of land or exclusive rights to a trade.
Eventually a company that managed to earn its exclusive trade deal, such as having exclusive rights to trade sugar or spice, was able to earn rich profits and thus was able to go to the bank and ask to borrow money to build something even bigger and better. The company was then able to leverage its trade on the monopoly by using the money borrowed from the banks, because that company had the exclusive rights to sell a much desired product.
The rich profits made from the company would then be taxed, and the King would received another layer of money. Money from his noble connections, the land owners and the military providers, and money from business folk who had mastered a trade and managed opportunity well. The King could also be a company himself so could also borrow directly from the bank and make a third avenue of income for himsel.
In the Traditional World, for a long, long time, people fought with knives, spears, bows and arrows. But the Gunpowder Revolution during the 1400’s and 1500’s created deadly firearms. Following that came the invention of artillery. Great canons that could blow apart densely packed formations.
The journey of improving these weapons created the Military Engineer. Someone who can work out where to shoot from, where to take cover, how much impact was likely, how to carry equipment around, and where best to breach. The Military Engineer was also very useful at sea in the development of navies.
With all of these new inventions comes a need to have people who are capable of using them. So the need for professional, trained armies became a big requirement to any successful nation. Armies needed to act in unison, they needed to have people shooting whilst others reloaded. They needed robotic qualities to keep pace during an attack.
No country more epitomized the drilled robotic quality of these new kinds of armies than the Prussian army.
Once everyone could use a gun, it became vital to be the first side to have formation. Soldiers charging aimlessly at their enemy versus a strict infantry square formation of attack.
The Ottoman Empire suffered badly here because they were not capable enough to control their armies in such regiments.
These armies and their horses all needed to be fed, they needed supplies of gunpowder and shells for their weapons. The logistics to manage all this became another vital industry, it created many more professionals, and much more capable organisations.
China’s Qing Dynasty were well equipped with firearms, and were also good at drilling their armies. The nomads of Mongolia and Turkestan had very little, if no firearm access. The Qing Dynasty found it very easy to advance their power.
The Russian Empire also had firearm advantage over many of the nomadic tribesmen in Central Asia.
Europe being so fragmented meant there were constant wars and fighting, which in turn meant that the Europeans were forced to up the quality of their military technology much quicker than the rest of the world if they wanted to stay a step ahead of their rivals.
A mechanical device for applying pressure to an inked surface resting on paper or cloth or some such, was invented in Germany during the 1400’s.
Before the end of that century, printing presses had spread to hundreds of cities in and around Germany and the use of the printed book was in universal use in Europe.
By 1500, print shops had been well established and the printing presses in operation throughout Western Europe had already produced more than twenty million copies. 100 years on, by the 1600’s, the printing output had increased tenfold to an estimated 200 million copies.
In comparison, the Far Eastern printing services relied on rubbing the back of a paper onto to page in order to print. They could, at best, produce 40 printed pages per day. At the same time, the European printing press could produce up to 3600 impressions a day.
This ability to print information in mass quantities was a game changer for the Europeans and their needs to advance their skills and military equipment. It also helped scientists communicate better and share their knowledge more efficiently. This was especially helpful when the scientist’s communications related to the latest military practices and techniques.
The military revolution interacts with the commercial revolution. A big part of the equation that created the Great Divide and started us on a new age journey never before experienced.
By the year 1800, European powers have a distinct military advantage against any rival in the world. However, there powers were often limited by the range of their naval forces or by how far their expeditionary army can travel inland. They were still beaten in different battles.
