AP World History Unit 4 - Transoceanic Interconnections Terms (and more)

1. God: to convert the heathens

2. Glory: personal and national

3. Gold: riches and resources

• Strong ships: construction techniques improves

• Three masted caravel: Larger ship that could go further with more supplies

• Lateen sails: ship could sail in a direction other than with the wind directly behind them

• Sternpost rudder: steering paddle on the stern of the ship; better steering

• Astrolabe: measure the distance of the sun and stars above the horizon to determine latitude

• Magnetic compass: sailors could maintain directions without seeing land

• Mapmaking, ship design, navigation, sailing techniques

• Ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, horses

• Crusades showed many new goods

• Cut out the “middlemen” (Muslim empires between Europe and Asia)

• Countries on the Atlantic rim of Europe (Portugal, Spain Britain, and France) were closer to the Americas than the Asian empires.

• Complex current system and fixed winds that blew in the same direction of the Atlantic Ocean, forced Western mariners to innovate ships that were among the most maneuverable in the world.

• Europeans were aware of their region’s marginal position in the rich world of Eurasian commerce and were determined to gain access.

• Once the Americas were discovered, lots of natural resources, including agricultural lands, drove further expansion.

• The rich markets of the Indian Ocean world provided little incentive for the Chinese, Indian, or Muslim participants to venture beyond their own waters.

• Hernán Cortés: Spanish conquistador who led the expedition that conquered the Aztec Empire in modern Mexico. Defeated Aztecs due to steel weapons and armor, horses, guns

  Francisco Pizarro: defeated Incas. Defeated Incas due to disease and steel weapons.

• Christopher Columbus: sailed for Spain; 4 voyages (in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue); calls the natives ‘Indians’; never reaches Asia; believed the Earth was 17,000 nautical miles in circumference; opened New World to European exploration.

• Vasco da Gama: sailed for Portugal; sailed from Portugal to India; brought back pepper and cinnamon; opened direct trade to India, Portuguese trade port of Calicut; it was the outcome of a deliberate, systematic, century-long Portuguese effort to explore a sea route to the East, by creeping slowly down the West African coast, around the tip of South Africa, up the East African coast, and finally across the Indian Ocean to India.

• Ferdinand Magellan: born in Portugal but sailed for Spain; sailed south around South America (Strait of Magellan), crossed the Pacific Ocean; first expedition to circumnavigate the Earth.

• Amerigo Vespucci: first person to recognize that he was in a “New World”

• Agreement between Spain and Portugal to divide the New World

• Written by the Pope (Alexander 6th)

• East-West Line (did not know accurate sizes)

• East became Portuguese: Brazil and Africa

• West became Mexico and North America

• Portuguese: Brazil

• Spanish: New Spain (present day Mexico), New Granda, Peru, Rio de la Plata, Florida, Cuba, Santo Domingo

• English: East Coast of present day U.S., area near Hudson Bay

• French: Haiti, Louisiana (central U.S.) to Quebec, part of Gulana

• Dutch: Gulana

Term used to describe the devastating demographic impact of European-borne epidemic diseases on the Americas; in many cases, up to 90 percent of the pre-Columbian population died.

A period of unusually cool temperatures from the 13th to 19th centuries, most prominently in the Northern Hemisphere.

The near-record cold winters experienced in much of China, Europe, and North America in the mid-seventeenth century, sparked by the Little Ice Age; extreme weather conditions led to famines, uprisings, and wars.

Regions near the equator in the tropics and Southern Hemisphere also experienced extreme conditions and irregular rainfall, resulting, for instance, in the growth of the Sahara Desert. Wet, cold summers reduced harvests dramatically in Europe, while severe droughts ruined crops in many other regions, especially China, which suffered terrible drought between 1637 and 1641. Difficult weather conditions accentuated other stresses in societies, leading to widespread famines, epidemics, uprisings, and wars in which millions perished. Eurasia did not escape lightly from these stresses: the collapse of the Ming dynasty in China, nearly constant warfare in Europe, and civil war in Mughal India all occurred in the context of the General Crisis, which only fully subsided when more favorable weather patterns took hold starting in the eighteenth century.

The enormous network of transatlantic communication, migration, trade, and the transfer of diseases, plants, and animals that began in the period of European exploration and colonization of the Americas.

It gave rise to something wholly new in world history: an interacting Atlantic world that permanently connected Europe, Africa, and North and South America. But the long-term benefits of this Atlantic network were very unequally distributed. The peoples of Africa and the Americas experienced social disruption, slavery, disease, and death on an almost unimaginable scale, while Western Europeans reaped the greatest rewards. Mountains of new information flooded into Europe, shaking up conventional understandings of the world and contributing to a revolutionary new way of thinking known as the Scientific Revolution. The wealth of the colonies — precious metals, natural resources, new food crops, slave labor, financial profits, colonial markets — provided one of the foundations on which Europe’s Industrial Revolution was built. The colonies also provided an outlet for the rapidly growing population of European societies and represented an enormous extension of European civilization. In short, the colonial empires of the Americas greatly facilitated a changing global balance of power, which now thrust the previously marginal Western Europeans into an increasingly central and commanding role on the world stage. Never before in human history had such a large-scale and consequential diffusion of plants and animals operated to remake the biological environment of the planet. “Without a New World to deliver economic balance in the Old, Europe would have remained inferior, as ever, in wealth and power, to the great civilizations of Asia.”

To both: people and diease

To the Americas: horses, pigs, sugar cane, goats, chili peppers

Wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes, and many garden vegetables and fruits, as well as numerous weeds, took hold in the Americas, where they transformed the landscape and made possible a recognizably European diet and way of life. Even more revolutionary were the newcomers’ animals — horses, pigs, cattle, goats, sheep — all of which were new to the Americas and multiplied spectacularly in an environment largely free of natural predators. These domesticated animals made possible the ranching economies and cowboy cultures of both North and South America. Horses also transformed many Native American societies, particularly in the North American West, as settled farming peoples such as the Pawnee abandoned their fields to hunt bison from horseback. As a male-dominated hunting and warrior culture emerged, women lost much of their earlier role as food producers.

To Europe: corn, potatoes, squash, beans and cacao

American food crops such as corn, potatoes, and cassava spread widely in the Eastern Hemisphere, where they provided the nutritional foundation for the population growth that became everywhere a hallmark of the modern era. In Europe, calories derived from corn and potatoes helped push human numbers from some 60 million in 1400 to 390 million in 1900. Those Amerindian crops later provided cheap and reasonably nutritious food for millions of industrial workers. Potatoes, especially, allowed Ireland’s population to grow enormously and then condemned many of the Irish to starvation or emigration when an airborne fungus, also from the Americas, destroyed the crop in the mid-nineteenth century. In China, corn, peanuts, and especially sweet potatoes supplemented the traditional rice and wheat to sustain China’s modern population explosion. By the early twentieth century, food plants of American origin represented about 20 percent of total Chinese food production. In Africa, corn took hold quickly and was used as a cheap food for the human cargoes of the transatlantic trade. Beyond food crops, American stimulants such as tobacco and chocolate were soon used around the world. Tea from China and coffee from the Islamic world also spread globally, contributing to this worldwide biological exchange.

• Smaller process within the Columbian Exchange

• From Europe: manufactured goods

• From Americas: raw materials

• From Africa: slaves (mostly to the Caribbean and Brazil)

Smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, whooping cough, diphtheria

The economic theory that governments served their countries’ economic interests best by encouraging exports and accumulating bullion (precious metals such as silver and gold); helped fuel European colonialism.

