Chapter 15: Chapter Outline
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. The Atlantic slave trade was and is enormously significant. | ||||||
B. The slave trade was only one part of the international trading networks that shaped the world between 1450 and 1750. | ||||||
1. Europeans broke into the Indian Ocean spice trade | ||||||
2. American silver allowed greater European participation in the commerce of East Asia | ||||||
3. fur trapping and trading changed commerce and the natural environment | ||||||
C. Europeans were increasingly prominent in long-distance trade, but other peoples were also important. | ||||||
D. Commerce and empire were the two forces that drove globalization between 1450 and 1750. | ||||||
II. Europeans and Asian Commerce | ||||||
A. Europeans wanted commercial connections with Asia . | ||||||
1. Columbus and Vasco da Gama both sought a route to Asia | ||||||
2. motivation above all was the desire for spices (though other Eastern products were also sought) | ||||||
3. European civilization had recovered from the Black Death | ||||||
4. national monarchies were learning to govern more effectively | ||||||
5. some cities were becoming international trade centers | ||||||
6. the problems of old trade systems from the Indian Ocean network | ||||||
a. Muslims controlled supply | ||||||
b. Venice was chief intermediary for trade with Alexandria ; other states resented it | ||||||
c. desire to find Prester John and enlist his support in the Crusades | ||||||
d. constant trade deficit with Asia | ||||||
B. A Portuguese Empire of Commerce | ||||||
1. Indian Ocean commerce was highly rich and diverse | ||||||
2. Portuguese did not have goods of a quality for effective competition | ||||||
3. Portuguese took to piracy on the sea lanes | ||||||
a. Portuguese ships were more maneuverable, carried cannons | ||||||
b. established fortified bases at key locations ( Mombasa , Hormuz, Goa, Malacca, Macao ) | ||||||
4. Portuguese created a “trading post empire” | ||||||
a. goal was to control commerce, not territories or populations | ||||||
b. operated by force of arms, not economic competition | ||||||
c. at height, controlled about half of the spice trade to Europe | ||||||
5. Portuguese gradually assimilated to Indian Ocean trade patterns | ||||||
a. carried Asian goods to Asian ports | ||||||
b. many Portuguese settled in Asian or African ports | ||||||
c. their trading post empire was in steep decline by 1600 | ||||||
C. Spain and the Philippines | ||||||
1. Spain was the first to challenge Portugal ’s control of Asian trade | ||||||
2. establishment of a Spanish base in the Philippines | ||||||
a. first encountered when Ferdinand Magellan circumnavigated the globe (1519–1521) | ||||||
b. Philippines were organized in small, competitive chiefdoms | ||||||
c. Spaniards established full colonial rule there (takeover occurred 1565–1650) | ||||||
d. the Philippines remained a Spanish colonial territory until 1898, when the United States assumed control | ||||||
3. major missionary campaign made Filipino society the only major Christian outpost in Asia | ||||||
4. Spaniards introduced forced relocation, tribute, taxes, unpaid labor | ||||||
a. large estates for Spanish settlers, religious orders, and Filipino elite | ||||||
b. women’s ritual and healing roles were attacked | ||||||
5. Manila became a major center with a diverse population | ||||||
6. periodic revolts by the Chinese population; Spaniards expelled or massacred them several times | ||||||
D. The East India Companies | ||||||
1. Dutch and English both entered Indian Ocean commerce in the early seventeenth century | ||||||
a. soon displaced the Portuguese | ||||||
b. competed with each other | ||||||
2. ca. 1600: both the Dutch and the English organized private trading companies to handle Indian Ocean trade | ||||||
a. merchants invested, shared the risks | ||||||
b. Dutch and British East India companies were chartered by their respective governments | ||||||
c. had power to make war and govern conquered peoples | ||||||
3. established their own trading post empires | ||||||
a. Dutch empire was focused on Indonesia | ||||||
b. English empire was focused on India | ||||||
c. French company was also established | ||||||
4. Dutch East India Company | ||||||
