Global History

Textbook and Lecture Slideshow Summary and Review: Slide 1-2

Slide 3 Summary –

In 1519, five ships under the command of Ferdinand Magellan set out from the Spanish mainland. Nearly three years later a single vessel returned, having successfully circumnavigated the globe. This achievement came at a high cost: four ships had been lost, and only 18 men out of 265 had staved off scurvy, starvation, and stormy seas to complete the journey. Magellan himself had died. But the survivors had become the first true world travelers. Unlike earlier adventurers who penetrated Eurasia and Africa, Magellan’s transoceanic passage connected these worlds with others that, from an Afro-Eurasian viewpoint, had been apart – the Americas.

The voyages of Magellan and other European mariners intensified westerners’ contact with Asia’s vibrant commercial networks and gave Europeans access to a region they called the New World. Although Christopher Columbus did not intend to “discover” America when he went looking for Asia, his voyages convinced Europeans that there were still new territories to exploit and people to convert to Christianity. Moreover, in colonizing the Americas, Europeans drew on connections with West Africa. Indeed, African laborers became vital to agriculture and mining in the American colonies. Soon the New World’s riches were prominent participants in the commercial circuits of Afro-Eurasia.

This lecture introduce the initial European conquest and colonization of the Americas. In the narrative of world history, few events surpass Columbus’s voyages of discovery, which opened up worlds about which Afro-Eurasians had no previous knowledge. For the first time since the Ice Age migrations, peoples again moved from Afro-Eurasian landmasses to the Americas. So did animals, plants, commercial products, and – most momentous – deadly germs.

Slide 4

It was enormously significant that Europeans, rather than Asians or Africans, first stumbled upon the Americas and then exploited their resources. For Europeans, too, now became empire builders – but of a different nature. Their empires were overseas, far from the homeland. While the new colonies generated vast riches, they also brought unsettling changes to those who sought to make and maintain empires.

Despite the significance of Europeans’ activity in the Americas, most Africans and Asians were barely aware of its importance to them. As the lecture demonstrates, Asian empires in Ottoman-controlled lands an in India and China continued to flourish after recovering from the Black Death. Nor was Europe’s attention exclusively on the Americas, for its national monarchies competed fro sway at home. Religious revolt in the form of the Protestant Reformation intensified these rivalries. In the wake of Columbus, the drive to build and protect empires across oceans – as well as religious conflicts abroad and at home – scattered peoples, splattered blood, and shattered worlds.

Revival in trade around global recovered by 15th century and accelerated, eventually maritime trade supplanting overland.

Slide 5

Searching for new and lucrative routes Europeans began exploring Atlantic coast of Africa lured by spices, silks, and slaves. Portuguese explorers made their way around Africa and onward to India while Spanish monarchs sponsored Columbus’s bid to reach Asia across the Atlantic.

Portuguese explorers looking for gold and silver and their visions shaped by myths and stories of giants, amazons, cannibals, and sea monsters. Innovations in technology – vessels – caravels – tacking, and compass/astrolabe led way (much of it technology taken from/absorbed from Muslims during Reconquista. Military tech, too, like canons and gunpowder.

Dynastic rulers were the main beneficiaries of this revolution of technology. 1492, Spanish had amassed an army of 60,000. Battles were long and inconclusive because of it.

Africa and islands along coast soon proved to be far more than a stop-off en route to India or a source of precious metals. Africa became a valued trading area, along Gold Coast, especially. To support growing sugarcane plantation systems along west African coast exploited slave labor. Ready supply led Portugal and Span to build sizeable plantations in their first formal colonies.

Having done this Portuguese ventured into Indian Ocean trade. Vasco da Gama first to reach it. Found network of Muslim traders and da Gama used violence as left coastal areas to pressure into working for crown. Effectively shows of force, he burned ships and villages of fishing towns, for instance, and took harbors to create stronghods where required ships to pay cartazes – permits.

