AP World History: Unit 3, 1450 to c. 1750

Land-Based Empires (c. 1450 to c. 1750)

  • Early Modern Period
  • Land Based Empires
    • Portuguese - Catholic
    • Spanish - Catholic
    • Russian - Eastern Orthodox Christian
    • English - Protestant
    • French - Catholic
    • Dutch - Protestant
  • Religion & National Identity
  • Key Topics:
    • Renaissance (1300-1430)
    • Reformation (1517-1648)
    • Scientific Revolution (1650-1750)
    • Enlightenment (1750-1850)
    • Industrial Revolution (1820-1880)

Main Events (1450-1750)

  • 1453 - Ottoman Conquest of Constantinople, Rise of Ottoman Empire
  • 1471 - Completion of the Sun Temple in Cuzco, Rise of the Inca Empire
  • 1517 - Martin Luther publishes 95 Theses, Protestant Reformation begins
  • 1526 - Guru Nanak founded the first Sikh Community
  • 1600 - Tokugawa Shogun unifies Japan
  • 1644 - Qing Dynasty is founded
  • 1682 - Palace of Versailles is completed in France
  • 1707 - Death of Emperor Aurangzeb, weakening of the Mughal Empire

Major Trends

  • New military weapons make wars more decisive.
  • Increase in the size and numbers of Empires
    • Administrative systems → more resources to expand
    • Collapse of Nomadic Empires → room for landed empires to expand
    • Continued spread of major religions associated with empires
  • Utilization of religious ideas to solidify rule
    • Rulers continue to use religious ideas to justify their rule
    • Rulers waged conflicts against other rulers of different religions

What is a Land-Based Empire

  • Refers to empires which existed during the period 1450-1750.
  • Focused on land-based expansion or administration.
  • Reasons for land-based focus:
    • Long-term conflict with other land-based powers.
    • Lack of state sponsorship of naval activity.
    • Rule by settled nomads uninterested in overseas expansion.
  • Exceptions: Ottoman, Ming, and French Empires sponsored naval expeditions, and the Tokugawa Shogunate launched a seaborne invasion of Korea.

Elements of an Empire

  • Administration
  • Expansion
  • Operation
  • Colonies

Monarchies

  • Absolute monarchy
    • James I of England
    • All power is on the king/queen
    • Religion is fabricated by the state
  • Divine Right Monarchy
    • Louis XIV of France
  • Constitutional Monarchy
    • Charles II of England
  • All are forms of hereditary Monarchy
    • Based on the premise called primogeniture that states that the first born male of a family will inherit the throne.

Main Empires Asia

  • Ming and Qing in China
  • Tokugawa in Japan
  • Mughal in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh
  • Safavid Empire in modern Iran and Iraq
  • Ottoman Empire (some parts of the Ottoman Empire were in Europe) in modern Turkey, Egypt, Syria and Jordan

Main Empires Other Locations

  • Africa
    • Songhai Empire
  • Europe
    • French Empire
    • Russian Empire
  • Americas
    • Inca Empire
    • Aztec Empire (also known as the Mexica, for the dominant cultural group within the empire)

Portuguese Empire

  • 1488: Bartholomeu Dias (1450–1500) rounded the Cape of Good Hope.
  • 1498: Vasco da Gama (1460–1524) rounded the cape, stopped at ports controlled by Muslim merchants in East Africa, crossed the Arabian Sea, and reached Calicut, India.
  • Da Gama sought "Christians and spices."
  • Returned to Europe with ginger and cinnamon, earning investors a profit of several thousand percent, despite losing two ships.

Religions & Power

  • Conversions
  • Soft Power
  • Hard Power
    • Hard Power is Battles, Expansion, and Tariffs
    • Soft Power is Diplomacy, Religious Influence, Cultural Influence, and Hegemony

Questions to Consider

  • Why did Europeans begin voyages of discovery and expansion at the end of the fifteenth century?
  • How did Portugal and Spain acquire their overseas empires, and how did their empires differ?
  • How did the arrival of the Dutch, British, and French affect Africa, Southeast Asia, India, China, and Japan?
  • How did European expansion affect both the conquered and the conquerors?
  • What was mercantilism, and what was its relationship to colonial empires?
    • A form of economic nationalism that sought to increase the prosperity and power of a nation through restrictive trade practices.
  • What was the relationship between European overseas expansion and political, economic, and social developments in Europe?
  • 1450 = Religion
  • 1750 = Economics

