Strayer, Chapter 16 pp 477 - 488

The scientific breakthroughs of the early modern period can be attributed somewhat to the preservation of texts from the Greco-Roman world and innovations and improvements upon the original ideas by Arab scholars between 800 A.D. – 1400 A.D. Arabs scholars made strides in astronomy, mathematics, optics, medicine, that far exceeded the technological and scientific gains within Europe. Similarly, Confucian China of the same period didn’t have a lot of religious dogma holding back scientific and technological innovations. However, there had been some legal institutions, codes of law and academic institutions that had grown separate from the Catholic Church, whereas within Islam there was no such distinctions in the way science and technology had evolved. The University of Paris, for example was built upon a cooperative or guild model with masters and (apprentices) scholars, which could both admit or expel students, as well as establish core curriculum, teaching credentials ad nauseam. This model was repeated in several European universities. A time came when scholars in Europe started to take charge of their own understanding of science and technology, in which God wasn’t responsible for their sense of knowledge and intellect. Whereas in Islam there was a limit; there was a fundamental belief amongst Muslims that all knowledge came from God. So, an Islamic scholar had limits on how much he or she could study and postulate before it challenged the theological dictums of the Koran. The Koran even said apparently, “May God protect us from useless knowledge. Chinese academic institutions also restricted freedom of thought. Their focus was geared towards preparing scholars with a rigorous set of studies emphasizing humanistic and and moral texts that conformed to Confucian morality. The Chinese scholars acquired knowledge to be more efficient in their civic duties rather than for personal enrichment of knowledge they had learned.

It was during this time that scholars like Copernicus postulated that the earth was not the center of the universe and that the planets revolved around the sun. It was considered heresy, and the Catholic Church didn’t pardon the heresy charge for centuries. It’s estimated that some of his work drew upon the astronomical work down in Maragha, Persia 200 years prior. Discovering the new world suggested that the Church didn’t know everything. They didn’t know about all these new people, these new continents, new commodities, and new ideas. So, it was only natural that the age of scientific discovery began in Europe when it did. It was when skepticism became more predominant in western European thinking.  The culmination of the scientific revolution occurred with the work of Sir Isaac Newton’s studies about the universe and gravity. Because of Newton’s ideas, scientists and scholars left behind superstition and believed there was a certain order to the way nature and the universe work in terms of cause and effect. God was removed from the equation. Man was no longer under the minor status of God, but rather, with science, mankind could chart and predict his own destiny. Descarte said, “Cogito Ergo Sum (I think, therefore, I am).”

Strayer chapter 16

I didn’t quite understand the reference by Vasco da Gama “in search of Christians and spices,” so out of curiosity, I looked up a realiable academic source.; I thought perhaps it meant the Portugese were looking for Christians already in India, but they were actually looking for converts and enemies of Christianity.:

"1498. Calicut. [Arrival.] That night (May 20) we anchored two leagues from the city of Calicut, and we did so because our pilot mistook Capna, a town at that place, for Calicut. Still further there is another town called Pandarani. We anchored about a league and a half from the shore. After we were at anchor, four boats (almadias) approached us from the land, who asked of what nation we were. We told them, and they then pointed out Calicut to us.

On the following day (May 22) these same boats came again alongside, when the captain-major sent one of the convicts to Calicut, and those with whom he went took him to two Moors from Tunis, who could speak Castilian and Genoese. The first greeting that he received was in these words: "May the Devil take thee! What brought you hither?" They asked what he sought so far away from home, and he told them that we came in search of Christians and of spices. They said: "Why does not the King of Castile, the King of France, or the Signoria of Venice send thither?" He said that the King of Portugal would not consent to their doing so, and they said he did the right thing. After this conversation they took him to their lodgings and gave him wheaten bread and honey. When he had eaten he returned to the ships, accompanied by one of the Moors, who was no sooner on board, than he said these words: "A lucky venture, a lucky venture! Plenty of rubies, plenty of emeralds! You owe great thanks to God, for having brought you to a country holding such riches!" We were greatly astonished to hear his talk, for we never expected to hear our language spoken so far away from Portugal." http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1497degama.asp

For Columbus, he said he “hoped they’d become Christians,” but he was more interested in acquiring spices and openings to new markets for his Spanish financiers than getting converts. The Puritans weren’t interested in converts from the Native American population, but they wanted their land regardless. Catholic missionaries spread the majority of missionary orders around the world. Europeans saw their military and political conquests as by divine right by God.