Slide 6

Atlantic World was New World or previously unknown. By 1550 Atlantic world was competitive with Indian Ocean. Columbus stepped onto the beaches of San Salvador on Oct. 12, 1492. Aiming to Christianize world and enrich himself and backers he was man of his time. He set stage for epochal transformation in world history. In their encounters with people from Americas Europeans brought pathogens that caused decline in Amerindian populations. Enabled them to conquer and colonize Americas but left severe labor shortage. Large-scale introduction of slave labor.

Ferdinancd and Isabella bankrolled a crusade to liberate Jerusalem alongside Columbus. Next, more ambitious mariners set sail to New World.

Columbus stepped onto San Slavador aiming to Christianize while enriching himself.

First encounters – Tainos clearly were impressed with European ships and metal goods, but they were also repulsed by their beards, food, smell, and inability to live off land.

Slides 7-8 Context/Point – What does this tell us about early, new world empire?

Slide 9

First Conquests – Between 1492 and 1519, Spanish experimented with insitituions of colonial rule over local populations. As early 1494 soldiers and Indians were fighting over land and resources. Grants to conquistadores (encomiendas) gave them land, rights to Indian labor, extracted precious metals. This could not last and many less favored Indians pulled up and went back to Spain.

Dominican friars protested the conquistadores with much dissent and debate over nature of Spanish rule.

Aztec Empire and Spanish Conquest – Aztecs made their empires through tributary taxes. 3-city league had been formed around Lake Texcoco, Mexica, expanding through central valley. United small, independent states. 25 million people, possibly. Tenochtitlan was capital folding out in circles from political and religious center. Extended kinship formed basis for aristocratic elites who formed foundation for centralized state. Priests managed religious idea that history ran in cycles and could influence gods with sacrifice.

Moctezuma became emperor in 1502. When Spanish came he hemmed and hawed and sent gifts, but did not prepare for war. Cortes – former law student – formed alliances with natives on march to Tenochtitlan. Impressed with size of city. Cortes captured Moctezuma in 1519 and made him Spanish puppet. Massacre of unarmed Aztec crowd led to uprising and many Spanish killed, also Moctezuma. Aztecs fought Spanish but eventually succumbed to disease and starvation.

Slide 10

Slide 11

The Incas – 4-6 million from base in Cuzco. In early 1500s, fight over successor to Huayna Capac. Huascar, son, took over rule when father died from smallpox, probably. Atahualpa was brother and declared war on Brother.

When Spanish arrived they found a divided empire in 1532. Francisco Pizarro commanded about 600 men and used guns and horses to suppress Inca forces. Eventually, Atahualpa was killed by Spanish and for decades Spanish chased Incas through Andes mountains. Spanish arriving in droves at new capital in Lima were staking claims for encomiendas. Split into factions, one of which assassinated Pizarro. Spanish king in 1541 stopped encomiendas from being hereditary.

Destroying both New World empires meant that Europeans had 1) way with human and material wealth of Americas 2) market for their own goods 3) new frontier to colonize as staple-producing provinces.

Slide 12

The Columbian Exchange – Spanish came to Americas for gold/silver but Indians taught them about unknown crops like potatoes and corn, taking away tomatoes, beans, cacao, peanuts, tobacco, and squash. Fueled ironically a population explosion across Afro-Eurasia (China could grow corn e.g. where too dry for rice and too wet for wheat)

Called Columbian Exchange – movement of previously unknown plants, animals, people between Afro-Eurasia and Americas – Spanish brought wheat, grapevines, and sugarcane. But microbes mostly exchanged. “Streets filled with dead and sick people that our men walked over nothing but bodies.” – Spanish soldier entering Aztec capital.

Measles, smallpox, plague, influenza – 90% of Indian population destroyed.

Environmental effects manifold. Cattle, swine, and horses to New World opened up herding ranches over highly productive agricultural estates in northern Mexico maintained by Indians before. No natural predators these animals took over. Forest clearing too.

