CHAPTER 14

AP® FOCUS & ANNOTATED CHAPTER OUTLINE

AP® FOCUS
The following information provides a “cheat sheet” for you to use when teaching this chapter.
Of the many topics in the AP European History course, European exploration and conquest may
be the one with which students have the greatest familiarity, but very often theirs is an American
perspective. In this course, it’s crucial to stay focused on the European aspects of the exploration
and colonization of Asia and the New World, both in
its causes and its impact. Also, this topic is frequently used for comparative questions on the AP
European History Examination, for example, a comparison of sixteenth-century and nineteenth-
century European overseas expansion.

ANNOTATED CHAPTER OUTLINE

The following annotated chapter outline will help you review the major topics covered in this chapter.

I. World Contacts Before Columbus

A. The Trade World of the Indian Ocean
1. The location of the Indian Ocean made it a crossroads for commercial and cultural exchange among
China, India, the Middle East, Africa, and Europe.
2. Trading volume increased over the centuries as merchants congregated in cosmopolitan port cities
strung around the Indian Ocean, most of which had some form of autonomous self-government.
3. Mutual self-interest had largely limited violence and attempts to monopolize trade.
4. The most developed area of this commercial web was in the South China Sea, particularly the port
of Malacca, which became a great commercial entrepôt, or trading post.
5. The Mongol emperors opened the doors of China to the West, encouraging Europeans like Marco
Polo to travel and do business there.
6. Marco Polo’s tales of his travels to the splendid court of the Great Khan and the city of Hangzhou
fueled Western fantasies about the exotic Orient.
7. After the Mongols fell to the Ming Dynasty in 1368, China entered a period of economic expansion,
population growth, and urbanization.
8. By the end of the dynasty in 1644, China’s population had tripled, making Nanjing the largest city
in the world.
9. China had the most advanced economy in the world until at least the end of the eighteenth century.
10. China also took the lead in exploration, sending Admiral Zheng He on seven expeditions (1405–
1433) involving hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men sailing thousands of miles to reach
as far west as Egypt.
11. Court conflicts and the need to defend against renewed Mongol encroachment led to the
abandonment of maritime expeditions and China’s turn away from external trade, which opened
new opportunities for European states to claim a decisive role in world trade.
12. India, another center of trade, was not only a crucial link between the Persian Gulf and the South
China Sea trade networks, but it was also an important contributor of goods to the world trading
system, especially pepper and cotton textiles.

B. The Trading States of Africa

1. By 1450 Africa had a few large and developed empires along with hundreds of smaller states.
2. Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk Egyptian empire, was a center of Islamic learning and religious
authority as well as a hub for Indian Ocean trade goods.
 3. The African highland state of Ethiopia, a Christian kingdom, shared in Cairo’s prosperity.
4. On the east coast of Africa, cities such as Mogadishu and Mombasa, where confident and urbane
merchants engaged in the Indian Ocean trade, were known for their prosperity and culture.
5. Gold from West Africa and the Akan was another important African commodity and was
transported by camel across the Sahara and sold in the ports of North Africa.
6. Inland nations that sat astride the north-south caravan routes grew wealthy from this trade.
7. In the thirteenth century, Mali had emerged as an important player on the overland trade route,
gaining prestige from its ruler Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324−1325.
8. Slaves were another important object of trade; Arabic and African merchants took West African
slaves to the Mediterranean to be sold in European, Egyptian, and Middle Eastern markets and also
brought eastern Europeans to West Africa as slaves.
9. Indian and Arabic merchants also traded slaves in the coastal regions of East Africa.
10. Belief in a legend about a Christian nation in Africa ruled by a mythical king, Prester John, played
an important role in Europeans’ imagination of the outside world.

C. The Ottoman and Persian Empires

1. The Middle East served as an intermediary for trade among Asia, Africa, and Europe and as an
important supplier of goods, especially silk and cotton.
2. Two great rival empires, the Persian Safavids and the Turkish Ottomans, dominated the region.
3. Economically, the two competed for control over western trade routes to the East.
4. Under Sultan Mohammed II (r. 1451–1481), the Ottomans captured Constantinople, Europe’s
largest city, in May 1453 and renamed it Istanbul; from there they came to control the sea trade in
the eastern Mediterranean.
5. Ottoman expansion frightened Europeans; Ottoman armies seemed invincible and the empire’s
desire for expansion limitless.
6. With trade routes to the east dominated by the Ottomans, Europeans wished to find new trade routes
free of Ottoman control.

