Ch 9-15 Review: 1450 to 1750

Ch 9: Expanding Horizons of Cross-Cultural Interaction

This first chapter of Part 2 centers on people moving across borders of one kind or another and making
contact and interacting with other cultures and societies. Those interactions start with the expansion of the
trade networks in Eurasia and then move into religion, politics, art, technology, and continue with the
transmission of disease changes in demographics. Exchanges became common and had great impacts on
Afro-Eurasian societies through the sailing routes of early modern merchants in the Mediterranean, the
Indian Ocean, and the North Sea; the Silk Roads; the pilgrimages of Muslims, Christians, or Buddhists;
and the Mongol empire’s military expeditions and trading routes.

The chapter begins with the description of journeys of three different men: Marco Polo, Rabban Sauma,
and Ibn Battuta. Polo was a Venetian and merchant whose accounts offer much insight but often cloud the
situation with fanciful creations; Rabban Sauma was a Nestorian prelate who functioned as a Mongol
ambassador; and Ibn Battuta was a Muslim jurist by profession, a traveler by experience, and a noted
observer of history and societies by inclination. These men and Mansa Musa of the famous pilgrimage to
Mecca were contemporaries and theoretically could have met each other. Other travelers—merchants,
missionaries, adventurers—are also included in the chapter. All link Afro-Eurasia into one large zone of
interactions and interconnections.

Another section discusses the rise or recovery of agrarian civilizations in the wake of the Mongol
interlude and its subsequent collapse. Although the rise of the Ming dynasty is discussed first and then the
chapter moves to Italy and the early Renaissance, recovery could just as easily have included the rise of
Muscovy, the Ottoman empire, and the Mughals in this discussion. The last section is the beginning of the
age of exploration. Zheng He and his Ming naval expeditions are discussed, but soon a more traditional
narrative returns with the Portuguese and Spanish in the Atlantic and Africa and the model for what would
occur after 1492 and 1498.

Ch 10: Transoceanic Encounters and Global Connections

You should understand the connection between the rise of trade and the rise of empires including those in
the Indian Ocean Basin. You should understand the effects of the Columbian exchange, focusing on
disease and then making connections to the changes brought about by the bubonic plague. You should
understand the changes brought about in both Europe and the Americas by foods such as potatoes
(Americas to Europe) or sugarcane (Europe/Africa to Americas). You should also understand the
exchanges of populations, ideas, and religions.

The principal ideas of this chapter revolve around the European maritime explorations, including motives,
technologies, findings, and effects both in Europe and in foreign lands. The motives include the desire for
basic resources and land on which to grow foods, particularly by the Portuguese, the desire for new
maritime trade routes to Asia because the traditional land routes had become unsafe, and the zeal of
Christian missionaries to convert new peoples. A discussion of the sailing and mapping technologies that
were both necessary and available highlights the gradual accumulation of technological knowledge in the
Eastern Hemisphere. How these hugely expensive adventures were funded and the beginnings of the
joint-stock companies, in which governments and private investors combined resources and shared risk
and profit is also important.

Europeans learned how to sail, map, and return home from their voyages across the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans, then set about figuring out how to profit from the lands they had “discovered.” First the
Portuguese and then the English were able to set up trading-post empires in large part because of their
military technology (they wanted trade, not direct control of ports, between west Africa and east Asia).
The EIC1 and the VOC realized fantastic profits for their investors, particularly from southeast Asian
spices. The Russians, however, explored and conquered Siberia and established the foundation of a
massive land-based empire stretching across Eurasia, while the English also established settler colonies in
North America. The Spanish claimed access to the Philippine Islands and used Manila galleons to transfer
Spanish-Mexican silver to China, which, in turn, fueled the massive Chinese economy. The histories of
the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese in the Americas are found in Chapter 12. This chapter deals
with the big picture of European explorations and brushes quickly past most specifics.