Resources were sent to the mother country for processing and manufacturing, finished goods were sold to the colonies

North America: Cahokia and Mississippian tribes

Central America: Aztec Empire

South America: Inca Empire

Caste system that originated in Latin America

Hierarchy based on race

• Peninsulares: European born officials

• Creoles: born in the new world to Spanish parents

• Mestizos/as: European and Native American parents

• Mulattos:: European and African parents

• Native American and slaves: worked on forms and in mines

Spanish (prior Aztec and Inca Empires): Despite the sharp divisions among these groups, some movement was possible. Indians who acquired an education, wealth, and some European culture might “pass” as mestizo. Likewise, more fortunate mestizo families might be accepted as Spaniards over time. Colonial Spanish America was a vast laboratory of ethnic mixing and cultural change. It was dominated by Europeans, to be sure, but with a rather more fluid and culturally blended society than in the racially rigid colonies of British North America.

Portuguese (Brazil): Skin color in Brazil, and in Latin America generally, was only one criterion of class status, and the perception of color changed with the educational or economic standing of individuals. A light-skinned mulatto who had acquired some wealth or education might well pass as a white.

• Spanish settlers compelled indigenous people of the Americas to work in mines or fields

• Justification: Peninsulares would protect natives and convert them to Christianity.

• Priests attempted to reform the system by introducing more workers (African slaves)

• Large estates that used labor via the encomienda system

• Cash crops (tobacco, rice, indigo, cotton) grown and sent to Europe

The natives who were forced to work on the estates. They had high taxes, low wages, and enjoyed little control over their lives or livelihood.

• Europeans indentured servants (4-7 year terms)

• Employees were typically: chronically unemployed, orphans, political prisoners, criminals

• NOT slaves; legal agreement (with contract)

While Spanish women shared the racial privileges of their husbands, they were clearly subordinate in gender terms, unable to hold public office and viewed as weak and in need of male protection. But they were also regarded as the “bearers of civilization,” and through their capacity to produce legitimate children, they were the essential link for transmitting male wealth, honor, and status to future generations. This required strict control of their sexuality and a continuation of the Iberian obsession with “purity of blood.” In Spain, that concern had focused on potential liaisons with Jews and Muslims; in the colonies, the alleged threat to female virtue derived from Native American and African men.

Mestizas, women of mixed racial background, worked as domestic servants or in their husbands’ shops, wove cloth, and manufactured candles and cigars, in addition to performing domestic duties.

Traumatized by the Great Dying, they were subject to gross abuse and exploitation as the primary labor force for the mines and estates of the Spanish Empire and were required to render tribute payments to their Spanish overlords. Their empires dismantled by Spanish conquest, their religions attacked by Spanish missionaries, and their diminished numbers forcibly relocated into larger settlements, many Indians gravitated toward the world of their conquerors. Many learned Spanish; converted to Christianity; moved to cities to work for wages; ate the meat of cows, chickens, and pigs; used plows and draft animals rather than traditional digging sticks; and took their many grievances to Spanish courts. Indian women endured some distinctive conditions because Spanish legal codes generally defined them as minors rather than responsible adults. As those codes took hold, Indian women were increasingly excluded from the courts or represented by their menfolk. This made it more difficult to maintain female property rights, but both Andean and Maya women continued to leave personal property to their female descendants. At the local level, Indian male authorities retained a measure of autonomy, and traditional markets operated regularly. Maize, beans, and squash persisted as the major elements of Indian diets in Mexico. Christian saints in many places blended easily with specialized indigenous gods, while belief in magic, folk medicine, and communion with the dead remained strong. Memories of the past also endured.

• Uses: as a medicine, spice, sweetener, preservative, and in sculptured forms as a decoration that indicated high status.

• Large-scale sugar production had been pioneered by Arabs, who had introduced it in the Mediterranean. Europeans learned the technique and transferred it to their Atlantic island possessions and then to the Americas.

• For a century (1570–1670), Portuguese planters along the northeast coast of Brazil dominated the world market for sugar. Then the British, French, and Dutch turned their Caribbean territories into highly productive sugar-producing colonies, breaking the Portuguese and Brazilian monopoly.

• It was perhaps the first modern industry in that it produced for an international and mass market, using capital and expertise from Europe, with production facilities located in the Americas.

• In the absence of a Native American population, which had been almost totally wiped out in the Caribbean or had fled inland in Brazil, European sugarcane planters turned to Africa and the Atlantic slave trade for an alternative workforce. The vast majority of the African captives transported across the Atlantic, some 80 percent or more, ended up in Brazil and the Caribbean. (demand for sugar created plantation system)

• Slaves worked on sugar-producing estates in horrendous conditions. The heat and fire from the cauldrons, which turned raw sugarcane into crystallized sugar, reminded many visitors of scenes from Hell. These conditions, combined with disease, generated a high death rate, perhaps 5 to 10 percent per year, which required plantation owners to constantly import fresh slaves.

• More male slaves than female slaves were imported from Africa into the sugar economies of the Americas, leading to major and persistent gender imbalances.

• Women made up about half of the field gangs that did the heavy work of planting and harvesting sugarcane. They were subject to the same brutal punishments and received the same rations as their male counterparts, though they were seldom permitted to undertake the more skilled labor inside the sugar mills.

• Women who worked in urban areas, mostly for white female owners, did domestic chores and were often hired out as laborers in various homes, shops, laundries, inns, and brothels.

• Discouraged from establishing stable families, women had to endure, often alone, the wrenching separation from their children that occurred when they were sold.

The plantation complex of the Americas, based on African slavery, extended beyond the Caribbean and Brazil to encompass the southern colonies of British North America, where tobacco, cotton, rice, and indigo were major crops

Because European women had joined the colonial migration to North America at an early date, these colonies experienced less racial mixing and certainly demonstrated less willingness to recognize the offspring of such unions and accord them a place in society. A sharply defined racial system (with black Africans, “red” Native Americans, and white Europeans) evolved in North America, whereas both Portuguese and Spanish colonies acknowledged a wide variety of mixed-race groups.

By 1750 or so, slaves in what became the U.S. proved able to reproduce themselves, and by the time of the Civil War almost all North American slaves had been born in the New World. That was never the case in Latin America, where large-scale importation of new slaves continued well into the 19th century. Nonetheless, many more slaves were voluntarily set free by their owners in Brazil than in North America, and free blacks and mulattoes in Brazil had more economic opportunities than did their counterparts in the United States. At least a few among them found positions as political leaders, scholars, musicians, writers, and artists. Some were even hired as slave catchers.

Racism in Brazil was different from racism in North America. For one thing, in North America, any African ancestry, no matter how small or distant, made a person “black”; in Brazil, a person of African and non-African ancestry was considered not black, but some other mixed-race category. Racial prejudice surely persisted, for European characteristics were prized more highly than African features, and people regarded as white had enormously greater privileges and opportunities than others.

Imperial territories in which Europeans settled permanently in substantial numbers. Used in reference to the European empires in the Americas generally and particularly to the British colonies of North America.

First the Portuguese and then the Spanish, French, Dutch, and British found their way into the ancient Asian world of Indian Ocean commerce.

• Desire for tropical spices: cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, cloves, pepper; used as condiments, preservatives, medicines, and aphrodisiacs.

• Other products of the East, such as Chinese silk, Indian cottons, rhubarb for medicinal purposes, emeralds, rubies, and sapphires, were also in great demand.

• The source of supply for these much-desired goods lay solidly in Muslim hands, most immediately in Egypt. The Italian commercial city of Venice largely monopolized the European trade in Eastern goods, annually sending convoys of ships to Alexandria in Egypt. Venetians resented the Muslim monopoly on Indian Ocean trade, and other European powers disliked relying on Venice as well as on Muslims. Circumventing these monopolies provided both religious and political motivations for the Portuguese to attempt a sea route to India that bypassed both Venetian and Muslim intermediaries.

