Chapter 13

The Americas, Aztec, and Inca empires flourished before they were included in rival empires all across the Western Hemisphere. 

BIG TRANSFORMATIONS took place: 

• old societies were destroyed 

• new societies arose as Native American European 

• Africans came into sustained contact with one another for the 1st time 

• The Spanish focused their empire-building efforts in the Caribbean in the early 16th century, turned to the mainland, with stunning conquest of the powerful, but fragile Aztec & Inca empires. 

• The Portuguese established themselves along the coast of present Brazil. Europeans extended their empires to encompass most of the Americas. 

• Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France → closer to the Americas than any potential Asian competitor 

• Fixed winds of the Atlantic blew steadily in the same direction Innovation in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship design, this enables Europeans to penetrate the Atlantic Ocean 

• After 1200, European elites were VERY AWARE of their region’s marginal position in the rich world of Eurasian commerce 

• The Americas brought windfalls of natural resources, including highly productive agricultural lands which were the foundation of the long-term growth of Europeans economy → 19th & 20th centuries 

• During this time, rulers were driven by the enduring rivalries of competing states 

• Poor nobles and commoners found opportunities for gaining wealth and status in colonies 

• Missionaries and others were inspired by a crusading zeal to make Christendom bigger

• Persecuted minorities were in search of a NEW LIFE → All this drove the expansion of the border of the Americas 

• Spanish conquistadors declared that they were there to serve God and to get rich 

• Despite the distance, → their seafaring technology allowed them to cross the Atlantic with ease, transporting people and supplies 

• Ironwork, gunpowder, and horses → initially had no parallel until later 

• Spanish military victories were not solely of their own making, but the product of alliances with local peoples, who supplied the bulk of the Europeans’ conquering armies 

• The most significant of European advantages lay in their germs and diseases → Native Americans had no familiarity ↴

• these diseases killed society after society, in particular regions like Caribbean, Virginia, & New England 

• The biggest grouping of people lived in the Mesoamerican and Andean zones, which were dominated by the Aztec & Inca Empire 

• Long isolation from the Afro-Eurasian world and the lack of most domesticated animals = the absence of acquired immunities to Old World diseases such as → smallpox, measles, typhus, influenza, malaria, & yellow fever

• All these diseases created Native Americans to die in big numbers → 90% of the population 

• These numbers began to recuperate until the late 17th century, but they did not recover everywhere

• Little Ice Age = a period of unusually cool temperatures that spanned much of the early modern period, especially Northern Hemisphere 

• The Great Dying resulted in the abandonment of plant life → took large areas of Native American farmland and ended traditional practices of forest management through burning in many regions. These changes sparked a resurgence of plant life→ took large amounts of carbon dioxide, greenhouse gas, out of the atmosphere contributing to global cooling 

• Like the Great Dying, the General Crisis reminds is that climate change plays an important role in shaping human history 

Russians constructed the world’s largest territorial empire now making Russia an Asian as well as a European power, meaning the early modern era was an age of Empire 

European Empires in the Americas 

“The European Advantage” 

“The Great Dying and the Little Ice Age” 

“The Colombian Exchange” 

• The Great Dying and the Little Ice Age created labor shortage so this created room for immigrants, both colonizing Europeans, and enslaved Africans → these Europeans and African people created new societies in the Americas ↴
• these people bought in their people, plants, and animals ↴
• wheat, rice, sugarcane, grapes, and many garden vegetables, and fruits, 
• Pigs, horses, cattle, goats, and sheep → these domesticated animals made possible the ranching economies of both North America and South America 
• In Europe calories that came from corn and potatoes helped population numbers from 60 million in 1400 to 390 million in the 1900s!
• The enormous network of communication, migration, trade, disease, and the transfer of plants, and animals, all generated by European colonial empires in the Americas has been called the “Columbian Exchange” → interacting Atlantic World connect 4 continents 
• The two worlds joined a new world of global dimensions 
• Western Europeans → dominant players in the Atlantic world
• Islam → coffee → spread globally contributed to the worldwide biological exchange 
• The societies that developed within the American colonies drove the processes of globalization and reshaped the world economy of the early modern era 

Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas 

• Europeans encountered an “old world” but gave rise to a “new world” in the Americas 
• Colonial Empires: Spanish, Portuguese, British, French generated new societies, born of the decimation of the Native American population and the introduction of European and African peoples, culture, plants, and animals 
• mercantilism → prevailing economic theory ↴
• this kind of thinking fueled European wars and colonial rivalries around the world in the early modern era → especially in Spanish America 
• Women and men experienced colonial intrusion in different ways → both enslaved Native American and African women had to cope with the additional demands made on them as females 
• Cortes, a Spanish conquistador, demanded that the Aztec ruler deliver to him → “women with him light skins, corn, chicken, eggs, and tortillas” 
• Soon after the conquest, many Spanish men married elite native women. Women experienced sexual violence and abuse 

“In the Lands of the Aztecs & the Incas” 

