Governance, 1450-1750 Notes

Governance, 1450-1750

Learning Objectives

  • Emergence of nation-states.
  • Political and administrative centralization (bureaucratic elites).
  • Land empires vs. maritime empires and trading-post empires.
  • Europe's age of exploration (Vasco da Gama, Christopher Columbus, Ferdinand Magellan).
  • Conquistadors and the encomienda system in the Americas.
  • Joint-stock companies (Dutch East India Company, British East India Company, Hudson's Bay Company).
  • Atlantic slave trade and colonial-era forms of coerced labor.
  • Global competition over trade routes and overseas colonies.
  • Absolutism and parliamentarism in Europe.
  • Islamic gunpowder empires:
    • Ottoman Turkey + Safavid Persia + Mughal India.
  • Songhai vs. Morocco; Kongo and Ashanti; Zulu vs. Boer colonists.
  • Ming and Qing dynasties in China.
  • Japanese unification and the Tokugawa shogunate.
  • Ideologies and political uses of religion (divine right, Dar al-Islam, circle of justice, mandate of heaven).
  • Military revolution thesis.
  • During the first centuries of this era-the 1500s and 1600s-global might was concentrated mainly in states like China and the Islamic world's gunpowder empires: Ottoman Turkey, Safavid Persia, and Mughal India.
  • However, in a major geopolitical development, the nations of Europe grew more powerful. By the early 1700s, they were overtaking the places listed above in military, scientific, and technological aptitude. Much of this change had to do with the European campaign, starting in the 1400s, to explore the rest of the world. Between the 1500s and 1700s, numerous European states-including Portugal, Spain, the Dutch Republic, England, and France-created trading-post empires and maritime empires with a truly global reach.
  • Another key development involved the incorporation of gunpowder weaponry into warfare by a number of Eurasian states. Both state building at home and imperial expansion in both hemispheres depended on skill in deploying gunpowder in infantry units, cannons, and gunships, as well as on the ability to build new fortresses and fortified cities capable of defending against gunpowder artillery.

The Iberian Wave: Portugal and Spain

  • The first European nations to systematically explore the wider Atlantic world were Portugal and Spain, on the Iberian peninsula.
  • Portugal's exploring efforts, encouraged by Prince Henry the Navigator, began around 1410 with voyages to the west and south. The Portuguese claimed several Atlantic island groups, including the Azores, as well as ports along Africa's west coast. In 1488, Bartholomeu Díaz reached the southern tip of Africa, which the rulers of Portugal named the Cape of Good Hope, recognizing this as an important step on the way to India. Over the next decade, the Portuguese made their way into the Indian Ocean basin, capturing East African ports and cities and then crossing the ocean to India itself. The first European to reach India by sea was Portugal's Vasco da Gama, who landed in Calicut in 1498, earning an immense profit upon returning home. The Portuguese quickly took steps to enlarge their presence in Africa and Asia.
  • Blocked from following Portugal's African-Indian Ocean route to Asia, Spain's monarchs-Ferdinand and Isabella-turned to the unusual proposal made in 1492 by the Italian captain Christopher Columbus: to sail west to reach the Far East. The boldness of Columbus's plan lay not in the idea that the world was round (a fact known to educated Europeans) but in his erroneous belief that the globe was small enough that an expedition would be able to sail from Spain to Asia before running out of food or water or without being barred by some other landmass. Columbus set sail in August 1492 and reached the Caribbean's Bahama islands in October.
  • Columbus himself believed he had found the Indies-hence the mistaken term "Indians" for indigenous Americans-but others realized that he had sailed someplace completely unknown to Europe. Spain and Portugal asked the pope to referee their competing claims to this "New World." In lines of demarcation agreed to between 1492 and 1529, the pope gave most of South America and all of North America to the Spanish. The Portuguese received Brazil, which Pedro Cabral had sailed to in 1500. The pope similarly defined Spanish and Portuguese spheres of influence in Asia. In the 1520s, the two countries' earlier efforts were tied together by Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese mariner sailing on behalf of Spain. Leader of the first circumnavigation of the globe, Magellan left Europe in 1519, traversed the Atlantic, and rounded the tip of South America. His ships crossed the Pacific and returned to Europe in 1522, having sailed around the world, although he himself died along the way, in the Philippines.
  • Portugal and Spain now established a commercial or colonial presence wherever they could. In the Far East and Southeast Asia, most states were too strong for the Portuguese to conquer, so for the most part, they settled for trade. Still, the Portuguese took over certain areas. In addition to their West African outposts, they gained control over East African cities like Mombasa and Zanzibar and the Arab port of Muscat (1507) in Oman. They also seized the Indian port of Goa (1510), the thriving commercial center of Melaka (Malacca, 1511), and the island of Sri Lanka. The Portuguese opened up ties with China and Japan between the 1510s and 1540s, and while the Chinese granted them the port of Macau in 1557 as a reward for fighting pirates, they had no hope of actual conquest here. What they built in this part of the world is generally referred to as a trading-post empire. In the 1600s, Portugal lost many of these assets to the Dutch, English, and Omani Arabs.
  • In the New World, by contrast, the Portuguese and Spanish founded maritime empires, or overseas colonies fully under their control. Portugal moved into Brazil, while Spain took over Caribbean islands such as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The mainland fell to conquistadors: generals who received permission from the crown to bring parts of North and South America under Spanish control and to profit themselves while doing so. Florida fell to Juan Ponce de León in 1513. The Spanish subjugated various Mayan communities between the 1520s and 1590s. Spain's most dramatic victories involved Hernán Cortés, who carried out the brutal conquest of the Aztecs (1519-1521), and Francisco Pizarro, who accomplished a similar conquest of the Incas in the 1530s. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, renamed Mexico City, became the headquarters for all of New Spain, and Cortés's success opened the way to Spanish domination of Mexico, Mesoamerica, and most of what is now the U.S. Southwest, along with California. Pizarro opened the way to the Spanish takeover of South America.
  • Several factors aided these conquests. Horses, metal armor, and gunpowder weapons gave the Spanish and Portuguese military advantages, making up for their small numbers (Cortés brought only a few hundred Spaniards to fight the Aztecs, while Pizarro led barely over a hundred). European arrivals also proved adept at divide-and-conquer tactics, stirring up rivalries among native groups and allying with some against others. This proved especially effective against the relatively new Aztec and Incan Empires, many of whose conquered subjects resented their masters and embraced the Spanish as potential liberators. This allowed Cortés to enlarge his forces to a total of 200,000 before moving against Moctezuma II of the Aztecs. (As noted in Chapter 11, local women provided invaluable diplomatic guidance and contacts, the chief example being Cortés's Nahua mistress Malinche, or Doña Marina.) The most important reason for Spain's and Portugal's triumph in the New World was the grimmest: as part of the Columbian Exchange discussed in Chapter 12, diseases like smallpox and measles, brought from Afro-Eurasia by European colonizers, killed indigenous Americans in massive numbers. Most historians now estimate that at least half of the Americas' original population perished (some believe that up to 90 percent died)-and the survivors were left vulnerable to European conquest.
  • The conquistador Cortés famously stated that he came to the Americas for "God, gold, and glory." Although the conversion of indigenous Americans to Catholicism was considered important, particularly to offset the loss of European worshippers to Protestant churches, economic exploitation was Spain's (and Portugal's) highest priority in the New World. The most important activities were mining (especially for silver near Mexico City and at Potosí, Bolivia's "mountain of silver") and plantation monoculture-with sugarcane the most prized and most labor-intensive cash crop. At first, conquistadors governed the land they took over on the crown's behalf, sending one-fifth (la quinta) of their profits back to Spain. Starting in 1535, New Spain was placed under more direct control as a viceroyalty ("in place of the king"), with all colonial economic activity run by the House of Trade in Seville.