Key Explorers

  • Ferdinand Magellan (1480-1521)
    • Portuguese explorer who organized the Spanish expedition to the East Indies from 1519 to 1522, resulting in the first circumnavigation of the Earth.
    • Heliocentrism proved that the earth was round
    • Selected by King Charles I of Spain to search for a westward route to the Maluku Islands (the "Spice Islands").
    • October 1520, he found it, passing through a narrow waterway (later named the Strait of Magellan) and emerging into an unknown ocean that he called the Pacific Sea.
  • Prince Henry the Navigator (1394 - 1460)
    • Inadvertently creates African Slave Trade in 14th Century.
    • Patron of Portuguese Empire
    • Sponsored exploration along the west coast of Africa.
    • Under his patronage, Portuguese crews founded the country's first colonies and visited regions previously unknown to Europeans.
    • Henry was a founder of the Atlantic slave trade. He sponsored Nuno Tristao’s exploration of the African coast, and Antao Goncalves’s hunting expedition there in 1441 founded the Atlantic slave trade.

Portuguese and Spanish Empire

  • Bartholomeu Dias sails around the tip of Africa - 1488
  • The voyages of Columbus - 1492 - 1502
  • Treaty of Tordesillas - 1494
  • Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut in India 1498
  • Portuguese seize Malacca - 1511
  • Landing of Portuguese ships in Southern China - 1514
  • Magellan’s voyage around the world - 1519-1522
  • Spanish Conquest of Mexico - 1519-1522
  • Pizzaro’s conquest of the Inca - 1530-1535

The Spanish Empire

  • Conquistadors were motivated by glory, greed, and religious crusading zeal.
  • Groups were financed and outfitted privately, not by the government.
  • Superior weapons, organizational skills, and determination brought success.
  • Benefited from rivalries among native peoples and decimation by European diseases.

Spanish Conquistadors

  • Conquistador comes from Spanish and means "he who conquers.”
  • Took up arms to conquer, subjugate, and convert native populations in the New World.
  • Came from all over Europe, typically from families ranging from the poor to the lower nobility. The very high-born rarely needed to set off in search of adventure.
  • Conquistadors had to have some money to purchase the tools of their trade, such as weapons, armor, and horses.

Strength and Efficiency

  • Spanish soldiers were among the finest in the world.
  • Spanish veterans from dozens of Europeans battlefields flocked to the New World, bringing their weapons, experience, and tactics with them.
  • Their deadly combination of greed, religious zeal, ruthlessness, and superior weaponry proved too much for native armies to handle, especially when combined with lethal European diseases, such as smallpox, which decimated native ranks

Motivation for Conquest

  • Goods: Foods, spices, materials, labor, gold and silver (bullion)
  • War: Spanish had been fighting muslims in 700 year war, needed more gold and silver to continue domination of Europe
  • Catholicism: The Spaniards were committed, by Vatican decree, to convert New World indigenous subjects to Catholicism

Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)

  • Italian explorer who worked for the queen of Spain
  • Italy was not a sovereign nation at the time, was independent states
  • To some, he was a great and heroic explorer who discovered the New World; to others, especially in Latin America, he was responsible for beginning a process of invasion that led to the destruction of an entire way of life.

Columbus’s Travels

  • Convinced that the circumference of the earth was less than contemporaries believed and that Asia was larger than people thought, Columbus felt that Asia could be reached by sailing west instead of around Africa.
  • After being rejected by the Portuguese, he persuaded Queen Isabella of Spain to finance his exploratory expedition.
  • With three ships, the Santa María, the Niña, and the Pinta, and a crew of ninety men, Columbus set sail on August 3, 1492.
  • On October 12, he reached the Bahamas and then went on to explore the coastline of Cuba and the northern shores of Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
  • The Europeans referred to the newly discovered territories as the New World, even though they held flourishing civilizations populated by millions of people.
  • Queen Isabella (Castile) and King Ferdinand (Argon)

Things to know about an Empire

  • Empire Name
  • Rulers
  • Colonies
  • Religions
  • Geography
  • Economies
  • Explorers

Example - Spanish Empire

  • Ferdinand and Isabella
  • Mexico, Colombia, Peru
  • Catholic
  • Iberian
  • Mercantilism
  • Columbus, Cortes, Pizzaro

Hernán Cortés

  • Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile in the early 16th century.
  • Destroyed the Aztec civilization between 1519 – 1521. Took over Mexico (with the approval of the Spanish monarchy)
  • He and the Spanish built Mexico City right on top of the Aztec’s capital Tenochtitlan.

