Empires of the Silk Road: A History of Central Eurasia From the Bronze Age to the Present (54 page)

Much like the low-profile old Littoral route trade, transcontinental trade had begun in prehistoric times. It went on not directly but indirectly from its beginnings, and continued largely unnoticed until the time of the first great Central Eurasian empires formed by steppe nomads, those of the Scythians and Hsiung-nu, who became noticeably rich on this trade. From that time on, the flourishing of the Central Eurasian steppe nomads and the Central Eurasian cities is inseparable from the flourishing of their internal economy, which included its international commerce component, altogether constituting the Silk Road economic system.

Unlike the ports of the old Littoral route, the commercial emporia in Central Eurasia had continental locations. The fortified cities of the Silk Road were therefore often large and politically important. Yet like the Littoral route trade, much of which consisted of local shipping from one Asian country to another nearby one—even after the European conquest of the Littoral zone, when European ships largely replaced the local Asian ships—the vast bulk of the commerce in Central Eurasia was conducted by small merchants in a small way, locally.
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Accordingly, much like the nonexistence of thalassocracies in the Littoral System, no one has ever heard of a Sogdian Empire or a Jewish Empire in Central Eurasia, because they never existed either. One of the notable characteristics of the history of Sogdiana is its disunity. Throughout its history it was only unified by conquest, and then only for a very short time. However, it was almost always under the suzerainty of an imperial power, such as the Achaemenid Persians, or the Hsiung-nu, or the Kushans, or the Türk, or the Arabs, who served to keep the trade flowing between the de facto independent city-states of the region. Tamerlane, though he came from a town near Samarkand in the heart of former Sogdiana, was neither an Iranian nor a merchant. Perhaps that is the reason he was able to conquer a huge empire from his capital in Samarkand. But all the same, his empire did break up immediately after his death.

The remarkable political fact about the great cities along the Silk Road (in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, at least) is that they were all essentially city-states. Rarely did any of the little kingdoms consist of more than one important city. Left to their own devices, therefore, the politics and commerce of the Central Eurasian towns were as unconnected and unimportant as they were in the towns of the Littoral. That is why the cities shrank physically and in every other way, and the Central Asians passed out of historical consciousness, several times in premodern history. The cause of this loss of connectedness, and resulting economic decline, is evidently that there was no steppe-empire suzerain. Without the steppe peoples’ infrastructure and careful tending and nurturing, the Silk Road tended to wilt.
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In every recorded case when the traditional Graeco-Roman, Persian, or Chinese empires of the periphery became too powerful and conquered or brought chaos to the Central Eurasian nomadic states, the result for Central Asia, at least, was economic recession.
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The Han Dynasty destruction of the Hsiung-nu resulted in chaos in much of Central Eurasia. Though the Hsien-pei replaced the Hsiung-nu on the Eastern Steppe, it was several centuries before the Türk, the next nomadic people who understood the Silk Road, could restore the system. There is no denying the fact that the T’ang Chinese succeeded in building a large, prosperous empire that included huge Central Asian colonial territories, but the prosperity of Central Asia itself suffered. When the Chinese and Arab alliance against the Tibetans and the Western Turkic empire of the Türgish succeeded and the Türgish were utterly destroyed, the result was chaos in that part of Central Eurasia, bringing with it a severe recession, followed by rebellions and revolutions led by Sogdians and other merchant peoples that affected most of the continent. Finally, when the Manchu-Chinese and Russians partitioned Central Eurasia and the Ch’ing Dynasty destroyed the Junghar Empire—the last great Central Eurasian nomad-ruled state—the economic devastation they wrought within Central Eurasia itself was so total that even at the turn of the millennium in
AD
2000 the area had not recovered. The only reason Eurasia as a whole did not collapse economically along with it is that the Littoral route had developed, under European management, into the full-blown Littoral System, which completely replaced the Silk Road in several respects.

