The Columbian Exchanges History

I. The Columbian Exchange A. Demographic Changes 1. The peoples of the New World lacked immunity to diseases from the Old World. Smallpox, measles, diphtheria, typhus, influenza, malaria, yellow fever, and maybe pulmonary plague caused catastrophic declines in the population of native peoples in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies. 2. Similar patterns of contagion and mortality may be observed in the English and French colonies in North America. Europeans did not use disease as a tool of empire, but the spread of Old World diseases clearly undermined the ability of native peoples to resist settlement and accelerated cultural change. B. Transfer of Plants and Animals 1. European, Asian, and African food crops were introduced to the Americas, while American crops, including maize, beans, potatoes, manioc, and tobacco, were brought to the Eastern Hemisphere. The introduction of New World food crops is thought to be one factor contributing to the rapid growth in world population after 1700. 2. The introduction of European livestock such as cattle, pigs, horses, and sheep had a dramatic influence on the environment and on the cultures of the native people of the Americas. 3. Old World livestock destroyed the crops of some Amerindian farmers. Other Amerindians benefited from the introduction of cattle, sheep, and horses. In fact, no animal had a greater impact on native peoples than the horse. It increased both the hunting efficiency and military capacity of indigenous North Americans in particular. II. Spanish America and Brazil A. State and Church 1. The Spanish crown tried to exert direct control over its American colonies but the difficulty of communication between Spain and the New World led to a situation in which the viceroys of New Spain and Peru and their subordinate officials enjoyed a substantial degree of power. 2. After some years of neglect and mismanagement, the Portuguese in 1720 appointed a viceroy to administer Brazil. 3. The governmental institutions established by Spain and Portugal were highly developed, costly bureaucracies that thwarted local economic initiative and political experimentation. 4. The Catholic Church played an important role in transferring European language, culture, and Christian beliefs to the New World. Catholic clergy converted large numbers of Amerindians, although some of them secretly held on to some of their native beliefs and practices. 5. Catholic clergy also acted to protect Amerindians from some of the exploitation and abuse of the Spanish settlers. One example is Bartolome de Las Casas, a former settler turned priest who denounced Spanish policies toward the Amerindians and worked to improve the status of Amerindians through legal reforms such as the New Laws of 1542. 6. Catholic missionaries were frustrated as Amerindian converts blended Christian beliefs with elements of their own cosmology and ritual to create their own forms of Christianity. By 1600 this resistance, as well as the rapidly declining numbers of B. C. indigenous people in the countryside due to disease, led the Church to redirect its energies toward the colonial cities and towns, where the Church founded universities and secondary schools and played a significant role in the intellectual and economic life of the colonies. Colonial Economies 1. The colonial economies of Latin America were dominated by the silver mines of Peru and Mexico and by the sugar plantations of Brazil. This led to a dependence on mineral and agricultural exports. 2. The economy of the Spanish colonies was dominated by the silver mines of Alto Peru (Bolivia) and Peru until 1680, and then by the silver mines of Mexico. Silver mining and processing required a large labor force and led to environmental effects that included deforestation and mercury poisoning. 3. In the agricultural economy that dominated Spanish America up to the 1540s, Spanish settlers used the forced-labor system of encomienda to exploit Amerindian labor. With the development of silver-mining economies, new systems of labor exploitation were devised: in Mexico, free-wage labor, and in Peru, the mita. 4. Under the mita system, one-seventh of adult male Amerindians were drafted for forced labor at less than subsistence wages for two to four months of the year. The mita system undermined the traditional agricultural economy, weakened Amerindian village life, and promoted the assimilation of Amerindians into Spanish colonial society. 5. The Portuguese developed the African slave-labor sugar plantation system in the Atlantic islands and then set up similar plantations in Brazil. The Brazilian plantations first used Amerindian slaves and then the more expensive but more productive (and more diseaseresistant) African slaves. 