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19 The Changing Balance of Wealth and Power 1650–1750

T welve thousand years ago, when the last Ice Age was just ending, a land bridge con- nected the eastern tip of Russia with Alaska. In 1728–1729, Vitus Bering, a Danish sea captain serving in the Russian navy, demonstrated to the world that this isthmus was long gone. Leading an expedition commissioned by Emperor Peter the Great, Bering sailed around the northeastern coastline of Eurasia and through the strait that now bears his name. Before entering the passage, he recorded in his ship’s log an encounter with local Siberians. They told him what to expect: “August 8th, having arrived in north latitude 64°30′, eight men rowed to us from the shore in a skin boat, enquiring from whence we came and what was our business there. They said they were Chuikchi . . . and they told us that on the coast lived many of their nation; that

A storm in the Pacific shipwrecked Vitus Bering and his crew in 1741. Bering died on the Aleutian island that was later named in his honor.

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the land not far from there takes a decided turn to the west- ward.”1 In other words, the land did not converge with the North American shore but veered away from it.

Bering did not find Alaska on that first trip, but in 1732 he set sail again, heading a much larger Russian mission. Last- ing nearly a decade, the Great Northern Expedition, as it be- came known, involved more than three thousand people who charted northern Pacific waters and coastlines, collected sci- entific data, and looked for commercial opportunities. This time Bering reached the coast of North America, but he did not live to return home. His ship broke up on an island (later named Bering Island), and he died there of scurvy in 1741. Sur- viving crew members managed to build a small craft from the wreckage of their ship and sailed back to Siberia. They carried with them a load of valuable sea otter pelts, which helped in- spire Russian trade settlement in Alaska a half-century later. A thread in the web of global connections now traversed the far North Pacific, and by the early 1800s the Russian empire extended from the northern coast of California to eastern Eu- rope, a straight-line distance of more than 5,800 miles.

The integration of northern Pacific lands into global ex- change networks is one aspect of the great world conver- gence that continued to intensify in the later seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. This chapter focuses on three large-scale manifestations of that convergence: land-based empire building on a spectacular scale; encounters between indigenous peoples and new European settlers in lands dis- tant from Europe; and a new intellectual movement centered in European cities to rethink long accepted explanations of the workings of nature as new knowledge of the world’s ge- ography, biology, and diverse human culture flowed in from all directions.

In the first part of the chapter we explore developments in politics and power relations in the century after 1650. The Qing (chihng) dynasty in China, the Romanov rulers in Rus- sia, and the Spanish in America, using gunpowder technol- ogy and centralized systems of command, consolidated their power over immense territories. In 1750 these three states together sprawled across about 14,282,000 square miles of land, about 4.5 times more than the continental United States today.2 By contrast, Europe remained an assemblage of competing states, some of them tiny, others large territo- rial monarchies that aimed to further centralize royal power. And as we described in Chapter 18, the Netherlands, Britain, France, and Portugal also projected naval and commercial power into Africa, Asia, and the Americas.

In the sixteenth century, Europeans went abroad as ex- plorers, soldiers, merchants, missionaries, business entre- preneurs, and imperial officials. In the second part of the chapter we describe a new type of colonial activity that got under way in the seventeenth century. Increasing numbers of Europeans migrated across the seas or into the forests of Siberia as settlers intending to build farm communities

and to reshape land and society, to the extent they could, in the image of Europe. Indigenous peoples, who did not want their land and societies reshaped, naturally opposed these colonizing projects, though to no avail in the long run. By 1750, European settler colonies were well established in North America, Siberia, and South Africa.

Because western Europe began in the sixteenth century to play a new role as a hub of global maritime activity, new information about the world and its peoples poured in. This knowledge circulated widely among literate Europeans just at the time when the Renaissance study of human nature and behavior was reaching into every part of the subconti- nent and when various Christian sects and denominations were proclaiming different, often conflicting versions of di- vine truth. In the final part of the chapter, we look at how these strands of thought converged in an intellectual move- ment that challenged the ancient wisdom handed down from Greek philosophers and church fathers and that presented radical new ways of describing reality. Yet even as European intellectuals questioned traditional certainties such as di- vine revelation and God’s intervention in human affairs, the world’s major belief systems continued to thrive and grow, notably Christianity and Islam.

Chapter Outline

EmpirEs and Big statEs Chinese Prosperity and Imperialism Russia from the Pacific to Poland The Spanish Empire in America Europe: Successes and Failures of Absolutism

EuropEan sEttlEmEnt and thE FatE oF indigEnous pEoplEs Early European Settlers in North America Russian Settlement of Siberia European and Khoisan in South Africa

WEighing thE EvidEncE The Journal of a Dutch Commander at the Cape of Good Hope

altErnativE visions oF god, naturE, and thE univErsE The Scientific Revolution The Enlightenment: Rethinking Human Nature and Society The Continuing Growth of Islam and Christianity

individuals mattEr Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita: A Visionary Christian of the Kongo

• • •

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DF 544 Chapter 19 | The Changing Balance of Wealth and Power

MAP 19.1 Major states and colonial territories, 1700.

Caption with question to be added in page proofs.

A Panoramic View

PHILIPPINES

MALUKUS

Cape of Good Hope

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

A T L A N T I C

O C E A N

I N D I A N

O C E A N

JAPAN KOREA

B A H I A

NEW FRANCE

VICEROYALTY OF PERU

VICEROYALTY OF NEW SPAIN

BRAZIL

ANGOLA

OT TO M A N E M P

I R E

MUGHAL EMPIRE

Z U N G H A R

SAFAVID EMPIRE

HAUSA STATES

ASANTE

BORNU DARFUR

KONGO

LUNDA

BUGANDA

BENIN

SEGUFUTA TORO

FUTA JALLON

R U S S I A N E M P I R E

Q I N G E M P I R E

Elmina

London

Potosí mine

Beijing

Bombay

Calicut Madras

Calcutta

Irkutsk

Manila

Huancavelica mineLima

Melaka

Macao

Batavia

Mexico City

Boston

Québec Amsterdam

Paris

Lisbon Madrid Constantinople

England and territories

France and territories

Dutch Republic and territories

Portugal and territories

Spain and territories

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DFEmpires and Big States 545

At the same time, the Manchus (also known as Jurchens), a people of the forests, mountains, and plains of Manchuria, or Northeast China, pressed against the Ming imperial bor- ders. Hung Taiji, the Manchu ruler in the mid-seventeenth century, created a strong central government modeled on the Chinese system. He named his dynasty the Qing, mean- ing “pure,” and he pushed out the frontiers of his state to in- corporate Mongols and Koreans. Ming frontier forces faced Manchu raids while simultaneously battling rural insur- gents within China. In 1644 Chinese rebels captured Beijing, the imperial capital, and then Manchu cavalry seized the city from them. Manchu leaders claimed the Mandate of Heaven, or divine authority, to rule in the name of the five-year-old son of the deceased Hung Taiji. This boy reigned under the guidance of a regent. Meanwhile, the last Ming emperor committed suicide.

The Qing in power. Though Ming resistance held out in some regions for several years, the new regime made a fairly rapid transition from violent conquest to consolidation of power in both city and countryside. As foreign conquerors, the Qing endeavored to preserve their Manchu ethnic iden- tity separate from the majority Han, or Chinese-speaking population they ruled. The Qing elite prohibited Manchu women from marrying Chinese men, though Manchu men could choose Chinese women as second wives or concu- bines. A system of parallel ranks characterized the high levels of Qing bureaucracy. That is, a Manchu and a Han Chinese official shared the same position. Each reported to the emperor, who encouraged them to spy on one another to ensure their loyalty to him alone.

Many Manchu-speaking officials learned to commu- nicate in Mandarin Chinese, and government documents were issued in both languages. The Manchus adopted Confucian doctrines of good government, a strategy that achieved important political goals. The Qing emperor rep- resented himself as the symbolic patriarch of a family con- stituted of all his subjects, and he proclaimed Confucian ideals of fair and just administration. The Ming imperial examination system, designed to train literate, competent, and dedicated public officials, was also retained. Confu- cianism provided a unifying framework for society but made room for religious toleration. In this respect the Qing carried on the Ming tradition of permitting Buddhists, Dao- ists, Muslims, and Christians to build places of worship and observe their rituals as long as they did not interfere in state business. The third Manchu emperor explained Qing ideas of religious diversity: “We Manchus have our own partic- ular rites for honoring heaven; the Mongols, Chinese, Rus- sians, and Europeans also have their own particular rites for honoring Heaven. . . . Everyone has his way of doing it.”3

Empires and Big States

Focus In what ways may the aims and successes of Chinese, Russian, and Spanish land-based empire building in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries be compared?

The period of world history from 1500 to 1650 saw the growth of two types of states (see Map 19.1). One type com- prised the territorial monarchies that marshaled armies of both gun-carrying soldiers and tax-gathering bureaucrats to expand royal power (see Chapter 17). Several of these states, notably Ming China, Mughal India, Safavid Persia, the Ot- toman Turkish sultanate, and the Habsburgs of central Eu- rope, may be classed as empires because they incorporated extensive territories and culturally diverse populations. The other type included the European countries that acquired overseas territories in addition to building stronger central governments. Portugal and Spain did this first; Netherlands, England, and France then followed suit (see Chapter 18).

In the century after 1650, important shifts occurred in state power. Both China under the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) and Russia under the Romanov tsars (1613–1917) dispatched armies to conquer immense new areas of Inner Eurasia to exploit its resources and to tax its populations of farmers, herders, and hunters. Spain also emerged in that period as a super-sized imperial power as its soldiers, missionaries, and merchants intruded into new regions of both North and South America. The Ottoman, Habsburg, and French mon- archies had all aspired in the sixteenth century to large-scale conquests within Europe. Amid the brutality and confusion of religious wars between Catholics and Protestants, how- ever, none of these states achieved their ambitions. Rather, Europe remained divided among numerous states large and small, simultaneously trading, sharing ideas, making trea- ties, and fighting one another.

Chinese Prosperity and Imperialism As we saw in Chapter 18, states in several parts of Afroeur- asia experienced economic and political instability in the mid-seventeenth century. China was one of them. The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) became progressively destabilized af- ter 1600. Courtiers, Confucian officials, and relatives of the emperor feuded continually for imperial favor and public influence. The court eunuchs, whose original job had been to guard the emperor, seized direct control of many gov- ernment functions. Climatic conditions associated with the continuing Little Ice Age worsened across northern China in the 1620s, producing famines. Persistent decline in the price of silver reduced the value of tax receipts, and a sud- den stoppage of silver imports in 1639–1640 precipitated an economic crisis. In those tumultuous conditions, peasant uprisings swept the northern and western provinces.

PHILIPPINES

MALUKUS

Cape of Good Hope

P A C I F I C

O C E A N

A T L A N T I C

O C E A N

I N D I A N

O C E A N

JAPAN KOREA

B A H I A

NEW FRANCE

VICEROYALTY OF PERU

VICEROYALTY OF NEW SPAIN

BRAZIL

ANGOLA

OT TO M A N E M P

I R E

MUGHAL EMPIRE

Z U N G H A R

SAFAVID EMPIRE

HAUSA STATES

ASANTE

BORNU DARFUR

KONGO

LUNDA

BUGANDA

BENIN

SEGUFUTA TORO

FUTA JALLON

R U S S I A N E M P I R E

Q I N G E M P I R E

Elmina

London

Potosí mine

Beijing

Bombay

Calicut Madras

Calcutta

Irkutsk

Manila

Huancavelica mineLima

Melaka

Macao

Batavia

Mexico City

Boston

Québec Amsterdam

Paris

Lisbon Madrid Constantinople

England and territories

France and territories

Dutch Republic and territories

Portugal and territories

Spain and territories

regent An individual who administers the affairs of a state when the ruler is absent, disabled, or has not reached adulthood.

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later Chinese forces fully annexed Zunghar territory. This victory signaled that China no longer needed to make deals with Mongols or other steppe cavalry armies to secure the empire’s western frontiers. Qing troops continued pushing west, subduing other Mongol and Turkic peoples, occupy- ing oasis towns, bringing in Han Chinese immigrant set- tlers, and absorbing the huge region that is modern China’s Xinjiang province. In 1720 a Qing army captured Lhasa, the principal city of Tibet and seat of the Buddhist Dalai Lama. Thereafter, Tibet became a Chinese dependency. These west- ern conquests made the empire much more linguistically and culturally diverse, including absorption of millions more Muslims. In long-term perspective, the Qing and Rus- sian advances together terminated a nearly four-thousand- year history of pastoral nomads forming powerful states in Inner Eurasia.

