Chapter 14 - Europe and the World: New Encounters, 1500-1800

Chapter 14.1 - On the Brink of a New World

• By the second half of the fifteenth century, European monarchies had increased both their authority and their resources and were in a position to turn their energies beyond their borders.

• For France, that meant the invasion of Italy, but for Portugal, a state not strong enough to pursue power in Europe, it meant going abroad.

• The Spanish monarchy was strong enough by the sixteenth century to pursue power both in Europe and beyond.

• At the same time, Europeans had achieved a level of wealth and technology that enabled them to make a regular series of voyages beyond Europe.

• With details on coastal contours, distances between ports, and compass readings, these charts proved of great value for voyages in European waters.

• But because the portolani were drawn on a flat scale and took no account of the curvature of the earth, they were of little use for longer overseas voyages.

• Only when sea-farers began to venture beyond the coast of Europe did they begin to accumulate information about the actual shape of the earth.

• By the end of the fifteenth century, cartography had developed to the point that Europeans possessed fairly accurate maps of the known world.

• One of the most important world maps available to Europeans at the end of the fifteenth century was that of Ptolemy, an astronomer of the second century.

• Printed editions of Ptolemy’s Geography, which contained his world map, became available from 1477 on.

• In addition to showing the oceans as considerably smaller than the landmasses, Ptolemy had also drastically underestimated the circumference of the earth, which led Columbus and other adventurers to believe that it would be feasible to sail west from Europe to reach Asia.

• The first European fleets sailing southward along the coast of West Africa had found their efforts to return hindered by the strong winds that blow steadily from the north along the coast.

• By the late fifteenth century, however, sailors had learned to tack out into the ocean, where they were able to catch westerly winds in the vicinity of the Azores that brought them back to the coast of western Europe.

• Christopher Columbus used this technique in his voyages to the Americas, and others relied on their new knowledge of the winds to round the continent of Africa in search of the Spice Islands.

  

Chapter 14.2 - New Horizons: The Portuguese and Spanish Empires

• In 1419, Prince Henry founded a school for navigators on the southwestern coast of Portugal. Shortly thereafter, Portuguese fleets began probing southward along the western coast of Africa in search of gold, which had been carried northward from south of the Atlas Mountains in central Morocco for centuries.
• In 1441, Portuguese ships reached the Senegal River, just north of Cape Verde, and brought home a cargo of black Africans, most of whom were then sold as slaves to wealthy buyers elsewhere in Europe.
• A few years later, they established contact with the state of Bakongo, near the mouth of the Zaire River in Central Africa.
• To facilitate trade in gold, ivory, and slaves , the Portuguese leased land from local rulers and built stone forts along the coast.
• Hearing reports of a route to India around the southern tip of Africa, Portuguese sea captains continued their probing.
• Ten years later, a fleet under the command of Vasco da Gama rounded the cape and stopped at several ports controlled by Muslim merchants along the coast of East Africa.
• Da Gama’s fleet then crossed the Arabian Sea and reached the port of Calicut, on the southwestern coast of India, on May 18, 1498.
• On arriving in Calicut, da Gama announced to his surprised hosts that he had come in search of ‘‘Christians and spices.
• Although he lost two ships en route, da Gama’s remaining vessels returned to Europe with their holes filled with ginger and cinnamon, a cargo that earned the investors a profit of several thousand percent.
• Portuguese fleets returned annually to the area, seeking to destroy Arab shipping and establish a monopoly in the spice trade.
• In 1509, a Portuguese armada defeated a combined fleet of Turkish and Indian ships off the coast of India and began to impose a blockade on the entrance to the Red Sea to cut off the flow of spices to Muslim rulers in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.
• The following year, seeing the need for a land base in the area, Admiral Afonso de Albuquerque set up port facilities at Goa , on the western coast of India south of present-day Mumbai .
• Goa henceforth became the headquarters for Portuguese operations through-out the entire region.

Chapter 14.3 - New Rivals on the World Stage

• Although the primary objective of the Portuguese in sailing around Africa was to find a sea route to the Spice Islands, they soon discovered that profits could be made in Africa itself.
• During the mid-seventeenth century, however, the Dutch seized a number of Portuguese forts along the West African coast and at the same time took control of much of the Portuguese trade across the Indian Ocean.
• Already in 1534, the French explorer Jacques Cartier had discovered the Saint Lawrence River and laid claim to Canada as a French possession.
• It was not until 1608, however, when Samuel de Champlain established a settlement at Quebec that the French began to take a more serious interest in Canada as a colony.
• In 1663, Canada was made the property of the French crown and administered by a French governor like a French province.
• French North America was run autocratically as a vast trading area, where valuable furs, leather, fish, and timber were acquired.
• The inability of the French state to get its people to emigrate to its Canadian possessions, however, left the territory thinly populated.
• By the mid-eighteenth century, there were only about 15,000 French Canadians, most of whom were hunters, trappers, missionaries, or explorers.
• The French failed to provide adequate men or money, allowing their European wars to take precedence over the conquest of the North American continent.
• Already in 1713, by the Treaty of Utrecht, the French began to cede some of their American possessions to their British rival.
• The British cajoled the Portuguese into allowing them into the lucrative Brazilian trade.
• The French, however, were the first to break into the Spanish Latin American market when the French Bourbons became kings of Spain at the beginning of the eighteenth century.
• Britain’s first entry into Spanish American markets came in 1713, when the British were granted the privilege, known as the asiento , of transporting 4,500 slaves a year to Spanish Latin America.

