John Galans MOTMW2

      At one level, as we have seen, the period from the mid-fourteenth century to the eighteenth was an age of plagues, when lethal diseases spread over the world and ravaged populations. Thanks to the new routes pioneered in the 1490s, that we talked about in Chapters 15 and 16, Chapters 17, 18, 19 and the "Traces of the Trade" video, tell us about how these routes widely impacted the world by interconnecting the globe which soon led to a more different world than it was before these routes were discovered.
     Chapter 17, is titled Ecological Revolution of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, which was the biggest evolution on earth.  From Columbus's first ocean crossing in 1492, he brought back descriptions and samples of New World plants, including pineapple and cassava or manioc. On his second transatlantic voyage in 1493, he took sugarcane to the island of Hispaniola - but let it grow wild. Pigs, sheep, cattle, chickens, and wheat made their first appearance in the New World on the same occasion. Out of Eurasia to new worlds in the Western and Southern Hemispheres went wheat, sugar, rice, bananas, apples, pears, apricots, peaches, plums, cherries, olives, citrus fruits, and major meat yielding and dairy livestock. Quinine, had enormous long-term significance, because it can control malaria and therefore equipped Europeans to survive in the tropics. The most important gifts of the New World to the rest of the planet, because they could feed vast populations - were maize, potatoes, and sweet potatoes. Turkic frontiersmen bore maize as a tribute plant to China, where it was first recorded in 1555. The sweet potato, first reported in southern China near the Burmes border in the 1560s, it found favor in hill country among immigrants and settlers who were obliged to occupy land previously thought marginal. Potatoes, which the Portuguese introduced to Asia in 1605, failed to win popular favor in Japan, Korea, or China. Yet they became an inescapable ingredient of Bengali meals in India and conquered northern Europe. European greens like dandelion and clover that came to be considered weeds in the New World made the revolution work. They bound soil together, saved it from drying out, filled eco-niches, and fed imported livestock. Sugar rapidly became the most important item of transoceanic trade. By the 1580s, four effects were evident. First, Brazil had become the world's major producer, and the economies of the older sugar islands of the eastern Atlantic - Madeira, the Azores, the Cape Verdes - went into eclipse. Second, the need for labor in the sugar plantations and mills caused an explosion in the transatlantic slave trade. Third, the growing volume of sugar production created new American industries : refining sugar and distilling rum. Finally, the competition for sugar-producing lands became a major cause of imperial rivalry among European states. Then, on their expulsion nearly a quater of a century later, concentrated on creating plantations of their own in the Caribbean and on the Guiana coast of South America, where they proclaimed a "second Brazil" in Surinam in 1667. Where sugar led, coffee - and ultimately, tea and chocolate - followed. It continued to boom, supplying markets in Persia, where coffee consumption quadrupled to nearly a million pounds a year by 1700. Persian aristocrats hired Moorish and Italian coffeemakers. The great coffee boom of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries took it to Brazil, to the French islands of the Indian Ocean, and to the French colony of Saint-Domingue on Hispaniola. One of the most enduringly successful of the new coffee lands was Java. While coffee spread across the world from the Middle East, chocolate followed, more slowly, a similar path from a starting place in Mesoamerica. Tea also contributed to the growth of global trade, but not to the ecological exchange. China was able to supply almost the whole of world demand until the nineteenth century when the British established tea plantations in India and Sri Lanka. Some ecological exchanges were happening within the Americas. The result of the ecological exchange  was a better-nourished world. Instead of increasing population, colonization in the New World provoked the worst recorded demographic disaster in history. The first Spanish navigators of the Amazon, in 1542, beheld cities built on stilts on the river banks, fed by aquaculture and the intensive cultivation of bitter manioc. Spaniards did no more than pass through, yet by the time of the next European visitors a generation later, that populous world had vanished. In the densely settled and highly exposed regions of Mesoamerica and the Andes, Indian populations typically fell by 90 percent before they began to recover. The influenza French explorers unwittingly introduced and the namless plague a Spanish expedition spread inaugurated a history in which every attempted European settlement infected Native Americans. Some regions outside the Americas suffered comparable devastation. In parts of Siberia, unimmunized natives were equally vulnerable to unaccustomed diseases. Eighty percent of the tribespeople east of the Yenisey River perished in the 1650s. Tuberculosis does not seem to have been around in Europe on a significant scale - and certainly was not a major killer - until the sixteenth century, when a more virulent form of the disease may have been brought back from the Americas. Cholera and yellow fever broke out of their tropical heartlands to attack some of the fast-growing, densely populated, heavily polluted cities and ports in the industrializing West. The gravest of these were in the last region to suffer devastating losses of population to disease: the New World. The solution lay in transplanting human labor. Subtropical America could not be made to pay without labor from