To the east, Qing seaborne forces captured the island of Taiwan from a Chinese merchant prince whose family ruled there after evicting the Dutch East India Company thirty-eight years earlier. After that victory in 1683, China adopted an “open seas” policy, encouraging active collabo- ration between government officials and Pacific merchants and opening six seaports in the south to shipping. Foreign commercial vessels were permitted to enter the port of Guangzhou. Qing officials enforced collection of port duties

Qing expansion. Within a few decades of the Manchu victory, China’s population and economy resumed the up- ward trend it had enjoyed in the sixteenth century. The ruler named the Kangxi (kang-shee) emperor spent most of his sixty-eight-year reign (1654–1722) enlarging the frontiers of China north, west, and east. To the north the Qing intended early on to bring the Amur River valley, a region of fertile land, timber, and fur-bearing animals, into the Chinese po- litical orbit. Shortly before the Manchu victory, however, the Amur region began attracting some of the Russian trappers, traders, and army contingents that spearheaded imperial Russia’s eastward advance into Siberia. Inevitably, Russian and Chinese troops came to blows. Fortunately, the two governments decided shortly that the valley might better serve as a middle ground for commerce rather than as a ter- rain of mutually debilitating war. In 1689 they agreed to the Treaty of Nerchinsk (a town near the Amur). By its terms, Russia relinquished claims to the valley, and the two pow- ers marked out a border. They even erected markers written in Chinese, Russian, Manchu, Mongol, and Latin.

Settling this conflict with Russia freed Qing forces to move westward to deal with Zunghar, a Mongol state in the Inner Eurasian steppe that menaced China’s western bor- ders. A Qing army with gunpowder artillery defeated the Buddhist ruler Galdan Khan in 1696, and sixty-four years

a display of imperial power. Qianlong, the sixth Qing emperor, used the Grand Canal to tour China’s southern provinces in 1751. Such tours were a longstanding practice of Chinese rulers. This painting on silk by an imperial court artist is titled The Qianlong Emperor’s Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Six: Entering Suzhou and the Grand Canal (1770). What elements in this image suggest that the emperor’s visit was an important event in Suzhou?

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Russia from the Pacific to Poland The reorganized and centralized Russian state that emerged in the fifteenth century suffered both fierce internal strug- gles and border invasions from Poland and Sweden in the early seventeenth century (see Chapter 17). After claiming the Russian throne, the teenaged tsar Mikhail Romanov (r.  1613–1645) managed to solidify his authority to the ad- vantage of his successors. The early Romanov tsars made land grants to boyars, or members of the titled aristocracy, who supported the dynasty. Laws imposed in 1649 reduced free peasants to the status of serfs obligated to work on large estates, making these grants even more valuable. Po- litical stability at the top also permitted Russian rulers to increase spending on territorial expansion, which brought the state more tax wealth, natural resources, and trade.

The ambitions of Peter the Great. Nearly paralleling the reign of the Kangxi emperor in Qing China, Peter I, known as Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725), transformed Russia, first into a regional power, then into both a trans- hemispheric empire and an important member of the European state sys- tem. Peter insisted on un- limited authority, an ideal of absolutism that Otto- man, Persian, and Mughal monarchs had refined in the previous century and that several European rulers also adopted. Like them, Pe- ter claimed that God granted the monarch a “divine right” to govern and that opposition to the monarch constituted opposition to God. All subjects from noble lords on down therefore owed allegiance to the monarch above all other loyalties. For several millennia kings and queens around the world had associated themselves with godly power. But Eu- ropean rulers, including Peter, tried more forcefully than in the past to nullify the independent authority of aristocratic assemblies, town councils, religious authorities, and other groups that had traditionally claimed social or political privileges and responsibilities. Royal claims of absolutism implied that monarchs had the exclusive right to make de- cisions for the well-being of their subjects and to impose on them whatever religious practice they thought best.

Peter much admired the technology and administrative techniques that enabled western European states to amass power and establish overseas empires. In 1697–1698, he and an entourage made two trips west to study shipbuilding, sailing, military strategy, administration, and scientific ideas. He consulted with master naval architects in Dutch shipyards, even dressing himself in workers’ clothes to la- bor alongside shipbuilders. He visited textile workshops and museums, conversed with Dutch and English scholars, and corresponded with French intellectuals.

Returning to Moscow, Peter introduced numerous changes, including a stronger central bureaucracy accountable to him and up-to-date armaments to strengthen the army, which

from visiting British, French, Danish, and (after 1789) Amer- ican merchants. But when British traders asked to build a permanent station, the Qianlong emperor refused. As he wrote to Britain’s King George III,

“Your request for a small island near Chusan [Zhoushan], where your merchants may reside and goods be ware- housed, arises from your desire to develop trade. . . . Consider, moreover, that England is not the only barbarian land which wishes to establish relations with our civili- zation and trade with our Empire: supposing that other nations were all to imitate your evil example and beseech me to present them each and all with a site for trading purposes, how could I possibly comply? This also is a fla- grant infringement of the usage of my empire and cannot possibly be entertained.”4

The ruler was not averse to commerce but insisted on the strict subordination of foreign visitors to imperial authority.

the Kangxi Emperor in court dress. This silk scroll by an anonymous court painter depicts Kangxi, the longest-reigning Qing ruler. He was in power for sixty-one years.

absolutism A political doctrine asserting that in a monarchy the ruler holds sole and un- questionable power by divine authority.

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In 1703 he set thousands of engineers, artisans, and peas- ants to work building St. Petersburg, an entirely new city

and imperial capital on marshland where the Neva River empties into the Baltic.

To the south and southeast, Peter’s forces seized territory in the

Ukraine from the kingdom of Poland-Lithuania, and they

continued to fi ght Ottoman Turkish forces for access to the Black Sea. Catherine the Great made huge gains in those directions late in the century. She seized the eastern third of Poland in

a coldblooded deal with the Austrian and Prussian monar-

chies to divide up and eradicate that country as a sovereign state.

The army also expelled the Otto- mans from the Black Sea’s northern shores. To the east, Peter intensifi ed Russian military advances into Sibe- ria, seeking new agricultural lands and commerce. Cossacks subjugated local peoples in the name of the tsar and traded for furs and other forest

products. By 1639 Russians reached the Pacifi c Ocean, then penetrated the Amur River valley. As we have seen, these forays led to the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), which calmed border confl ict between Russia and China.

After Vitus Bering explored the sea passage between Siberia and North America, Russian trappers and trad- ers began inching their way through the Aleutian Islands and along the Alaskan coast. In 1804 the Russian Ameri- can Company occupied the little port of Sitka in southern Alaska. Eight years later, the company set up a trading and farming station at Fort Ross in northern California, building a stockade and an Orthodox chapel and making occasional contact with Spanish and later Mexican offi cers and missionaries advancing from the south. The company occupied this distant post until 1841. Russians interacted with native Siberians and Alaskans in a variety of ways. The newcomers, almost all of them males, frequently mar- ried or cohabited with local women, producing children that adapted themselves to two different cultural worlds. Russian merchants and trappers sought mutually benefi cial trade with Siberians, offering rewards for collecting furs. But Russians also intimidated and attacked native commu- nities that put up resistance, a portent of the “Russianizing” of Siberia that was to come.

The Spanish Empire in America As of 1650, Spain and its colonial possessions constituted an empire second only to Russia in territorial extent. The

by 1715 numbered about 215,000 conscripted soldiers. He further reduced the local power of the land-owning boyars by creating the Table of Ranks, which gave nobles pre- cedence at court based on their meritorious service to the state rather than on their aristocratic family tree. He bolstered royal control of the Russian Or- thodox Church, even replacing its patriarch with a council of priests that operated accord- ing to the tsar’s rules. He initiated westward-looking cultural and education re- forms, including a decree that all children of nobles and offi cials must learn mathematics. He founded a medical school, supported Russia’s fi rst newspaper, and set up a scientifi c academy. To make visible the drastic cultural reorien- tation he desired, he ordered men to cut off their traditional beards and forced his courtiers to wear western European–style hats, coats, and un- derwear. To the horror of Orthodox churchmen, he held salons in which men and women socialized together in one room. Not sur- prisingly, Peter’s reforms encountered resistance from con- servative leaders, but under his relentless pressure, coupled with Russian military successes, they gained elite support.

Empire building west, south, and east. Peter and his successors, especially the empress Catherine II (Catherine the Great, r. 1762–1796), pursued campaigns of overland expansion that tsars had initiated in the fi fteenth century. The pace and scope of this expansion was staggering. Impe- rial territory tripled in the 1700s. Similarly to China in the same period, conquests transformed Russia into a complex multicultural state. The tsars generally tolerated ethnic and religious diversity but insisted on the primacy of Russian cultural and political leadership. They strengthened their historic alliance with the Cossacks, a polyglot collection of mounted fi ghters and merchants that originated mainly in the Ukraine. Armed Cossack bands, which included both Christians and Muslims and speakers of several different languages, spearheaded many of the emperor’s expansion- ary campaigns.

Looking west, the tsars had long coveted warm water ports on the Baltic Sea, the passage to the wider maritime world. Peter realized this goal after defeating Sweden in the Great Northern War, a struggle that endured from 1700 to 1721. Deploying his newly modernized forces, he oblit- erated the Swedish army, effectively ending that country’s role as a Baltic power and obliging all the major European states to recognize that Russia was going to join their club.

River empties into the Baltic. To the south and southeast, Peter’s forces seized territory in the

Ukraine from the kingdom of

chies to divide up and eradicate that country as a sovereign state.

The army also expelled the Otto-

service to the state rather than on their aristocratic family tree. He bolstered royal control of the Russian Or-

Russia’s fi rst newspaper, and set up a scientifi c academy. To make

tsar peter i, imperial modernizer. Peter the Great stands in front of newly-constructed

St. Petersburg. What symbols of imperial power and of Peter’s modernization efforts did artist Grigory Semyonovich Musikiysky (1670–1739)

incorporate into this miniature enamel portrait?

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transformed themselves into oppressive and wealth-seeking agents of the colonial regime.

Paralleling the viceroy’s bureaucracy, imperial judicial courts called audiencias judged civil and criminal cases. These tribunals were obligated to recognize the legal standing of people of all social statuses and ethnic backgrounds. The courts typically favored the interests of Europeans, though commoners occasionally won disputes over property own- ership or labor abuse. Both the audiencias and the viceroys ideally took direction from the Council of the Indies, a body of nobles and court favorites that met in Madrid to advise the king on imperial policies.

The Spanish monarch had the authority to nominate all of the empire’s church officials, collect tithes, and found new churches, missions, and monasteries. This tight meshing of church and state meant that Catholic institutions played a particularly prominent role in the Spanish colonies. Sev- eral religious orders, including Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits, founded both urban churches, which people of European descent attended, and missions, which primarily served Indians. Missionaries converted Indians, ideally at- tended to their moral and material needs, and encouraged them to become “civilized” by learning Spanish and adopt- ing European dress and diet. Mission friars also typically made heavy demands on Indians to grow food and pay a variety of fees.

The empire’s social profile. Many Spaniards and other Europeans traveled to the American empire to serve as soldiers, missionaries, or government officials, but others migrated in search of trade, urban business, or plantation ownership. In 1650 the European population living in Span- ish America numbered about 600,000, rising to 3.8 million by 1825. This group consisted of both peninsulares (pehn- INH-soo-LAH-rayz), the elite class of men and women born

Spanish monarchy’s American lands far exceeded the size of Spain itself. In the mid-seventeenth century, the Ameri- can empire already had several large Spanish-governed cit- ies, busy trade networks, and control over extensive rural areas, all held together by shared laws, an evolving central governing structure, and the Roman Catholic Church.

Governing Spanish America. Despite persistent Na- tive American resistance in remote areas and wars with rival European states for trade and land, the empire con- tinued to grow as imperial forces conquered deep interior lands. At its territorial peak in the early 1800s, it stretched from northern California to the tip of South America, in- cluding several Caribbean islands. This realm was initially divided into two huge viceroyalties governed by appointees of the Spanish crown. Mexico City became the capital of New Spain, Lima the center of the viceroyalty of Peru.

In contrast to Beijing and Moscow, Madrid, the impe- rial capital, was separated from its giant land empire by an ocean. Consequently, viceroys and other colonial officials tended to exercise more autonomous power than the crown would have preferred. The viceroys sometimes disagreed with royal proclamations and dragged their feet in imple- menting them. Since it could take up to two years to send a message to Spain and receive a reply, officials had plenty of time to do things their own way. The relationship be- tween the crown and colonial elites evolved into a system in which Madrid secured the loyalty of colonial officials, land- lords, and mine owners—a tiny percentage of the Ameri- can population—by allowing them to buy and sell lucrative administrative offices, appropriate Indian land, and evade numerous laws intended to protect ordinary people from labor or tax abuse.