Missionary efforts in Asia in later centuries occurred more specifically around the time of the Ming Dynasty, but China was not a country that could be easily subdued, with mostly missionaries and traders coming there. The missionaries actually needed permission of the Chinese authorities to do their proselytizing. Jesuits in particular made efforts to learn Chinese and exchange eastern and western ideas. It was hoped that by drawing parallels with Confucian teachings that Christianity would be more easily embraced. However, the Chinese really didn’t need Christianity since their native faiths were well established, and they didn’t wish to reject Chinese traditions that Christianity would ask them to give up. The Chinese were suspicious of missionaries claims of miracles, which they considered superstition.

Islam experienced a broad expansion and revival at this time, but there was a certain amount of syncretism that occurred that Islamic authority tried to clamp down in African and India, for example. Hinduism experienced a tradition called Bhakti in which caste distinctions were sometimes ignored in favor of a direct experience with the divine without the intercession of Brahmin priests, which emphasized art, dance, and poetry. This movement was very appealing to women. Using Confucian values as a framework, China experienced a period somewhat analogous to The Enlightenment in which scholars sought to establish a scientific method to verify facts through research with evidence a.k.a.  “kaozheng”  during the late Ming Dynasty. There was also a lot of revival and inquiry into works of antiquity during the Qing period.

Strayer, part IV, pp 448 - 458, CH 15

Between a 400 year period between the mid-fifteenth t- the mid-nineteenth century, there were an estimated 11 million slaves taken from Africa and shipped via the Atlantic Middle Passage. The textbook indicates that African society was disrupted, others were corrupted, and others were strengthened. Slavery is not a unique institution to early modern history. There was slavery even during the ancient era. And early readings suggested that the Industrial Revolution didn’t occur as quickly in the past because there was a large labor pool to discourage industrial innovation. Obviously, slavery was a part of that early modern labor poor. But, unlike the early modern era, from the ancient period onwards slavery was not racially motivated. Slaves before the early modern era were often prisoners of war, or they’d committed crimes, amongst some examples. In the Islamic world it’s no surprise to hear that female slaves were favored by a 2 – 1 margin. This figure conjures up images of the harems in the Islamic world. Slavery prior to 1500 could sometimes become “respected” members of households, but sometimes the children of slaves inherited their parents slave status. The Greeks and the Romans even had some of their children educated by slaves, if they were knowledgeable of foreign languages or some academic knowledge that was useful. Slavery before 1500 tended not to be within the purview of large-scale operations, such as plantations, but rather they worked in shops, small farms et cetera. Sugar plantations in the Mediterranian were the first large-scale producers of commodities requiring a large influx of slaves by Europeans around the time of the Crusades.

I had heard that the ethnic designation of “Slav” became the basis of our word for “slave” before, but Strayer was the first source that ever asserted it in writing. Because the trade of Slavic slaves was cut off from the Ottomans and because Native American populations were dying off, the west African slave trade had a major boom. However, racism in Slavery always somewhat existed in Europe. The English weren’t really so confident that they knew how to conduct the slave business effectively at first, so I know outside of the textbook, form other historians that Ireland was kind of a test-market for slavery to see how well the English did at slavery. The textbook presents coastal west Africans as being able to more easily defend themselves than history gives them credit. However, the Europeans didn’t always go inland to capture slaves. They hired middlemen to do the capturing much of the time. Europeans would often exploit tribal rivalries in which the slaves came as captured prisoners of war by rival tribes. Of course, many of the initial negations for slaves began at the highest level with west African kings and receiving their blessings in exchange for goods that the Europeans rendered unto them such as: metals, firearms, gunpowder, tobacco, alcohol, and decorative items, such as beads. Some of the goods had first been purchased elsewhere or mined in the Americas and traded for the slaves. This is what’s known as the triangle trades.