Trade was not merely critical to the existence of the nomadic states, which were critical to the existence of the Silk Road. The nomadic peoples and the settled urban peoples were
mutually inseparable components
of any successful Central Eurasian empire.
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Every such empire had to include pastoral nomads, agriculturalists, and cities. The nomads therefore participated in trade, they encouraged it, and they coddled it, just as the agriculturalists and urbanites in their empires did. The fact that the rulers were usually steppe nomads does not change the fact that they went to war above all to force peripheral empires to allow trade.
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The Central Eurasian steppe peoples were in this respect the exact mirror images of the West European maritime peoples who built and maintained the Littoral System. The result of the steppe peoples’ efforts was the flourishing of the Silk Road, the internal and external economy of Central Eurasia. It grew to the point that the peripheral empires—who never actually understood it, despite all the posturing and preposterous assertions made by their politicians, advisers, and historians—saw it as the proverbial goose that lays the golden egg. They attempted many times to capture it and eliminate its owners, the nomads. As long as they did not succeed, the Central Eurasian economy (the Silk Road) continued to flourish. When they did finally succeed, they killed it.
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But by that time, the Western European nations developing the open-sea routes to Asia had done exactly the same thing that the nomads had earlier done by land. The Europeans too were passionately interested in trade, so they encouraged, protected, and participated in it. Their interest was in profit, the same as with the nomads. In neither case did the political patrons go to all that trouble out of altruism, but it was not the “greed of the barbarians,” as traditional historians of East and West have termed the activities of both the Central Eurasian nomads and the European maritime merchants. It was something more like the “virtue of selfishness.” It was in the European rulers’ own interests to take care of the merchants and their suppliers. When such economic interests eventually became vital to the European states that dominated the Littoral System, their navies covered the open seas in the same way that the nomads and their hordes once covered the steppe lands of Central Eurasia. The Littoral System then came into its own, eventually including most of Europe plus port cities and hinterlands along the coast of India, most of Southeast Asia, and China, and even a trading post in Japan, controlled or dominated by Europeans.

The impact of international maritime trade had long remained much less than that of the continental trade, despite the volume and value of the maritime trade. One of the main reasons is that until the European conquest, Littoral zone trade was not a distinct, fundamental element of the local economies connected by the merchants involved. It also never constituted a distinct economic zone
separate
from the Central Eurasian continental economic zone but was fully integrated into the continental system, which had Central Eurasia, or the Silk Road economy, as its center.
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The old maritime trade routes and the continental trade routes thus did not conflict, though the possibility of obtaining goods by more than one route may have exerted some competitive downward pressure on prices. The two existed throughout history, but purely as different subsystems of transportation and distribution within one Eurasian continental trade system, the center of which remained the Silk Road, the Central Eurasian economy. The region where the two routes met and interacted most intensely was Southwest Asia, primarily meaning Iran, Iraq, Egypt, Syria, and Anatolia. To some extent the political power of Persia throughout history is inseparable from its strategic position between East, South, and West by land and by sea. The same is true of Anatolia and Greece, which supported the Eastern Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the Ottoman Empire.
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At the height of the new European-run Littoral System, the international trade of Eurasia was conducted largely by sea. By that time, what trade did go by land did not go very far. Other than a tiny trickle of local low-value trade and the rare caravan, the Silk Road commerce no longer existed. The reason is that the conquest and occupation of the steppe zone and most of the native Central Eurasian states by peripheral powers eliminated local Central Eurasian governments, which were replaced by the colonial officials of the peripheral empires. The loss of their independence and the total suppression of independent-minded leaders in Central Eurasia eliminated the lords, their courts, their guard corps (the late form of the comitatus), and much else. That eliminated most of the internal Central Eurasian economic demand for silks and other high-value international trade goods. The Russians and Manchu-Chinese established official border trading posts, but they were designed specifically to control a strictly binational “official” trade between Russia and China, and to exclude Central Eurasians from participating in it. With the destruction not only of the basis for Central Eurasia’s internal economy but even of the possibility of continuing the already shrunken caravan trade, by the mid-nineteenth century the Silk Road dwindled into insignificance, and Central Eurasia sank into poverty.