The daily lives of all Spanish American subjects centered on the pueblos (towns), haciendas (large landed estates), Catholic missions, and presidios (garrisons). Provincial governors and judges had legal oversight of Spanish town councils made up entirely of local white men of wealth. In towns distant from the viceroyal capitals, these coun- cils usually had a good deal of freedom to make policies that served their interests. In the country side, individual estate owners had wide latitude to discipline their families, black slaves, and Indian laborers as they saw fit, echoing the power of feudal lords in medieval Spain. In the huge rural expanses of both Mesoamerica and Peru, the Spanish authorities could only keep order, collect taxes, and recruit workers with the collaboration of local indigenous nobles and chiefs. These heads of villages and kinship groups walked a fine line between Spanish demands for revenue and labor and the pleas of commoners for protection against imperial exactions. As Spanish government and law be- came entrenched, however, many local leaders

spanish hacienda/hacendero with indians working. Photo research still on-going; caption to come.

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of special dynastic circumstances, Philip V, a grandson of the French Bourbon ruler Louis (LOO-ee) XIV, mounted the Spanish throne. Philip and his two Bourbon successors im- plemented a series of reforms both at home and in the col- onies to centralize and modernize economic and political structures. In Spain the king had limited success challenging the long-held power of nobles, town elites, and high church clergy. But across the Atlantic, political reforms to improve government efficiency met with less resistance. To strengthen regional administration, the crown created two new viceroy- alties: New Granada (1739), with its capital at Bogotá in mod- ern Colombia; and Rio de la Plata (1776), centered on Buenos Aires in the far south. The reforms also aimed to check the growing power of affluent creoles, who dominated the colo- nial economy. The crown tended to distrust American-born elites and moved to bar them from high-ranking offices. The main effect, however, was to alienate this economically vital class from the imperial government.

As demand in Europe for sugar, tobacco, hides, and other products continued to climb, the Bourbon government initi- ated other reforms to increase customs revenues on Amer- ican exports. After 1770, coffee and cacao joined sugar on the roster of crops exported from the Spanish Caribbean colonies. Cattle ranching in the Rio de la Plata region and a revival of silver mining in Mexico and Peru also signaled higher economic growth. All of these operations depended on intensive use of low-paid manual labor. Even small co- lonial manufacturing relied on coercion. A German visitor to a Mexican textile factory in 1803 noted troubling condi-

tions “not only with the great imperfection of the technical process . . . but . . . also with the unhealthiness of the situation, and the bad treatment to which the workers are exposed. Free men, Indians, and people of color are confounded with the criminals distributed . . . among the manufactories, in order to be com- pelled to work. All appear half naked, covered with rags, meager, and deformed.”6 Owing to conditions like these, miners and others who worked for low wages increasingly expressed their grievances in strikes and spontaneous uprisings.

Europe: Successes and Failures of Absolutism In the first half of the sixteenth century, the Habsburg emperor Charles V imagined him- self transforming Europe into a unitary em- pire under the moral leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. France, the Ottoman em- pire, and German princes who had converted to Protestantism—all Habsburg enemies— sabotaged this dream, and Europe remained a collection of diverse and competing states (see Map 19.2).

in Europe, and creoles, that is, people of European de- scent born in America. Be- fore the nineteenth century,

these groups together remained a small minority of the to- tal population. Despite the sixteenth century’s catastrophic mortality, Indians continued to far outnumber Europeans throughout most of South America and Mesoamerica. After about 1620, the Indian population began gradually to recover. In some lowland regions and on Caribbean islands, African slaves outnumbered both European and Indian inhabitants. As in Russian Siberia, though with a much larger base pop- ulation, unions between men and women of different ethno- racial identities became common throughout the Spanish empire. Some of these unions were formalized in marriage; often they were not. Either way, they produced children of mixed ancestry. Social conventions emerged to categorize these castas, or mixed “races,” according to their various per- mutations: Spanish father–Indian mother, Spanish mother– African father, Indian father–African mother, and so on. Generally, people of mixed race occupied higher steps in the empire’s rigid social hierarchy than Indians or African slaves. In Mexico the population, the group descended pre- dominantly from unions between Indians and Europeans, came to constitute nearly 25 percent of the population by 1650 and about 40 percent by 1810.5

Imperial reforms. Changes in the Spanish monarchy had direct consequences for the American empire. Because

colonial family life, c. 1715. This representation of a mixed-race family is typical of a genre known as casta paintings. These works aimed to specify racial identities and depict social hierarchies based on birth, skin color, ethnicity, and place of origin. The painter, Juan Rodriguez Juarez (1675–1728), was a Spaniard who lived and worked in New Spain. What attitude toward interracial families does the painting seem to communicate?

creole A person of African or European descent born in

the Americas.

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projects using firearms technology and new approaches to top-down bureaucratic government to expand their borders and to rule their own populations more efficiently. These projects continued in the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, in some places successfully, as in Qing China and Romanov Russia, and in other places unsuccessfully, as in South Asia, where the Mughal empire began to fragment not long after 1700.

Most Europeans no doubt yearned for social order after decades of violent religious discord and an economic de- pression in the mid-seventeenth century. Responding to this mood, rulers of several states reactivated projects to re- duce the independent power of aristocratic landlords and strengthen the authority of royal officials. Like Peter and Catherine in Russia, western European rulers claimed abso- lute authority. Jean Domat (1625–1696), a French legal expert and eloquent proponent of absolutism, wrote: “Since gov- ernment is necessary for the public good, and God Him- self has established it, it is consequently also necessary for those who are subject to government, to be submissive and obedient. For otherwise they would resist God Himself.”7

The religious passions that the Protestant Reformation triggered eventually played themselves out, and by the complex terms of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, Europe’s monarchs and princes resolved a number of troublesome ter- ritorial issues and stabilized religious divisions in central Eu- rope between Catholic and Protestant areas. Subsequently, rulers generally resigned themselves, at least for the time be- ing, to a politically segmented Europe, even though they con- tinued as before to try to seize one another’s territories and resources. In the century after 1648, wars continued in one part or another of Europe almost without interruption. Gen- erally though, limited strategic objectives rather than reli- gious hatred motivated fighting. European states also fielded more rigorously disciplined armies—professional forces that fought set battles, rather than running riot in the countryside or murdering large numbers of civilians.

In a sense, Europe’s monarchs returned after 1648 to the business of strengthening and consolidating state power, a trend that had started back in the fifteenth century before religious and civil strife interrupted it. Not only in Europe but across Afroeurasia, states had undertaken centralizing

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What geographical and political challenges were European rulers who sought to expand their territories in this period likely to face?

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violently repressing them. Still, in every European country, provincial groups that did not want the central state nosing deeper into their lives periodically rioted, murdered state officials, or even tried to start civil wars.

French absolutism. Some European monarchs put ab- solutist ideals into practice more effectively than others. Reigning together for a total of 165 years (1610–1774), the French Bourbon monarchs Louis XIII, XIV, and XV had re- markable success shifting power from provincial aristo- crats to themselves and their appointed ministers of state. Like sixteenth-century Russian tsars and Mughal emperors in South Asia, Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643) and his chief min- ister Cardinal Richelieu introduced a service nobility: an elite class of political administrators who owed their status and livelihoods entirely to the monarchy. These individu- als, called “nobles of the robe,” came largely from the ris- ing urban bourgeois class of merchants and professionals.

Subjects must obey those who head the state, but rulers also have a duty to govern justly, in accordance with God’s will. This doctrine contradicted the earlier European tradition of shared governance between the monarch and other in- fluential groups within society. Nevertheless, if rulers im- proved law, order, and the economy, while winning battles abroad, their subjects tended to go along with absolutist pretensions.

Even the most successful divine right monarchs ruled less absolutely than they might have liked. Communication and transport remained dependent on animal muscle, sail, or oar, and it took about as much time to send troops or government instructions from one province to another in 1750 as it had three hundred years earlier. This meant that village peasants, town elders, and local nobles could often ignore, delay, or resist orders sent out from the capital. Fur- thermore, all absolutist rulers had greater success negoti- ating and making deals with local power groups than in

political resolution. As part of the general Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Dutch and Spanish officials concluded the Treaty of Münster, ending the long war between them and granting independence to the Dutch Republic. Gerard Ter Borch (1617–1681), a noted Dutch portrait painter, rendered both Dutch and Spanish delegates in detail in this work titled The Swearing of the Oath of Ratification of the Treaty of Münster (1648). Do you think a Spanish painter might have represented this event differently? Why or why not?

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limited rights to worship. Louis XIII, however, terminated Protestant control of certain towns. Louis XIV revoked the edict altogether in 1685, ordering churches to close and Huguenot clergy to leave the realm. Indeed, thousands of Protestants fled France, taking their literacy, skills, and suc- cessful businesses to places like the Netherlands, Germany, and England, where rulers welcomed them.

Absolutist monarchs across Afroeurasia discovered that political centralization, war making, and magnificent displays of power were hugely expensive; thus they were incessantly thinking up new ways to raise money. The French kings had rich resources to work with—a realm of twenty million people (twice the population of Russia), abundant and productive land, burgeoning commercial cities, and a growing overseas empire. They did not try to force the nobility and the clergy to pay direct taxes, but they chose competent financial advisers to help them impose levies on ordinary people more rationally and systemati- cally. They also built canals and roads, subsidized textile and other industries, and promoted shipbuilding and over- seas trade. Economic growth, they understood, generated imports, exports, and private money-making, all of which could be taxed.

Like so many other monarchies of the era, however, France continued to let spending far outrun revenue, espe- cially outlays for wars in both Europe and abroad. Louis XIV,

Louis XIII also transferred provincial administration from local noble families to intendants. These were royal officers who held their positions temporarily and had no family or financial interests in the provinces where they served.

Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) expended much creative energy transforming proud aristocrats into royal subordinates. He showered them with honors, gifts, and other symbols of sta- tus while simultaneously undermining their independent action. Jean Domat wrote that sovereigns should have the right “to make manifest the authority and dignity of such wide-ranging and lofty power. . . .” In line with that doc- trine, Louis made himself an object of awe and reverence, building the extravagant palace of Versailles (vehr-SEYE) outside Paris, associating himself with the Greek sun god Apollo, and creating intricate court rituals to celebrate his grandeur. He enticed France’s nobles to Versailles, offering them nonstop partying, sexual adventure, and chances to compete with one another, not for land and power, but for the king’s personal notice. And he kept a close eye on them for any sign of defiance.

The Bourbon monarchs also wanted religious confor- mity. On one hand, they tolerated no interference from the pope in the administration of the French church; on the other hand, they had no interest in religious freedom. In 1598 King Henry IV (r. 1589–1610) had signed the Edict of Nantes, which award Huguenots, or French Protestants,

diplomatic splendor of louis Xiv’s court. This painting, credited to the studio of the artist Antoine Coypel, depicts the French king receiving an ambassador from the Safavid empire of Persia. What symbolic role might art forms like this have played in legitimizing absolute monarchy?

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declining authority in Germany, the empire under Leopold I (r. 1657–1705) made dramatic territorial gains to the east. In 1683 Ottoman Turkish forces assaulted the walls of Vienna, the Habsburg capital, as they had done in 1529. The offen- sive fell short, however, and Austria counterattacked in the 1690s, driving the Ottoman government out of Hungary. This victory transformed the Habsburg state into a more culturally diverse collection of ethnic and religious groups than it had ever been. Leopold claimed absolute authority, but he did not succeed in imposing full centralization and certainly not cultural uniformity. German and Hungarian land magnates retained substantial power. Moreover, Ger- man, Hungarian, Serb, Romanian, and several other ethno- linguistic communities held more closely to their separate regional cultural identities than to any concept of a unitary society under the Habsburg crown.

British power sharing. In the Netherlands, Poland for a time, and Britain, political assemblies representing the elite classes of society successfully rejected divine-right absolut- ism and established governments of collective leadership. When Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603, England’s Parliament had already firmly established its authority to debate and approve new taxes. James VI of Scotland, who succeeded Elizabeth as James I of England (r. 1603–1625), had eager hopes of absolutist rule and let his subjects know it: “It is atheism and blasphemy to dispute what God can do: . . . so it is presumptuous and high contempt in a subject to dis- pute what a king can do, or say that a king cannot do this or that. . . .”8 James, who inaugurated the Stuart dynasty, thus put himself at loggerheads with Parliament as soon as he grasped the crown. His son and successor Charles I

believing that absolutist success required mili- tary glory, attacked both the Dutch Republic and Habs burg territories and spent the last years of his reign fighting the debilitating War of the Spanish Succession (1701–1714). When he died, France was financially exhausted. Louis  XV (r.  1715–1774) returned the country to relative peace, but only until 1740, when new fighting broke out among the European pow- ers. This put even greater strains on the French economy and Bourbon absolutist hopes.

Prussian militarism. In the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War, Germany was divided into about three hundred princedoms, bish- oprics, and free cities, most of which paid no more than ceremonial allegiance to the Habsburg emperor in Vienna. Nevertheless, in northern Germany a succession of three rulers of the Hohenzollern family built a formidable professional army and progressively gathered together several discontinuous territories that by the end of the eighteenth century emerged as an important European power. These territories included Brandenburg, location of the modest capital city of Berlin, and Prussia, which had earlier been a dependency of Po- land. The Hohenzollern kings, whose state church was Lu- theran, financed army and administration by collecting a variety of direct and indirect taxes, promoting industries, and squeezing revenue out of serfs who toiled on dynas- tic lands. Traditionally, diets, or assemblies of aristocrats and other notables, had local governing powers in Hohen- zollern territories. But Frederick William, known as the Great Elector (r. 1640–1688), advanced an absolutist plan to centralize taxation, gutting the diets’ taxing authority and making them irrelevant.

