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Ch.15 Trend The trend in the century between 1450 and 1550 was that it was a major turning point in world history.It was the beginning of an age to which they have given various names: the “Vasco da Gama epoch,” the “Columbian era,” the “age of Magellan,” or simply the “modern period.” During those years European explorers opened new long-distance trade routes across theworld’s three major oceans, for the first time establishinregular contact among all the continents. By 1550 those who followed them had broadened trading contacts withsubSaharan Africa, gained mastery of the rich traderoutes of the Indian Ocean, and conquered a vast land empire in the Americas. As dramatic and momentous as these events were,they were not completely unprecedented. The riches ofthe Indian Ocean trade that brought a gleam to the eye ofmany Europeans had been developed over many centuries by the trading peoples who inhabited the surrounding lands. European conquests of the Americaswere no more rapid or brutal than the earlier Mongolconquests of Eurasia. Even the crossing of the Pacific hadbeen done before, though in stages.What gave this maritime revolution unprecedentedimportance had more to do with what happened after1550 than with what happened earlier. Europeans’ overseas empires would endure longer than the Mongols’and would continue to expand for three-and-ahalf centuries after 1550. Unlike the Chinese, the Europeans didnot turn their backs on the world after an initial burst of exploration. Not content with dominance in the IndianOcean trade, Europeans opened an Atlantic maritimenetwork that grew to rival the Indian Ocean network inthe wealth of its trade. They also pioneered regular trade across the Pacific. The maritime expansion begun in theperiod from 1450 to 1550 marked the beginning of a newage of growing global interaction. Ch. 16 Trend The word revolution is described as a great trend in the many different changes taking place in Europe between 1500 and 1750. The expansion of trade hasbeen called a commercial revolution, the reform of statespending a financial revolution, and the changes inweapons and warfare a military revolution. We have alsoencountered a scientific revolution and the religious revolution of the Reformation.These important changes in government, economy, society, and thought were parts of a dynamic processthat began in the later Middle Ages and led to even bigger industrial and political revolutions before the eighteenth century was over. Yet the years from 1500 to 1750were not simply—perhaps not even primarily— an age ofprogress for Europe. For many, the ferocious competition of European armies, merchants, and ideas was awrenching experience. The growth of powerful states extracted a terrible price in death, destruction, and misery.The Reformation brought greater individual choice inreligion but widespread religious persecution as well. Individual women rose or fell with their social class, butfew gained equality with men. The expanding economybenefited members of the emerging merchant elite andtheir political allies, but most Europeans became worseoff as prices rose faster than wages. New scientific andenlightened ideas ignited new controversies long beforethey yielded any tangible benefits. The historical significance of this period of European history is clearer when viewed in a global context.What stands out are the powerful and efficient Europeanarmies, economies, and governments, which larger states elsewhere in the world feared, envied, and sometimes imitated. From a global perspective, the balance of political and economic power was shifting slowly, but inexorably, in the Europeans’ favor. In 1500 the Ottomansthreatened Europe. By 1750, as the remaining chaptersof Part Five detail, Europeans had brought the world’sseas and a growing part of its land and people undertheir control. No single group of Europeans accomplished this. The Dutch eclipsed the pioneering Portuguese and Spanish; then the English and French bestedthe Dutch. Competition, too, was a factor in Europeansuccess.Other changes in Europe during this period had nogreat overseas significance at the time. The new ideas ofthe Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment were still of minor importance. Ch. 17 Trend Trends in the New World colonial empires of Spain, Portugal,France, and England had many characteristics in common. All subjugated Amerindian peoples and introduced large numbers of enslaved Africans. Within allfour empires forests were cut down, virgin soils wereturned with the plow, and Old World animals and plantswere introduced. Colonists in all four applied the technologies of the Old World to the resources of the New,producing wealth and exploiting the commercial possibilities of the emerging Atlantic market.Each of the New World empires also reflected thedistinctive cultural and institutional heritages of its colonizing power. Mineral wealth allowed Spain to developthe most centralized empire. Political and economicpower was concentrated in the great capital cities ofMexico City and Lima. Portugal and France pursued objectives similar to