Slide 13 State Church and Community in Spanish Empire

How did Spain Control New World?

Disease (especially smallpox) was important method – not intentional at first

Peru’s Incan imperial population fell from 1.3 million in 1570 to 600,000 by 1620.

Mexico’s population fell from 25.3 million in 1519 to 1 million in 1605

Native population had no immunity because of isolation from the population networks of Africa and Eurasia.

Written legal system

Urbanization and Displacement

Racial mixing laws; cultural language of color-based racial thinking, led to strict social hierarchy

Gendercide – First, no Spanish women, so intermarriage; later, no mixing, Spanish women invited and children of mixed marriages marginalized

Religion & State

A wholly “new world” bureaucracy

The Council of the Indies was set up to be the supreme governing body of Spain's colonies in America (1524–1834).

Composed of between 6 and 10 councilors appointed by the king, the council:

Prepared and issued all legislation governing the colonies

Approved all important acts and expenditures by colonial officials

Acted as a court of last resort in civil suits appealed from colonial courts.

This was an attempt by the Spanish government to limit the power of the conquistadors

The Church concentrated on conversion in the earliest periods and repressed Amerindian religions sometimes with force and violence. Later on, after conversion efforts were met with considerable failure, the Church lifted repression on Amerindian religions

A new landed elite and forced labor divided communities, class and racial divisions

Slide 14 Class System in Spain

The European population of Latin America was made up of lesser nobles, merchants, artisans, miners, priests, lawyers, criminals – all in service to the colony

Spanish settlers were always a smaller minority to Amerindians, Africans, and Creoles (American-born whites) taken as a whole

Encomenderos were people who had received encomiendas (grants of land for tribute to the Spanish government), until halted by the power of viceroys, judges and church officials

As such the new social hierarchy would put Europeans at the top and Amerindians at the bottom with slaves not far below

Spain’s Tributary Empire – Indian survivors made tribute payments to new masters thereby extracting wealth without massive settlement. Spain took tribute and so did encomiendas holders in labor – for mines, estates, and public works.

Most Spanish migration was men, although some women like Ines Suarez who came to Indies only to find husband dead, married conquistador Pedro de Valdivia together conquering Chile later marrying governor Rodrigo de Quiroga – an exceptional story.

Too few women, Spanish men married into Indian families. As result, mestizos became fastest-growing population. Most settled in urban environments, old cities of Indian empires like Mexico City and Cuzco.

Slide 15 North America –

“Only the Dregs were left…”

British North America lacked the obvious wealth of Spanish possessions, in particular

Britain launched their colonial ventures in the post-Reformation period, during which a commercial class was developing, the textile industry was growing, parliament was checking the king, and feudalism was in steep decline

For the British state, they were happy to extract wealth and let private companies run the colonies

For British Protestants, they were happy to create new ways of living in North America rather than recreate the British class/political system. They were also less interested in missionary conversion and a relationship with the British crown

Early on, small-farms with little need for slaves, less racial mixing

Slide 16 British competition with Spanish?

Slide 17 France and Fur Trading –

The French capitalized on the new desire

Created a luxury market for fine furs as well as providing comfort for ever cold winters in Europe

American Indian trappers and hunters like the Huron benefited at first

Trade with Europeans led American Indian groups to become dependent on European goods, disrupting traditional hunting practices and community values

European diseases, alcohol and guns also contributed to the diminishing of American Indian power in the Americas

Slide 18 Summary and Contact with Asia in next steps –

Summary – Only a few pedestrians crossing Moscow’s central square actually witnessed the death of their country, the Soviet Union. It was about 7:30pm on December 25, 1991, when the red flag of the Soviet Union was lowered for the last time from its perch high above the Kremlin, replaced by the tricolor flag of the new Russian republic. Soviet President Gorbachev formally resigned and gave a brief farewell address. Those events symbolized many endings – of the Communist party, of a state-controlled economy, of an international superpower. It also marked an end of an empire, for the Soviets had maintained the old Russian Empire, constructed over many centuries, bringing Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Georgians, Kazaks, and many others under Russian rule. Now that empire was split into 15 separate states.

