Download The European Reconnaissance of the World`s Oceans

Honors World History – Unit 7 – Chapter 17 – Pages 468-501 - European Renaissance
and Reformation – Chapter 19 – Pages 526-542 – An Age of Exploration and Isolation –
Chapter 21 – Pages 586-614 - Absolute Monarchs in Europe.
The Renaissance
The European Reconnaissance of the World’s Oceans
• Motives for Exploration:
• European exploration was prompted by complex & interacting motivations:
• Search for basic resources and lands suitable for cultivating cash crops.
• Need to establish new trade routes outside of Muslim control to reach Asian markets.
• Desire to expand the influence of Christianity.
• These motivations first moved the Portuguese who had relatively poor rocky soil at
home to search for new lands and products on islands in the open Atlantic: the
Azores, the Madeiras, the Canaries.
• Soon Portugal established sugar plantations on the central Atlantic islands of Sao
Tome, Principe, and Fernando Po as well as the Cape Verde Islands.
• In addition to the quest for fresh lands and resources, the desire to reduce costs and
increase supplies of products like:
• Spices, especially pepper.
Ginger.
Cloves.
• Drove European merchants and monarchs to seek direct routes to Asia and Asian
goods to avoid the expensive services of Muslim merchants who charged mightily for
those desirable products.
• The collapse of the Mongol empire and the spread of bubonic plague made those
desired goods increasingly expensive to Europeans.
• The Europeans were also interested in African goods, especially gold and ivory and
eventually slaves to work on the island sugar plantations started by European
entrepreneurs.
• Once again the Muslim intermediaries were to be avoided through European direct
access to African markets.
• The other motivating factor was religion: the desire to spread Christianity had a
biblical foundation.
• This spread sometimes took peaceful means as through the work of missionaries in
India, central Asia, and China.
• It could also take military means as in the reconquista on the Iberian Peninsula
completed in 1492 and in Palestine and the islands of the Mediterranean.
• Much of the technology needed for the European voyages of exploration came from
Chinese or Arabic resources.
• Stern rudder developed by the Chinese, improved by the Arabs.
• Triangular lateen sail which made it possible for a ship to advance against the wind
by sailing across it-to “tack”- meant that sturdy European ships could now explore
dangerous seas with uncooperative winds.
• The magnetic compass to figure direction.
• From Greek and Persian astronomers the astrolabe to determine latitude, made these
earlier European voyages possible.
• Soon however, interaction with Arab sailors who used simpler and more serviceable
instruments made the cross staff and back staff the navigation equipment of choice
for European sailors.
• European sailors used these “new” technologies to venture out into the uncharted
ocean where they began to gather information about winds and currents.
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This knowledge of wind patterns and currents allowed them to sail almost anywhere
on earth.
They applied this knowledge in their use of volta do mar, a Portuguese phrase
meaning “return through the sea”
This strategy allowed them to sail into the open ocean to catch the westerly winds,
rather than to fight against the trade winds as they sailed home.
Soon all European mariners were relying on this strategy to travel throughout the
world’s seas.
Voyages of Exploration: from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic
The Portuguese, and then the Spanish, took the early lead in the European voyages
of exploration into the Atlantic.
Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal conquered the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415
and then sponsored a series of voyages down the west African coast.
Navigation school.
Soon Portuguese merchants established permanent trading ports where they
exchanged horses, leather, textiles, and metal-ware for gold and slaves.
Bartolomeu Dias in 1488 who rounded the Cape of Good Hope and entered the
Indian Ocean.
Vasco Da Gama made the round trip to India in 1499 returning with a valuable cargo
of pepper and cinnamon.
By 1500, the Portuguese had established a trading post in Calcutta and had trading
relationships with ports throughout the Indian Ocean basin.
Soon the English and the Dutch followed the Portuguese into the Indian Ocean.
The Spanish interest in the Atlantic centered on the desire to reach Asia by sailing
west and on inaccurate calculations.
