Download History 2752: The Historiography of European Imperialism, 1500-1750

History 2752: The Historiography of European Imperialism, 1500-1750
1. The significance of European imperialism
*Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, vol. 1, chapters 1 (Population) and 5 (Spread of Technology);
vol. 2, pp. 81-137, vol. 3, chapter 5.
*Emmanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System (New York, 1974), pp. 52-129.
*Patrick O'Brien, "European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery," Economic History
Review 35 (1982):1-18.
Fernand Braudel. Capitalism and Material Life, 1400-1800. Trans. M. Kochan. (?: 1973), chapters 1, 5.
E. Wallerstein, "European Economic Development: A Comment on O'Brien," Economic History Review 36
(1983):580-83; see O'Brien's response in this issue, pp. 584-85.
2. The technological imperative
*Geoffrey Parker, "Europe and the Wider World, 1500-1700: The Military Balance." In The Political Economy
of the Merchant Empires. Edited by James Tracey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 16195.
*Stephen Morillo, "Guns and Government: A Comparative Study of Europe and Japan." Journal of World
History 6.1 (1995):75-106.
*Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe's Conquest of the New World, 1492-1640. Cambridge
University Press, 1995. Chap. 4: "A New Sky and New Stars: Arabic and Hebrew Science, Portuguese
Seamanship, and The Discovery of America" [E121 S44 1995]
Frank Lestringant, Mapping the Renaissance World: The Geographical Imagination in the Age of Discovery.
trans. David Fausett. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994.
David B. Ralston, Importing the European Army: The Introduction of European Military Techniques and
Institutions in the Extra-European World, 1600-1914. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990. [UA 830
R34 1990]
3. Ideologies of imperial expansion
*Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. University of Chicago Press,
1991.
J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New. xx.
Valerie I. J. Flint, The Imaginative Landscape of Christopher Columbus. Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1992. [E112 F57 1992]
Roger B. Schlesinger, In The Wake of Columbus: The Impact of the New World on Europe, 1492-1650.
Harlan Davidson, Inc. 1996. [CB 401 S34 1996]
4. Europe in the Americas: Successful Imperialism
*Barbara L. Solow, "Slavery and Colonization," in Slavery and the Rise of the Atlantic System, edited by
Barbara L. Solow, pp. 21-42. Cambridge University Press, 1991. [HT855 S58 1991]
*Franklin Knight, "Slavery and Lagging Capitalism in the Spanish and Portuguese American Empires, 14921713," ibid, pp. 62-74.
*P. C. Emmer, "The Dutch and the Making of the Second Atlantic System," ibid. pp. 75-96.
Judith Zeitlin, "Ranchers and Indians on the Southern Isthmus of Tehuantepec: economic change and
indigenous survival in colonial Mexico," Hispanic American Historical Review 69.1 (1989):24-60. Zeitlin
argues that the success of the Spanish in the Americas was very dependent on indigenous social structures
and presents contrasting cases.
E. Charles Adams, "Passive Resistance: Hopi Responses to Spanish Contact and Conquest." In Columbian
Consequences, vol 1: Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands, West, edited
by David H. Thomas, pp. 77-91. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.
5. Europe in Asia: Contact and Competition
*Victor Lieberman, "Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350c.1830," Modern Asian Studies 27.3 (1993):475-572. A painstaking panoramic survey of the secondary
literature, which attempts to synthesize the monographic research to make generalizations which contrast
trends in "mainland Southeast Asia" (present-day Burma, Thailand, Vietnam) with the archipelago, where
European influence became dominant and decisive during the seventeenth century. Despite its length, it is
probably a useful assigned reading for those with no background: comparisons made by Lieberman
concerning the socio-political developments in Western Europe, Russia, and Japan with Southeast Asia will
be a good starting point for class discussion.