6. Sugar and silver played important roles in integrating the American colonial economies into the system of world trade. Society in Colonial Latin America 1. The elite of Spanish America consisted of a relatively small number of Spanish immigrants and a larger number of their American-born descendants (creoles). The Spanish-born dominated the highest levels of government, church, and business, while the creoles controlled agriculture and mining. 2. Under colonial rule, the cultural diversity of Amerindian peoples and the class differentiation within the Amerindian ethnic groups both were eroded. Some natives, especially elites, sought to protect their positions and status by intermarrying with colonists. Others, mainly commoners, suffered the heaviest burdens of the colonial system. 3. People of African descent played various roles in the history of the Spanish colonies. Slaves and free blacks from the Iberian Peninsula participated in the conquest and settlement of Spanish America; later, the direct slave trade with Africa led both to an increase in the number of blacks and to a decline in the legal status of blacks in the Spanish colonies. 4. At first, people brought from various parts of Africa retained their different cultural identities; but with time, their various traditions blended and mixed with European and Amerindian languages and beliefs to form distinctive local cultures. Slave resistance, including rebellions, was always brought under control, but runaway slaves occasionally formed groups that defended themselves for years. 5. Most slaves were engaged in agricultural labor and were forced to submit to harsh discipline and brutal punishments. The overwhelming preponderance of males made it impossible for slaves to preserve traditional African family and marriage patterns or to adopt those of Europe. 6. In colonial Brazil, Portuguese immigrants controlled politics and the economy, but by the early seventeenth century, Africans and their American-born descendants—both slave and free—were the largest ethnic group. 7. The growing population of individuals of mixed European and Amerindian descent (mestizos), European and African descent (mulattos), and mixed African and Amerindian descent were known collectively as castas. III. English and French Colonies in North America A. Early English Experiments 1. Attempts to establish colonies in the Americas in the late sixteenth century ended in failure. 2. In the seventeenth century, hope that colonies would prove to be profitable investments, combined with the successful colonization of Ireland, led to a new wave of interest in establishing colonies in the New World. B. The South 1. The Virginia Company established the colony of Jamestown on an unhealthy island in the James River in 1606. After the English Crown took over management of the colony in 1624, Virginia (Chesapeake Bay area) developed as a tobacco plantation economy with a dispersed population and with no city of any significant size. 2. The plantations of the Chesapeake Bay area initially relied on English indentured servants for labor. As life expectancy increased, planters came to prefer to invest in slaves; the slave population of Virginia increased from 950 in 1660 to 120,000 in 1756. 3. Virginia was administered by a Crown-appointed governor and by representatives of towns meeting together as the House of Burgesses. The House of Burgesses developed into a form of democratic representation at the same time as slavery was growing. 4. Colonists in the Carolinas first prospered in the fur trade with Amerindian deer-hunters. The consequences of the fur trade included environmental damage brought on by overhunting, Amerindian dependency on European goods, ethnic conflicts among Amerindians fighting over hunting grounds, and a series of unsuccessful Amerindian attacks on the English colonists in the early 1700s. 5. The southern part of the Carolinas was settled by planters from Barbados and developed a slave-labor plantation economy, producing rice and indigo. Enslaved Africans and their descendants formed the majority population and developed their own culture; a slave uprising (the Stono Rebellion) in 1739 led to more repressive policies toward slaves throughout the southern colonies. 6. Colonial South Carolina was the most hierarchical society in British North America. A wealthy planter class dominated a population of small farmers, merchants, cattle ranchers, artisans, and fur-traders who, in turn, stood above the people of mixed EnglishAmerindian or English-African background and slaves. C. New England 1. The Pilgrims, who wanted to break completely with the Church of England, established the small Plymouth Colony in 1620. The Puritans, who wanted only to reform the Church of England, formed a chartered joint-stock company (the Massachusetts Bay Company) and established the Massachusetts Bay colony in 1630. 