A variety of internal and external factors contribute to state formation, expansion, and decline. Governments maintain order through a variety of administrative institutions, policies, and procedures, and governments obtain, retain, and exercise power in different ways and for different purposes.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Explain the process of state building and expansion among various empires and states in the period from 1450 to 1750.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS

KC 4.3.II.A.i - Europeans established new trading posts in Africa and Asia, which proved profitable for the rulers and merchants involved in new global trade networks. Some Asian states sought to limit the disruptive economic and cultural effects of European-dominated long-distance trade by adopting restrictive or isolationist trade policies.

KC 4.3.II.A.ii - Driven largely by political, religious, and economic rivalries, European states established new maritime empires, including the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, and British.

KC 4.3.II.A.ii - The expansion of maritime trading networks fostered the growth of states in Africa, including the Asante and the Kingdom of the Kongo, whose participation in trading networks led to an increase in their influence.

As societies develop, they affect and are affected by the ways that they produce, exchange, and consume goods and services.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Explain the continuities and changes in economic systems and labor systems from 1450 to 1750.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS

KC 4.3.II.A.iii - Despite some disruption and restructuring due to the arrival of Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch merchants, existing trade networks in the Indian Ocean continued to flourish and included intra-Asian trade and Asian merchants.

KC 4.2.II.D - Newly developed colonial economies in the Americas largely depended on agriculture, utilized existing labor systems, including the Incan mit’a, and introduced new labor systems including chattel slavery, indentured servitude, and encomienda and hacienda systems.

ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLES

Indian Ocean Asian merchants:

§Ming China - adoption of isolationist trade policies

§ Tokugawa Japan - adoption of isolationist trade policies

§Swahili Arabs in the Indian Ocean trade

§ Omanis in the Indian Ocean trade

§ Gujaratis in the Indian Ocean trade

§ Javanese in the Indian Ocean trade

The processes by which societies group their members and the norms that govern the interactions between these groups and between individuals influence political, economic, and cultural institutions and organization.

LEARNING OBJECTIVE

Explain changes and continuities in systems of slavery in the period from 1450 to 1750.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS

KC 4.2.II.B - Slavery in Africa continued in its traditional forms, including incorporation of slaves into households and the export of slaves to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean regions.

KC 4.2.II.C - The growth of the plantation economy increased the demand for slaves in the Americas, leading to significant demographic, social, and cultural changes.

Tokugawa Japan states sought to limit the disruptive economic and cultural effects of European-dominated long-distance trade by adopting restrictive or isolationist trade policies.

Christian Missions

Jesuit Francis Xavier traveled to Japan in 1549 and opened a mission to seek converts to Christianity

• 1580s -- about 150,000 Japanese had converted to Christianity

• 1615 - Japanese Christians numbered about 300,000

Restrictions

• concerns that Christianity might serve as a cultural bridge for alliances between daimyo and European adventurers, which in turn could lead to destabilization of Japanese society and even threats to the bakufu (military government of Japan/Shoguns)

• Buddhist and Confucian scholars resented the Christian conviction that their faith was the only true doctrine.

• Anti-Christian Campaign

  • • Between 1587 and 1639, shoguns promulgated several decrees ordering a halt to Christian missions and commanding Japanese Christians to renounce their faith.

    • 1612 the shoguns began rigorous enforcement of those decrees

    • They tortured and executed European missionaries who refused to leave the islands as well as Japanese Christians who refused to abandon their faith

    • They often executed victims by crucifixion or burning at the stake, which Tokugawa authorities regarded as especially appropriate punishments for Christians.

Americas

existing labor systems

• Incan mit’a

  • • rotational labor system that organized members of ayllus (clan or community) to provide service to the community or state.

    • each ayllu contributed a set number of workers for specific tasks each year

    • Mit'a laborers built and maintained:

      • • roads

        • bridges

        • temples

        • palaces

        • terraces for farming

        • canals

    • system would later be adapted by the Spanish to perform coerced labor (ie. Potosi)

new labor systems

• chattel slavery

  • • Chattel slavery was perpetual

    • it was hereditary, the children of slaves were the property of their owner

    • the status of chattel slave was designated by ‘race’

    • During the period from 1500 to 1800, the largest contingent of migrants consisted of enslaved Africans transported involuntarily to South American, North American, and Caribbean destinations.

    • European textiles, guns, and other manufactured goods went south to west Africa, where merchants exchanged them for African slaves, who then went to the tropical and subtropical regions of the western hemisphere to work on plantations

    • English, Dutch, and other merchants purchased cowry shells from India—which served as currency in much of sub-Saharan Africa—and exchanged them for slaves destined for plantations in the western hemisphere.

