Big Era Six In Development Panorama Teaching Unit   Overview Presentation Landscape Teaching Units Closeup Teaching Units The Great Global Convergence 1400-1800 CE

This Big Era and the Three Essential Questions

Many historians agree that the period 1400-1800 marks the beginning of the modern era. At the level of the human species as a whole, the most striking aspect of this period was the enormous extension of networks of communication and exchange that linked individuals and societies more and more tightly. Every region of the world became intricately connected to every other region, a development we call the Great World Convergence. Also in this era the world’s population began to move dramatically upward, breaking through the ceilings on growth that had previously governed human affairs. Big Era Six saw striking changes in human history. Five key transformations mark the era.

• Viewed from the species level, the most important development was the increase in the complexity of human societies and of the networks that connected them. The best example of this is that for the first time in history peoples of Afroeurasia began to interact on a large scale with peoples of the Americas (from the sixteenth century) and Australasia (from the later eighteenth century).

• A second major development was the Columbian Exchange of plants, animals, and microorganisms between Afroeurasia and the Americas. It followed the success of European sea captains in permanently linking the two hemispheres. The ecological and demographic consequences of the Great Global Convergence were huge, especially the “Great Dying” of much of the indigenous population of the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, and the Andean highlands. Europeans benefited from this disaster by peopling the Americas with new immigrants, both free European settlers and Africans slaves. Europeans also gained access to important new sources of food and fiber. These included, among many others, maize (corn) and the potato, which were American crops, and sugar and cotton, which came from Afroeurasia but thrived in American soil.

• A third change was the emergence of a truly global economy. This was another consequence of the Great Global Convergence, which linked together all major regions, except Antarctica, in a single web of exchange. Silver was the great lubricator of global trade. In the 1550s, silver mined in the Americas became available to Spain, then to the rest of western Europe. Silver financed Europe's increasing involvement in the world market, which was centered in East and South Asia well into the eighteenth century. By 1800, the world economy was shifting toward the Atlantic as its center.

• The remarkable rise of European political and military power relative to the rest of the world was the fourth major change. This was a consequence of 1) the diffusion to western Europe of technological and cultural innovations that originated elsewhere in Eurasia, and 2) western Europe’s response to the challenges of warfare in the new age of gunpowder weapons. A complete transformation of the way people fought and paid for wars occurred first in Europe, then around the world. Historians have named this development the “military and fiscal revolution” because it involved unprecedented advances in military technology and in the methods governments used to raise public money for wars.

• A fifth great change was the development in western Europe of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and the subsequent diffusion of their ideas to other parts of the world, where women and men grappled with them in a variety of ways. These intellectual and cultural movements helped to solidify rational science as a standard for measuring and explaining the natural world and human behavior. They greatly enhanced human ability to manipulate nature. Because they challenged long-established religious and philosophical perspectives, these movements raised profound questions about ultimate meaning in nature and society. These questions continue to perplex us today.

Humans and the Environment

Big Era Six was a period of major population increase in Afroeurasia but stunning collapse in the Americas. Overall, the world’s population increased from about 375 million in 1400 to 954 million in 1800. Still, some important continuities linked this era to preceding ones. For example, in 1800, the end of Big Era Six, no more than about 2 percent of humans lived in cities, while 95 percent were farmers. The rest, about 3 percent, were hunter-gatherers.

Consider differences in major regions:

• China and India together had a population of around 114 million in 1400. At the end of Big Era Six they numbered 330 million and 140 million respectively.
• Europe's population went from about 52 million in 1400 to 146 million in 1800, with most of the increase coming in the eighteenth century. These figures, however, should be set against some important countertrends.
• The population of Africa south of the Sahara was around 60 million in 1400 and may have reached 104 million by 1600. Because the trans-Atlantic slave trade, numbers then declined, decreasing to about 92 million in 1800.
• The population of Latin America, which may have been 36 million in 1400, had fallen to 10 million by 1600. At this point a gradual recovery set in, but in 1800 numbers recovered only to about 19 million.

