World Contacts Before Columbus: Afro-Eurasian Trade World

Chapter 15 Outline
I. World Contacts Before Columbus
1. The Afro-Eurasian trade world linked Europe, Asia and Africa in the 15th century.

A. The Trade World of the Indian Ocean
1. Indian Ocean was the center of Afro-Eurasian trade world.
2. Location made crossroads for China, India, the Middle East, and Europe.
3. Trading volume increased over the centuries as merchants congregated in a series of cosmopolitan port cities, most had some form of autonomous self-government
4. Most developed area of commercial web was in the South China Sea.
5. Malacca became a great commercial entrepot
6. Entrepot is a trading pot to which goods were shipped for storage while awaiting redistribution to other places.
7. Mongol emperors opened the
doors of China to the West, Encouraging Europeans to do business there.
8. After the Mongols fell to the Ming Dynasty in 1368, China entered a period of agricultural and commercial expansion, population growth, and urbanization.
9. China had the most advanced economy in the world until 18th century.
10. After Zheng He and the emperor died, China turned away from external trade. This opened up opportunities for European states to claim a decisive role in world trade.
11. India was another center of trade. Linked the Persian Gulf and the Southeast Asian and East Asian trade networks.

B. The Trading States of Africa
1. 1450 Africa had a few large and developed empires along with hundreds of smaller states
2. Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk Egyptian empire, was a center of Islamic learning and religious authority as well as a hub for Indian Ocean trade goods.
3. Africa contributed gold to world trade.
4. Gold was sold in the ports of North Africa.
5. Nations inland that sat astride the north-south caravan routes grew wealthy from this trade.
6. 13th century Mali emerged as an important player on the overland trade route.
7. The diversion of gold away from the trans-Sahara routes would weaken the inland states of Africa politically and economically.
8. Slavery was practiced in Africa. Arabic and African merchants took West African slaves to the Mediterranean to be sold in European, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern markets.

C. The Ottoman and Persian Empires
1. Middle East served as an intermediary for trade between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Also an important supplier of goods for foreign exchange.
2. Persian Safavids and Turkish Ottomans were rival empires and dominated the region.
3. Persia and Ottomans competed for control over western trade routes to the East.
4. Ottomans captured Europe's largest city, Constantinople and renamed it Istanbul. It became the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
5. 16th century Ottomans controlled the sea trade in many places and their power extended into Europe to Vienna. This frightened the Europeans.
6. With the trade routes to the east in the hands of the Ottomans Europeans needed to find new trade routes.

D. Genoese and Venetian Middlemen
1. In the late Middle Ages, the Italian city-states of Venice and Genoa controlled the European luxury trade with the East.
2. 1304 Venice established formal relations with the sultan of Mamluk Egypt, opening operations in Cairo, the gateway to Asian trade.
3. Venice claimed victory in the spice trade so the Genoese shifted focus from trade to finance and from the Black Sea to the western Mediterranean.
4. When Spanish and Portuguese voyages began to explore the western Atlantic, Genoese merchants, navigators, and financiers provided their skills to the Iberian monarchs, whose own subjects had much less commercial experience.
5. With the growth of Spanish colonies in the New World, Genoese and Venetian merchants would become important players in the Atlantic slave trade.
6. Italian experience in colonial administration, slaving, and international trade and finance served as a model for the Iberian states as they pushed European expansion to new heights.

II. The European Voyages of Discovery
1. A century after the Black Death, Iberian explorers began the overseas voyages the helped create the modern world.

A. Causes of European Expansion
1. 15th century, Europe was experiencing a revival of population an economic activity after the lows of the Black Death. This created demands for luxury goods.
2.
Spices were so desirable because they added flavor and variety to the monotonous European diet, evoked the scent of the Garden of Eden and divinity itself. They were used as flavoring, oils, religious rituals, medicines, and dyes.
3. Religious fervor was important factor for expansion. They had eagerness to spread Christianity.
4. Eagerness for exploration was heightened by a lack of opportunity at home.
5. Competition among European monarchs was an important factor in encouraging the steady stream of expeditions.
6. Men choose to join these miserable crews to escape poverty at home, to continue family trade, to find riches, or find better live.
7. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville was a popular book that was about the travels to the Holy Land, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Middle East, and India.