Frederick William I (r. 1713–1740), who made clear he an- swered only to God, organized the state mainly around the needs of the army, increasing its personnel to eighty thou- sand, including large numbers of draftees. Like the French, he moved to drain the noble class (junkers) of local auton- omy. But instead of drawing them to a pleasure palace like Versailles, he assimilated them into the army officer corps, where the emphasis was on duty, honor, and loyalty to the crown. He also made the nobility pay direct taxes, which the Bourbons had not dared to do, and he replaced elected city councils with his own officials. Frederick II (Frederick the Great, r. 1740–1786) continued the absolutist policies of his predecessor but also deployed the army more aggres- sively, seizing important territories from both Austria and Poland. This enlarged state became the core of modern Germany.

Austrian multiculturalism. Although the rise of Prus- sia much weakened the Austrian Habsburg’s already-

Frederick the great inspects his troops. All of Europe’s absolutist monarchs fielded strong armies. This painting portrays Frederick reviewing a regiment from Hesse, one of the component states in the centralized Prussian kingdom. Why did artists frequently depict Frederick as military commander?

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Charles I tried for a decade to govern without convening Parliament and to force religious uniformity on both En- glish and Scottish Christians. But facing both rebellion in Ireland (whose common people remained Catholic) and an invasion from Scotland, he was obliged to call Parliament into session in 1640 to raise money to deal with these cri- ses. Consequently, the Commons acquired new leverage to make more demands. Charles responded by forming his own army without Parliament’s funding. Members of the Commons did the same, and the country descended into civil war. Most European countries faced aristocratic or peasant uprisings in this period, but England had a revolu- tion on its hands.

The British Isles experienced a whirlwind of changes be- tween 1642, when the civil conflict started, and 1660, when Charles II took the throne. In 1645 the Puritan commander Oliver Cromwell assumed charge of the parliamentary army and within four years captured and executed Charles I, an event that stunned the crowned heads of Europe. Par- liament declared its supremacy, abolished the monarchy, and wrote a constitution. In effect England became a repub- lic, called the Commonwealth. Cromwell led an army into Ireland and suppressed the rebellion there, killing tens of thousands of Irish Catholics and transferring much land to

(r. 1625–1649) took the same view of royal supremacy; con- sequently, a tug-of-war between king and Parliament con- tinued for nearly four decades.

The Lords and the Commons constituted the two Houses of Parliament, and members of the Commons zealously guarded their right to approve taxes. The merchants, pro- fessionals, and members of the gentry (lower nobility) who dominated the Commons also turned England’s wheels of industry and commerce. They wanted to expand their par- ticipation in government, especially to influence foreign policy. Parliament won some concessions from James be- cause he needed money. The religious strife that engulfed the European continent in the early 1600s also roiled En- gland. The Church of England, or Anglican church, had severed ties with Rome in the previous century. Neverthe- less, strict Protestants in the tradition of the Reformation leader John Calvin believed the Anglican faith should re- place excessive ceremony and the hierarchy of bishops with simple services, more preaching, lay (nonclerical) church governance, and stern policing of the public’s moral behav- ior. Some of the righteous Puritans who wished to cleanse Christian practice of any vestiges of Catholicism went off to America to found the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Others, however, broadcast their grievances through Parliament.

King charles i’s last walk. This nineteenth-century painting by Ernest Crofts portrays Puritan soldiers marching Charles I, convicted of treason, to his beheading in January 1649. With this act, Parliament abolished the British monarchy, though its restoration came just eleven years later. Does the artist express sympathy for the king or for the soldiers, or neither?

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start of a globe-encircling movement of Europeans to regions thousands of miles from their homelands. This movement continued throughout the eighteenth century and surged mightily in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Europeans migrated as permanent settlers mainly to the world’s temperate latitudes both north and south of the equa- tor, where they aimed to create societies founded on the lan- guages, institutions, and cultural practices that they brought with them. Their success at planting settlements resulted in formation of a particular type of society, one in which Euro- peans living far from Europe came in time to constitute the great majority of the pop- ulation. Historians have named this type of soci- ety a neo-Europe. Before 1800, neo-European soci- eties emerged principally in eastern North America, Siberia, and the Cape region of South Africa. (Later they would form in Australia and the southern third of South America.) In terms of both demography and culture, this type of society differed from others where Europeans ruled but nonetheless remained a small fraction of the population relative either to indigenous people, as in Mexico or Peru, or African slaves, as in the Caribbean and northeastern Brazil. In Mexico the population of exclusively European ancestry remained small. The mestizo population of mixed European and Indian descent evolved into a large minority by the early nineteenth century, but in the neo-Europes mixed popula- tions remained small as percentages of the total—and they became smaller as European settlers continued to arrive.

Most Europeans left home as settlers because of land shortage, poverty, religious persecution, or trouble with the law. Most of these emigrants did not intend to serve an im- perial government, convert souls, or make a quick fortune and depart. Free settlers, rather, hoped to work the land, take up craft and commerce, and raise families. Settlers were drawn mainly to temperate zones because those re- gions were climatically and ecologically similar to western Europe. These destinations promised somewhat healthier disease environments than tropical latitudes did. And new- comers could grow crops (wheat, barley) and herd domestic animals (cattle, sheep) that they already knew about (see Table 19.1).

European settlers also enjoyed an advantage they did not fully understand. In most temperate lands where immigrants appeared, indigenous populations were already seriously declining or soon would be. This happened primarily be- cause infectious diseases of Afroeurasian origin devastated native societies before significant numbers of Europeans even arrived, or else settlers introduced unknown pathogens that set in motion terrible epidemics. New diseases killed millions in Mesoamerica and Andean South America, but the native agrarian populations in those places were so large and dense that they continued to constitute large majorities relative to Europeans. This was not the case in eastern North

rich English families. Historians have made the point that English overseas empire-building really began in Ireland. Cromwell’s forces also invaded and secured Common- wealth rule over Scotland. Despite Parliament, he awarded himself dictatorial powers, ran the country as a military state, and enforced a Calvinist moral code that, among other things, forbade dancing and theaters. He did, however, al- low limited freedom of worship.

Cromwell died in 1658 and, amid popular weariness over two decades of turmoil, Parliament moved in 1660 to invite Charles II, son of the executed king, to restore the monar- chy. Even so, king and Parliament continued to jockey for political dominance for another three decades. During the Restoration, as the period became known, religious antag- onisms also continued between Anglicans, who once again dominated Parliament, and Calvinists and other dissenters who demanded religious toleration for themselves. Both groups feared that Charles II had Catholic sympathies, and his brother James II, who took the throne in 1685, was indeed a Catholic. Both Anglicans and other Protestants turned against him. In 1688 Parliament invited William of Orange— the Protestant stadholder, or chief administrator, of the Dutch Republic—to take the English thrown as coruler with his wife Mary, James II’s Protestant daughter.

This sudden change, called afterward the Glorious Revo- lution, saw Parliament enact a Bill of Rights that established its full lawmaking authority and the principle that legisla- ture and monarch must share sovereignty. Kings and queens would no longer rule by divine or even hereditary right but on the foundation of an unwritten contract with their sub- jects. Religious toleration was also extended, though restric- tions remained on non-Anglicans, especially Catholics. We should not conclude, however, that the Glorious Revolution put Britain on the road to popular democracy. Voting was sharply restricted to property-owning adult males, and for another two centuries the House of Commons remained under the domination of the land-owning gentry together with professionals and wealthy businesspeople whose fam- ilies frequently intermarried. Nevertheless, the absolutism that continued to loom over the European continent was gone for good in Britain.

European Settlement and the Fate of Indigenous Peoples

Focus In what ways may the political, social, and cultural characteristics of early European settler colonies in North America, Siberia, and South Africa be compared, including relations between settlers and indigenous populations?

As political and religious troubles gripped England, men and women began migrating in modest numbers to North America. This small trans-Atlantic stream represented the

neo-Europe A region outside of Europe, predominantly in temperate latitudes, where peo- ple of European descent came to make up a large majority of the population.

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tended to be short. The fur trade changed that, especially when some warrior groups acquired fi rearms, using them to prey more violently on gunless neighbors to seize their hunting lands. Algonquian groups who allied with French traders also battled Iroquois peoples who lived in what later became New York State. Iroquoians made their own alliances with the Dutch, who built forts along the Hudson River, founding New Amsterdam on Manhattan Island in 1625. Meanwhile, Europeans penetrated Indian lands far- ther west. French explorers, fur traders, and Jesuit mission- aries advanced into the Great Lakes region after 1635, and English sea merchants began building posts on Hudson’s Bay in the 1670s.

France’s royal government encouraged French peasants to emigrate to the St. Lawrence valley, called New France, to open farms and keep out potential English aggressors. These communities grew slowly. Most settlers had no ag- ricultural knowledge, and the sex ratio remained heavily weighted toward young men. To adjust this imbalance, the crown enlisted Parisian orphan girls to go to the col- ony. These “daughters of the king” were expected to marry a settler. Nevertheless, New France had only about three thousand European residents in 1663, and immigration all but dried up a decade later. Even so, the few that did come reproduced at a remarkable rate in the long term. Numbers reached about fi fteen thousand by 1700 and continued to rise thereafter. Simultaneously, the Indian population of New France, pushed off their lands and suffering from re- peated barrages of smallpox and other infections, shrank steadily. Today the French-speaking population of Canada numbers nearly 7.5 million.

English settler colonies. English men and women mi- grated to North America in the later seventeenth century in much larger numbers than French people did. They landed mainly on the coastlands extending from Massachusetts to Chesapeake Bay. Settler families and indentured ser- vants began to arrive in New England in 1620, hoping to make livings from the land. They left home amid chronic

America, Siberia, or the South African Cape. In those places, local populations were relatively smaller, and, despite their determination to resist, their numbers dwindled rapidly un- der the persistent assault of lethal maladies and European settlers with guns.

Early European Settlers in North America North America’s temperate latitudes began to attract Eu- ropean migrants early in the seventeenth century (see Map 19.3). The fi rst settlements were founded in the St. Law- rence River valley and along the Atlantic seaboard, though they remained small and scattered for several decades. Many Europeans crossed the ocean as free settlers, though others left home as indentured servants contracted to work for a master for a specifi ed number of years. Still others trav- eled as exiled criminals or rebels. Migrants also brought in African slaves, though in far smaller numbers than were transported to the plantations of the Caribbean or Brazil.

Europeans, Indians, and beaver pelts. Attracted by the beavers, black foxes, and other furry creatures whose pelts commanded a market among affl uent Europeans, French traders sailed up the St. Lawrence River to found set- tlements at Quebec (1608) and Montreal (1611). Indians who spoke Algonquian languages bartered with those strang- ers, offering furs and hides for textiles, liquor, metal ware, and sometimes guns. As the fur trade grew, both Europe- ans and Indians became locked into the world economy. The merchants, few in number relative to Indian popula- tions, had no choice except to ally with local leaders, ac- cept their trade customs, and employ them as hunters and guides. Conversely, Native Americans warmed quickly to European manufactured goods. As a Montagnais Indian remarked, “The beaver does everything perfectly well, it makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; in short, it makes everything.”9

Native American societies of upper North America had long fought one another for resources, but those confl icts

type political organization population profi le Examples

Imperial society

A small minority population of European offi cials and soldiers administers the imperial territory and rules a large majority of indigenous people.

Over time, a population of mixed European and indigenous descent becomes a signifi cant minority.

Spanish viceroyalty of Peru British India Russia (excluding Siberia)

Settler society

European offi cials, soldiers, and settlers administer the colony.

European settlers, most of them farmers and artisans, rise in numbers to constitute a large majority population. The indigenous population declines to a small minority.

British North America St. Lawrence River valley (Canada) Cape of Good Hope (South Africa) Siberia

Plantation society

A small minority of European offi cials and soldiers rule a large majority population of slaves imported from Africa.

A population of mixed European and African descent rises in numbers to constitute a signifi cant minority. The indigenous population declines to a small minority or disappears.

Northeastern Brazil Caribbean Islands Mauritius (Indian Ocean)

TABLE 19.1. Types of Colonial Societies in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

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intended to build a “New Jerusalem,” a Christian utopia to serve as a beacon of Protestant virtue. Persecuted Catholics later settled in Maryland. Quakers, another dissenting Prot- estant group, founded Pennsylvania.

From an economic standpoint, Virginia was the most suc- cessful early English venture. The Virginia Company of Lon- don financed a settlement on the James River in 1607. After a rocky start, villages multiplied and population grew. Small land-owners produced food, while private entrepreneurs

political troubles, high population growth, and rising poverty. Large-scale commercial farming in England also pushed growing numbers of peasants off the land and into low- paying jobs or vagrancy. In those circumstances settle- ment in North America could look appealing.