*John E. Wills, Jr. "Maritime Asia, 1500-1800: The Interactive Emergence of European Domination,"
American Historical Review 98.1 (1993):83-105. A survey which begins with twenty-four major conference
volumes and monographs, but footnotes many many more works. Wills is useful in setting out the broad
parameters of the recent scholarship, which emphasizes the degree to which European states were not able
to dominate and take over Asia before ca. 1750. The new themes stress "interactive" nature of the AsianEuropean encounter in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and early eighteenth centuries; the importance of Muslim
and Chinese mercantile networks and trade. Useful guide to the field, but it does not duplicate Lieberman.
J. Kathirithamby-Wells, "Forces of Regional and State Integration in the Western Archipelago, c. 15001700," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 18.1 (1987):24-44. "Although. . . [European] trade. . . laid the
area open to external intrusions which ultimately forced the region into a single matrix, colonial authority was
imposed largely upon a pre-existing inter-regional economic infrastructure." A survey of the pre-European
trade patterns, the Portuguese role, and the response of the native kingdoms.
M. N. Pearson, Before Colonialism: Theories on Asian-European Relations, 1500-1750. Oxford University
Press, 1988.
Frank Perlin, "Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia," Past and Present 98 (1983):30-95.
Critique of secondary literature which posited "de-industrialization" in South Asia in sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Expansion of international trade stimulates South Asian economic development; the
author argues that there were parallels to European development. Long article; Washbrook is more concise.
Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680. 2 vols. New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1988, 1993. [DS 526.4 R46 1988, DS 526.4 S68 1993]
D. A. Washbrook, "Progress and Problems: South Asian Economic and Social History c. 1720-1860,"
Modern Asian Studies 22.1 (1988):57-96. Washbrook surveys the secondary literature on Indian economic
history. A revisionist, he cites the research that contradicts the image of India as a victim of British
imperialism, talks about India's connections with the rest of South Asia and world trade, . Good article.
6. Europe in Africa: Accommodation
*John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680. Cambridge University
Press, 1992. Chapters 1-4.
John Thornton, "The Art of War in Angola, 1575-1680," Comparative Studies in Society and History 32
(1988):360-78. Europeans, facing a hostile environment and short of troops, were forced to adapt their ways
of warfare to the African environment.
General History of Africa, vol. 5: Africa from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century. Edited by B. A. Ogot.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 [DT 20 G45 1981 v. 5]. Resource book.
Ivana Elbl, "The Horse in Fifteenth-Century Senegambia," The International Journal of African Historical
Studies 24 (1991):85-110. It was not the European threat, but internal politics within Senegambia, that led its
elites to seek to import more horses for warfare.
Robin Law, "Dahomey and the Slave Trade: Reflections on the Historiography of the Rise of Dahomey,"
Journal of African History 27 (1986):237-67. Dahomey was one of the "winners" in Africa, whose rise as a
military power was closely tied to its active participation in the slave trade.
John Thornton, "The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750,"
Journal of African History 25.2 (1984):147-67. Kongo was receptive to outside goods, people and mores but
its Catholic conversion was highly idiosyncratic. Catholicism became an instrument of integrative power and
an element of cultural resistance.
Achim von Oppen, "Cassava, `The Lazy Man's Food'? Indigenous Agricultural Innovation and Dietary
Change in Northwestern Zambia (ca. 1650-1970)," Food and Foodways 5.1 (1991):15-38.
7. Long-term trends in exchange relations: Commoditification
*William S. Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy Ca. 1530-1650," Past and Present
95 (1982):68-90. The impact of silver bullion from the Americas on China: Atwell posits that the early
seventeenth-century depression contributed to the downfall of the Ming dynasty in 1644.
*Dennis O. Flynn, "Comparing the Tokugawa Shogunate with Hapsburg Spain: Two Silver-Based Empires in
a Global Setting," in The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade 1350-1750,
edited by James D. Tracy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. New World silver did not promote
capitalism in northwest Europe; Spanish super-profits were instead used to attack Spain's perceived
enemies. Contrast the situation in Europe with Japan, where the shogun gained control of the major silver
producing regions and silver profits were used to help Japan escape from the Chinese tributary system.