Columbus found support for his plan with the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and
Isabella.
Reporting that he had reached the islands of Asia, “the Indies,” in the fall of 1492,
Columbus managed to get the Spanish monarchs to support three more voyages
which were unsuccessful in achieving his goal of reaching Asia.
Though these four voyages did not achieve Columbus’s dream, they were
unintentionally, yet monumentally, successful in establishing Spain as the leader in
European exploration of these new lands, resources, and people.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific:
Even after Columbus’s initial failures, some Europeans continued to seek a western
route to Asia.
Vasco Nunez de Balboa first sighted the Pacific Ocean in 1513 while searching for
gold in Panama, but he had no idea about its true size: one third of the earth’s
surface.
Portuguese navigator Ferdinand Magellan explored the Pacific and eventually
circumnavigated the world, 1519-1522, sailing under the flag of Spain as the
Portuguese continued to have little interest in a westerly route to Asia.
His three-year voyage, rack by starvation, scurvy, and violence, returned to Spain
with only 35 of his original crew of 280 still alive.
Exploration of the vast Pacific was dangerous and delayed.
The Spanish concentrated on establishing safe trade route between Mexico and the
Philippines.
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English mariners determined to find a northwest passage from Europe to Asia
inadvertently charted many details of Pacific geography; soon they would be joined
by the Norwegians, the French, and eventually the Russians.
The most important of these explorers was the Englishman Captain James Cook
whose three eighteenth-century explorations of the southern and northern Pacific
Ocean helped Europeans compile a reasonably accurate understanding of the ocean’s
basin, land, and peoples.
Trade and Conflict in Early Modern Asia
A key result of the voyages of exploration was the potential for commercial
opportunities for European nations who built trading posts as footholds in regions
where prior commercial powers had dominated for centuries.
Lacking the military resources and sheer human numbers to impose their rule in the
eastern hemisphere, the Spanish were able to build a small empire in the Philippines
and the Dutch were able to establish a small but lucrative empire in Indonesia.
On land, Russia commercial interests expanded into the former Mongol lands.
These small and eventually competing European claims would eventually lead to the
Seven Year’s War in 1763.
The British victory in that worldwide conflict would enable that small nation to
dominate world trade and build a vast empire in the nineteenth century.
Trading-post Empires
The Portuguese built the first trading-post empires as they established trading posts
from Africa throughout Asia: San Jorge da Mina, Mozambique, Hormuz, Gao, Melaka,
Ternate, Macau, and Nagasaki.
The goal of this strategy was not to conquer territory but to control trade routes by
forcing merchant vessels to stop at fortified trading sites and to pay duties.
Afonzo d’Alboquerque was the architect of this aggressive policy and his fleets were
very effective at overpowering other crafts they encountered and in using their heavy
artillery effectively on shore.
He forced merchant ships to purchase safe conduct papers and present them with
payment at Portuguese ports of call.
Goods would be confiscated and crews imprisoned, ransomed, tortured, and
sometimes killed.
By the middle of the sixteenth century, Portuguese ships transported half the spices
the European nations consumed.
The other half continued to be transported on Arab, Indian, and Malay ships.
Despite all attempts, the Portuguese simply did not have the manpower or naval
power to fully enforce their demands, and, by the end of the sixteenth century, the
English and the Dutch began to rival Portuguese domination of the Indian Ocean
trade.
English and Dutch merchants also built trading posts in the Indian Ocean region, but
they were much more interested in collecting duties on trade rather than controlling
ocean shipping.
The English concentrated on India and built forts at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.
Dutch built forts from Cape Town in southern Africa to Colombo, and at Batavia on
the island of Java.
The English & Dutch emerged superior to their Portuguese predecessors because of
an efficient form of commercial organization: joint-stock company.
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This sophisticated business structure made it possible for investors to make
impressive profits while limiting the risk on their investments.