A large portion of early migrants to New England and the mid-Atlantic region represented religious groups— Pilgrims, Puritans, Catholics—dissatisfied with prevailing trends at home. Puritans, who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony,

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France claimed all the territory shaded in [INSERT COLOR]. To what extent were its territorial claims supported by colonial occupation and settlement? How would you compare the extent of French and British claims and actual occupation?

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and religion faded quickly as Europeans pushed for more land and total social domination. In Massachusetts much of the Native American population had already succumbed to smallpox epidemics in 1617–1619 and 1633. Surviving Indian communities, colonial leaders argued, had no right to the land because they failed to cultivate it properly, or in any case they were guilty of “godless ignorance and blasphe- mous idolatry.”10 In 1675–1676, Wampanoag, Narragansett, and other New England Indians rose in rebellion against the spreading Massachusetts Bay Colony, briefly threaten- ing its survival. The rising ultimately collapsed, however, and thereafter New England’s Indian population steadily withered. In Virginia a violent three-way struggle broke out in 1675 between Powhatan Indians, rebellious land- hungry settlers, and the British governor. This disturbance cost many Powhatan lives. In the face of long-term settler plans “for extirpating all Indians without distinction of friends or enemies,”11 Powhatan groups either retreated westward or resigned themselves to farming or servile jobs in the colo- nial economy.

In the eighteenth century the English colo- nies remained overwhelmingly rural. Never- theless, the settler population swelled, rising between 1680 and 1750 from 150,000 to more than one million. Both agriculture and trade flourished. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston grew into respectable cities. As this emerging neo-Europe became more im- portant to the English economy, the imperial government sought to exercise more control. King James II (r. 1685–1688) tried to centralize royal authority in North America. But after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, all twelve of the colonies (Georgia, the thirteenth, was founded in 1732) reclaimed their separate political identities, including both royal governors and representative assemblies of land-owning Eu- ropean males.

Russian Settlement of Siberia The Russians, Ukrainians, and other eastern Europeans who migrated to Siberia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not have to cross an ocean to begin building a neo- European society there. But similarly to French and English settlers in North America, they moved into temperate latitudes where wheat, cattle, and hogs could be raised. They had po- litical and military support from the Russian state. They encountered relatively small pop- ulations of farmers, herders, and hunters. And they brought with them guns, plows, timber saws, and infectious diseases that would help clear these “small people,” as Russians liked

opened agricultural estates. Sugar cane did not grow well, but local tobacco did. In 1638, Virginia produced more than three million pounds of leaves. Before long, American to- bacco became a popular European addiction.

Entrepreneurs also began to carve out tobacco, indigo, cotton, and rice plantations in the Carolinas and Georgia, at first employing indentured labor. By the late seventeenth century, however, planters realized what sugar growers in the Caribbean already understood. European immigrant la- bor was not going to meet the needs of expanding plantation economies. Consequently, land-owners adopted the Carib- bean system of putting captured Africans to work in closely watched gangs. By 1750 African slaves accounted for about 40 percent of the population in Virginia and Maryland.

Native American resistance and retreat. Early coop- eration and neighborly coexistence between Indians and Eu- ropeans gave way to increasing hostility. Small numbers of Indian converts to Protestantism learned to read and write. But prospects of social harmony based on shared education

resistance to colonial settlement. Although Indians burned Brookfield, Massachusetts, and other villages during the 1675–1676 Narraganset War, they could not sustain their challenge to the expanding Massachusetts Bay Colony. How would you account account for the deterioration of relations between Native Americans and settlers in New England?

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welcome to live in European settlements as long as they ad- opted Russian language and dress as well as Christianity.

Peter the Great regarded the “civilizing” of Siberians as an important modernizing project. Small cities like Ir- kutsk began to rise up. By 1760 Irkutsk was connected to Moscow by a muddy trail called the Siberian Road. New towns supported civic life, including local governing coun- cils, churches, libraries, and theaters. Imperial officials, however, had a hard time persuading even the most adven- turous Russians to migrate to Alaska or down the North American coast. Those “overseas” settlements depended for their survival mainly on residents of mixed European and Indian parentage.

to call them, out of the way. European settlement of Sibe- ria, however, took a long time, and, like North America, the region did not achieve its full neo-European demographic character until well into the nineteenth century.

The territory that Russian settlers entered beginning in the seventeenth century had fundamental climatic and ecological similarities to northern Canada. In the far north, tundra supported low plant cover and reindeer herds. Far- ther south were boundless forests of fir, spruce, and pine. In both zones winter temperatures were extreme and rain- fall unreliable. Consequently, the indigenous peoples who spoke Tangut, Samoyed, Yakut, and several other languages made their livings hunting, foraging, farming, fishing, and herding, depending generally on the ecological region they occupied. They lived in small, usually mobile groups, and coastal communities hunted seal, whale, and walrus.

Trade and tribute. The fur trade motivated early Euro- pean colonization in Siberia as it did in upper North Amer- ica. Russian trappers shipped sable, ermine, and sea otter pelts westward to be sold to affluent folk at huge price mark- ups. As in North America, however, fur-bearing animals were a finite resource. Once traders depleted a region, they had to move on. The relentless search for fur brought Rus- sians to the Pacific by the 1630s.

Encounters between Siberians and Russian settlers had mixed consequences. Compared to upper North American Indians, Siberians had modest defensive power and there- fore less leverage to form trading partnerships with Europe- ans than Iroquois or Hurons did. Russian traders supplied Siberians with axes, cloth, tea, tobacco, and alcohol in return for pelts. But as representatives of the imperial state, Russians also demanded fur as formal tribute. Orders from Moscow declared: “The [Russian] serving and trading men should be ordered to bring under the sovereign’s exalted hand the . . . diverse foreigners of various tongues who live  .  .  . in new and hostile lands.”12 Though the government appealed for “kindness” in collecting tribute, officials and merchants of- ten held women and children hostage until they received deliveries and conscripted local people to serve as porters, guides, interpreters, and laborers. Furthermore, Siberia was far enough away from the densely populated lands of Eur- asia that infections like measles, smallpox, and various ve- nereal diseases were unknown until Russians introduced them. The first smallpox epidemic raged through Siberian communities as early as 1630, and these scourges tended to recur every ten or twenty years.

Advancing farmers. Despite the harsh climate and vast distances, Russian and Ukrainian farmers followed the trap- pers and merchants into Siberia, especially to its southern, warmer zone. These migrants, who had started moving into western Siberia as early as the fifteenth century, included peasants looking for land, serfs escaping their lords, fugitive criminals, and religious dissenters. Indigenous people were

a sustained demand for furs. Siberian sable and other fur remained an important commodity in Russia’s trade with western Europe for centuries after trappers first began to exploit this resource. The affluent woman in this late eighteenth-century drawing from a series on Paris fashions is bedecked in expensive fur. What other products illustrate connections between expanding empires and growing global commerce in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

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a crew at the Cape of Good Hope to set up a refreshment sta- tion for ships making the arduous but profitable six-month passage between Amsterdam and Batavia (modern Jakarta), the principal Dutch enclave in Indonesia. The VOC planned to limit investment at the Cape to a small defensive fort, ac- cess to timber for ship repairs, and some farms to supply vessels with grain, vegetables, and meat. The little outpost succeeded, partly because the moderate climate supported food crops familiar to European farmers. VOC officials thought the Khoisan had plenty of surplus cattle to trade, but they did not understand the social significance of herd possession and got limited cooperation. Relations remained tense, and the two groups began rustling each other’s cattle.

From outpost to colony. Within five years of its found- ing, the Cape settlement began to expand. Initially, a few soldiers received grants of land to raise crops and animals. The Dutch lacked sufficient military power to coerce local

Europeans and Khoisan in South Africa In the temperate latitudes of the Southern Hemisphere, the first place where Europeans founded a society of farming settlers was in the Cape region at the southern tip of Africa. Like both upper North America and Siberia, this was a region of relatively small-scale human habitation, not dense, city-building populations. Local people spoke languages in the very ancient Khoisan (KOI-sahn) family. Twenty-nine of these languages, characterized by their distinctive clicking sounds, are spoken today, though by relatively few people. In the seventeenth century, Khoisan speakers lived in sea- sonally mobile foraging and hunting groups. Some Khoisan also herded cattle and sheep. These pastoralists placed great social value on their livestock. Large herds signaled both economic wealth and respectable community status.

The early Dutch outpost. In 1652 the directors of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) issued instructions to land

symbols of colonial power. This well-known painting, The Landing of Jan van Riebeeck, 6 April 1652, presents an idealized view of early contact between Dutch settlers and indigenous Khoisan peoples in South Africa. The artist, Charles Davidson Bell, was a British civil servant who worked in South Africa in the mid-nineteenth century. What features of clothing and posture did Bell choose to emphasize in portraying the two groups? How would you account for those choices?

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Weighing THE EVIDENCE

The Journal of a Dutch Commander at the Cape of Good Hope When Dutch East India Company (VOC) of� cials under Jan van Riebeeck decided to establish a refreshment station on the South African coast, they did not have to negotiate for space with well-armed kingdoms, as they did in Southeast Asia. But they did have to deal with multiple Khoisan groups that hunted, � shed, and herded cattle. The early colonists gradually recognized the complexity of Khoisan alliances, animosities, and interests. They also realized that superior weapons did not translate smoothly into immediate political dom- ination. A few Khoisan individuals worked with the colonists, though collaboration put them in the awkward position of not having the full trust of either Europeans or their own communities. After the company began importing slaves in 1658, relationships became even more complicated as runaway captives joined Khoisan groups, strengthening their ability to challenge VOC control.

Van Riebeeck brought his family from the Netherlands to the Cape, and Krotoa, the daughter of a Khoisan chief, joined the household as a servant. She learned Dutch, converted to Christianity, and served as a VOC interpreter. She eventually married a VOC of� cial and had children. But when her husband died, both the Dutch and the Khoisan societies rejected her. She ended her life in prison, a pariah without social identity.

The following excerpts from the VOC journal reveal the company’s attempts to understand and manage local conditions. Note the range of dates in these three entries.

F E Brua rY 2 5, 16 5 2 . a Boa rd t h E DIAMANT, a n ch o r Ed in ta Bl E BaY.

This evening we went ashore . . . to consider where the fort should be built. Also had 2 savages on board this evening, one of whom could speak a little English. We generously fi lled their bellies with food and drink. As far as we could gather

cattle could not be obtained from them for—as they gave us to understand by means of broken English and signs—they were only fi shermen and the cattle were always supplied by those from Saldania [farther up the coast].

a p ril 10, 16 5 2 . at t h E si t E o F t h E F o r t c o n s t ru c t io n .

About noon a small band of 9 or 10 savages from Saldania ar- rived, against whom the [fi shermen], who sit outside our tents with their wives and children every day, arranged themselves in battle order and advanced toward them with assegais [spears], bows and arrows with such courage and fury that we had suffi cient to do to check them. . . . [We] succeeded in arranging a truce between them, so that for the rest of the day

they remained at peace with one another in the vicinity of our tents. Those from Saldania, by means of signs and the use of broken English, as well as some Dutch words . . . gave us to understand that for copper and tobacco they would bring cattle and sheep within a few days. By good and liberal treat- ment we urged them to do so.

J u lY 1, 16 5 8 . at t h E F o r t.

Today almost all the Hottentots . . . who had been searching for . . . fugitive slaves returned without any and reported that they could fi nd none. Thereupon all the [Khoisan] prisoners and their wives [detained by the Company] began to weep and wail lustily, as they had been told that they would not be released until all the slaves had been brought back to us. They evidently saw little chance of that happening just yet. . . . The interpreter Doman maintains that they had never seen the fugitives, who had run away of their own accord. This we showed him that we did not believe. On the contrary, we feel that we are correct in presuming [the Khoisan are helping the fugitive slaves], for the Hottentot women were too familiar with the slaves in the beginning and gave them many things. The result is that they have to be satisfi ed to remain in captivity until we recover the slaves or know what has really become of them. This made the interpreter Doman hang his head and seem much depressed, as also Eva [as Krotoa was called by the Dutch], who said that the Hottentots would kill her if we did not release [high ranking Khoisan hostages]. She was told to keep within the fort, and that if anyone harmed her, the Commander would have him captured as well.

To set the minds of the hostages at rest, the Commander in person told them to have no fear for no harm would come to them, and said that everything was being done to recover the runaway slaves. They were given some tobacco, bread, and brandy, which seemed to cheer them up somewhat.

Source: Journal of Jan van Riebeeck, ed. H. B. Thom (Amsterdam and Cape Town: A. A. Balkema, 1952), 1:25, 30; 2:294–295.