Spain’s in their colonies. However, neither Brazil’s agricultural economy nor France’s Canadianfur trade produced the financial resources that made possible the centralized control achieved by Spain. Nevertheless, all three of these Catholic powers were able toimpose and enforce significant levels of religious andcultural uniformity, relative to the British.Greater cultural and religious diversity characterized British North America. Colonists were drawn fromthroughout the British Isles and included participants inall of Britain’s numerous religious traditions. They werejoined by German, Swedish, Dutch, and French Protestant immigrants. British colonial government variedsomewhat from colony to colony and was more responsive to local interests. Thus colonists in British NorthAmerica were better able than those in the areas controlled by Spain, Portugal, and France to respond tochanging economic and political circumstances. Mostimportantly, the British colonies attracted many moreEuropean immigrants than did the other New World colonies. Between 1580 and 1760 French colonies received 60,000 immigrants, Brazil 523,000, and the Spanish colonies 678,000. Within a shorter period—between 1600and 1760—the British settlements welcomed 746,000.Population in British North America—free and slave combined—reached an extraordinary 2.5 million by 1775.By the eighteenth century, colonial societies acrossthe Americas had matured as wealth increased, populations grew, and contacts with the rest of the world became more common (see Chapter 18). Colonial eliteswere more confident of their ability to define and defendlocal interests. Colonists in general were increasinglyaware of their unique and distinctive cultural identities and willing to defend American experience and practicein the face of European presumptions of superiority. Moreover, influential groups in all the colonies weredrawn toward the liberating ideas of Europe’s Enlightenment. In the open and less inhibited spaces of the Western Hemisphere, these ideas (as Chapter 21 examines)soon provided a potent intellectual basis for opposingthe continuation of empire. Ch. 18 Trend The trend in the new Atlantic trading system had great importance in and momentous implications for world history. In the first phase of their expansion Europeans hadconquered and colonized the Americas and capturedmajor Indian Ocean trade routes. The development ofthe Atlantic system showed their ability to move beyondthe conquest and capture of existing systems to create amajor new trading system that could transform a regionalmost beyond recognition.The West Indies felt the transforming power of capitalism more profoundly than did any other place outside Europe in this period. The establishment of sugar plantation societies was not just a matter of replacing native vegetation with alien plants and native peoples withEuropeans and Africans. More fundamentally, it madethese once-isolated islands part of a dynamic tradingsystem controlled from Europe. To be sure, the West Indies was not the only place affected. Parts of northernBrazil were touched as deeply by the sugar revolution, and other parts of the Americas were yielding to thepower of European colonization and capitalism.Africa played an essential role in the Atlantic system, importing trade goods and exporting slaves to the Americas. Africa, however, was less dominated by the Atlanticsystem than were Europe’s American colonies. Africansremained in control of their continent and interactedculturally and politically with the Islamic world morethan with the Atlantic.Historians have seen the Atlantic system as a modelof the kind of highly interactive economy that becameglobal in later centuries. For that reason the Atlantic system was a milestone in a much larger historical process,but not a monument to be admired. Its transformations were destructive as well as creative, producing victims aswell as victors. Yet one cannot ignore that the system’sawesome power came from its ability to create wealth.As the next chapter describes, southern Asia and the Indian Ocean basin were also beginning to feel the effectsof Europeans’ rising power. Ch.19 Trend A trend was that Asians and Africans ruled by the Ottoman and Mughal sultans and the Safavid shahs did not perceive that a major shift in world economic and politicalalignments was under way by the late seventeenth century. The rulers focused their efforts on conquering moreand more land, sometimes at the expense of ChristianEurope and Hindu India, but also at one another’s expense, since the Sunni-Shi’ite division justified Iranianattacks on its neighbors and vice versa.To be sure, more and more trade was being carriedin European vessels, particularly after the advent ofjoint-stock companies in 1600; and Europeans had enclaves in a handful of port cities and islands. But the ageold tradition of Asia was that imperial wealth came fromcontrol of broad expanses of agricultural land. Except for state monopolies, such as Iranian silk, governments did not greatly concern themselves with what farmer’s did.They relied mostly on land taxes, usually indirectly collected via holders of land grants or