Spanish Conquest of Mexico

  • February 1519: The Spanish campaign began
  • August 13, 1521: Spanish declared victorious on when a coalition army of Spanish forces and native Tlaxcalan warriors led by Hernán Cortés and Xicotencatl theYounger captured the emperor Cuauhtémoc and Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec Empire.
  • During the campaign, Cortés was given support from several tributaries and rivals of the Aztecs, including the Totonacs, and the Tlaxcaltecas, Texcocans, and other city-states particularly bordering Lake Texcoco.

Codex and Codices

  • Encrypted documents written in a certain form or language for only certain people to understand
  • Codex = book constructed from a number of sheets of paper, vellum, papyrus, or similar materials w/ handwritten content
  • Through codices, historians “read” daily life of Aztecs. Aztecs - illustrators of many popular codices that we know today
  • Franciscan Friars were asked by the Spanish crown to report on various aspects of daily life in New Spain or Mexico.
  • The Aztecs did not create codices on their own like the Maya did
  • A large portion of the Aztec codices were lost in various circumstances, either at sea or by theft
  • The first codices were drafted less than 10 years after the conquest of Mexico in August 1521 AD

The Colonial Period: Conquest and Competition

  • Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola in December 1492 and christened it La Española.
  • It was in the Caribbean where clerics first protested abuse of the natives.
  • In 1511 Antonio de Montesinos shocked a congregation in Santo Domingo by denouncing maltreatment of the Indian population. Soon afterward Bartolomé de las Casas began his fervent campaign to protect the Indians from adventurers and conquerors.
  • In response to these pleas, the crown ultimately agreed to regulate the treatment of the native population. But to protect the American natives, Las Casas also made a fateful suggestion: that Spain import African slaves as a source of necessary labor.
  • De La Casas says treatment of indigenous as slaves is unethical but stopping that would crash economy
    • Solution was to take africans instead as they were more expendable
    • Introduces colorism and concept that treatment is directly tied to your proximity to whiteness

Indian Slavery in The Americas

  • Thus began the history of forced migration from the western coast of Africa.
  • Of the 10 to 15 million people who were sent to the New World as slaves, approximately 2 million found their way to the Caribbean—where they would work on sugar plantations, alter the racial composition of the area, and, ultimately, help to establish foundations for the Industrial Revolution in nineteenth-century Europe.

Escape

  • In no other region of the Americas was the destruction of the native population as complete as in the Caribbean. Some Indians managed to escape to the mountains, as in Cuba, but in most places geography was an impediment.
  • The islands were so small that there was nowhere to hide. As in New France and New England, the native population fell victim to virtual elimination.
  • Depending on geography it could have been easier or harder to escape
    • Example: Chile was a more difficult place to escape
    • Example: Smaller islands were more difficult to hide from

Plantations

  • Aboard the ships came the way of life, the language, the creeds, and political institutions of contemporary Europe. One of the vessels brought some sugarcane cuttings from the Canary Islands (as others had brought domestic animals and plants), and this altered the course of history.
    • Trade was not just in goods but also in culture
    • Europeans would make sure different tribes were separated from each other so they could not communicate and exchange ideas and culture.
  • Sugarcane grew bountifully, but as prospects for sugar production rose, the need for labor became more apparent.
    • Sugar was in demand, but rather than paying people a wage, they decided to use enslaved people as it was free

European Domination

  • Though the Spanish crown proclaimed authority over the entire Caribbean, it was unable to sustain a commercial and political monopoly.
  • European powers established settlements as well. The English seized Jamaica in 1655.
  • The French took the western half of Hispaniola in 1679.
  • Having occupied northeastern Brazil from 1630 to 1654, the Dutch then moved onto a number of islands off the coast of Venezuela.
  • Little by little, Spain ceded or accepted de facto loss of some of its colonial claims. Caribbean holdings became pawns in European wars, handed back and forth between winners and losers like the proceeds in a poker game.

Pirates

  • 16th-17th century: the Caribbean Sea was an open and inviting target for privateers and buccaneers, who raided coastal settlements and pursued the royal fleets.
  • Spain’s European rivals, especially England, encouraged and sometimes outfitted these pirates; Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and Henry Morgan all became knights of the English realm.
  • Pirates were an official title within certain kingdoms even though they began as freelance agents

Sugar Trade

  • Demand for sugar was steadily increasing in Europe. Soon the cultivation of sugar not only dominated trade from the Caribbean but profoundly affected the agricultural and racial composition of the islands.
  • Another consequence of sugarcane cultivation was the transformation of once-diversified systems of production into single-product economies, emphasizing sugar for export.

