Chapter 13: The Age of Exploration

Exploration and Expansion

Motives and Means

The dynamic energy of Western civilization between 1500 and 1800 was most apparent when Europeans began to expand into the rest of the world.
For almost a thousand years, Europeans had mostly remained in one area of the world.
- Europeans had long been attracted to Asia. In the late thirteenth century, Marco Polo had traveled with his father and uncle to the Chinese court of the great Mongol ruler Kublai Khan.
Economic motives loom large in European expansion.
This statement suggests another reason for the overseas voyages: religious zeal.
There was a third motive as well. Spiritual and secular affairs were connected in the sixteenth century.
By the second half of the fifteenth century, European monarchies had increased their power and their resources.

The Portuguese Trading Empire

Portugal took the lead in European exploration. Beginning in 1420, under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator, Portuguese fleets began probing southward along the western coast of Africa.
- Portuguese sea captains heard reports of a route to India around the southern tip of Africa. I
In 1488, Bartholomeu Dias rounded the tip, called the Cape of Good Hope.
Later, Vasco da Gama went around the cape and cut across the Indian Ocean to the coast of India.
Portuguese fleets returned to the area to destroy Muslim shipping and to gain control of the spice trade, which had been controlled by the Muslims
The Portuguese then began to range more widely in search of the source of the spice trade.
Soon, Albuquerque sailed into Melaka on the Malay Peninsula.
- From Melaka, the Portuguese launched expeditions to China and the Spice Islands.
The Portuguese had neither the power, the people, nor the desire to colonize the Asian regions.

Voyages to the Americas

The Portuguese sailed eastward through the Indian Ocean to reach the source of the spice trade.
An important figure in the history of Spanish exploration was an Italian, Christopher Columbus.
- Columbus persuaded Queen Isabella of Spain to finance an exploratory expedition.
- In October 1492, he reached the Americas, where he explored the coastline of Cuba and the island of Hispaniola.
- Columbus believed he had reached Asia.
Through three more voyages, he sought in vain to find a route through the outer islands to the Asian mainland.
In his four voyages, Columbus reached all the major islands of the Caribbean and Honduras in Central America—all of which he called the Indies.
By the 1490s, then, the voyages of the Portuguese and Spanish had already opened up new lands to exploration.
According to the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494, the line would extend from north to south through the Atlantic Ocean and the easternmost part of the South American continent.
Other explorers soon realized that Columbus had discovered an entirely new frontier.
Government-sponsored explorers from many countries joined the race to the Americas.
A Venetian seaman, John Cabot, explored the New England coastline of the Americas for England.
The Portuguese sea captain Pedro Cabral landed in South America in 1500.
Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, went along on several voyages and wrote letters describing the lands he saw.
Europeans called these territories the New World, but the lands were hardly new.

The Spanish Empire

The Spanish conquerors of the Americas—known as conquistadors—were individuals whose guns and determination brought them incredible success.
In South America, an expedition led by Francisco Pizarro took control of the Incan Empire high in the Peruvian Andes.
By 1535, the Spanish had created a system of colonial administration in the Americas.
- The Spanish were supposed to protect Native Americans, but the settlers were far from Spain and largely ignored their rulers.
- Forced labor, starvation, and especially disease took a fearful toll on Native American lives.
- In the early years of the conquest, Catholic missionaries converted and baptized hundreds of thousands of native peoples.

Economic Impact and Competition

Spanish conquests in the Americas affected not only the conquered but also the conquerors.
Colonists established plantations and ranches to raise sugar, cotton, vanilla, livestock, and other products introduced to the Americas for export to Europe.
At the same time, Portuguese expansion in the East created its own economic impact.
By the end of the sixteenth century, several new European rivals had entered the scene for the eastern trade.
The Spanish established themselves in the Philippine Islands, where Ferdinand Magellan had landed earlier.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, an English fleet landed on the northwestern coast of India and established trade relations with the people there.
- Trade with Southeast Asia soon followed.
The first Dutch fleet arrived in India in 1595.
- The Dutch also formed the West India Company to compete with the Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas.
After 1660, however, rivalry with the English and the French (who had also become active in North America) brought the fall of the Dutch commercial empire in the Americas.
- During the 1600s, the French colonized parts of what is now Canada and Louisiana.
- Led by Portugal and Spain, European nations in the 1500s and 1600s established many trading posts and colonies in the Americas and the East.
A colony is a settlement of people living in a new territory, linked with the parent country by trade and direct government control.
With the development of colonies and trading posts, Europeans entered an age of increased international trade.
Colonies played a role in the theory of mercantilism, a set of principles that dominated economic thought in the seventeenth century.
The balance of trade is the difference in value between what a nation imports and what it exports over time.
- When the balance is favorable, the goods exported are of greater value than those imported.
- To encourage exports, governments stimulated export industries and trade.
- Colonies were considered important both as sources of raw materials and markets for finished goods.

