Download Chapter 21 The Age of Global Interaction: Expansion and

Chapter 21 The Age of Global Interaction: Expansion and Intersection of
Eighteenth-Century Empires
I. Asian Imperialism in Arrest or Decline: China, Persia, and the Ottomans
A. China
1. Chinese colonization spread into Tibet, Central Asia, and along its borders
with Mongolia, Russia, Burma, and Vietnam. It also moved into lands in
Manchuria and Taiwan. With this expansion came the spread of Chinese
culture and goods. The government subsidized and coordinated this movement
of peoples.
2. The Chinese also continued to move overseas into places like the Spanishruled Philippines and the Dutch East Indies. These were independent
businessmen, sailors, and others who sought new opportunities outside China.
3. In Thailand, Chinese immigrants gained high political offices in the kingdom.
At times this created jealousy, suspicion, and even moves against these
powerful foreigners.
4. China’s growing tax revenues in the face of large tax cuts reflected the
country’s economic dynamism. However, territorial expansion stopped and
endemic corruption began to take its toll by the end of the century.
B. The Asian Context
1. Large states throughout Southeast Asia stopped expanding and broke up in
Burma, Thailand, and Vietnam.
C. Persia and the Ottoman Empire
1. The Safavid Empire fell in 1722, but unsuccessfully attempted a recovery.
Raids by Afghan warlords helped destabilize the Mughal Empire and even
sacked Delhi in 1739. No strong power took their place and warlords held
various areas in their place.
2. Ottoman expansion ended in the late seventeenth century and the empire
began to stagnate. Government efficiency declined and first Christian areas
and then even Muslim-majority areas began to be lost.
As a result, trade revenues fell and the balance of power began to shift to its neighbors with
territorial losses to Russia on the Black Sea and in the Caucasus. By the end of the century, all of
North Africa and Egypt, much of the Balkans, and Arabia were lost.
II. Imperial Reversal in India: Mughal Eclipse and British Rise to Power
A. Mughal India
1. Relentless expansion and a more fiercely Islamic ideology under the Emperor
Aurangzeb that alienated Hindus and Sikhs created internal problems. Tax
burdens became greater and privileges granted to the newly conquered elites
angered older parts of the realm.
2. Breakaway states like the Marathas in 1725 began to show that now territories
were up for grabs. In India’s history, reunification tended to come from an
external invader; in this case it would be the British.
B. British East India Company
1. With its seizure of Bengal in 1757 (with the clerk-turned-colonel Robert Clive
in the lead), the company began a series of conquests that increased its riches
and made possible further conquests. By 1782, the company had an army of
115,000 men and either held key territories or had local Hindu and Muslim
princes under its sway.
2. Comparison with the Spanish conquest of the Americas is apt both in the
speed and in the size of the territory taken. Britain was able to push its
European rivals out of India and monopolize the spice and other trades.
3. By the end of the century, the Mughal emperor sought the protection of his
ancestral enemy, the leader of the Marathas, and the ruler of southern India,
Tipu Sultan, attempted to directly oppose the British. By the early nineteenth
century, Tipu was dead and the Marathas had accepted the British as
overlords.
The British East India Company now held a large empire in mainland Asia.
III. The Dutch East Indies
A. East Indies
1. In the 1740s, the Dutch intervened in local disputes and were able to exploit
the situation to gain a territorial empire in the East Indies that was mainly
ruled through local dynasts.
2. This landward turn stretched the manpower-poor Dutch thin and gradually
exhausted their resources. Only the turning of much of Java to coffee
production brought profits.
IV. The Black Atlantic: Africa, the Americas, and the Slave Trade
A. The Slave Trade
1. Millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic to North America,
the Caribbean, and Brazil. Conditions of the passage for these slaves were
terrible, and many thousands died on the way.
2. Although modern economists understand that forced labor is inefficient, it was
common in the eighteenth century in various forms and had been employed
for centuries. Slave-grown commodities, such as tobacco and sugar, on
plantations made profits.
3. Life for slaves was brutal and enforced by whipping and even mutilation and
death. Some of the European colonial powers (France, Spain, and Portugal)
did have laws guaranteeing rights of slaves to marriage, the inseparability of
children from parents before puberty, and against sexual abuse by owners.
4. Relations between blacks and whites were tightly controlled with the only
permissible relationship being between white men and black women. In
British America, interracial marriage was outlawed. Always of key concern
was the maintenance of white dominance.
5. The most effective form of slave resistance was the refusal to have children.
Harsh living conditions often made childbirth unlikely and infant mortality
was high, but it is also likely that many women also chose not to bring
children into their own world of bondage.
B. Africa
1. In part this made the continued importation of slaves from Africa all the more
profitable, and slavery became a bigger and bigger part of the Atlantic trade.
Various European slave stations multiplied along the western coast of Africa
as a result.
