MOTMW3....How You

    The upheaval of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affected much of the world. As we saw in Chapter 18, ecological exchanges had reversed, in a crucial respect, the course of biological evolution. Empires had over flowed like tidal waves and covered much of the globe. The balance of power between pastoral and settled peoples in Eurasia had shifted definitely toward the latter. Chapters 20, 21, and 22 as well as the Justice and Montaigne videos talk about how the changes in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries affected the world in the later years.
    Chapter 20, titled, Driven by Growth: The Global Economy in the Eighteenth Century, will focus on  four things: 1. Population Trends, 2. Economic Trends, 3. The West's Productivity Leap, and 4. The Expansion of Resources. Between about 1750 and 1850, the population of China doubled, that of Europe nearly doubled, and that of the Americas doubled three times. Population increase is stimulating. We cannot fully understand anything else in history of the eighteenth century without it: the  speeding up of economic activity; the extension of settlement into new lands; the huge increase in production as empires pursued resources; the drive of science to understand and exploit nature; the intellectual challenges that accompanied all this ferment. On the whole, with exceptions, shifts in the balance of wealth and power also reflected demographic change. Rising regions, like Europe, China, and parts of North America and Africa, experienced sharp population increase, whereas areas of relatively stable population, such as the Ottoman Empire, housed stagnant or declining states. Population growth took two forms: dispersal on underexploited frontiers, and concentration in growing cities and denser agricultural settlements. China had nearly 350 million people by 1800, India 200 million, and Europe not many fewer. Although figures are unavailable for Africa, evidence of restless migration suggests that the population was increasing there, too. By 1800, Spain's American empire probably contained 14.5 million people. The population of British North America increased fivefold in the first half of the century, and nearly tenfold to 2.5 million in the second half. In the Caribbean, slaves accounted for most of the increase. During the eighteenth century the slave population in the British West Indies grew from about 120,000 to about 750,000, mainly because so many new slaves were brought from Africa, and they lived alongside about 100,000 white people. Some parts of the world lagged behind in population growth or experienced it in different ways. It helps to understand the fading of the Ottoman Empire, among the great powers of the world, to know that the ratio of its population relative of Europe as a whole dropped from perhaps about 1:6 in 1600 to about 1:10 in 1800. But Europe also experienced intensified urbanization and, in pockets, exceeded even Japan's rate. London approached a million inhabitants by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Except in the New World we cannot satisfactory explain the demographic growth of the eighteenth century. Improved food supply played an important part, but not sufficient enough. Urbanization, on the other hand, made the diet of the poor worse. Improved hygiene may have helped increase populations, but it is not likely to have been decisive. However, a particularly deadly series of local epidemics in England in the 1720s killed 100,000 people. We can group other existing explanations for the new demographic trend under two main headings.  First, the theory of progress suggests that human health improved because of better medical and public health strategies. Second, environmental conditions suggest that the survivors of plagues and epidemics developed immunities to diseases or that fatal microorganisms evolved into less deadly forms. Contagion was feared, but no one had any idea how it worked. No on yet recognized germs or microbes as dangerous or knew anything about viruses. Historically, our improving health may owe less than we suppose to our own cleverness and more to the changing habits and nature of microbes. Eighteenth century economic activity marked a new departure from long-prevailed global patterns, as the gap in production, and therefore in wealth, began to narrow. The West began to catch up to China and India. The new rich among the world's economies began to emerge in Europe and America. By the 1800, India went into sharp relative decline. China maintained its supremacy, but signs suggested that its days as the world's richest society were numbered. The overall picture is clear. In the eighteenth century world, economies in western Europe were catching up with, and even surpassing the parts of Asia that had previously enormously more productive. At first sight, industrialization in Europe looks like one of those great transformations of history that just happened beyond human control because of economic, demographic, and environmental forces - necessities that mother invention. Yet a conspicuously active and fruitful period in the history of Western science preceded and accompanied - though it did not cause - industrialization. Science and technical innovation were parallel results from growing curiosity about the real world and growing interest in tinkering with things to see how they work. It makes sense to look into the realm of ideas to try to find the origins of Europe's leap in production. The effort to coax more food from the soil was only one aspect of a worldwide search for new food resources - a search in which Western Europeans occupied a privileged place. The world was encircled by a cycle that was speeding up: growing population, growing demand, growing output, growing commerce, all stimulated by each other. The big gainers were economies that bordered the Atlantic, where traders and shippers could participate in the increasing opportunities worldwide. The New Europes made the West big. A culture crammed, for most of its history, into a small, remote, and beleaguered corner of Eurasia, now had much of the Western Hemisphere and important parts of the Pacific and Africa at its disposal. The plantations and ranchlands of the Americas helped the West to even up the traditional imbalance of global resources that had formerly favored Asian economies. Other eighteenth century developments contributed to reshaping world history: the growth, strain, instability, and - in some cases - collapse of land empires, and in the increasing exchange of ideas between parts of Asia and the West.
