Lecture 27, we call this the early modern period and the Columbian Exchange.
So this lecture may be a few minutes longer than our usual because there is a lot to do
here.
This period begins with change.
Perhaps most importantly is the European exploration of the rest of the world.
In the Mediterranean, in what today we call the Middle East, you have the Ottoman Empire;
it now organizes much of the Arabic world and the Islamic world.
The early modern era will end approximately 1750 of the Common Era because of the advent
of industrialization.
This will take us into the modern era and into the course that follows this one.
A warning – after 1450, the world increasingly becomes Europe, in most western histories.
The Eurocentric viewpoint, we talked about this earlier, sort of viewing the world or
viewing history from a distinctly European, western Christian viewpoint.
Again, the west treats much of the world as invisible until it is conquered by European
imperial powers.
But world history of course, requires balance.
Europe did not run the world in this time period.
Some dominant themes undergoing change here – Civilization will spread.
The human web is increasingly connected.
There’s just a few places on the periphery now that are going to be brought into the
human web.
Networks of trade have been long established.
World religions continue to spread and this world network is transformed because of the
Americas – the Western Hemisphere that is, is now brought into the human web.
Some new themes – New trade networks are formed after Columbus as the Western Hemisphere
joins the rest of the world.
The Pacific Ocean islands, Polynesia, increasingly brought into the human web as well.
New power relations are going to be evident as Western Europe becomes more and more dominant,
and of course, there are biological exchanges between Europe; Africa; and the Americas,
and some of these will have catastrophic effects as smallpox and other Eurasian diseases are
brought to the Western Hemisphere, and these of course will destroy the indigenous people
of what today we call North and South America.
And then finally, there’s a rapid expansion of what historians call ‘gunpowder empires’
and we’ll talk about that more.
So let’s look at European exploration, or European expansion, for a moment.
Europeans adapted Chinese gunpowder for muskets and for artillery.
Heavy metal casting that had previously been used for church bells is now turned into cannons
that can be fixed to a deck of a ship.
Europeans begin to make better seagoing vessels – again, borrowing technology quite often,
from both Chinese and Arabs, for oceangoing exploration.
Europeans usually sail to coastal areas where their artillery could be most effective in
enforcing their will.
The interior of Africa and Asia would remain immune to European power for a while longer.
Europeans nibble around the edges of world civilizations.
The exception – The Western Hemisphere.
The Americas fall totally before European technology; horses; military organization;
and diseases.
Let’s go to the Far East just for a moment and look at China and Japan in this rapidly-changing
era.
China continues to benefit obviously, from European trade.
China tries to keep Europeans confined to specific coastal areas, specific ports.
Japan, on the other hand, tries to cut off contact with Europeans in the 16th century.
Japan sees the European presence in the Philippines and they don’t like it.
Japan understands that European weaponry could threaten the feudal system dominated by the
Samurai in Japan.
Now let’s take a look here at what we call the Columbian Exchange.
I think I mentioned early in the semester that every teacher in this country now has
a lecture entitled ‘the Columbian Exchange’.
This is a big topic.
We’re going to condense it for you and try to pull out if it what’s significant.
The definition of Columbian Exchange is simply the exchange of domesticated plants and animals,
diseases, technology, religion, culture, between the Old World, Eurasia and Africa, and the
New World.
This begins with Christopher Columbus and it continues with successive explorations
by the Europeans.
Let’s talk about some of these domesticated plants and animals that are taken to the New
World starting with Columbus.
Domesticated grains – these are foundational food items.
Rice; wheat; oats; barley; hops; rye – if you think of wheat as sort of the ‘staff
of life’ in Western Eurasia – wheat, of course, is – we make bread and pasta from
wheat – and then of course, on the Eastern end of Eurasia; rice is a foundational diet,
and these other domesticated grains can be used for human consumption or for livestock,
and of course, we use hops to flavor beer.
Domesticated animals taken to the New World, beginning with Columbus.
It’s a remarkable array of creatures that did not exist in the Western Hemisphere.
Horses; mules; donkeys; oxen; goats and sheep; chickens; honeybees; silkworms; pigs; and
so on – when you think about the animals that were available for domestication in the
New World, what do you have?
Llamas, alpacas, turkeys, dogs, guinea pigs – that’s about the lineup.
So you can see that the Old World – Africa and Eurasia – have many more animals available
for domestication than those in the New World, and it’s the same with the domesticated
grains we just talked about.
In the New World you have corn, the only domesticated grain available.