Africa is an Age of Transition

The Slave Trade

Traffic in slaves was not new, to be sure.
As in other areas of the world, slavery had been practiced in Africa since ancient times.
In the fifteenth century, it con- tinued at a fairly steady level.
The primary market for African slaves was Southwest Asia, where most slaves were used as domestic servants
Cane sugar was introduced to Europe from Southwest Asia during the Middle Ages.
During the sixteenth century, plantations, large agricultural estates, were set up along the coast of Brazil and on islands in the Caribbean to grow sugarcane.
In 1518, a Spanish ship carried the first boatload of African slaves directly from Africa to the Americas.
- During the next two centuries, the trade in slaves grew dramatically and became part of the triangular trade that marked the emergence of a new world economy.
- An estimated 275,000 African slaves were exported during the sixteenth century.
One reason for these astonishing numbers, of course, was the high death rate.
- The journey of slaves from Africa to the Americas became known as the Middle Passage, the middle portion of the triangular trade route.
- Many slaves died on the journey.
- Death rates were higher for newly arrived slaves than for those born and raised in the Americas.
Before the coming of Europeans in the fifteenth century, most slaves in Africa were prisoners of war.
At first, local slave traders obtained their supplies of slaves from the coastal regions nearby.
- As demand increased, however, they had to move farther inland to find their victims.
Local rulers became concerned about the impact of the slave trade on the well-being of their societies.
In a letter to the king of Portugal in 1526, King Afonso of Congo (Bakongo) said, “so great is the corruption that our country is being completely depopulated.”
Protests from Africans were generally ignored by Europeans, however, as well as by other Africans.
The effects of the slave trade varied from area to area.
The desire of local slave traders to provide a constant supply of slaves led to increased warfare in Africa.
Only a few Europeans lamented what they were doing to traditional African societies.
The slave trade had a devastating effect on some African states.
- The case of Benin in West Africa is a good example.
- A brilliant and creative society in the sixteenth century, Benin was pulled into the slave trade.
- As the population declined and warfare increased, the people of Benin lost faith in their gods, their art deteriorated, and human sacrifice became more common.

Political and Social Structures

The slave trade was one of the most noticeable effects of the European presence in Africa between 1500 and 1800.
Generally, European influence did not extend beyond the coastal regions.
Only in a few areas, such as South Africa and Mozambique, were there signs of a permanent European presence.
In general, traditional African political systems continued to exist.
Other African states were more like collections of small principalities knit together by ties of kinship or other loyalties.
Many Africans continued to live in small political units in which authority rested in a village leader.
- For example, the Ibo society of eastern Nigeria was based on independent villages.
- Nevertheless, the Europeans were causing changes, sometimes indirectly.
Morocco had long hoped to expand its influence into the Sahara in order to seize control over the trade in gold and salt.
Foreigners also influenced African religious beliefs.
Here, however, Europeans had less impact than the Islamic culture.
Although their voyages centered on trade with the East, Europeans were also interested in spreading Christianity.

Southeast Asia in the Era of the Spice Trade

Emerging Mainland States

In 1500, mainland Southeast Asia was a relatively stable region.
- Throughout mainland Southeast Asia, from Burma in the west to Vietnam in the east, kingdoms with their own ethnic, linguistic, and cultural characteristics were being formed.
Conflicts did erupt among the emerging states on the Southeast Asian mainland.
Across the mountains to the east, the Vietnamese had begun their “March to the South.”
By the end of the fifteenth century, they had subdued the rival state of Champa on the central coast.
The Vietnamese then gradually took control of the Mekong delta from the Khmer.
The situation was different in the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The major impact of Islam, however, came in the fifteenth century, with the rise of the new sultanate at Melaka.

The Arrival of Europeans

In 1511, the Portuguese seized Melaka and soon occupied the Moluccas.
The Portuguese, however, lacked the military and financial resources to impose their authority over broad areas.
The situation changed with the arrival of the English and Dutch traders, who were better financed than were the Portuguese.
- During the next 50 years, the Dutch occupied most of the Portuguese coastal forts along the trade routes throughout the Indian Ocean, including the island of Ceylon (today’s Sri Lanka) and Melaka.
- The aggressive Dutch traders drove the English traders out of the spice market, reducing the English influence to a single port on the southern coast of Sumatra.
- The Dutch also began to consolidate their political and military control over the entire area
- Then the Dutch turned their attention to the island of Java, where they established a fort at Batavia in 1619.
Portuguese and then Dutch influence was mostly limited to the Malay Peninsula and the Indonesian Archipelago.
The arrival of the Europeans had less impact on mainland Southeast Asia.
The Portuguese estab- lished limited trade relations with several mainland states (part of the continent, as distinguished from peninsulas or offshore islands), including Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, and the remnants of the old Angkor kingdom in Cambodia.
In Vietnam, a civil war temporarily divided the country into two separate states, one in the south and one in the north.
- By the end of the seventeenth century, however, it had become clear that economic opportunities were limited.
In the non-mainland states, there was less political unity.
The spice trade there was enormously profitable.
European merchants and rulers were determined to gain control of the sources of the spices.

Religious and Political Systems

Religious beliefs changed in Southeast Asia during the period from 1500 to 1800.
Particularly in the nonmainland states and the Philippines, Islam and Christianity were beginning to attract converts.
The political systems in Southeast Asian states evolved into four styles of monarchy.
The Buddhist style of kingship became the chief form of government in the mainland states of Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia.
The Javanese style of kingship was rooted in the political traditions of India and shared many of the characteristics of the Buddhist system.
Islamic sultans were found on the Malay Peninsula and in the small coastal states of the Indonesian Archipelago.
In the Islamic pattern, the head of state was a sultan. He was viewed as a mortal, although he still possessed some special qualities.
He was a defender of the faith and staffed his bureaucracy (a body of nonelective government officials) mainly with aristocrats.
In Vietnam, kingship followed the Chinese model.
Like the Chinese emperor, the Vietnamese emperor ruled according to the teachings of Confucius.