The World 4th Blog

    Fat made the nineteenth century world work. It supplied calories for human consumers and greased the machines of industrialization. But the fat crisis was part of a bigger picture: a revolution in the sources of energy that kept human society working. How people responded to the crisis is the subject of Chapter 23: industrialization, new ways to release energy and new uses for it. The following three chapters, Chapter 24, 25, and 26, will cover the major consequences of industrialization, new forms of imperialism, and the effects of industrialization on society and politics.
    Global health declined as a result of food production and population growth. As people got more crowded together, new eco-niches opened for disease. Improvements in long range communications made it easier for disease to spread. In 1917-1919, an influenza pandemic killed more than 30 million people worldwide. Famine killed at least 4.3 million people in India in 1876-1878. Rural populations were also prone to ecological disasters. Although food production soared in global terms, its effects were unevenly distributed. In the nineteenth century, famine was worse than ever before. Political neglect made the effects even worse, especially in the territories of large empires under distant or indifferent rulers. In some ways, the most successful crops of the period - the most prolific, the most nutritious - ensnared customers in over-reliance on them. Beyond question, the greatest extension of the frontier of food production happened in vast open lands of Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, Australia, and North America. Grains soon became more important than meat, as wheat and maize replaced the native prairie grasses. The change could not have happened without industrial technologies. Steel plows turned the sod. Railways transported grain. Houses built from precision milled lumber and cheap nails spread cities in a region where most construction materials were unavailable. Repeating rifles destroyed vital links in the earlier ecosystem: the buffalo herds and their human hunters, the Native Americans. Grain elevators appeared in 1842. Harvesting machinery enabled a few hands to reap large harvests. Wire enclosed farmland against buffalo and cattle. Giant mills processed the grain into marketable foodstuffs. In 1862, the Homestead Act made land in the West available to settlers at nominal prices. By the 1900, 500 million acres of farmland had been added. Similar changes occurred in other grasslands. By 1900, Argentina, which had been a net importer of grain in the 1860s, was exporting 100 million bushles of wheat and maize a year. Canada also became a major grain exporter. Fertilizers increased productivity, too. In Europe, farmers kept their fields constantly productive, alternating beets or turnips with clover or alfalfa, which renew the soil by recycling nitrogen. Turnips, rutabagas, and potatoes, kept cattle alive throughout the winter, generating more manure. Food no longer ad to be produced near where it was eaten. In industrializing areas, agriculture declined.
     The economic consequences of militarization were, perhaps, even more significant. Wartime logistics generated innovations in production, supply, and communications. Huge production lines, for instance, first appeared in state bakeries that produced dry bread for navies. These bakeries inspired the factory system of production that was necessary for large scale industrialization. Fossil fuels ignited industrialization. Peat and coal were the first to be extracted from the ground on an unprecedented scale. Oil followed (and, in the twentieth century, natural gas). Iron and steel were inescapably part of the picture. Fuel compensation and production leaped. Japanese coal production had always been modest, but it rose from 390,000 tons in 1860 to 5 million tons in 1900. Increases of similar order of magnitude occurred in Belgian and Spanish coal mines over the same period. The most productive coalfield in the world was already that of South Wales in Britain. Machinery in use in Britain by the 1830s, for instance, could produce in 135 hours the same amount of cotton that took 50,000 hours to spin by hand. Industrialization happened earliest and fastest in regions where labor was relatively expensive: in Europe and Japan, where the size of the workforce was smaller than in China and India; or in the United States, which, despite the huge increase in its population, was still seriously underpopulated in the nineteenth century.
    Population increase contributed to increasing demand, but so did the multiplication of sources of wealth - the new resources unlocked from the soil, the enormous expansion of financial institutions, the growth in the money supply as governments took on increasing responsibilities and minted cash to pay for them. Industrial technology represented, for its early witnesses, the triumph of imagination over nature. Admirers of mechanization saw it as a romantic - a perspective we have lost today. The first successful experiment in steam locomotion was carried out in 1804, when Richard Trevithick carried 10 tons of iron along 9 miles of track in Britain. Although the web of railways was densest in industrial regions, the rails also stretched across vast distances of the unindustrialized world, delivering to ports and factories ingredients for the machines to turn into saleable goods and food and drugs to keep the workers at their tasks. The first line  across the American continent opened in 1869. Jamsetji Dorabji Naegamwalla was the most successful of all. He was an illiterate carpenter in a British run dockyard when, in 1850, he realized the potential of the railways. He employed thousands of Indians and a handful of European engineers, ensuring the smooth running of the operations the government confided to him by getting to know his men and boosting their morale by his constant presence on the job. The development of steam powered shipping kept pace with that of the railways. In 1807, the first commercial steamboat, built by Robert Fulton, navigated the Hudson River, traveling 150 miles upriver from New York City to Albany in 32 hours. The first transatlantic steam service began in 1838. Electricity began to rival steam power in some applications. In the 1830s and 1840s in England Michael Faraday in demonstrated the possibilities of electric lighting. The biggest contribution arose from one of his first gadgets: an electromagnetic induction machine, made in 1831. In the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain, Spain, Italy, and Belgium all doubled their steam driven industrial capacity. France and Russia tripled theirs. In what is now the Czech Republic, capacity grew fivefold, and Germany's capacity multiplied sixfold. Industrialization helped shape what remains, on the map, a conspicuous feature of the moder world: a zone of densely clustered industrial cities from Belfast in northern Ireland and Bilboa in northwest Spain to Rostov and St. Petersburg in Russia. The patchiness of industrialization, in short, was essential to industrializations's success.
     As a result of the gigantic wealth gaps between classes, class wars have been going on since the first class system was made. Most of the time the wars start out as revolts because the lower classes want land, maybe a roll in government or politics, or more importantly freedom from being slaves. Industrialization increased the wealth gap between classes tremendously. Workers who worked on railroads, coalmines, etc did not receive a profit for their labor, instead the aristocrats made all of the money. Urbanization occurred as a result of industrialization. People moved closer to factories so city sizes increased as well as the populations. This had a positive and negative effect on the cities. Maybe the worst effect of the increase in city size was the horrible living conditions for the poor.
    During class we discussed nationalism: something that can be shared culturally, economically, politically, and biologically. Nationalism had a big role in politics because armies consumed a very large amount of the taxes. The armies would use this money to buy new weapons which would in turn make them stronger. Therefore nationalism had a positive and negative effect also because it made the armies stronger but it made the bloodshed that much greater.
   In the videos, I Still Call Australia Home and Can You Hear Us, there is great pride behind the songs towards their homeland. Even if one person doesn't agree with everything their government's views or priorities they take immense pride in singing their national anthem, its like saying this is my home and I am proud to be a citizen of this great country. Its crazy how much music can bring everyone together, i feel like if it wasn't for music the world would not be as close an understanding as it is today. In the Can You Hear Us video they show a group of people all gathering together to watch a rugby game, pretty much like every single American does on sunday and monday nights, it brings people together to bond and get along instead of fighting.
   The next to videos were, Secrets of the Manor House and Albany: Business Women. The Manor Houses of Great Britain were full of wealthy aristocrats and politicians, sort of like the Estate's the Americans had in the South. Servants also lived in the houses as well which introduced a class system in the houses. The system went like this : housekeepers, butlers, maids, valets, footmen, housemaids, and kitchen maids. Servants would only make about $50 a year while the aristocrats would spend millions of dollars on unnecessary things. With these new times alot of Englishmen moved over seas with hopes of new and better opportunities. Albany: Business Women tells us that between 1830 and 1885 2,000 women ran businesses. Its interesting to see what was happening to the lives of women compared to those during this time in England. Queen Victoria might be the best example, ever since she was 18 she was ruling over the largest Empire of the world and women from 17 to 70 were running shops by themselves pretty much. There was a big change since the nineteenth and twentieth centuries because it was men who were working and making the profit while the women were staying at home cooking, cleaning and taking care of the children. Once women were in the workplace it was very common for them to see their husbands as useless and worthless. Women now have places in politics and soon we might even have a women president. It really shows how hard they fought and how far they have came from the housewife with no say in anything.
    Industrialization may have had one of the biggest impacts on the world. Without it there would be no trains, boats, or pretty much anything that requires an engine or metal. If industrialization never happened the world would still be one where you need a horse and carriage to get to places you need to go and there wouldn't be nearly as much jobs out there as there is today.

