StudySpace: Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, 2 e.

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1. The Old Trade, and the New
1. Eurasian trade revived strongly in the fifteenth century, having collapsed in the wake of the Black Death during the 1300s.
2. Maritime trade in the Indian Ocean particularly rebounded, although the overland trade routes continued.
3. Europeans remained minor players in this trade system, having little to offer in terms of goods and being isolated geographically from the center of this trade regime.
4. Portuguese and Spanish maritime ventures began to alter the status quo.
1. Portuguese mariners explored the African coast and eventually made their way to India via the southern tip of Africa.
2. Spanish kingdoms sponsored Columbus's bid to reach Asia by way of the Atlantic Ocean.
5. The revival of the Chinese economy
1. Internal growth in Ming dynasty China fueled Eurasian commerce.
1. Capital moved from coast, inland to Beijing
2. Chinese population doubled during Ming rule
3. Reconstruction of Grand Canal aided trade
4. Chinese population doubled during Ming rule.
5. A larger percentage of the population lived in urban areas.
6. Elaborate trade networks developed.
2. Domestic production of silk and porcelain expanded.
3. Foreign demand for silk and porcelain increased.
1. Best-quality silks from Suzhou
2. Blue and white Ming ware
4. Foreigners could pay for Chinese products with silver, the basis of the Ming monetary system.
1. Japan was a major source of silver in the sixteenth century.
2. Increasingly, the Americas became an important supplier of silver through the Philippines.
6. Revival of Indian Ocean trade
1. Islamic merchants reworked a network of exchange linking the East African coast, South Asia, and Southeast Asia to China.
2. The Indian subcontinent was the center of these trade routes.
1. Indian population expanded.
2. India boasted several large urban areas.
3. India manufactured silk and cotton textiles.
4. Indian merchants sought silver in their exchanges in order to purchase goods from China.
5. Rulers along Indian Ocean flourished by taking custom duties on trade.
3. Melaka in Southeast Asia emerged as an important emporium.
7. Overland commerce and Ottoman expansion
1. Overland commerce reemerged in some places.
1. One route linked China to Central Asia, Muscovy, and the Baltic.
2. Another linked China and Indian Ocean ports to the Ottoman empire and Europe.
3. Aleppo in Syria, part of the Ottoman empire, emerged as an important entrepot.
4. Ottoman empire encouraged overland routes by protecting caravans and providing safe rest stops.
1. Revenue from this commerce helped finance Ottoman military expansion.
2. In 1453, the Ottomans conquered Constantinople and, making it their capital, renamed it Istanbul.
2. European exploration and expansion
1. Many Europeans believed the Ottoman capture of Constantinople threatened their traditional overland access to Asia markets.
2. The Portuguese in Africa and Asia
1. The Portuguese explored the West African coast in the fourteenth century.
1. They hoped to reach Asia by heading south.
1. They hoped to gain a cut of the Indian Ocean trade.
2. They also hoped to convert non-believers
3. They also hoped to establish commercial ties with Africans.
4. Africa was a major source of gold
2. Navigation and Military Developments
1. New technology and borrowed information aided their ocean voyages
2. They also developed tacking (sailing against the wind).
3. Using the compass and the astrolabe, they determined latitude
4. Using Greek and Arab knowledge, Muslim mariners, and their own experience, they developed hybrid ships for long-distance travel
1. The carrack suitable for enclosed bodies of water
2. The caravel was better for unpredictable currents and winds.
3. Often their vessels blended elements of both
5. Military technology also important
1. Gunpowder from Chinese
2. Cannons, some small enough to go on ships
3. Sugar and Slaves
1. In the fifteenth century, Africa became a vital trading area
2. Africa became a source of gold and sugar
3. The Portuguese established numerous ports of call and fortresses
4. The Portuguese also occupied several islands off the coast of Africa and developed sugar plantations.
5. The use of enslaved Africans from mainland on the island sugar plantations became a model that would be transported to the New World.
