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The balance of power held until the 1350s, when peasants throughout the nation rebelled against their Mongol masters. One of these revolts would eventually topple the Yuan and establish the Ming dynasty. To safeguard Fujian against the insurgencies, the Yuan emperor authorized Zaytun merchants to build up their private militias even more by recruiting and training thousands of foreign Muslim soldiers (or, perhaps more accurately, “foreign” Muslim soldiers—many were not from the Middle East but were converted Chinese). The emperor asked two Sunni militia leaders to suppress an insurrection by Chinese around Zaytun in 1357. The next year they stopped revolts in Xinghua and Fuzhou, the next two port cities to the north. Nonetheless, the Yuan were not entirely pleased. Overcome by enthusiasm, one Sunni militia had plundered Xinghua for days; the other had occupied Fuzhou, turning it into a private satrapy. The leader of the first militia was slain by a rival Sunni—a Pu family confederate who was superintendent of marine affairs in Zaytun. The second was killed by the Yuan, who didn’t like it when their creatures acted too boldly.

Proclaiming his loyalty to the Mongols, the Pu confederate took over the dead man’s militia and used it to stamp out peasant uprisings. But he also took advantage of the chaos to turn Zaytun into an independent fiefdom and “exterminate” the city’s remaining Shi’ites (the verb comes from an account in an official city gazetteer). After three years of sporadic conflict the local Yuan commanders allied with the Shi’ite militias they had previously fought against, persuaded one of the few surviving Shi’ites in Zaytun to open the city gates secretly, and wiped out the Sunni. Then the commanders switched to the side of the incoming Ming.

It was too late to save Zaytun. Years of conflict had reduced all but one of the city’s seven great mosques to rubble. (Wealthy Arabs are supposedly about to restore the surviving building, now a park, to its former glory.) Most of the foreign population was dead. The survivors fled into the hills and became farmers. They stopped identifying themselves as Muslim. The Ming were loath to restore a city that had been, in its way, a center of pro-Yuan sentiment. They allowed its waterworks to break down and fill the harbor with silt. Foreign trade did not openly resume for two centuries. The center of its revival was not Zaytun, but Yuegang, the harbor to the south. But that didn’t stop many of the old Zaytun trading families from leaving the hills to participate in the birth of globalization.

Many of the Chinese merchants who filled the junks at Yuegang thus were descendants of families that had prospered from its first pass at globalization. They were doing the work of the centuries. They were agents of humankind’s unending quest to enlace its most far-flung members in a single skein, a journey whose endpoints the travelers have rarely been able to anticipate.

1 The Mongols eagerly absorbed Han Chinese culture but were leery of granting too much power to the Han themselves. (The Han, one recalls, are China’s dominant ethnic group—the group Westerners refer to as “Chinese.”) As a result, the Yuan often installed non-Han leaders as local rulers. Giving Arabs and Persians control over Zaytun was an extension of this stratagem.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Years after reading Alfred Crosby’s books, The Columbian Exchange and Ecological Imperialism, I met the author and got to know him a little bit. Almost every time we spoke, I suggested that he should update those books to take into account the enormous amount of research they had stimulated. Crosby was never interested; he was on to other, newer things. One day when I had mentioned this notion a few too many times, he growled, “Well, if you think it’s such a good idea, why don’t you do it?” Naturally, I took his offhand quip as license. The project quickly got out of hand. 1493, the result, is scribbled in the margins of The Columbian Exchange.

Crosby is far from the only person to whom I owe gratitude. All the