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

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.

John Galans Making of the Modern World

           The world has been changing over time - whether it be the geography of a place, demograpy, economics, politics or even culture - it is not the same that it was 200 or even 20 years ago. The readings and viewings : Fernandez-Armesto, Chapters 15 and 16, History Detectives, Time Team America, and Diamond all talk about and show just how much a specific area or place has changed over time. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, the author of The World, is a very intelligent man and has impecable knowledge about history and the world today - he believes that all history is intelectual history. He holds the William P. Reynolds Chair of History at the University of Notre Dame and has both a masters and doctoral degree from the University of Oxford - spent most of his career teaching. Along with all of that he was the Chair of Global Environmental History at Queen Mary college (University of London) in 2000 and Prince of Austrias Chair at Tuffs University. Felipe breaks down history into six categories: History is stories, history as global, history as universal, history is a problem-posing discipline, history is evidence, and history enhances life. 

           The first category, history is stories, is just mainly made up of the 100's of stories that are in the book. They vary anywhere from stories about commoners and kings, sons and mothers, heroes and villains, the famous and the failed, etc. He combines them in two narratives that criss-cross throughout the book, each story is about how people connect and separate, as cultures take shape and influence and change each other. History as global is about seeing the world as a whole. The whole world stays in view in almost every chapter and readers can analyze and connect what was happening all over the globe in all time periods. History as universal is where Fernandez discusses all elements of life, from science and art, to suffering and pleasure. History is a problem-posing discipline employs facts to make the readers think. The book is full of provacations, contested claims, debated speculations, open horizons, and question. From history is evidence the reader is encouraged to think and feel what it was like to live in each time period through the words, images, and objects. Finally in the last category, history enhances life, Fernandez believes that textbooks dont have to be hostile. He believes that they can be entertaining, and can encourage you to learn, and at times amuse you. Felipe then talks about how we adopt what we think are natural behaviors like wearing clothes, cooking food, and replacing nature with culture. Because of this we do what is natural to us. All the elaborate culture we produce generates new, intimate relationships with the environment we fashion and the life forms we exploit. The more that we change the environment, the more vulnerable we are to ecological unpredictable disasters. A result from failing to establish the right balance (exploitation and conservation) will lead to leaving civilizations in ruins. 