Thinking Critically What do you think may have constituted the colonists’ hospitality, generosity, and “liberal treatment” of Khoisan in these passages? What evidence do you fi nd of hostile attitudes? Why would the interpreters Doman and Krotoa feel threatened by the VOC’s seizure of Khoisan hos- tages? What hints, if any, do you think this document offers regarding Khoisan attitudes toward the settlers?

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Alternative Visions of God, Nature, and the Universe

Focus How did the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment represent a new system of knowledge, and what factors help explain the continuing growth of Islam and Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

In the hubs of European overseas empires, especially Lon- don, Amsterdam, and Paris, scientists, philosophers, and practical technicians sorted through cascades of new in- formation from across the seas. Africans, Asians, and Na- tive Americans offered much of this knowledge—from Iroquoian kinship relations to West African plant species to Confucian imperial court ceremonies—to European visitors, who returned home with it for study and interpretation. Moreover, the work of making sense of new knowledge took place in a post-Protestant Reformation religious environ- ment in which novel ideas about the natural world no longer had to conform exclusively to the doctrines of the Catholic Church. Growing numbers of intellectuals felt free to chal- lenge truths received from the Bible, the ancient Greeks, and church theologians. An intensive project to reexamine long-accepted explanations of the workings of nature, the cosmos, and human society, an endeavor whose two funda- mental elements were the scientific revolution and the En- lightenment, got under way. Also, because peoples around the world participated in interpreting and transmitting this knowledge and because it circulated continuously from one region of the world to another, the project was a global one from the start.

As this rethinking of the nature of things proceeded, people in both Europe and other societies continued their religious quests to understand the operation of the divine in human affairs and come to grips with moral questions, the prospects of salvation, and responsibilities to family and community in a rapidly changing world The world’s ma- jor religions of salvation and missionary outreach—Islam, Christianity, and Buddhism—all continued to grow, a phe- nomenon aided greatly by the new world-girdling routes of transport and travel.

The Scientific Revolution Since the emergence of Homo sapiens more than 200,000 years ago, bright flashes of scientific and technical innovation have occurred periodically in one society or another. One of those moments of illumination took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it was centered in western Eu- rope. This burst of scientific inquiry and invention was not inevitable. Rather, political, economic, and cultural circum- stances of the time came together to set it in motion.

After the opening of the oceanic passages in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans had continuous and star- tling encounters with peoples, plants, animals, landscapes,

Khoisan into servile labor, so they began bringing in slaves from the VOC’s ports on the Indian Ocean. By 1658 the basic demographic profile of the colony was emerging. A minority of European settlers, overwhelmingly men, de- pended mainly on Asian slave labor to do farm work. In the following decades, the Dutch authorities issued land grants farther away from the Cape fort, and the population of both Europeans and Asians rose gradually, from about four hun- dred in 1662 to twenty thousand by 1780.13

The early Cape colony was culturally diverse. Sexual and marital unions crossed ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines. This happened chiefly because European men con- tinued throughout the eighteenth century to outnumber settler women by three to two.14 The top level of the VOC governing elite was Dutch and Calvinist Protestant. But new settlers came from across northwestern Europe, including Dutch, German, and Scandinavian farmers, as well as Hu- guenots escaping religious repression in France. The Afri- kaans language, for example, is based on sixteenth-century spoken Dutch but also incorporates words and grammat- ical influences from French and Portuguese, as well as Southeast Asian languages introduced by slaves. The Cape diet was equally varied, combining European bread, meat, wine, and brandy with African game and Indian Ocean rice, coffee, tea and spices. By the end of the eighteenth cen- tury, the population also practiced Protestant Christianity in several forms.

The growth of the colony cost Khoisan hunters and herd- ers dearly. Colonial records point to communities being pushed to the margins of their former hunting and grazing lands. And as Europeans and their slaves advanced along the coast and into the interior to plow land and graze their own herds, Khoisan men and women lost their options for independent life. Consequently, more of them resigned themselves to servile employment on settler farms. Like na- tive Siberians, Cape Khoisan occupied a territorial extremity of Afroeurasia. They therefore lacked effective immunities to a number of infectious diseases. Smallpox, introduced at the Cape by either Europeans or Asians, took an appalling toll. An epidemic in 1713 hit Khoisan communities particu- larly hard, sparing scarcely one in ten individuals.

In the early eighteenth century, Khoisan society in the Cape region effectively collapsed. As this happened, the Southern Hemisphere’s first Neo-Europe began to take shape. In contrast to Siberia, however, greater South Africa was not simply a land of mobile hunters and herders. Not far north and east of the Cape lived much larger, denser farming and cattle-keeping populations of Africans speaking Bantu lan- guages, peoples more resistant to infectious Afroeurasian diseases than were the Khoisan. By the later eighteenth century, these populations met the moving frontier of Eu- ropean settlement with much stiffer economic competition and military resistance than the Khoisan had been able to mount. The South African neo-Europe remained territori- ally small and, in contrast to North America and Siberia, did not last long.

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mathematical theorems formulated by Muslim scholars during the previous two centuries. Copernicus’s heliocen- tric, or sun-centered theory had significant flaws and failed to attract widespread support. But in the following century, other scholars revised and refined the Copernican model, while theologians grappled with the implications of mov- ing God’s earthly creation out of the center of the cosmos. Johannes Kepler built on the work of the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe to postulate that planetary orbits are elliptical, rather than round. The Catholic Church enlisted their own scholars to refute heliocentric claims as contrary to received truth. In 1633 the church’s inquisition pronounced Galileo Galilei a heretic, sentencing him to house arrest for the rest of his life for publicly advocating a heliocentric universe. His Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems (1632) combined logical reasoning with evidence of telescopic ob- servations to argue that the corrected Copernican system had greater explanatory power than the Ptolemaic model.

and climates that they previously knew little or nothing about. This roused great curiosity and a yearning for fresh explanations of natural phenomena and of how the world got to be the way it is. As thinkers sought to make sense of the flood of new knowledge, they brought together three exist- ing intellectual strands: ancient Greek philosophy, especially logic; the medieval European synthesis of this thought; and scientific and mathematical writings of South Asian, Greek, and Muslim thinkers. They also began to work out new methods to verify information to ensure that what people thought they knew about the world was true.

“Scientific revolution” may be too strong a term to de- scribe these first steps toward a systematic rethinking of what philosophers then called the “laws of nature.” But over the course of two centuries, this work produced a dra- matic shift toward explanations of the world founded on empirical observation, controlled experimentation, care- ful recording, analytical reasoning, and sharing of knowl- edge among scholarly communities. By the 1700s European governments and church authorities, whether Catholic or Protestant, interfered less in the publication and circula- tion of new ideas than they had just a century earlier. New technical instruments such as telescopes and microscopes greatly magnified human powers to observe. Mathematics emerged as the fundamental language for describing phe- nomena and for communicating and testing scientific hy- potheses among educated scholars. European universities, founded in earlier centuries as self-governing corporations, served well as incubators of new theories and speculations. As novel explanations of reality circulated widely, those founded on religious teachings, ancient philosophies, folk- lore, or other forms of wisdom handed down from earlier generations lost some, though not nearly all, of their power to guide human behavior.

Sun and earth. An early battle between empirical observa- tion and traditional wisdom took place over the celestial rela- tionship between the sun and our planet. Until the sixteenth century, astronomers in both Europe and the major Muslim centers of learning agreed that the earth occupied the center of the universe. This understanding was based on the work of Claudius Ptolemy, the second-century Greek-speaking scholar who lived in Alexandria in Egypt. In his book titled the Almagest, he proposed a geocentric, or earth-centered model of the universe in which all other heavenly bodies revolved around our world in nested spheres. Ptolemy re- mained the accepted authority on astronomy during the next 1,300 years.

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), a Polish scholar and Catholic cleric, put forth the first serious challenge to the Ptolemaic system in 1543 when he published On the Rev- olutions of the Celestial Spheres. The book tackled problems in Ptolemy’s model by proposing that the earth orbited around the sun, along with other planets and stars. Co- pernicus founded his challenge to Ptolemaic astronomy on his own reading of ancient Greek texts but also on two

sir isaac newton (1642–1727) analyzes light. An English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, Newton carefully recorded his observations of the natural world, laying foundations for modern scientific knowledge. Here he uses a prism to investigate the constituent colors in a ray of light. What does this nineteenth-century engraving reveal about the tools and methods used in early scientific experiments?

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philosopher Francis Bacon articulated new scholarly meth- ods that relied on personal observation, not just on libraries of ancient texts. He argued for a total reconstruction of sci- ence, the arts, and all human knowledge to found conclu- sions on the careful observation, cataloging, and analysis of natural phenomena. He also advocated inductive reason- ing, that is, the method of arriving at a general hypothesis or theory regarding a phenomenon from careful observa- tion of specific examples of that phenomenon. His effort to devise a systematic classification of human knowledge not based simply on received wisdom was instrumental to the development of modern thought.

The questioning of tradition spread outward from scien- tific inquiry, which at this time was little separated from philosophy and other branches of knowledge. In fact, sci- entists like Newton were known as “natural philosophers.” Their work reinforced a growing conviction that much new knowledge was yet to be discovered, not simply dug up from the past. Governments began to look to science for potential contributions to economic progress and military advantage. By the mid-1600s, European states became more interested in promoting the spirit of inquiry than in pun- ishing it. In 1660 Charles II of England granted a charter to the Royal Society of London for the Promotion of Natu- ral Knowledge. It began publishing a scientific periodical to disseminate new developments. The French government approved a Royal Academy of Sciences in 1666.

The Enlightenment: Rethinking Human Nature and Society The Enlightenment was a wide-ranging, many-sided intel- lectual movement among thinkers centered in Europe to put all inherited descriptions of nature and society to the test of reason. The movement emerged from several strands of thought. Most important was the work of scientists, es- pecially Isaac Newton. He argued that universal physical laws governed all God’s creation, that these laws could be expressed in mathematical equations applicable in all times and places, and that humans could understand the workings of the universe through their God-given powers of reason. John Locke, an English physician, politician, and colleague of Isaac Newton, was among the first to contend that if scientists like Newton could discover and articulate the laws of nature, then humans could also reason their way to clearer understanding of the operations of both the individual human mind and collective social behavior. Like the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment also aimed to make sense of the blizzard of knowledge arriving from other parts of the world. Finally, it built on the Renaissance commitment to humanistic education and creative thought, the Protestant Christian idea that individuals must discover God and their relation to him through private study and prayer, and reform efforts within the Catholic Church to rid it of ignorance, corruption, and superstitions that had no base in scripture.

A generation later the English scientist Isaac Newton published Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687), which describes universal gravitation and the laws of mo- tion, demonstrating a connection between gravity and Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, thereby confirming the heliocentric theory. Newton’s work defined specific laws of physics and set a standard for the next three centuries of scientific writing, combining accessible prose with detailed mathematical explanations of physical motion. Newton’s work also had global scope.

Observation and experimentation in many fields. Remarkable advances took place in a number of fields be- sides astronomy and physics. Experiments in biology, chem- istry, optics, and medicine changed not just what people knew about the world, but how they knew it. The English

observing and recording the natural world. The German artist Maria Sibylla Merian worked for a time in the Dutch colony of Surinam in South America. Like many of her drawings, this illustration of a pair of common morpho butterflies (c. 1719) shows the interconnected life-cycles of plants and insects. Many Europeans of this period believed that insects spontaneously generated from mud or rotten meat. How does Merian’s illustration exemplify modern scientific method?

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faith that if scientifi c methods and enlightened reasoning guided human action, then continuous material well- being and progress could be assured. Few of them advocated radical action to dismantle religious institutions, govern- ments, or even absolutist monarchies, but most were highly

Enlightenment fi gures, known in France as philosophes, explored humankind’s relation to God, nature, and the universe from nearly every conceivable angle, sometimes making their arguments with mathematical equations and geometrical proofs (see Table 19.2). Many of them expressed

individual country achievements

Baha’ al-Din ibn H. usayn al-Amili 1547–1621

Persia Prominent mathematician, astronomer, poet, and Sufi mystic in Persia’s Safavid empire; revived the study of mathematics in Persia.

Francis Bacon 1561–1623

England Proposed a system of inquiry founded on empirical and inductive reasoning, later called the scientifi c method.

Galileo Galilei 1564–1642

Italy Drawing on evidence from telescopic observations, supported Copernicus’s heliocentric theory; discovered the moons of Jupiter.

Johannes Kepler 1571–1630

Germany Proposed, following Copernicus, that the earth revolves around the sun (heliocentrism) and postulated three planetary laws of motion.

Yoshida Mitsuyoshi (Yoshida Kōyū) 1598–1672

Japan Known along with two other scholars as the Three Arithmeticians; wrote the oldest surviving Japanese mathematical text.

Gadadhara Bhattacharya 1604–1709

India Wrote prolifi c volumes on language, mind, law, and the concept of “meaning”; analyzed the emotive power of language and expression.

Margaret Cavendish 1623–1673

England Wrote voluminously on power, manners, science, philosophy, and gender; an early writer of science fi ction who also advocated for animal rights.