4. Commerce and Conquest in the Indian Ocean
1. Vasco da Gama first accomplished this feat.
1. Da Gama and later Portuguese mariners were greatly aided by Muslim pilots.
2. Indian rulers were not impressed with his cargo.
5. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese created a trading post empire in the Indian Ocean.
1. They used their ships armed with cannons to capture several key ports such as Aden, Hormuz, and Melaka, Sofala, Kilwa, Goa, and Calicut.
2. They used this strategic advantage to set up a pass system (the cartaz), like a toll.
3. Lisbon eclipsed Italian ports as the prime entry point of Asian goods to Europe.
3. The Atlantic World
1. The development of sea lanes from Europe to the Americas was an epochal transformation in world history.
1. Diseases brought by Europeans devastated the indigenous population, opening up the area to European conquest and colonization.
2. The ensuing labor shortage led Europeans to bring African slaves to the Americas at numbers far greater than Europeans.
3. Accidental discovery led to resettlement and conquest.
4. The competition for the spoils of the Atlantic system heightened European rivalries.
2. The western voyages of Columbus
1. Columbus never accepted that he had discovered a "New World" in his voyages to the Americas in the late fifteenth century. Others, however, soon realized the significance of his journeys.
3. First encounters
1. Columbus's first encounters with natives in the Caribbean symbolized the competing visions of Native Americans held by Europeans-innocents or savages
1. Encountered Tainos
2. The Caribs were described as warlike
2. We know less about Indian perceptions of Europeans.
1. They were impressed with European technology.
2. They often thought of Europeans as godlike.
3. European beards, breath, and bad manners often repulsed them.
4. First conquests
1. Columbus claimed the island of Hispaniola for Spain.
1. There the Spanish experimented with governing an American colony.
1. They enslaved the Indian population with the encomienda system, whereby the crown would reward conquerors with grants of land and labor.
1. Encomenderos (those granted the land) had to pay special taxes on precious metals extracted from their land.
2. When the gold supply on the island dwindled, many Spaniards looked for opportunity elsewhere.
3. Dominican friars trying to convert the Indians often protested their treatment by the Spanish.
4. The vast majority of the Indians died off very quickly.
5. The Aztec empire and the Spanish conquest
1. Mexica Society
1. In Mesoamerica, the Mexica had created a large, complex empire that embraced perhaps 25 million people.
2. The Aztec state was based on extensive kinship networks.
3. Priest played a powerful role as well.
1. The Mexica believed in a cyclical universe and a coming apocalypse.
2. Captives were sacrificed to the gods.
4. From 1440 onward, the Aztec empire was under stress.
1. Conquered people on the periphery were rebelling.
6. Cortés and Conquest
1. Hernan Cortés arrived in early sixteenth century.
1. Aztec ruler Moctezuma and his ministers feared Cortés and his men were the god Quetzalcoátl and his entourage and sent emissaries to distract them, but made little effort to fortify the empire.
2. Doña Marina, a daughter of a local Indian noble farmer, was the key to translating between Aztecs and Spanish.
2. Cortés made alliances with aggrieved Aztec enemies.
3. Cortés entered the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, in 1519 and captured Moctezuma, who then ruled as a Spanish puppet.
4. The Aztecs rose in rebellion two years later but were defeated by the Spanish and their allies.
1. Spanish had more advanced technology.
2. Aztecs fought to capture, not to kill.
3. Diseases brought over by the Spanish wiped out much of the Aztec population and made resistance all the more difficult.
4. Cortés became governor of the colony "New Spain."
7. The Incas
1. From capital of Cuzco, Incas governed an empire of 4 to 6 million
1. As Spanish arrived, internal strife over inheritance of empire
2. Smallpox epidemic struck
2. Spanish led by Francisco Pizarro, take advantage of internal conflict to conquer the Incas in 1532.
3. After conquest, Spanish establish their capital in Lima.
4. Spanish fight over spoils of the empire.
8. The Columbian exchange
1. Spanish conquest of the Americas initiated a massive exchange of flora and fauna between the Afro-Eurasian land mass and the Americas.