Africa. No other area could supply enough workers adaptable to the climate. This could be called the economic dividend of imperialism: the extension of land exploited for ranching, farming, and mining, and the conversion of some land from relatively less productive to relatively more productive methods of exploitation. In the 1640s, a Manchu army, which the Chinese Empire had created to help police the Mongol frontier, intervened decisively in a Chinese civil war, conquered China and dethroned the last Ming emperor in 1644. Disputes over Tibet eventually provoked China into sustained war against the Mongols. The Chinese Empire was reaching into the Mongol steppe, instead of lying at the periodic mercy of steppeland conquerors. That the balance of power shifted from pastoralism to settled life is usually attributed to the so-called military revolution that accompanied the rise of firepower technology. Without definitive evidence, the best we can say is that all these changes, in combination, weakened the steppelanders relative to the empires that surrounded them. In the 1580s, Morocco's long-cherished dreams of crossing the desert and conquering a gold-rich empire in black Africa began to look practical. In 1588, al-Mansur declared war on the Sahelian empire of Songhay. Half the force may have died on the way , but the survivors dispersed the mounted hosts of Songhay as efficiently as Spanish conquerors had shattered the Aztecs and Incas. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, horse-borne Native American empire builders threatened to dominate the prairie and the pampa. By 1600, a million settlers had turned a quater of the region to grain civilization, turning over the heavy sod with ox-drawn plows. The English and lowland Scots waged wars to seize land, from Ireland to the Highlands and islands of Scotland. In Japan, after the Ainu War of 1669-1672, about half of Hokkaido was set aside for Japanese peasants to settle, at the expense of the displaced Ainu natives, whom the Japanese classed as primitive and savage, using their language similar to that of English and Scots propaganda about the highlanders, islanders, and Gaelic Irish. The civil wars of the third quater of the seventeenth century, which pitched the last Ming loyalists against the Manchu conquerors, drove Chinese peasants out of the densely populated provinces of Fujian and Guangdong into Guangzxi and the Yangtze highlands to the tea and timber industries, or to cultivate sweet potatoes or maize. We can detect the same trends - imperial expansion, fostering new settlement, increasing the range of farming, and exploiting new resources - in the same period in India. Forest clearance was a policy the Mughal emperors embraced determinedly, in their heartlands and new conquests alike. Suitable environments for all the new kinds of activity were available in abundance, while traditional native economies continued to produce time-honored crops - maize, beans, squash, cotton, and cacao in Mesoamerica or coca, potatoes, and sweet potatoes in the Andes - and generate tribute. New cities on new sites - like Lima, Peru, still perhaps the most Spanish of Spanish American cities in looks and atmosphere - replaced some Native American capitals. But in North America in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, beyond the Spanish frontier, cities of English and French construction generally remained, in a sense, in the Iroquois tradition. They were largely built of wood and, though intended for permanent occupancy, had a gimcrack air of instant shabbiness. Gold and diamonds, discovered in the Brazilian province of Minas Gerais in the 1680s, proved the incentive required for Portugal to drive its Brazilian frontier inland. Furs were the "black gold" of the north, but, like the timber and fish that also abounded in and around North America, resources of these kinds could not alone sustain permanent or populous colonies, only the French fur trappers who lived among the Indians, migrant merchants and hunters, and seasonal visitors. New England only really began to reveal its potential as a great center of wealth and civilized life in the eighteenth century, not because of its own resources but because so many of the inhabitants took to the sea. New England became a maritime civilization. Three trades in particular contributed to transforming its economy into one of the richest, per capita, in the world by the late eighteenth century: first, the slave trade, second, the export of locally produced rum and manufactured goods to slave-producing and slave-consuming markets, and finally, the so-called East India trade- mainly with China, by way of Cape Horn on the southern tip of South America - for tea and porcelain to sell at home. New windmill-pumping technology drained 57,000 acres of land in North Holland between 1610 and 1640. In all, the Dutch added nearly 370,000 acres to the land available for farming during the century. In England, the drainage of the fenlands, just across the sea from Holland in the eastern counties, began in 1600. The cultivated land area of Japan grew by 82 percent between 1600 and 1720. IN PERSPECTIVE: Not only did total food production go up, but a revolution in nutrition also occurred, as a wider variety of foodstuffs became available worldwide. In some places, newly introduced crops displaced traditional ones without increasing people's choices. In southeast Europe, for instance, maize cultivators could move upcountry to higher altitudes, where the Ottoman Empire's tax gatherers and enforcers never penetrated. Ecological revolution was the essential precondition for some of the global changes of the next few centuries, fueling some of the major themes  of the next two parts of this book: population growth, radical breakthroughs in exploiting the globe's resources, and the globalization of empires and trade.
