The Age of Exploration and Expansion: A Historical Overview, Assignments of Political history

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An Age of Exploration

and Expansion

• (^) From the early 15th century, European society was transformed by a succession of revolutionary changes
• (^) Trade expanded, towns grew, printing came into use and gunpowder armies caused feudal power structures gave way to centralised monarchies.
• (^) The Italian Renaissance led to new learning, and increased curiosity.
• (^) During this period a distinct and rigorous way of looking at the world, which today we call “science”, emerged.
• (^) At the same time, explorers began charting the coasts of the Oceans of the world, and penetrating lands previously unknown to Europeans.

Motivations of Exploration

• (^) Historians generally recognize three motives for European exploration and colonization in the New World: God, Gold, and Glory.
• (^) The Christians looked to colonization partly as a means of continuing religious conquests
• (^) Merchants’ ships brought Europeans valuable goods, traveling between the port cities of western Europe and the East from the 10th century on along routes collectively labeled the Silk Road. However, transporting goods along the Silk Road was costly, slow, and unprofitable
• (^) Competition between the Portuguese and the Spanish motivated both nations to colonize quickly and aggressively.

Portugese Maritime Empire

• (^) Why where the Portuguese so successful in taking over the spice trade?
• (^) Portugal took the lead in exploration when it began exploring the coast of Africa under the sponsorship of Prince Henry the Navigator (1394--1460).
• (^) in 1471 the Portuguese discovered a new source of gold along the southern coast of the hump of West Africa

• (^) Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine, accompanied several voyages and wrote a series of letters describing the geography of the New World.
• (^) The publication of these letters led to the use of the name ‘‘America’’ for the new lands.
• (^) The newly discovered territories were referred to as the New World, even though they possessed flourishing civilizations populated by millions of people when the Europeans arrived.
• (^) But the Americas were new to the Europeans, who quickly saw opportunities for conquest and exploitation

The route east around the Cape of Good Hope was to be reserved for the Portuguese, while the route across the Atlantic was assigned to Spain.

What were some of the consequences of the

arrival of the European traders and missionaries

for the peoples of Asia and the Americas?

• (^) The native American civilizations were virtually destroyed
• (^) Ancient social and political structures were replaced by European institutions, religion, language, and culture.
• (^) The European success in dominating native peoples undoubtedly reinforced the Europeans’ belief in the inherent superiority of their civilization.
• (^) Wherever they went in the Americas, Europeans sought gold and silver.
• (^) One Aztec observer commented that the Spanish conquerors : “ Their bodies swelled with greed, and their hunger was ravenous; they hungered like pigs for that gold.”

• (^) It has been estimated that between 1503 and 1650,
• (^) 16 million kilograms of silver and 185,000 kilograms of gold entered the port of Seville, fueling a price revolution that affected the Spanish economy.
• (^) New agricultural products native to the Americas, such as potatoes, cacao, corn, and tobacco, were also imported

• (^) In the second half of the seventeenth century, however, rivalry and years of warfare with the English and the French brought the decline of the Dutch commercial empire in the Americas.
• (^) In 1664, the English seized the colony of New Netherland and renamed it New York
• (^) In 1663, Canada became the property of the French crown and was administered like a French province
• (^) By the early eighteenth century, the French began to cede some of their American possessions to their English rival.

Africa in Transition

• (^) In the early sixteenth century, a Portuguese fleet seized a number of East African port cities
• (^) But the first Europeans to settle in southern Africa were the Dutch.
• (^) As the trade in slaves increased during the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, thousands, and then millions, were removed from their homes and forcibly exported to plantations in the Western Hemisphere.