Strayer Chapter 15

Strayer first gives a brief summation of Columbus’ early voyages as well as other prominent explorers and their immediate impact upon the Columbian exchange. He then goes into discussing the backstory of the Black Plague, and its effects upon European population. Then he goes into a brief synopsis about mediterranian trading blocs such as Venice and how the rise of Islam disrupted trade for Europeans, causing the age of exploration, slavery, the implied triangle trade ad nauseam.

The Portuguese had a choice to be peaceful traders or a military, mercantile power.  While Asian goods were attractive in European markets they weren’t attractive,nor lucrative in European markets.  The Portuguese didn’t have much in the way of military and economic rivals in the trading lanes of the Indian ocean, so they jumped at the opportunity to dominate these trade routes. Their ships were fast and highly maneuverable if they did come upon any threats such as pirates, opposing naval forces, or coastal fortifications which they could bombard.

The Portuguese also acquired a foothold in coastal India and Asia where they established colonies such as Macao through bribery and negotiations with Asian leaders, forcibly using strong-armed tactics. This was not without some resistance. Some 1,500 people were killed when the protestors resisted giving up their acquisition of large quantities of cotton and silk in Mombasa, east Africa.  The Portuguese created the “trading post empire” in the Indian Ocean, mostly to control the flow of materials and resources they wanted. The Portuguese were not very interesting and colonial land acquisition itself in the far East as much as other colonial powers. The Portuguese found themselves outnumbered by Asian traders, so they’d sometimes marry local women to gain trading rights and property rights.

Spain, of course, would attempt to challenge Portugal’s monopolies on trade routes in the Indian Ocean by the 16^th Century.  The Spanish annexed the Philippines as a base of trading operations since the the Dutch and Portuguese had already established trade monopolies in Borneo, Sumatra, India, and east Africa. The Spanish also were very zealous in their missionaries proselytizing in the territories they acquired compared to other colonial powers. The annexation of the Philippines was described as “bloodless.” Taxes and alms were used to subdue native populations as part of Christian life and many Spaniards were known to marry into Filipino families. The rising prosperity of the Philippines under Spanish rule also attracted Chinese and Japanese merchants to settle the islands.

Part 4: Empires and Encounters 1450 - 1750 pages 417 - 430

The Russian expansion into the Siberian steppes of Eurasia was a very rapid development. According to Strayer, the Russians didn’t force the people they subjugated onto reservations, but there were certainly efforts to “Russify them,” i.e., get them to adopt Russian language and culture. By the 18^th Century, 700,000 Russians had settled eastward within its expanded borders. Ukrainians and other Slavic speakers shared some of the demographic to outpace the population growth of indigenous peoples in Siberia, who were down to 30% by that time. The Russians encountered little resistance in their conquest in Eurasia. Although, there were times that it was a challenge to tax the populations of indigenous peoples. Siberia was sort of a frontier or wild west for some on the fringes of Russian society. Especially, the Cossacks, who were a culture of roving bands of outlaws that had escaped serfdom, who were permitted some autonomy in Siberia. They even built wooden buildings that the textbook showed some examples of. Part of the impetus for the Russians empire-building was the acquisition of raw materials., especially the fur trade in Siberia, which was nearly as valuable as commodity as gold.  Russians of course, had numerous invasions by the Mongols, who’d established kingdoms on their borders. So, one could speculate that some of their motivations for expanding the Russian empire was to create “buffer states,” so that in the future other civilizations with imperialistic ambitions couldn’t so easily threaten the stability of the empire. What set the Russian empire-building stage apart from other western powers was that unlike Spain, England, France, and Portugal for example, there was no need for the Russians to go overseas to acquire new land.  But, it seemed as if the Russians felt as if they needed to somehow catch up with the other European powers in terms of economic growth. So, annexing Siberian commodities seemed to be the most logical course of action.