The final major topic is the Columbian Exchange. It is hard to overemphasize its importance. The
transmission of diseases, plants, livestock, and human migrants from Eurasia into the previously isolated
Americas and Oceania fundamentally changed these environments and effectively decimated the native
populations. The new foods from the Americas, however, fueled (fed) huge population increases in
Eurasia and Africa. The global trade that was created by these explorations further amplified the effects of
the Columbian exchange. Fur-bearing animals were hunted to near extinction, forests were razed for ship
timbers, slaves were shipped across oceans, and previously unconnected populations became
economically dependent upon each other. Find more information at
https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/columbian-exchange.

Ch 11: The Transformation of Europe

When 1500 dawned, it would have seemed for many observers to be a new age of great promise. Within
two decades, however, western Christianity had fragmented into rival camps and ended any concept of a
unified Christendom. This fragmentation produced two reformations—the Protestant and the Catholic.
Although many reforms were implemented by both groups, the faith remained fractured as religious wars
spread outward from the Holy Roman Empire to France, the Netherlands, Bohemia, the British Isles, and
Switzerland. States unaffected by violent reformations often participated in religiously inspired wars
against their neighbors. And while war impacted the nations involved to the smallest social level, the
reformations also unleashed violence and repression in the larger societies and sects against groups such
as the Anabaptists, the Anti-Trinitarians, and supposed witches. All of these episodes seemed to have
religious causes, but most had equally strong political, social, and economic influences. For AP purposes,
it is important to note that the zeal generated by religious issues and the reformations also sent Christian
missionaries to Asia, Oceania, and the Americas. Similar religious developments occurred in the eastern
European, Muslim, west African, southeast Asian, and south Asian worlds.

At the end of the postclassical era in Europe, a new style of state began to arise. It relied less on feudalism
and more on a traditional Roman concept of national law and the power of the monarch as a
representation of the nation. These “new monarchs” used bureaucracies, collected new taxes, utilized the
bourgeoisie, raised modern armies, and in general attempted to centralize power around a core ethnicity.
Many sought to be the head of the church in their land. Spain, Portugal, France, England, Sweden,
Denmark, and Norway were such examples.

Juxtaposed against the new monarchs were older states such as the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Russia,
Hungary, and Italy’s city-states, ecclesiastical princely states. Some ambitious dynasties, including the
Habsburgs, attempted to revive large multinational empires by uniting the crowns of diverse states. Only
the grand princes of Muscovy would succeed and eventually unify the Russian states, becoming the tsars
of all the Russias.

The constant rivalry and wars for religious privilege or dynastic advantage birthed the European states
system and the concepts of modern diplomacy, diplomats, negotiated settlements, international law, and
the balance of power. Two different intellectual traditions typified governmental structures of states by the
seventeenth century: constitutional monarchies struggled in England and the Netherlands, whereas
absolutism under a centralizing monarch exerted great power and influence in Spain, Portugal, France,
and Scandinavia.

The same period of religious reformation and state formation witnessed the birth of a modern economic
system—the early capitalist system—and led to changes in society. Where once land determined privilege
and power, now capital, investments, stocks, entrepreneurs, risk, and companies influenced states and
rulers. The government influenced and managed this financial revolution in some states, while in others
the individual worked alone without necessarily seeking the protection of government. Both mercantilism
and laissez-faire capitalism produced great wealth and helped transform many dwellers of the cities and
towns into wealthy commercial elite, highly sought out and used by the new monarchs in their
bureaucracies, militaries, and universities. In many lands, even peasants benefited and increasingly
abandoned older feudal regulations.

Challenges to religious, artistic, and political traditions impacted intellectual thought. The Renaissance
saw some developments in science and math, but in the seventeenth century, there was a radical
transformation in scientific thinking that included a reconceptualization of the universe as well as
physical and biological sciences. This would eventually be called the scientific revolution and would see
open clashes between religious ideas and scientific concepts as both the spiritual and physical attempted
to reconcile new discoveries, new lands, new calculations, and older religious traditions.

Women exercised some influence in the Renaissance and even through the Reformation. Women were
heavily involved in the reformations both as religious figures and leaders of factions: Marguerite of
Navarre conversed openly with Protestant and Catholic reformers; other influential women included
Elizabeth I of England, Mary Queen of Scots, and Catherine de Medici. Many daughters and wives of
merchants openly worked in the commercial realm and made important economic decisions. At the end of
the era, women became instrumental in the facilitation of the scientific revolution as well as the later
Enlightenment.