Ward Barrett, "World Bullion Flows, 1450-1800." In The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-Distance Trade in
the Early Modern World, edited by James D. Tracy, pp. 224-54. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1990. Barrett surveys the secondary literature on bullion (silver and gold) flows throughout the world, tries to
pick "best estimates" and presents the material in tables. Includes Japanese silver production as well as
output in Europe, Americas, even West Africa. No interpretation.
John Day, "The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century," Past and Present 79 (1980):3-54.
Kazui Tashiro, "Exports of Japan's Silver to China via Korea and Changes in the Tokugawa Monetary
System During the 17th and 18th Centuries." In Precious Metals, Coinage and the Changes of Monetary
Structures in Latin America, Europe and Asia. Leuven University Press, 1989. This is a summation of the
silver exports to China that went through Tsushima and thence to Korea, being carried to Peking by Korean
tributary missions. The author provides quantitative estimates of the volume of this flow and a description of
the institutional context.
8. Commoditization: Sugar
*Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power. Viking Penguin, 1986.
G. J. Knaap, "Coffee for Cash: The Dutch East India Company and the Expansion of Coffee Cultivation in
Java, Ambon and Ceylon 1700-1730," in Trading Companies in Asia, 1600-1830. edited by J. Van Goor.
Utrecht: HES Uitgevers, 1986. pp. 33-49. How the Dutch East India Company encouraged the cultivation of
coffee in Batavia, Ambon and Ceylon as a counter to rising prices of Yemen coffee; coffee became a cash
crop in Java, grown initially on a voluntary basis by peasant farmers. Later, however, prices were repressed
and output was restricted in order to preserve price levels and there was a switch to compulsory cultivation
of this crop.
Londa Sciebinger, Plants and Empire. Harvard University Press, 2005.
9. Exchange Relations II: Global diasporas
*James C. Boyajian, Portuguese Trade in Asia Under the Habsburg 1580-1640. Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993. pp. 1-52; 133-43; 166-78.
Leonard Bluss‚, "Chinese Commercial Networks and State Formation in Southeast Asia, 1600-1800," in
Southeast Asia in the Modern Era: Trade, Power and Belief, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1993).
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds. Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious
Imagination. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990.
10. Exchange Relations III: Race Relations
*Ivana Elbl, "Cross-Cultural Trade and Diplomacy - Portuguese Relations with West Africa, 1441-1521,"
Journal of World History 3.2 (1992):xx.
*James H. Sweet, "The Iberian Roots of American Racist Thought," The William and Mary Quarterly 3rd ser.
54.1 (1997):143-66.
*Mason Hoadley, "Javanese, Peranakan, and Chinese Elites in Cirebon: Changing Ethnic Boundaries,"
Journal of Asian Studies 47.3 (1988):503-17. A study of the shifting ethnic boundaries in early eighteenthcentury west Java, where the Dutch succeeded in hindering the assimilation of Chinese-origin persons into
the Javanese elite through regulations negotiated with the Javanese princes.
*Armando Guevara-Gil and Frank Salomon, "A `Personal Visit': Colonial Political Ritual and the Making of
the Indians in the Andes," Colonial Latin American Review 3.1-2 (1994):3-36.
*Ronald P. Toby, "The `Indianness' of Iberia and Changing Japanese Iconographies of Other," in Implicit
Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters Between Europeans and Other
Peoples in the Early Modern Era, pp. 323-51. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Ashin Das Gupta, "Indian Merchants and the Western Indian Ocean: The Early Seventeenth Century,"
Modern Asian Studies 19.3 (1985):481-99. Traces the Indo-Portuguese mercantile network.
Stuart B. Schwartz, ed. Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting, and Reflecting on the Encounters
Between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994.
Irene Silverblath, "Becoming Indian in the Central Andes of Seventeenth Century Peru," in After Colonialism:
Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, ed. Gyan Prakash. Princeton University Press, 1995.
Edgar Wickberg, "The Chinese Mestizo in Philippine History," Journal of Southeast Asian History 5.1
(1964):62-100.
11. Exchange Relations IV: Religions and Cosmologies
*Anthony Reid, "Islamization and Christianization in Southeast Asia: The Critical Phase, 1550-1650," in
Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era: Trade, Power, and Belief. edited by Anthony Reid. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1993. pp. 151-79.
