The so-called 'Glorious Revolution' in England in 1688 was a pivotal event in the country's history. It also began a train of events leading to almost twenty years of war in Europe and the emergence of Britain as a major power. This is why elsewhere I cover the life of Thomas Pitt who, living from 1653 to 1726, straddled this period of rapid social and economic change in Europe and the world.

Wills, 1688: a global history

To take an overview of the deepening connections between parts of the world, I will often go back to a short but highly interesting book, John Wills' global history of the year 1688. He speculates that: In 1688 a full sense of the variety of the world's places and peoples, of their separations and their connections, was confined to a few, referring to the small number of travellers as well as the literate urban Europeans who read the growing literature of travel and descriptiion of other parts of the world.

He goes on to say:

China's Kangxi Emperor and some of his ministers certainly were aware of the Europeans as a new element on the far margins of their 'All under heaven', but hardly at all of Africa and the Americas. The world of Islam stretched from Beijing and Mindanao to the Danube and the Niger but reached the New World only when some unfortunate African Muslim survived the middle passage and lived out his or her life in slavery in the Americas. The world of the illiterate farmer of any culture was largely limited to his village and a nearby market town. The world of the Bardi of Australia contained a thousand people at most, almost no tools, and a host of spirits and dreams. Thus we may find many worlds of human experience within the geographical world of 1688. (Wills, p3-4)

Wills points out that no one in the late seventeenth-century world experienced or expected rapid technological change in one lifetime or basic change, even over a longer time span, in the political order or in one's way of life.

Certainly, technological change was slow. As for the political order, there were revolutions and upheavals, as for instance the dynasty change in China in the mid-17th century. But essentially the same kind of order was imposed afterwards as before, with different people at the top.

Early signs of change are perceptible:

.. in retrospect we can see in the world of 1688 signs of the basic shifts that created our own very different world

Europe was oddly fractured compared to some other parts of the world. There was no imperial center, as there were in India, China, Russia, the Ottoman Empire.

This made the Europe of 1688 a cauldron of forms of political life new in Europe, such as centralizing bureaucracies, or new in the world, such as representative assemblies with real powers. (p. 168)

Novel forms of mobilization of resources and human energy, like the Dutch East India Company and the Society of Jesus, spread European power and presence to almost every part of the world.

Interconnections

When the Portuguese arrived in Kongo in 1485 they found an established kingdom, whose ruler soon converted to Christianity.

Much of the Kongo elite converted, and a dense web of Portuguese trade and influence developed. But the Kongolese soon discovered that they could pay for European goods only by exporting slaves, and the slave trade became the overwhelming reality of the relation. The kings did manage to keep the delivery of slaves within their kingdom orderly, passing through slaves taken in wars beyond their borders, condemning criminals to slavery, and extorting gifts of slaves from the rich and noble.(p. 33)

Capuchin missionaries sent by the Vatican angered the population by attacking traditional customs. Unrest led to an uprising.

The Capuchins were much more intrusive and less willing to compromise with Kongolese custom than earlier Portuguese priests had been. .. In the resulting war with the Portuguese in 1665, the Kongolese king was killed, his capital was devastated, and the kingdom of the Kongo disintegrated.

The Europeans were glad to be able to sell cowries, metals, cloth, liquor, and increasing amounts of guns and gunpowder. They bought some ivory for the European market and other goods to be sold in other African ports. But by far the most important reason why they continued .. was the ever-growing demand for slaves in the towns, mines, and plantations of the Americas.(p. 34)

Early gunpowder (black powder) was made by adding charcoal and sulphur to saltpetre - which is the common name for the mineral potassium nitrate. Because charcoal can be produced almost anywhere and sulphur was widely mined in continental Europe, the most in-demand ingredient for gunpowder was often the saltpetre. As wars and armies became ever bigger, by the mid-1600s the European companies found it convenient to establish large-scale production facilities in Bengal.

Source

John E. Wills, 1688: a global history (Norton 2001)