2. There was little pressure by European colonists, but many of the African slave
states wore themselves down through continual fighting. The expansion of the
Omani Empire drove the Portuguese out of East Africa by 1729, but it was the
Omani who benefited most.
3. On the cape, Dutch expansion was an exception to this and put pressure on the
Xhosa peoples there as the Boer farmers pushed inland from the coast. In
1795, the British seized the Cape Colony for themselves.
Within Africa itself, wars in Ethiopia and western Africa created siege mentalities and displaced
native dynasties. In the case of Usuman da Fodio, however, a pastoral empire was created across
the Sahel that stretched from Bornu to Niger that would last until 1906.
V. Land Empires Of The New World
The introduction of the horse and livestock to the Americas made the South American pampa
and North American prairie desirable places to build and live in.
A. The Araucanos and the Sioux
1. The Araucanos built an empire of native peoples in the pampa region of
modern Argentina on pastoralism and mining that could muster thousands of
warriors and even threaten Buenos Aires.
2. In a similar fashion, the Sioux adopted the values of an imperial society and
pushed other native peoples out as they created a nomadic empire based on
hunting and the domination of the plains.
B. Portugal in Brazil
1. Having withdrawn from much of East Africa and Asia, Brazil became
Portugal’s crown jewel with the discovery in the 1860s of gold and diamonds,
which replaced sugar as its chief cash crop. The wealth was poured into
luxury items and high art.
C. Spanish America
1. The Spanish gradually turned from force to a more collaborative approach to
empire in the Americas that proved successful. The Spanish convinced Native
Americans to settle new towns on their frontiers in Argentina and Chile and in
the present-day southwestern United States.
2. In California, the system of 21 missions along the coast from San Diego to
San Francisco opened new lands to the cultivation of a wide variety of new
crops: wheat, grapes, citrus, olives, and almonds. The Native American
populations were hard hit by the ensuing spread of disease.
3. As the Spanish turned from conquest to conciliation, they found native
peoples on their frontier, such as the Mapuche in South America, willing to
allow Spanish missions and roads on their lands to promote trade.
D. Creole Mentalities
1. European colonists had come for a variety of reasons, but now were drifting
further away from their home countries as they developed internal economies
and followed new loyalties.
2. Some European scholars depicted the Americas as a nasty and brutish place,
but this sparked a strong reaction from the New World Creoles who saw
things the other way around.
In the British colonies, most thought of themselves as English, until 1776, but war for
independence brought changing attitudes. More and more, people began to see themselves as
different, not merely as transplanted Europeans but as a new race.
E. Toward Independence
1. At the outset of the century, the British Americas had only around 250,000
persons, but by the end of the century ten times that number had come seeking
new opportunities for wealth and religious freedom. Much of this
unprecedented growth had taken place at the end of the century in the
aftermath of the American Revolution.
2. Immigrants increasingly moved westward to take advantage of the new lands
available. In New England, wealth came from the sea and from trade, which in
turn led to conflict with Britain, especially over monopolies and taxes.
3. From the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763, Britain had taken a more
centralizing and interventionist view of the American colonies through
taxation and stronger control from London.
4. British rule increasingly threatened colonial interests as slave holders—
because of the rising tide of abolitionist sentiment in England—and because
England wanted to preserve Native American buffer states on the western
frontier.
5. Similar things were happening between Spain and its colonies: a monarchy
reasserting its bureaucratic control over its possessions, reorganizing imperial
defenses, eliminating traditional colonial customs, and maximizing its
revenues. Revolutionary movements grew in response.
6. With France removed from North America, colonists were now free to
challenge the mother country. England’s attempts at taxation and
militarization fueled resentment and led to violence. The American
Revolution was, in a sense, a civil war between Englishmen, but it was also an
American civil war with 20% of the white population, blacks, and Native
Americans mostly on the side of Britain. It also became international with the
intervention of France (1778) and Spain (1779) on the side of the colonists.
7. Rebellions in the 1770s and 1780s multiplied in the Spanish colonies and the
Creole mentality was strong. With the horrors of the French Revolution next
door, Spain was in no mood for reform. Only in Haiti was there a successful
revolution (1791-1802). Canada remained loyal. Brazil developed into a
monarchy ruled by a member of the Portuguese royal house. In the Spanish
Empire, independence would come at the price of long wars with Spanish
armies, wars that ruined the economies of the colonies.
There were essential differences in the wars for independence in North and South America. The
wars in Spanish colonies started later and lasted longer, with terror and massacre becoming a
routine feature. Loyalists mobilized slave armies against South American revolutionaries, as
well.
VI. In Perspective: The Rims of Empire
Not only in the Americas were the rights of empires questioned. Many in Europe’s elite
applauded them. As the colonies became independent, trade and immigration increased.
Exploration of the largely unknown interior of North and South America accelerated. Europe
now had a virtual monopoly on empire building, as the Asian empires declined.