Statecraft: Old and New Techniques of Governance

  • In addition to multiethnic land empires, nation-states, in the modern sense of the term, began to emerge. These were political units with relatively fixed borders, a sense of national unity, and populations that were largely (though never completely) homogeneous in terms of language and ethnicity.
  • In many parts of the world, political and administrative centralization led to a higher degree of state organization and efficiency. Features of modern government-such as bureaucracies, treasuries, and state banks-were more commonplace. Rulers devised reliable and efficient means to collect taxes and conscript soldiers.
  • As in earlier eras, state-building techniques included impressive displays of architecture and art. Regimes continued to rely on religious concepts to legitimate their authority. As states grew more adept at placing ethnic and religious minorities under firmer control while keeping them economically productive.
  • Most monarchies remained autocratic or absolutist, but some nations experimented with more representative forms of government, including parliamentary monarchy. While many states established or expanded land empires, the nations of Europe took the lead in building trading-post empires and maritime empires across the globe.

Empire Building: The Age of Exploration and Colonization

  • Between the early 1400s and the mid-1700s, the nations of Europe accomplished what no other civilization had done. They explored the wider world around them, discovered how to sail around the globe, and mapped the planet's major oceans and landmasses.
  • With this knowledge came great power and wealth, but the legacy of European exploration and colonization is mixed. Europe eventually dominated most of the world but paid a steep moral price in exchange. Colonization went hand in hand with war, greed, racial and religious intolerance, and slavery. Much of the globe remained under European rule for centuries, and even now, the tensions left over between Western nations and their former colonies continue to affect international relations.

Motivations and Capabilities

  • Early on, Europe's primary motivation for exploring was economic. Throughout the Middle Ages, Mediterranean trade, greater awareness of the Middle East gained during the Crusades, and tales told by travelers like Marco Polo whetted European appetites for the wealth of eastern locales like China, the Indies, and Japan. Rather than rely on the Silk Road and Middle Eastern middlemen, Europeans increasingly wanted their own direct access to Asiatic goods such as silk, spices, and other luxury items.
  • As the Europeans' interest in exploring grew, so did their ability to voyage farther and more safely. By the 1300s and early 1400s, the Europeans were adopting from Asia key navigational and maritime technologies: the astrolabe, the magnetic compass, and the sternpost rudder. At the same time, Europeans were developing sailing ships capable of long-range oceanic voyaging, with deep keels for stability and advanced rigging systems that permitted ships to sail where they needed to despite the direction of the wind. The most important model was the nimble, three-masted caravel, in extensive use by the 1400s. The Dutch fluyt and the larger carrack played roles as well.
  • Gunpowder weaponry, which the Europeans began to use in the 1300s and 1400s, also affected the age of exploration. Wherever they went, European sailors and soldiers came equipped with muskets and cannons. Used against less technologically advanced natives, these weapons allowed for faster and easier colonization. By the 1500s and 1600s, the Europeans had invented galleons and other gunships that allowed them to project greater quantities of firepower.