tax farmers, ratherthan on customs duties or control of markets to fill thegovernment coffers.With ever-increasing military expenditures, thesetaxes fell short of the rulers’ needs. Few people realized,however, that this problem was basic to the entire economic system rather than a temporary revenue shortfall.Imperial courtiers pursued their luxurious ways; poetryand the arts continued to flourish; and the quality of manufacturing and craft production remained generally high.Eighteenth-century European observers, luxuriating in the prosperity gained from their ever-increasing controlof the Indian Ocean, marveled no less at the riches and industry of these eastern lands than at the fundamentalweakness of their political and military systems. Ch.20 Trend As the world has grown more interconnected, it trended to become increasingly difficult to sort out the degree to which major historical changes were due to forces within asociety or to outside forces acting upon it. The histories ofJapan, China, and Russia between 1500 and 1800 revealhow internal forces operated separately from externalones and the degree to which they were intertwined.The formation of the Tokugawa in Japan is a clear example of a society changing from within. The decisionsof government to suppress the Christianity that someJapanese had adopted from European missionaries andto severely curtail commercial and intellectual contactswith distant Europe illustrate how readily even the smallest of the three states could control its dealings with outsiders. China’s history illustrates more complex interplay of internal and external forces. In the world’s most populous state, the already faltering Ming dynasty was greatlyweakened by Hideyoshi’s Japanese invasion through Korea, overthrown by Li Zicheng’s rebels from within, andreplaced by the conquering armies of the Manchu fromacross the northern frontier. The Qing’s settlement of theAmur frontier with Russia illustrates how diplomacy andcompromise could serve mutual interests. Finally, theChinese added new European customers to already extensive internal and external markets and developedboth positive and problematic cultural relations with theJesuits and some other Europeans. From a Chinese perspective, European contacts could not be useful but wereneither essential nor of great importance.The internal and external factors in Russia’s history arethe hardest to sort out. Especially problematic is assessing the rising importance of the West in light of Russia’s growing trade in that direction, Russia’s emergence as a European Great Power, and the stated policies of both Peter theGreat and Catherine the Great to westernize their people.Clearly, Western influences were very important, but justas clearly their importance can easily be exaggerated. Theimpetus for Muscovy’s expansion came out of its own history and domination by the Mongols. Trade with westernEurope was not the center of the Russian economy. Tsar Peter was primarily interested in imitating Western technology, not in the full range of Western culture. The Russianchurch was quite hostile to the Catholics and Protestantsto their west, whom it regarded as heretics. Peter the Greatbanned the Jesuits from Russia, considering them a subversive and backward influence.Looking at each country separately and from within,the influence of western Europeans seems clearly inferiorto a host of internal and regional influences. Yet when onelooks at what happened in Japan, China, and Russia in thedecades after 1800, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that their relationship with the West was a common factorthat, when combined with unresolved internal problems, would have a tremendous impact on the course of theirhistory. Qianlong might tell Macartney and the Britishthat he had no use for expanded contacts, but the sentiment was not mutual. As the next part details, after the increasingly powerful Western societies got over dealingwith their own internal problems, they would be back,and they would be impossible to dismiss or resist. Ch.21 Trend This era of revolution was a large trend, the product of a long period of costly warfare among the imperial nations of Europe. Using taxes and institutionsinherited from the past, England and France found it increasingly difficult to fund distant wars in the Americasor in Asia. Royal governments attempting to impose newtaxes met with angry resistance. The spread of literacyand the greater availability of books helped create a European culture more open to reform or the revolutionary change of existing institutions. The ideas of Locke andRousseau guided critics of monarchy toward a new political culture of elections and representative institutions.Each new development served as example and provocation for new revolutionary acts. French officers who tookpart in the American Revolution helped ignite the FrenchRevolution. Black freemen from Haiti traveled to Franceto seek their rights and returned to spread revolutionarypassions. Each revolution had its own character. The revolutions in France and Haiti proved to be more violentand destructive than the American Revolution. Revolutionaries in