a. controlled both shipping and production of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace | ||||||
b. seized small spice-producing islands and forced people to sell only to the Dutch | ||||||
c. destroyed the local economy of the Spice Islands ; made the Dutch rich | ||||||
5. British East India Company | ||||||
a. was not as well financed or as commercially sophisticated as the Dutch; couldn’t break into the Spice Islands | ||||||
b. established three major trade settlements in India during the seventeenth century: Bombay , Calcutta , and Madras | ||||||
c. British navy gained control of Arabian Sea and Persian Gulf | ||||||
d. could not compete with the Mughal Empire on land | ||||||
e. negotiated with local rulers for peaceful establishment of trade bases | ||||||
f. Britons traded pepper and other spices, but cotton textiles became more important | ||||||
6. Dutch and English also became involved in “carrying trade” within Asia | ||||||
7. both gradually evolved into typical colonial domination | ||||||
E. Asian Commerce | ||||||
1. European presence was much less significant in Asia than in Americas or Africa | ||||||
2. Europeans were no real military threat to Asia | ||||||
3. the case of Japan | ||||||
a. Portuguese reached Japan in the mid-sixteenth century | ||||||
b. Japan at the time was divided by constant conflict among feudal lords (daimyo) supported by samurai | ||||||
c. at first, Europeans were welcome | ||||||
d. but Japan unified politically under the Tokugawa shogun in the early seventeenth century | ||||||
i. increasingly regarded Europeans as a threat to unity | ||||||
ii. expulsion of missionaries, massive persecution of Christians | ||||||
iii. Japanese were barred from travel abroad | ||||||
iv. Europeans were banned, except the Dutch at a single site | ||||||
e. Japan was closed off from Europe from 1650 to 1850 | ||||||
4. Asian merchants continued to operate, despite European presence | ||||||
a. overland trade within Asia remained in Asian hands | ||||||
b. tens of thousands of Indian merchants lived throughout Central Asia, Persia , and Russia | ||||||
III. Silver and Global Commerce | ||||||
A. The silver trade was even more important than the spice trade in creating a global exchange network. | ||||||
1. enormous silver deposits were discovered in Bolivia and Japan in the mid-sixteenth century | ||||||
2. in the early modern period, Spanish America produced around 85 percent of the world’s silver | ||||||
B. China’s economy was huge and had a growing demand for silver. | ||||||
1. 1570s: the Chinese government consolidated taxes into a single tax to be paid in silver | ||||||
a. value of silver skyrocketed | ||||||
b. foreigners with silver could purchase more Chinese products than before | ||||||
C. Silver was central to world trade. | ||||||
1. “silver drain” to Asia: bulk of the world’s silver supply ended up in China (most of the rest reached other parts of Asia ) | ||||||
2. Spanish silver brought to Europe was used to buy Asian goods | ||||||
3. silver bought African slaves and Asian spices | ||||||
4. the Spanish “piece of eight” was widely used for international exchange | ||||||
5. Potosí , Bolivia , became the largest city in the Americas (population: 160,000) because it was at the world’s largest silver mine | ||||||
a. the city’s wealthy European elite lived in luxury | ||||||
b. Native American miners lived in horrid conditions | ||||||
D. Silver vastly enriched the Spanish monarchy. | ||||||
1. caused inflation, not real economic growth in Spain | ||||||
a. Spanish economy was too rigid | ||||||
b. Spanish aristocrats were against economic enterprise | ||||||
2. Spain lost its dominance when the value of silver fell ca. 1600 | ||||||
E. The Japanese government profited more from silver production than did Spain . | ||||||
1. Tokugawa shoguns used silver revenues to defeat rivals and unify the country | ||||||
2. worked with the merchant class to develop a market-based economy | ||||||
3. heavy investment in agriculture and industry | ||||||
4. averted ecological crisis, limited population growth | ||||||
F. In China , silver further commercialized the country’s economy. | ||||||
1. people needed to sell something to obtain silver to pay their taxes | ||||||
2. economy became more regionally specialized | ||||||