Ancestor of the corporation.
The English East India Company, founded in 1600, and the Dutch United East India
Company (VOC) relied on private merchants who advanced funds to launch the
companies.
Outfit ships with men, equipment, and supplies; and provide commodities and money
for travel.
Government charters granted these private companies the right to buy and sell
goods, build trading posts, and even wage war if it was in the company’s interest.
Their advanced nautical technology , powerful military arsenal, efficient organization,
and untiring pursuit of profit made these companies and the governments who
sponsored them very wealthy and helped both England and the Dutch to build a
global trade network.
European Conquests in Southeast Asia:
European interaction in the eastern hemisphere was much different than in the
western hemisphere.
Unlike in the western hemisphere, where Europeans conquered indigenous peoples
and built territorial empires to establish colonies with European settlers, in the east
the Europeans were unable to dominate the peoples of larger more established
states.
With the decline of the Portuguese influence in the region, other European powers
mostly traded peacefully with indigenous peoples and nations with two exceptions:
the Philippines and Indonesia.
Though highly populated, neither of these regions was protected by a large
centralized power like India or China, so when the heavily armed European powers
arrived in the sixteenth century, the indigenous population was no match.
The Spanish goals in the Philippines were clear: promote trade and Christianity.
Using and at times abusing Chinese merchants, the Spanish relied on these longestablished traders to supply silk from China to fill the Manila galleons.
Spanish authorities approached the spread of Christianity with equal vigor; they built
schools and targeted influential Filipino families for conversion.
Though meeting some resistance particularly in the rural, mountainous island regions,
by the nineteenth century the Philippines were one of the most devout Roman
Catholic regions in the world.
The Dutch goals were much more focused: exploit trade and do not be concerned
with the spread of Christianity.
The desire to control the lucrative spice trade dominated the economic strategy of
men like Jan Pieterszoon Coen who established the city of Batavia in 1619 to serve as
headquarters for the VOC.
Coen and others used local conflicts as an opportunity to gain allies as he pitted one
indigenous group against the other.
The Dutch, who had neither the manpower nor the military might to exert their
control over all of Indonesia, chose to concentrate on specific wealthy clove-and
mace-producing regions.
They wanted to control the production of spices, not to rule.
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To achieve this goal, the Dutch moved spice-bearing plants to islands under their
direct control and then mercilessly attacked people who grew spices for trade with
non-Dutch merchants.
This successful strategy made Holland the wealthiest land in Europe for much of the
seventeenth century.
Foundations of the Russian Empire in Asia:
Russian expansion in this era was land-based and took two directions: central Asia
and northeastern Eurasia.
In central Asia, Russian forces took over previous Mongol khanates which gave them
control over the Volga River and offered opportunities for trade in the Ottoman
Empire, Iran, and India by way of the Caspian Sea.
During the eighteenth century, Russia added much of the Caucasus region to its land
empire including the modern-day nations of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan.
In northeastern Eurasia, it was Siberia and its furs which brought Russia great
wealth.
By 1639, the Russians controlled the region all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
This vast region included many different ethnic groups from which the Russians
exacted tribute in the form of fur.
Some groups resisted Russian domination and the Russians responded with military
force, at times nearly wiping out entire cultures.
Endemic diseases were an even greater threat to the peoples of Siberia, decimating
local communities.
There was not a great push for conversion to Russian Orthodox Christianity as
conversion removed the requirement for tribute, so most indigenous people of the
region retained their traditional beliefs.
Russian settlers in these regions were often individuals who were ostracized from
Russian society: social misfits, convicted criminals, and prisoners of war.
Often these Russians found working conditions better in Siberia than in Russia
proper.
Over time, Siberian trading posts developed into Russian towns with populations of
Russians often double the population of indigenous people.
This rate further increased in the nineteenth century with the discovery of the
region’s vast mineral wealth.