B. Technology and the Rise of Exploration
1. Technological developments in shipbuilding, weaponry, and navigation advanced European expansion.
2. Galleys-narrow, open boat propelled by slaves or convicts. They couldn't withstand the rough winds and waters.
3. Portuguese developed the caravel, a small, light, three-mast sailing ship. Held more cargo. More maneuverable
vessel.
4. 1410 Arab scholars reintroduced Europeans to Ptolemy's Geography, the work synthesized the classical knowledge of geography and introduced the concepts of longitude and latitude.
5. The astrolabe was used to determine the altitude of the sun and other celestial bodies.

C. The Portuguese Overseas Empire
1. Prince Henry was called “the Navigator” because oh his support for the study of geography and navigation and for the annual expeditions he sponsored.
2. 1420 Portuguese began to settle the Atlantic islands of Madeira and the Azores.
3. Established trading posts on the gold-rich Guinea coast. By 1500 Portugal controlled the flow of African gold to Europe.
4. Lisbon became the entrance port for Asian goods into Europe. Muslim-controlled port city-states had long controlled the rich spice trade of the Indian Ocean and they didn't give it up easily. Portuguese, Calicut, Ormuz, and Goa bombarded the port of Malacca in 1511. This laid the foundation for Portuguese imperialism in the 16th and 17th centuries.

D. The Problem of Christopher Columbus
1. Columbus embodied a long-standing Genoese ambition to circumvent Venetian domination of eastward trade, which was now being claimed by the Portuguese.
2. Portolans- written descriptions of the courses along which ships sailed.
3. He believed that he was a divine agent. God made him the messenger of the new heaven and the new earth.
4. On his first voyage he wanted to find a direct ocean trading route to Asia. Rejected for funding by the Portuguese in 1483 and by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1486, finally won the backing of the Spanish monarchy in 1492.
5. He expected to pass the islands of Japan and then land on the east coast of China.
6. Columbus believed he had found some small islands off the east coast of Japan.
7. He thought he was in the Indies so he called the natives “Indians.”
8. He sailed southwest thinking this course would take him to Japan or the coast of China. He landed in Cuba
9. To the end of his life in 1506, he believed that he had found small island off the coast of Asia.
10. The scale of his discoveries would revolutionize world power, raising issues of trade, settlement, government bureaucracy, and the rights of native and African peoples.

E. Later Explorers
1. Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci realized what Columbus had not. He stated that he new regions found and explored could be called a New World. His letter was the first document to describe America as a continent separate from Asia. This is why it is called America, after him.
2. The Treaty of Tordesillas was an agreement giving Spain everything to the west of an imaginary line drawn down the Atlantic and giving Portugal everything to the east.
3. Treaty worked in Portugal's favor when an expediton landed on the coast of Brazil, claimed as Portuguese territory.
4. In 1519 Charles V of Spain sent Ferdinand Magellan to find a sea route to the spices of the Moluccas of the southeast coast of Asia.
5. He located the treacherous straits that now bear his name. He named the Pacific because of how calm it was. Comes from Latin word for peaceful.
6. Ferdinand's voyage was the first to circumnavigate the globe, took 3 years.
7. John Cabot aimed for Brazil but discovered Newfoundland. Then he explored the New England coast.
8. Martin Frobisher made three voyages in and around the Canadian bay that now bears his name.
9. Jacques Cartier explored the St. Lawrence region of Canada, searching for a passage to the wealth of Asia.

F. Spanish Conquest in the New World
1. In 1519 Hernando Cortes was to launch the conquest of the Mexica Empire.
2. Mexica Empire was ruled by Montezuma II in Tenochtitlan.
3. Cortes landed on April 21, 1519 on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
4. Cortes decided to cut his ties with Spain because of the wealth of the local people.
5. He quickly forged an alliance with the Tlaxcalas and other subject kingdoms.
6. Cortes took Montezuma hostage and the emperor's influence over his people crumbled.
7. He lead a second assault on Tenochtitlan at the head of an army. The Spanish won mostly because of the effects of smallpox which had weakened and reduced the Mexica population.
8. Inca Empire-vast and sophisticated Peruvian empire centered at the capital city of Cuzco that was at its peak from 1438 to 1532.
9. Incas were isolated from other cultures. They created a civilization that rivaled the Europeans in population and complexity. They built an extensive network of roads. The imperial government taxed, fed, and protected its subjects.
10. Inca Empire was weakened by disease and warfare and the empire had been embroiled in a civil war over succession.
11. Francisco Pizarro landed on the northern coast of Peru the day Atahualpa won control of the empire.
12. Atahualpa's plan was to lure the Spaniards into a trap, seize their horses and ablest men for his army, and execute the rest. Instead the Spaniards ambushed and captured him.