• A further problem for Europeans lay in paying for Eastern goods. Few products of an economically less developed Europe were attractive in Eastern markets. Thus Europeans were required to pay cash — gold or silver — for Asian spices or textiles. This persistent trade deficit contributed much to the intense desire for precious metals that attracted early modern European explorers, traders, and conquerors. Portuguese voyages along the West African coast, for example, were seeking direct access to African goldfields. The enormously rich silver deposits of Mexico and Bolivia provided at least a temporary solution to this persistent European problem.

The massive, interconnected web of commerce in premodern times between the lands that bordered the Indian Ocean (including East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia); the network was transformed as Europeans entered it in the centuries following 1500.

• East Africans, Arabs, Persians, Indians, Malays, Chinese, and others traded freely. Most of them were Muslims, though hailing from many separate communities, but Hindus, Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and Chinese likewise had a role in this commercial network.

Portuguese: South eastern coast of Africa

Spanish: Philippines

Dutch: Indonesia

English: India

• It was quickly apparent that European trade goods were crude and unattractive in Asian markets and that Europeans would be unable to compete effectively. Moreover, the Portuguese soon learned that most Indian Ocean merchant ships were not heavily armed and certainly lacked the onboard cannons that Portuguese ships carried. Since the withdrawal of the Chinese fleet from the Indian Ocean early in the fifteenth century, no major power was in a position to dominate the sea lanes, and many smaller-scale merchants generally traded openly, although piracy was sometimes a problem.

• Given these conditions, the Portuguese saw an opening, for their ships could outgun and outmaneuver competing naval forces, while their onboard cannons could devastate coastal fortifications. Although their overall economy lagged behind that of Asian producers, this military advantage enabled the Portuguese to quickly establish fortified bases at several key locations within the Indian Ocean world — Mombasa in East Africa, Hormuz at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, Goa on the west coast of India, Malacca in Southeast Asia, and Macao on the south coast of China. With the exception of Macao, which had been obtained through bribery and negotiations with Chinese authorities, these Portuguese bases were obtained forcibly against small and weak states. In Mombasa, for example, the commander of a Portuguese fleet responded to local resistance in 1505 by burning and sacking the city, killing some 1,500 people, and seizing large quantities of cotton and silk textiles and carpets.

• They partially blocked the traditional Red Sea route to the Mediterranean and for a century or so monopolized the highly profitable route around Africa to Europe. Even so, they never succeeded in controlling much more than half of the spice trade to Europe, and from the mid-sixteenth into the eighteenth century older routes by both land and sea through the Ottoman Empire into the Mediterranean revived and even prospered.

• By 1600, the Portuguese trading post empire was in steep decline. This small European country was overextended, and rising Asian states such as Japan, Burma, Mughal India, Persia, and the sultanate of Oman actively resisted Portuguese commercial control. Unwilling to accept a dominant Portuguese role in the Indian Ocean, other European countries also gradually contested Portugal’s efforts to monopolize the rich spice trade to Europe.

Form of imperial dominance based on control of trade through military power rather than on control of peoples or territories.

A pass that the Portuguese required of all merchant vessels attempting to trade in the Indian Ocean, and to pay duties of 6 to 10 percent on their cargoes.

Transporting Asian goods to Asian ports, thus selling their shipping services because they were largely unable to sell their goods.

Like the Portuguese before them, both the Dutch and English became heavily involved in trade within Asia. The profits from this “carrying trade” enabled them to purchase Asian goods without paying for them in gold or silver from Europe. Dutch and English traders also began to deal in bulk goods for a mass market — pepper, textiles, and later, tea and coffee — rather than just luxury goods for an elite market.

The Spanish were the first to challenge Portugal’s position as they established themselves on what became the Philippine Islands, named after the Spanish king Philip II. There they found an archipelago of islands, thousands of them, occupied by culturally diverse peoples and organized in small and highly competitive chiefdoms.

• Some of these chiefdoms were involved in tribute trade with China, and a small number of Chinese settlers lived in the port towns. Nonetheless, the region was of little interest to the governments of China and Japan, the major powers in the area.

• These conditions — proximity to China and the Spice Islands, small and militarily weak societies, the absence of competing claims — encouraged the Spanish to establish outright colonial rule rather than to imitate a Portuguese-style trading post empire.

• Conquest and colonization involved small-scale military operations, gunpowder weapons, local alliances, gifts and favors to chiefs, and the pageantry of Catholic ritual, all of which contributed to a relatively easy and often-bloodless Spanish takeover of the islands in the century or so after 1565.

• Accompanying Spanish rule was a major missionary effort that turned Filipino society into the only major outpost of Christianity in Asia. That effort also opened up a new front in the long encounter of Christendom and Islam, for on the southern island of Mindanao, Islam was gaining strength and provided an ideology of resistance to Spanish encroachment for 300 years. Indeed, Mindanao remains a contested part of the Philippines into the twenty-first century.

• Beyond the missionary enterprise, other features of Spanish colonial practice in the Americas found expression in the Philippines. People living in scattered settlements were persuaded or forced to relocate into more concentrated Christian communities. Tribute, taxes, and unpaid labor became part of ordinary life. Large landed estates emerged, owned by Spanish settlers, Catholic religious orders, or prominent Filipinos.

• Women who had played major roles as ritual specialists, healers, and midwives were now displaced by male Spanish priests, and the ceremonial instruments of these women were deliberately defiled and disgraced. Short-lived revolts and flight to interior mountains were among the Filipino responses to colonial oppression.

An archipelago of Pacific islands colonized by Spain in a relatively bloodless process that extended for the century or so after 1565, a process accompanied by a major effort at evangelization; the Spanish named them the Philippine Islands in honor of King Philip II of Spain.

The capital of the colonial Philippines, which by 1600 had become a flourishing (of more than 40,000 inhabitants and was home to many Spanish settlers and officials and growing numbers of Filipino migrants) and culturally diverse city (attracting some 3,000 Japanese and more than 20,000 Chinese. Serving as traders, artisans, and sailors, the Chinese in particular became an essential element in the Spanish colony’s growing economic relationship with China); the site of violent clashes between the Spanish and Chinese (however, their economic prominence and their resistance to conversion earned them Spanish hostility and clearly discriminatory treatment. Periodic Chinese revolts, followed by expulsions and massacres, were the result. On one occasion in 1603, the Spanish killed about 20,000 people, nearly the entire Chinese population of the island).

A business owned by its investors, witch each investor owning a share based on the amount of stock purchased.

• Owners expect to have a share in its profits

• Created in order to finance endeavors that are too expensive for an individual or government to fund

1. Private citizens invest money into a trade voyage

2. Money used to hire a crew, buy a ship, etc.

3. Upon return, the goods are sold

4. Each investor receives a percentage of the profit that is proportional to the percentage of costs.

• British settler colonies in America: Preferring to rely on joint stock companies or wealthy individuals operating under a royal charter, Britain had nothing resembling the elaborate imperial bureaucracy that governed Spanish colonies.

A single company or group owns all or nearly all of the market for a given type of product or service.

Private trading company chartered by the English in 1600

Mainly focused on India

It was given a monopoly on Indian Ocean trade, including the right to make war and to rule conquered peoples.

• Less well financed and less commercially sophisticated than the Dutch, the British were largely excluded from the rich Spice Islands by the Dutch monopoly.

• Thus they fell back on India, where they established three major trading settlements during the 17th century: Bombay (now Mumbai), on India’s west coast, and Calcutta and Madras, on the east coast.

• Although British naval forces soon gained control of the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, largely replacing the Portuguese, on land they were no match for the powerful Mughal Empire, which ruled most of the Indian subcontinent. Therefore, the British were unable to practice “trade by warfare,” as the Dutch did in Indonesia. Rather, they secured their trading bases with the permission of Mughal authorities or local rulers, with substantial payments and bribes as the price of admission to the Indian market.

• When some independent English traders plundered a Mughal ship in 1636, local authorities detained British East India Company officials for two months and forced them to pay a whopping fine.