Commercial Rivalries and the Seven Years’ War
The effort to establish markets and monopolies lead to war between the Europeans
and the indigenous peoples and also between the European nations themselves.
The Dutch, English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese fought each other on land and
sea throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries over these trade rivalries.
The Seven Years’ War, also known as the “great war for empire” is the most
significant of these conflicts as its outcome laid the foundation for 150 years of British
imperial domination across the world.
Global Exchanges
Columbian Exchange
The Age of Exploration was a period of vast exchange of people, plants, animals,
ideas, and technology.
This is known as the Columbian Exchange, because it starts with Columbus.
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While many aspects of this exchange had positive effects, such as the exchange of
foods between Europe and America, there were also negative effects, such as the
exchange of diseases between Europe and America.
The Age of Exploration changed the world.
Access to new and better foods allowed the European population to grow, and access
to the New World gave these people a place to go.
New World civilizations such as the Inca and Aztecs, faced near total destruction of
their cultures either through disease brought by the Europeans, or by colonization.
Africa faced a diaspora, or forced movement of its people, as slavery became the
dominant labor force in the Americas.
The Age of Exploration was both a positive and negative experience for many
civilizations.
The Origins of Global Trade
Due to the trading-post empires established by Portuguese, Dutch, and English
merchants, Asian and European markets were linked through goods transported on
European ships.
Those same ships soon began carrying goods within the Asian markets of the Indian
Ocean basin.
By the late sixteenth century, European merchants and Arab merchants were nearly
equal in the trading patterns in the Indian Ocean basin.
This circumstance laid the groundwork for the emergence of a truly global trading
system in which mariners from European nations carried goods around the world by
way of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans:
sugar, silver, tobacco, textiles, guns, furs, and enslaved human beings were carried
as valuable cargo from one port to another.
Silver especially became the desired medium of exchange as it was highly valued in
China and easily exploited from South America.
Cowry shells from India were a highly desirous medium of exchange throughout West
Africa.
The demand for furs in China, Europe, and North America decimated the ecological
balance in fur-producing regions like seventeenth-century Siberia and eighteenthcentury North America.
Mass markets for commodities like coffee, tea, tobacco, cotton, and especially sugar
dramatically stimulated the market for enslaved workers.
By 1750, all parts of the world, except Australia, participated in this global commercial
network with European merchants fulfilling the most prominent roles.
Chapter 24 – The Transformation of Europe – Pages 631-661.
The Protestant Reformation
The Protestant Reformation
Witch-Hunts and Religious Wars
Witch-Hunts and Religious Wars
The effects of religious dissent soon moved into political and social spheres as
Europeans sought to adjust to the new split.
The most powerful social phenomenon occurred as Europeans hunted witches with
more fervor than they ever had.
Like other cultures, Europeans believed in the power of individual to mysteriously
affect the lives of their neighbors.
The hysteria brought some 110,000 people to trial with almost 60 percent killed.
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While there were male victims, the overwhelming number of accused witches were
women, most of whom lived on the margins of society as old, poor widowed or single
women.
Historians believe that the witch-hunts that persisted in Europe for two centuries
were largely indicative of the general stress and strain of profound changes within
multiple spheres of society.
Outright war broke out in several places as a result of the Reformation.
For thirty-six years, the French Catholics fought the Huguenot Protestants for control
of the monarchy.
It only ended when a Huguenot contender converted to Catholicism.
The Spanish monarch tried to persuade England to return to Catholicism first by
marrying one queen who died and then attacking the forces of Queen Elizabeth I with
an armada.
The endeavor proved a spectacular failure for the Spanish who lost forever their
chance to re-Catholicize Britain.
In addition to that, Spain controlled the Low Countries where the northern provinces
were adopting Protestantism.
The Dutch revolt against the Spanish domination went on for forty years until the
provinces gained their independence and became the Netherlands.
The final religious war was the devastating Thirty Years’ War which was fought on
German soil but engaged most European countries in fighting or financing the war.
