Southernization

The Overview

This article has generated controversy in the field of world history for making sweeping claims about the contribution of Asians to the development of ideas, agriculture, and material life across the world. The argument contrasts with the familiar claim that the making of the modern world has been a process of Westernization led by Europe and Europeans. Many scholars have found her thesis convincing. Others have not, rejecting, for example, her suggestion for a revised periodization of world history.

Summary of her major arguments: “Southernization” is Shaffer’s term for the contributions of Asians to the development of ideas, agriculture, and material life between the fourth and eighteenth centuries. She deals with the major crops, ideas, and inventions that Indians, Malays, and Chinese developed. Her argument is that southernization preceded westernization and that the economic development of Europe was dependent on Asian inventions and ideas. A list of relationships among key foods, ideas, and goods follows:

Cotton from India contributed to sail-making for Chinese ships.
Gold from Siberia, the Malay peninsula, and Zimbabwe contributed to production of coins for trade.
Indian, Persian, Arab, East African, and Malay knowledge of monsoon wind patterns contributed to the development of trade routes throughout the Indian Ocean basin.
Indian development of cinnamon and pepper production and trade made these spices available throughout Afroeurasia. Malay development of nutmeg, clove, and mace production and trade had similar impact.
New Guineans originally grew sugar cane, and Indians later invented crystallized sugar.
Indians’ full development of the concept of zero in Afroeurasia contributed to advances in mathematics in Southwest Asia, China, Europe, and all over the world.
Fast-ripening Champa rice from the Malay peninsula contributed to China’s population increase during Sui and Tang Dynasties (sixth-tenth centuries), which in turn contributed to China’s remarkable urbanization, commercialization, and industrialization between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.
Chinese invention of the compass contributed to advances in maritime navigation that allowed longer sea voyages out of sight of land.

Shaffer then explains how Muslim and Mongol empires contributed to spreading ideas and goods throughout Afroeurasia, and very importantly to the European peoples north of the Mediterranean. Without southernization first, the Portuguese would not have rounded Africa and reached the coast of India in the sixteenth century. Moreover, she argues that the early European nations needed to make colonies in tropical and subtropical areas in order to control basic goods like sugar, cotton, spices, and rice, whose spread had resulted from southernization. Shaffer concludes that “westernization” which is associated with industrialization, capitalism, and international trade, owes a debt to the peoples who earlier achieved southernization.

From: World History for Us All; A project of San Diego State University in collaboration with the National Center for History in the Schools (UCLA)

The Article

The West began to have an impact on the rest of the globe from about the fifteenth century. According to the historian Lynda Shaffer in a seminal article in the Journal of World History in 1994, the South began to have a similar impact a millennium earlier. “The term southernization is meant to be analogous to westernization.”

A process called southernization first began in Southern Asia. By the fifth century C.E. [= A.D.], developments associated with southernization were present in India, whence they spread to China and then to the Middle East and the Mediterranean basin. After 1200 they began to have an impact on southern Europe. These developments included the discovery of bullion sources, the emergence of a new mathematics, the pioneering of trade routes, the trade in tropical spices, the cultivation of southern crops such as sugar and cotton, and the invention of various technologies.

Cotton was first domesticated in the Indus River valley and Indian cotton virtually clothed the world until Britain’s Industrial Revolution.

During the Mauryan Empire (321-185 B.C.E), Siberia had been India’s main source for gold bullion, but when that route was disrupted, Indians began to look for gold in the Malay and Indonesian archipelagos, and then in East Africa. By the fifth century C.E., Indian traders and Malay sailors had established sea routes all the way from the Red Sea to China, and even into the Pacific.

Until 1621 C.E., the Moluccas (Maluku) was the only place on earth able to produce commercial quantities of cloves, nutmeg, and mace. Sugar may have been first domesticated in New Guinea, but the Indians were the first to discover how to turn it into granulated crystals that could be easily stored and transported.

Indians also invented the concept of zero, which the Arabs eventually conveyed to the Europeans. What the West called Arabic numerals, the Arabs called Hindi numerals.

During the period of Southernization in Sui, Tang, and Song China (6th to 13th centuries C.E.), Buddhism and rice agriculture spread from south to north, and the north became less dominant intellectually, socially, and politically.

During the early Muslim Caliphates, sugar, cotton, and citrus fruits spread north. The Arabs were the first to import large numbers of East African (Zanj) slaves to work sugar plantations near Basra at the north end of the Persian Gulf. By 1000, sugar and cotton had become important crops from Iran to Spain. Arabs also pioneered new trade routes and discovered new sources of silver in Tashkent and in Afghanistan that rivaled the later discoveries near Potosi in the New World. After silver became relatively abundant, Arabs sought new sources of gold in East and West Africa.

“By 1200 the process of southernization had created a prosperous south from China to the Muslim Mediterranean.” The Mongol conquests then helped to southernize northern regions across Eurasia. “Southernization was not overtaken by westernization until the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century…. Only after the northwestern Europeans had added to their own repertoire every one of the elements of southernization did the world become divided into a powerful, prestigious, and rich north and an impoverished south perceived to be in need of development.”|

SOURCE: Linda Shaffer, “Southernization,” Journal of World History 5:1-21.