    Chapter 21, titled, The Age of Global Interaction: Expansion and Intersection of Eighteenth Century Empires, will focus on five things: 1. Asian Imperialism in Arrest or Decline, 2. Imperial Reversal in India, 3. The Dutch East Indies, 4. The Black Atlantic, and finally 5. Land Empires of the New World. On the whole, in the eighteenth century, Europeans were becoming relatively more successful in encounters with enemies in other parts of the world. The Omani Empire became a loose network of autonomous states, tied by sense of kinship among Sayid clan members, like the regional branches or offshoots of a family business. Empires grew not only or even mainly by conquest, but by colonization. In the eighteenth century, an era of colonization worldwide or, at least, world widespread, peopled the boarder lands of the expanding empires and lined political frontiers with settlers. Painstakingly recruited, thinly spread, colonists began to extend the limits of the inhabited world. At the edges of the empires to which they belonged, where they reached out to touch the outposts of other expanding peoples, they helped to mesh the world together. The most dramatic reversal of fortune - and the one with the most profound implications for the future - happened in India. The Emperor Aurangzeb had driven the frontiers of the Mughal state southward with relentless energy. But after his death, expansion halted and gradually, the empire exhibited signs of the strains that arise from success. Widened boarders enclosed ever more-diverse cultures, religions, political systems, and ethnic identities. Sikhs and Hindus  were hard to accommodate in the fiercely Muslim ideology that Aurangzeb had imposed. The Mughals had always made money out of war in the past. But empire was a capital-intensive business, subject to diminishing returns. The tax burden necessary to sustain Aurangzeb's policy provoked increasingly frequent peasant rebellions. In the remoter parts of the empire, the Mughals, in effect, delegated power to local elites. As late as 1750, the British East India Company, which descended from a business founded in 1600, insisted that its officials think of themselves as the "agents of merchants" rather than as military colony. The province of Bengal in northeast India was by far the most important trading area  in India for European commerce. Bengal was full of internal dissent: Hindu resentment of Muslim rule, warlord rivalry with the Nawab, popular resentment of heavy taxation, military unrest at overdue pay. The East India Company raised 2 million in 1761-1764 from Bengal and almost 7.5 million in 1766-1767. The riches of Bengal paid for the conquest of other Indian principalities. By 1782, the Company, whose motto had once been "trade not war," was keeping an army of 115,000 men in India. British supremacy was only the latest variant on an old theme of Indian history: dominance by foreign military elites. The British could now seize or clear much of India to grow products that suited them. They could smother the potential competition of Indian industries, shifting the balance of the world's resources in the favor of the West. Britain's Indian empire was the last of the old adventurer conquests, achieved with native collaboration and without conspicuous technical advantages, and the forerunner of the the new industrial conquests, by which Europeans would extend their empires in the next centerury.   The Dutch built up a land empire on Java, dividing authority among rival Javanese clients called regents. The landward turn did the Dutch little good. Their strength was in their shipping, and a seaborne, piratical empire suited their talents and technology. Their weakness was a shortage of manpower. Territorial acquisitions gradually overstretched and exhausted them. The Dutch could only pay for war by enforcing high prices. As they devastated rivals' lands, uprooted surplus crops, and destroyed competitors' ships, they ran the risk of running the entire region and being left profitless, as one of their leaders warned, "in depopulated lands and empty seas." By opting their latter strategy, they committed themselves to seizing the spices and, in the end, the land the spices grew on, by force. They ended up with an empire, the Dutch East Indies, whose costs exceeded its profits. Only the conversion of much of Java to the cultivation of coffee closed the gap between costs and profits. Equaling or exceeding the vast movements of internal colonization in Asia was the shift of people across the Atlantic. In the eighteenth century, nearly 400,000 were imported into English North America, nearly 1 million into Spanish colonies, more than 1 million into the Caribbean, and some 3 million into Brazil. Strictly from the point of view of profits, the slavers knew what they were doing. The economies of slavery are hard to understand. Slavery was just one form of forced labor, on which, in various forms, most eighteenth century economies relied. Indentured workers, peasants tied to the land, unpaid apprenticeships, and convict workers all made compulsion seem normal. Traditional forms of employment generally gave employers - masters, as they were commonly called - enormous power over their worker's lives: where the workers lived, how they spent their leisure, whom and when they married. Yet within the constraints of plantation life, black people retained a degree of initiative that allowed them to continue, as in the previous century, to craft their own social words, domestic practices, values, and norms of behavior. Transportation on the same ship, or membership of the same group of runaways, or association in the same religious brotherhoods became forms of ritual kinship, within which marriage was taboo. In the second half of the eighteenth century, slaves exported from West Africa in British ships were worth 10 times the value of all other African exports put together. The slave-trading