2. The Massachusetts Bay colony had a normal gender balance, saw a rapid increase in population, and was more homogenous and less hierarchical than the southern colonies. The political institutions of the colony were derived from the terms of its charter and included an elected governor and, in 1650, a lower legislative house. 3. Without the soil or the climate to produce cash crops, the Massachusetts economy evolved from dependence on fur, forest products, and fish to a dependence on commerce and shipping. Massachusetts’s merchants engaged in a diversified trade across the Atlantic, which made Boston the largest city in British North America in 1740. D. The Middle Atlantic Region 1. Manhattan Island was first colonized by the Dutch and then taken by the English and renamed New York. New York became a commercial and shipping center; it derived particular benefit from its position as an outlet for the export of grain to the Caribbean and southern Europe. 2. Pennsylvania was first developed as a proprietary colony for Quakers but soon developed into a wealthy grain-exporting colony with Philadelphia as its major commercial city. In contrast to rice-exporting South Carolina’s slave agriculture, Pennsylvania’s grain was produced by free family farmers. E. French America 1. Patterns of French settlement closely resembled those of Spain and Portugal: the French were committed to missionary work, and they emphasized the extraction of natural resources—furs. French expansion was driven by the fur trade and resulted in depletion of beaver and deer populations and made Amerindians dependent upon European goods. 2. The fur trade provided Amerindians with firearms, which increased the violence of the wars that they fought over control of hunting grounds. 3. Catholic missionaries, including the Jesuits, attempted to convert the Amerindian population of French America, but, meeting with indigenous resistance, they turned their attention to work in the French settlements. These settlements, dependent on the fur trade, were small and grew slowly. This pattern of settlement allowed Amerindians in French America to preserve a greater degree of independence than they could in the Spanish, Portuguese, or British colonies. 4. The French expanded aggressively to the west and south, establishing a second furtrading colony in Louisiana in 1699. This expansion led to war with England in which the French, defeated in 1759, were forced to yield Canada to the English and to cede Louisiana to Spain. IV. Colonial Expansion and Conflict A. Imperial Reform in Spanish America and Brazil 1. After 1713, Spain’s new Bourbon dynasty undertook a series of administrative reforms, including expanded intercolonial trade, new commercial monopolies on certain goods, a stronger navy, and better policing of the trade in contraband goods to the Spanish colonies. The eighteenth century was one of remarkable economic expansion in the Spanish colonies. 2. Threatened by the independence and power of Jesuit influence, both Portuguese and Spanish monarchies expelled them from their American colonies. 3. The Bourbon policies led to a growing sense of grievance among Spanish colonists. The new monopolies aroused opposition from creole elites whose only gain from the reforms was their role as leaders of militias that were intended to counter the threat of war with England. 4. The Bourbon policies were also a factor in the Amerindian uprisings, including the uprising led by the Peruvian Amerindian leader José Gabriel Condorcanqui (Tupac Amaru II). The rebellion was suppressed after more than two years and cost the Spanish colonies over 100,000 lives and enormous amounts of property damage. 5. Brazil also underwent a period of economic expansion and administrative reform in the 1700s. Economic expansion fueled by gold, diamonds, coffee, and cotton underwrote the Pombal reforms, paid for the importation of nearly 2 million African slaves, and underwrote a new wave of British imports. B. Reform and Reorganization in British America 1. In the latter half of the seventeenth century, the British Crown tried to control colonial trading (smuggling) and manufacture by passing a series of Navigation Acts and by suspending the elected assemblies of the New England colonies. Colonists resisted by 2. V. overthrowing the governors of New York and Massachusetts and by removing the Catholic proprietor of Maryland, thus setting the stage for future confrontational politics. During the eighteenth century, economic growth and new immigration into the British colonies was accompanied by increased urbanization and a more stratified social structure. Conclusion 1. Amerindians in the colonies of Spain, Portugal, France, and England all experienced European subjugation, as well as the catastrophic effects of exposure to European diseases. 