Regional Populations in Millions

In the Western Hemisphere the demographic collapse among Amerindians (Native Americans) was especially catastrophic in places that had high, dense populations on the eve of European contact. These places included the Caribbean islands, central Mexico, the Mayan highlands of southern Mexico and central America, and the Andes Mountains. The most devastating epidemiological event known in world history, the Great Dying was set off when Spanish and Portuguese invaders, followed by other immigrants from Afroeurasia, introduced disease pathogens to Amerindian populations as part of the Columbian exchange of numerous organisms. Owing to the long separation between the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, these populations did not evolve significant natural immunities to Afroeurasian infections, which included measles, smallpox, influenza, typhus, and tuberculosis.

The Great Dying caused massive social, economic, and cultural upheaval in numerous Amerindian societies. This was probably the major factor in the disintegration of the Aztec and Maya empires. The demographic calamity also had major impact on the development of the new Spanish empire in the Americas. The population loss confronted the Spanish with severe shortages of labor and rapidly shrinking taxes. Therefore, they had to create an administrative system that privileged and maintained the mining industry and ensured the continued export of silver. Another consequence was the creation of social and legal institutions to force surviving Amerindian men and women to work for Europeans in mines and commercial agriculture.

The Great Dying was horrific, but it was just one aspect of the many ecological transformations that resulted from the Great World Convergence. The arrival of Europeans in the Americas transformed the natural environment because the newcomers brought with them new biota of all types, including many new food plants, several domestic animals (of which Amerindians had few), and an array of weeds. Because America’s pre-existing biota was unable to compete successfully with these invading species, much of the Western Hemisphere’s environment was progressively changed to resemble in many respects the environment of northwestern Europe. In 1500, for example, wheat was unknown to peoples of North America. Then, European wheat-eaters introduced this crop, which became a staple of the North American diet. In the bumper crop year of 1998, for example, the United States alone produced more than 2.5 billion bushels of wheat.

Another consequence of demographic and ecological transformation in the Americas was the forced migration of millions of African men and women across the Atlantic. European mine and estate owners could make handsome profits from production and sale of sugar, silver, and other commodities, but they had a challenging labor problem. They could not get enough workers from the surviving Amerindian populations, nor could they persuade free Europeans to cross the Atlantic in large numbers to take up back-breaking jobs and expose themselves to tropical diseases. Consequently, they contracted with European sea merchants to bring in African workers, who had been captured and enslaved in their homelands. From a sugar planter’s point of view, African slaves—plentiful, cheap and usually experienced at farming—were a practical solution.

Sugar Plantation Mill Yard, Antigua, West Indies, 1823
William Clark, Ten Views in the Islar of Antigua (London 1823)
The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record
Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr.
http://gropius.lib.virginia.edu/Slavery/

Between 1450 and 1810, 11-14 million enslaved Africans arriving in the Americas. Six million crossed the Atlantic between 1700 to 1801. Historians have estimated that 42 percent of these men and women were sent to the Caribbean, 38 percent to Brazil, and only 5 percent to North America. The trade was disastrous for tropical Africa as a whole. African slave traders aimed to capture and sell mainly young women and men because they were the age group best fit to work and reproduce. The trade therefore drained African societies of millions of productive people. The population of sub-Saharan Africa in 1900 was about 95 million. If the trade had not occurred, it would likely have been much higher.

In the Americas between 1500 and 1800, the proportion of men and women of African origin in the overall population steadily grew. From a demographic perspective, the hemisphere was becoming increasingly “Africanized.” However, Europeans continued to arrive in Western Hemisphere as well, about 2 million of them during those 300 years. After 1800, European migration to the Americas began to surge. It was in next era (Big Era Seven) that the demographic “Europeanization” of the Americas really took off.

In a different environmental sphere, Big Era Six witnessed a sharp increase in world deforestation, notably in Europe, the Americas, and Japan. The chief cause was the expansion of mining worldwide. This industry required vast quantities of wood, both fuel for smelters and timbers for mine shafts. This led to the deforestation of entire regions around the major mining sites. Silver and mercury mining in Japan and Latin America (Potosi and Huancavelica in the Peruvian Andes and Zacatecas in central Mexico) was especially destructive. Mining also significantly decreased forest cover in England, northern France, and central Europe.