compound on Bence Island in West Africa in mid-century was owned by a syndicate of Scots eccentrics, who built a golf course, served by black caddies in kilts woven in Glasgow - a canny example of how even small scale imperialism stimulated home industry. Slave states as rapacious and militaristic as anything known earlier grew up in the savanna toward the south of the Congo drainage area, from the Kwango River to Lake Tanganyika. Luanda was the greatest of these states. Slavery was the basis of Luanda's domestic economy as well as of its commerce. Slaves were needed to work soil adapted for cassava and maize, New World crops that revolutionized productivity in Africa. In parts of West Africa, meanwhile, the continuing expansion of the Islamic world put relentless pressure on local African states. Usuman da Fodio, had a vision in which he was "girded with the Sword of Truth, to unsheathe it against the enemies of God." Usuman attracted a fervent following among the Fulani, traditional herdsmen of the Sahel. Their empire was a combination of three traditions: 1. another pastoralist attempt to exploit the Sahel's potential for long range grazing of flocks, 2. another frustrated step to unify the area politically, and 3. another holy war inspired by Islamic militancy. The case of the Fulani had parallels in the Americas. By the eighteenth century, horse-borne hunting made the South American pampa and North American prairie desirable places to live in. Intrusions of farmers and city dwellers on the edges enhanced the new economic opportunities horses, cattle, and sheep offered. There was little revulsion of feeling between the mother countries and their rebellious children. The independence of most of the Americas might have opened a new chasm in the Atlantic, splitting the Atlantic world that had grown up in the previous three centuries. On the contrary, Atlantic trade continued to grow after the independence of most of the Americas, as did migration from Europe. The nineteenth century saw few if any reversals comparable to those the Omanis had inflicted on the Portuguese, for instance. From now on, successful empire builders would need continually to update their war-making technology, with industrially produced guns and ships. The hand of empire may have lain lightly on some lands, but it stretched the long fingertips over the world.
    Chapter 22, titled, The Exchange of Enlightenments: Eighteenth Century Thought, focuses on The Character of the Enlightenment, The Enlightenment in Global Context, The Enlightenment's Effects in Asia, The Enlightenment in Europe, The Crisis of the Enlightenment, and The French Revolution and Napoleon. The innovative movement of eighteenth century European thought was called the Enlightenment - writers who elevated reason, science, and practical utility; challenged conventional religion; and sought ruthlessly to expose every kind of can't. The Enlightenment was global in inspiration as well as effects. Much debate among historians has focused on the problem of where the Enlightenment started. England, Scotland, France, and the Netherlands all have their partisans. In some ways, we can trace origins all over western Europe. The intersection of western Europe thought with ideas from overseas, and, in particular, from China, was fundamental. Like all topics in history of thought, the Enlightenment is complex and elusive. We can then look at the global exchange of influences that surrounded enlightened ideas, the key texts that encoded them in Europe, and the changes that overtook and - ultimately - transformed the Enlightenment during the eighteenth century. To understand what the Enlightenment was like, a good place to start is Kittis in northern Finland, near the Arctic Circle, where a French scientist, Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, pitched camp in August 1736. The light reflected and refracted among the rocks and ice made it seem, he said, "a place for fairies and spirits." Traditionally, Western scientists had assumed that the Earth was perfectly spherical. Seventeenth century theorists, however, led by Isaac Newton in England, argued that it must be distended at the equator and flattened at the poles, owing to centrifugal force (the thrust or sense of thrust you get on the edge of a circle in motion, which tends, for instance, to fling you of a merry go round). The French Royal Academy of Sciences decided to end the debate by sending expeditions - of which Maupertuis's was one - to measure the length of one degree along the surface of the circumference of the Earth. If measurements at the Arctic Circle matched those at the equator, the globe would be spherical. Any difference between them either way would indicate where the world bulged. Maupertuis's readings helped to convince the world that the planet was, indeed, squashed at the poles and bulging at the equator. During the eighteenth century, despite the long reach of some European empires, China's was, as we saw in Chapter 21, by almost every standard, still the fastest growing empire in the world. China was also the homeland of a more modern society than any you could find in the West. It was a better educated society, with more than a million graduates from a highly demanding educational system, and a more entrepreneurial society, with bigger businesses and bigger clusters of mercantile and industrial capital than you could find anywhere else. China was even - for adult males - a more egalitarian society, in which the hereditary landed gentry had social privileges similar to those of their Western counterparts, but had to defer to scholar bureaucrats who were drawn from every level of rank and wealth. European interest in Asia transformed Europe but changed Asia only a little. Even in Europe, in some quarters, new thinking met distrust, censorship, and persecution. To understand why - and to identify the defining themes of the thought of