Chapter 14.4 - The Impact of European Expansion

• The native American civilizations, which had their own unique qualities and a degree of sophistication not much appreciated by Europeans, were virtually destroyed.
• In addition to devastating losses of population from European diseases, ancient social and political structures were ripped up and replaced by European institutions, religion, language, and culture. Without the slave trade, these territories became susceptible to European control in the nineteenth century.
• The Portuguese trading posts in the East had little direct impact on native Asian civilizations, although Dutch control of the Indonesian archipelago was more pervasive.
• Already by 1501, Spanish rulers had authorized inter-marriage between Europeans and native American Indians, whose offspring became known as mestizos .
• Another group of people brought to Latin America were the Africans. Over a period of three centuries, possibly as many as 8 million slaves were brought to Spanish and Portuguese America to work the plantations.
• Africans also contributed to Latin America’s multiracial character.
• The ecology of the conquered areas was also affected by the European presence.
• Europeans brought horses and cattle to the Americas, which revolutionized the life of the Indians. South America would later become a great exporter of beef.
• Europeans also brought new crops, such as wheat and cane sugar, to be cultivated on large plantations by native or imported slave labor.
• In their trips to other parts of the world, Europeans also carried New World plants with them.
• Thus, Europeans introduced sweet potatoes and maize to Africa in the sixteenth century.
• For some Europeans, expansion abroad brought the possibility of obtaining land, riches, and social advancement. ’’
• Although some wives accompanied their husbands abroad, many ordinary European women found new opportunities for marriage in the New World because of the lack of white women.
• ’’ 12 In the violence-prone world of early Spanish America, a number of women also found themselves rich after their husbands were killed unexpectedly.
• In one area of Central America, women owned about 25 percent of the landed estates by 1700. European expansion also had other economic effects on the conquerors.
• Wherever they went in the New World, Europeans looked for sources of gold and silver.
• When the mines at Potosı ́in Peru opened in 1545, the value of precious metals imported into Europe quadrupled.
• While Europeans were bringing horses, cattle, and wheat to the New World, they were taking new agricultural products such as potatoes, chocolate, corn, tomatoes, and tobacco back to Europe.
• Potatoes became especially popular as a dietary staple in some areas of Europe.
• Other products, such as cochineal, a red dye discovered in Mexico, gave European artists and artisans a ‘‘perfect red’’ for their paintings and cloth.
• The European lifestyle was greatly affected by new products from abroad. In addition to new foods, new drinks also appeared in Europe.

Chapter 14.5 - Toward a World Economy

• This so-called price revolution was a Europe-wide phenomenon, although it affected different areas at different times.
• Though the inflation rate was probably a relatively low 2 to 3 percent a year, it was noticeable in a Europe accustomed to stable prices.
• Although precise data are lacking, economic historians believe that as a result of the price revolution, wages failed to keep up with price increases.
• Wage earners, especially agricultural laborers and salaried workers in urban areas, saw their standard of living drop.
• The causes of the price revolution are a subject of much historical debate.
• Already in the 1560s, European intellectuals associated the rise in prices with the great influx of precious metals from the New World.
• Although this view was accepted for a long time, many economic historians now believe that the increase in population in the sixteenth century played an important role in creating inflationary pressures.
• The commercial expansion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was made easier by new forms of commercial organization, especially the joint-stock company.
• Individuals bought shares in a company and received dividends on their investment while a board of directors ran the company and made the important business decisions.
• During its first ten years, investors received 30 percent of their money from the Dutch East India Company, which opened the Spice Islands and Southeast Asia to Dutch activity.
• The joint-stock company made it easier to raise large amounts of capital for world trading ventures.
• The mining industry was closely tied to sixteenth-century family banking firms.
• In exchange for arranging large loans to Charles V, Jacob Fugger was given a monopoly over silver, copper, and mercury mines in the Habsburg possessions of central Europe that produced profits in excess of 50 percent per year.
• The House of Fugger went bankrupt at the end of the sixteenth century when the Habsburgs defaulted on their loans.
• By the seventeenth century, the traditional family banking firms were no longer able to supply the numerous services needed for expanding commercial capitalism.
• The city of Amsterdam created the Bank of Amsterdam in 1609 as both a deposit and a transfer institution and the Amsterdam Bourse, or Exchange, where the trading of stocks replaced the exchange of goods.
• By the first half of the seventeenth century, the Amsterdam Exchange had emerged as the hub of the European business world, just as Amsterdam itself had replaced Antwerp as the greatest commercial and banking center of Europe.
• Despite the growth of commercial capitalism, most of the European economy still depended on an agricultural system that had experienced few changes since the thirteenth century.
• At least 80 percent of Europeans still worked on the land.
• Almost all of the peasants of western Europe were free of serfdom, although many still owed a variety of feudal dues to the nobility.
• In eastern Europe, the peasants’ position even worsened as they were increasingly tied to the land in a new serfdom enforced by powerful landowners.
• Mercantilist theory on the role of colonies was matched in practice by Europe’s overseas expansion.
• With the development of colonies and trading posts in the Americas and the East, Europeans embarked on an adventure in international commerce in the seventeenth century.
• Although some historians speak of a nascent world economy, we should remember that local, regional, and intra-European trade still predominated.
• At the end of the seventeenth century, for example, English imports totaled 360,000 tons, but only 5,000 tons came from the East Indies. Trade within Europe remained strong throughout the eighteenth century as wheat, timber, and naval stores from the Baltic, wines from France, wool and fruit from Spain, and silk from Italy were exchanged along with a host of other products.
• But this trade increased only slightly while overseas trade boomed. This increase in overseas trade has led some his-torians to proclaim the emergence of a truly global economy in the eighteenth century.
• Trade patterns now interlocked Europe, Africa, the East, and the Americas.