John Locke 1632–1704

England Wrote extensively on theories of both knowledge (epistemology) and natural rights, postulating the idea of a social contract between ruler and subjects.

Isaac Newton 1642–1727

England Set forth three laws of motion and described the operation of gravity; developed the calculus as a branch of mathematics.

Maria Sibylla Merian 1647–1717

Germany Created observational drawings of numerous insect species that contributed to the discovery of insect metamorphosis; a founder of the scientifi c fi eld of entomology.

Juana Inés de la Cruz 1651–1695

Mexico Self-taught nun, poet, and scholar; wrote extensively on Christian philosophy and theology and defended the right of women to education and intellectual inquiry.

Baron de Montesquieu 1689–1755

France Powerfully infl uenced liberal political theory, notably the concept of the separation of powers in government.

Voltaire 1694–1778

France Historian, philosopher, and social critic; attacked the intolerance, superstition, oppression, and authoritarianism of the European old regime.

Benjamin Franklin 1706–1790

United States Pursued research on electricity, sea currents, meteorology, and the nature of atoms; a revolutionary leader and diplomat who also founded the fi rst lending library in the United States.

Carl Linnaeus 1707–1778

Sweden Invented the modern system of naming and classifying organisms.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712–1778

Switzerland Wrote three major works that explored questions of morality, equality, freedom, government, and education; asserted that humans are good by nature but have been corrupted by society.

Dai Zhen 1724–1777

China Neo-Confucian philosopher; wrote on human nature and metaphysics and incisively criticized earlier Confucian thinkers.

Immanuel Kant 1724–1804

Germany Moral philosopher; proposed that humans have knowledge of reality only through the exercise of their rational faculties; had a large impact on modern philosophical speculation.

Ivan Shuvalov 1727–1797

Russia Powerful fi gure in the Russian imperial court; championed the arts and humanities; fi rst minister of education and overseer of Moscow University.

David Rittenhouse 1732–1796

United States Astronomer, mathematician, and inventor; wrote an account of the transit of Venus and calculated to near accuracy the distance between the earth and the sun.

William Jones 1746–1794

England Proposed structural relationships between South Asian and European languages, a hypothesis that launched the fi eld of Indo-European studies.

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759–1797

England Argued in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman that females are naturally equal to men but are deprived of education and the opportunity to develop fully their intellectual faculties.

TABLE 19.2. Innovative Thinkers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

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physical functions overwhelmed her intellectual ones. “The male is male only at certain moments; the female is female her whole life,” Rousseau wrote in Emile (1762), a treatise on education. Rousseau did not mean to degrade women by his statements but to exalt all that in his view was “natu- ral” in them. Some women echoed his sentiments. In Letters on the Female Mind (1792), British author Laetitia Hawkins concurred that “the feminine intellect has less strength and more acuteness. . . . [W]e show less perseverance and more vivacity.”15 Writings of Hawkins and other women helped open a new debate about women’s rights toward the end of the eighteenth century. In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft, an English essayist, wrote history’s first indisputably feminist tract, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. She argued that the social training given to girls taught them to be frivolous, vain, and incapable. If educated equally, women would be the intellectual match of men.

Europe’s new breed of natural philosophers filtered great amounts of data and used it to formulate new theories, both natural and social. One debate swirled around the idea that because people around the world looked and behaved so differently from one another, God must have created man and woman more than once, a theory that some said con- tradicted the Bible and therefore could not be true. Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish botanist who devised the modern system for classifying plants and animals, identified five races of humans having particular physical and mental ten- dencies. (He also believed some human groups had tails.) Enlightenment sages generated early theories of inherent racial qualities and differences that scientists demolished fully only in the late twentieth century. As information, whether accurate or not, regarding American Indians, Pa- cific Islanders, Chinese, and Africans reached Europe, En- lightenment writers ventured all sorts of social and cultural comparisons, sometimes to affirm European and Christian superiority but quite often to critique European habits and institutions. In 1721, for example, the Baron de Montesquieu published the Persian Letters, an imaginary account of two Persian gentlemen who visited France and commented crit- ically on various aspects of society.

Several eighteenth-century European monarchs invited Enlightenment thinkers such as Voltaire to their courts or exchanged letters with them. These rulers, including Freder- ick II of Prussia, Catherine II of Russia, and the Habsburg em- peror Joseph II (r. 1780–1790), saw no particular contradiction between their claims to absolute political authority and the thought of French philosophes. For them, Enlightenment ratio- nality translated into programs to improve government effi- ciency, codify laws, eliminate senseless torture of prisoners, advance technical education, promote the arts, and reform agriculture and industry in ways that would improve the lives of peasants and workers at least marginally, thereby im- proving their productivity and raising their taxable incomes. These rulers could chat amiably about natural rights and enlightened government without thinking that such notions should in any way upset the existing old regime hierarchy.

critical of what they saw as the irrational, arbitrary, fanatical, or cruel aspects of what later was called the old regime. This term refers to the prevailing Eu- ropean social pyramid, the hierarchy of ranks from

the monarch and the nobility on down based not on talent, education, occupation, or even wealth, but fundamentally on privilege either inherited or awarded by the state.

According to Locke, higher reasoning power distin- guished humans from animals. This entitled people to cer-

tain natural rights, which no government should be allowed to take away with- out just cause, namely, “life, liberty, and property.” Locke

expressed his philosophy in many works, two of which particularly influenced political thought in England and eventually around the world. The first, A Letter Concern- ing Toleration, helped to justify Parliament’s passage of the English Toleration Act following the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That bill significantly lightened discrimination against religious dissenters. In 1690 Locke published Two Treatises of Government to justify England’s emergence as a constitutional, limited monarchy. He attacked absolutism, contending that government must be a civil contract be- tween citizens and government. Both parties operated un- der legal obligations that, if unfulfilled, released the other party from its obligations.

Innovative thinkers in France also spoke out against the excesses of the old regime. These philosophes, including math- ematicians, poets, playwrights, novelists, and essayists— argued that rationality, not faith, custom, superstition, or revelation, should guide human affairs. Their debates col- lectively made a case for religious toleration, natural rights, eradication of cruel and unusual punishments, and even abolition of slavery. For some Enlightenment thinkers, such as the French poet and playwright Voltaire, the Christian church obstructed rationality and progress because of its ri- gidity and hypocrisy and the ignorance and dogmatism of its clergy. But even the skeptical Voltaire accepted the exis- tence of a supreme being. Most Enlightenment philosophers, including Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, found no incompatibility between reason and faith, believing that human reason reflected God’s wis- dom and benevolence.

Some philosophes defined man’s rationality in ways that excluded women. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a creative thinker and a popularizer of Enlightenment ideas, argued that the male of the species in his natural state was fully equipped to solve the thorny problems of existence, many of which were the fault of civilization. But women, he believed, did not pos- sess the ability to reason and thus the capacity to advance society except as nurturers of their families. A woman’s

old regime The political and social system in France and other European monarchies

between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries;

characterized by a rigid class hierarchy and rulers’ claims to

absolute authority.

natural rights Universal and inherent rights of human

beings bestowed by nature or divine power.

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leaders to protest British imperial injustices and, finally, to declare independence in defense of their “inalienable rights” (see Chapter 20).

The Continuing Growth of Islam and Christianity Modern science emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a particular way of describing nature and the cosmos based on practical observation of material phe- nomena and, from that evidence, formulation of general theories and principles. In other words, science evolved as a specific system of knowledge. Other complex systems of knowledge, however, also existed, notably, the major world religions. They too sought to explain universal truths. The scientific revolution and the Christian system of knowledge challenged each other on numerous points. But they also in- fluenced each other’s development, and both remained in- tact. In the same period that modern scientific thought took root in Europe, the major religions, especially Islam and Christianity, attracted growing numbers of adherents. The success of these religions rested fundamentally on the ways they explained existence, roused hopes, and guided human conduct. They also benefited, however, from the great world convergence—the opportunities that worldwide communi- cation and transport, as well as empire building, offered to introduce the faith to more people across greater distances.

Islam in Afroeurasia. Islam grew faster than any other major religion in the early modern centuries. Muslim mer- chants, artisans, and scholars carried the faith to new places, often taking passage on European ships. Muslim pilgrims traveled from all directions and in larger numbers to make the sacred pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina in Arabia. In the early modern period about fifteen thousand South Asians made the pilgrimage yearly, most of them by sea.17 These devotees often returned home eager to share the message of the Qur’an with unbelievers.

Sufi saints and devotees contributed immensely to con- versions in regions where Islam had previously been a minority faith or completely unknown. Sufism appealed to individuals seeking not only a community of fellow worshipers but also individual spiritual enlightenment. It represented the mystical side of Islam, the quest to achieve direct and personal communion with God. From the elev- enth century, Sufi teachings and practices became progres- sively integrated into both Sunni and Shi’a Muslim life. Sufi practitioners typically followed a pious teacher, or “friend of God,” who guided them along a spiritual path. The journey might involve a wide range of devotions, including study of mystical texts, visits to the shrines of deceased Sufi divines, and participation in sessions of chanting or dancing aimed at achieving a transcendent state. Most Sufi disciples also joined one or more religious associations, or orders, whose members pursued a distinctive path to enlightenment. For Muslim women, who did not typically occupy public or

Communicating the Enlightenment. Individuals en- gaged in scientific and philosophical inquiry collectively produced a huge body of writings. But the Enlightenment was not simply an elite phenomenon. Many outstanding contributors were individuals of modest origins and means. Diatribes against intolerance, bigotry, and the political sta- tus quo became commonplace in newspapers, novels, es- says, and pamphlets, most of these contributions the work of authors now forgotten. The Enlightenment was in large part a middle-class phenomenon made possible by inex- pensive printing technology, the spread of literacy, and the emergence of libraries and coffeehouses, all media of com- munication that reinforced one another. The educated class gathered in public literary societies, some of which admitted women, to read popular works of the day.

Encyclopedias and dictionaries became a pronounced expression of the Enlightenment, putting forth the doctrine that any person who aspired to self-improvement must have a comprehensive knowledge of science, technology, and the humanities. For people of relatively low social sta- tus, these volumes could be an entry into polite society. In England, Ephraim Chambers edited what is considered the first modern encyclopedia. It went through five editions between 1728 and 1744. A French publisher, recognizing good market potential, commissioned Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert to edit Encyclopédie, “a systematic dictionary of the sciences, arts, and crafts” that reached twenty-eight volumes. Scottish and German encyclopedias soon followed. The renowned British author Samuel John- son published the first edition of a Dictionary of the English Language in 1755. The work contains 42,773 word entries, some of them laced with humor: “Lexicographer. writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge that busies himself in trac- ing the original, and detailing the signification of words;” and “Politician. 1. One versed in the arts of government; one skilled in politicks. 2. A man of artifice; one of deep contrivance.”16

Although the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment were predominantly western European movements, they diffused quickly to parts of the world where people spoke or read European languages. Eastern European states, no- tably Poland and Russia, had their own Enlightenment fig- ures. In Moscow, Ivan Shuvalov, minister of education and Catherine II’s lover, played a major role in founding both Moscow University and the Russian Academy of Arts. Far to the west in British North America, Benjamin Franklin’s path-breaking experiments with electricity earned him ad- mission to the French Royal Academy of Sciences. In Mas- sachusetts, John Winthrop III at Harvard College measured the distance between the earth and the sun with near ac- curacy. The Enlightenment idea of the natural equality of all humans began in the mid-eighteenth century to inspire some colonial religious leaders and intellectuals to plead for the abolition of slavery. Simultaneously, the ideas that came out of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, com- bined with Enlightenment political thought, stirred colonial

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Muslims both ruled and dominated trade in the savanna lands just south of the Sahara, and Sufi brotherhoods car- ried the faith to rural herders and farmers. The extensive conversion of peoples of Sudanic West Africa, however, did not take place until the nineteenth century (see Chapter 22). A significant percentage of the slaves transported to the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century were West African Muslims. Christian masters, however, prohib- ited Muslim slaves in America from open communal wor- ship. Practice could be preserved only in fragmentary ways or in secret.

Christianity around the world. The Roman Catholic Church enjoyed global reach in the sixteenth century be- cause Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian sea captains, vir- tually all of them Catholics, opened the global sea routes and began conquering the Americas. Missionaries who fol- lowed the conquistadors across the Atlantic began baptizing

religious offices, Sufi devotions and affiliation offered an arena for religious expression and leadership. By the six- teenth century, Sufi organizations numbered in the hun- dreds, and some had branches in several regions.

When Sufi missionaries advanced into new regions, they often adapted to local, non-Muslim religious practices, contending that sincere commitment to God was more im-

portant than conformity to details of Muslim law. Syncretism was not un- common on the frontiers where Islam met Hindu- ism, Buddhism, Christi- anity, and local religions.

