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.