• Although pepper and other spices remained important in British trade, British merchants came to focus much more heavily on Indian cotton textiles, which were becoming widely popular in England and its American colonies. Hundreds of villages in the interior of southern India became specialized producers for this British market.

Private trading company chartered by the Netherlands 1602

Mainly focused on Indonesia;

It was given a monopoly on Indian Ocean trade, including the right to make war and to rule conquered peoples.

• Operating in a region of fragmented and weak political authority, the Dutch acted to control not only the shipping of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace but also their production.

• With much bloodshed, the Dutch seized control of a number of small spice-producing islands, forcing their people to sell only to the Dutch and destroying the crops of those who refused. On the Banda Islands, famous for their nutmeg, the Dutch killed, enslaved, or left to starve virtually the entire population of some 15,000 people and then replaced them with Dutch planters, using a slave labor force, mostly from other parts of Asia, to produce the nutmeg crop.

• And for a time in the seventeenth century, they were able to monopolize the trade in nutmeg, mace, and cloves and to sell these spices in Europe and India at fourteen to seventeen times the price they paid in Indonesia. While Dutch profits soared, the local economy of the Spice Islands was shattered, and their people were impoverished.

In the second half of the eighteenth century, both the Dutch and British trading post empires slowly evolved into a more conventional form of colonial domination, in which the British came to rule India and the Dutch controlled Indonesia.

By the early seventeenth century, a series of remarkable military figures had unified Japan politically, under the leadership of a supreme military commander known as the shogun, who hailed from the Tokugawa clan.

• With the end of Japan’s civil wars, successive shoguns came to view Europeans as a threat to the country’s newly established unity rather than as an opportunity.

• They therefore expelled Christian missionaries and violently suppressed the practice of Christianity. This policy included the execution, often under torture, of some sixty-two missionaries and thousands of Japanese converts.

• Shogunate authorities also forbade Japanese from traveling abroad and banned most European traders altogether, permitting only the Dutch, who appeared less interested in spreading Christianity, to trade at a single site.

• Thus, for two centuries (1650–1850), Japanese authorities of the Tokugawa shogunate largely closed their country off from the emerging world of European commerce, although they maintained their trading ties to China, Korea, and Southeast Asia.

• In the early seventeenth century, a large number of Japanese traders began to operate in Southeast Asia, where they behaved much like the newly arriving Europeans, frequently using force in support of their commercial interests.

• But unlike European states, the Japanese government of the Tokugawa shogunate explicitly disavowed any responsibility for or connection with these Japanese merchants.

• In one of many letters to rulers of Southeast Asian states, the Tokugawa shogun wrote to officials in Cambodia in 1610: “Merchants from my country [Japan] go to several places in your country [Cambodia] as well as Cochinchina and Champa [Vietnam]. There they become cruel and ferocious…. These men cause terrible damage…. They commit crimes and cause suffering…. Their offenses are extremely serious. Please punish them immediately according to the laws of your country. It is not necessary to have any reservations in this regard.”

• Thus Japanese merchants lacked the kind of support from their government that European merchants consistently received, but they did not refrain from trading in Southeast Asia.

Japanese feudal lord who commanded a private army of samurai

Member of a powerful warrior class

Nor did other Asian merchants disappear from the Indian Ocean, despite European naval dominance.

• Arab, Indian, Chinese, Javanese, Malay, Vietnamese, and other traders benefited from the upsurge in seaborne commerce.

• A long-term movement of Chinese merchants into Southeast Asian port cities continued in the early modern era, enabling the Chinese to dominate the growing spice trade between that region and China. Southeast Asian merchants, many of them women, continued a long tradition of involvement in international trade.

• Malay proverbs from the sixteenth century, for example, encouraged “teaching daughters how to calculate and make a profit.”

• Overland trade within Asia remained wholly in Asian hands and grew considerably.

• Based in New Julfa near the capital of the Safavid Empire, Christian merchants originally from Armenia were particularly active in the commerce linking Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and India, with a few traveling as far as the Philippines and Mexico in pursuit of trading opportunities.

• Tens of thousands of Indian merchants and moneylenders, mostly Hindus representing sophisticated family firms, lived throughout Central Asia, Persia, and Russia, thus connecting this vast region to markets in India.

• These international Asian commercial networks, equivalent in their commercial sophistication to those of Europe, continued to operate successfully even as Europeans militarized the seaborne commerce of the Indian Ocean.

Within India, large and wealthy family firms, such as the one headed by Virji Vora during the 17th century, were able to monopolize the buying and selling of particular products, such as pepper or coral, and thus dictate terms and prices to the European trading companies. Furthermore, Vora was often the only source of loans for the cash-strapped Europeans, forcing them to pay interest rates as high as 12 to 18 percent annually.

• “He knoweth that wee must sell,” complained one English trader about Vora, “and so beats us downe till we come to his owne rates.” Despite their resentments, Europeans had little choice, because “none but Virji Vora hath moneye to lend or will lend.”

At the heart of that Pacific web, and of early modern global commerce generally, was China’s huge economy, especially its growing demand for silver. In the 1570s, Chinese authorities consolidated a variety of tax levies into a single tax, which its huge population was now required to pay in silver. This sudden new demand for the white metal caused its value to skyrocket. It meant that foreigners with silver could now purchase far more of China’s silks and porcelains than before.

• The mid-sixteenth-century discovery of enormously rich silver deposits in Bolivia, and simultaneously in Japan, suddenly provided a vastly increased supply of that precious metal.

• Spanish America alone produced perhaps 85 percent of the world’s silver during the early modern era. S

• pain’s sole Asian colony, the Philippines, provided a critical link in this emerging network of global commerce. Manila, the colonial capital of the Philippines, was the destination of annual Spanish shipments of silver, which were drawn from the rich mines of Bolivia, transported initially to Acapulco in Mexico, and from there shipped across the Pacific to the Philippines. This trade was the first direct and sustained link between the Americas and Asia, and it initiated a web of Pacific commerce that grew steadily over the centuries.

• Chinese, Portuguese, and Dutch traders flocked to Manila to sell Chinese goods in exchange for silver. European ships carried Japanese silver to China. Much of the silver shipped across the Atlantic to Spain was spent in Europe generally and then used to pay for the Asian goods that the French, British, and Dutch so greatly desired. Silver paid for some African slaves and for spices in Southeast Asia.

Term often used to describe the siphoning of money from Europe to pay for the luxury products of the East, a process exacerbated by the fact that Europe had few trade goods that were desirable in Eastern markets; eventually, the bulk of the world’s silver supply made its way to China.

The standard Spanish silver coin used by merchants in North America, Europe, India, Russia, West Africa, and China.

City that developed high in the Andes (in present-day Bolivia) at the site of the world’s largest silver mine and that became the largest city in the Americas, with a population of some 160,000 in the 1570s.

• Potosí became the largest city in the Americas and equivalent in size to London, Amsterdam, or Seville.

• Its wealthy European elite lived in luxury, with all the goods of Europe and Asia at their disposal.

• Meanwhile, the city’s Native American miners worked in conditions so horrendous that some families held funeral services for men drafted to work in the mines. A Spanish priest observed, “Once inside they spend the whole week in there without emerging…. If 20 healthy Indians enter on Monday, half may emerge crippled on Saturday.” The environment too suffered, as highly intensive mining techniques caused severe deforestation, soil erosion, and flooding.

Spanish women might rent out buildings they owned for commercial purposes or send their slaves into the streets as small-scale traders, earning a few pesos for the household. Those less-well-to-do often ran stores, pawnshops, bakeries, and taverns. Indian and mestiza women likewise opened businesses that provided the city with beverages, food, clothing, and credit.

