Download Ch.15 Trend The trend in the century between 1450 and 1550 was

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.