They had political and economic goals but religious allegiances complicated the
matter and it became the most destructive war fought on European soil to that point.
More than one-third of the German population died while no one state proved its
ability to dominate the others.
• The Consolidation Of Sovereign States
Ironically, most monarchs in Europe benefited from religious strife.
Established monarchs consolidated their power while ambitious opportunities used
the chaos to gain power
The Holy Roman Empire remained decentralized and lost its prominence but almost
all other countries gained strength and the ability to compete with each other.
The Attempted Revival of Empire
The Holy Roman Empire was a loosely connected federation of German states which
appeared to momentarily unite the Hapsburg ruler Charles V.
Although a Spaniard, he had inherited the title from his mother’s family but he
became embroiled in the Lutheran controversy and was unable to consolidate control
over the empire.
Eventually he had to agree to allow the German princes to choose which religion they
would follow.
He allowed all the countries he ruled to continue with their separate administrations
and only use his military power to subdue rebellions.
Furthermore, both the French king and the Ottoman rulers were concerned at the
prospect of a large central empire in Europe so they united to work against the Holy
Roman Empire.
Charles became so defeated at his inability to control his empire that he split the
kingdom between his brother and his son and retired to a monastery.
The New Monarchs
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While Italian states dominated commercial enterprise in Europe, the new monarchs of
England, France, and Spain increased their political power through taxation, control of
the nobility, and strongly centralized administrations.
The Spanish and French monarchs increased the financial stability of their realms with
new and increased taxes on sales, households, and salt.
Ever since the Magna Carta, the English kings had been reluctant to increase taxation
but they did increase royal fees and fines.
Magna Carta: respect certain legal procedures, writ of habeas corpus.
After Henry VIII dissolved the Catholic church, he confiscated church holdings which
vastly increased his financial power but also burdened the state with the charitable
responsibilities that the church had previously met.
The new monarchs increased the size of their bureaucracy to make tax collection and
administration more reliable.
Spain and France maintained large standing armies but England’s unique position as
an island nation did not necessitate the same.
The standing armies were so large that they overwhelmed the ability of any
nobleman to maintain his own private army which effectively nullified the power of
the nobility.
In England, the monarch kept the nobility under control by forcing them to comply
with royal justice.
In addition to these measures, church properties seized by Protestant monarchs gave
them increased leverage over their nobility.
In Spain, Ferdinand and Isabel mobilized the Catholic church in the form of the
Spanish Inquisition to consolidate their power.
They obtained a papal license to use it as a royal office to persecute Jews, Muslims,
and Protestant movements.
While witch-hunts in northern Europe had addressed the fears and concerns of
Protestants, the Inquisition served to expand the power of the Catholic church into
every part of Spanish life.
Constitutional States
In the seventeenth century, European monarchies began to develop into two distinct
types: constitutional and absolute.
The rulers of England and Holland shared their power with representative bodies in
constitutional monarchies while those in France, Spain, Austria, Prussia and Russia
held power tightly within the monarchy itself.
Although they did not have written constitutions, England and the Netherlands
evolved into states where political power was vested in the hands of a legislature.
However, it did not happen easily.
In England, the seventeenth century was a tortuous period of civil war in which one
ruler was beheaded and two were deposed in the fight for executive power between
the parliament and monarchs.
The initial fight over taxation was coupled with religious disagreement between the
monarchy’s Anglicans and strict Calvinist Puritans in Parliament.
Finally, in the bloodless Glorious Revolution, British obtained a royal family from
Holland who agreed to share power with Parliament.
For the Dutch, a long war of independence waged against the Spanish preceded their
republican form of government.
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Their government was based on locally elected councils that formed the foundations
of the Dutch Republic.
Despite little experience with representative government, these two governments
were remarkably effective in harnessing popular support while allowing dissenting
views.
Furthermore, the prosperous merchants who were central to the elected bodies
promoted a state policy of maritime trade and overseas empires.