China on the other hand, was closed off and looked inward on itself until the early modern period.  But, instead of expanding eastward, the Chinese expanded their empire into western realms such as the Gobi Desert, Tibet, Mongolia et cetera. It took 8 years for the Qing dynasty to militarily pacify these areas so that they could be governed by the Chinese expansionism.  The Chinese like the Russians were also empire-building partially because of security concerns, and like the Russians, had felt the brunt of the Mongol invaders in the past. The Chinese didn’t rule their newly conquered areas with ethnic Chinese aristocrats from the imperial court. Rather, the Chinese created a special department charged with managing the modus operandi of Mongol aristocrats and Muslim officials in these areas. The Chinese didn’t at this time try to change the ethnic demographics of these areas; because they feared the Chinese civility would impact the fierce warrior ethic of the Mongolian warriors they were trying to recruit into their armed forces, for example. One has to realize that the Chinese dynasties have always been very pragmatic, and administered government with an emphasis upon harmony, by allowing a certain degree of coexistence between varying religious and ethnic groups, so long as they didn’t threaten the absolute authority of the Chinese state.

Travels In Siberia handout (extra credit)

The story begins with an anecdote about Genghis Khan seeking out a monk famed with wisdom and medicinal knowledge to make the great khan immortal. Genghis Khan perhaps was so ambitions in his conquests in his own lifetime that he still wanted to conquer more territory once he realized his time on Earth was drawing to a close. He was born surrounded by divine-right legends as Temuchin. And in his early life united the Mongol tribes and conquered territories from China all the way to Muslim lands in central Asian steppe, bordering on the Middle East.  It was said that the Mongols practically lived their whole lives on horseback. They shaved the crowns of their heads, leaving bangs, filed their weapons constantly. Their arrows were “four fingers broad” to inflict larger wounds. They wore shiny armor and where known both for the military tactics as much as their psychological warfare. They’d even mock enemies such as Muslim infantries war cries. The Mongols according to historians even were feared from the stench of their unwashed clothes. And perhaps they stank also because they drank mares milk, which would have caused them to have a rancid odor. For the Mongols, they had not only conquer, but also destroy. Genghis Khan once famously said about his ambitions, “It is not enough that I succeed. All others must fail!”  Genghis really had a strong blood-lust. He also said, “The greatest pleasures in life is to ‘cut my enemies to pieces, drive them before me, seize their possessions, witness the tears of those who are dear to them and to embrace their wives and daughters.” One Persian chronicler said that “not one in a thousand of the inhabitants survived” where Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes had invaded and decimated the local populations.

It was not enough to conquer and intimidate. Genghis Khan had many wives and so did his sons and soldiers. One historian hypothesized that Genghis Khan sired 20,000 descendants.  Geneticists later studying the Y chromosome in Asia found that at least 8% of the populations could trace their lineage to  a common ancestor (perhaps Genghis Khan himself) out of sixteen million men or 1% of the population. The Mongols during Genghis’ lifetime didn’t take much interest in the Russian empire. Their primary focus was later on the Islamic empires to the west after they’d conquered China.  However, later on the Mongols a.k.a. The Tatars would invade Russia and the Ukraine. When the Mongols took Kiev they did a lot of burning and they even opened up tombs, scattering and crushing the bones. It’s thought that no czar until Alexander II dared make military annexations past the Urals because the Mongols had so imbued the Russian psyche with their psychological warfare in the past. A Mongol general under the Mongol ruler, Tamerlane even managed to at one point burn Moscow to the ground. It was only when the Mongols were absorbed into the populations they’d subjugated; the Mongols adopted those peoples faiths that the Mongol threat truly ended for the western world.

