Webs of Humankind : A World History (9780393417760) by McNeill J. R

Author:McNeill, J. R.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W W Norton College

CONCLUSION

In (sub-Saharan) Africa and (pre-Roman and non-Roman) Europe before 200 CE, people lived on the frontiers or beyond the big webs that were developing around the Mediterranean. Their lands were less thickly populated, and people had more room to roam. Unlike the populations of the narrow river valleys in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China, they could walk away from men seeking to convert them into forced labor. They didn’t need irrigation. With rare exception, they didn’t face militarily formidable mounted nomads. So they did not need states, did not organize themselves into elaborate social hierarchies, and did not readily submit to ambitious men hoping to live like kings and pharaohs.

Africans and Europeans were, as a result, usually less constrained by taxation, conscription, and forced labor than the peoples of the webs in Egypt or Asia. But when and where populations grew and links to Egypt or Rome developed, Africans or Europeans might find themselves bartered as slaves by chiefs eager for prestige goods from the workshops of complex societies. This risk of enslavement eventually extended to almost all Europeans by the height of the Roman Empire, but in Africa not far beyond the northeastern quarter of the continent, closest to Egypt.

Although partly isolated from the world’s big webs, Africans and Europeans built their own networks of trade, often along river routes. In Africa, this process accelerated with the rise of iron and the spread of new crops from Southeast Asia. In Europe, it accelerated with the rise of bronze and probably weakened—certainly in northern Europe—when after 800 BCE iron came into use, a case in which an existing web decayed.

Both Africa and Europe slowly entered more and more into the tangle of the Nile-Indus web and by 100 CE the Old World web. The distant reaches of each, southern Africa and northernmost Europe, remained but little affected. But those regions closest to Egypt, the Mediterranean, and Mesopotamia slowly changed their ways under the influence of opportunities and risks emanating from the Nile-Indus web. This process began very slowly and was certainly imperceptible to people then alive. But by 200 CE trade, artistic styles, military techniques, food crops, and diseases long in circulation in Egypt, the eastern Mediterranean, and Southwest Asia had clearly made their imprint on most of Europe and parts of Africa.

Although their circumstances and social worlds had much in common at the end of the last ice age, by 200 CE Africa and Europe increasingly differed. More of Europe showed the effects of interaction with the Mediterranean and with Asian steppe people. Its incorporation into the larger webs of humankind, although far from complete, was fuller than Africa’s. It was swept up in more sustained exchanges than was Africa, outside of Kush and Aksum.

While there were several reasons for this diverging fate between Europe and Africa, the simplest ones are geographical. First, Africa is much larger than Europe, and more of it is a long way from the Mediterranean or Mesopotamia. Northeast Africa interacted regularly with the web links

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