D. Genoese and Venetian Middlemen

1. Europeans produced few products to rival the fine wares and coveted spices of Asia, and Europe
constituted a minor outpost of the world trading system.
2. In 1304 Venice established formal relations with the sultan of Mamluk Egypt, opening operations in
Cairo, the gateway to Asian trade; Venetian merchants specialized in luxury goods such as spices,
silks, and carpets obtained from middlemen in the eastern Mediterranean and Asia Minor.
3. Because demand for European products such as wool and metal goods in the East was low, the
Venetians made up the difference by earning currency in the shipping industry and through trade in
firearms, slaves, and precious metals.
4. Genoa had dominated the northern route to Asia through the Black Sea, and in 1291 it sponsored an
expedition into the Atlantic in search of India, which never returned.
5. In the fifteenth century, with Venice claiming victory in the spice trade, the Genoese shifted focus
from trade to finance, especially in the western Mediterranean.
6. When Spanish and Portuguese voyages began to explore the western Atlantic, Genoese merchants,
navigators, and financiers provided their skills to the Iberian monarchs.
7. Genoese merchants would eventually help finance Spanish colonization of the New World.
8. A major element of Italian trade was slavery; merchants purchased slaves in the Balkans and sold
them in various Mediterranean ports.
 9. After the loss of the Black Sea to the Ottomans—and thus the source of slaves—the Genoese sought
new supplies of slaves in the West, taking indigenous peoples from the Canary Islands, Muslim
prisoners and Jewish refugees from Spain, and by the early 1500s both black and Berber Africans.
10. With the growth of Spanish colonies in the New World, Genoese and Venetian merchants would
become important players in the Atlantic slave trade.
11. Mariners, merchants, and financiers from Venice and Genoa, including Christopher Columbus,
brought their experience to the Iberian states and the New World.

II. The European Voyages of Discovery

A. Causes of European Expansion
1. By the middle of the fifteenth century, Europe was experiencing a revival of population and
economic activity after the lows of the Black Death.
2. This revival created demands for luxury goods from the East, particularly spices.
3. The fall of Constantinople and subsequent Ottoman control of trade routes created obstacles to
fulfilling these demands, motivating Europeans to seek new sources of precious metals to trade with
the Ottomans or new trade routes that bypassed the Ottomans.
4. Spices were desirable not only because they added flavor and variety to the monotonous European
diet but also because they could be used in religious rituals and as perfumes, medicines, and dyes.
5. Religious fervor was another important catalyst for expansion, especially the passion and energy
ignited by the Christian reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula.
6. Overseas exploration was in some ways a transfer of the Crusading spirit to new
non-Christian territories, and because the Ottoman Empire was too strong to defeat, Iberians turned
their attention elsewhere.

7. Combined with an eagerness to earn profits and to spread Christianity was the desire for glory and a
curiosity about the physical universe.
8. Individual explorers combined these motivations in their own ways; Portuguese explorer Vasco da
Gama, for example, claimed to be searching for Christians and spices.
9. Eagerness for exploration and a lack of opportunity at home provided the motivation for young men
of the Spanish upper classes to make voyages that were now possible because of the growth of
government power and the monarchs’ ability to support foreign ventures.
10. Competition among European monarchs and between Protestant and Catholic states was an
important factor in encouraging the steady stream of expeditions that began in the late fifteenth
century.
11. Ordinary sailors were ill paid, and life at sea meant danger, overcrowding, and hunger.
12. Some chose to join a ship’s crew to escape poverty, continue a family trade, or find better lives;
others were orphans or poor boys who were placed on board with little say in the decision.
13. Women also paid a price for the voyages of exploration, as sailors’ wives, left alone for months or
years at a time, struggled to feed their families.
14. Merchants provided the capital for many early voyages and had a strong say in their course.
15. An educated public eagerly read tales of fantastic places written by John Mandeville, Marco Polo,
and other travelers.

