The following annotated chapter outline will help you review the major topics covered in this chapter.
Instructions: Review the outline to recall events and their relationships as presented in the chapter. Return to skim any sections that seem unfamiliar.
I. Opening Vignette | |||||
A. In 2005, China celebrated the 600th anniversary of the initial launching of the country’s great maritime expeditions in 1405. | |||||
1. Admiral Zheng He had commanded a fleet of over 300 ships carrying 27,000 people that sailed as far as the East African coast | |||||
2. Why is Columbus so much more remembered? | |||||
B. The fifteenth century was a major turning point in world history. | |||||
1. Zheng He’s voyages did not have world-historical consequences | |||||
2. Columbus’s voyages did | |||||
C. | This chapter’s purpose is to review the human story up to the sixteenth century and to establish a baseline against which to measure the transformations of the period 1500–2000. | ||||
II. The Shapes of Human Communities | |||||
A. | In 1500, the world still had all types of societies, from bands of gatherers and hunters to empires, but the balance between them was different than it had been in 500. | ||||
B. Paleolithic Persistence | |||||
1. | gathering and hunting societies (Paleolithic peoples) still existed throughout all of Australia , much of Siberia, the arctic coastlands, and parts of Africa and the Americas | ||||
2. they had changed over time, interacted with their neighbors | |||||
3. example of Australian gatherers and hunters | |||||
a. some 250 separate groups | |||||
b. | had assimilated outside technologies and ideas, e.g., outrigger canoes, fish hooks, netting techniques, artistic styles, rituals, mythological concepts | ||||
c. had not adopted agriculture | |||||
d. manipulated their environment through “firestick farming” | |||||
e. exchanged goods over hundreds of miles | |||||
f. developed sophisticated sculpture and rock painting | |||||
4. northwest coast of North America developed very differently | |||||
a. abundant environment allowed development of a complex gathering and hunting culture | |||||
b. had permanent villages, economic specialization, hierarchies, chiefdoms, food storage | |||||
5. elsewhere, farming had advanced and absorbed Paleolithic lands | |||||
C. Agricultural Village Societies | |||||
1. predominated in much of North America, in Africa south of the equator, in parts of the Amazon River basin and Southeast Asia | |||||
2. their societies mostly avoided oppressive authority, class inequalities, and seclusion of women typical of other civilizations | |||||
3. example of forested region in present-day southern Nigeria , where three different political patterns developed | |||||
a. | Yoruba people created city-states, each ruled by a king (oba), many of whom were women and who performed both religious and political functions | ||||
b. kingdom of Benin: centralized territorial state ruled by a warrior king named Ewuare | |||||
c. Igbo peoples: dense population and trade, but purposely rejected kingship and state building | |||||
d. Yoruba, Benin , and Igbo peoples traded among themselves and beyond | |||||
e. the region shared common artistic traditions | |||||
f. all shifted from matrilineal to patrilineal system | |||||
4. in what is now central New York State, agricultural village societies underwent substantial change in the centuries before 1500 | |||||
a. Iroquois speakers had become fully agricultural (maize and beans) by around 1300 | |||||
b. population growth, emergence of distinct peoples | |||||
c. rise of warfare as key to male prestige (perhaps since women did the farming, so males were no longer needed for getting food) | |||||
d. warfare triggered the creation of the Iroquois League of Five Nations, based on agreement known as the Great Law of Peace | |||||
e. some European colonists appreciated Iroquois values of social equality and personal freedom (even for women) | |||||
D. Herding Peoples | |||||
1. Turkic warrior Timur (Tamerlane) tried to restore the Mongol Empire ca. 1400 | |||||
a. his army devastated Russia , Persia , and India | |||||
b. Timur died in 1405, while preparing invasion of China | |||||
c. his successors kept control of the area between Persia and Afghanistan for a century | |||||
d. Timur’s conquest was the last great military success of Central Asian nomads | |||||
2. in the following centuries, the steppe nomads’ homeland was swallowed up in expanding Russian and Chinese empires | |||||
3. African pastoralists remained independent from established empires for several centuries longer (until late nineteenth century) | |||||
4. example of the Fulbe ( West Africa’s largest pastoral society) | |||||
a. gradual eastward migration after 1000 c.e. | |||||
b. usually lived in small communities among agriculturalists | |||||
c. gradually adopted Islam | |||||
d. some moved to towns and became noted religious leaders | |||||
e. series of jihads in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries created new states ruled by the Fulbe | |||||
III. Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: Comparing China and Europe | |||||
A. By the fifteenth century c.e., a majority of the world’s population lived within a major civilization. | |||||
B. Ming Dynasty China | |||||
1. China had been badly disrupted by Mongol rule and the plague | |||||
2. recovery under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) | |||||
a. effort to eliminate all signs of foreign rule | |||||
b. promotion of Confucian learning | |||||
c. Emperor Yongle (r. 1402–1422) sponsored an 11,000-volume Encyclopedia summarizing all the wisdom of the past | |||||
