CH13, CH14 & CH15

(Intro)

• 1450-1750
• The beginning of genuine globalization: the oceanic journeys of European explorers and the European conquest and colonial settlement of the Americas, the Atlantic slave trade.
• The silver trade allowed Europeans to use New World precious metals to buy their way into ancient Asian trade routes.
• The Columbian exchange: the massive transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people.
• Stronger and more cohesive sates represented yet another global pattern as they incorporated various local societies into larger units while actively promoting trade, manufacturing and a common culture within their borders: France, the Dutch Republic, Russia, Morocco, the Mughal Empire, Vietnam, Burma, Siam and Japan.
• In 1750, Europe, India and China were comparable in their manufacturing output.
• For majority of mankind, the 3 centuries marked less an entry into the modern era than the continuing development of older agrarian societies.

(CH13)

• Motivated Europeans to gain more land for economic development, access to trade.
• Advantages for Europeans: closeness to the Americas compared to the Asian countries, seafaring technologies built on Chinese and Islamic precedents, ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses, divisions within and between local societies provided allies for the determined European Invaders. Germs and diseases. 
• To Americas:wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes, horses, pigs, cattle, goats and sheep.
• To Europe and Asia: potato, corn and cassava. supported rapid population growth in the regions.
• Russian Empire in the making: oath of eternal submission the the grand tsar; yasak(tribute); intermittent pressure to convert to Christianity.
• The Russian Empire represented the final triumph of an agrarian civilization over the hunting societies of Siberia and over the pastoral peoples of the grasslands.
• The Russians were the first of many peoples to measure themselves against the West and to mount major "catch-up" efforts.

(CH14)

• Portuguese mariner Vasco da Gama's deliberate, systematic, century-long 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 Calicat in Southern India in 1498.
• Cinnamon, nutmeg, made, cloves and pepper.
• Trading deficit, Europeans did not have much valuable products in exchange for Eastern goods. They had to pay with cash, gold or silver.
• "Trading post empire": aimed to control commerce, not large territories or populations by force of arms. Although their overall economy lagged behind that of Asian producers, Europeans had more than caught up in the critical area of naval technology and naval warfare. This military advantage enabled the Portuguese to quickly establish fortified bases at several key locations within the Indian Ocean world. By 1600, the Portuguese trading post empire was in steep decline.
• The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company received charters from their respective governments granting them trading monopolies and the power to make war and to govern conquered peoples.
• The British were unable to practice "trade by warfare" as the Dutch did in Indonesia. 
• Dutch and English traders also began to deal in bulk goods for a mass market - pepper, textiles, tea and coffee - rather than luxury goods for an elite market.
• Between 1500 and 1866, the Atlantic slave trade took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage, deposited 10.7 million of them in the Americas; about 1.8 million (14.4%) died during the transatlantic crossing.
• how slavery was different in the Americas: large scale and number, largely based on plantation agriculture and treated slaves as a form of dehumanized property, slave status inherited across generations, no hope for eventual freedom and distinctive racial dimension "blackness"
• 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."

(CH15)

• The Reformation began in 1517: Martin Luther, publicly invited debate about various abuses within the Roman Catholic Church by issueing a document, know as the Ninety-five Theses. Critical of the luxurious life of the popes, the corruption and immorality of some clergy, the Church's selling of indulgences (to remove the penalties for sin).
• Salvation comes through faith alone.
• The protestant breakaway, combined with reformist tendencies within the Catholic Church itself, provoked a Catholic or Counter-Reformation. The Council of Trent (1545-1563).
• Efforts to accommodate Chinese culture contrast sharply with the frontal attacks on Native American religions in the Spanish Empire.
• Europe's Scientific Revolution (mid-16th to early-18th centuries): knowledge acquired through a combination of careful observations, controlled experiments, and the formulation of general laws, expressed in mathematical terms.
• Europe's historical development as a reinvigorated and fragmented civilization arguably gave rise to conditions uniquely favorable to the scientific enterprise. Europeans had evolved a legal system that guaranteed a measure of independence for a variety of institutions. The autonomy of its emerging universities. Europe was in a position to draw extensively on the know ledge of other cultures, especially of Islamic world: Arab medical texts, astronomical research and translations of Greek classics.
• Polish mathematician and astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus.
• Observation, deduction and experimentation.
• European enlightenment thinkers shared the belief in the power of knowledge to transform human society.
• Deists and Pantheists.
• The idea of progress: human society was not fixed by tradition or divine command but could be changed, and improved, by human action guided by reason.
• The Romantic movement in art and literature appealed to emotion, intuition, passion, and imagination rather than cold reason and scientific learning.