         Chapter 18, is titled Mental Revolutions: Religion and Science in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Westerners primarily - but by no means exclusively - initiated the contacts. Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism all contributed to cultural exchange. A new sense of mission had grown in the Christendom in the late Middle Ages. Fervor to renew the dynamism of the early history of the church combined with a new conviction of the obligations of the godly to compel "right thinking" - not just outward conformity - and to combat heresy, unbelief, and supposedly satanic forces. Campaigns like these were part of a more general attempt by ministers of religion to enforce their claim to a monopoly over ritual. For instance, in Spain, from the early sixteenth century, the church hierarchy ceased to validate laypeople's claims to have experienced saintly visions. The Council of Trent - a series of meetings held from 1545 to 1563 by bishops who acknowledged the pope's authority - ordered that the cults of saints be purged of "perversion by the people into boisterous festivities." In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in most of Europe, successful campaigns brought under the supervision of the clergy all contracts in which men and women agreed to live with each other as man and wife. Ostensibly, for instance, the Spanish Inquisition, founded in 1478, was a tribunal of faith, originally designed to monitor the sincerity of former Jews who had converted to Christianity under pressure from the Spanish authorities. One of the most effective communicators of the Christian message to a wider public was the German theologian Martin Luther. In a personal mission that he began toward the end of the second decade of the sixteenth century, he looked first to his fellow priests, with patchy success. Luther's version of Christianity became the majority religion, to be carried, often in more radical forms, along the corridors of the Rhine, Rhone, and Danube rivers. Among new religious orders, the most significant was the Jesuits, founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540. Loyola was an ex-soldier under the Spanish crown who brought martial virtues to the movement: tight discipline, comradeship, self-sacrifice, and a sense of chivalry. Hostility among the different forms of Christianity led to wars justified, if not caused, by religious cant. As a result, traditional history has exaggerated differences between Protestants and Catholics. Few people understood or cared about the subtleties that divided theologians. Beyond Europe, the world that exploration and imperialism disclosed was a magnet for missionaries. The conviction that the Algonquin Indians were a lost tribe of ancient Israel inspired John Eliot, who created "praying towns" in New England where Native American pastors preached and led congregations in prayers and readings from the Bible. For a while, Franciscans and Jesuits in Japan encountered amazing success by targeting potentates. By the 1630s, more than 100,000 Japanese had been baptized. Xu Guangqi failed the civil service exam, but he thanked God because failure brought him closer to Christ. Despite such promising instances, the Jesuits failed to convert China for three reasons: first, most high-ranking Chinese were more interested in the Jesuits' scientific learning and technical skills than in their religious teaching. Second, the strategy the Jesuits adopted to convert China  was a long-term one, and the revolutions of Chinese politics tended to interrupt. Finally, the church lost confidence in the Jesuits' methods. This was the outcome of a conflict that began with the founder of the mission, Matteo Ricci. The fear of backsliding and apostasy by new converts haunted the missions. In China, Zhu Hong and Han Shan presented Buddhism afresh as a religion people could practice "at home," eliminating the priestly character that had formerly made it seem inaccessible and unintelligible to lay followers. In the eighteenth century, Peng Shaosheng took the same line further by explaining techniques of mental prayer, unprompted by images of gods. The decisive initiative in reenergizing missionary Buddhism came from Mongolia in the 1570s. Realizing that Buddhist help would be vital to his schemes to extend his realm by conquest, he founded monasteries, sent for scriptures to Beijing, and had them translated on tablets of polished apple wood. At