Chapters 1-3

CHAPTER 1: Worlds in Motion, 1450-1550 \n The Worlds of Christopher Columbus

  • European Nations in the Age of Discovery
    • In 1492:
    • Spain and Portugal had just been liberated
    • France and England were under the same leader’s limited rule
    • European nation-states were being consolidated, each under the rule of a single monarch
    • Since Spain and Portugal were the first nations to be unified, they were the first to begin to explore and conquer foreign lands
    • Netherlands, France, and England unified a century later
    • Germany and Italy weren’t unified until the 19th century
  • The Political Economy of Europe
    • 1450-1750: the establishment of new trade patterns 
    • Powerful traders dominated trade in their region (ex: Islamic traders linked parts of Europe, Africa, and Asia)
    • Wealth first flowed to Spain and Portugal and then to England, France, and Holland
    • As western European nations became wealthier, conquered nations in America, Africa, and Asia became more economically dependent on them
    • They supplied the raw materials that made Europe wealthy
    • Their populations were exploited and enslaved to turn out gold, silver, sugar, and tobacco
    • The vast majority of Europeans were peasants BUT the rich elite developed a taste for luxury items: sugar, spices, fabrics, metals
    • By the middle of the fifteenth century, new technologies made it possible for Europeans to travel farther
    • Gunpowder from China
    • Navigational compass from the Arabs
    • Better maps, stronger metal, caravel, and a lighter, faster ship came from Europe
    • Portugal had begun exploring the Atlantic coast of Africa, looking for a water route to Asia. They had driven out their Muslim conquerors. They became the first imperial nation
    • In exchange for European goods such as horses, cloth, and wheat, the Portuguese received African luxury products such as ivory, and especially gold, that could be sold in Europe.

 \n The Consequences of Conquest

  • Demographic Decline

    • The encomienda system worked for Spanish settlers, but didn’t work for the Indians
    • The dislocation of their normal way of life caused the birthrate to fall
    • This and smallpox, typhus, and influenza caused the populations of Natives to decline
    • Disease caused the death of people in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica (everywhere the Spanish and other Europeans went), making conquest easier
    • European diseases challenged Native American belief systems and prepared them to accept the god of the Spaniards
    • Syphilis was transferred from the New World to the Old World. It killed millions and incapacitated many more.

  • The Columbian Exchange

    • Columbus brought pigs, cattle, horses, sheep, goats, sugarcane, wheat, and seeds for fruits and vegetables
    • Lands once farmed by native agriculturalists were overrun by herds of Old World animals
    • Natives adapted Old World life forms to their own purposes
    • Horse: made them more productive hunters and more dangerous as enemies
    • Cultivation of American foods in the Old World, particularly potatoes and corn, made the dramatic population boom possible

 \n Onto the Mainland

  • The First Florida Ventures
    • The Spanish purposely disrupted local societies by spreading disease and undermining their political structures
    • Juan Ponce de Leon was the first European explorer to set foot in the US
    • March 1513 he reached the Atlantic shore of Florida, which he thought was an island
    • He and his men sailed around to the gulf coast, where he met hostile Indians who already knew about Spanish slave traders
    • On the west coast, he met the Calusas, the most powerful tribe
      • They attacked when he returned in 1521. He returned to Cuba to die
    • The spanish enslaved male Indians to carry their goods and females to serve as sexual partners
  • The Conquest of Mexico
    • The Aztec empire encompassed 10-20 million people, making their population twice as large as Spain’s.
    • Aztec society was hierarchical, with a nobility of warriors and priests at the top and slaves at the bottom.
    • Women of all classes were expected to stay home. Boys and girls attended separate schools, with the boys learning the arts of war and the girls practicing the skills of the homemaker
    • Tenochtitlan was built on a lake and traversed with canals
    • Hernan Cortes
    • Landed on the Yucatan coast with 500 men in 1519
    • After the Tabasco Indians were defeated, they gave him gold and 20 slave women (one was a translator)
    • Picked up many, many Indian allies
    • The foreigners placed the ruler of Tenochtitlan under house arrest and laid Tenochtitlan under siege
    • After 3 months, the Spanish entered the city, but the Aztecs refused to fight OR submit
    • Cortes and his troops killed 12,000 and let their Indian allies slaughter 40,000 more
  • The Establishment of a Spanish Empire
    • The ruined city of Tenochtitlan became the center of a Spanish empire with a new political economy based on the extraction of silver and gold and the production of plantation crops

