Chapter 13: Political Transformations
Welcome back to another blog post! For this post, we will be discussing Chapter 13 which focuses on Political Transformations: Empires and Encounters. As I mentioned in my last post, the focus of our upcoming chapters would be on the early modern era which is merely around 1450-1750.
European Empires in the Americas
The European Advantage
Key points in this section would be:
- Geography provides a starting point for explaining Europe's American empires. Countries on the Atlantic rim of Europe: Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France were simply closer to the Americas than were any potential Asian competitors. Furthermore, the fixed winds of the Atlantic blew steadily in the same direction.
- The Europeans penetrated the Atlantic Ocean through their innovations in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship design.
The Columbian Exchange
- The impact of the little age created an acute labor shortage and certainly did make room for immigrant newcomers, both colonizing Europeans, and enslaved Africans.
- Over the several centuries of the colonial era and beyond, various combinations of indigenous, European, and African people created entirely new societies in the Americas, largely replacing the many and varied cultures that had flourished before 1492.
Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas
What the Europeans had encountered across the Atlantic was another "old world" but their actions surely gave rise to a "new world" in the Americas.
Their colonial empires-- Spanish, Portuguese, British and French did not simply conquer and govern established societies but rather generated wholly new societies, born of African peoples, cultures, plants, and animals.
In The Land of the Aztecs and the Incas
- Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empire in the early sixteenth century
- The economic foundation for this emerging colonial society lay in commercial agriculture, much of it in large rural estates, and in silver and gold mining.
- In both cases, native peoples, rather than African slaves or European workers, provided most of the labor, despite their small numbers.
- A distinctive social order grew up, replicating something of the Spanish class and gender hierarchy while accommodating the racially and culturally different Indians and Africans as well as growing numbers of racially mixed people.
- By the twentieth century, mixed-race people represented the majority of the population of Mexico, and cultural blending had become a central feature of the country's identity.
Colonies of Sugar
- Another and quite a different kind of colonial society emerged in the lowland areas of Brazil, ruled by Portugal, and in the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Carribean
- Europeans found a very profitable substitute in sugar, which was much in demand in Europe, where it was used as a medicine, a spice, a sweetener, a preservative, and in sculptured forms as a decoration that indicated high status.
Muslim and Christians in the Ottoman Empire
- Like the Mughal state, the Ottoman empire was also the creation of the Turkic warrior groups, whose aggressive raiding of agricultural civilization was now legitimized in Islamic terms.
- Gaining such an empire transformed Turkish social life. The relative independence of Central Asian pastoral women, their open association with men, and their political influence in society all diminished as the Turks adopted Islam, ancient and patriarchal Mediterranean civilizations.
That is all for this blog post in Chapter 13! In the next post, we will be discussing the first part of Chapter 14 which gives focus on Economic Transformations.
European Empires in the Americas
The European Advantage
Key points in this section would be:
- Geography provides a starting point for explaining Europe's American empires. Countries on the Atlantic rim of Europe: Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France were simply closer to the Americas than were any potential Asian competitors. Furthermore, the fixed winds of the Atlantic blew steadily in the same direction.
- The Europeans penetrated the Atlantic Ocean through their innovations in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship design.
The Columbian Exchange
- The impact of the little age created an acute labor shortage and certainly did make room for immigrant newcomers, both colonizing Europeans, and enslaved Africans.
- Over the several centuries of the colonial era and beyond, various combinations of indigenous, European, and African people created entirely new societies in the Americas, largely replacing the many and varied cultures that had flourished before 1492.
Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas
What the Europeans had encountered across the Atlantic was another "old world" but their actions surely gave rise to a "new world" in the Americas.
Their colonial empires-- Spanish, Portuguese, British and French did not simply conquer and govern established societies but rather generated wholly new societies, born of African peoples, cultures, plants, and animals.
In The Land of the Aztecs and the Incas
- Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empire in the early sixteenth century
- The economic foundation for this emerging colonial society lay in commercial agriculture, much of it in large rural estates, and in silver and gold mining.
- In both cases, native peoples, rather than African slaves or European workers, provided most of the labor, despite their small numbers.
- A distinctive social order grew up, replicating something of the Spanish class and gender hierarchy while accommodating the racially and culturally different Indians and Africans as well as growing numbers of racially mixed people.
- By the twentieth century, mixed-race people represented the majority of the population of Mexico, and cultural blending had become a central feature of the country's identity.
Colonies of Sugar
- Another and quite a different kind of colonial society emerged in the lowland areas of Brazil, ruled by Portugal, and in the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Carribean
- Europeans found a very profitable substitute in sugar, which was much in demand in Europe, where it was used as a medicine, a spice, a sweetener, a preservative, and in sculptured forms as a decoration that indicated high status.
Muslim and Christians in the Ottoman Empire
- Like the Mughal state, the Ottoman empire was also the creation of the Turkic warrior groups, whose aggressive raiding of agricultural civilization was now legitimized in Islamic terms.
- Gaining such an empire transformed Turkish social life. The relative independence of Central Asian pastoral women, their open association with men, and their political influence in society all diminished as the Turks adopted Islam, ancient and patriarchal Mediterranean civilizations.
That is all for this blog post in Chapter 13! In the next post, we will be discussing the first part of Chapter 14 which gives focus on Economic Transformations.
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