3. deforestation was a growing problem; wasn’t addressed as it was in Japan | ||||||
G. Europeans were essentially middlemen in world trade. | ||||||
1. funneled American silver to Asia | ||||||
2. Asian commodities took market share from European products | ||||||
IV. The “World Hunt”: Fur in Global Commerce | ||||||
A. Europe’s supply of fur-bearing animals was sharply diminished by 1500. | ||||||
B. There was intense competition for the furs of North America . | ||||||
1. French were prominent in St. Lawrence valley, Great Lakes, and along the Mississippi | ||||||
2. British traders moved into Hudson Bay region | ||||||
3. Dutch moved into what is now New York | ||||||
C. North American fur trade | ||||||
1. Europeans usually traded with Indians for furs or skins, rather than hunting or trapping animals themselves | ||||||
2. beaver and other furry animals were driven to near extinction | ||||||
3. by the 1760s, hunters in the southeastern British colonies took around 500,000 deer every year | ||||||
4. trade was profitable for the Indians | ||||||
a. received many goods of real value | ||||||
b. Huron chiefs enhanced their authority with control of European goods | ||||||
c. but Indians fell prey to European diseases | ||||||
d. fur trade generated much higher levels of inter-Indian warfare | ||||||
5. Native Americans became dependent on European trade goods. | ||||||
a. iron tools and cooking pots | ||||||
b. gunpowder weapons | ||||||
c. European textiles | ||||||
d. as a result, many traditional crafts were lost | ||||||
e. many animal species were depleted through overhunting | ||||||
f. alcohol’s deeply destructive effect on Indian societies | ||||||
D. Russian fur trade | ||||||
1. profits of fur trade were the chief incentive for Russian expansion | ||||||
2. had a similar toll on native Siberians as it had on Indians | ||||||
a. dependence on Russian goods | ||||||
b. depletion of fur-bearing animal populations | ||||||
3. Russians didn’t have competition, so they forced Siberians to provide furs instead of negotiating commercial agreements | ||||||
4. private Russian hunters and trappers competed directly with Siberians | ||||||
V. Commerce in People: The Atlantic Slave Trade | ||||||
A. | Between 1500 and 1866, the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 12.5 million people from Africa and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas . | |||||
1. around 1.8 million died during the transatlantic crossing | ||||||
2. millions more died in the process of capture and transport to the African coast | ||||||
3. vast human tragedy | ||||||
4. African slave trade transformed the societies of all participants | ||||||
a. the African diaspora created racially mixed societies in the Americas | ||||||
b. slave trade and slavery enriched many | ||||||
c. slavery became a metaphor for many types of social oppression | ||||||
B. The Slave Trade in Context | ||||||
1. most human societies have had slaves | ||||||
2. Africans had practiced slavery and sold slaves for centuries | ||||||
a. trans-Saharan trade took slaves to the Mediterranean world | ||||||
b. East African slave trade | ||||||
3. slavery took many forms, depending on the region and time period | ||||||
a. slaves were often assimilated into their owners’ households | ||||||
b. children of slaves were sometimes free, sometimes slaves | ||||||
c. Islamic world preferred female slaves; Atlantic slave trade favored males | ||||||
d. not all slaves had lowly positions (in Islamic world, many slaves had military or political status) | ||||||
e. most premodern slaves worked in households, farms, or shops | ||||||
4. distinctiveness of slavery in the Americas | ||||||
a. the scale and importance of the slave trade in the Americas was enormous | ||||||
b. largely based on plantation agriculture, with slaves denied any rights at all | ||||||
c. slave status was inherited | ||||||
d. little hope of manumission | ||||||
e. widespread slavery in society that valued human freedom and equality—unlike anywhere else except maybe ancient Greece | ||||||
f. slavery was wholly identified with Africa and with “blackness” | ||||||
5. origins of Atlantic slavery lay in the Mediterranean and with sugar production | ||||||