• indentured servitude

  • • those who lacked means were brought from Europe under contract to work off their passage, room, and board over a period of two to seven years, until they were considered to have earned their freedom.

    • smaller but still sizable migration involved Europeans who traveled to the Americas and settled in lands depopulated by infectious and contagious diseases.

    • forced indentured servitude

      • • during the period of the English Civil Wars prisoners (ie. Irish) were forcibly banished into indentured servitude to British colonies in the Caribbean.

        • following King Philip’s War, thousands of Amerindians from New England were sold into indentured servitude

• encomienda system

  • • land grants were the first type of reward given to conquistadores as a reward for their conquest and claiming land for Spain.

    • It would give them a title and a group of indigenous people as part of the encomienda as labor for the land itself.

    • The church could receive encomienda grants as well to work land to fund the missionary activities and other work (Inquisition) of the church in the colonies.

    • with the demographic collapse of the indigenous communities and the increase in the use of African slaves to replace labor, the Spanish crown abolished encomienda labor in the 1540s and replaced it with a new system called the repartimiento.

    • Repartimiento-The indigenous population would work for others and be placed on land, sometimes in their own towns and communities, sometimes being relocated as labor demand was needed, a lot like the mit'a system the Spanish took over in the Andes from the Inca.

    • Spanish crown wanted to administer the colonies.

    • labor wasn't allocated based on the land grants, though the term encomienda continued on in some areas without the same type of system from the early conquest and colonization period.

    • Source: Erika Weber

• hacienda system

  • • large plantations that could produce agriculture or mined resources, but the labor was paid rather than coerced.

    • Haciendas helped the Creoles maintain power through land ownership later in the colonial period, especially after the Bourbon reforms in the eighteenth century.

    • An owner of a hacienda might have inherited land that had been an encomienda, but haciendas weren't a labor system the same way the economienda was.

    • based on buying land and private ownership

    • Source: Erika Weber

Indian Ocean Asian merchants:

§Ming China - adoption of isolationist trade policies

emperor Yongle (reigned 1403–1424)

• 1421 - Yongle moved the capital from Nanjing in the south to Beijing so as to keep closer watch on the Mongols and other nomadic peoples in the north.

  • • Mongol forces massacred several Chinese armies in the 1440s, and in 1449 they captured the Ming emperor himself

• launched a series of naval expeditions that sailed throughout the Indian Ocean basin and showed Chinese colors as far away as Malindi in east Africa.

  • • led by the eunuch admiral Zheng He.

    • The Chinese fleets included as many as 317 vessels and 28,000 men. Zheng He called at ports from Java to Malindi

    • suppressed pirates in southeast Asian waters

    • intervened in local conflicts in Sumatra and Ceylon

    • intimidated local authorities with shows of force in southern Arabia and Mogadishu

    • made China’s presence felt throughout the Indian Ocean basin.

• Yongle’s successors discontinued the expensive maritime expeditions but maintained the tightly centralized state that Hongwu (1368–1398), founder of the Ming, had established.

  • • even tried to prevent Chinese subjects from dealing with foreign peoples

Centralization Projects

• the Great Wall was a Ming-dynasty project

  • • The Great Wall had precedents dating back to the fourth century B.C.E., but had fallen into disrepair

    • hundreds of thousands labored throughout the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to build a formidable stone and brick barrier that ran some 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles).

• Confucian imperial academies and regional colleges reestablished

• Ming state restored the system of civil service examinations

• Forbidden City constructed

  • • vast imperial enclave in Beijing

Trade

• Defense

  • • Ming navy and coastal defenses were ineffective

    • From the 1520s to the 1560s, pirates and smugglers operated almost at will along the east coast of China

      • • Wokou-Japanese Pirates raided Chinese merchant ships. Mainly based in Okinawa and Taiwan.

    • 1517-first Portuguese embassy in China

    • 1557-Portuguese gained right to trade from Macao

• Increase in interregional production (assembly line) of porcelain, textiles (silk) and lacquered furniture.

§ Tokugawa Japan - adoption of isolationist trade policies

• Europeans viewed as a threat--even if they couldn't conquer Japan, they could make alliances with daimyo and supplying them with weapons.

Edicts sharply restricting Japanese relations in 1630s

• forbade Japanese from going abroad on pain of death

• prohibited the construction of large ships

• It expelled Europeans from Japan

• prohibited foreign merchants from trading in Japanese ports

  • • 1640--a Portuguese merchant ship arrived at Nagasaki in hopes of engaging in trade in spite of the ban. Officials beheaded sixty-one of the party and spared thirteen others so that they could relate the experience to their compatriots.