B. Technology and the Rise of Exploration

1. Technological developments in shipbuilding, weaponry, and navigation paved the way for European
expansion.
2. The need for sturdier craft to withstand the rough winds of the Atlantic, as well as population losses
caused by the Black Death, forced the development of a new style of ship that would not require
much manpower to sail.
3. The Portuguese developed the caravel, a small, light, three-mast sailing ship that, although slower
than the open boat called a galley, held more cargo.
4. The caravel’s triangular lateen sails and sternpost rudder also made the caravel a more
maneuverable vessel, and when fitted with cannon, it could dominate larger vessels.
5. Great strides in cartography and navigational aids were made during this period.
6. Arab scholars reintroduced Europeans to Ptolemy’s Geography, an ancient text which clearly
depicted the world as round and introduced the concepts of latitude and longitude, but also showed
the world as much smaller than it was in reality.
7. Cartographers combined the knowledge of the classical world with the latest information from
mariners to create more accurate maps.
8. The magnetic compass enabled sailors to determine their direction and position at sea, and the
astrolabe, invented by the ancient Greeks and perfected by Muslim navigators, permitted mariners
to plot their latitude.
9. Gunpowder, the compass, and the sternpost rudder were all Chinese inventions.
10. The lateen sail, which allowed European ships to tack against the wind, was a product of the Indian
Ocean trade world.
11. Advances in cartography drew on the rich tradition of Judeo-Arabic mathematical and astronomical
learning in Iberia.
C. The Portuguese Overseas Empire
1. Portugal, a small, poor nation on Europe’s margins, had a long history of seafaring and navigation.
2. Prince Henry (1394–1460), a younger son of the king, sponsored annual expeditions down the
western coast of Africa and supported the study of geography and navigation.
3. The objectives of Portuguese exploration policy included the desire to achieve military glory,
convert Muslims, and find gold, slaves, and an overseas route to the spice markets of India.
4. Portugal’s conquest of Ceuta in 1415 marked the beginning of European overseas expansion.
5. In the 1420s, under Henry’s direction, the Portuguese began to settle the Atlantic islands of Madeira
(ca. 1420) and the Azores (1427) and founded their first African commercial settlement at Arguin
(1443).
6. The Portuguese established trading posts and forts on the gold-rich Guinea coast and penetrated
Africa to Timbuktu; by 1500, Portugal controlled the flow of African gold to Europe.
7. Pushing farther south down the west coast of Africa, Bartholomew Diaz first rounded the Cape of
Good Hope in 1487, although he had to turn back; then in 1497 Vasco da Gama succeeded in
rounding the Cape of Good Hope with a fleet of four ships.
8. With the help of an Indian guide, da Gama reached the port of Calicut in India and then returned to
Lisbon loaded with spices and samples of Indian cloth.
9. Although he had failed to forge any trading alliances with local powers and Portuguese arrogance
ensured the future hostility of Muslim merchants who
dominated the trading system, da Gama had proved the possibility of lucrative trade with the East via
the Cape route.

10. Portuguese cannon blasted open the Muslim-controlled port of Malacca in 1511, followed by
Calicut, Hormuz, and Goa, enabling the Portuguese to make Lisbon the entrance port for Asian
goods and laying the foundation for Portuguese imperialism in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.

D. Spain’s Voyages to the Americas

1. Columbus was very knowledgeable about the sea: he had worked as a mapmaker, was familiar with
Portuguese navigational developments and the use of the compass as a nautical instrument, and had
gained experience from years at sea.
2. Columbus also was a deeply religious man who understood Christianity as a missionary religion that
should be carried to all places on earth and viewed himself as a divine agent.
3. Inspired by the stories of Marco Polo and others, Columbus wanted to find a direct ocean trading
route to Asia.
4. In 1492, after being rejected by the Portuguese, Columbus’s expedition finally won the backing of
Ferdinand and Isabella, who named him viceroy over any territory he might discover and promised
him one-tenth of the journey’s material rewards.
5. Based on Ptolemy’s Geography and other texts, he expected to pass the islands of Japan and then
land on the east coast of China.
6. When he landed in the Bahamas, which he christened San Salvador, on October 12, 1492,
Columbus believed he had found some small islands off the east coast of Japan.
7. Believing he was in the Indies, he called the native peoples “Indians,” a name later applied to all
inhabitants of the Americas, and he concluded that they would make good slaves and could be
converted to Christianity easily.
8. In fact, Columbus had landed in modern-day Haiti and Dominican Republic, and the inhabitants he
encountered were the Taino people who spoke the Arawak language.
9. From San Salvador, Columbus sailed southwest and landed on Cuba on October 28; believing that
he was on the Chinese mainland near the coastal city of Quinsay (now Hangzhou), he sent a small
party inland to locate the great city.
10. Disappointed at not finding Quinsay, but confident a source of gold would soon be found, he headed
back to Spain to report on his discovery, and news of his voyage spread rapidly across Europe.
11. On his second voyage, Columbus subjugated the island of Hispaniola and enslaved its people; he
began establishing settlers in the new Spanish territories under his governance.
12. Revolts broke out against Columbus and his brother, and a royal expedition brought them back to
Spain for investigation; although Columbus was cleared of wrongdoing, the territories remained
under royal control.
13. Columbus was very much a man of his times and believed, to the end of his life, that he had found
small islands off the coast of Asia.
14. He never realized the scope of his achievement: to have found a vast continent unknown to
Europeans.

