Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (53 page)

JAPAN

The age-old imperial capital of Kyoto is surrounded by mountains deep inside the Kansai region of western Japan. Most Japanese capitals were in that region until after the Portuguese had been trading with Japan for half a century. The capital of the Tokugawa Shogunate was then established in the port town of Edo, in the Kanto region of Eastern Japan. During the following period of self-imposed isolation, Japan’s imperial capital remained at Kyoto, while the de facto capital remained at Edo, which grew into a great metropolis. In 1868, shortly after the Americans forcibly reopened Japan to the world, the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown and in the following year Edo was made the official capital, renamed Tokyo. The former Tokugawa castle there became the imperial palace.
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Kyoto, which remained a secondary capital, did not change much. It continued to be an important, though much smaller, city, noted for its monuments, cultural conservatism, and political liberalism.

RUSSIA

The city of St. Petersburg was founded by Peter the Great in 1703 on territory he had just captured from the Swedes that year. He moved the Russian imperial capital there in 1712.
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After his victory over Sweden, Russia became a minor naval power in Europe. The eastern extremity of the Russian Empire ended at the Sea of Okhotsk, named after the small port town of Okhotsk, which, though blocked by ice for much of the year, was the main Russian port in the Pacific until the mid-nineteenth century.
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In 1858 the territory of Primor’e (or Primorskiy Kray, ‘the Maritime Province’), which had been assigned to the Manchus under the Treaty of Nerchinsk in 1689, came under Russian control. In 1860 the Russians founded Vladivostok, on the Sea of Japan at the southern tip of Primor’e, near Korea and China.
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It grew very rapidly, becoming a city in 1880. After the completion of the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1903, Vladivostok became a large, prosperous city and Russia’s major Pacific port.
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The Silk Road System and the Littoral System

The development of a continental, land-based international trade system dates to prehistoric times. Although international trade by sea also began very early, it appears to have been strictly local until the Bronze Age, when ship-borne trade expanded to cover the Mediterranean and even extended via the Atlantic as far as Britain. In the east, the sea routes were less protected and perhaps for that reason long continued to be more local, but no later than Classical Antiquity local maritime trade flourished all around the Asian littoral and indirect maritime trade connected East Asia with the Near East. That is, ships traveled along the coast back and forth between one port and the next; the same ship did not sail directly even between East Asia and India, though individual merchants did begin traveling the entire route no later than mid-T’ang times in China, when a large population of Arab and Persian merchants resided in Canton (Guangzhou). This local, “internal” point-to-point trade was however not distinct from the “internal” continental trade of the Silk Road.

Throughout history up until early modern times, there was no sharp line or distinction drawn between international trade conducted overland, by rivers, or by sea. But the partition of Central Eurasia effectively eliminated that world area as a significant link in the Eurasian economy as a whole, and a distinction between the two did appear. The Silk Road system—though, practically speaking, it no longer existed—then truly became a counterpart of the seaborne commerce of Eurasia, which is thenceforth properly known as the Littoral System. Before this time, although it might be thought ideal to ascribe equal importance to the Silk Road trade routes and the Littoral zone trade routes, they were not equal. Even the most superficial perusal of, for example, the major historical sources in Chinese, Arabic, and Persian for the medieval period, and right up to the closing of the Silk Road, reveals that, except for the internal politics of the authors’ home regions, the sources are focused above all on Central Eurasia, to which they give an amazing amount of detailed attention. By contrast, the Littoral zone is barely mentioned and it is difficult to find out much about it except in foreign (mainly European) sources.
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This remarkable difference deserves some attention.

While the great peripheral states of Eurasia were deeply interested in Central Eurasia—especially Central Asia—from the time of the Scythians down to the end of the Junghar Empire, and spent a great amount of time, money, and energy on policies directed toward that area, none of the states on the Eurasian coast were noticeably invested in the Littoral trade route. Even the Byzantine Empire, which would seem to be a littoral state par excellence, was not founded on or sustained by international maritime trade—though the Byzantines certainly did profit by it—but rather by taxes and tribute imposed on subject peoples in lands conquered by the Romans and retained or reconquered by the Byzantines. Similarly, the Mughals received the overwhelming majority of their income internally, despite the active international trade conducted (mostly overland) by fellow Muslims between India and the Near East. And although China was involved in Littoral route maritime trade already in Han times via Canton, it must be stressed that even in the T’ang period Canton was a distant, uncouth frontier town, small in size compared to the great cities of the north, and of note (if at all) only because of its heavily non-Chinese population.