The downfall of the Soviet Union/Russian Empire was but the last of a long list of empires that perished during the twentieth century: the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires after World War I; the British, French, Belgian, Italian, and Portuguese empires in the aftermath World War II. Elsewhere, Uighurs and Tibetans challenged Chinese rule, while Cubans, Vietnamese, Afghans, and others resisted American domination. Empire building was thoroughly discredited during the twentieth century as “imperialist” became a term of insult rather than a source of pride.

How very different were the three centuries of the early modern era, when empire building was a global process. Of those empires, none were more significant than the European colonies in the Western hemisphere. But European empires in the Americas were not alone on the imperial stage of the early modern era. Across the immense expanse of Siberia, Russians constructed what was then the world’s largest territorial empire. Qing China penetrated deep into inner Asia, doubling the size of the country while incorporating millions of non-Chinese people who practiced Islam, Buddhism, and other religions. Thus the early modern era was an age of empire.

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were ridden with crisis for Europe. The commercial and agricultural sectors suffered from prolonged economic stagnation, and many nations found themselves locked in expensive and devastating internal and external wars. In an effort to cope with these difficulties, European states instituted increased government growth and extended control over their populations through new forms of taxation, the military, and the state bureaucracy. The following documents reveal the different ways in which European governments engaged with the challenges of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In countries like England, a system of constitutionalism envisioned political power as a careful balance of many forces. In France and eastern European states, the doctrine of absolutism stressed the divine and total power of the monarch. Despite their differences, both systems represented careful attempts to establish centralized states that claimed sovereignty over their territories and peoples.

In the same way that the Mediterranean and North Atlantic trading spheres linked a wide range of producers and consumers, so too did the northwest Pacific Ocean and China Sea connect to the monsoon trade of the eastern Indian Ocean, bringing spices to China and silk and porcelain to Southeast Asia. As in the Mediterranean, pirates sailed these seas in search of valuable goods and captives, and no empire managed to gain a monopoly on violence or trade in early modern times. On land, the Russian Empire began its march east across northern Asia, reaching Pacific shores not long after the Qing seized China from the Ming dynasty in the 1640s. The islands of Japan, meanwhile, underwent consolidation in a period of extreme isolation, while the Philippines became a mostly Catholic Christian stronghold claimed by Spain, but with a significant Muslim population in the south. More isolated than open, Korea developed a unique, hierarchical society that included the widespread enslavement of native Koreans. These extremes of expansion and isolation persisted well beyond the early modern period in East Asia.

From 1400 to 1800, East Asian countries experienced important changes at all levels of society. Despite the growing presence of Europeans in East Asia, both China and Japan remained relatively free from the influence of European commercial expansion. Chinese thinkers in the Ming and early Qing periods were primarily concerned with internal development and regional conflicts involving other Asian states. In Jpan, the work of the three great unifiers – Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu – ended the chaotic Warring States Period and led to the relative peace of the Tokugawa regime (1603-1867). In both countries, transitions from older to newer political orders were mirrored by changes in society and culture. In China, the fall of the Ming Dynasty and the founding of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) by Jurchen invaders from Manchuria (known as the Manchu) occasioned new unrest and social critique. In Japan, the stability of the Tokugawa family’s rule fostered domestic economic and cultural advances, and – despite careful control of international contact – afforded Dutch merchants limited but important access to Japanese society. The documents here illustrate not only the political shifts in East Asia, but also new ways that the Chinese and Japanese tried to define gender and its role in their lives.