E. Spain “Discovers” the Pacific

 1. The Florentine navigator Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512) realized what Columbus had not—that
this “New World” was actually a continent separate from Asia—and in recognition of his claim, the
continent was named for him.
2. To settle competing claims to the Atlantic discoveries, Spain and Portugal turned to Pope Alexander
VI.
3. The resulting Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) gave Spain everything to the west of an imaginary line
drawn down the Atlantic and Portugal everything to the east of that line.
4. This arbitrary division worked in Portugal’s favor when in 1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral landed on the
coast of Brazil, which Cabral claimed as Portuguese territory.
5. Spain renewed the search for a western passage to Asia in 1519 when Charles V sent the Portuguese
mariner Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) to find a direct sea route to the spices of the Moluccas off
the southeast coast of Asia.
6. Magellan sailed across the Atlantic to Brazil, through the treacherous straits that now bear his name,
into a new ocean he dubbed the Pacific, and then he headed west toward the Malay Archipelago.
7. Terrible storms, disease, starvation, and violence devastated the expedition, which had begun with
five ships and about 270 men; a single ship with only eighteen men aboard returned to Spain, having
taken nearly three years to circumnavigate the globe.
8. This voyage revolutionized Europeans’ understanding of the world by demonstrating the vastness of
the Pacific and proving that the earth was clearly much larger than Columbus had believed.
9. It also demonstrated that the westward passage to the Indies was too long and dangerous, and Spain
soon abandoned the attempt to oust Portugal from the Eastern spice trade to concentrate on its New
World territories.

F. Early Exploration by Northern European Powers

1. The English and French also set sail across the Atlantic in search of a northwest passage to the
Indies.
2. The voyages of John Cabot, a Genoese merchant living in London who explored Newfoundland and
the New England coast, and Martin Frobisher, who explored areas of Canada, ultimately proved
futile; the English did not establish any permanent colonies in these territories.
3. Early French exploration of the Atlantic was equally frustrating: Jacques Cartier’s exploration of the
St. Lawrence River was halted at the great rapids west of the present-day island of Montreal,
although the French began a lucrative trade in beaver and other furs there.
4. French fisherman also competed with the Spanish and the English for the teeming schools of cod
found around Newfoundland, which the fishing vessels salted on board and brought back to Europe.

III. Conquest and Settlement

A. Spanish Conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires
1. The first two decades after Columbus’s arrival in the New World saw Spanish settlement of
Hispaniola, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and other Caribbean islands.
2. The Spanish governor in Cuba sponsored expeditions to the Yucatan coast of the Gulf of Mexico,
including one in 1519 under the command of the conquistador Hernando Cortés (1485–1547).
3. After landing on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico in 1519 and receiving an unarmed delegation of
Mexica leaders, Cortés realized that he could exploit internal dissension within the empire to his
own advantage.
 4. Cortés quickly forged an alliance with the Tlaxcalas and other subject kingdoms, which chafed
under the tribute demanded by the Mexica, and with a force of a few hundred Spanish and some six
thousand indigenous warriors, he marched on Tenochtitlán in November 1519.
5. Montezuma was apparently deeply impressed by Spanish victories and believed they were
invincible. Sources written after the Conquest claimed that the emperor believed Cortés was an
embodiment of the god Quetzalcoatl, whose return was promised in Aztec myth.
6. Cortés took Montezuma hostage, and the emperor’s influence over his people crumbled.
7. After a second assault on Tenochtitlán in May 1520, which resulted in an uprising and Montezuma’s
death, Cortés achieved a hard-won victory in late summer 1521 that was greatly aided by
deprivations of the siege and the effects of smallpox.
8. Cortés and other conquistadors began the systematic conquest of Mexico, and over time, a series of
indigenous kingdoms gradually fell under Spanish domination.
9. In Peru, the Incas had created a vast and well-fortified empire. Their strength lay largely in their
bureaucratic efficiency.
10. At the time of the Spanish invasion, the Inca Empire had been weakened by a disease epidemic and
by a civil war over succession.
11. In 1532 Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1475–1541), a conquistador of modest Spanish origins, ambushed
and captured the new Incan ruler, Atahualpa, collected an enormous ransom in gold, and then
executed him on trumped-up charges.
12. In 1533 the Spanish, aided by alliances with local peoples, marched on the capital of Cuzco and
plundered immense riches in gold and silver, setting off decades of violence and resistance.