Ch 12: The Integration of the Americas and Oceania with the Wider World

This chapter could bear a subtitle of “When Worlds Collide.” In 1492 and later, when Europeans first
ventured into the Pacific and encountered Oceanic societies and peoples, worlds did indeed collide—
along with different flora, fauna, diseases, ideas, and cultures. And while Native Americans and the
peoples of Oceania and Australia did resist, resistance in many cases was futile due to a lack of disease
immunity and European superiority in technology.

When European peoples first sought to establish their presence in the Americas, they brought a range of
technology unavailable to the peoples they encountered in the Western Hemisphere. Even more important
than European technology, however, were the divisions between indigenous peoples that Europeans were
able to exploit and the effects of epidemic diseases that devastated native societies. Soon after their arrival
in the Western Hemisphere, Spanish conquerors toppled the Aztec and Inca empires and imposed their
own rule in Mexico and Peru. In later decades, Portuguese planters built sugar plantations on the
Brazilian coastline. French, English, and Dutch migrants displaced indigenous peoples in North America
and established settler colonies under the rule of European peoples.

Throughout the Americas, relations between individuals of American, European, and African ancestry
soon led to the emergence of mestizo populations. European peoples and their Euro-American offspring
increasingly dominated political and economic affairs in the Americas. They oversaw the mining of
precious metals, the cultivating of cash crops such as sugar and tobacco, and the trapping of furbearing
animals to supply capitalist markets that met the voracious demands of European and Asian consumers.
Over time they also established their Christian religion as the dominant faith of the Western Hemisphere.
Though geographically distant from the Americas, Australia and the Pacific islands underwent
experiences similar to those that transformed the Western Hemisphere in early modern times. Like their
American counterparts, the peoples of Oceania had no inherited or acquired immunity to diseases that
were common to peoples throughout the Eastern Hemisphere, and their numbers plunged when epidemic
disease struck their populations. European mariners thoroughly explored the Pacific basin between the
sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but only in Guam and the Mariana Islands did they establish
permanent settlements before the late eighteenth century. Nevertheless, their scouting of the region laid a
foundation for much more intense interactions between European, Euro-American, Asian, and Oceanic
peoples during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There were significant differences in how
Europeans dealt with native peoples of the Americas and Oceania, in the kinds of labor systems
Europeans employed to exploit the resources they now controlled, and what kind of syncretic societies
developed.

Ch 13: Africa and the Wider World

African history is much more than the slave trades. Muslim merchants who ventured to sub-Saharan
Africa after the eighth century brought trade that encouraged the formation of large kingdoms and
empires in west Africa and thriving city-states in east Africa. Long before Europe had a university, west
Africa did. The region saw three massive trade-tribute states arise: Ghana, Mali, and Songhay. In east
Africa and in the upper reaches of the Nile, Christian African states more than a millennia old struggled to
remain viable in the aftermath of massive Arab Muslim movements to conquer or trade with the area.

African peoples continued to form states during the early modern era, but under the influence of maritime
trade, the patterns of state development changed. Regional kingdoms replaced the imperial states of west
Africa as people organized their societies to take advantage of Atlantic as well as trans-Saharan
commerce. The city-states of east Africa fell under the domination of Portuguese merchant-mariners
seeking commercial opportunities in the Indian Ocean basin. The extension of trade networks also led to
the formation of regional kingdoms in central and southern Africa. As the volume of long-distance trade
grew, both Islam and Christianity became more prominent in sub-Saharan African societies.

Of all the processes that linked Africa to the larger Atlantic world in early modern times, the most
momentous was the Atlantic slave trade, which fundamentally altered the relationship between Africa and
the rest of the world. From the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, Europeans looked to Africa as a source
of labor for sprawling plantations they established in the Western Hemisphere and on the Indian Ocean
coast. In exchange for slaves, Africans received European manufactured products—most notably
firearms, which they sometimes used to strengthen military forces that then sought further recruits for the
slave trade. There were three slave trades out of Africa—the transatlantic, the trans-Saharan, and the east
African Indian Ocean trade. The trans-Saharan and east African slave trades were much older than the
transatlantic and continued long after the trans-Atlantic slave trade ended. The transatlantic slave trade,
however, grew from a trickle to a massive movement that impacted many of the states bordering the
Atlantic in western and central Africa.