The energy demands of the sugar industry in Brazil and the Caribbean, where biomass (wood) energy was needed to fire sugar boilers, produced extensive deforestation. A third source of the wood crisis was naval construction, which boomed during this period. The demands for ship’s timbers, masts, and spars placed a severe strain upon the forests of the Baltic and New England, as well as of the Indian Ocean rim, where vessels for the Asian trade were constructed.

Western Europe and Japan underwent profound energy crises in the seventeenth century because of deforestation. In Europe the shortage of biomass energy occasioned a search for alternative sources, provoking the shift to fossil fuels (initially, coal). In Japan, by contrast, the wood crisis led to an ambitious reforestation project. This said, we must note that most of the switch from biomass to fossil fuels occurred in the subsequent Big Era.

Humans and Other Humans

The most important change affecting the relationships of humans with one another in this period was transformation in social organization. Important developments included larger and more efficient bureaucratic states, as well as more complex systems of communication and economic exchange. Changes in the scale and complexity of human interactions greatly favored elites because wealthy and powerful groups were able to control and manage the new forms of organization and technology. Ordinary people, however, could also use new forms of communication to oppose changes that they thought were harmful.

Far-reaching changes in maritime ship-building and navigation greatly speeded global exchange in Big Era Six. New maritime technology, plus the European innovation of mounting cannons on shipboard, permitted the rise of the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French maritime empires. These empires were larger and more diverse than any earlier ones. New firearms technology also contributed to the expansion of Afroeurasian land empires that were better organized (for controlling their subjects and collecting taxes from them) than earlier agrarian empires. These states included the Turkish Ottoman, Safavid Persian, Mughal Indian, Chinese, and Russian empires, plus others in Inner Eurasia, West Africa, and Southeast Asia.

By contrast, the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas, though impressive in size, resembled earlier agrarian states of Afroeurasia, not the new “gunpowder empires.” Their lack of firearms, long-distance transport ships, horse cavalry, and other technologies that Europeans had contributed to their sudden collapse. Even so, if there been no Great Dying, Spanish conquests in the Americas would almost certainly have been more difficult than they were.

The ”Czar Cannon”
The emperor of Russia ordered the casting of this gigantic bronze
Cannon in 1586. Its tube alone weighs 40 tons. It was intended
for defense of the Kremlin in Moscow, but it was never fired.
Photo by R. Dunn

The world economy was Asia-centered at the beginning of Big Era Six, but it gradually underwent a major shift in organization. By 1800, it was becoming focused on the Atlantic world. How did this come about, and what were the main consequences? The linking of Afroeurasia with the Americas was the most important factor. The sudden arrival in the sixteenth century of vast quantities of silver on world markets led to a rapid increase in world commercial exchanges of all kinds. This was as true for Asia, where the economies of both China and Mughal India were based on silver coinage, as it was for Europe. In the long run, it seems clear that Europeans benefited the most from this development. But this was not apparent at the time.

In the early part of Big Era Six, European participation in the trade of Asia was seriously limited. Europeans did not produce commodities or finished goods that Asians wanted to buy. American silver, which Amerindians and African slaves extracted from the earth, provided a solution for capitalist entrepreneurs. These merchants could purchase Asian commodities (pepper, spices, coffee, tea, porcelain, carpets, silk, and cotton cloth) with American silver and, to some extent, gold. Once Europeans with precious metals to sell entered the trade of Asia, they also profited as specialists in moving goods from one part of Asia or Africa to another—Chinese porcelain to India, for example, or Indian textiles to West Africa. The trade boom in maritime Asia soared to new heights between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Because it greatly benefited European states and merchants, however, the weight of the world economy began to shift from East and South Asia to the Atlantic world.

The changing patterns of production, consumption, and labor around the world greatly affected the lives of ordinary women and men. These transformations took place in work habits, incomes, diet, family structure, and in some places even the ratio of women to men. For example, in parts of tropical Africa the slave trade removed so many young males from society that women came significantly to outnumber men. By contrast, in the densest plantation societies in the Caribbean and Brazil, enslaved men of African descent greatly outnumbered enslaved women. Sugar itself had a transforming effect on the Atlantic world in Big Era Six. The sugar boom brought riches to some Europeans and Africans, but a death sentence to many others. The swelling consumption of sugar, coffee, tea, and cacao transformed the diets and daily habits of ordinary Europeans and linked them by invisible economic threads to Caribbean and Brazilian slave workers. The silver mines and sugar plantations did much to create a new international division of labor in which Africans, Native Americans, and Asians increasingly supplied labor and raw materials, while Europeans made finished goods using complex technologies.

