THE BEGINNINGS OF A GLOBAL WEB

The oceanic voyaging of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries united continents into a single global web for the first time in human history. The web-making process—at work from the very earliest human settlements onward—had developed an extended, multilayered fabric of connections across Eurasia and North Africa. Significant webs had developed also in the Americas, and smaller, local ones elsewhere. But for thousands of years before 1492, the Americas had largely stood apart from Africa and Eurasia, notwithstanding the brief Viking and Polynesian visits. Now the history of the Americas unfolded in continuing connection with the Old World web. Similarly, after the secrets of oceanic navigation spread and mariners sailed regularly among all the world’s inhabited shores, the islands of the Pacific, the coastlands of South Africa, and a few other spots around the world became linked as never before to the new, global web now in formation.

The oceanic voyaging also tightened linkages within the Old World web. In some cases, the tighter links proved temporary, as with Zheng He’s voyages to India and East Africa between 1405 and 1433. But in others they endured much longer, as with Portuguese ties to African coasts, India, and the spice islands of Southeast Asia. So the three centuries after the 1490s saw a sudden spurt in web building, one that transformed human history and inaugurated a global age in which we still live.

The spinning of the first truly global web had many consequences. The most enduring and important of these was the biological globalization that reshuffled the distribution of economically significant plants and animals around the world and brought devastating infections to the Americas and Oceania. Another important consequence flowed from the fact that it was mainly Atlantic Europeans—not Chinese, Africans, Polynesians, or anyone else—who first fully deciphered the oceanic winds and currents. As a result, they were the first to sail the seven seas and learn of new long-distance trade possibilities. They also found new opportunities to conquer peoples less militarily formidable than themselves. The role of Europeans, especially seafaring Atlantic Europeans, in influencing world history rose to new levels. Over the prior millennia, only rarely could such a small minority of humankind exercise such outsized influence upon world history as Atlantic Europeans would wield in the three or four centuries to come.

The penalties of isolation for societies with few or no connections to the Old World web were now felt as never before. These societies typically hosted a narrower range of infectious diseases than did peoples in the web that enveloped Eurasia and North Africa, leaving them vulnerable to shattering epidemics when European ships arrived with new pathogens. They typically possessed a less formidable array of weaponry than existed in China, India, or Europe, using less metal, no firearms, and no horses. These societies had not needed or developed institutions and technologies that equipped them to deal with the challenges posed by seafaring, horse-riding, disease-bearing, well-armed strangers.

The spinning of the first truly global web proved transformational in other respects too. It continued the longstanding process by which cultural diversity narrowed. The major religions, especially Christianity and Islam, spread to new ground. They became slightly more diverse themselves as a result, because in every case they adopted some local features; but they reduced the overall diversity of religion with their conversions in Asia, Africa, the Americas, and Oceania. The spread of Arabic, Spanish, and English also, on balance, reduced the variety of languages spoken around the world, even if the English spoken in Australia or Barbados was not the same as that spoken in London. Many languages would gradually go extinct in the centuries after oceanic voyaging linked up the world. The next few chapters will detail the formation of the global web and how it affected political, economic, and cultural life throughout the world.