• The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca Empires in the early 16th century gave Spain access to the most wealthy, urbanized, and densely populated regions of the Western Hemisphere
• Native people provided MOST of the labor → rather than African slaves or European workers 
• Encomienda → a legal system the Spanish Crown granted to certain Spanish settlers a number of local native people from whom they require labor, gold, or agriculture produce → they owed “protection” 
• This turned into an exploitative regime → but was replaced by a similar system → “repartimiento” → but with a little bit more control from the Spanish Crown and Spanish Officials 
• By the 17th century, the “Hacienda” system took over and large estates directly employed Native people with lower wages, higher taxes, and large debts 
• Creoles = Spaniards born in the Americas 
• Peninsulares =Spaniards born in Spain 
• Even though Spanish women shared the racial advantages of their husbands, they were clearly lower in rank in gender terms, → unable to hold public office and viewed as weak. However, they were “bearers of civilization” they were essential for transmitting male wealth, honor, and status to the future generations
• A small amount of women causes the emergence of “mestizo” or “mixed-race” initially the product of unions between Spanish men & Indian women → over 300 years of the colonial era, mestizo numbers grew, becoming the majority of the population in Mexico → these mixed-race people were divided into dozens of different groups known as “castas” → based on racial heritage and skin color 
• Mestizos were mostly Hispanic, which is why Spaniards looked down on them and called them illegitimate → not born of “proper” marriages 
• Mestizas = women of mixed racial background worked as: domestic servants, husbands; shops, wove clothing, manufactured candles, and cigars, including domestic duties. Many become wealthy
• Mencia Perez: married successively and after their deaths she took over their businesses, becoming very rich by the 1590s. 
• Mexican, Peruvian, & Indians → aka indigenous peoples → traumatized by the Great Dying → subject to exploitation ↴
• many learned Spanish converted to Christianity, moved cities to work for wages, ate the meat of cows, chickens, and pigs, 
• Indian women endured some distinctive conditions as Spanish legal codes generally defined them as minors rather than responsible adults
• Maize, beans, and squash persisted as the major elements of Indian diets in Mexico → the Tupac Amaru revolted in Peru during 1780-1781 was made in the name of the last independent Inca emperor 
• Spaniards, mestizos, and Indian represented the major social categories in the colonial lands of what had been the Inca and Aztec empires, while African slaves and freeman were less numerous than elsewhere in the Americas → Indians who gained an education, wealth, and some European culture might pass as mestizos 

“Colonies of Sugar” 

• Different kind of colonial society emerged in the lowland areas of Brazil, ruled by Portugal, & in the Spanish, British, French, and Dutch colonies in the Caribbean ↴
• these regions locked the great civilization of Mexico and they didn’t provide much mineral wealth until the Brazilian gold rush of the 1690s and discovery of diamonds
• The Europeans found profit in sugar → used as a medicine, a spice, a sweetener, a preservative, and in sculpture forms as a decoration that indicated HIGH STATUS 
• These sugar-based calories produced almost exclusively for export while importing their food and other necessities 
• Large-scale sugar production had been pioneered by Arabs, who had introduced it in the Mediterranean → Europeans learned the technique and transferred it to their Atlantic island possessions and → to Americas 
• Sugar → transformed Brazil and the Caribbean
• It was perhaps the first modern industry in that it produced for am international and mass market, using capital & expertise from Europe with production facilities located in the Americas  
• Slaves worked on sugar-producing estates in horrendous conditions. The heat and fire from cauldrons turned raw sugarcane into crystallized sugar, these conditions combined with a disease, generated a high death rate, perhaps 5 to 10% per year, which required plantation owners to constantly import fresh slaves 
• More male slaves than female slaves were imported from Africa into the sugar economies of the Americas → leading to major gender imbalances 
• Women did the heavy work of planting and harvesting sugarcane 
• Women who worked in urban areas did domestic chores and were often hired out as laborers in various homes, shops, laundries, inns, and brothels 
• When women’s children were sold, women had to endure the separation 
• Women were subject to punishments and received the same rations as their male counterparts 
• mulattoes = the product of Portuguese-African unions predominated but as many as forty separate and named groups, each indicating a different racial mixture, emerged in colonial Brazil 
• Slavery was different in North America than in sugar colonies. By 1750 slaves in what became the United States proved able to reproduce themselves and by the time of the Civil War, almost all North American salves had been born in the New World 
• None the less, many more slaves were voluntarily set free by their owners in Brazil than in North America → a few among them found positions as political leaders, scholars, musicians, writers, and artists 

“Settler Colonies in North America” 

• Another distinctive type of colonial society emerged in the northern British colonies of New England, New York, and Pennsylvania
• The British settlers came from a more rapidly changing society than did those from an ardently Catholic, semi-feudal, authoritarian Spain 
• Men in Puritan New England became independent heads of family farms, a world away from Old England where most lands were owned by nobles and gentry & worked by servants, tenants, and paid laborers 
• Women were less able to avoid their gender limitations 
• British settlers were far more numerous than their Spanish counterparts outnumbering them 5-1 by 1750
• This was the biggest difference of the New England and Middle Atlantic colonies
• Diseases and a highly aggressive military policy have declared the colonies of Native Americans
• 75% of white males in British North America were literate 1770 while women's literacy skills were lower 
• British settler colonies involved traditions of local self-government more extensively than in Latin America
• The major centers of wealth, power, commerce, and innovation lay in Mesoamerica and the Andes

The Stepps and Siberia: The Making of a Russian Empire 

• Russian attention was drawn first the grassland south and east of the Russian heartland an area long inhabited by various nomadic pastoral peoples who are organized into feuding tribes and Clans and adjusting to the recent disappearance of the Mongol Empire 
• Empire building was an extended process involving the Russian state and its officials as well as a variety of private interests →  merchants, hunters, peasants, churchman, exiles, criminals, and adventurers 

“Experiencing the Russian Empire” 

• Everywhere Russian authorities demanded an oath of Allegiance by which native peoples swore “eternal submission to the grand to tsar” → They also demanded yasak or “tribute” paid in cash or in-kind
• The most profounding transforming feature of the Russian Empire was the influx of Russian settlers whose numbers by the end of the eighteenth Century had overwhelmed native peoples giving their land a distinctively Russian character