France and Haiti, facing a more strongly entrenched and more powerful opposition and greatersocial inequalities, responded with greater violence.The conservative retrenchment that followed thedefeat of Napoleon succeeded in the short term. Monarchy, multinational empires, and the established churchretained their hold on the loyalty of millions of Europeans and could count on the support of many of Europe’s wealthiest and most powerful individuals. Butliberalism and nationalism continued to stir revolutionary sentiment. The contest between adherents of the oldorder and partisans of change was to continue well intothe nineteenth century. In the end, the nation-state, theEnlightenment legacy of rational inquiry, broadened political participation, and secular intellectual culture prevailed. This outcome was determined in large measureby the old order’s inability to satisfy the new socialclasses that appeared with the emerging industrial economy. The material transformation produced by industrial capitalism could not be contained in the narrowconfines of a hereditary social system, nor could therapid expansion of scientific learning be containedwithin the doctrines of traditional religion.The revolutions of the late eighteenth century beganthe transformation of Western society, but they did notcomplete it. Only a minority gained full political rights.Women did not achieve full political rights until thetwentieth century. Democratic institutions, as in revolutionary France, often failed. Moreover, as Chapter 23discusses, slavery endured in the Americas past the mid-1800s, despite the revolutionary era’s enthusiasm for individual liberty. Ch. 22 Trend The great change we call the Industrial Revolution was a great trend that began in Great Britain, a society that was open to innovation, commercial enterprise, and the crossfertilizationof science, technology, and business. New machines andprocesses in the cotton and iron industries were instrumental in launching the Industrial Revolution, but whatmade industrialization an ongoing phenomenon was anew source of energy, the steam engine.In the period from 1760 to 1851 the new technologies of the Industrial Revolution greatly increased humans’ power over nature. Goods could be manufacturedin vast quantities at low cost. People and messages couldtravel at unprecedented speeds. Most important, humans gained access to the energy stored in coal and usedit to power machinery and propel ships and trains fasterthan vehicles had ever traveled before. With their newfound power, humans turned woodland into farmland,dug canals and laid tracks, bridged rivers and cut throughmountains, and covered the countryside with towns andcities.The ability to command nature, far from benefitingeveryone, increased the disparities between individualsand societies. Industrialization brought forth entrepreneurs—whether in the mills of England or on plantations in the American South—with enormous powerover their employees or slaves, a power that they foundeasy and profitable to abuse. Some people acquiredgreat wealth, while others lived in poverty and squalor.While middle-class women were restricted to caring fortheir homes and children, many working-class womenhad to leave home to earn wages in factories or as domestic servants. These changes in work and family lifeprovoked intense debates among intellectuals. Some defended the disparities in the name of laissez faire; otherscriticized the injustices that industrialization brought.Society was slow to bring these abuses under control.By the 1850s the Industrial Revolution had spreadfrom Britain to western Europe and the United States,and its impact was being felt around the world. To make aproduct that was sold on every continent, the British cotton industry used African slaves, American land, Britishmachines, and Irish workers. As we shall see in Chapter 23, industrialization brought even greater changes tothe Americas than it did to the Eastern Hemisphere. Ch. 23 Trend The nineteenth century, a trend witnessed was the enormous changes in the Western hemisphere. Except in Canada, manyCaribbean islands, and a handful of mainland colonies like Surinam, the Guyanas, and Belize, colonial controlswere removed by century’s end. The powerful new political ideas of the Enlightenment and an increased senseof national identity contributed to the desire for independence and self-rule. The success of the American andHaitian Revolutions began the assault on the colonial order, transforming the hemisphere’s politics. Napoleon’sinvasion of Portugal and Spain then helped initiate the movement toward independence in Latin America. Once colonial rule was overturned, the creation of stable and effective governments proved difficult. Powerful personalist leaders resisted the constraints imposedby constitutions. National governments often confronteddivisive regional political movements. From Argentina inthe south to the United States in the north, regional political rivalries provoked civil wars that challenged thevery survival of the new nations. Foreign military interventions and wars with native peoples also consumedresources and determined national