1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [229]
I make one big exception to this rule. In this book, indigenous people are usually referred to by their ethnic names, not by a geographic label. In the modern context, it seemed to me forgivable to refer to people from Yuegang as “Chinese,” even if they would not have used that name. But it seemed foolish to refer to, say, the Inka as “Peruvians”—the gap between the Inka empire and modern Peru is too great. I make exceptions to my exception. In Chapter 9, for instance, I refer several times to “Angolans” in Palmares, because it is not clear which ethnic group from the area that is now modern Angola they belonged to. A bigger exception, as I imagine the reader is already thinking, is my use of the term “Indian.” On the simplest level, the plain sense of the word is wrong—among other things, Indians are not from India. (“Red Indians,” sometimes heard in Britain, is not preferred as a way to distinguish Indians from the Americas from Indians from India.) Unfortunately, alternative terms are no better. “Native American,” for instance, literally means someone who was born in the Western Hemisphere. My family and I are native Americans—yet we are not Indians. Canada has introduced the term “First Nations,” an admirable term, but one that lacks useful adjectival and possessive forms. As a writer, I am reluctant to inflict terms on readers that I cannot easily say.
On a deeper level, “Indian,” “Native American,” and “indigenous” are remote from the way the Americas’ original inhabitants thought about themselves. Just as sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europeans did not describe themselves as “Europeans,” the inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere in that same era did not think in terms of any collective entity. Today, such group nouns are important. In my experience, indigenous Americans tend to use the word “Indian” when referring to their fellows. For better or worse, I am following their example.
APPENDIX B
Globalization in Beta
Why did Fujian become the center of the silver trade, and not some other place in China? One answer is that it was the region in China most experienced with exchange across the ocean. The fabled city of Zaytun, one bay north of Yuegang, was the eastern terminus of the maritime Silk Road.
A glittering, congested metropolis, Zaytun occupied a key place in what might be called a first pass at globalization, a system of exchange across Eurasia that reached its apogee in the fourteenth century. One trade route went overland, across western China to the Middle East and Black Sea before reaching, through many middlemen, the Mediterranean. The other went by sea, touching down at Indochina and India before going up the Red Sea; it, too, finished at the Mediterranean. The overland route was dominant until the Mongol empire began falling violently apart, at which point the nautical route became safer. From Zaytun’s wharfs sailed Chinese junks low in the water with chests of silk and porcelain; into them came Chinese junks laden, according to an impressed Marco Polo, with “rich assortments of jewels and pearls, upon the sale of which they obtain a considerable profit.” Polo’s descriptions of Fujianese trade focused obsessively on the Asian luxury goods—precious stones, silk, porcelain, spices—that fascinated Europeans. In fact, though, Fujian’s traders made most of their money from items that Polo would have found mundane, such as bulk copper and iron, which temples across Southeast Asia needed for ritual objects. Zaytun was a full-service emporium, not a boutique.
The city was ringed by a twenty-foot-high wall, faced with glazed tile and brick. Outside the wall, trading prosperity paid for massive marsh-drainage