The Chinese, Mughal, and Ottoman empires continued older patters of historical development, while those of Europe represented something wholly new in human history – an interacting Atlantic world of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Furthermore, the European empires had a far greater impact on the poples they incorporated than did other empires. Nowhere else did empire building generate such a catastrophic population collapse as in the Americas. Nor did Asian empires foster the kind of slave-based societies transcontinental trade in slaves that were among the chief outcomes of Europe’s American colonies. Finally, Europe was enriched and transformed by its American possessions far more than China and the Ottomans were by their territorial acquisitions. Europeans gained enormous new biological resources from their empires – corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, tobacco, timber, and much more – as well as enormous wealth in the form of gold, silver, and land.

All the European rulers of their empires viewed their realms through the lens of the prevailing economic theory of mercantilism. This view held that European governments served their countries’ economic interests best by encouraging exports and accumulating bullion (precious metals such as silver and gold), which were believed to be the source of national prosperity. In this scheme of things, colonies provided closed markets for the manufactured goods of the “mother country” and, if they were luck, supplied great quantities of bullion as well. Mercantilist thinking fueled European wars and colonial rivalries.

But the relative newness of these European states and their monarchs’ desperate need for revenue in the absence of an effective tax-collecting bureaucracy pushed European royals into an unusual alliance with merchant classes. Small groups of merchant capitalists might be granted special privileges, monopolies, or even tax-collecting responsibilities in exchange for much-needed loans or payments to the state. It was therefore in the interest of governments to actively encourage commerce and innovation. Thus states granted charters and monopolies to private trading companies, and governments founded scientific societies and offered prizes to promote innovation. In this way, European merchants and other innovators from the fifteenth century onward gained an unusual degree of freedom from state control and in some places a higher social status than their counterparts in more established civilizations. In Venice and Holland, merchants actually controlled the state. By the eighteenth century, major Western European societies were highly commercialized and governed by states generally supportive of private commerce. In short, they were well on their way toward capitalist economies – where buying and selling on the market was an established practice – before they experienced industrialization. Such internally competitive economies, coupled with a highly competitive system of rival states, arguably fostered innovation in the new civilization taking shape in Western Europe.

Europe’s societies were not alone in developing market-based economies by the eighteenth century. Japan, India, and especially China, were likewise commercialized or market-driven. But after 1500, Europe found itesel at the hub of the largest and most varied network of exchange in history. Widespread contact with culturally different peoples was het another factor that generated historical change and innovation. The new global network, largely the creation of Europeans themselves, greatly energized commerce and brought Europeans into disrect contact with peoples around the world.

For example, Asia, home to the world’s richest and most sophisticated societies, was the initial destination of European voyages of exploration. Jesuit missionaries were encouraged to learn about Chinese inventions and cultures and customs to bring back to Europe. Inexpensive and well-made Indian textiles began to flood into Europe in the seventeenth century. Indian textiles and Chinese and Japanese porcelain and lacquerware encouraged British textile industry competition, which first began with imitation ware and then fostered domestically produced, innovative products by the nineteenth century. Thus, competition from desirable, high-quality, and newly available Asian goods played a role in stimulating Europe’s Industrial Revolution.

In the Americas, Europeans found a windfall of silver that allowed them to operate in Asian markets. They also found timber, fish, maize, potatoes, and much else to sustain a growing population. Later, slave-produced cotton supplied an emerging textile industry with its key raw material at low prices, while sugar, similarly produced with slave labor, furnished cheap calories to European workers. Europe’s capitalist industrial revolution depended highly on their ability to disproportionately draw on world resources. Further, the growing Atlantic colonial world provided a market for European goods. Capitalist commerce (trading in market with few tax/tariff burdens and then reinvesting back into the business to expand it) and cross-cultural exchange, acting in tandem, sustained the impressive technological changes of the first industrial societies.