1. From the Americas came tomatoes, beans, and other crops.
2. From the rest of the world to the Americas came wheat, sugarcane, and livestock.
1. Without natural predators, cattle, swine, and horses thrived in the Americas.
2. Indeed, the altering of the American landscape can be called "ecological imperialism."
3. Most devastating were diseases brought to the Americas by Europeans.
1. Smallpox, measles, pneumonic plague, and influenza were especially devastating.
2. Up to 90 percent of the indigenous population was wiped out.
9. Spain's tributary empire
1. The Spanish tapped into existing commercial systems, not completely dismantling the indigenous empires they inherited.
1. They continued the encomiendas, which built on previous Aztec and Incan labor conscription systems.
2. Few Spanish women immigrated to the Americas.
1. Spanish men consorted with native women.
2. Many Spaniards married into prominent Indian families.
3. Most Spaniards and their offspring lived in towns.
4. The Spanish quickly plundered the gold and silver of the Aztec and Incan empires.
5. Silver
1. In the sixteenth century, the mines at Potosí in Andes were the largest source of silver.
2. In the seventeenth century Mexico became the prime source of silver.
3. The Spanish adopted indigenous labor conscription schemes to mine the silver.
1. Mortality rates in the mines were appalling.
10. Portugal's New World Colony
1. Portuguese created enclaves along coast.
1. Unlike Spanish, the Portuguese rarely intermarried.
2. When no precious metals were discovered in Brazil, the Portuguese began to raise sugarcane in the fertile fields.
1. When the Indian population fled, the Portuguese imported African slaves to produce the crop.
1. Most slaves were men who died off relatively quickly, necessitating the importation of more slaves.
3. Sugar Plantations
1. Labor model came from West Africa Island plantations
2. Sugar major export from New World
3. Plantation fairly small, between sixty to one hundred enslaved people
4. Terrible work and living conditions led to high mortality and need for constant imports of more enslaved Africans.
4. This development provided an alternative model to colonization and exploitation to the Spanish tributary empire
11. Beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade
1. The growth of the slave and sugar trade were intimately linked.
2. Africa supplied five times as many peoples to the Americas as Europe between 1492 and 1820.
3. Many European merchants participated in the slave trade.
4. Trade in African slaves predated the Europeans.
1. Arab and Muslim traders transported large numbers of slaves to Muslim centers of civilization starting in the seventh century.
2. Africans also maintained slaves themselves.
1. Because of underpopulation and poor climate and soils, labor was a precious commodity.
2. Slaves in Africa were often not consigned to permanent servitude. They often were assimilated into families.
5. The Atlantic slave trade intensified demand for Africans. Very few areas of the continent were untouched.
4. The Transformation of Europe
1. The emergence of the linkages between Africa, the Americas, and Europe deepened divisions in Europe
2. The Habsburgs and the Quest for Universal Empire in Europe
1. Initially the emergence of the Atlantic system strengthened the Habsburg dynasty that ruled Spain.
2. Other rivals quickly tried to tap into this source of wealth and power.
1. The English crown sponsored pirates to seize Spanish cargo in the Atlantic.
1. Sir Francis Drake was the most famous of these.
2. English provocations precipitated naval warfare between the English and the Spanish, with the English coming out on top in the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588.
3. The Reformation
1. The Protestant Reformation furthered emerging rivalries in Europe.
2. Martin Luther, a German monk, spearheaded this movement against papal authority in the early sixteenth century.
1. Luther criticized corruption in the church and preached that salvation came through individual faith alone.
2. His words spread by the printing press and converts, Luther challenged the Catholic church's primacy in Western Europe's religious affairs.
1. Luther's ideas gained a strong following in Germany and northern Europe.
2. Jean Calvin, who modified many of Luther's teachings, developed a strong following in Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, and Scotland.