So you can see the exchange here is going to be dramatic, and going to fundamentally
change human diet in the New World.
And of course, the New World is going to give back to the Old World – not just corn, but
other vegetables – potatoes, for instance, will be key food with high caloric value,
easy to store.
Diseases, of course, are exchanged.
The New World – the natives will give back to the Europeans things like syphilis; encephalitis;
polio; I believe, tuberculosis; and of course, the Europeans are going to bring over to the
Western Hemisphere smallpox; measles; mumps; chickenpox; the plague – so you can see
this is going to be fundamental in destroying the population of the New World.
These people of course have no immunity to these diseases.
The Europeans are going to bring metal to the New World; so guns and swords and tools
and knives and hatchets and pots and pans and so on and so forth – clocks; you name
it, things made of metal are going to be novel to the people of the New World.
And the Europeans also bring the Christian god with them to the New World; this is going
to have a dramatic impact because this new Christian god is going to show up at the same
time that this massive die off takes place.
So the indigenous people of the Western Hemisphere, some of them will draw the obvious conclusion
that this new Christian god is killing them off.
So some will convert to Christianity to try to avoid death; others will simply flee.
So when you think about this new, powerful Christian god, who appears to have some connection
with these Jesuit priests, or these Dominican priests, that with their rituals and with
their strange dress, the Indians are both in awe of this new development and frankly
terrified by it.
Europeans, of course, are going to bring the wheel to the New World as well.
The indigenous people of the west had no large domesticated animals to pull a cart, so they
had no use for a wheel.
This, of course, will all change now with horses and cows and donkeys and mules.
From America back to Eurasia – sweet potatoes; we mentioned corn; chili peppers; tomatoes;
vanilla; chocolate.
India and China are quick to adopt American foods.
Some places in Europe are less willing to adopt some of these foods because they were
never mentioned in the Bible; so it’s not clear of their origins.
Now let’s go back to ‘gunpowder empires’ that I mentioned at the beginning of this
lecture.
In Europe these include Spain and Portugal, the first of the great exploring empires,
and then the Dutch; the French; the English, will all adopt gunpowder.
So think of this as sort of a military package.
You have ships with cannons.
You have men with muskets.
You have, in time, fortifications – and fortifications will obviously be built here
in the New World.
And then you have sort of a software that goes along with this – drill, military engineering,
a sort of a logistical, bureaucratic base for all this, and then you have the financial
systems that support it – quite often in Europe, at least, are private bankers.
Now think about the Asian land-based gunpowder empires.
The Ottoman Turks, we mentioned the Ottoman Empire at the beginning of the lecture.
You have the Mughal Empire in India, the Safavid Empire in Persia, and then of course, the
Russian Empire is going to take form here in the 15th century.
Then, of course, China had invented gunpowder long ago, but had usually used it for ceremonial
purposes.
That, too, will change.
So let’s draw some conclusions here, some sort of broad-sweeping generalizations.
Nomadic horsemen from the Asian Steppes are now outclassed by gunpowder empires.
We’ve seen how these nomadic horsemen, the Mongols perhaps most especially, how they
had periodically dominated the old sedentary civilizations of Eurasia.
This pattern is going to come to an end now.
European colonies are now going to emerge across the globe.
The Europeans tend to take their culture, their gods, their food, with them to Australia
and New Zealand; North America; South America.
European diseases are now going to spread across the globe killing previously isolated
peoples, especially in the Pacific and in the New World.
Trade is now going to become worldwide because of the colonization of the Americas.
What Europe really accomplished here was to place itself as sort of the broker, or the
transmitter, of the Americas to the rest of the world.
Aztecs and Inca are overthrown by Spanish conquistadors, Cortes and Pizarro.
These are pretty fabulous stories, if you have time and interest you can look into these
more closely.
One major trend of the early modern era was sort of the notion of the big fish swallowing
the little fish.
These empires are going to grow increasingly powerful and larger and larger as they colonize
areas of Asia; Africa; and the New World.
States that manage to tax efficiently retain the loyalty of their nobility and their military
– and adapt to the changing basis of warfare – increasingly enjoyed more and more power.
Finally, two major consequences of the Columbian Exchange and ‘gunpowder empires’ – first
is imperialism, or the colonization of the New World – and we’ll talk about that
in our last lecture – and then also is Atlantic slavery, whereby millions of Africans will
be forcibly taken to the New World and ordered to produce commodity crops – the first being
rice, and then of course later, indigo; cotton; tobacco; and so on.
So that’s a look at the early modern period and the Columbian Exchange.
Thank you.