This process affected every major region of Central Eurasia, including—to use their modern names—Mongolia, Tibet, Afghanistan, Western Central Asia (or West Turkistan), and East Turkistan (or Xinjiang). East Turkistan, which has recently received considerable scholarly attention, may be taken as an example.

The expansion of the Junghar Empire happened at the same time as that of the Manchu-Chinese, Russian, and British Indian empires. But the peripheral powers “effectively hemmed in Xinjiang and the rest of Central Eurasia, marking the end of the nomadic steppe empire.” Though the Junghars themselves had brought Central Eurasia into “unprecedented contact with a wider world,”
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introducing goods and technology from the peripheral states, with the destruction of the Junghars and conquest and subjugation of Central Eurasia by the Manchu-Chinese and Russians the opposite happened: the local economies suffered increasingly, to the point that by the mid-nineteenth century what highly regulated international commerce did exist consisted of goods such as Chinese “brick tea and some cloth” and Russian “livestock, hides, furs, and manufactured goods.”
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From the Ch’ing conquest on, as early as the Ch’ien-lung emperor’s reign in the eighteenth century, “Xinjiang could not generate sufficient revenue to fully support the military forces required to hold it, and millions of ounces of silver had to be shipped annually from China to Xinjiang to pay military salaries.”
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The “last trickle of trade” in mid-nineteenth century East Turkistan consisted of “re-exporting Chinese tea, silver, and other items.”
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In the early twentieth century, “Russian liquor, metal goods, fabrics, lamps, ceramics, watches, cigarettes and so forth were all much cheaper than their Chinese counterparts on Xinjiang markets.”
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These are all inexpensive goods with low unit value. The conspicuous absence of high-value luxury goods among them is in sharp contrast to the situation from Antiquity to the end of the Middle Ages, and even as late as at the height of the Junghar Empire. Their absence is direct evidence for the disastrous economic decline suffered by Central Eurasia.

The East Turkistanis finally rebelled against the intolerable conditions in 1864 and came under the rule of Yaqub Beg (r. 1865–1877), whose diplomatic astuteness brought the region international attention. Unfortunately, the Ch’ing Dynasty was not willing to let go. The Manchu-Chinese reconquest, completed in 1878, was followed by the annexation of the entire territory as a province, Sinkiang (Xinjiang), in 1884.
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By the late nineteenth century, the little commerce of any significance that still existed was in the hands of Russian and Chinese merchants. The stagnation and backwardness of culture in East Turkistan was remarked on by the few foreign travelers who braved the opposition of the peripheral imperial rulers, as well as local dangers, to enter the region and describe it.
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All the wars and the long Ch’ing mismanagement had ruined the economy, infrastructure, practically everything.
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With access to Central Eurasia so tightly controlled from all directions, it became culturally isolated and ceased to keep up with technological and other changes that were affecting most of the rest of the world at that time. In particular, the industrial-commercial revolution and the cultural changes that went along with it completely bypassed Central Eurasia, which increasingly became a primitive, poverty-stricken colonial backwater more like Central Africa or the Amazon jungle than the center of world culture it once had been.

The bad conditions in Central Eurasia hardly made it attractive or interesting to most Russians and Manchu-Chinese, who increasingly paid these colonial territories little attention, though they did manage to make it almost impossible for Europeans or Americans to go there. Indeed, because travel to Central Eurasia—including Afghanistan, West and East Turkistan, Mongolia, and Tibet—was mostly forbidden outright, information about the region became almost nonexistent anywhere outside it. Even inside it, the isolation and poverty of Central Eurasian peoples lowered their level of education, resulting in widespread ignorance about their own territories, histories, and cultures.