B. Portuguese Brazil
1. Unlike Mesoamerica or the Andes, the territory of Brazil contained no urban empires, but instead
roughly 2.5 million nomadic and settled people divided into small tribes and many different
language groups.
2. In the 1520s, Portuguese settlers brought sugar cane production to Brazil, thus creating a new form
of colonization in the Americas: large plantations worked by enslaved people. This model would
spread throughout the Caribbean along with sugar production in the seventeenth century.

C. Colonial Empires of England and France

1. In the early seventeenth century, northern European powers profited from Spanish weakness to
challenge its monopoly over the seas. They eventually succeeded in creating multi-sited overseas
empires, consisting of settler colonies in North America, plantation slavery in the Caribbean, and
scattered trading posts in west Africa and Asia.
2. The colony of Virginia, founded at Jamestown in 1607, initially struggled to grow sufficient food
and faced hostility from the Powhatan Confederacy. Eventually it thrived by producing tobacco for
a growing European market.
3. During the late seventeenth century enslaved Africans replaced indentured servants as laborers on
tobacco and rice plantations, and a harsh racial divide was imposed.
4. For the first settlers on the coast of New England, the reasons for seeking a new life in the colonies
were more religious than economic.
5. Whereas the Spanish established wholesale dominance over Mexico and Peru and its indigenous
inhabitants, English settlements hugged the Atlantic coastline and excluded indigenous people from
their territories rather than incorporating them.
 6. In place of the unified rule exerted by the Spanish crown, English colonization was haphazard and
decentralized in nature, leading to greater colonial autonomy and diversity.
7. Whereas English settlements were largely agricultural, the French established trading factories in
present-day Canada, much like those of the Portuguese in Asia and Africa.
8. French immigration to New Canada was always minuscule compared with the stream of settlers
who came to British North America; nevertheless, the French were energetic and industrious traders
and explorers.
9. In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the English and French defied Spain’s hold over the
Caribbean Sea: the English seized control of Bermuda (1612), Barbados (1627), and a succession of
other islands. The French took Cayenne (1604), St. Christophe (1625), Martinique and Guadeloupe
(1635), and Saint-Domingue (1697) on the western half of Spanish-occupied Hispaniola.
10. In the 1600s, France and England—along with Denmark and other northern European powers—
established fortified trading posts in West Africa as bases for purchasing slaves and in India and the
Indian Ocean for spices and other luxury goods.

D. Colonial Administration
1. Early conquest and settlement were conducted largely by private initiatives, but the Spanish and
Portuguese governments soon assumed more direct control.
2. Spanish territories themselves were divided initially into two viceroyalties or administrative
divisions: New Spain, created in 1535, with its capital at Mexico City, and Peru, created in 1542,
with its capital at Lima.
3. As in Spain, settlement in the Americas was centered on cities and towns. In each city, the
municipal council, or cabildo, exercised local authority.
4. To secure the vast expanse of Brazil, the Portuguese implemented the system of captaincies in the
1530s, hereditary grants of land given to nobles and loyal officials who bore the costs of settling and
administering their territories.
5. Throughout the Americas, the Catholic Church played an integral role in Iberian rule.
6. By the end of the seventeenth century, the French crown had imposed direct rule over its North
American colonies, whereas English colonists established their own autonomous assemblies to
regulate local affairs. Wealthy merchants and landowners dominated the assemblies, although even
common men had more say in politics than was the case in England.