Part Four: Empires and Encounters 1450 - 1750

The New World was closest to the Europeans sphere of influence. Especially the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, and Dutch. The Spaniards motivations in particular could be summed up by one conquistador as: “We came here to serve God and king, and also to get rich. The Conquistadors used divide and conquer strategies to take over Mesoamerican civilizations. In the case of the Aztecs, the Spaniards simply allied themselves with subjugated peoples that were not so thrilled about their tributary relationships with the Aztecs. The Aztecs were somewhat akin to  ancient Greek city states in the makeup of their empire. Their technology was nowhere near on par with the Europeans. The native peoples had no wheels, iron, horses, pigs, cows, or even gunpowder. In the case of the Incans, the Spaniards exploited two rival brothers fighting for the throne.

While the Europeans brought their livestock and other aforementioned examples of their technology to the new world, it was a two-fold process within the Columbian Exchange. American crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava would become the bedrock of poor Europeans diets. Nowhere more so, than Ireland where the Irish peasantry would later suffer from the Irish Potato Famine in the 19^th Century. In China corn, peanuts, and sweet potatoes supplemented rice and wheat and would soon account for 20% of the Chinese diet.

 

The Far East was too far from European influence for the most part during the early modern period.  Although, items such as gunpowder, porcelain and various technologies were integral in the evolution of western technologies. The Europeans participated in a three-fold triangle trade in which they traded raw metals for African slaves, and would then sell the slaves to buy spices from Asian trade consortiums in the Far East. About 90% of the native peoples of the Americas died mostly from European diseases that they had no immunities too, otherwise known by historians as “The Great Dying.” Many Europeans were perplexed prior to the Great Dying on how to annex land from native peoples for their own schemes. But when this large die-off occurred, some surmised that God wanted all these natives to die, so that Europeans could by divine right have their lands.

Europeans would have according to some historians, been significantly delayed in their industrial revolutions and rise in economic power had they not discovered and colonized the new world when they had. Their colonies provided Europe with the raw materials and commodities that jump-started their industrial revolution.

About the same time as Europeans were colonizing the Americas the Russians began expanding their empire into the central Asian step and across Siberia, especially to gain a monopoly on the fur trade. Unlike the Europeans in central and south America, the Russians rarely inter-bred with the peoples the subjugated. However, the Russians did attempt to “Russify” the local cultures they annexed by encouraging them to speak Russian and adopt Russian cultural norms. Most of these peoples were hunter-gatherer groups. Between 1500 – 1800 Russia extended her borders all the way to the Pacific, making it the largest country on Earth still today. In the 21^st Century Russians continue to be perplexed by the question of whether they are more European or Asian given that the Ural mountains acts as a natural divide between European and Asian cultures.

Sweet Nexus: Sugar And The Origins of The Modern World (1600 - 1800)

Sugar redefined the socio-economic structures of the early modern period.  But, it was this commodity that was the first to be produced and used for global consumption. At first it was just a luxury for the aristocracy. Of course, with sugar, coffee, tea, and cocoa became synonymous with the sugar trade. It’s strange to think of items like coffee, tea, sugar, and tobacco as drugs because today we consume these things and they are not illegal. However, according to Pomeranz and Topic, in their seminal work, “The economic culture of drugs,” they were historically considered drugs because of “the altered states of being upon ingestion.” We wouldn’t however consider candy or sweetened coffee drugs today.

I never realized that sugar existed in Asia before reading this handout. I was always under the impression that it never existed in the ancient world, that it was only discovered and consumed after the discovery of the new world. But, apparently the Greeks encountered sugar in India in the fourth century B.C.E.  Although, the rest of Europe knew nothing of this spice. The Europeans thought sugar was only rumored to exist before The Crusades.  It was the Muslims who introduced sugar to Europeans, but even then it was grown in limited quantities.  I always knew the Venetians gained a lot of wealth because the city was built upon marshes with unlimited salt supplies as a preservative. But, I was not aware that the Venetians also had a lucrative business trading sugar. The Venetians apparently thought sugar had medicinal value, which seems contrary to nutritional values we know today.