Altan Khan's invitation, the ruler of Tibet, known as the Dalai Lama, visited Mongolia in 1576 and 1586. The ongons - the felt images in which spirits resided, except when the rites of shamans liberated them - were to be burned and replaced by Buddhist statues. The next Dalai Lama was the son of a Mongol prince. From the 1630s, Prince Neyici Toyin took the Buddhism of Tibet beyond Mongolia into Manchuria, building the great Yellow Temple in Shenyang to house an antique statue of the Buddha. In both Mongolia and the Americas, the old gods continued to mediate between humans and nature. In Southeast Asia and Africa, which were the two great arenas of Islamic expansion at the time, the means of conversion were fourfold: commerce, deliberate missionary effort, holy war, and dynastic links. In some areas of Southeast Asia Sufis made crucial contributions. Sufis congregated in Malacca, and after the city fell to the Portuguese in 1511, they fanned out from there through Java and Sumatra. In West Africa, merchant clans or classes - like the Saharan Arabs known as Kunta, who made a habit of marrying the daughters of holy men - were the advanced guard of Islam. Schools with a wide curriculum played a vital part in diffusing Islam among the Hausa, scattering pupils who in turn attracted students of their own. A sheikh who died in 1655 was able, at school in Katsina, near the present border of Niger and Nigeria, to "taste to the full the Law, the interpretation of the Quaran, prophetic tradition, grammar, syntax, philology, logic, study of grammatical particles, and of the name of God, Quranic recitation, and the science of meter and rhyme." Malik ibn Anas, was the eight-century codifier of Islamic Law. The religion of black people in the Americas - though it varied greatly from place to place, molded into conflicting traditions by the influence of Protestantism and Catholicism, respectively - was always different from the religion of white people. Here, in colonial times, black artistic vocations and religious devotion were centered on cult images and charitable associations of black Catholic laypeople. These confraternities, as they are called, were vital institutions for colonial society generally, melding the culturally uprooted into a coherent community, renewing their sense of identity and belonging. Their choice of patron saints, whose statues they paraded through the streets and elevated in shrines, was often self-assertive, sometimes defiant. St. Elesbaan, for instance, was a warrior-avenger, a black crusading emperor of Ethiopia. St. Benedict of Palermo, became a hermit in his youth to escape taunts about his blackness. St. Iphigenia, a legendary black virgin, who resisted the spells of her suitor's magicians with the help of 200 fellow virgins, embodied the triumph of faith over magic. Columbus and Cortes - neither of whom showed much interest in religion in their early lives - both had visions of a restored apostolic age in the lands they explored and conquered. The most extreme form of enthusiasm is millenarianism. The fervor of the spiritual Franciscans mingled with whatever forms of millenarianism was inherited from Native American tradition. Sikhism, which blended elements of Hindu and Muslim tradition - or, as Sikhs would say, went beyond both. Neither Hindu nor Muslim paths to God suffice, said Guru Nanak, the Sikh founder, "so whose path should I follow? I shall follow the path of God." Akbar promoted debates between teachers of rival religions in an attempt to establish a synthesis, which he called the "Faith of God" - the Din-i-ilahi. People became less committed to their religions because they had to live at peace with neighbors of different faiths. But this may have had less to do with changing ideologies than with the economics of art. As wealth spread, so did art patronage. IN PERSPECTIVE: Buddhism and Islam expanded into territories that bordered their existing heartlands. Christianity proved more flexible - more adaptable to more cultures - than Islam or Buddhism did. Christianity still exhibits remarkable adaptability, with dramatic levels of conversions and rates of growth in parts of Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. In the eighteenth century, as we shall see, Western superiority in some military, naval, and industrial technologies would begin to have an impact. The resulting shift in the world balance of power and resources is the subject we have to tackle next.