3. reestablished the civil service examination system | |||||
4. created a highly centralized government | |||||
a. great power was given to court eunuchs | |||||
b. state restored land to cultivation, constructed waterworks, planted perhaps a billion trees | |||||
c. was perhaps the best-governed and most prosperous civilization of the fifteenth century | |||||
5. maritime ventures | |||||
a. Chinese sailors and traders had become important in the South China Sea and in Southeast Asian ports in the eleventh century | |||||
b. Emperor Yongle commissioned a massive fleet; launched in 1405 under command of Zheng He | |||||
c. | fleet sought to enroll distant peoples and states in Chinese tribute system but did not seek to conquer new territories or establish settlements | ||||
d. Chinese government abruptly stopped the voyages in 1433 | |||||
e. | Chinese merchants and craftsmen continued to settle and trade in Japan , Philippines , Taiwan , and Southeast Asia, but without government support | ||||
C. European Comparisons: State Building and Cultural Renewal | |||||
1. a similar process of demographic recovery, consolidation, cultural flowering, and European expansion took place in Western Europe | |||||
2. European population began to rise again ca. 1450 | |||||
3. state building, but fragmented, with many independent and competitive states | |||||
4. the Renaissance: reclamation of classical Greek traditions | |||||
a. began in the commercial cities of Italy ca. 1350–1500 | |||||
b. “returning to the sources” as a cultural standard to imitate | |||||
c. turn to greater naturalism in art (e.g., Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo) | |||||
d. “humanist” scholars explored secular topics in addition to religious matters (e.g., Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince) | |||||
D. European Comparisons: Maritime Voyaging | |||||
1. Portuguese voyages of discovery began in 1415 | |||||
2. 1492: Columbus reached the Americas | |||||
3. 1497–1498: Vasco da Gama sailed around Africa to India | |||||
4. European voyages were very small compared to Chinese ones | |||||
5. unlike the Chinese voyages, Europeans were seeking wealth, converts, allies in Crusades against Islam | |||||
6. Europeans used violence to carve out empires | |||||
7. Chinese voyages ended; European ones kept escalating | |||||
a. no overarching political authority in Europe to end the voyages | |||||
b. rivalry between states encouraged more exploration | |||||
c. much of European elite interested in overseas expansion | |||||
d. China had everything it needed; Europeans wanted the greater riches of the East | |||||
e. China ’s food production could expand internally; European system expanded by acquiring new lands | |||||
IV. Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Islamic World | |||||
A. The long-fragmented Islamic world crystallized into four major states or empires. | |||||
B. In the Islamic Heartland: The Ottoman and Safavid Empires | |||||
1. Ottoman Empire lasted from fourteenth to early twentieth century | |||||
a. huge territory: Anatolia, eastern Europe, much of Middle East, North African coast, lands around Black Sea | |||||
b. sultans claimed the title “caliph” and the legacy of the Abbasids | |||||
c. effort to bring new unity to the Islamic world | |||||
2. Ottoman aggression toward Christian lands | |||||
a. fall of Constantinople in 1453 | |||||
b. 1529 siege of Vienna | |||||
c. Europeans feared Turkish expansion | |||||
3. Safavid Empire emerged in Persia from a Sufi religious order | |||||
a. empire was established shortly after 1500 | |||||
b. imposed Shia Islam as the official religion of the state | |||||
4. Sunni Ottoman Empire and Shia Safavid Empire fought periodically between 1534 and 1639 | |||||
C. On the Frontiers of Islam: The Songhay and Mughal Empires | |||||
1. Songhay Empire rose in West Africa in the second half of the fifteenth century | |||||
a. Islam was limited largely to urban elites | |||||
b. Sonni Ali (r. 1465–1492) followed Muslim practices, but was also regarded as a magician with an invisibility charm | |||||
c. Songhay Empire was a major center of Islamic learning/trade | |||||
2. Mughal Empire in India was created by Turkic group that invaded India in 1526 | |||||
a. over the sixteenth century, Mughals gained control of most of India | |||||
b. effort to create a partnership between Hindus and Muslims | |||||
c. Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagara continued to flourish in the south | |||||
D. The age of these four great Muslim empires is sometimes called a “second flowering of Islam.” | |||||
1. new age of energy, prosperity, and cultural brilliance | |||||
2. spread of Islam to new areas, such as Southeast Asia | |||||
3. rise of Malacca as a sign of the times—became a major Muslim port city in the fifteenth century | |||||
a. Malaccan Islam blended with Hindu/Buddhist traditions | |||||
b. was a center for Islamic learning | |||||
V. Civilizations of the Fifteenth Century: The Americas | |||||
A. | Both the Aztec and the Inca empires were established by once-marginal peoples who took over and absorbed older cultures, and both were destroyed by Spanish conquistadores and their diseases. | ||||
B. The Aztec Empire | |||||
1. The Mexica were a seminomadic people who migrated southward from northern Mexico | |||||
a. established themselves on an island in Lake Texcoco by 1325 | |||||
b. built themselves up and established capital city of Tenochtitlán | |||||
2. Triple Alliance (1428): Mexica and two other city-states united | |||||
a. launched a program of military conquest | |||||