The seemingly insatiable European demand for slaves led to the creation of an African supply of slaves.
African rulers and traders supplied the slaves that Europeans bought. Many factors made European
control of the slave trade out of Africa impossible. The African rulers of states along the Atlantic were
more powerful than the Europeans and refused to cede control of the trade to Europeans. Europeans also
were susceptible to African diseases. Yet African rulers did not see their sale of other people from the
region as unusual because slavery in Africa, like in most other parts of the world, was normalized. Nor
did they sell their own people; they sold prisoners of war, criminals, and people who had sold themselves
into slavery to pay off debts. The idea of “Africa” was largely foreign in this period. Much like Europeans
did not see themselves as a unified group, but as many different peoples who had a lot of (often violent)
conflict, Africans too saw their states and communities as distinct and had many different priorities and
motivations in their interactions.

Due to the Atlantic slave trade, the African world grew in the Americas, especially along the coasts of the
Atlantic (Brazil and Guianas) and the Caribbean, most notably wherever plantation agriculture existed.2
There they cultivated cash crops that made their way into commercial arteries linking lands throughout
the Atlantic Ocean basin. Some slaves worked as urban laborers or domestic servants, and in Mexico and
Peru, many also worked as miners. Although deprived of their freedom, slaves often resisted their
bondage, and they built hybrid syncretic cultural traditions comprised of African, European, and
American elements.

Most European and American states ended the slave trade and abolished slavery during the early
nineteenth century. It took Muslim states a while longer to do so. By that time the African diaspora— the
dispersal of African peoples and their descendants—had left a permanent mark throughout the Western
Hemisphere. And the impact of the slave trade on Atlantic coastal and interior lands has lasted until the
present age.

Ch 14: Tradition and Change in East Asia

During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, China experienced the trauma of rule by the Yuan dynasty
(1279–1368) of nomadic Mongol warriors. Mongol overlords ignored Chinese political and cultural
traditions, and they displaced Chinese bureaucrats in favor of Turkish, Persian, and other foreign
administrators. When the Yuan dynasty came to an end, the Ming emperors who succeeded it sought to
erase all signs of Mongol influence and restore traditional ways to China. Looking to the Tang and Song
dynasties for inspiration, they built a powerful imperial state, revived the civil service staffed by
Confucian scholars, and promoted Confucian thought. Rulers of the succeeding Qing dynasty were
themselves Manchus of nomadic origin, but they too worked zealously to promote Chinese ways. Ming
and Qing emperors alike were deeply conservative: their principal concern was to maintain stability in a
large agrarian society, so they adopted policies that favored Chinese political and cultural traditions. The
state they fashioned governed China for more than half a millennium.

By modeling their governmental structure on the centralized imperial states of earlier Chinese dynasties,
the Ming and Qing emperors succeeded in their goal of restoring and maintaining traditional ways in
China. They also sought to preserve the traditional hierarchical and patriarchal social order. Yet while the
emperors promoted conservative political and social policies, China experienced economic and social
changes partly as a result of influences from abroad.

Agricultural production increased dramatically—especially after the introduction of new food crops from
the Americas—and fueled rapid population growth. Meanwhile, global trade brought China enormous
wealth, which stimulated the domestic economy by encouraging increased trade, manufacturing, and
urban growth. These developments deeply influenced Chinese society and partly undermined the stability
the Ming and Qing emperors sought to preserve.

The Ming and Qing emperors looked to Chinese traditions for guidance in framing their cultural as well
as their political and social policies. They provided generous support for Confucianism, particularly in the
form of neo-Confucianism articulated by the twelfth-century scholar Zhu Xi, and they ensured that formal
education in China revolved around Confucian thought and values. Yet the Confucian tradition was not
the only cultural alternative in Ming and Qing China.