In Spain itself, which was the initial destination for much of Latin America’s silver, the precious metal vastly enriched the Crown, making Spain the envy of its European rivals during the sixteenth century. Spanish rulers could now pursue military and political ambitions in both Europe and the Americas far beyond the country’s own resource base. “New World mines,” concluded several prominent historians, “supported the Spanish empire.”15 Nonetheless, this vast infusion of wealth did not fundamentally transform the Spanish economy, because it generated inflation of prices more than real economic growth. A rigid economy laced with monopolies and regulations, an aristocratic class that preferred leisure to enterprise, and a crusading insistence on religious uniformity all prevented the Spanish from using their silver windfall in a productive fashion. When the value of silver dropped in the early seventeenth century, Spain lost its earlier position as the dominant Western European power.

Japan, another major source of silver production in the sixteenth century, did better. Its military rulers, the Tokugawa shoguns, used silver-generated profits to defeat hundreds of rival feudal lords and unify the country. Unlike their Spanish counterparts, the shoguns allied with the country’s vigorous domestic merchant class to develop a market-based economy and to invest heavily in agricultural and industrial enterprises. Japanese state and local authorities alike acted vigorously to protect and renew Japan’s dwindling forests, while millions of families in the eighteenth century took steps to have fewer children by practicing late marriages, contraception, abortion, and infanticide. The outcome was the dramatic slowing of Japan’s population growth, the easing of an impending ecological crisis, and a flourishing, highly commercialized economy. These were the foundations for Japan’s remarkable nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution.

In China, silver deepened the already substantial commercialization of the country’s economy. To obtain the silver needed to pay their taxes, more and more people had to sell something — either their labor or their products. Communities that devoted themselves to growing mulberry trees, on which silkworms fed, had to buy their rice from other regions. Thus the Chinese economy became more regionally specialized. Particularly in southern China, this surging economic growth resulted in the loss of about half the area’s forest cover as more and more land was devoted to cash crops. No Japanese-style conservation program emerged to address this growing problem.

China’s role in the silver trade is a useful reminder of Asian centrality in the world economy of the early modern era. Its large and prosperous population, increasingly operating within a silver-based economy, fueled global commerce, vastly increasing the quantity of goods exchanged and the geographic range of world trade. Despite their obvious physical presence in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, economically speaking Europeans were essentially middlemen, funneling American silver to Asia and competing with one another for a place in the rich markets of the East. The productivity of the Chinese economy was evident in Spanish America, where cheap and well-made Chinese goods easily outsold those of Spain. In 1594, the Spanish viceroy of Peru observed that “a man can clothe his wife in Chinese silks for [25 pesos], whereas he could not provide her with clothing of Spanish silks with 200 pesos.” Indian cotton textiles likewise outsold European woolen or linen textiles in the seventeenth century to such an extent that French laws in 1717 prohibited the wearing of Indian cotton or Chinese silk clothing as a means of protecting French industry.

• Fur bearing animals: beaver, rabbits, sable, marten, and deer.

• The Little Ice Age, may have increased the demand for furs. These conditions pushed prices higher, providing strong economic incentives for European traders to tap the immense wealth of fur-bearing animals found in North America.

A global industry in which French, British, and Dutch traders exported fur from North America to Europe, using Native American labor and with great environmental cost to the Americas. A parallel commerce in furs operated under Russian control in Siberia.

• The French were most prominent in the St. Lawrence valley, around the Great Lakes, and later along the Mississippi River; British traders pushed into the Hudson Bay region; and the Dutch focused their attention along the Hudson River in what is now New York. They were frequently rivals for the great prize of North American furs. In the southern colonies of British North America, deerskins by the hundreds of thousands found a ready market in England’s leather industry.

• Only a few Europeans directly engaged in commercial trapping or hunting. They usually waited for Native Americans to bring the furs or skins initially to their coastal settlements and later to their fortified trading posts in the interior of North America. European merchants paid for the furs with a variety of trade goods, including guns, blankets, metal tools, rum, and brandy, amid much ceremony, haggling over prices, and ritualized gift giving. Native Americans represented a cheap labor force in this international commercial effort, but they were not a directly coerced labor force.

Over the three centuries of the early modern era, enormous quantities of furs and deerskins found their way to Europe, where they considerably enhanced the standard of living in those cold climates. The environmental price was paid in the Americas, and it was high. A consistent demand for beaver hats led to the near extinction of that industrious animal in much of North America by the early nineteenth century and with it the degradation or loss of many wetland habitats. By the 1760s, hunters in southeastern British colonies took about 500,000 deer every year, seriously diminishing the deer population of the region.

• For the Native American peoples who hunted, trapped, processed, and transported these products, the fur trade bore various benefits, particularly at the beginning. One Native American trapper told a French missionary, “The beaver does everything perfectly well. It makes kettles, hatchets, swords, knives, bread; and, in short, it makes everything.” The Hurons, who lived on the northern shores of Lakes Erie and Ontario in the early seventeenth century, annually exchanged some 20,000 to 30,000 pelts, mostly beaver, for trade items, some of which they used to strengthen their relationships with neighboring peoples. These goods also enhanced the authority of Huron chiefs by providing them with gifts to distribute among their followers. At least initially, competition among Europeans ensured that Native American leaders could negotiate reasonable prices for their goods. Furthermore, their important role in the lucrative fur trade protected them for a time from the kind of extermination, enslavement, or displacement that was the fate of native peoples in Portuguese Brazil.

• Nothing, however, protected them against the diseases carried by Europeans. In the 1630s and 1640s, to cite only one example of many, about half of the Hurons perished from influenza, smallpox, and other European-borne diseases. Furthermore, the fur trade generated warfare beyond anything previously known. Competition among Native American societies became more intense as the economic stakes grew higher.

• Beyond the fur trade, many Native American peoples sought actively to take advantage of the new commercial economy now impinging upon them. The Iroquois, for example, began to sell new products such as ginseng root, much in demand in China as a medicine. They also rented land to Europeans, worked for wages in various European enterprises, and started to use currency, when barter was ineffective. But as they became enmeshed in these commercial relationships, Native Americans grew dependent on European trade goods. Among the Algonquians, for example, iron tools and cooking pots replaced those of stone, wood, or bone; gunpowder weapons took the place of bows and arrows; European textiles proved more attractive than traditional beaver and deerskin clothing; and flint and steel were found to be more effective for starting fires than wooden drills. A wide range of traditional crafts were thus lost, while the native peoples did not gain a corresponding ability to manufacture the new items for themselves. Enthusiasm for these imported goods and continued European demands for furs and skins frequently eroded the customary restraint that characterized traditional hunting practices, resulting in the depletion of many species.

Catastrophic population declines owing to disease stimulated “mourning wars,” designed to capture people who could be assimilated into much-diminished societies. A century of French-British rivalry for North America (1664–1763) forced Native American societies to take sides, to fight, and to die in these European imperial conflicts. Firearms, of course, made warfare far more deadly than before.

Alongside germs and guns, yet another highly destructive European import was alcohol — rum and brandy, in particular. Whiskey, a locally produced grain-based alcohol, only added to the problem. With no prior experience of alcohol and little time to adjust to its easy availability, these drinks “hit Indian societies with explosive force.” Binge drinking, violence among young men, promiscuity, and addiction followed in many places. In 1753, Iroquois leaders complained bitterly to European authorities in Pennsylvania: “These wicked Whiskey Sellers, when they have once got the Indians in liquor, make them sell their very clothes from their backs…. If this practice be continued, we must be inevitably ruined.” In short, it was not so much the fur trade itself that decimated Native American societies, but all that accompanied it — disease, dependence, guns, alcohol, and the growing encroachment of European colonial empires.