3. Tudor kings in England developed a moderate blending of Protestant and Catholic beliefs-Anglicanism.
4. Many of these new Protestant sects developed animosity toward each other as well as toward the Catholic church.
3. The Catholic church responded with the Counter-Reformation.
1. The church worked to end corruption.
2. Church doctrine gave greater emphasis to individual spirituality.
3. Society of Jesus (Jesuits) formed to revive the church and spread its message around the world.
4. Religious warfare in Europe
1. The religious fervor of the sixteenth century precipitated numerous bloody wars.
1. These wars were accompanied by atrocities committed by both sides against one another.
2. The wars weakened the Habsburg dynasty.
1. Spain spent much of its American silver on the wars.
2. The Protestant Netherlands successfully revolted and achieved independence from Spanish control.
3. The wars helped bring an end to the Valois dynasty in France and led to the emergence of a stronger dynasty-the Bourbons.
1. France was wracked by civil war, as exemplified by the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, in which thousands of Protestants were massacred by Catholic crowds.
2. Henry IV initiated the Bourbon dynasty with an emphasis on domestic peace.
4. The wars helped strengthen England and Holland, as they could expand commercial networks around the world at the expense of Spain.
5. The wars also strengthened emerging national identities.
5. Prosperity in Asia
1. The conquest of the Americas gave Europeans the means to reshape relations with Asia.
1. Portugal took the lead in establishing a maritime empire in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
1. The Portuguese became important shippers in the Indian Ocean and between the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
2. The Spanish monopoly of American silver allowed them to enter into Asian commerce.
1. The port of Manila in the Philippines became an important entrepot were New World silver was exchanged for Chinese manufactured goods.
3. Other European powers such as the English, the French, and the Dutch soon entered the fray.
2. Mughal India and Commerce
1. As Europeans entered into the commerce of the Indian Ocean, the Mughal dynasty was one of the world's wealthiest and most powerful empires
1. Mughal power rested on military strength
1. They used cavalry and artillery to subdue most of the Indian subcontinent
2. Mughal rulers were flexible in their dealings with the diverse people of their realm
1. Akbar tolerated religious differences and even married non-Muslim wives
2. Akbar took part in discussions of comparative religions
1. Debate took lace in his Din-i-Iladi (House of Worship)
3. The Mughals benefited from increased Indian Ocean commerce
1. Increased commerce brought in more silver and reinforced the use of money
2. European commercial networks expanded the markets for Indian products and provided greater access to imports without threatening the territorial integrity of the empire
3. Greater commercialization allowed Mughals to reform imperial finances, weakening the power of zamindars, or tribute collectors
1. They began to collect taxes in money, not goods
2. Zamindars were paid a fee instead of a share in taxes collected
4. Mughal rulers used newfound wealth to sponsor impressive artwork and monumental feats of architecture
3. Prosperity in Ming China
1. China's Ming dynasty experienced similar patterns to those in Mughal India during the sixteenth century
1. New World silver flowed into China.
2. Employees paid in money, not goods
3. Agriculture and handicraft production soared
4. Constraints on borrowing and lending eased
2. Ming China's population soared due to economic prosperity
1. Several cities had a population of over one million
3. Asia's relations with Europe
1. Europeans appeared more often in China during the sixteenth century
2. Portuguese took lead
3. There were one thousand Portuguese in Macao in 1563
4. Jesuits and other Catholic orders sent missionaries to evangelize
4. Like the Mughals, the Ming confined Europeans for the most part to coastal enclaves
6. Conclusion
1. In the middle of the fifteenth century, the world had many different regional trading spheres. European exploration and innovation changed all of that by 1600. By then, Europeans had developed sea lanes that linked the world
2. The accidental discovery of the Americas increased European wealth and power through the creation of an Atlantic Ocean system linking Africa, the Americas, and Europe
3. The newfound wealth afforded them greater influence in Asia. Although they were in no position to dominate Asian affairs, by 1600 the balance of power was moving towards the western portion of Eurasia
4. Native Americans and African slaves played a significant role in making the modern world. Harsh labor conditions and disease took their toll on the indigenous people and enslaved Africans
7. Chronology
8. Study Questions
9. Further Readings

 

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