Sugar, an Afroeurasian crop cultivated in the Americas, and the seeds
of the cacao, an American plant introduced to Afroeurasia,
are the key ingredients of chocolate.

One main reason for the rise of European power was the military and fiscal revolution. In the military sphere Europeans adopted gunpowder technologies, and this soon led to advances in strategy, tactics, fortifications, and discipline. Warfare became the business of professional soldiers and sailors. Europeans fought many wars during this Big Era and therefore had numerous opportunities to experiment with military innovations. These conflicts included the Wars of Religion, the Puritan revolution in England, the Seven Year's war, the American War of Independence, and the French Revolution. Military innovations, however, did not serve all European states equally, because some states augmented their power at the expense of others. Most importantly, by the end of the era Britain had virtually eliminated France, its principle rival for global domination, in North America, the Caribbean, and South Asia.

The military revolution was also fiscal because it required deep changes in state administration, taxation, and accounting to pay for increasingly expensive wars. In this race for revenue only the fittest survived. States unable to finance costly artillery and other weapons were gradually eliminated by their more successful rivals. Britain's greater ability to finance warfare largely explains its victories over France. For example, French military and financial support for the American revolution led to that kingdom’s bankruptcy and thus to the French revolution (discussed in Big Era Seven). In Asia, imperial states like the Ottomans, Mughals, and Ming Chinese adopted gunpowder weapons and expanded their territories. They did not, however, accept the full package of military and fiscal reforms that Europeans did. By the later eighteenth century, the balance of military power in the world was shifting to the European side. Overall, the map of Europe was greatly transformed in this period by the failure of states, both great and small, to cope with the military and fiscal revolutions.

Before the nineteenth century, European states did not have significant military advantage over Asian or African rivals. For example, at the start of the era the Austrian Hapsburg empire (the largest in Europe) could not defeat the Ottoman Turkish empire, its principle rival. The Portuguese, Dutch, and English traded for slaves in West Africa but seized little territory because regional African states, which were increasingly armed with guns, had sufficient power to defend themselves. The tropical disease environment in West Africa was also deadly to Europeans. It was not until the nineteenth century that Europeans began to have adequate military and medical technology to readily defeat Asian or African imperial armies. At the start of Big Era Seven, for example, both Austrian and Russian forces deploying massed field artillery and other lethal weapons were able to defeat the Ottomans more or less at will.

Humans and Ideas

In Big Era Six, Europe emerged as a center of technological and scientific advance, a hotbed of ideas and inventions that contributed greatly to the building of denser networks of human interaction. Europe enjoyed this role, however, only because its thinkers and experimenters were able to build on the deep legacy of scientific and technological exchanges that had been part of Afroeurasian history for several millennia. This legacy included the basic technological toolkits that societies in other parts of Afroeurasia had first developed, for example, weaving, iron-making, writing, printing, sail transport, animal harnessing, irrigation management, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy, governing techniques (bureaucracy), university organization, and many others. In Big Era Six (and the last few centuries of Big Era Five) western Europeans consolidated and standardized many elements of these toolkits. These included, for example, such basic innovations as gunpowder weapons, paper, printing, the stern-post ship rudder, the compass, the idea of the sun-centered universe, the concept of zero, the hospital, the astronomical observatory, the library, and the college.

Muslim societies of the central regions of Afroeurasia played a central role in this cultural cross-fertilization owing in large part to their cultural openness and closeness to Christian Europe. Between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, Muslim scholars produced a new synthesis of Arab, Persian, Mesopotamian, Greek, and Indian knowledge about nature, society, and the cosmos. Beginning in the twelfth century, Europeans gradually adopted this synthesis of learning and increasingly contributed to it.