All of this had particular implications for women. A substantial number of native women married European traders according to the “custom of the country” — with no sanction from civil or church authorities. Such marriages eased the difficulties of this cross-cultural exchange, providing traders with guides, interpreters, and negotiators. But sometimes these women were left abandoned when their husbands returned to Europe. More generally, the fur trade enhanced the position of men in their societies because hunting or trapping animals was normally a male occupation. Among the Ojibwa, a gathering and hunting people in the northern Great Lakes region, women had traditionally acquired economic power by creating food, utensils, clothing, and decorations from the hides and flesh of the animals that their husbands caught. With the fur trade in full operation, women spent more time processing those furs for sale than in producing household items, some of which were now available for purchase from Europeans. And so, as one scholar put it, “women lost authority and prestige.” At the same time, however, women generated and controlled the trade in wild rice and maple syrup, both essential to the livelihood of European traders. Thus the fur trade offered women a mix of opportunities and liabilities.

Became a major source of furs for Western Europe, China, and the Ottoman Empire.

The profitability of that trade in furs was the chief incentive for Russia’s rapid expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries across Siberia.

• The international sale of furs greatly enriched the Russian state as well as many private merchants, trappers, and hunters. Here the silver trade and the fur trade intersected, as Europeans paid for Russian furs largely with American gold and silver.

• The consequences for native Siberians were similar to those in North America as disease took its toll, as indigenous people became dependent on Russian goods, as the settler frontier encroached on native lands, and as many species of fur-bearing mammals were seriously depleted.

• Whereas several European nations competed in North America and generally obtained their furs through commercial negotiations with Indian societies, no such competition accompanied Russian expansion across Siberia.

• Russian authorities imposed a tax or tribute (yasak), payable in furs, on every able-bodied Siberian male between eighteen and fifty years of age. To enforce the payment, they took hostages from Siberian societies, with death as a possible outcome if the required furs were not forthcoming. A further difference lay in the large-scale presence of private Russian hunters and trappers, who competed directly with their Siberian counterparts.

Nickname used in the early modern period for animal furs, highly valued for their warmth and as symbols of elite status.

Between 1500 and 1866, this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas as slaves; approximately 1.8 million died during the transatlantic crossing, while countless others perished in the process of capture and transport to the African coast.

• Despite the language of commerce and exchange with which it is often described, this transatlantic slave system was steeped in violence, coercion, and brutality. It involved forcible capture and repeated sale, beatings and brandings, chains and imprisonment, rebellions and escapes, lives of enforced and unpaid labor, broken families, and humans treated as property.

Route used to transport captured Africans between Africa and the New World

Within Africa itself, that commerce thoroughly disrupted some societies, strengthened others, and corrupted many. Elites often enriched themselves, while the enslaved Africans, of course, were victimized almost beyond imagination.

The global spread of African peoples via the slave trade.

• This African diaspora injected into these new societies issues of race that endure still in the 21st century. It also introduced elements of African culture, such as religious ideas, musical and artistic traditions, and cuisine, into the making of American cultures. The profits from the slave trade and the labor of enslaved Africans certainly enriched European and Euro-American societies, even as the practice of slavery contributed much to the racial stereotypes of European peoples. Finally, slavery became a metaphor for many kinds of social oppression, quite different from plantation slavery, in the centuries that followed. Workers protested the slavery of wage labor, colonized people rejected the slavery of imperial domination, and feminists sometimes defined patriarchy as a form of slavery.

• Moreover, Africans were black. The precise relationship between slavery and European racism has long been a much-debated subject. Historian David Brion Davis has suggested the controversial view that “racial stereotypes were transmitted, along with black slavery itself, from Muslims to Christians.” For many centuries, Muslims had drawn on sub-Saharan Africa as one source of slaves and in the process had developed a form of racism. The fourteenth-century Tunisian scholar Ibn Khaldun wrote that black people were “submissive to slavery, because Negroes have little that is essentially human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals.”

• Other scholars find the origins of racism within European culture itself. For the English, argues historian Audrey Smedley, the process of conquering Ireland had generated by the sixteenth century a view of the Irish as “rude, beastly, ignorant, cruel, and unruly infidels,” perceptions that were then transferred to Africans enslaved on English sugar plantations of the West Indies. Whether Europeans borrowed such images of Africans from their Muslim neighbors or developed them independently, slavery and racism soon went hand in hand. “Europeans were better able to tolerate their brutal exploitation of Africans,” writes a prominent world historian, “by imagining that these Africans were an inferior race, or better still, not even human.”

• The transatlantic slave system represented the most recent large-scale expression of a very widespread human practice — the owning and exchange of human beings.

• Before 1500, the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean basins were the major arenas of Old World slave systems, and southern Russia was a major source of its victims.

• Many African societies likewise both practiced slavery themselves and sold slaves into these international commercial networks.

• A trans-Saharan slave trade had long funneled African captives into Mediterranean slavery, and an East African slave trade from at least the seventh century C.E. brought Africans into the Middle East and the Indian Ocean basin. Both operated largely within the Islamic world and initiated the movement of African peoples beyond the continent itself.

• In the Indian Ocean world, African slaves were often assimilated into the societies of their owners and lost the sense of a distinctive identity that was so prominent in North America. In some places, children inherited the slave status of their parents; elsewhere those children were free persons.

• Within the Islamic world, where most slaves worked in domestic settings, the preference was for female slaves by a two-to-one margin, while the later transatlantic slave system, which funneled captives into plantation labor, favored males by a similar margin. Not all enslaved people, however, occupied degraded positions. Some in the Islamic world acquired prominent military or political status. Most slaves in the premodern world worked in their owners’ households, farms, or shops, with smaller numbers laboring in large-scale agricultural or industrial enterprises.

The slave system that emerged in the Americas was distinctive in several ways. One was simply the immense size of that system and its centrality to the economies of colonial America, which featured a great deal of plantation agriculture. Furthermore, slave status throughout the Americas was inherited across generations, and there was little hope of eventual freedom for the vast majority. Nowhere else, with the possible exception of ancient Greece, was the contradiction between slavery and social values affirming human freedom and equality quite so sharp. Perhaps most distinctive was the racial dimension: Atlantic slavery came to be identified wholly with Africa and with “blackness.”

Slavery: refers to a condition in which individuals are owned by other, who control where they live and what they work. Slavery has previously existed throughout history, in many times and most places. To be a slave is to be owned by another person. A human being classed as property and who is forced to work for nothing.

Enslaved person: a human being who is made to be a slave. This term refers to the fact that people in slavery is not their choice or their single characteristic.

1. Most enslaved people were captured in battle

2. Children of enslaved people didn’t automatically become slaves.

3. Temporary slavery was a punishment for some crimes or debt (some places).

4. Enslaved people could work to buy their freedom (some places).

   African states participated in the slave trade while other protested it.

Chattel: a personal possession

A chattel slave is an enslaved person who is owned forever and whose children’s children are automatically enslaved.

Chattel slaves are individuals treated as complete property, to be bought and sold.

All new world slavery was chattel slavery.

The origins of Atlantic slavery clearly lie in the Mediterranean world and with that now-common sweetener known as sugar. Until the Crusades, Europeans knew nothing of sugar and relied on honey and fruits to sweeten their bland diets. However, as they learned from the Arabs about sugarcane and the laborious techniques for producing usable sugar, Europeans established sugar-producing plantations within the Mediterranean and later on various islands off the coast of West Africa. It was a “modern” industry, perhaps the first one, in that it required huge capital investment, substantial technology, an almost factory-like discipline among workers, and a mass market of consumers. The immense difficulty and danger of the work, the limitations attached to serf labor, and the general absence of wageworkers all pointed to slavery as a source of labor for sugar plantations.