IV. The Era of Global Contact

A. Indigenous Population Loss and Economic Exploitation
1. The conquerors of the New World made use of the encomienda system to profit from the peoples
and territories they encountered. This system was a legacy of the methods used to reward military
leaders in the time of the Reconquista, when victorious officers received feudal privileges over
conquered areas in return for their service.
2. Conquistadors granted their followers the right to employ groups of indigenous people as laborers
and to demand tribute payments from them in exchange for providing food, shelter and instruction
in the Christian faith.
3. A 1512 Spanish law authorizing the use of encomiendas called for indigenous people to be treated
fairly, but in practice the system lead to terrible abuses, including overwork, beatings, and sexual
violence.
4. King Charles I responded to these complaints in 1542 with the New Laws, which set limits on the
authority of encomienda holders. This provoked a revolt in Peru. Eventually the crown gained
 control over encomiendas in central areas of the empire and required indigenous people to pay
tributes in cash rather than in labor.
5. Royal officials established a new government-run system of forced labor, called repartimiento in
New Spain and mita in Peru. Laborers received modest wages in exchange, which they could use to
fulfill tribute obligations.
6. Indigenous peoples saw a disastrous decline in population soon after the arrival of Europeans,
caused by violence of conquest, the disruption of agriculture and trade caused by warfare, and
infectious disease.
7. The pattern of devastating disease and population loss established in the Spanish colonies was
repeated everywhere Europeans settled. Overall, population declined by as much as 90 per cent or
more across the Americas after European contact, but with regional variations.

B. Life in the Colonies

1. Many factors helped to shape life in European colonies, including geographical location, religion,
indigenous cultures and practices, patterns of European settlement, and the cultural attitudes and
official policies of the European nations that claimed them as empire.
2. The first explorers formed unions with native women, through coercion or choice, and relied on
them to act as translators and guides and to form alliances with indigenous powers.
3. Where European women and children accompanied men, as in the British colonies and the Spanish
mainland, new settlements took on European languages, religion, and ways of life, with input from
local cultures.
4. Where European women were not present, as on the west coast of Africa and in most European
outposts in Asia, local populations retained their own culture, to which male Europeans
acclimatized themselves.
5. The scarcity of women in all colonies, at least initially, opened up opportunities for those that
arrived.
6. English cultural attitudes drew strict boundaries between “civilized” and “savage,” which prevented
English men from forming unions with indigenous women.
7. In contrast, in New France, where royal officials initially encouraged French traders to form ties
with native people and to marry local women, assimilation with the native population was seen as a
solution to the low levels of immigration from France.
8. Most women who crossed the Atlantic were Africans, comprising four-fifths of the female
immigrants before 1800.
9. Wherever slavery existed, masters used their power to engage in sexual relations with enslaved
women.
10. In Portuguese, Spanish, and French colonies, substantial populations of free blacks descended from
the freed children of such unions, but in English colonies, masters were less likely to free children
they had fathered with female slaves.
11. The mixing of indigenous peoples with Europeans and Africans created whole new populations and
ethnicities and complex feelings of self-identities.
12. In Spanish America, the word mestizo described people of mixed Native American and European
descent; the terms “mulatto” and “people of color” referred to those of mixed African and European
origin.
13. Brazil, with its immense slave-based plantation system, large indigenous population, and relatively
low Portuguese immigration, developed an especially racially complex society.
C. The Columbian Exchange
1. The migration of peoples to the New World led to an exchange of animals, plants, and disease, a
complex process known as the Columbian exchange.
2. Perhaps the most significant introduction to the diet of Native Americans came via the meat and
milk of the livestock that the early conquistadors brought with them, including cattle, sheep, and
goats. The horse enabled both the Spanish conquerors and native populations to travel faster and
farther and to transport heavy loads.
3. Maize became a staple in Spain, Portugal, southern France, and Italy, and in the eighteenth century
it became one of the chief foods of southeastern Europe and southern China.
4. Even more valuable was the nutritious white potato, which slowly spread from west to east,
contributing everywhere to a rise in population.
5. Disease was perhaps the most important form of exchange; a wave of catastrophic epidemic disease
swept the Western Hemisphere after 1492.