time - the best source is the French Encyclopedia, subtitled Reasoned Dictionary of the Sciences, Arts and Trades, which appeared in 17 volumes of text and 11 volumes of illustrations between 1751 and 1772. Denis Diderot, who masterminded the entire project, wanted a comprehensive work that would "start from and return to Man," while covering every intellectual discipline along the way. First, its values were practical. There was enormous emphasis on utility, engineering, mechanics, and technology. Second, the writers advocated reason and science as means to truth. Third, although the contributors by no means agreed among themselves on questions of political philosophy, the tone of the Encyclopedia was generally highly critical of the existing record of Europe's monarchies and aristocracies. The work was uniformly hostile to organized religion. The attitude, which would be known as scientism, did not satisfy all is practitioners. The Scottish philosopher David Hume pointed out that sensations are not really evidence of anything except themselves - that objects cause them is just an unverifiable assumption. Many scientists, like Maupertuis, drifted back from atheism toward religion, or became more interested in speculation about truths beyond the reach of science. In 1799, with the aid of a powerful microscope, Lorenzo Spallanzani saw cells reproduce by splitting. They could only germinate in an environment where they were already present. No known case of spontaneous generation of life was left in the world. Divine creation seemed vindictive. Believers in the nobility of the savage found it relatively easy to believe in the wisdom of the common man. The Bastille, a medieval fortress prison in the heart of Paris, was a symbol of oppression. Urban myth insisted that hundreds of prisoners of conscience suffered in the Bastille. Rebels who broke into it in search of arms and gunpowder on July 14, 1789, found only a handful of inmates. The Enlightenment survived in America. The United States' Constitution of 1787 embodied some of the dearest political principles of Montesquieu and the authors of the Encyclopedia, substituting the sovereign government, switching many powers from the executive to the legislature, creating a long list of constitutional guarantees of freedom, outlawing any "establishment of religion," and expressing confidence in the people's fitness to decide their own fate. Money became a more powerful indicator of social distinction than birth. Even in Europe, the idea of progress survived. Yet the Enlightenment rippled over the world. Rammohan Roy was not alone in his day in trying to appropriate the scientific learning of the Enlightenment for Indians' use. Indians joined the scientific societies that the British founded in India and founded others of their own.
    The eighteenth century was a century of population growth, economic demand, growing economic output, and growing commerce all of which were stimulated by each other. The big gainers during the era were the economies that bordered the Atlantic, those economies where traders and shippers could participate in the increasing opportunities that the Atlantic and Pacific trades offered and gave these growing European empires easy access to its exploitable colonies. At the end of the eighteenth century Empire building was pretty much a European monopoly. Technological changes meant that any empire builder would have to rely on technology, technologies that helped produce new guns, ships and other means to improve their warfare. During the nineteenth century Europe and the United States would have a monopoly on access to these new industrial research and development technologies.
    In the Justice video, episode 3 talks about redistribution. Robert Nozick, a libertarian philosopher, has three arguments against redistribution. First, is the argument that according to some pattern the government tends to redistribute wealth. For example, it tends to tax rich people and spend money on poor people, so that there is more equality in the distribution of income, wealth, etc. But, Nozick believes, it is not possible to maintain a pattern like equality without restricting people's liberty. So lets just say that everyone in the United States had the same amount of money, and we all gave 25 cents to Michael Jordan in exchange for the pleasure of watching him play basketball. In this case, Jordan would then have much more money than everyone else, and there would no longer be a pattern of equality. In order to restore that pattern of equality, the government would then have to talk all that money back from Jordan and give it back to all of us. And to actually maintain that pattern then the government would have to forbid us from doing what we want with the money that we have. Nozick's second argument is the argument that maintaining this pattern would require taking a richer person's earnings and giving them to a poorer person. Nozick thinks that taking the earnings from 2 hours of labor from the rich person is like taking 2 hours off of the rich persons life since they lose what they worked for. Nozicks third and final argument against redistribution is incompatible with an historical view of justice. If something was originally acquired justly, and later transferred justly, then Nozick thinks that it is now owned justly. If it is owned justly, according to Nozick, then neither the government nor anyone else should be allowed to take that away.
    The consequences from the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries are apparent in the rest of Fernandez Armesto. Up to this point in our story, the exchanges of culture we have chronicled have been mutually influential or have tended to be dominated by influences exerted on Europe from outside it. From this point onward, global history becomes increasingly a story of Western influence.
 

Bibliography
The World, Fernandez Armesto
Justice, PBS