 \n The World of the Indian Peoples

  • Aztec and Inca emerged as large and powerful states

  • The Archaic Indians

    • The first Americans were hunter-gatherers
    • Lived in small bands of 2 dozen people
    • Work was assigned by gender: men hunted and women gathered nuts, berries, and other foods.
    • Paleo-Indians learned to hunt smaller game after the Ice Age → became less nomadic, tools became more sophisticated, began storing food
    • After they began to cultivate plants, population grew to 1 million

  • The Indians of the Eastern Woodlands

    • Mississippian mound builders’ center was at Cahokia
    • 700 BCE Indians in that area had begun to cultivate crops
    • Mississippian societies were distinguished by the increasing capacity to support large populations from their agriculture, the extent of their trade networks, and their increasing capacity to support large populations from their agriculture
    • Maize accounted for half of the Mississippians’ diets
    • All Mississippians build mounds to bury the dead and as platforms for temples and public structures
    • Societies were hierarchical
    • When powerful ppl died, they were buried with their luxury goods
    • Had to keep trading for supplies
    • Before the arrival of Europeans, Indian cultures flourished and disappeared for reasons unknown
    • Spanish explorers saw mound builders in 16th century but they were gone a century later
    • Theories: bc there were densely packed populations and no effective sanitation systems, lethal diseases were everywhere
    • The Iroquois 
    • Southern Great Lakes region
    • Matrilineal
    • Tribes banded together to limit infighting and strengthen them against enemies
    • The Algonquians
    • Similarities (Iroquois and Algonquians)
    • Slash-and-burn method
    • More warlike

 \n CHAPTER 2: Colonial Outposts, 1550-1650 \n New France: An Outpost in the Global Political Economy

  • The Indian Background to French Settlement
    • The Iroquois culture groups were almost always at war but almost nobody died (mourning wars)
  • Champlain Encounters the Hurons
    • After Cartier’s last voyage in 1541, the French didn’t come back until after their civil war
    • 1608 Samuel de Champlain traced Cartier’s route up the St. Lawrence River and established a post at Quebec
    • Champlain’s party depended on their hosts, an Alognquian tribe
    • They had to adapt to Indian customs and assist the tribe in wars
    • Peasants were transplanted to New France in 1614 to raise food for the traders
    • Catholic priests were sent to convert the Natives
    • Their persistence, willingness to adapt, and ability to translate their religion into easy terms gained them many converts

 \n New Netherland: The Empire of a Trading Nation

  • Shaped by the force of commerce
  • Colonization by a Private Company
    • The Netherlands were Protestant, committed to a market economy, and sustained by a thriving middle class. They had a political economy
    • A Dutch expedition provided them a claim to the Hudson River Valley
    • 1609 Henry Hudson persuaded a group of Dutch merchants (Dutch East India Company) to finance his venture, where he found the Hudson
    • The New Netherland Company secured a temporary monopoly for trade between the Delaware and Connecticut rivers
    • 1621 The Dutch West India Company obtained a monopoly for trade with the Americas and Africa that entitled it to establish colonies in “fruitful and unsettled parts”
    • Established settlements at Fort Orange and New Amsterdam and purchased the entire island of Manhattan from Algonquian Indians 
      • First 30 families arrived 1624
      • Colony grew slowly
    • Policies they made to grow settlers
    • 1629 offered large plots of land and extensive governing powers to men who brought 50 settlers to the new colony. Not successful
    • Offered smaller grants of land to individuals who would farm the land and return 1/10 of what they produced. Not successful
    • 1640 offered greater rights of self-government and 200 acres to anyone who brought over 5 adult immigrants. Worked better
    • Ethnic diversity of the colony was increased in 165 when it absorbed the small colony of New Sweden
  • Slavery and Freedom in New Netherland
    • The Company found that European agricultural workers “sooner or later applied themselves to trade, and neglected agriculture altogether”
    • The primary function of New Netherland was to provide food for its more lucrative plantation colonies in Brazil and the Carribbean
    • By 1664, there were 700 slaves in the colony, 8% of the population
    • The Dutch Reformed Church
    • Accepted Africans and Indians as converts, but Calvinism insisted that followers be able to read and understand the Bible and the doctrines of the church
    • Didn’t oppose slavery
  • The Dutch-Indian Trading Partnership
    • The Dutch’s most profitable activity was the fur trade
    • Tribes relied on the Europeans for goods, weapons, and soldiers
    • Dutch and Mohawks were violent, but when the Mohawks became the most powerful force in the region, their relationship became peaceful
    • The Dutch did what was necessary to maintain their lucrative trade
    • Gave the Indians gifts
    • Cut off enterprising individuals who set out on their own
    • By the 1660s New Netherland was in serious economic trouble
    • Oversupply of wampum made the price of wampum fall and the price of trade goods skyrocket
    • Competition among Dutch traders increased
    • The pressure on Iroquois trade partners mounted
  • The Beaver Wars
    • The Iroquois were vulnerable because they depended on the Dutch for a steady supply of guns
    • They lashed out in hostilities, known as Beaver Wars 1648-1660s
    • They attacked almost all of their Indian neighbors and succeeded in pushing the few surviving French-allied Hurons to the west
    • Europeans gained the upper hand. The Iroquois couldn’t secure the French as trade partners
    • The Indians were never able to replace the population they lost to warfare