Slave Trade

  • The slave trade became highly profitable, and sugar from the New World created a demand for European products that later helped to stimulate the Industrial Revolution
  • The invention of the modern mill, or ingenio, with its use of steam and mechanization, decreased the need for slave labor and ultimately set the stage for the abolition of slavery
  • Spanish and Portuguese empires are very similar. Both practiced the same religion, were located in the same region, and practiced mercantilism. They differed in

The Russian Empire 15th Century Russia

  • 1840 = small Russian state centered on Moscow was emerging from two cent. of Mongol rule
  • That state soon conquered a number of neighboring Russian-speaking cities and incorporated them into its expanding territory.
  • Russians also expanded westward, bringing numerous Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Baltic peoples into the Russian Empire.

Russia's Expansionist Politics under the Tsars

  • That state soon conquered a number of neighboring Russian-speaking cities and incorporated them into its expanding territory.
  • Russians also expanded westward, bringing numerous Poles, Germans, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Baltic peoples into the Russian Empire.

Ivan III (1440-1505)

  • Called Ivan the Great, was grand duke of Moscow from 1462 to 1505.
  • He completed the unification of Russian lands, and his reign marks the beginning of Muscovite Russia.
  • An impressive building program in Moscow took place under Ivan, directed primarily by Italian artists and craftsmen.
  • New buildings were erected in the Kremlin, and the Kremlin walls were strengthened and furnished with towers and gates. In 1475, Ivan III established the first cannon foundry of Russia in Moscow, which started the native cannon production.
  • Ivan died on 27 October 1505, and was succeeded by his son, Vasily III.

The Need for Revival

  • The Mongols, content to leave local administration in indigenous hands, had not reshaped basic Russian culture.
  • The occupation did, however, reduce the vigor of cultural and economic life. Literacy declined and the economy became purely agricultural and dependent on peasant labor.

Patterns of Expansion

  • Territorial expansion focused on central Asia. Russians moved across their region’s vast plains to the Caspian Sea and the Ural Mountains.
  • By the 16th century, they moved into western Siberia. Peasant adventurers (cossacks) were recruited to occupy the new lands.
  • Loyal nobles and bureaucrats received land grants in the territories.
    • Cossacks = peasant adventurers
  • The conquests gave Russia increased agricultural regions and labor sources. Slavery existed into the 18th century. Important trading connections opened with Asian neighbors.
  • The Russian advance, along with that of the Ottomans to the south, eliminated independent central Asia as a source of nomadic invasions. Russia became a multicultural state. The large Muslim population was not forced to assimilate to Russian culture\

Western Contact and Romanov Policy

  • The tsars, mindful of the cultural and economic lag occurring under Mongol rule, also began a policy of carefully managed contacts with the West.
  • Ivan III dispatched diplomatic missions to leading Western states; under Ivan IV, British merchants established trading contacts. Italian artists brought in by the tsars built churches and the Kremlin, creating a distinct style of architecture.

Times of Troubles

  • When Ivan IV died without an heir early in the 17th century, the Time of Troubles commenced. The boyars tried to control government, while Sweden and Poland seized territory. In 1613, the boyars chose a member of the Romanov family, Michael, as tsar.
  • The Time of Troubles ended without placing lasting constraints on the tsar’s power. Michael restored internal order, drove out the foreign invaders, and recommenced imperial expansion.

Expanding Political Power

  • Russia secured part of Ukraine and pushed its southern border to Ottoman lands. Alexis Romanov increased the tsar’s authority by abolishing the assemblies of nobles and restoring state control over the church.
  • His desire to cleanse the church of changes occurring during the Mongol era created tensions because conservative believers resisted changes to their established rituals. The government exiled these “Old Believers” to Siberia or southern Russia.

Peter 1, The Great (1672-1725)

  • Tsar of Russia who reigned jointly with his half-brother Ivan V (1682–96) and alone thereafter (1696–1725) and who in 1721 was proclaimed emperor.
  • He implemented a variety of reforms that included revamping the Russian calendar and alphabet and reducing the Orthodox Church's autonomy.

Russia’s First Westernization (1690-1790)

  • By the end of the 17th century, Russia, although remaining more of an agricultural state than most leading civilizations, was a great land empire.
  • Peter I, the Great, continued past policies but added a new interest in changing the economy and culture through imitation of Western forms. It was the first Westernization effort in history.
  • Peter traveled incognito to the West and gained an interest in science and technology. Many Western artisans returned with him to Russia.

Tsarist Autocracy of Peter the Great

  • Peter was an autocratic ruler; revolts were brutally suppressed.
  • Reforms were initiated through state decrees. Peter increased the power of the state through recruitment of bureaucrats from outside the aristocracy and by forming a Western type military force. A secret police was created to prevent dissent and watch over the bureaucracy.