Demographic and urban growth encouraged the emergence of a vibrant popular culture in Chinese cities,
and European missionaries reintroduced Roman Catholic Christianity to China and acquainted Chinese
intellectuals with European science and technology. After some initial successes, Catholic missionaries
made little headway in their attempts to convert east Asians and came to be seen by the elites and the
governors as politically destabilizing. Most European merchandise had little appeal to the elite Chinese
and Japanese, and the Confucian bias against merchants added to the elite disdain of European traders.
Even though they were at the bottom of the Confucian social scale, eighteenth-century east Asian
merchants were becoming increasingly wealthy and prominent. The Chinese in particular benefited from
an influx of silver from Spanish-American mines by way of Manila. In Japan, urban-based merchants
patronized the “floating world” of geishas, sumo wrestling, and kabuki theater, creating their own
subculture in Tokugawa Japan.

During the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the political unification of Japan ended an
extended period of civil disorder. Like the Ming and Qing emperors in China, the Tokugawa shoguns
sought to lay a foundation for long-term political and social stability, and they provided generous support
for neo-Confucian studies in an effort to promote traditional values. Indeed, the shoguns went even
further than their Chinese counterparts by promoting conservative values and tightly restricting foreign
influence in Japan. As in China, however, demographic expansion and economic growth fostered social
and cultural change in Japan, and merchants introduced Chinese and European influences into Japan.

Ch 15: Empires in South and Southwest Asia

By the sixteenth century, Turkish warriors had transformed the major Islamic areas of the world into vast
regional empires. Three empires divided up the greater part of the Islamic world: the Ottoman empire,
which was distinguished by its multiethnic character; the Safavid empire of Persia, which served as the
center of Shi’a Islam; and the Mughal empire, which had been imposed over a predominantly Hindu
Indian subcontinent. The creation of these durable and powerful political entities brought an end to a
century and a half of Muslim political disunity. The Islamic empires began as small warrior principalities
in frontier areas. They expanded at varying rates and with varying degrees of success at the expense of
neighboring states. As they grew, they devised elaborate administrative and military institutions. Under
the guidance of talented and energetic rulers, each empire organized an effective governmental apparatus
and presided over a prosperous society.

Despite their ethnically and religiously diverse populations, there were striking similarities in the
development of Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal societies. All relied on bureaucracies that drew inspiration
from the steppe traditions of Turkish and Mongol peoples and from the heritage of Islam. They adopted
similar economic policies and sought ways to maintain harmony in societies that embraced many different
religious and ethnic groups. Rulers of all the empires also sought to enhance the legitimacy of their
regimes by providing for public welfare and associating themselves with literary and artistic talent.

The Islamic empires underwent dramatic change between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. The
Safavid empire disappeared entirely. In 1722 a band of Afghan tribesmen marched all the way to Isfahan,
blockaded the city until its starving inhabitants resorted to cannibalism, forced the shah to abdicate, and
executed thousands of Safavid officials as well as many members of the royal family. After the death of
Aurangzeb in 1707, Mughal India experienced provincial rebellions and foreign invasions. By mid-
century the subcontinent was falling under British imperial rule. By 1700 the Ottomans, too, were on the
defensive: the sultans lost control of remote provinces such as Lebanon and Egypt, and throughout the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European and Russian states placed political, military, and economic
pressure on the shrinking Ottoman realm.

The early modern Muslim world makes an easy comparison to other civilizations of this period. While the
Ottomans, Mughals, and Safavids created gunpowder empires (a common theme of this time period),
their governmental structures were different from the Europeans, east Asians, and Africans. One major
difference was the ethnic makeup of these empires. They were all multicultural or multi-religious states
that required the Muslim leadership to create institutions to regulate relations. Another difference was the
limited desire by Muslim elites to change their states or structures when confronted by the more powerful
Europeans. Heavily dependent on agriculture and the local markets or bazaars, all three paid scant
attention to external commerce except as a source of tax revenues and often left trade in the hands of
ethnic minorities. Although the Muslim states were in contact with the wider world through war,
diplomacy, alliances, and commerce, they had little interest in contact with the Europeans and were not
overly impacted by the Columbian Exchange.