The same was true of all the known ports of the old Littoral route from England to Egypt (via the Mediterranean) and from Arabia to Japan. The great capital cities and metropolises were never seaports themselves, though they were typically located on major rivers and were often close to ports. In Europe, Constantinople comes to mind as the outstanding exception, and London
⁷⁰
is accessible by navigable river, making it a port, but even today most West and East European capitals are continental. Paris is inland. Berlin is inland. Rome is inland. Athens is inland. Madrid is inland.
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The major capital cities of the Near East—Cairo, Jerusalem, Damascus, Mecca, and Baghdad, as well as the historical capitals of Persia (Susa, Persepolis, Ctesiphon, Isfahan, Tehran, and others)—are all inland. Further east, Delhi in India; Pagán, Toungoo (Taungoo), Ava, and Mandalay in Burma; Ayudhya (Ayutthaya) in Thailand; Ch’ang-an (now Xi’an), Loyang (Luoyang), and Peking (Beijing) in China; Pyongyang and Seoul in Korea; and Nara and Kyoto in Japan, are all inland. If Littoral route commerce had been the life-blood of any of these countries, this distribution would not make any sense, and the movement in the last centuries of the second millennium
AD
also would not make sense. Even in the case of Athens, a commercially oriented city-state, Thucydides notes that the city’s location nine miles inland was chosen out of fear of piracy, as in the case of the other old Greek cities.
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Before the Littoral System came to dominate the world, fear of the sea and its denizens prevented most states from having much to do with it.

That would seem to account for the fact that trade along the coast had existed for time out of mind, mostly “under the radar”: no one ever paid much attention to it until very late in history. While it was certainly profitable for the merchants involved in it, as testified to by actual historical and geographical accounts, as well as by the Sindbad stories of the
Thousand and One Nights
and other romantic tales, it seems to have been overlooked that states of all shapes and sizes that had coastline along the Eurasian continent did not build their great cities there. The people in these states, including the rulers, were on the whole interested in trade, even if they rarely mentioned it publicly—Chinese and Romans, in particular, looked down on merchants and commerce, and rarely discussed it in their literature—but the fact remains that not a single politically significant Asian city
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was actually located on the coast at the beginning of the European Age of Exploration, and some states (most notably the Mughal Empire) did not even bother to establish direct control over much of their own coastal territory; they let it be ruled by local potentates who had submitted nominally to them. By contrast, though Mecca, Damascus, Baghdad, Delhi, Ch’ang-an, and other capitals were inland, they were merchant cities as well as centers of political power, as were all the cities of Central Eurasia.

The focus of traditional states everywhere in Eurasia was control of land. To accomplish that goal it was necessary to hold the territory with walled fortified cities, the terms for which are often translated incorrectly as ‘forts’ or ‘fortresses’. In early medieval terminology all across Eurasia, there is usually only one unitary word for the two English concepts—Arabic
madîna,
Persian
shahristân,
Old Tibetan
mkhar,
Chinese
ch’eng
Archaic Koguryo
kuru,
and so on—because it was in fact one thing: an urbanized area surrounded by fortified walls. In order to maximize the control effected by each of these ‘fortified cities’, and to better protect them from capture by enemies or defection to them, or to hold firmly onto them and prevent them from trying to become independent, they were best located well inside a country’s territory. The frontiers of each state were thus by definition the furthest places from the controlling political power. Merchants, then as always, relished the freedom to trade with as little interference or taxation as possible. At the frontiers they could do business without attracting much attention to themselves.

The simple physical geographical facts about Western Europe, Arabia, Southeast Asia, and Northeast Asia discouraged the creation and maintenance of large empires there. This created more frontiers and simultaneously encouraged local international trade by sea. Although the Japanese and Koreans are known to have traded intensively with each other from the earliest records on, and while they also traded somewhat with China, they did not sail further. Far to the south, from Canton to Southeast Asia and from thence to India, there was again considerable regional trade by sea. The trade passed from Bengal down to Ceylon and ports in southern India, and from there on to ports on the western Indian coast, Persia, Arabia, and Egypt, always keeping close to land. Commerce was very important indeed in the kingdoms of southern Southeast Asia, especially in the long-lived kingdom of Srivijaya, centered on Sumatra and the southern Malay Peninsula, but the power of the realms in that region seems nevertheless to have rested primarily on agriculture, much of their wealth on natural resources (particularly gold), and their military strength mainly on armies, as in the rest of Asia. In Europe, there was a good deal of commerce in the Baltic Sea and North Sea, and from the Early Middle Ages onward there were a number of important trading towns—not quite cities until rather late—yet rarely did ships sail south into the Mediterranean, a distant and dangerous voyage.

Moreover, there were no large thalassocracies—maritime-based empires—anywhere in the Littoral zone.
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Some of the realms built by the ancient Greeks (who coined the term
thalassocracy)
may have been exceptions, but they were not very large, and in any case do not seem to have been
based
on commerce, though they fostered it and prospered from it.
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The greatest merchants of the Early Iron Age, the Phoenicians, who traded as far as Spain, seem not to have established an actual empire to support their trade.
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Nor, later on, did the far-ranging Vikings, or the Muslim merchants in the Indian Ocean. In each case, when a political entity evolved out of a trading center, it was a strictly local affair—for example, the regime of the Vikings in Normandy was originally unconnected to the Viking realms established in Britain, Ireland, Russia, and so on.

In short, although the Littoral routes had existed for some two millennia before the Europeans set out across the open ocean to Africa, Asia, and the Americas, they were
politically
and
culturally
unimportant, and therefore barely noticed. It was only when the Europeans established trading posts and began reaping huge profits from international trade that the Littoral zone became truly significant. When the port cities, some of them completely new foundations, began to grow large and prosperous, international maritime trade around Eurasia was reborn as the new Littoral System, which finally became so important economically that the political capitals of some of the smaller peripheral states of Asia actually moved there.