Apparently Columbus was the first to introduce sugar to the new world. However, the Portugese were the first civilization that were the first to introduce sugar production first on their Atlantic islands then to the West Indies and Brazil. The Dutch, British, French, and Spanish also tried to get into the modes and means of sugar production and trade by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the 18^th century the sugar industry made many very rich due to its high demand by consumers. Queen Elizabeth I was perhaps one of the first persons notable in history to have a “sweet tooth” for sugar, and had dental problems as a consequence. It wasn’t until after 1660 that the middle and lower classes began to consumer sugar in larger quantities. By the 18^th century, it was the most common sweetener used in coffeehouses.

It seems odd that people in the early modern period actually thought a sugar-laden beverage could replace a whole meal; they thought beer and bread weren’t healthy enough, when in fact there were more nutrition in beer and bread than in sugar. I confess this is not the first time I’d heard of the triangle trades. I learned about the triangle trades in a Latin American history course in 2012. We know of the Boston Tea Party, but probably most Americans haven’t heard of the Navigation Acts, meant to tax Americans producing rum (a by-product of sugar) being one of the causes of the American Revolution.

Sugar was so bulky in its raw, unprocessed form that it had to be broken down in series of steps by slaves on or near the plantation in an agro-industrial scale. It had to be crushed, then the sugar juice was extracted and shipped and then the final leg of the manufacturing process took place in Europe or America. Most of the profits earned on sugar were in Europe not in Brazil or the West Indies where it was produced in the highest quantities and broken down into by-products such as molasses and rum. The production of sugar had the highest mortality rate of any commodity produced by African slaves.

Chapter 4: The Early Modern World 1450 1750

Although this is chapter 4 in my World History II course, it's more of an excerpt than a chapter.  for If anyone in my course reading this, I should mention that on the first day of class nobody asked about the minimum word requirements for this course. As a rule of thumb, Professor Andrews has asked for a minimum of 500 words per blog entry in a previous course I took, so until you get clarity, I would assume the same rule applies for this course? You can count your words by first typing your entries into Microsoft Word then paste into your blogs. The textbook is at least colorful, making it an engaging read. However, it's unfortunate that Strayer doesn't highlight key terms. But, at least the author reminds you of the key terms covered at the end of each chapter. I did have to answer the study questions with partners in my World History I class with this textbook, so hopefully that will be helpful if employed.

What does it mean on page 397 that Europeans used their new-found wealth from silver to "buy themselves into Asian trade routes? It doesn't say more specifically what they gained? I'm going to make an educated guess that they bought spices brought from Asia along the Silk Road.  The implication is that in some cases missionaries spread their beliefs and ideas further than explorers. New crops such as potatoes and corn allowed poor populations in the east and west to sustain larger population growth that hadn't been possible before. The Irish, which we might or might not read about later were one of these civilizations that become very dependant on the potato in terms of higher nutritional needs that sustained more population growth. The chapter suggests that there were periods where civilizations were on the verge of industrialization, but factors stopped the surge of scientific innovation. I won't speculate too much about the reasons for this, but the textbook does sort of give us a clue that slavery, i.e., free labor discouraged industrialization. Civilizations in the early modern era were also doing a lot of "empire building," so perhaps there wasn't a lot of motivation to build up industrial infrastructure in more localized areas. Especially, since the early modern era was largely motivated by the acquisition of commodities, raw materials from untapped markets. With this new-found wealth new nations such as the Netherlands and Spain rose.

More and more people found themselves drawn to urban areas to produce goods for consumers far away, but because there was a lot invested in quality craftsmanship, there really wasn't a strong motivating factor to changes the modes of production to mass-produce cheaper goods even as steam power and other aspects of the industrial revolution were coming into being.

The early modern period saw a mixture of old feudal systems such as the Hindu caste system in Indian and values such as monarchies and Confucian ethos in China for example, that weren't eroded away quickly because societies in the east and west still had a large agrarian segment producing goods.