b. conquered much of Mesoamerica in under a century | |||||
c. Aztec rulers claimed descent from earlier peoples | |||||
3. Aztec Empire was a loosely structured, unstable conquest state | |||||
a. population of 5–6 million | |||||
b. conquered peoples paid regular tribute | |||||
c. Tenochtitlán had 150,000–200,000 people | |||||
d. local and long-distance trade on a vast scale | |||||
4. trade included slaves, many intended for sacrifice | |||||
a. human sacrifice much more prominent in Aztec Empire than in earlier Mesoamerica | |||||
b. Tlacaelel is credited with crystallizing ideology of state giving human sacrifice such importance | |||||
5. created an important philosophical/poetic tradition focused on the fragility of human life | |||||
C. The Inca Empire | |||||
1. Quechua speakers established the Inca Empire along the length of the Andes | |||||
a. empire was 2,500 miles long | |||||
b. around 10 million subjects | |||||
2. Inca Empire was more bureaucratic, centralized than the Aztecs | |||||
a. emperor was an absolute ruler regarded as divine | |||||
b. state theoretically owned all land and resources | |||||
c. around 80 provinces, each with an Inca governor | |||||
d. subjects grouped into hierarchical units of people (10, 50, 100, 500, etc.), at least in the central regions | |||||
e. inspectors checked up on provincial officials | |||||
f. population data was recorded on quipus (knotted cords) | |||||
g. massive resettlement program moved much of the population | |||||
3. Incas attempted cultural integration | |||||
a. leaders of conquered peoples had to learn Quechua | |||||
b. sons were taken to Cuzco (the capital) for acculturation | |||||
c. subjects had to acknowledge major Inca deities, but then could carry on their own religious traditions | |||||
4. almost everyone had to perform labor service (mita) for the Inca state | |||||
a. work on state farms, herding, mining, military service, state construction | |||||
b. also production of goods for the state | |||||
c. state provided elaborate feasts in return | |||||
5. the state played a large role in distribution of goods | |||||
D. Both the Inca and Aztec civilizations practiced “gender parallelism.” | |||||
1. women and men operated in “separate but equivalent spheres” | |||||
2. parallel religious cults for women and men | |||||
3. parallel hierarchies of female and male political officials (especially among Incas) | |||||
4. women’s household tasks were not regarded as inferior | |||||
5. still, men had top positions in political and religious life | |||||
6. glorification of the military probably undermined gender parallelism | |||||
7. Inca ruler and his wife governed jointly, were descended from sun and moon, respectively | |||||
VI. Webs of Connection | |||||
A. Large-scale political systems brought together culturally different people. | |||||
B. Religion both united and divided far-flung peoples. | |||||
1. common religious culture of Christendom, but divided into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy | |||||
2. Buddhism linked people in China , Korea , Tibet , Japan , and parts of Southeast Asia | |||||
3. Islam was particularly good at bringing together its people | |||||
a. the annual hajj | |||||
b. yet conflict within the umma persisted | |||||
C. Patterns of trade were very evident in the fifteenth century | |||||
1. trade was going on almost everywhere | |||||
2. the balance of Afro-Eurasian trade was changing | |||||
a. the Silk Road network was contracting | |||||
b. ocean trade in the west Atlantic/Indian Ocean picked up | |||||
VII. A Preview of Coming Attractions: Looking Ahead to the Modern Era (1500–2010) | |||||
A. No fifteenth-century connections were truly global. | |||||
1. those came only with European expansion in the sixteenth century | |||||
2. 1500–2010: inextricable linking of the worlds of Afro-Eurasia, the Americas , and Pacific Oceania | |||||
B. “Modern” human society emerged first in Europe in the nineteenth century and then throughout the world. | |||||
1. core feature: industrialization | |||||
2. accompanied by massive population increase | |||||
3. societies favored holders of urban wealth over rural landowning elites | |||||
4. states became more powerful and intrusive | |||||
5. opening up of public and political life to more of the population | |||||
6. self-conscious departure from tradition | |||||
7. the modernity revolution was as important as the Agricultural Revolution | |||||
a. introduced new divisions and conflicts, new economic inequalities | |||||
b. destruction of older patterns of human life | |||||
C. The prominence of European peoples on the global stage grew over the last 500 years. | |||||
1. after 1500, Western Europe became the most innovative, prosperous, powerful, imitated part of the world | |||||
2. spread of European languages and Christian religion throughout the world | |||||
3. initiated the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution | |||||
4. origin of modern -isms: liberalism, nationalism, feminism, socialism | |||||
5. rest of the world was confronted by powerful, intrusive Europeans | |||||
VIII. Reflections: What If? Chance and Contingency in World History | |||||
A. Might history have been shaped, at least at certain points, by coincidence, chance, or the decisions of a few? | |||||
1. What if Ogodei Khan hadn’t died in 1241 and the Mongols had continued their advance into Europe? | |||||
2. What if China had continued maritime exploration after 1433? | |||||
3. What if the Ottomans had taken Vienna in 1529? | |||||
B. It’s worthwhile to sometimes take a “what if” approach to history. |