D. Sugar and Slavery

1. Throughout the Middle Ages, slavery was deeply entrenched in the Mediterranean, but it was not
based on race; many slaves were white.
2. Cut off from its traditional sources of slaves—Ottomans halted the flow of white slaves from the
eastern Mediterranean, and the reconquista diminished the supply of Muslim captives—
Mediterranean Europe turned to sub-Saharan Africa, which had a long history of slave trading.
3. Portuguese explorers sought slaves during their voyages along the western coast of Africa and in
1444 returned to Lisbon with the first cargo of enslaved Africans.
4. While the first slaves were simply seized by small raiding parties, Portuguese merchants found that
it was easier to trade with local African leaders, who were accustomed to dealing in slaves captured
through warfare with neighboring powers.
5. From 1490 to 1530, Portuguese traders brought hundreds of enslaved Africans to Lisbon each year,
where they eventually made up 10 percent of the city’s population.
6. European demand for sugar grew with population increases and monetary expansion in the fifteenth
century.
7. To meet the demand for sugar, a difficult and demanding crop to produce for profit, Europeans
forced native islanders and then enslaved Africans to provide the backbreaking work.
8. The transatlantic slave trade began in 1518 when emperor Charles V authorized traders to bring
enslaved Africans to the Americas.
9. After its founding in 1621, the Dutch West India Company transported thousands of Africans to
Brazil and the Caribbean, mostly to work on sugar plantations.
10. In the mid-seventeenth century, the English entered the trade, and from 1660 to 1698, the Royal
African Company held a monopoly over the slave trade from the English crown.
11. For African slaves, the Atlantic passage was lethal; some 20 percent of them died on the voyage,
most commonly from dysentery caused by poor-quality food and water, crowding, and lack of
sanitation.
12. Scholars estimate that European traders embarked more than 10 million enslaved Africans across
the Atlantic from 1518 to 1800 (of whom roughly 8.5 million disembarked), compared to only 2 to
2.5 million Europeans who migrated to the New World during the same period.
13. Slaves worked in a variety of occupations as miners, soldiers, sailors, servants, artisans, and in the
production of various crops.
 E. Spanish Silver and Its Economic Effects
1. In 1545 the Spanish discovered an extraordinary source of silver at Potosí (in present-day Bolivia)
in territory conquered from the Inca Empire.
2. From Potosí and the mines at Zacatecas and Guanajuato in Mexico, huge quantities of precious
metals poured forth—35 million pounds of silver and more than 600,000 pounds of gold between
1503 and 1650—and were transported by armed convoys to Spain each year.
3. In sixteenth-century Spain, a steady population increase and a sharp rise in the demand for food and
goods, which Spain could not meet, led to widespread inflation, aggravated by the influx of silver.
4. Because Spain’s King Philip II paid his armies and foreign debts with silver bullion, Spanish
inflation was transmitted to the rest of Europe in the form of large price increases, especially for
food, hurting the poor worst of all.
5. China, however, absorbed half the world’s production of silver, demanding it in exchange for their
products and for the payment of imperial taxes.

F. The Birth of the Global Economy

1. With the Europeans’ discovery of the Americas and their exploration of the Pacific, the entire world
was linked for the first time in history by seaborne trade, bringing three successive commercial
empires into being: the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch.
2. In the sixteenth century, the Portuguese controlled the sea route to India, exporting horses from
Mesopotamia and copper from Arabia to India; hawks and peacocks from India to Chinese and
Japanese markets; and Asian spices, purchased with textiles produced in India and with gold and
ivory from East Africa, back to Portugal.
3. From their colony in Brazil, the Portuguese shipped back sugar, which had been produced by
African slaves whom they had transported across the Atlantic.
4. The Spanish Empire in the New World was a land empire, but across the Pacific the Spaniards built
a seaborne empire centered at Manila in the Philippines.
5. In Manila, Spanish traders used silver from American mines to purchase Chinese silk, which was in
high demand in European markets.
6. The Dutch Empire, initially built on spices, began to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese
commercial empires with the founding of the Dutch East India Company in 1602.
7. In return for assisting Indonesian princes in local squabbles and disputes with the Portuguese, the
Dutch won broad commercial concessions; through agreements, seizures, and military aggression,
they gained control of the Indonesian sources of spices and gradually acquired political domination
over the archipelago.
8. By the 1660s, the Dutch had expelled the Portuguese from Ceylon and other East Indian islands,
thereby establishing control of the lucrative spice trade.
9. Founded in 1621 when the Dutch were at war with Spain, the Dutch West India Company
aggressively sought to open trade with North and South America, and in 1628 the company captured
portions of Brazil and the Caribbean.
10. The Dutch also successfully interceded in the transatlantic slave trade, establishing many trading
stations on the west coast of Africa and becoming one of the principal operators of the slave trade
starting in the 1640s.

V. Changing Attitudes and Beliefs

A. Religious Conversion
 1. Converting indigenous people to Christianity was one of the most important justifications for
European expansion.
2. The first missionaries to the New World accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, and more
than 2,500 Franciscans, Dominicans, Jesuits, and other friars crossed the Atlantic in the following
century.
3. Catholic friars were among the first Europeans to seek an understanding of native cultures and
languages as part of their effort to render Christianity comprehensible to indigenous people. They
were also the most vociferous opponents of abuses committed by Spanish settlers.
4. Missionaries taught indigenous peoples European methods of agriculture and instilled loyalty to
colonial masters.
5. Authorities became suspicious about the thoroughness of native peoples’ conversion and their
lingering belief in the old gods.

