Chapter 2: The Rise of the Atlantic World (1400-1625)

African and European Backgrounds

 Christopher Columbus- Italian explorer who claimed the island of San Salvador in the Bahamas
for the king and queen of Spain

 West Africa and western Europe were being transformed

o Developing a market society

 European’s population doubled in size

o It’s distribution of wealth and power shifted
 New modes of thought and spirituality undermined established beliefs and knowledge

West Africa: Tradition and Change

 The trans-Saharan caravan trade stimulated the rise of grassland kingdoms and empires
o The richest grassland states were in West Africa
 Lots of gold
 Mali- A leading power in the West African savanna during the 14 th and 15th centuries
o Timbuktu was the cultural center in Mali

 Mali’s Muslim rulers imported brass, copper, cloth, spices, manufactured goods, and Arabian
horses
o Exports were gold and slaves

 Europeans switched their currency to gold, so their demand for gold went up
o This brought thousands of newcomers from the savanna and Central Africa to the region
later known Africa’s Gold Coast

 Kongo- The most powerful and highly centralized kingdom along the African Coast in the 15 th
century

 Rulers of smaller kingdoms depended largely on their ability to persuade

 West African viewed marriage as a way for extended families to forge alliances for mutual
benefit
  West African wives generally maintained lifelong links with their own families

 A driving force behind marriage in West Africa was the region’s high mortality rate from
frequent famines and tropical disease epidemics

 Children contributed to a family’s wealth by increasing its food production and the amount of
land it could cultivate

 Men usually married more than one women for more children to help out

 In coastal rainforests, West Africans grew crops like yams, sugar cane, bananas, okra, and
eggplant, among other foods, as well as cotton for weaving cloth

 In the grasslands the staff of life was grain supplemented by cattle raising and fishing

 Cowry shells served as the medium of exchange currency if they didn’t have gold

 West African religions emphasized the importance of believers’ continuous revelations as source
of spiritual truth

 The ivory, cast iron, and wood sculptures of West Africa were used in ceremonies reenacting
creation myths and honoring spirits

European Culture and Society

 Renaissance- An era of intense artistic creativity in Europe after the Middle Ages

 Renaissance creativity was partly inspired by intense social and spiritual stress

 Gender, wealth, inherited position, and political power defined every European’s status, and few
lived outside the reach of some political authority’s taxes and laws

Most Europeans – about 75 percent – were peasants, frequently driven to starvation by taxes,
rents, and other dues owed to landlords and Catholic Church officials

 Deforestation deprived peasants of wild foods and game, whose food sources disappeared with
deforestation|

 Some English writers viewed overseas colonies as places where the unemployed, landless poor
could find opportunity, thereby enriching their countries rather than draining resources
  Joint-Stock Company- A business corporation that amassed the capital through sales of stock to
investors

Religious Upheavals

 Europe was home to Christians, Muslims, and Jews in 1400

 For more than three centuries, European Christians conducted numerous Crusades against
Muslims in Europe and the Middle East, and Muslims retaliated with “holy war”
o Turned into wars of conquest

 The Church had assumed the authority to grant extra blessings, or “indulgences”, to repent
sinners
o Indulgences became popular

 In 1517, German monk Martin Luther openly attacked the practice of indulgences
o The Roman Catholic Church excommunicated him
o His revolt led to the Protestant Reformation

 Protestant Reformation- A movement led by Martin Luther in the 16 th century in which people
split from the Catholic Church

 Luther’s search for salvation convinced him that God bestowed salvation not on the basis of
worldly deeds, but solely to reward a believer’s faith

 John Calvin was a protestant reformer as well

o Believed in predestination

 Predestination- God already had planned who was going to heaven or hell. You couldn’t change
where you were going

 Catholic/Counter-Reformation- The movement in the 16th century within the Catholic Church to
reform itself as a result of the Protestant Reformation

The Reformation in England (1533-1625)

 King Henry VIII persuaded Parliament to pass a series of acts in 1533-1534 dissolving his
marriage and proclaiming him supreme head of the Church of England (Anglican Church)

 Under Edward VI (Henry’s son) the church veered sharply toward Calvinism
 o Mary I tried to restore Catholicism, in part by burning several hundred Protestants at
the stake

 Puritans- Militant Calvinists who insisted that membership in a congregation be limited to those
who had a conversation experience and that each congregation be independent for other
congregations and of the Anglican hierarchy