a. sugar production was the first “modern” industry (major capital investment, technology, disciplined workers, mass market) | ||||||
b. the work was very difficult and dangerous—slaves were ideal | ||||||
c. at first, Slavs from the Black Sea region provided most slaves for Mediterranean sugar plantations | ||||||
d. Portuguese found an alternative slave source in West Africa | ||||||
6. Africans became the primary source of slave labor for the Americas | ||||||
a. Slavs weren’t available | ||||||
b. Indians died of European diseases | ||||||
c. Europeans were a bad alternative: Christians from marginal lands couldn’t be enslaved; indentured servants were expensive | ||||||
d. Africans were farmers, had some immunity to diseases, were not Christian, and were readily available | ||||||
e. much debate over how much racism was involved | ||||||
C. The Slave Trade in Practice | ||||||
1. slave trade was driven by European demand | ||||||
2. but Europeans didn’t raid Africa for slaves; they traded freely with African merchants and elites | ||||||
a. from capture to sale on the coast, trade was in African hands | ||||||
b. Africans received trade goods in return, often bought with American silver | ||||||
3. destabilization of African societies | ||||||
a. many smaller societies were completely disrupted by slave raids from their neighbors | ||||||
b. even larger states were affected (e.g., kingdom of Kongo ) | ||||||
c. some African slave traders were themselves enslaved by unscrupulous Europeans | ||||||
4. increasing pace of Atlantic slave trade | ||||||
a. during the sixteenth century, annual slave exports from Africa averaged under 3,000 annually | ||||||
b. in the seventeenth century, average of 10,000 slaves per year taken to the Americas | ||||||
5. Who was enslaved? | ||||||
a. people from West Africa (present-day Mauritania to Angola ) | ||||||
b. mostly people from marginal groups (prisoners of war, debtors, criminals) | ||||||
c. Africans generally did not sell their own peoples | ||||||
6. 80 percent of slaves ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean | ||||||
a. 5–6 percent in North America | ||||||
b. the rest in mainland Spanish America or in Europe | ||||||
c. about 15 percent of those enslaved died during the Middle Passage | ||||||
D. Comparing Consequences: The Impact of the Slave Trade in Africa | ||||||
1. created new transregional linkages | ||||||
2. slowed Africa’s growth, while Europe and China expanded in population | ||||||
a. sub-Saharan Africa had about 18 percent of the world’s population in 1600 but only 6 percent in 1900 | ||||||
b. slave trade generated economic stagnation and political disruption in Africa | ||||||
i. those who profited in the trade did not invest in production | ||||||
ii. | did not generate breakthroughs in agriculture or industry—since Europeans didn’t increase demand for Africa ’s products, just for its people | |||||
3. political effects | ||||||
a. some kingdoms (Kongo, Oyo) gradually disintegrated | ||||||
b. some took advantage of the slave trade | ||||||
c. Benin was one of the most developed states of the coastal hinterland | ||||||
i. state dates back to about the eleventh century c.e. | ||||||
ii. monarch (oba) controlled trade | ||||||
iii. largely avoided involvement in the slave trade | ||||||
iv. diversified its exports | ||||||
d. Aja-speaking peoples to the west of Benin | ||||||
i. slave trade disrupted several small, weak states | ||||||
ii. inland kingdom of Dahomey rose in the early eighteenth century | ||||||
iii. was a highly authoritarian state | ||||||
iv. turned to deep involvement in the slave trade, but under royal control | ||||||
v. annual slave raids by the army | ||||||
vi. government depended on slave trade for revenue | ||||||
VI. Reflections: Economic Globalization—Then and Now | ||||||
A. A study of global commerce in the early modern period shows both how different from and how similar we are to people of the past. | ||||||
B. Globalization isn’t just a twentieth-century phenomenon. | ||||||
1. but early modern globalization was much slower and on a smaller scale | ||||||
2. early modern globalization was not yet centered on Western civilizations | ||||||
3. early modern economic life was mostly preindustrial | ||||||
4. early modern globalization was tied to empire building and slavery |