Maritime Empires Established [AP World History Review] Unit 4 Topic 4

Hi and welcome back to Heimler’s History. We’ve been in Unit 4 of our AP World History curriculum and we’ve been considering how maritime empires were established from 1450-1750. In this video we’re going to look at the kind of influence these empires had in Africa and Asia.

Then we’re going to see the kind of European rivalries that spurred imperial expansion on. And finally we’re going to look at the labor systems that kept the whole imperial machine running. Let’s get to it.

So, first, let’s consider what kind of responses Africa and Asia had to the European imperial expansion. As I’ve mentioned before, the Portuguese were the first to establish an empire in Africa, but it was a different kind of empire than were used to: it was a trading post empire. By setting up ports of trade at strategic locations along the African coast, the Portuguese grew exceedingly rich by controlling trade.

And these trading posts were usually established in cooperation with local African leaders. Once they arrived, the Portuguese traded with the Africans, offering them gunpowder weapons in exchange for enslaved people. And once some African leaders had guns, it gave them a supreme advantage over their neighboring tribes who did not have guns, and all things being equal, he with the guns usually wins.

So we can see that at least some of the African peoples were open to influence from the Europeans. In fact, some African states grew exceedingly wealthy by trading enslaved people to the Portuguese. But not only were these African states benefiting from economic growth, they also experienced some cultural borrowing from the Europeans as well.

For example, in the Kingdom of the Kongo, King Alfonso I converted to Christanity and you can see Christian influence in the art coming out of the Kingdom of Kongo during this time. Now let me stop here and address a potential complaint. I’ve made videos before in which I’ve mentioned the cooperation that African leaders gave to the Europeans in their demand for enslaved peoples, and as a result of such comments I’ve been called a blue-eyed demon who has whitewashed the horrors of slavery.

But you can’t ignore the evidence that some African states raided other states to enslave people to sell to the Europeans. It happened. So by acknowledging this reality, let me be clear on a couple of things I’m not saying.

1. ) Slavery is good. 2.

) Enslaved people were happy to be enslaved. So if you’re going to insult me in the comments, fine. But at least insult me for the things Im saying, not the things I’m NOT saying.

Okay, let’s see how one particular Asian state dealt with the intrusion of Europeans, namely, Japan. Whereas some African states were somewhat open to European influence, Japan offers us a good illustration of a state that closed itself off from European influence. Now when the Dutch and Portuguese first showed up with merchants and missionaries, the Japanese were relatively tolerant of their influence.

But as the Japanese officials began to observed a growing European, and especially Christian, influence in their people, they shut it down. They closed off all trade with Europeans and did their best to purge from Japan all European influence and foreign religion. Okay, now let’s turn our attention to the political, religious, and economic rivalries that spurred European expansion on.

Let’s start with the British. After driving the French out of India during the Seven Years’ War, Britain gained significant influence in India. At the beginning of their time in India, Britain had established your average trading posts which were run by the British East India Company.

Under this arrangement, they were pretty restricted by the Mughal leaders and therefore held very little territory. But because of the growing tensions between the Hindus and Muslims, the British were able to play each faction against the other and ended up consolidating power for themselves. And with the help of special Indian forces called sepoys, the East India Company eventually moved inland and eventually controlled much of India.

How about the Spanish? With the arrival of Columbus and the diseases he and his men carried, the Spanish eventually toppled the Aztec and Incan Empires. By 1521 the colony of New Spain was established on the ashes of the Aztec Empire, and by 1572 they had conquered the Incans as well.

But the Spanish had to deal with rivalries of their own, namely, with the Portuguese. Spain and Portugal vied powerfully to control new empires in the Americas. Finally they settled their differences in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494.

According to this treaty, the Portuguese controlled all the land east of a particular meridian line (essentially Brazil) and the Spanish controlled all the land west of the meridian. Okay, there were other rivalries in empire building, like the Dutch and the British in the North American colonies, and the Frensh and the British in Canada, but that should suffice to illustrate the point. Now as I’ve mentioned before, all of this cross-Atlantic empire building led to massive changes in trade patterns across the Atlantic Ocean.