B. European Debates About Indigenous Peoples

1. Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566), a Dominican friar and former encomienda holder, was one of
the earliest and most outspoken critics of the brutal treatment inflicted on indigenous peoples.
2. King Charles I assembled a group of churchmen and lawyers to debate the issue in 1550. Both sides
claimed victory in the debate, but it had little effect on the situation in the Americas.
3. Northern Europeans derived the “Black Legend” of Spanish colonialism, the notion that the Spanish
were uniquely brutal and cruel in their conquest and settlement of the Americas. This helped
northern European powers overlook their own record of colonial violence and exploitation.

C. New Ideas About Race

1. Most Europeans grouped Africans into the despised categories of pagan heathens or Muslim
infidels; the Irish, Jews, and, more generally, the peasant masses also were viewed as alien peoples
and a lower form of humanity.
2. As Europeans turned to Africa for new sources of slaves, they drew on and developed ideas about
Africans’ primitiveness and barbarity to defend slavery and even argue that enslavement benefited
Africans by bringing the light of Christianity to heathen peoples.
3. Europeans developed increasingly rigid ideas of racial superiority and inferiority to safeguard
profits from the slave trade; over time, black skin became equated with slavery itself as Europeans
at home and in the colonies convinced themselves that blacks were destined by God to serve them
as slaves.
4. Support for this belief went back to the Greek philosopher Aristotle’s argument that some people
are naturally destined for slavery and to biblical associations between darkness and sin.
5. Defenders of slavery also cited the Biblical story of Noah’s curse upon Canaan and all of his
descendants to be the “servant of servants,” as well as Biblical genealogies that listed Ham’s sons as
those who peopled North Africa and Cush.
6. After 1700 the emergence of new methods of observing and describing nature led to the use of
science to define “race” to mean biologically distinct groups of people, whose physical differences
produced differences in culture, character, and intelligence.

D. Michel de Montaigne and Cultural Curiosity

1. Decades of religious fanaticism that led to civil anarchy and war and doubts on the part of both
Catholics and Protestants that any one faith contained absolute truth, along with the discovery of
 peoples in the New World who had radically different ways of life, all produced ideas of skepticism
and cultural relativism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
2. Skepticism as a school of thought holds that total certainty or definitive knowledge is not attainable.
3. Cultural relativism suggests that one culture is not necessarily superior to another, just different.
4. Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) developed a new literary genre, the essay, to express
his ideas, which reflected both skepticism and cultural relativism.
5. Essays (1580), which was written in French and drawn from ancient texts, Montaigne’s own
experience in government, and his moral judgment, became one of the most widely read texts of the
period.
6. Reflecting on the impact of overseas discoveries, Montaigne, in his essay “Of Cannibals,” rejected
the notion that one culture is superior to another.
7. Few in Montaigne’s time would have agreed with his challenge to ideas of European superiority, but
his popular essays contributed to a basic shift in attitudes, inaugurating an era of doubt.

E. William Shakespeare and His Influence

1. The sixteenth century was a period of remarkable literary creativity, especially in England.
2. The undisputed master of this period was the dramatist William Shakespeare, whose genius lay in
his characterizations and plots, his understanding of human psychology, and his unexcelled gift for
language.
3. Shakespeare, a Renaissance man with a deep appreciation of classical culture, individualism, and
humanism, wrote plays that explore an enormous range of human problems and are open to an
almost infinite variety of interpretations.
4. Like Montaigne’s essays, Shakespeare’s work reveals the impact of the new discoveries and
contacts of his day.
5. For example, the title character of Othello is described as a “Moor of Venice,” although Othello is
also described as “black” in skin color; such discrepancies may reflect uncertainty about racial and
religious classifications and Shakespeare’s doubts about the prevailing view of Moors as inferior.
6. Modern scholars often note the echoes between Shakespeare’s last play, The Tempest, which has a
plot marked by an interest in race and race relations, and the realities of imperial conquest and
settlement in his day.
7. In the play, Shakespeare borrows words from Montaigne’s essay “Of Cannibals,” suggesting that he
may have intended to criticize, rather than endorse, racial intolerance.