Initially, Slavic-speaking peoples from the Black Sea region furnished the bulk of the slaves for Mediterranean plantations, so much so that “Slav” became the basis for the word “slave” in many European languages. In 1453, however, when the Ottoman Turks seized Constantinople, the supply of Slavic slaves was effectively cut off. At the same time, Portuguese mariners were exploring the coast of West Africa; they were looking primarily for gold, but they also found there an alternative source of enslaved people available for sale. Thus, when sugar, and later tobacco and cotton, plantations took hold in the Americas, Europeans had already established links to a West African source of supply. They also now had religious justification for their actions, for in 1452 the pope formally granted to the kings of Spain and Portugal “full and free permission to invade, search out, capture, and subjugate the Saracens [Muslims] and pagans and any other unbelievers … and to reduce their persons into perpetual slavery.” Largely through a process of elimination, Africa became the primary source of slave labor for the plantation economies of the Americas. Slavic peoples were no longer available; Native Americans quickly perished from European diseases; even marginal Europeans such as the poor and criminals were Christians and therefore supposedly exempt from slavery; and European indentured servants, who agreed to work for a fixed period in return for transportation, food, and shelter, were expensive and temporary. Africans, on the other hand, were skilled farmers; they had some immunity to both tropical and European diseases; they were not Christians; they were, relatively speaking, close at hand; and they were readily available in substantial numbers through African-operated commercial networks.

• Within Africa itself, however, a different picture emerges, for over the four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, European demand elicited an African supply. The slave trade quickly came to operate largely with Europeans waiting on the coast, either on their ships or in fortified settlements, to purchase slaves from African merchants and political elites. Certainly, Europeans tried to exploit African rivalries to obtain slaves at the lowest possible cost, and the firearms they funneled into West Africa may well have increased the warfare from which so many slaves were derived. But from the point of initial capture to sale on the coast, the entire enterprise was normally in African hands. Almost nowhere did Europeans attempt outright military conquest; instead they generally dealt as equals with local African authorities.

• Geographically, the slave system drew mainly on the societies of West and South-Central Africa, from present-day Mauritania in the north to Angola in the south. Initially focused on the coastal regions, the slave raiding progressively penetrated into the interior as the demand for slaves picked up. Socially, these enslaved people were mostly drawn from various marginal groups in African societies — prisoners of war, criminals, debtors, people who had been “pawned” during times of difficulty. Thus Africans did not generally sell “their own people” into slavery. Divided into hundreds of separate, usually small-scale, and often rival communities — cities, kingdoms, microstates, clans, and villages — the various peoples of West Africa had no concept of an “African” identity. Those whom they captured and sold were normally outsiders, vulnerable people who lacked the protection of membership in an established community. When short-term economic or political advantage could be gained, such people were sold. In this respect, the transatlantic slave system was little different from the experience of enslavement elsewhere in the world.

In exchange for slaves, African sellers sought both European and Indian textiles, cowrie shells (widely used as money in West Africa), European metal goods, firearms and gunpowder, tobacco and alcohol, and various decorative items such as beads. Europeans purchased some of these items — cowrie shells and Indian textiles, for example — with silver mined in the Americas. Thus the transatlantic slave system connected with commerce in silver and textiles as it became part of an emerging worldwide network of exchange. Issues about the precise mix of goods African authorities desired, about the number and quality of slaves to be purchased, and always about the price of everything were settled in endless negotiation.

For the slaves themselves — seized in the interior, often sold several times on the harrowing journey to the coast, sometimes branded, and held in squalid slave dungeons while awaiting transportation to the New World — it was anything but a normal commercial transaction. One European engaged in the trade noted that “the negroes are so willful and loath to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat, and ship, into the sea, and kept under water till they were drowned, to avoid being taken up and saved by our boats.”

Over the four centuries of the slave trade, millions of Africans underwent such experiences, but their numbers varied considerably over time. During the 16th century, slave exports from Africa averaged fewer than 3,000 annually. In those years, the Portuguese were at least as much interested in African gold, spices, and textiles. Furthermore, as in Asia, they became involved in transporting African goods, including slaves, from one African port to another, thus becoming the “truck drivers” of coastal West African commerce. In the 17th century, the pace picked up as the slave trade became highly competitive, with the British, Dutch, and French contesting the earlier Portuguese monopoly. The century and a half between 1700 and 1850 marked the high point of the slave trade as the plantation economies of the Americas boomed.

The destination of enslaved Africans, half a world away in the Americas, however, made the transatlantic system very different. The vast majority wound up in Brazil or the Caribbean, where the labor demands of the plantation economy were most intense. Smaller numbers found themselves in North America, mainland Spanish America, or in Europe. Their journey across the Atlantic was horrendous, with the Middle Passage having an overall mortality rate of more than 14%.

• Enslaved Africans frequently resisted their fates in a variety of ways. About 10 percent of the transatlantic voyages experienced a major rebellion by desperate captives, and resistance continued in the Americas, taking a range of forms from surreptitious slowdowns of work to outright rebellion. One common act was to flee.

• While slave owners feared wide-scale slave rebellions, these were rare, and even small-scale rebellions were usually crushed with great brutality. It was only with the Haitian Revolution of the 1790s that a full-scale slave revolt brought lasting freedom for its participants.

Free communities of former slaves in remote regions of South America and the Caribbean; the largest such settlement was Palmares in Brazil, which housed 10,000 or more people for most of the seventeenth century.

Free communities of former slaves in remote regions of South America and the Caribbean; the largest such settlement was Palmares in Brazil, which housed 10,000 or more people, mostly of African descent but also including Native Americans, mestizos, and renegade whites, for most of the 17th century.

• From the viewpoint of world history, the chief outcome of the transatlantic slave system lay in the new global linkages that it generated as Africa became a permanent part of an interacting Atlantic world. Millions of its people were now compelled to make their lives in the Americas, where they made an enormous impact both demographically and economically. Until the 19thcentury, they outnumbered European immigrants to the Americas by 3 or 4 to 1, and West African societies were increasingly connected to an emerging European-centered world economy. These vast processes set in motion a chain of consequences that have transformed the lives and societies of people on both sides of the Atlantic.

• Socially too, the slave trade shaped African societies. It surely fostered moral corruption, particularly as judicial proceedings were manipulated to generate victims for export. A West African legend tells of cowrie shells, a major currency of the slave trade, growing on corpses of decomposing slaves, a symbolic recognition of the corrupting effects of this commerce in human beings.

• Within particular African societies, the impact of the transatlantic slave system differed considerably from place to place and over time. Many small-scale kinship-based societies, lacking the protection of a strong state, were thoroughly disrupted by raids from more powerful neighbors, and insecurity was pervasive. Oral traditions in southern Ghana, for example, reported that “there was no rest in the land,” that people went about in groups rather than alone, and that mothers kept their children inside when European ships appeared. Some larger kingdoms such as Kongo and Oyo slowly disintegrated as access to trading opportunities and firearms enabled outlying regions to establish their independence.

Although the slave trade did not produce in Africa the kind of population collapse that occurred in the Americas, it certainly slowed Africa’s growth at a time when Europe, China, and other regions were expanding demographically. Beyond the loss of millions of people over four centuries, the demand for African slaves produced economic stagnation and social disruption. Economically, the slave trade stimulated little positive change in Africa because those Africans who benefited most from the traffic in people were not investing in the productive capacities of their societies. Although European imports generally did not displace traditional artisan manufacturing, no technological breakthroughs in agriculture or industry increased the wealth available to these societies. Maize and manioc (cassava), introduced from the Americas, added a new source of calories to African diets, but the international demand was for Africa’s people, not its agricultural products.

African women felt the impact of the slave trade in various ways, beyond those who numbered among its transatlantic victims. Since far more men than women were shipped to the Americas, the labor demands on those women who remained increased substantially, compounded by the growing use of cassava, a labor-intensive import from the New World. Unbalanced sex ratios also meant that far more men than before could marry multiple women. Furthermore, the use of female slaves within West African societies grew as the export trade in male slaves expanded. Retaining female slaves for their own use allowed warriors and nobles in the Senegambia region to distinguish themselves more clearly from ordinary peasants. In the Kongo, female slaves provided a source of dependent laborers for the plantations that sustained the lifestyle of urban elites. A European merchant on the Gold Coast in the late eighteenth century observed that every free man had at least one or two slaves.