G. Early French and English Settlement in the New World
1. Spanish and Portuguese dominated settlement in the New World.
2. The colonies originated as bases for harassing Spanish shipping.
3. On the coast of New England, radical Protestants seeking to escape Anglican repression in England founded the small and struggling outpost of Plymouth (1620), followed by Massachusetts (1630), which grew into a prosperous settlement.
4. As the English crown grew more interested in colonial expansion, it made efforts to acquire the territory between New England in the north and Virginia in the south, which would allow the English to unify their holdings and overcome French and Dutch competition on the North American mainland.
5. Samuel de Champlain founded the first permanent French settlement at Quebec in 1608.
6. 1682 LaSalle descended the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, opening the way for French occupation of Louisiana.
7. French ambitions of the mainland and in the Caribbean sparked a century-long competition with the English that culminated in the Seven Years' War.
8. European involvement in the Americas led to profound transformation of pre-existing indigenous societies and the rise of a transatlantic slave trade, as well as to accelerated global trade and cultural exchange.

III. The Impact of Conquest
1. Violence and disease wrought devastating losses, while surviving peoples encountered new political, social, and economic organizations imposed by Europeans.
2. Columbian Exchange brought infectious disease to the Americas but gave new crops to the old World. A. Colonial Administration
1. Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro had claimed the lands they had “discovered” for the Spanish crow
2. The Crown divided its New World territories into 4 viceroyalties (administrative divisions) Within each territory, the viceroy, or imperial governor, exercised broad military and civil authority as the direct representative of Spain.
3.
Viceroy presided over the audiencia, a board of twelve to fifteen judges that served as his advisory council and the highest judicial body.
4. Charles III introduced the system of intendants to the New World territories. The royal officials possessed broad military , administrative and financial authority within their intendancies and were responsible no to the viceroy but to the monarchy in Madrid.
5. Corregidores held judicial and military powers.

B. Impact of European Settlement on the Lives of Indigenous Peoples
1. The lives of the Americans were transformed by the arrival of Europeans.
2. Haciendas were vast estates in temperate grazing areas.
3. The Spaniards imported livestock for ranching on these haciendas.
4. Spanish established the encomienda system, where the Spanish crown granted the conquerors the right to forcibly employ groups of Indians; a disquised form of slavery.
5. The inhabitants of the New World had low resistance to disease and the infant morality rates was high and people were very malnourished.
6. Las Casas and other missionaries pressured Charles V to abolish the worst abuses of the encomienda system in
1531.
7. King Ferdinand of Spain noticed that the Indians seemed to be very frail and that one black could do the work of four Indians.

C. Life in the Colonies
1. Geographical location, religion, indigenous cultures and practices, patterns of European settlement, and the cultural attitudes and official policies of the European nations helped shape life in European colonies.
2. The first explorers formed unions with native women, through coercion or choice, and relied on them as translators and guides and to form alliances with indigenous powers.
3. English cultural attitudes drew strict boundaries between civilized and savage, which prevented English men from forming unions with indigenous women.
4. Mixing of indigenous people with Europeans and Africans created whole new populations and ethnicities and complex self-identities.
5. Mestizo described people of mixed Native American and European descent.

D. The Columbian Exchange
1. Columbian Exchange was the exchange of animals, plants, and diseases between the Old and the New Worlds.
2. Columbus introduced horses, cattle, sheep, dogs, pigs, chickens, and goats. The horses allowed the Spanish conquerors and natives to travel faster and farther.
3. The world after Columbus was unified by disease and by trade and colonization.