Examples of such compromise included symbolic linking of Hindu gods and goddesses with venerated Muslim saints; transforming sacred trees, rocks, or ponds into Muslim shrines; and wearing charms containing written phrases from the Qur’an to ward off evil spirits.

From the sixteenth to the early eighteenth century, the Muslim Mughal dynasty ruled much of South Asia, but the majority population followed a variety of devotions that collectively we call the Hindu tradition. Sufi believers converted significant numbers of South Asians, notably in Bengal, the region of the lower Ganges River. The Mughal rulers encouraged Muslim farmers to migrate to the Ganges valley to cut forests and plant rice, cotton, and other crops, thereby extending agricultural lands that could be taxed. These pioneers assumed a leading role in the wave of eco- nomic expansion that benefited Bengal starting in the later seventeenth century. Sufism, together with the economic success of many Muslim entrepreneurs and merchants, firmly established Islam in the region, eventually as the ma- jority faith.

Merchants, traveling scholars, and holy preachers, many from South Asia, introduced Islam to island Southeast Asia beginning in the fourteenth century. By the 1500s the re- ligion was established across the Indonesian archipelago. Advancing northeastward from there, Muslim traders and Sufis founded communities in the southern Philippine Is- lands in the sixteenth century, even as Spanish priests in- troduced Catholic Christianity around Manila in the north.

Islam spread briskly in Subsaharan Africa from the later 1600s. Muslim populations had dominated the commercial towns along the East African coast for several centuries. Conversion intensified from the end of the seventeenth cen- tury, when the sultans of Oman, a maritime state located at the southeastern end of the Arabian Peninsula, built a formidable navy and began to dominate the major East Af- rican ports. From that time, Muslim merchants began to in- troduce their religion along the trade routes that led into the East African interior. In South Africa, the VOC brought in Muslim slaves and political prisoners. Islam’s message also proved attractive to non-Muslim slaves, offering them a fo- cus of social and devotional life separate from their Chris- tian masters. In West Africa in the seventeenth century,

christian art in new spain. Caption to come when photo research is completed, likely to be the atrial cross in the Basilica of Guadalupe near Mexico City.

syncretism In religion, the blending of beliefs or practices from two or more different be- lief systems; also the incorpo- ration of beliefs or practices of

one belief system by another.

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calling them “teopantlaca,” the name given to workers in the old Aztec temples. Spanish priests granted villagers their own patron saints, but Indians routinely melded these Chris- tian fi gures with local deities that they believed watched over their communities. The Spanish required Indians to ac- cept one God and the Holy Trinity but also shared with their imperial subjects popular Christian beliefs in the power of magical and supernatural forces in various manifestations. In short, Spanish missionaries and Mexican Indians shared some common religious ground even though they often as- signed different meanings to the same rituals and beliefs.

In China and other parts of Asia, Christian conversion proceeded slowly. In contrast to the situation in the Ameri- cas, wherever the Portuguese seized coastal enclaves or en- tered ports to trade, they had to deal with local authorities

Indians. Priests and monks had the greatest initial success in Mesoamerica and Andean South America, where peo- ple had previously lived under Aztec or Inca rule and were therefore accustomed to an “offi cial” religion and a priest- hood associated with the state. In other words, the institu- tion and hierarchy of the Catholic Church moved into the place of the Aztec and Inca religions.

Though one Spanish priest reported baptizing up to four- teen thousand Indians in a single day,18 such mass conver- sions did not typically run deep. Syncretism fl ourished as many local religious practices became intermeshed with Christian ones. Since Spanish clergy usually spent little time in rural villages, they appointed local people to run churches. The Spanish called these native helpers “cantors” and “sac- ristans.” In Mexico, however, Nahuatl speakers persisted in

In 1665, the once proud and powerful Kong king- dom, an African realm the size of England, de- scended into civil war, as rival lords fought over succession to the throne. This war was still raging four decades later, when Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684–1706), a twenty-year-old Chris- tian woman, determined to intervene. As she lay wracked by illness, she dreamed that the Cath- olic saint Anthony of Padua had entered her body. When she recov- ered, she began travel- ing throughout Kongo, speaking out against both factional violence and enslavement and attracting followers to what became known

as the Antonian Movement. St. Anthony instructed her, she preached, to heal the kingdom of civil strife.

She also preached a novel Christian theology, declaring the teachings of European clerics in the Kongo were incorrect in important particulars. Jesus Christ, she proclaimed, was not born in Bethlehem, but in São Salvador, the Kongo capi- tal. Nazareth was a corruption of the name Nsundi, a northern

province of Kongo where Christ had been baptized. Mary, his Kongolese mother, had been a slave when she and Joseph sought shelter on the night of the messiah’s birth. Though Dona Beatriz and the Antonian Movement recognized the au- thority of the pope, they rejected the presence of Portuguese monks of the Capuchin order and wanted to spread their dis- tinct Kongolese version of Christian truth.

Dona Beatriz’s preaching exerted a powerful pull on the Kongolese population for both religious and political reasons. The Antonian Movement gained devoted adherents among both the nobility and the common people, many of them tired of civil confl ict and rampant slave trading. Dona Beatriz and her followers, however, placed Pedro, the reigning king at the time, in an awkward and dangerous position. He resented the condescension of Capuchin missionaries, but he could not allow a charismatic young woman to undermine his authority. In 1706 the king ordered Dona Beatriz arrested and tried on charges of witchcraft and heresy. Convicted, she was burned on a fl aming pyre.

Though the Antonian Movement continued after Dona Be- atriz’s death, thousands of her followers were rounded up and sold into slavery. Capuchin monks objected but only because these captives were shipped to Protestant countries. Many, in fact, may have ended up in South Carolina, which, after Haiti, had the second largest concentration of slaves from Kongo. In 1740, Catholic Kongolese slaves led a bloody though futile rebellion against their masters near the Stono River in South Carolina. Their battle cry was “lukangu,” which in the Kongo language meant both “liberty” and “salvation.”19

Thinking Critically Would you characterize Dona Beatriz as an anti-European resistance leader? Why or why not?

Dona Beatriz Kimpa Vita: Visionary christian of the Kongo

Individuals MATTER

Caption for an image of Doña Beatriz Kimpa Vita (1684–1706) to come when photo research is completed.

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and urban populations who could limit or prohibit mis- sionary activity. The Jesuit priest Francis Xavier (1506–1552) preached in Japan, ordering priests under him to observe Japanese etiquette and conduct themselves in the manner of Zen Buddhist dignitaries. By 1600 the church counted 300,000 Japanese believers, most on the southern island of Kyusu. But the Buddhist Tokugawa shoguns, who con- solidated their power in the early seventeenth century, clamped down on Christian conversion and worship and Catholic communities withered away (see Chapter 18). In China, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and other Jesuit priests se- cured permission to preach and build churches, and they tried to show parallels between Catholic doctrine and Chi- nese Confucian philosophy. Both the Ming and the early Qing royal courts made use of Jesuit knowledge of cartog- raphy, astronomy, mathematics, clock making, and firearms technology. The Catholic missions, however, reached few ordinary Chinese. After 1704, when an envoy from the pope insolently announced that Chinese Christians must be pro- hibited from venerating their family ancestors, the emperor had missionaries expelled. The church’s hopes of large- scale conversion evaporated after that.

Wherever Portuguese, Dutch, British, or French mer- chants founded stations along the West and Central Afri- can coasts, they introduced their own Catholic or Protestant religion. But Europeans operated in most places as the guests of African rulers and usually huddled close to their posts. Christianity did not therefore spread far before the eighteenth century, though the ancient Christian church in Ethiopia, whose teachings differed significantly from either Catholic or Protestant churches, continued to flourish. In tropical Africa, Europeans achieved the most conversions in the Central African Kongo kingdom, whose royal family became Catholic early in the sixteenth century. Subsequent monarchs vigorously promoted the Christian gospel, and the religion became deeply ingrained in Kongolese life. This involved, however, significant syncretism, as Catholic and older Kongolese religious practices intermingled.

• • •

Conclusion

In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, rulers of a number of Afroeurasian states demonstrated that by fielding gunpowder armies and more effectively taxing their popula- tions to pay for huge military expenditures, they could build stronger, more highly centralized states and even territorial or seaborne empires. Large-scale state building continued in the period from 1650 to 1800, a process assisted by the increas- ing sophistication and deadliness of firearms technology.

The world map of powerful states, however, changed sig- nificantly. The Muslim-ruled Mughal, Persian, and Ottoman empires reached the end of their long expansionary phases

in the seventeenth century and either shrank or, in the case of Safavid Persia, disappeared. In the same era, however, Russian and Chinese armies advanced across the immense spaces of Inner Eurasia in opposite directions, while avoid- ing prolonged conflict with each other. In Europe, France, England, the Netherlands, Prussia, and (for a time) Sweden became both politically and economically stronger, while the Habsburg empire expanded deeper into southeastern Eu- rope at the expense of the Ottoman state. By contrast, Por- tugal and Spain dropped to a lower rank in the hierarchy of European power.

Jesuit missionaries in china. Jesuits combined assimilation of Chinese cultural forms, European scientific knowledge, and Christian theology to persuade potential Asian converts. What evidence does this engraving provide of their blending of Christian and Chinese symbols?

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European empire-building overseas succeeded spectacu- larly in the Americas. The Spanish crown, despite economic troubles at home, continued to exploit its great Latin American viceroyalties, and Portugal progressively subjugated more of Brazil’s Native American population. Britain, France, and the Netherlands seized territories in the Caribbean and eastern North America. All fi ve of these powers deployed naval power to either acquire or hang on to coastal enclaves and islands in Asia and tropical Africa, but in those regions the balance of territorial power remained fi rmly in the hands of local rulers.

In the seventeenth century, Europeans also undertook a new kind of long-distance expansion, founding colonies of settlers in eastern North America, Siberia, and the Cape region of South Africa. In these regions, populations of mainly European descent not only made themselves polit- ically dominant, but with the help of infectious diseases and armed aggression gradually succeeded in displacing native indigenous communities to create neo-Europes, societies whose populations and cultural form were of largely Euro- pean origin. Across much of the world’s temperate zones, these societies would grow much larger in the nineteenth century, to the grim detriment of indigenous peoples.

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, networks of both transoceanic and long-distance overland commu- nication became increasingly complex. As that happened, all but the most isolated societies had to confront immense amounts of new information arriving from afar. This ava- lanche of knowledge, circulating from one part of the world to another, provoked new questions about the universe, na- ture, and human society, as well as growing distrust of old answers. Peoples around the world took part in generating knowledge and posing fresh ideas , though the intellectual hub of this phenomenon was the globally connected ports and capitals of western Europe. The resulting scientifi c revolution and cultural Enlightenment changed forever the premises and methods for discovering and knowing truth. The new ways of thinking challenged time-honored religious doctrines on many points. Nevertheless, the great mission- ary religions, especially Christianity and Islam, continued to grow apace as monks, priests, ministers, pious scholars, and Sufi devotees fanned out along land and sea routes to share their own solutions to the problem of being.

• • •

Key Terms

absolutism 547 creole 550 English Civil War 568 Enlightenment 563 Glorious Revolution 556 natural rights 567

neo-Europe 556 New Spain and the Viceroyalty of Peru 549 old regime 567 Peace of Westphalia 551 philosophes 566

Qing dynasty 545 regent 545 scientifi c revolution 563 syncretism 569 Treaty of Nerchinsk 546 War of the Spanish Succession 554

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Please see page 000 for additional reading suggestions related to this chapter.

Change over Time

1582 Confucian scholars encounter Catholic Christian missionaries in China.

1632 Galileo Galilei offers proof of heliocentric theory of planetary motion.

1639 Russian explorers advancing across Siberia reach the Pacifi c.

1642–1660 The English Civil War involves temporary abolition of monarchy.

1643–1715 Louis XIV rules France, promoting absolutist principles.

1644 The Qing dynasty comes to power in China, replacing the Ming dynasty.

1648 The Peace of Westphalia proposes principles to guide international relations in Europe.

1652 Khoisan peoples of South Africa encounter Dutch East India Company (VOC) colonizers.

1654–1722 The Kangxi emperor expands China’s land frontiers.

1675–1676 Native Americans unsuccessfully rebel against settlers in Massachusetts Bay Colony.

1682–1725 Peter the Great transforms Russia into a major European power.

1687 Isaac Newton publishes The Principia, detailing laws of gravity and motion.

1688 The Glorious Revolution in Britain limits the monarchy’s power.

1689 China and Russia settle land frontier disputes with the Treaty of Nerchinsk.

1690 John Locke publishes Two Treatises of Government, criticizing absolutist government.

1690s The Austrian Habsburg empire drives Ottoman forces out of Hungary.

1701–1714 The War of the Spanish Succession drains economies of western European states, especially France.

1713–1740 Frederick William I consolidates power in Prussia.

1792 Mary Wollstonecraft publishes A Vindication of the Rights of Women, arguing for equal education for women.

Early 1800s The Spanish American empire reaches its greatest territorial extent.

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