The Global Logistical Revolution

There is an unfortunate note of motivated reasoning and ideological research to the article, but the underlying research is interesting.

From The Thousand and One Connections of Medieval Africa by Grégory Fléchet. I found this thought-provoking. The facts are not in dispute, but I had never particularly focused on their implications.

GlobAfrica’s final research focus was the Great Lakes region, in the southern part of the Rift Valley. Its objective was to clarify the role of plants imported from America beginning in the sixteenth century on the economic, social, and cultural organisation of the population centres of this large geographic area. “It is important to note that on the scale of the Great Lakes region, the vast majority of today’s food crops such as sweet potatoes, manioc, corn, beans, peanuts, and chilli peppers all came from the Americas,” points out Christian Thibon, Professor of History at the Université de Pau (southwestern France) and coordinator of this part of the programme.

The original approach adopted for this series of explorations was based on a retrospective form of historical analysis. Relying on the features of the agricultural landscapes of both today and the nineteenth century—in addition to the diversity and intensity of cultivation as well as the distribution of population density—the team endeavoured to reconstruct the evolution of cultivation systems and social structures over the course of the preceding centuries, going as far back as the medieval period.

By going off the beaten track, researchers were able to show that the great diversity of plant varieties grown north of Lake Victoria resulted in particular from intensive trade in seeds, knowledge, and experience between peasant communities, which was conducted at a distance from major communication routes, and outside of any type of political or commercial framework.

The work of the team’s ethnobotanists and linguists on the names of cultivated plants helped uncover two main routes of diffusion for American plant species: from the west following the Congo River Basin, and from the north travelling along the Nile Valley to Lake Victoria. These conclusions supplement the current consensus, according to which these plants originated from the eastern coast. “While our research somewhat shakes up the vision of a Great Lakes region led by powerful kingdoms—whose power it should be remembered was reinforced by the colonisers—it strives in particular to recount the history of the stateless societies and forgotten kingdoms that contributed to the rise of this part of Africa through the cultivation of a wide range of exogenous plants,” Christian Thibon sums up.

If indeed, and I am not disputing it, "the vast majority of today’s food crops [in Africa] such as sweet potatoes, manioc, corn, beans, peanuts, and chilli peppers all came from the Americas," it implies an agricultural and nutritional revolution as a consequence of the connecting of the Old and New Worlds. The time frame is pretty recent. Routine transatlantic trading routes sufficiently robust and frequent enough to cause an agricultural revolution were probably not in place until circa 1600-1650. Maybe as late as 1700. So a very recent agricultural transformation.

One of the corollary questions to this agricultural revolution is whether there was a demographic consequence. If crops from the Americas displaced native foodstuffs, they must have carried advantages such as durability and resilience to variable crop conditions, superior nutritional content, storability, etc.

We have the case study of Ireland and potatoes to help inform this speculation. The Spanish first encountered Peruvian potatoes in 1532. The potato made it to Spain by 1570. By 1600, potatoes had reached Ireland. The island then had an estimated total population of some 1 million people. As the potato spread as a common dietary supplement, the population rose to two million by 1700. The potato became, in Ireland, a staple, with a large portion of the population relying entirely on potatoes for their nutrition. By 1840, the population of Ireland had risen from a pre-New World foods level of one million to about 8.5 million. With the potato blight, the population fell by half, plateauing at 4 million.

Some of this population rise came from the Age of Enlightenment discoveries, the development of the basic science of agriculture, and the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, from 1650-1720, Ireland experienced the Little Ice Age which would have worked against these other trends. Netting out all these factors is guesswork but I suspect that it is a reasonable estimate that the introduction of the New World potato led to a three or four-fold rise in the natural population of Ireland, from one million to four million.

If this experience has any sort of transferability, it suggests that the natural population of Africa in 1800 would have been about one quarter save for the introduction of the New World food stuffs.

This population explosion arising from New World crops flows into the historical record.

One of the great ironies of history is that Southern Africa was only sparsely populated by Saan and Khoikhoi peoples until the 1600s. As the great Dutch trading empire rose, they needed supply depots, particularly for their fleets to Asia. South Africa was initially just some scattered supply stations but through the efforts of the Dutch East India Company settlers and farmers arrived in numbers to enhance the settlement, staging points, and supplies.

By the 1750s, Dutch farmers moving north from the Cape began encountering Bantu tribes moving south. The Saan and Khoikhoi were caught between them and suffered from both.

But why were the Bantu tribes moving south in the 1750s? My guess is that the nutritional enhancement from the New World crops drove a population explosion in Central and Western Africa, just as in Ireland. Consequently, the great clash between the settler Dutch in South Africa and the newly arriving Bantu migrating south were both the consequence of the great logistical revolution of 1500 when ships connected the Old World and the New.

The Dutch were there as a necessary support to the shipping routes, and therefore a direct consequence of the global logistical revolution. The Bantu arrived as an indirect consequence. Ships brought the Dutch to support the shipping routes. But ships also brought the New World crops to Africa which led to a population explosion which led to the Bantu move into new lands to the south.

What a mosaic.


(Sources here, here, and here)