2. Of the Catholic powers of Spain, Portugal, and France, Spain gained the most wealth and developed the most centralized control. 3. British colonial governments were more likely to develop according to local interests than the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonial governments. 4. The Catholic nations forced more cultural uniformity on their colonies than Britain did in the more religiously and ethnically diverse British colonies. 5. The British colonies welcomed a much larger influx of European migrants than did the other New World colonies. Plantations in the West Indies A. Colonization Before 1650 1. Spanish settlers introduced sugar-cane cultivation into the West Indies shortly after 1500 but did not do much else toward the further development of the islands. After 1600, the French and English developed colonies based on tobacco cultivation. 2. Tobacco consumption became popular in England in the early 1600s. Tobacco production in the West Indies was stimulated by two new developments: the formation of chartered companies and the availability of cheap labor in the form of European indentured servants. 3. In the mid-1600s, competition from milder Virginia tobacco and the expulsion of experienced Dutch sugar producers from Brazil combined to bring the West Indian economies from tobacco to sugar production. 4. The Portuguese had introduced sugar-cane cultivation to Brazil, and the Dutch West India Company, chartered to bring the Dutch wars against Spain to the New World, had taken control of a large portion of the Brazilian sugar-producing region. Over a fifteenyear period, the Dutch improved the efficiency of the Brazilian sugar industry and brought slaves from Elmina and Luanda (also seized from Portugal) to Brazil and the West Indies. 5. When Portugal reconquered Brazil in 1654, the Dutch sugar planters brought the Brazilian system to the French and English Caribbean Islands. B. Sugar and Slaves 1. Between 1640 and the 1680s, colonies like Guadeloupe, Martinique, and particularly Barbados made the transition from a tobacco economy to a sugar economy. In the process of doing so, their demand for labor caused a sharp and significant increase in the volume of the Atlantic slave trade. 2. The shift from European indentured servants to enslaved African labor was caused by a number of factors, including a decline in the number of Europeans willing to indenture themselves to the West Indies and a rise in sugar prices that made planters more able to invest in slaves. VI. Plantation Life in the Eighteenth Century A. Technology and Environment 1. Sugar production had both an agricultural and an industrial character. Sugar plantations both grew sugar cane and processed the cane into sugar crystals, molasses, and rum. The technology for growing and harvesting cane was simple, but the machinery required for processing (rollers, copper kettles, and so on) was more complicated and expensive. The expenses of sugar production led planters to seek economies of scale by running large plantations. 2. Sugar production damaged the environment by causing soil exhaustion and deforestation. Repeated cultivation of sugar cane exhausted the soil of the plantations and led the planters to open new fields, thus accelerating the deforestation that had begun under the Spanish. 3. European colonization led to the introduction of European and African plants and animals that crowded out indigenous species. Colonization also pushed the indigenous peoples to extinction. B. Slaves’ Lives 1. West Indian society, which was the most polarized society in the world in the eighteenth century, consisted of a wealthy land-owning plantocracy, their many slaves, and a few people in between. 2. A plantation had to extract as much labor as possible from its slaves to turn a profit. Slaves were organized into “gangs” for fieldwork, while those male slaves not doing fieldwork were engaged in specialized tasks. 3. Slaves were rewarded for good work and punished harshly for failure to meet their production quotas or for any form of resistance. On Sundays, slaves cultivated their own food crops and did other chores; they had very little rest and relaxation, no education, and little time or opportunity for family life. 4. Disease, harsh working conditions, and dangerous mill machinery all contributed to the short life expectancy of slaves in the Caribbean. The high mortality rate added to the volume of the Atlantic slave trade and meant that the majority of slaves on West Indian plantations were born in Africa. 5. Slaves frequently ran away and occasionally staged violent rebellions such as that led by a slave named Tacky in Jamaica in 1760. European planters sought to prevent rebellions by curtailing African cultural traditions, religions, and languages. C. Free Whites and Free Blacks 1. In Saint Domingue, there were three groups of free people: the wealthy great whites, the less-well-off little whites, and the free blacks. In the British colonies, where sugar almost completely dominated the economy, there were very few free small landholders, white or black. 