The small number of African women who were able to exercise power and accumulate wealth through marriage to European traders.

• For much smaller numbers of women, the slave trade provided an opportunity to exercise power and accumulate wealth. In the Senegambia region, where women had long been involved in politics and commerce, marriage to European traders offered advantage to both partners. For European male merchants, as for fur traders in North America, such marriages afforded access to African-operated commercial networks as well as the comforts of domestic life. Some of the women involved in these cross-cultural marriages, became quite wealthy, operating their own trading empires, employing large numbers of female slaves, and acquiring elaborate houses, jewelry, and fashionable clothing.

Furthermore, the state-building enterprises that often accompanied the sale of slaves in West Africa offered yet other opportunities to a few women. As the Kingdom of Dahomey expanded during the eighteenth century, the royal palace, housing thousands of women and presided over by a powerful Queen Mother, served to integrate the diverse regions of the state. Each lineage was required to send a daughter to the palace even as well-to-do families sent additional girls to increase their influence at court. In the Kingdom of Kongo, women held lower-level administrative positions, the head wife of a nobleman exercised authority over hundreds of junior wives and slaves, and women served on the council that advised the monarch. The neighboring region of Matamba was known for its female rulers, most notably the powerful Queen Nzinga (1626–1663), who guided the state amid the complexities and intrigues of various European and African rivalries and gained a reputation for her resistance to Portuguese imperialism.

However, African authorities also sought to take advantage of the new commercial opportunities and to manage the slave trade in their own interests. The kingdom of Benin, in the forest area of present-day Nigeria, successfully avoided a deep involvement in the trade while diversifying the exports with which it purchased European firearms and other goods. As early as 1516, its ruler began to restrict the slave trade and soon forbade the export of male slaves altogether, a ban that lasted until the early eighteenth century. By then, the ruler’s authority over outlying areas had declined, and the country’s major exports of pepper and cotton cloth had lost out to Asian and then European competition. In these circumstances, Benin felt compelled to resume limited participation in the slave trade. The neighboring kingdom of Dahomey, on the other hand, turned to a vigorous involvement in the slave trade in the early eighteenth century under strict royal control. The army conducted annual slave raids, and the government soon came to depend on the trade for its essential revenues. The slave trade in Dahomey became the chief business of the state and remained so until well into the nineteenth century.

• The resolutely Catholic Spanish and Portuguese both viewed their movement overseas as a continuation of a long crusading tradition that only recently had completed the liberation of their countries from Muslim control.

• If religion drove and justified European ventures abroad, it is difficult to imagine the globalization of Christianity without the support of empire. Colonial settlers and traders, of course, brought their faith with them and sought to replicate it in their newly conquered homelands.

• New England Puritans, for example, planted a distinctive Protestant version of Christianity in North America, with an emphasis on education, moral purity, personal conversion, civic responsibility, and little tolerance for competing expressions of the faith. They did not show much interest in converting native peoples but sought rather to push them out of their ancestral territories.

• Although they brought much of their English culture with them, many of the British settlers — Puritans in Massachusetts and Quakers in Pennsylvania, for example — sought to escape aspects of an old European society rather than to re-create it, as was the case for most Spanish and Portuguese colonists. The easy availability of land and the outsider status of many British settlers made it even more difficult to follow the Spanish or Portuguese colonial pattern of sharp class hierarchies, large rural estates, and dependent laborers. Thus men in Puritan New England became independent heads of family farms, a world away from Old England, where most land was owned by nobles and gentry and worked by servants, tenants, and paid laborers. But if men escaped the class restrictions of the old country, women were less able to avoid its gender limitations. While Puritan Christianity extolled the family and a woman’s role as wife and mother, it reinforced largely unlimited male authority.

• It was missionaries, mostly Catholic, who actively spread the Christian message beyond European communities. Organized in missionary orders such as the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits, Portuguese missionaries took the lead in Africa and Asia, while Spanish and French missionaries were most prominent in the Americas.

• Missionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church likewise accompanied the expansion of the Russian Empire across Siberia, where priests and monks ministered to Russian settlers and trappers, who often donated their first sable furs to a church or monastery.

• Missionaries had their greatest success in Spanish America and in the Philippines, areas that shared two critical elements beyond their colonization by Spain.

• Most important, perhaps, was an overwhelming European presence, experienced variously as military conquest, colonial settlement, missionary activity, forced labor, social disruption, and disease. Surely it must have seemed as if the old gods had been bested and that any possible future lay with the powerful religion of the European invaders.

• A second common factor was the absence of a literate world religion in these two regions. Throughout the modern era, peoples solidly rooted in Confucian, Buddhist, Hindu, or Islamic traditions proved far more resistant to the Christian message than those who practiced more localized, small-scale, orally based religions.

• Spanish America and China illustrate the difference between those societies in which Christianity became widely practiced and those that largely rejected it.

Europeans saw their political and military success as a demonstration of the power of the Christian God. Native American peoples generally agreed, and by 1700 or earlier the vast majority had been baptized and saw themselves in some respects as Christians. After all, other conquerors such as the Aztecs and the Incas had always imposed their gods in some fashion on defeated peoples. So it made sense, both practically and spiritually, to affiliate with the Europeans’ god, saints, rites, and rituals. Many millions accepted baptism, contributed to the construction of village churches, attended services, and embraced images of saints.

Despite the prominence of the Virgin Mary as a religious figure across Latin America, the cost of conversion was high, especially for women. Many women who had long served as priests, shamans, or ritual specialists had no corresponding role in a Catholic church, led by an all-male clergy. And, with a few exceptions, convent life, which had provided some outlet for female authority and education in Catholic Europe, was reserved largely for Spanish women in the Americas.

• Earlier conquerors had made no attempt to eradicate local deities and religious practices. The flexibility and inclusiveness of Mesoamerican and Andean religions had made it possible for subject people to accommodate the gods of their new rulers while maintaining their own traditions.

• But Europeans were different. They claimed an exclusive religious truth and sought the utter destruction of local gods and everything associated with them. Operating within a Spanish colonial regime that actively encouraged conversion, missionaries often proceeded by persuasion and patient teaching. At times, though, their frustration with the persistence of “idolatry, superstition, and error” boiled over into violent campaigns designed to uproot old religions once and for all. In 1535, the bishop of Mexico proudly claimed that he had destroyed 500 pagan shrines and 20,000 idols. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, church authorities in the Andean region periodically launched movements of “extirpation,” designed to fatally undermine native religion. They destroyed religious images and ritual objects, publicly urinated on native “idols,” desecrated the remains of ancestors, flogged “idolaters,” and held religious trials and “processions of shame” aimed at humiliating offenders.

It is hardly surprising that such aggressive action generated resistance. Writing around 1600, the native Peruvian nobleman Guaman Poma de Ayala commented on the posture of native women toward Christianity: “They do not confess; they do not attend catechism classes … nor do they go to mass…. And resuming their ancient customs and idolatry, they do not want to serve God or the crown.

Literally, “dancing sickness”; a religious revival movement in central Peru in the 1560s whose members preached the imminent destruction of Christianity and of the Europeans and the restoration of an imagined Andean golden age.

Possessed by the spirits of local gods, or huacas, traveling dancers and teachers predicted that an alliance of Andean deities would soon overcome the Christian God, inflict the intruding Europeans with the same diseases that they had brought to the Americas, and restore the world of the Andes to an imagined earlier harmony. “The world has turned about,” one member declared, “and this time God and the Spaniards [will be] defeated and all the Spaniards killed and their cities drowned; and the sea will rise and overwhelm them, so that there will remain no memory of them.”