Europe’s energy in the early modern period was also the product of internal cultural trends. Following the devastating plagues, climatic deterioration, and warfare of the fourteenth century, Europe gradually revived in population, agricultural production, commerce, and urbanization. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the most visible cultural sign of this revival was the Renaissance, a flowering of art, literature, philosophy, and science centered in (and paid for by) royal courts and wealthy men and women in Italy and, a bit later, northwestern Europe. The Renaissance was a cultural expression of Europe’s new prosperity, and it was fed by the new knowledge that poured into the region in the wake of European explorations and conquests across the oceans. In world terms, however, the Renaissance was no major cultural turning point. Rather, it was an achievement that raised the level of sophistication and refinement of European elite culture to that of urban societies in the rest of Afroeurasia.

Sofonisba Anguissola, 1531-1626
Self-Portrait, 1554
This Italian Renaissance artist was painter
to the royal court of Philip II of Spain.
Women Artists
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
http://www.csupomona.edu/~plin/women/womenart.html

One critical innovation was the printing press and movable type engineered by Johann Gutenburg (1394-1468). Printing stimulated literacy among middle and upper class Europeans, a growing market for written texts, and the rapid diffusion of ideas, including new conceptions of nature, the cosmos, and human society.

1. The spread of Protestantism was a major development linked to printing. The Protestant Reformation was a movement of religious protest and reform that burst on the European scene in the early sixteenth century. Martin Luther (1483-1546), a German Christian monk, challenged the Roman Catholic Church to make numerous reforms in doctrine and leadership. The result was a long and bitter struggle for religious and political power that divided western Europeans for well over a century. At the same time, the Catholic church continued to gain followers, and a variety of Protestant churches sprang up, the forerunners of modern denominations such as the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, and Baptist churches.

A Replica of Johannes Gutenberg’s Printing Press of 1450
Museum of Printing History, Houston, Texas
http://www.printingmuseum.org
Photo by Gerald E. McLeod
Gerald E. McLeod, “Day Trips,” The Austin Chronicle, Feb. 2, 2001

European merchants, soldiers, and missionaries also took Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant, around the world, leading to its rapid spread, especially in the Americas. Islam, an alternative vision of belief in one God, also continued to expand across Afroeurasia, carried along the overland routes and long-distance sea lanes. While Christianity was sinking deep roots in the Americas, Islam gained millions of new adherents in West Africa, East Africa, southeastern Europe, Inner Eurasia, India, and Southeast Asia.

However, the major organized faiths—Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Daoism, Hinduism, and Judaism—had nothing like a monopoly on religious belief and practice in the world. Local, polytheistic religions continued to thrive in many regions. Also, faiths involving syncretism, that is, the meshing of beliefs and rituals of different traditions, became more common as the web of human interactions around the world tightened. The stresses and strains of the first age of global trade, migration, warfare, and colonialism invited many religious movements that promised immediate salvation for all worthy people, even the annihilation of all evil. These movements are usually described as messianic, that is, promising a messiah to save the world, or millenarian, a term referring in Christian teaching to the “millennium,” or one thousand years when Christ will return to rule the earth.

In Europe, the fragmenting of religious doctrine that accompanied the Protestant Reformation, the sudden linkup to the “New World,” and the continuing flow of knowledge from distant parts of Afroeurasia produced multiple shocks to the Christian worldview. Such newness and change provoked a searching examination of the place of humans in the cosmos and nature. In the absence of any single controlling religious authority to stop them, scholars like Copernicus, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton put forward philosophical and scientific ideas that challenged older ways of thinking. Most important, they argued that the universe operates according to natural laws, which human reason and careful observation may discover and explain. The resulting Scientific Revolution was in many ways the logical outcome of Afroeurasia’s total legacy of scientific and philosophical creativity. It was also, however, a dramatic break with the long world trend to rely mainly on priests, spiritual sages, and other religious authorities to explain all things. In the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment, a great debate over the relative merits of science and faith as the standard measure of nature and the universe gathered steam in Europe and began to penetrate other parts of the world.

Teaching Units for Big Era Six

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Definition of Landscape Teaching Units

Definition of Closeup Teaching Units

3.2.5

Korea From Calm to Conflict

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