2. Only a very wealthy man could afford the capital to invest in the land, machinery, and slaves needed to establish a sugar plantation. West Indian planters were very wealthy and translated their wealth into political power, controlling the colonial assemblies and even gaining a number of seats in the British Parliament. 3. Slave owners who fathered children by female slaves often gave both mother and child their freedom; over time, this practice (manumission) produced a significant free black population. The largest group of freed slaves in the French, Spanish, and Portuguese colonies came from self-purchase. Another source for the free black population was runaway slaves, known in the Caribbean as maroons. VII. Creating the Atlantic Economy A. Capitalism and Mercantilism 1. The system of royal monopoly control of colonies and their trade as practiced by Spain and Portugal in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries proved to be inefficient and expensive. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the two new institutions of capitalism and mercantilism established the framework within which governmentprotected private enterprise participated in the Atlantic economy. 2. The mechanisms of early capitalism included banks, joint-stock companies, stock exchanges, and insurance. 3. Mercantilism was the government-led promotion of private investment in overseas trade and accumulation of capital in the form of precious metals. The instruments of mercantilism included chartered companies, such as the Dutch West India Company and the French Royal African Company, and the use of military force to pursue commercial dominance. 4. The French and English eliminated Dutch competition from the Americas by defeating the Dutch in a series of wars between 1652 and 1678. The French and the English then revoked the monopoly privileges of their chartered companies but continued to use high tariffs to prevent foreigners from gaining access to trade with their colonies. The Atlantic became the major trading area for the British, the French, and the Portuguese in the eighteenth century. B. The Atlantic Circuit 1. The Atlantic Circuit was a clockwise network of trade routes going from Europe to Africa, from Africa to the plantation colonies of the Americas (the Middle Passage), and then from the colonies to Europe. If all went well, a ship would make a profit on each leg of the circuit. 2. The Atlantic Circuit was supplemented by a number of other trade routes: Europe to the Indian Ocean; Europe to the West Indies; New England to the West Indies; and the “Triangular Trade” among New England, Africa, and the West Indies. 3. As the Atlantic system developed, increased demand for sugar in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe was associated with an increase in the flow of slaves from Africa to the New World. 4. The slave trade was a highly specialized business in which chartered companies (in the seventeenth century) and then private traders (in the eighteenth century) purchased slaves in Africa, packed them into specially designed or modified ships, and delivered them for sale to the plantation colonies. 5. Disease, maltreatment, suicide, and psychological depression all contributed to the average death rate of one out of every six slaves shipped on the Middle Passage. Disease was the single most important cause of death, killing the European crew of the slave ships at roughly the same rate as it killed the slaves themselves. VIII. Africa, the Atlantic, and Islam A. The Gold Coast and the Slave Coast 1. European trade with Africa grew tremendously after 1650 as merchants sought to purchase slaves and other goods. The growth in the slave trade was accompanied by continued trade in other goods, but it did not lead to any significant European colonization of Africa. 2. African merchants were discriminating about the types and the amounts of merchandise that they demanded in return for slaves and other goods, and they raised the price of slaves in response to increased demand. African governments on the Gold and Slave Coasts were strong enough to make Europeans observe African trading customs, while the Europeans, competing with each other for African trade, were unable to present a strong, united bargaining position. 3. Exchange of slaves for firearms contributed to state formation in the Gold and Slave Coasts. The kingdom of Dahomey used firearms acquired in the slave trade to expand its territory, while the kingdoms of Oyo and Asante had interests both in the Atlantic trade and in overland trade with their northern neighbors. 