 \n England Attempts an Empire 57

  • The Origins of English Nationalism
    • Henry’s daughter Elizabeth established order in the country
    • Reestablished the Anglican Church
    • Subdued internal dissent
    • Built on the strong state that her grandfather and father had consolidated
  • Raiding Other Empires
    • Tried to steal from the Spanish
    • Her goal was more to weaken Spain than to build an empire
    • 1562, John Hawkins tried unsuccessfully to break into the slave trade. The Spanish forced him out and the English moved on to privateering
    • Privateering: state-sanctioned piracy
    • 1570 Sir Francis Drake set off for the Isthmus of Panama on a raiding expedition. 
    • Motivated by dreams of glory and a conviction that his Protestant religion was superior to all others
    • He also hated the spanish
    • Drake led the second expedition to sail the world, crossed the Atlantic many times, helped defeat the Armada (Spanish fleet), and became an architect of England’s colonial strategies
    • Drake’s venture into Panama failed to produce treasure
    • Inspired a group of professional seamen to formulate plans for an English colonial empire
    • Proved that the Spanish empire was vulnerable
  • Rehearsal in Ireland
    • At the end of the 16th century England embarked on a campaign to bring Ireland under its full control
    •  the conquest of Ireland between 1565 and 1576 became the model for England's following Colonial Ventures 
    • England forcefully removed some of the Irish to make way for loyal Englishmen 
  • The Roanoke Venture
    • Roanoke: England's first colony in the United States, a military venture intended as a resupply base for privateers raiding in the Caribbean
    • Unsuccessful
    • Half of the crew of 600 were probably recruited for forcefully seized from the unemployed poor. They were expendable
    • Roanoke was a poor port: dangerous to small ships and inadequate for large ships
  • The Abandoned Colony
    • The supply ships for the colony never arrived
    • The people were considered expendable
    • They left because they needed to in order to survive
    • 20 years after the abandonment of Roanoke, the English finally established a permanent colony at Jamestown

 \n CHAPTER 3: The English Come to Stay, 1600-1660 \n Dissention in Puritan Ranks 94

  • Roger Williams and Toleration
    • Roger Williams: a brilliant and obstinate young minister
    • Williams announced that he was really a Separatist and wouldn’t be a part of the church unless it stopped being part of the Church of England
    • Williams didn’t have a church so he preached to anyone who would listen
    • Questioned the validity of the Massachusetts charter 
    • Argued for strict separation of church and state
    • Argued for strict separation of the regenerate (ppl who were converted) and the unconverted
    • Advocated religious toleration, with each congregation governing itself, free from state interference
    • These doctrines were heresy to the Puritan church and the state
    • When Williams didn’t stop preaching in 1635, the magistrates decided to ship him to England, where he could be imprisoned or executed for his beliefs
    • John Winthrop warned him, giving him time to sneak away to Narragansett Bay, which was outside their jurisdiction
    • Some of his followers joined him, and they established the new colony Rhode Island
    • The colony became a refuge for all dissenters
    • Puritans of Massachusetts referred to it as “the sewer of New England”
  • Anne Hutchinson and the Equality of Believers
    • Protestantism, especially Puritans, insisted on the equality of all true believers before God and the importance of marriage
    • Undermined the negative view of women
    • When they preached that women had rights, they were directly criticizing the Catholic church and everyone’s belief
    • Puritanism gave women respect but also insisted they be subordinate to men
    • Anne Hutchinson, her husband, and their 12 children followed the Reverend John Cotton to Massachusetts Bay
    • Cotton placed emphasis on predestination and Hutchinson didn’t agree
    • Hutchinson also challenged the doctrine of preparation
    • A majority of the colony’s residents became her followers
    • The colony leaders mounted a campaign against her and her allies
    • They moved the election site for governor to a place where her opponent had more support so he won
  • Puritan Indian Policy and the Pequot War