But I should mention that the Indian Ocean trade networks were still going strong. And although there was significant change there as well with the huge infusion of European merchants, the Indian Ocean network pretty much absorbed the changes and kept doing its thing. However, there are some changes I can mention.

For example, trade along the Indian Ocean networks had always been maintained by ehtnic and religious ties. But when the Portuguese showed up with cannons all over their ships, they used military might to make trade favorable for themselves. Even so, much of the intra-Asian and Asian merchants traded just as they always had.

Okay, now let’s turn our attention to the third section in this topic, namely, the labor systems that kept the imperial machine running. And the answer is pretty simple: it was largely coerced labor that supported the expansion of empires. And just in case you don’t know, “coerced” just means something done against your will.

So there were several forms of coerced labor that I should mention. The first three come to us from our friends in Spain. First, they established the hacienda system of labor.

The Spanish government granted haciendas (which is to say, land holdings) to conquistadors and Spanish nobles who were willing to make the trip across the sea. And that land was under their control to farm or to lease to other Spaniards of the lower class. And once these folks started working for the lords, they were unlikely ever to stop because of their exceedingly low wages and the enormous debts they had to pay to the owners of the land.

And many of these lords grew fabulously wealthy on the backs of their workers, especially with the cultivation of sugarcane. A second coerced labor system you need to know from the Spanish is the encomienda system. This wasn’t so much a land grant like hacienda, but it was more of a system of labor.

The beneficiary of the encomienda system was granted responsibility for a certain number of natives. The nobles gave protection and Christian education to the natives in return for tribute, and most often that tribute came in the form of their labor. And this situation was similar to feudal Europe.

It’s not that these natives were slaves, but they weren’t NOT slaves either. Third, the Spanish took advantage of an existing labor system in the Americas, namely the mit’a system. They borrowed this labor system from the Incas.

And under the Incan Empire, the mit’a system provided the state with labor by compelling certain people work on public projects for a given number of days per year. Now as you may remember, the Spanish came to the Americas in search of gold. Now they certainly found some, but not enough to cure them of their desire for wealth.

But when they found boo-koos of silver buried in the American earth, they decided that the Incan forced labor system might serve them well. And so the Spaniards compelled native villages to send a portion of its men to do the dangerous work of silver mining for next to no wages. Now those three systems of labor weren’t exactly slavery, but now were going to talk about labor systems that were exactly slavery.

And the word for this is chattel slavery. The word chattel means a piece of property. So this is a kind of slavery in which people owned other people as property.

So as I’ve mentioned, African states had long provided their own people as slaves in the Indian Ocean trade, but it was the Atlantic Slave Trade that devastated Africa. Now a significant question arises at this point: why did the Europeans target Africans for their coerced labor systems? I’ve already mentioned that they established several systems to coerce the natives to work for them.

But there were two problems with native labor. First, the supply was severely diminished by European diseases. Second, because the natives knew their own land far better than the colonizers, it was much easier for them to escape, which they often did.

And so suffice to say, the attempt to enslave natives was a large-scale failure. Up in North America, the British colonists tried indentured servitude which compelled people to work for seven years and then they became free. But they had trouble with that system because once the servants had completed their indenture, they had this rude habit of actually going free.

And so chattel slavery solved all these problems for the Europeans. Africans who arrived as slaves knew the land even less than the Europeans. And since there was no end to their term of servitude, they were in no danger of going free.

So once Africans were sold to the Europeans, they had to endure the brutal middle passage across the Atlantic. They were stuffed so tightly in the hulls of ships that many of them died from disease and some even from suffocation. And the African Slave Trade caused significant consequences in African demographics.

As Europeans grew wealthy from agriculture in the Americas, demand for enslaved people spiked. And this, as you can imagine, disrupted family organizations. Proportionally more men were taken than women, and that led to the rise of polygyny which is when one man takes multiple wives.

And once the Africans finally arrived on their plantations, they were dislocated from their family and their culture. If you compare this to the fate of enslaved Africans in the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean trade, you can see the contrast in their fate. In these trade networks African slaves were more likely to work in sea ports or as household servants or even as sailors.

And because they often were placed in highly populated areas, they had more occasion to develop communities with other dislocated Africans than did the Africans working in isolation on American farms. Okay, that’s what you need to know about Unit 4. 4 for AP World History.

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