4. B. C. The African kings and merchants of the Gold and Slave Coasts obtained slaves from among the prisoners of war captured in conflicts between African kingdoms. However it is unclear if slave-taking was the motivation for these wars in the first place. The Bight of Biafra and Angola 1. There were no sizeable states—and no large-scale wars—in the interior of the Bight of Biafra. Those sold into slavery were debtors, convicted criminals or victims of kidnapping. African traders who specialized in procuring people for the slave trade did business at inland markets or fairs and brought the slaves to the coast for sale. 2. In the Portuguese-held territory of Angola, the largest source of slaves in the Atlantic world, Afro-Portuguese caravan merchants brought trade goods to the interior and exchanged them for slaves, whom they transported to the coast for sale to Portuguese middlemen, who then sold the slaves to slave dealers for shipment to Brazil. Many of these slaves were prisoners of war, a byproduct generated by the wars of territorial expansion fought by the federation of Lunda kingdoms. 3. Enslavement has also been linked to environmental crises in the interior of Angola. Droughts forced refugees to flee to kingdoms in better-watered areas, where the kings traded the grown male refugees to slave dealers in exchange for textiles and other goods that they then used to cement old alliances, attract new followers, and build a stronger, larger state. 4. Although the organization of the Atlantic trade varied from place to place, it was always based on a partnership between European traders and a few African political and merchant elites who benefited from the trade, while many more Africans suffered from it. Africa’s European and Islamic Contacts 1. In the centuries between 1550 and 1800, Europeans built a growing trade with Africa but did not acquire very much African territory. The only significant European colonies were those on islands; the Portuguese in Angola; and the Dutch Cape Colony, which was tied to the Indian Ocean trade rather than to the Atlantic trade. 2. Muslim territorial dominance was much more significant, with the Ottoman Empire controlling all of North Africa except Morocco and with Muslims taking large amounts of territory from Ethiopia. In the 1580s, Morocco attacked the sub-Saharan Muslim kingdom of Songhai, occupying the area for the next two centuries and causing the bulk of the trans-Saharan trade to shift from the western Sudan to the central Sudan. 3. The trans-Saharan slave trade was smaller in volume than the Atlantic slave trade and supplied slaves for the personal slave army of the Moroccan rulers as well as slaves for sugar plantation labor, servants, and artisans. The majority of slaves transported across the Sahara were women destined for service as concubines or servants and children, including eunuchs, meant for service as harem guards. 4. Muslims had no moral objection to owning or trading in slaves, but religious law forbade the enslavement of fellow Muslims. Even so, some Muslim states south of the Sahara did enslave African Muslims. 5. Muslim cultural influences south of the Sahara were much stronger than European cultural influences. Islam and the Arabic language spread more rapidly than Christianity and English, which were largely confined to the coastal trading centers. 6. The European and Islamic slave trade could not have had a significant effect on the overall population of the African continent, but they did have an acute effect on certain areas from which large numbers of people were taken into slavery. The higher proportion of women taken across the Sahara in the Muslim slave trade magnified its long-term demographic effects. 7. The volume of trade goods imported into sub-Saharan Africa was not large enough to have had any significant effect on the livelihood of traditional African artisans. Both African and European merchants benefited from this trade, but Europeans directed the Atlantic system and derived greater benefit from it than the African merchants did. IX. Conclusion 1. The Atlantic system, created by European merchants, investors and governments, became a vital part of the global trading system. It linked together different parts of the Atlantic world, and then connected this system as a whole to the rest of the world. 2. Sugar, as the most valuable commodity produced in this system, drove financial and technological innovations, and was fundamental for the dramatic rise in the volume of the slave trade. 3. Slave trading, both in the Atlantic and on the Trans-Saharan route, had a dramatic impact on West Africa. In the case of the Atlantic trade, African rulers and powerful states were able both to maintain themselves and increase their power through their role in the slave trade.