boundaries. The effort to fulfill the promise of universal citizenship led tostruggles to end slavery, extend civil and political rights to women and minorities, and absorb new immigrants.These objectives were only partially achieved. Industrialization had a transforming effect on thehemisphere as well. Wealth, political power, and population were increasingly concentrated in urban areas. Inmost countries, bankers and anufacturers, rather thanfarmers and plantation owners, directed national destinies. The United States, the most industrialized nationin the Americas, played an aggressive economic role inthe region’s affairs and used its growing military power aswell. Industrialization altered the natural environmentin dramatic ways. Modern factories consumed hugeamounts of raw materials and energy. Copper mines inChile and Mexico, Cuban sugar plantations, Braziliancoffee plantations, and Canadian lumber companies all left their mark on the natural environment and all had ties to markets in the United States. The concentration ofpeople in cities in the United States and Latin Americaput pressure on water supplies, sewage treatment, andfood supplies.By 1900, however, the hemisphere’s national governments were much stronger than they had been at independence. Latin America lagged behind the UnitedStates and Canada in institutionalizing democratic political reforms, but Latin American nations in 1900 were stronger and more open than they had been in 1850. By1900 all the hemisphere’s nations also were better able tomeet the threats of foreign intervention and regionalism.Among the benefits resulting from the increased strengthof national governments were the abolition of slaveryand the extension of political rights to formerly excluded citizens. Serious challenges remained. Amerindian peopleswere forced to resettle on reservations, were excludedfrom national political life, and, in some countries, remained burdened with special tribute and tax obligations. Women began to enter occupations previouslyreserved to men but still lacked full citizenship rights.The baneful legacy of slavery and colonial racial stratifi-cation remained a barrier to many men and women. Thebenefits of economic growth were not equitably distributed among the nations of the Western Hemisphere orwithin individual nations. In 1900 nearly every Americannation was wealthier, better educated, more democratic,and more populous than at independence. But these nations were also more vulnerable to distant economicforces, more profoundly split between haves and havenots, and more clearly divided into a rich north and apoorer south. Ch.24 Trend One trend the continuing exploitation of the weak by thestrong, of African, Asian, and Pacific peoples by aggressive Europeans. In this view, the emergence of Britain asa dominant power in the Indian Ocean basin and SouthPortuguese and the Spanish pioneered and the Dutchtook over. Likewise, Britain’s control over the denselypopulated lands of South and Southeast Asia and overthe less populated lands of Australia and New Zealandcan be seen as a continuation of the conquest and colonization of the Americas.From another perspective what was most importantabout this period was not the political and militarystrength of the Europeans but their growing dominationof the world’s commerce, especially through longdistance ocean shipping. In this view, like other Europeans, the British were drawn to Africa and southernAsia by a desire to obtain new materials. However, Britain’s commercial expansion in thenineteenth century was also the product of Easterners demand for industrial manufactures. The growing exchanges could be mutually beneficial. African and Asianconsumers found industrially produced goods farcheaper and sometimes better than the handicrafts theyreplaced or supplemented. Industrialization creatednew markets for African and Asian goods, as in the caseof the vegetable-oil trade in West Africa or cotton inEgypt and India. There were also negative impacts, as inthe case of the weavers of India and the damage tospecies of seals and whales.Europeans’ military and commercial strength didnot reduce Africa, Asia, and the Pacific to mere appendages of Europe. While the balance of power shiftedin the Europeans’ favor between 1750 and 1870, othercultures were still vibrant and local initiatives oftendominant. Islamic reform movements and the rise of theZulu nation had greater significance for their respectiveregions of Africa than did Western forces. Despite someominous concessions to European power, SoutheastAsians were still largely in control of their own destinies.Even in India, most people’s lives and beliefs showedmore continuity with the past than the change due toBritish rule.Finally, it must not be imagined that Asians andAfricans were powerless in dealing with European expansion. The Indian princes who extracted concessionsfrom the British in return for their cooperation and theIndians who rebelled against the raj both forced the system to accommodate their needs. Moreover, someAsians and Africans were beginning to use European education, technology, and methods to transform theirown societies. Leaders in