Mercantilism – the belief that national economies grew through exports and the accumulation of bullion (precious metals, gold and silver) – was the economic theory of the day

Colonial economies were generally regional e.g. settler-dominated agriculture versus slave plantations, or silver mining versus ranching

With greater supply of silver from the Americas Europeans “bought” their way into Asian markets, making Asian goods available in mass and for cheap, confirming Asian centrality in the world economy

This did not provide for growth but rather led to price inflation, the devaluation of the currency and the loss of Spanish imperial power

In general…

Silver mines and sugar plantations dominated New World economies early on, with gold and silver spurring European expansion into Asian trade networks

Portuguese sugar plantations were the first to use slave labor, introduced in the Caribbean first and later in Brazil, causing slave labor to triple in the Americas

The Revival of Chinese economy was crucial ingredient to AfroEuraisa’s global economic revival and Ming dynasty did it. Internal economy was key with surging domestic markets with elaborate trading empire of silk, cotton textiles, rice, porcelain, and paper.

Zheng He’s voyages and other efforts at overseas commerce were unsuccessful. Ming also refused paper money (as Han had) and so bought silver for commercial dealings. Unable to make enough for domestic ecoomy began to trade with Spanish in 1570s who had gained silver from New World.

The revival of Indian Ocean trade came with efforts to include China in global trade. India was epicenter and led by Muslim traders. India’s silk manufacturing and cotton textiles gave them favorable trade status (more export than import) and part of long-distance trade through silver needs.

Ottoman expansion carried overland caravan trading into the early modern period. They linked the Baltics, Muscovy, and central Eurasia. Various entrepots sprang up like Aleppo in Syria. Ottomans made efforts to support trade through tax revenue, military and refreshment stations.

Main Themes –

· European voyagers and colonizers “discover” the Americas (the so-called New World) and connect Afro-Eurasia with the Americas for the first time since the Ice Age.

· Not only do peoples move back and forth between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas; so do plants, animals, cultural products, and diseases – the Columbian exchange.

· Europeans create empires at great distances from their homelands, fail to enslave Native Americans, and bring in African captives as slave laborers, creating the Atlantic system.

Europe –

· Portugal creates a trading empire in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.

· Spain and Portugal establish colonies in the Americas discover silver, and establish export-oriented plantation economies.

· As the balance of power in Europe shifts, the Protestant Reformation breaks out in northern and western Europe, splitting the Catholic Church.

The Americas –

· Native Americans, lacking immunity to European diseases, perish everywhere.

· Spanish conquest and disease destroy the two great Native American empires in Mexico (the Aztecs) and Peru (the Incas).

Africa –

· Trade in African captives fuels the Atlantic slave trade, which furnishes labor for European plantations in the Americas.

Asia –

· Asian empires – the Mughals in India, the Ming in China, the Safavids in Iran, and the Ottomans in western Asia and the eastern Mediterranean – barely notice the Americas but profit economically from enhanced global trade.

Key Terms: Atlantic system; Aztec Empire; Columbian Exchange; conquistadors; Reformation; Counter-Reformation; Inca Empire; Mughal Empire; New World Empire

Study Questions:

1. Describe the old and new trade patterns in Afro-Eurasia and the Americas during the fifteenth century. How similar and different were they from trade patterns during the pre-Black Death Mongol period?

2. Describe how Spain created a vast empire in the Americas. How did the spread of lethal disease influence this outcome?

3. Explain the Columbian exchange. What consequences did it have on regions both beyond the Atlantic world and within it?

4. Compare and contrast Spain’s tributary empire in the Americas with Portugal’s seaborne empire in the Indian Ocean. Why did these empires pursue such different strategies?

5. Explain what conditions promoted the strengthening of regional dynasties in Europe in the sixteenth century as opposed to the growth of one large European empire.

6. Compare and contrast political and commercial developments in the Mughal and Ming dynasties during the sixteenth century. How did the expansion of global commerce affect each region?

7. Evaluate to what extent an increased European presence altered the political balance of power in Asia at this time. How did Asian dynasties react to increased European contacts?