Entrepreneurs had remarkably little official interference from government so they
became the engine that drove the two small nations to extraordinary prosperity in the
late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
A partnership between merchants and rulers allowed the state to rely on the profits
of commerce while the rulers instituted policies to support it.
Absolute Monarchies
The absolute monarchs of Europe based their power on the theory of the divine right
of kings which stated that monarchs derived their authority from God while neither
commoners nor nobility had any political role.
The most fully formed example of the absolute state was found in the court of Louis
XIV (1643-1715) of France.
Based on the earlier work of Cardinal Richelieu, adviser to Louis XIII, who destroyed
the power of the nobility as well as French Calvinists, the French monarchy was the
epitome of tightly centralized absolute monarchy.
He became known as The Sun King for his central and grand position in the French
government.
As benefits an absolute ruler, he turned the royal hunting lodge, Versailles, into the
largest building in Europe where he was the center of all.
This served the purpose of keeping the nobles within the control of the monarchy as
they curried favor for themselves.
While the nobles concerned themselves with elaborate manners and dress, Louis XIV
worked diligently with his ministers to administer his large kingdom.
They promoted economic development with improvements to the infrastructure,
abolishing internal tariffs, and encouraging exports.
Louis XIV also maintained an enormous standing army with which he regularly
engaged other European nations.
While the French monarchy was briefly the most successful practitioner of absolutism,
the monarchs of Austria, Prussia, and Spain were also embracing its tenets.
The Russian tsars were particularly adept in absolute policies as the Romanovs had
already held a tightly controlled government since coming to power in the early
seventeenth century.
(Note: Tsar can be spelled as czar and is derived from the Latin word for Caesar.)
By 1600, Russia had become a vast empire that spread between the Arctic and
Caspian seas.
The most important tsar was Peter I, known to as Peter the Great (1682-1725)
A veritable storm of energy, the extremely tall young man came to power over a
medieval nation that he was determined to pull into the seventeenth century
European world.
He reformed the army by offering better pay and more professionalism and began to
construct a navy.
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He revised administrative practices to improve tax collection and general
administration.
Peter even decided that the Russian nobility looked too backward in their long robes
and beards so he ordered them to be clean-shaven in western clothing.
When faced with active resistance, he personally shaved beards from faces.
The crowning achievement of his rule was the construction of St. Petersburg along
the Baltic as a naval base and capital.
The most talented successor to Peter the Great was an Austrian princess, Catherine,
who had married into the Russian royal family.
To improve government efficiency, Catherine the Great divided Russia into fifty
provinces and continued Peter’s promotion of development.
She did try to help oppressed serfs until a rebellion by disgruntled ex-soldier
Pugachev killed numerous nobles and government officials in the steppes north of the
Caspian Sea.
The rebellion failed but from then on, Catherine vigorously protected authoritarian
government.
Later, these absolutist states, Russia, Prussia, and Austria, demonstrated their power
by carving up Poland between them in a series of “partitions.”
It became quite evident that in Europe national survival became dependent on a
strong and effective government.
The European States System
The new European states were much more powerful than their predecessors and this
led to more competition and war.
While the Thirty Years’ War had been devastating, it was resolved with the Peace of
Westphalia that granted recognition of sovereignty to each nation and the right of all
states to manage their internal affairs.
Nevertheless, Europe continued to engage in rounds of warfare.
Most conflicts were small and quickly resolved but occasional wars grew larger, lasted
longer, and involved France.
Louis XIV engaged in wars to expand into Germany, Spain, and the Spanish
Netherlands.
Later, a more global conflict, the Seven Years’ War, had France ally with Austria and
Russia against Britain and Prussia.
It was fought in India and North America as well as on the European continent.
Coalitions that developed could shift as the balance of powers between nations
changed.
However, it was risky because a coalition could stop one strong state but then see
another one rise.