           Chapter 15 is titled, Expanding worlds: Recovery in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Chapter 15 starts off talking about the age of sail and how for almost the entire history of travel - winds and currents set the limits of what was possible : the routes, the rates, and the mutually accessible cultures. Many European maps of the fifteenth century depicted the Indian Ocean as landlocked- literally inaccessible by sea. Yet it was the biggest and richest zone of long-range commerce in the world. By the end of the fifteenth century however, European navigators had found a way to penetrate it. Meanwhile, the Atlantic was developing into a rival zone, with transoceanic routes ready to be exploited. Seafaring on the Atlantic would indeed transform the world by bringing cultures that had been torn apart into conflict, contact, commerce, and cultural and ecological exchange. In regions that escaped the catastrophes of the fourteenth century, long term population growth continued to strengthen states and economies. So it is not surprising that the world of the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was a world in recovery and even a world of resumed expansion. To some extent, technological advances made up for- indeed, was a response to- decreased population. The long period of accelerated exchange in the Song and Mongol eras had equipped expanding economies with improved technology.  Beyond the reach of the recurring plagues that stopped demographic growth in much of Eurasia, some of the most dynamic and rapidly expanding societies of the fifteenth century were in the Americas and Sub-Saharan Africa. EAST AFRICA: Ethiopia emerged relatively early from its period of quiescence. Southward from Ethiopia, at the far end of the Rift valley, lay the gold-rich Zambezi valley and the productive plateau beyond, which stretched to the south as far as the Limpopo River and was rich in salt, gold, and elephants. Like Ethiopia, these areas looked toward the Indian Ocean for long-range trade with the economies of maritime Asia, but their outlets to the sea lay below the reach of the monsoon system and, therefore, beyond the normal routes of trade. Further evidence of the effects of trade, lie inland between the Zambezi and Limpopo Rivers, where fortified, stone-built administrative centers called Zimbabwes, had been common for centuries. Like Mali in West Africa, Mwene Mutapa was a landlocked empire, sustained by trade in gold and salt. WEST AFRICA: New states emerged in West Africa, following the decline of the old regional power, Mali. Gao was one of the great trading cities between the rain forest and the desert. Traders could now move around Mali's trading monopoly. The result of the first recorded European contact with Mali was a tragedy for the history of the world, for the absence of a strong West African empire undermined European's view of black Africans as equals. Gradually, Songhay succeeded Mali as the most powerful state in the region, but it never controlled as much of the Saharan trade as Mali had. As Muhammad Touray Askias ascended into power he promoted a modest sort of capitalism by concentrating resources in the hands of religious foundations, which had the personnel and range of contacts to maximize their holdings' potential. New canals, wells, dikes, and reservoirs scored the land. The states and cultures of the tropical forest and coast in the African "bulge" were confined to regional power and wealth. The trading post that Portugal opened at Sao Jorge da Mina, on the underside of the African bulge, in 1482, appeared on maps as a gilded, turreted fantasy city. The Kingdom of Kongo dominated the Congo River's navigable lower reaches, probably form the mid-fourteenth century. The Kingdom became hot to Portugese missionaries, craftsmen, and mercenaries. They gained territory and more importantly, slaves, many of whom they sold to the Portuguese for export. Although Ethiopia, Mwene Mutapa, Songhay, and Kongo were all formidable regional powers, and although many small states of the West African coast expanded commercially and territorially, little of this activity was on an unprecedented scale. Like some states in Eurasia, African empires grew at impressive rates and to impressive extents in part because they were in touch with other phenomena of commercial and political expansion: Songhay across the Sahara, Ethiopia and Mwene Mutapa across the Indian Ocean, the coastal trading cities and Kongo with the Portuguese. ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM IN THE AMERICAS: In 1972 inventive historian Alfred Crosby coined the term ecological imperialism and ever since then historians have used it to refer to the sweeping environmental changes European imperialists introduced in regions they colonized. THE INCA EMPIRE: The fastest growing empire in the late fifteenth century. They occupied Cuzco in what is today Peru, which became their biggest city and begun subjugating their neighbors. The Inca realm encompassed coastal lowlands and the fringes of the rain forest. To maintain the state, the Incas had to acquire new territories, leading to hectic and, in the long run, perhaps, unsustainable expansion. THE AZTEC EMPIRE: At the peak of the Aztec expansion the Aztec empire stretched from the Panuco River in the north to what is now the Mexican-Guatemalan border on the Pacific Coast and encompassed hundreds of tributary communities. The Aztec bureaucracy meticulously listed and depicted the ecological diversity of regions. From the "hot countries" in the south came ornamental feathers and jaguar pelts, jade, amber, gold, rubber, and resin for incense. Overlapping regions supplied cacao, the essential ingredient of the addictive, high-status drink essential at Aztec ceremonies and parties. The tribute system brought necessities as well as luxuries: hundreds of thousands of bushels of maize and beans every year, with hundreds of thousands of cotton garments and quilted cotton suits of armor. The Incas and the Aztecs did not benefit from technology. NEW EURASIAN EMPIRES: It was the borderlands that straddle Europe and Asia that nurtured the really big, really enduring new or resumed empires of the age, those of the Turks and Russians. THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE: Muscovy's sudden take-off in the second half of the century, when conquests of neighboring peoples turned it into an imperial state, over-shadowed early efforts at expansion. Once Ivan the Great took over he more than trebled the territory he ruled- to more than 240,000 square miles. TIMURIDS AND THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE: The Mongol supremacy had been a traumatic challenge to the Islamic world, shattering the reputation of Muslim armies, breaking the monopoly of Sharia or Islamic law, exposing the limitations of the clergy, and inspiring the religious minded to withdraw from the world in a spirit of resignation. Historian Ibn Khaldun produced one of the most admired works of all time on history and political philosophy, The Muqaddimah. Perhaps the most conspicuous mobilizer of steppeland manpower in Muslim service in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was Timur the Lame. By the time he died in 1405, he had conquered Iran, defeated the Ottoman Turks and put their sultan in a cage, invaded Syria and India, and planned the conquest of China. By weakening the Muslim sultans of Delhi, he liberated millions of Hindus. The fate of the Mongols shows how hard it was for a great Eurasian empire to survive in the aftermath of the Black Death. The Ottomans' great advantage was location. The heartlands of the empire were at the crossroads of some of the world's greatest trade routes, where the Silk Roads, the Indian Ocean routes, the Volga, the Danube, and the Mediterranean almost converged. Gradually, the Ottomans adapted to the environments that they conquered: agrarian, urban, and maritime. The direction of Ottoman conquests tilted toward Europe, extending over most of what are  now Greece, Romania, and Bosnia, seeking to control the shores of the Adriatic and Black seas. THE LIMITATIONS OF CHINESE IMPERIALISM: The leader who emerged from the chaos of rebellion was Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu's son, the Yongle emperor aggressively sought contact with the world beyond the empire. He meddled in the politics of Vietnam, fought Mongols, and enticed Japanese to trade. By consolidating their landward empire, and refraining from sea born imperialism, China's rulers ensured the longevity of their state. THE BEGINNINGS OF OCEANIC IMPERIALISM: Merchants took no interest in venturing far beyond the monsoon system to reach other markets or supplies. There were, first, the Northeast trade winds, which led to the resource-rich, densely populated regions of the New World, far south of the lands the Norse reached. There were also the South Atlantic wind system, which led, by way of the Southeast trade winds and the Weterlies of the far south, to the Indian Ocean. The technology to exploit the Atlantic's wind systems only gradually became available during a period of long, slow improvements to ships' hulls, rigging, and water casks in the thirteenth fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In West Africa, the Portuguese post at Sao Jorge da Mina, near the mouth of the Benya River, was close to the gold fields in the Volta River Valley, and the large amounts of gold now began to reach European hands. THE EUROPEAN OUTLOOK: PROBLEMS AND PROMISE: In some ways, indeed, Western Europe in the fifteenth century was beset with problems, such as: Recovery from disasters, plagues and severe climate. Humanism gradually became Europe's most prestigious form of learning. Europe's outreach into the Atlantic was probably not the result of science or strength so much as of delusion and desperation. IN PERSPECTIVE: BEYOND EMPIRES: The power of the state really did increase. One reason was improved communications. The state system deprived Europeans of unified command. The new routes pioneered in the 1490's linked the populous central belt of Eurasia to the Americas and Africa, and Europe to Asia by sea. We can see the beginnings of an interconnected globe- a world system- able to encompass the planet. 