Egypt, India, and other lands,like those in Russia, the Ottoman Empire, China, andJapan—the subject of Chapter 25—were learning tochallenge the power of the West on its own terms. In 1870no one could say how long and how difficult that learning process would be, but Africans and Asians wouldcontinue to shape their own futures. Ch. 25 Trend A trend is that most of the subjects of the Ottoman, Russian, and Qing rulers did not think of European pressure or competition as determining factors in their lives duringthe first half of the nineteenth century. They continuedto live according to the social and economic institutionsthey inherited from previous generations. By the 1870s,however, the challenge of Europe had become widely realized. The Crimean War, where European allies achieveda hollow victory for the Ottomans and then pressuredthe sultan for more reforms, confirmed both Ottomanand Russian military weakness. The Opium War did thesame for China. Though all three empires faced similarproblems of reform and military rebuilding, Russia enjoyed a comparative advantage in being less appealingto rapacious European merchants and strategists concerned with protecting overseas empires.The policies adopted by the three imperial governments responded both to traditional concerns and to European demands. The sultans gave first priority to strengthening the central government to prevent territorial losses that began when Serbia, Egypt, and Greece became fully or partially independent. The Qing emperors confronted population growth and agricultural decline that resulted in massive rebellions. The tsars focused oncontinued territorial expansion. However, each faced differet European pressures. In China, the Europeans andAmericans wanted trade rights. In the Ottoman Empire, Britain, France, and Russia wanted equality for Christians and freedom from naval and commercial competition in the eastern Mediterranean. In Russia, moraldemands for the abolition of serfdom accompanied British determination to stop territorial advances in Asiathat might threaten India.Repeated crises in all three empires would eventuallyresult in the fall of the Qing, Romanov, and Ottoman dynasties in the first two decades of the twentieth century, but in 1870 it was still unclear whether the traditionalland empires of Asia would be capable of weathering the storm. One thing that had become clear, however, at leastto European eyes, was that Russia was part of Europe, while the other two empires were fundamentally alien.This judgment was based partly on religion, partly onthe enthusiasm of westernizing Russian artists and intellectuals for European cultural trends, and partly on therole Russia had played in defeating Napoleon at the beginning of the century, a role that brought the tsars intothe highest councils of royal decision making in Europe. Ch. 26 One trend is that clean water, electric lights, and railways began to improve the lives ofcity dwellers, even the poor. Goods from distant lands,even travel to other continents, came within the reach ofmillions.European society seemed to be heading toward better organization and greater security. Municipal servicesmade city life less dangerous and chaotic. Through laborunions, workers achieved some measure of recognitionand security. By the turn of the century, liberal politicalreforms had taken hold in western Europe and seemedabout to triumph in Russia as well. Morality and legislation aimed at providing security for women and families, though equality between the sexes was still beyondreach.The framework for all these changes was the nationstate. The world economy, international politics, evencultural and social issues revolved around a handful of countries the great powers that believed they controlled the destiny of the world. These included the mostpowerful European nations of the previous century, aswell as three newcomers Germany, the United States, and Japan that were to play important roles in thefuture. The strength of the dominant countries rested notonly on their industries and trade, but also on the enthusiasm of their peoples for the national cause. The feeling of unity and identity that we call nationalism was a two-edged sword, for it could also be divisive for multi ethnic states like Russia and Austria-Hungary, and even GreatBritain. It was also a Western concept that did not spreadeasily to other cultures. Thus Japan and China reactedvery differently to the Western intrusion. China, long in contact with the West, was ruled by a conservative elitethat associated modern technology with Western interference and resisted both. Japan, after a period of turmoil, accepted not only Western technology but also the nationalist and expansionist ideology of the West.The success of the great powers rested on their ability to extract resources from nature and from other societies, especially in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In aglobal context, the counterpart of the rise of the greatpowers is the story of imperialism and colonialism. Tocomplete our understanding of the period before 1914,let us turn now to the relations between the great powersand the rest of the world.