In many ways, the intense competition between European states drained resources
but strengthened them as a whole.
States developed professional officer corps through military academies while their use
of increasingly sophisticated weaponry intensified their firepower.
Despite the fact that China, India, and the Islamic lands had used cannons earlier,
they never had the incentive to develop more powerful weapons as their military
efforts were primarily focused on internal problems rather than confrontation with
foreign enemies with their more powerful armaments.
Early Capitalist Society
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In addition to religious and political changes, Europe also experienced population
growth that led to a thriving marketplace.
Combined with improvements in communication and transportation, changes in social
and economic structure resulted in the development of a broadly based capitalist
society.
But the effects of wealthy capitalist economics were uneven.
The western European countries experienced great economic prosperity while eastern
European countries were regulated to providing raw goods such as grain exports.
They remained far away from centers of trade and manufacturing which resulted in
little wealth accumulation in the general population.
However, wealth had its own wrenching effects on western society.
Population Growth and Urbanization
The increased population growth of western Europe was fueled by enriched diets with
the advent of new food crops from the Columbian exchange.
In particular, potatoes provided an increased source of carbohydrates to northern
European peasants and laborers who found bread prices to be beyond their means.
Some regions adopted American maize as well (polenta in northern Italy) but it was
primarily a welcome addition to the feeding of livestock.
Tomatoes and peppers provided welcome new tastes to the European palate.
As American crops improved the European diet, better-nourished populations were
able to fend off old diseases to an extent that had not been possible before.
While smallpox, typhus, dysentery, tuberculosis, and influenza continued to claim
victims in all strata of society, the epidemic scourge of bubonic plague began to
retreat.
The last significant outbreaks were in Marseilles, France and London during the last
half of the seventh and early part of the eighteenth centuries.
After that, Europe was largely free of major epidemic disease.
Decreasing mortality rates helped increase the population at a time when there was
no actual rise in the birth rate.
In 1500, Europe including Russia had a population of about 81 million.
In the next century, the population increased to over 100 million.
Despite a decrease by one-third of the German population during the Thirty Years’
War, the population recovered and climbed to 120 million by 1700.
Along with the population growth, Europe continued its pattern of urbanization that
had begun in the late middle ages.
Some cities grew as they were designated the site of government.
Madrid, for instance, was a town of a few thousand in 1561 when Philip II moved his
capital there.
By 1600 its population had increased to 65,000 and within thirty years, it reached
170,000.
Other cities became commercial and industrial centers.
In the mid-sixteenth century, London and Paris had populations of 60,000 and
130,000 respectively; these grew to half a million each in the next century.
Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, Stockholm ,and Vienna were among other
cities that grew significantly if not spectacularly in the early modern era.
Early Capitalism and Proto-industrialization
Population growth and rapid urbanization fostered extraordinary economic growth
which coincided with the emergence of capitalism-
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an economic system in which private individuals provided goods in a free market
while they bear the costs of production in terms of land, buildings, machinery, tools,
equipment, workshops, and raw materials.
In capitalism, businessmen hire workers and make the decisions about production
rather than depending upon the government or upper classes to direct commerce.
However, it can be a risky proposition as the resulting profit of loss is entirely up to
the individual.
Individuals accumulating great wealth was common in other regions of the world.
In fact, banks, investors, and insurance underwriters had supported private business
for over a thousand years in areas like China and the Middle East.
However, European merchants transformed their societies during this period in a way
no others had.
They used efficient networks of communication and transportation to provide their
commodities to regions that had the most need and thereby profited enormously.
One example was Dutch merchants who imported grain from eastern Europe, stored
it in Amsterdam, and sent it to southern Europe when there were crop failures.
The Dutch did not produce the grain but they knew how to obtain it cheaply and sell
it at the best price.
Europeans began to develop a banking system while insurance underwrote the risks
of long-distance trade.
Banks not only held funds and granted loans but they published the first business
newsletters about the markets.