 Puritanism appealed primarily to the small but growing number of people in the “middling”
ranks of English society

Europe and the Atlantic World (1400-1600)

 Expanding Europeans proclaimed it their mission to introduce Christianity and “civilization” to

the savages and pagans of alien lands.
o Outcomes of the new imperialism were:
 Transatlantic slave trade
 Colonization of the Americas

Portugal and the Atlantic (1400-1500)

 Tiny Portugal led the way in overcoming impediments to long-distance oceanic travel

 Renaissance new learning helped sharpen Europeans’ geographic sense

 Prince Henry – The Navigator

o By Henry’s death, Portugal was exporting substantial quantities of gold and slaves from
south of the Sahara
 Portugal showed western Europeans a way around Africa to Asia

The “New Slavery” and Racism

 Many Africans were enslaved because of indebtedness

 Portuguese traded guns with the Africans

o African soldiers would use the weapons to get more slaves for the Portuguese

 New Slavery- Form slavery initiated by Portugal where African slaves were forced to work on
sugar plantations and were subjected to new extremes of dehumanization

 The unprecedented magnitude of the trade resulted in a demographic catastrophe for West
Africa and its peoples
o African slaves were subjected to new extremes of dehumanization
 o They were thought of now as property instead of lower class

 Race was now the ideological basis of the new slavery

o Europeans justified enslaving blacks as their Christian duty

To the Americas and Beyond (1492-1522)

 Columbus’s imaginations led him to conclude that Europeans could reach Asia more directly by
sailing westward across the Atlantic rather than around Africa and across the Indian Ocean

 The Treaty of Tordesillas drew a line in the mid-Atlantic, dividing all future discoveries between
Spain and Portugal

 America was named after Amerigo Vespucci

Spain Conquistadors (1492-1536)

 Tainos and other Native Americans in the Caribbean colonies died off in shockingly large
numbers from smallpox, measles, and other imported diseases
o To replace the dead Indians the colonists enslaved more Africans to do the labor

 Hernán Cortés enlisted the support of enemies and discontented subjects of the Aztecs in a
quest to conquer that empire

The Colombian Exchange

 Colombian Exchange- The widespread exchange of animals, plants, germs, and peoples from
Europe, Africa, and the Americas

Footholds in North America (1512-1625)

Spain’s Northern Frontier

 Most of Spain’s horses died from arrow wounds while their livestock scattered

 St. Augustine, Florida- City in Florida where Spain established the first lasting European post in
North America in 1565

 New Mexico- The Spanish colony in the upper Rio Grande Valley

 Encomiendas- Grants awarding Indian labor to wealthy colonists

France: Colonizing Canada

 New France- Areas in North America under French colonial rule

England and the Atlantic World (1558-1603)

 England had two objectives in the Western Hemisphere in the 1570’s.

o To find the northwest passage to Asia and discover gold on the way
o To singe the king of Spain’s beard by raiding Spanish fleets and ports

Failure and Success in Virginia (1603-1625)

 James I signed a truce with Spain in 1604

 Virginia- colony on the James River

 Tobacco emerged as Virginia’s salvation

o Virginia exported large amounts to a newly emergent European market

 Indentured Servants- Young men and women who were given free passage to America with
shelter, food, and clothing in exchange for labor from 4-7 years

 Serious problems Virginia faced in 1622:

o Local officials systematically defrauded the shareholders by embezzling treasury funds,
overcharging for supplies, and using company laborers to work their own tobacco fields
o Despite massive immigration, the colony’s population continued to experience an
appallingly high death rate
o Relations with Native Americans steadily worsened after Powhatan died

New England Begins (1614-1625)

 In 1620 Thomas Weston sent over 24 families in a small leaky ship called the Mayflower
o The expedition leaders were Separatist Puritans who had withdrawn from the Church of
England and fled to the Netherlands to practice their religious freely
o The Mayflower landed at Plymouth Bay (Massachusetts), north of Virginia Company’s grant

 Plymouth- Colony established by English immigrants, half of which were Puritans

 Squanto showed the colonists how to grow corn, using fish as fertilizer (Thanksgiving)

A “New Netherland” on the Hudson (1609-1625)

 The Dutch built an empire stretching from Brazil to South Africa to Indonesia, and played a key
role in colonizing North America
 Henry Hudson sailed up the river later named for him, traded with Native Americans, and
claimed the land for the Netherland

 New Netherland- Dutch colony in America