IV. Europe and the World After Columbus
1. A truly global economy emerged in the 16 and 17th centuries. It forged new links among far-flung people, cultures and societies. A. Sugar and Slavery
1. 1453 the Ottoman capture of Constantinople halted the flow of white slaves from eastern Mediterranean. Cut off from its traditional sources of slaves, Mediterranean Europe then turned to sub-Saharan Africa.
2. The first ship returned to Lisbon with a cargo of enslaved Africans.
3. When Genoese and oher Italians colonized the Canary Islands and the Portuguese settled on the Madeira Islands, sugar plantations came to the Atlantic.
4. The growing season of sugar is constant. So, they forced the enslaved Africans to provide all the labor of growing and harvesting the sugar.
5. Sugar gave New World slavery its shape.
6. Charles I authorized traders to bring African slaves to New World colonies.
7. The Dutch West India Company transported thousands of Africans to Brazil and the Caribbean to work on sugar plantations. B. Spanish Silver and Its Economic Effects
1. 1545 the Spanish discovered a great source of silver at Potosi (Bolivia.)
2. To protect the silver from French and English pirates, armed convoys transported it to Spain each year.
3. 16th century Spain had a steady population increase. Demanded more food and goods. The Spanish economy was suffering and couldn't meet the new demands. Led to inflation.
4. Silver didn't cause inflation. Did make situation worse though.
5. Spanish inflation was transmitted to the rest of Europe.
6. China was main buyer of worlds silver.

C. The Birth of the Global Economy
1. Europeans' discovery of the Americas and their exploration of the Pacific allowed the entire world to be linked for the first time by seaborne trade.
2. Portuguese were the first worldwide traders.
3. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese controlled the sea route to India, transporting horses from Mesopotamia and copper from Arabia to India; hawks and peacocks from India to Chinese and Japanese markets; and Asian spices, purchased with textiles produced in India and with gold and ivory from East Africa, back to Portugal.
4. The Spanish Empire in the New World was a land empire, but across the Pacific the Spaniards built a seaborne empire centered at Manila in the Philippines.
5. Manila served as the trans-pacific bridge between Spanish America and China. Spanish traders used silver from American mines to purchase Chinese silk for European markets.
6. The Dutch emerged by the end of the 17th century as the most powerful worldwide seaborne trading power. It was built on spices.
7. The voyage of spices led to the establishment of the Dutch East India Company.
8. The Dutch also successfully interceded in the transatlantic slave trade, bringing much of the west coast of Africa under Dutch control and becoming one of the principal operators of the slave trade starting in the 1640s.

V. Changing Attitudes and Beliefs
1. Essays of Michel de Montaigne epitomized a new spirit of skepticism and cultural relativism.
2. The plays of William Shakespeare reflected the efforts of one great writer to come to terms with the cultural complexity of his day.

A. New Ideas about Race
1. As Europeans turned to Africa for new sources of slaves, they drew on and developed ideas about Africans’ primitiveness and barbarity to defend slavery and even argue that enslavement benefited Africans by bringing the light of Christianity to heathen peoples.
2. Europeans said that the black skin was a sign by God that he wanted them to serve as slaves.
3. After 1700 the emergence of new methods of observing and describing nature led to the use of science to define “race” to mean biologically distinct groups of people, whose physical differences produced differences in culture, character, and intelligence.

B. Michel de Montaigne and Cultural Curiosity
1. The discovery of peoples in the New World who had radically different ways of life, decades of religious fanaticism that had caused civil anarchy and war, and doubts on the part of both Catholics and Protestants that any one faith contained absolute truth all produced ideas of skepticism and cultural relativism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
2. Skepticism is a school of thought founded on doubt that total certainty or definitive knowledge is ever attainable.
3. Cultural relativism suggests that one culture is not necessarily superior to another, just different.
4. Montaigne developed a new literary genre, the essay.
5. Montaigne's essays consisted of short personal reflections drawing on his extensive reading in ancient texts, his experience as a government official, and his own moral judgment.
6. Montaigne created an era of doubt.

C. William Shakespeare and His Influence
1. The terms Elizabethan and Jacobean are used to designate the English music, poetry, prose, and drama of this period.
2. Shakespeare grew into a Renaissance man with a deep appreciation of classical culture, individualism, and humanism.
3. His work reveals the impact of the new discoveries and contacts of his day.
4. Modern scholars often note the echoes between Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest—with a plot marked by an interest in race and race relations—and the realities of imperial conquest and settlement in Shakespeare’s day.
5. Shakespeare borrows words from Montaigne's essay “Of Cannibals,” suggesting that he may have intended to criticize, rather than endorse, racial intolerance.
6. His work shows us one of the finest minds of the age grasping to come to terms with the racial and religious complexities around him.