          Chapter 16 is titled, Imperial Arenas : New Empires in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth centuries. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries imperialism changed everything. Around 500 years ago, man started to cross oceans and continents to come into mutual contact with new land and peoples. They swapped ideas and cultures and began to shape the world that we know today. MARITIME EMPIRES: The main maritime empires were the Portugal, Japanese, and Dutch. The goal of the empires was to gain control of, or power over, the places and people that produced valuable goods. The sea made it difficult and some were only able to seize limited parts. Some were able to colonize coastal territory along Seaborne routes, produce and ship commodities for their own profit. These empires flourished in mediterranean and maritime Asia. Technological improvements helped bring about new opportunities. New longer sea routes were navigated around monsoonal areas and the monopoly of the Indian Ocean came to an end. The discovery of the Gulf Stream helped bring about knowledge of the elements of wind and Atlantic system. Land Empires emphasized more on control of large amounts of people and land. Along with that came a large military investment, they needed people to staff numerous outposts and fund armies because the land and sea routes were vulnerable if unmanned. There was also a need for a massive capital investment which supported imperial colonies and helped build infrastructures. Superior technology became necessary to overcome resistance from natives. 

         As you can see from the information that I have provided the world would not be the way it is now without all of the conflict, contact, commerce, and cultural and ecological exchange that happened from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries. Indeed there was alot of suffering and genocide but in the end everything worked out to make the world we live in today as modern and diversified as it is today.

                WORKS CITED: Fernandez-Armesto, Felipe. The World. since 1300. 2. University of Notre Dame: 397-466. Print.