*James Lockhart, "Some Nahua Concepts in Post Conquest Guise," History of European Ideas 6
(1985):465-82.
*Patricia Seed, "Failing to Marvel: Atahualpa's Encounter with the Word," Latin American Research Review
26.1 (1991):7-32.
Michelle Buchanan, "Savages, Noble and Otherwise, and the French Enlightenment," Studies in EighteenthCentury Culture 15 (1986):97-110.
Anthony Pagden, "The `Defence of Civilization' in Eighteenth-Century Social Theory," History of the Human
Sciences 1.1 (1988):33-45.
M. C. Ricklefs, "Six Centuries of Islamization in Java," in Conversion to Islam, edited by Nehemia Levitzion
(New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), pp. 100-28. A summary of the gradual spread of Islam from the
fourteenth through eighteenth centuries; the Islamic revival in the late nineteenth century; and twentiethcentury reformist movements in Islam.
Francis Robinson, "Technology and Religious Change: Islam and the Impact of Print," Modern Asian Studies
27.1 (1993):229-51. Islam did not adopt printing until the nineteenth century. Why did it take so long? Author
goes on to consider the impact of print on Islamic movement in South Asia. Important for the question of
relationship of technology and religions.
John Thornton, "On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas," The Americas 44.1
(1988):261-78.
12. Exchange Relations V: Disease and Environmental Changes
*Philip Curtin, "The environment beyond Europe and the European theory of empire," Journal of World
History 1.2 (1990):131-50.
*-----. Death By Migration: Europe's Encounter with the Tropical World in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge
University Press, 1989. Chap. 1, pp. 1-39, Chap. 5, pp. 104-29.
*Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of
Environmentalism, 1600-1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Introduction and Chapter
One.
*Kenneth F. Kiple and Krienhild C. Ornelas, "After the Encounter: Disease and Demographics in the Lesser
Antilles," in The Lesser Antilles in the Age of European Expansion ed. Robert L. Paquette and Stanley L.
Engerman, pp. 50-67. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996.
Philip Curtin, "Epidemiology and the Slave Trade," Political Science Quarterly 83 (1968):190-216.
-----. "The end of the `white man's grave'? Nineteenth-century mortality in West Africa," Journal of
Interdisciplinary History 21.1 (1990):63-89.
K. G. Davies, "The Living and the Dead: White Mortality in West Africa, 1684-1732," in S. L. Engerman and
E. D. Genovese, Race and Slavery in the Western Hemisphere: Quantitative Studies. Princeton University
Press, 1975, pp. 83-98.
Harvey M. Feinberg, "New Data on European Mortality in Africa: The Dutch on the Gold Coast, 1719-1760,"
Journal of African History¯ 15 (1974):363-67.
Eric Jones, "The History of Natural Resource Exploitation in the Western World," Research in Economic
History Supplement 6 (1991):235-52.
13. 1992: Changing interpretations of Columbus
*Ida Altman and Reginald D. Butler, "The Contact of Cultures: Perspectives on the Qincentenary," American
Historical Review 90.2 (1994):478-503.
*Bernard Lewis, Conflict of Cultures. ??
Kerwin Lee Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America,
1890-1990. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.
14. European imperialism and world history
*S. L. Engerman, "The Atlantic Economy of the Eighteenth Century: Some Speculations on Economic
Development in Britain, America, Africa, and Elsewhere," The Journal of European Economic History 24.1
(1995):145-75.
A.J.R. Russell-Wood, "The Expansion of Europe Revisited: The European Impact on World History and
Global Interaction, 1450-1800," Itinerario 18.1 (1994):89-94.
Marshall Sahlins, "Cosmologies of Capitalism: The Trans-Pacific Sector of `The World system'." In
Culture/Power/History, edited by Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1994, pp. 412-55.
Ernst Schulin, "European Expansion in Early Modern Times: Changing Views on Colonial History," History of
European Ideas 6.3 (1985):253-66.