       Chapter 19, is titled States and Societies: Political and Social Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. As monarchs searched and struggled to redistribute power to their own advantage and new or newly empowered classes contended for a share in the growing might and resources of states. In 1519, Charles, ruler of Spain and many other lands, was elected to be head of the group of mainly German states still known as the Holy Roman Empire. Propagandists speculated that Charles V or his son would be the "Last World Emperor." Rulers power against rivals to their authority and the states power over their own citizens increased. Countries that had been difficult or impossible to rule before their civil wars became easy to govern when their violent and restless elements had been exhausted or become dependent on royal rewards and appointments. Poland, though vast in area, had insecure frontiers and a powerful nobility that defied royal power. Sweden had its moment as a major power for much of the seventeenth century and Holland in the second half of it. Spain had the advantage of privileged access to the silver mines of Mexico and Peru. While shipments remained regular, until the second or third decade of the seventeenth century, they gave Spanish kings better credit ratings than other rulers. Finally, in 1580, dynastic accident added, the vast Portuguese empire to Spain's dominions. The 1590s were a turning point, as the loyalty of subordinate kingdoms showed signs of strain, state revenues ebbed, and a catastrophic decline of population, which would last for most of the seventeenth century began. Serious rebellions broke out in Naples and Catalonia, and Portugal recovered its independence in 1640. Sovereignty defined the state, which had the sole right to make laws and distribute justice to its subjects. Sovereignty could not be shared. Later thinking borrowed two influences from Machiavelli's The Prince: first, the doctrine of realpolitik, which says that the state is not subject to moral laws and serves only itself; second, the claim that any excesses are permissible to ensure state security. When Thomas Aquinas summarized the previous state of thinking in the Western world in the thirteenth century, he distinguished the laws of individual states from what he called the law of nations that all states must obey and that governs the relationships between them. The law of nations "differs in an absolute sense," he said, "from natural law" and "is simply a kind of positive human law." Natural law obliged states to respect each others sovereignty. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, classes intersected with other structures: vertical structures - interest groups, professions, trades, the entourages and clients of powerful noblemen and officials, social orders, such as the nobility or the peasantry, religious sects, clans - whose members' sense of mutual belonging depended on the differences they felt between themselves and outsiders rather than on shared values, wealth, priorities, or educations. Vast, slow erosion changed this way of organizing society. In ost of Europe, the family was redefined as an ever smaller knot of close kin. Women who married according to the clergies' new rules could be better protected against male predators and more secure in keeping their property when their husband died. The English Civil Wars of 1640-1653 used to be held up as a classic case of class revolution. But the war seems better understood as a mixture of a traditional aristocratic rebellion, a provincial revolt against intrusive central government, a struggle of "ins" and "outs," and a genuine war of religion. A world of aristocratic dominance was emerging. Peter the Great's policy, and in particular, his decision to relocate the capital of Russia from Moscow to the new city of St. Petersburg, should be considered in a further context : the northward shift of Europe's center of gravity. The nerve center of the Ottoman Empire was the sultan's palace in Constantinople, the Topkapi Saray. This was an empire that sustained memories of its ancient nomadic origins through centuries of settled life. The Topkapi was a fortress, a sanctuary, and a shrine. Access to a sultan's mother or favorite concubine was an avenue of political influence. While other empires of nomadic origins failed to keep up with advances in the technology of war, but the Ottomans could float a vast navy or blow away enemies with firepower. The modernization of the army influenced social change. Though wary of the moral vigilance of the Islamic clerical establishment, they controlled the power structure of Sunni Islam themselves. Like the empire of the Ottomans, that of the Mughals in India thrived on the economic success of the people they ruled. Or perhaps it would be fairer to say that the Mughals and their subjects enriched each other. The wealth gap between China and most of the rest of the world probably went on increasing over the next two centuries, as demand soared for newly popular goods in which China dominated world markets: porcelain, fine lacquerware, tea, ginseng, and rhubarb. After intervening decisively in China's civil wars, the Manchus methodically and bloodily took over the country, proclaiming the Qing dynasty. In Japan a dynasty of chief ministers, the Tokugawa, ruled as shoguns in Edo, while emperors remained secluded figureheads, performing sacred rites in a provincial court at the old capital in Kyoto. In Africa, Kongo became a hereditary kingdom, whose rulers appointed the chiefs of subordinate states, and who succeeded, on the whole, in preventing, or at least limiting, enslavement of their own subjects.
       In the "Traces of the Trade" video we see the major roles that the Dewolf family had in the Triangle trade in the Americas. The Dewolf family was full of professors, writers, artists, architects, and episcopal ministers. Although the Dewolf family were very much liked they were said to be the largest slave trading family in United States history. More than 10,000 Africans were brought to the Americas from the Dewolf family alone. The two brothers that ran the slave trading were George and James Dewolf. James imported molasses and slaves and exported rum and sugar in the warehouse that he owned. In 1837, James was said to be the second richest man in the United States. Alothough they were making a very good living the trading that they were doing was illegal. In order to be above the law and keep doing what they were doing the Dewolf family got into bed with Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson would ignore the Dewolf ships as they entered and departed from the from the water especially because America needed the revenue from their trading.
        Ever since the discovery of the New World the whole world changed drastically. Disease spread, new plants and crops were founded, trading took place in abundance and technology started to improve. Also one of the worst events in history started to take place, the enslavement of many blacks. After Columbus made this discovery the world was never the same and it continues to keep changing to this day.