Stock exchanges developed in large cities as capitalists sought investors to fund their
ventures.
Joint-stock companies became essential for the development of overseas trade.
The English East India Company and the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie
(VOC) spread the risks of distant ventures among many investors while they fueled
the extraordinary expansion if European trade into the global market.
As the English and Dutch governments realized the enormous profits and prestige
that could be obtained through capitalist venture, they instituted policies that fostered
private business.
They were encouraged by the presence of merchants in the upper echelons of
government.
Thus England and Holland protected the individual’s right to own property, enforced
private contracts, protected financial institutions, and settled disputes.
They also chartered the joint-stock companies and granted some of them the right to
overseas exploration.
As the companies developed colonies to obtain raw materials, the governments took
an active interest in their successes, so the concept of imperialism and colonial rule
went hand in hand with capitalist expansions into the global market.
As individuals took over the responsibility of business, they began to reorganize their
manner of manufacture.
The guild structure that had controlled the production of goods for centuries
protected its members and decreased competition, while a capitalist economy thrives
on competition.
So, entrepreneurs avoided guilds by organizing production centers in the countryside
rather than in urban settings.
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In the “putting-out system,” raw materials such as wool were given to family
households to spin, weave, and be fashioned into garments.
Then, the businessman picked it up, paid the family, and sold his goods in town.
The system proved to be very profitable as rural labor was cheap and available.
Recognized as an early attempt to organize efficient industrial organizations, some
historians call this period the era of “proto-industrialization” and it remained in place
until the advent of the factory system in the nineteenth century.
Social Change in Early Modern Europe.
The putting-out system changed life in rural Europe with large infusions of cash that
hitherto was unavailable to the peasant class.
Western European households acquired more material objects such as cabinets and
furnishings while rural people ate and dressed better.
With more income, individuals could choose to follow their own pursuits rather than
the traditional family pursuits.
This became worrisome for older people as they contemplated young adults and
women abandoning their agricultural families to follow other lines of work.
In eastern Europe, this was not the case as they persisted in traditional agricultural
roles, but their landlords pushed them much harder than before so life grew more
miserable for peasants in Poland, Russia, and Bohemia.
Conditions were particularly harsh in Russia where the Romanov tsars had restricted
the freedom of peasants and tied them to the land as serfs, mimicking what had
existed in western Europe in the early middle ages.
The Romanov goal was to gain the support of the nobility by guaranteeing that their
lands would be worked.
Although the legal code of 1649 strictly determined social status and occupation, it
did not include a designation of chattel slavery.
Yet later nobles bought and sold serfs as though it had.
All of this provided the landlord with inexpensive labor and huge profits.
The contrast between eastern and western Europe was profound as the east provided
raw materials such as grains and timber using an almost enslaved work force and the
western Europeans became a thriving capitalist marketplace with its free labor force.
Two systems were so interdependent by the early sixteenth century that ironically the
development of capitalist society was dependent on its non-capitalist counterpart.
Capitalism had moral implications as medieval churches had regarded profit as akin to
sinfulness.
In particular, interest on loans was considered an immoral profit.
Nevertheless, loans and huge profits were the signs of a thriving capitalist economy,
Philosophers such as Adam Smith (1723-1790) assuaged these concerns by asserting
that a prosperous society was the result of individuals pursing profit.
Wealth of Nations.
The evolution into a capitalist society was wrenching as people watched their
neighbors and family members move away from traditional pursuits while refusing to
help them in hard times.
• The social upheaval was especially evident in the growth in banditry in the
countryside and mugger in the cities.
• Capitalism appears to have strengthened the nuclear family as an economic and
social unit.
Traditionally, European couples had married later-on their mid-twenties-in order to
set up independent households, and capitalism only enhanced this trend.
• As the nuclear family grew in economic importance, love became more important in
the choice of a spouse instead of value to one’s extended families.
• Furthermore, affection between parents and children took on more importance.
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