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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.