• forbade the import of foreign books (until 1720)

• The policy allowed carefully controlled trade with Asian lands

• permitted small numbers of Chinese and Dutch merchants to trade under tight restrictions at the southern port city of Nagasaki.

Dutch Learning

• After 1639 Dutch merchants trading at Nagasaki became Japan’s principal source of information about Europe and the world beyond east Asia.

• A small number of Japanese scholars learned Dutch in order to communicate with the foreigners. Their studies, which they called “Dutch learning,” brought considerable knowledge of the outside world to Japan.

• After 1720 Tokugawa authorities lifted the ban on foreign books, and Dutch learning began to play a significant role in Japanese intellectual life.

• European art influenced Japanese scholars interested in anatomy and botany because of its accurate representations of objects.

• Scholars translated Dutch medical and scientific treatises into Japanese and learned to draw according to the principles of linear perspective, which enabled them to prepare textbooks that were more accurate than the Chinese works they had previously used.

• European astronomy was also popular in Japan, since it enabled scholars to improve calendars and issue accurate predictions of eclipses and other celestial events.

• By the mid-eighteenth century the Tokugawa shoguns themselves had become enthusiastic proponents of Dutch learning

• schools of European medicine and Dutch studies flourished in several Japanese cities.

§ Omanis in the Indian Ocean trade

• Arab state based in Musqat (main port on southeast Arabian peninsula)

• succeeded Portugal as a power in the western Indian Ocean in the 18th century (1700s)

• seized Musqat in 1650

• seized Mombasa (East Africa) in 1698

• created a maritime empire of their own

  • • worked in cooperation with African populations

    • intermarriage between Arabs and East African locals played an important role in the development of Swahili culture

§Swahili Arabs in the Indian Ocean trade

• Kilwa, Mombasa, and Malindi

• Trade:

  • • slaves

      • • est. 2.1 million slaves exported between 1500 and 1890

        • a little over 12.5% of the total traffic in African slaves during this period

    • other exports

      • • ivory

        • ambergris (whale byproduct used in perfumes)

        • beeswax

        • copal tree resin

    • Kilwa known for exporting gold

§ Gujaratis in the Indian Ocean trade

• Muslim traders controlled overseas trade

• exported cotton textiles and indigo to the Middle East and Europe in exchange for gold and silver

• exported cotton cloth, carnelian beads and foodstuffs to the Swahili Coast in exchange for ebony, slaves, ivory, and gold

• during the 15th century (1400s), traders expanded eastward to the Strait of Malacca

  • • Gujarat merchants helped spread the Islamic faith among east Indian traders

§ Javanese in the Indian Ocean trade

• Dutch mariners for the VOC in 1619 founded Batavia on the island of Java to serve as an entrepôt

• Batavia occupied a strategic site near the Sunda Strait, and its market attracted both Chinese and Malay vessels

• sought to to control the production of spices (cloves)

  • • made alliances with local authorities to maintain order in most regions, reserving for direct Dutch rule only Batavia and the most important spicebearing islands such as clove-producing Amboina and the Banda Islands

    • Banda Islands, famous for their nutmeg, the Dutch killed, enslaved, or left to starve virtually the entire population of some 15,000 people and then replaced them with Dutch planters, using a slave labor force to produce the nutmeg crop

• VOC naval power brought to bear on the small Indonesian islands and forced them to deliver spices only to VOC merchants

• On larger islands such as Java, the VOC took advantage of tensions between local princes and authorities and extracted concessions from many in return for providing them with aid against the others.

  • • By the late seventeenth century, the VOC controlled all the ports of Java as well as most of the important spice-bearing islands throughout the Indonesian archipelago

Americas demographic, social, and cultural changes

government was authoritarian and society was divided by class

Peninsulares

• native born on the Iberian Peninsula (Spain or Portugal)

• exercised power over the colonies on behalf of the crown

• subject them to heavy taxes and tariffs

creole

• native-born elites in the Spanish colonies

• little tradition of local self-government

Native Americans, people of African ancestry, and those of mixed race made up the vast majority of the population

• By the end of the colonial period in 1821, over one hundred categories of possible variations of mixture existed

• Casta system were racial categories that had social and legal consequences

• some of the more well known classifications are:

  • • Mestizo -- mixed European and Amerindian ancestry

    • Mulatto -- mixed European and African ancestry