Skip to main content

Chapter 14 Part II




Chapter 14: Economic Transportation 



“The World Hunt”: Fur in Global Commerce 
  • In the early modern era first joined silver textiles and spices as major items of global commerce. Their production had an important environmental impact as well as serious implications for the human societies that generated and consumed them 
  • By the 1500 European population growth and agricultural expansion have sharply diminished the supply of fur-bearing animals such as beaver, rabbits, sable, marten, and deer
  • Much of the early modern era witnessed a period of cooling temperatures and harsh winters, known as the Little Ice Age. 
  • The cost of a good-quality beaver pelt quadrupled in France between 1558 and 1611.  The price increase translated into strong economic incentives for European traders to tap the immense wealth of fur-bearing animals found in North America. At the same time, the collapse of Native American populations in North America caused by the Great Dying led to the regrowth of forest habitats for fur-bearing animals and deer herds. 
  • Only a few Europeans directly engaged in commercial trapping or hunting. They usually waited for Indians to bring the furs or skins initially to their coastal settlements and later to their fortified trading posts in the interior of North America. 
  • Native Americans represented a cheap labor force in this international commercial effort, but they were not directly coerced labor force. 
  • In the 1630s and 1640s, about half of the Hurons perished from influenza, smallpox, and other European-borne diseases. The fur trade generated warfare beyond anything previously known. 
  • The fur trade wasn’t the only thing that decimated Native American societies. Disease, dependence, guns, alcohol, and the growing encroachment of European colonial empires
  • With the fur trade in full swing, women spent more time processing those furs for sale than in producing household items, some of which were now available for purchase from Europeans. 
  • Women generated and controlled the trade in wild rice and maple syrup, both essential to the livelihood of European traders. 


Commerce in People: The Atlantic Slave Trade 
  • Between 1500 and 1866, the Atlantic Slave Trade took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the infamous Middle Passage and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas, where they lived out their often-brief lives as slaves. 
  • Within Africa itself, that commerce thoroughly disrupted some societies, strengthened others, and corrupted many. 
  • The profits from the slave trade and the forced labor of African slaves certainly enriched European and Euro-American societies, even as the practice of slavery contributed much to racial stereotypes of European peoples. 


Slave Trade in Context 

  • The Atlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas represented the most recent large-scale expression of a very widespread human practice, the owning and exchange of human beings

  • Before 1500, the Mediterranian and Indian Ocean basins were the major areas of the Old World slave trade, and southern Russia was a major source of slaves

  • Although slaves were everywhere vulnerable “outsiders” to their masters’ societies, in many places they could be integrated into their owners’ households, lineages, or communities 

  • In some places, children inherited the slave status their parents elsewhere those children were free persons. 

  • The slavery that emerged in the Americas was distinctive in several ways. One was simply the immense size of the traffic in slaves and its centrality to the economies of colonial America. The New World slavery was largely based on plantation agriculture and treated slaves as a form of dehumanized property, lacking any rights in the society of their owners.


The Slave Trade in Practice


  • The European demand for slaves was clearly the chief cause of this tragic commerce and from the point of sale on the African coast to the massive use of slave labor on American plantations, the entire enterprise was in European hands


  • Europeans died like flies when they entered the interior because they lacked immunities to common tropical diseases


  • Over the four centuries of the slave trade, millions of Africans underwent such experiences, but their numbers varied considerably over time

The Impact of the Slave Trade in Africa


  • Although the slave trade did not cause Africa to experience the kind of population collapse that occurred in the Americas, it certainly slowed Africa’s growth at a time where Europe, China, and other regions were expanding demographically 


  • Economically, the slave trade stimulated little positive change in Africa because those Africans who benefited most from the traffic in people were not investing in the productive capacities of their societies 


  • Socially, the slave trade shaped African societies. It surely fostered moral corruption, particularly as judicial proceedings were manipulated to generate victims for the slave trade

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Module 8: Capitalism and Culture

2) What factors contributed to economic globalization in the second half of the twentieth century? The first half of the twentieth century witnessed a deep concentration of global economic linkages as the aftermath of World War I and then the Great Depression. This was very big damage to the world’s economy.  There was a major acceleration in international economic transactions that took place in the second half of the twentieth century and continued into the twenty-first. The "Bretton Woods system" negotiated the rules for commercial and financial dealings among the major capitalist countries, while promoting relatively free trade, stable currency values linked to the US dollar, and high levels of capital investment. The technology was a major contributor to the acceleration of economic globalization. Containerized shipping, huge oil tankers, and air express services dramatically lowered transportation costs. Later the internet provided communication for global economic i...
Post a Comment
Read more

Module 5: Global Pandemics

In 2020 the world is suffering from COVID-19. There have been many global pandemics in the world and long ago there was a pandemic that killed about 5 million people around 165 AD to 180 AD. This plague known as the Antonine Plague emerged during the reign of Marcus Aurelius. This epidemic brought the spread of religions like Christianity and Mithraism and renewal in spirituality. This plague affected Asia, Egypt, Greece, and Italy, but to this day the cause of this pandemic is still unknown. Many people believe that it was smallpox or measles. This disease was brought by Roman soldiers when they returned from Mesopotamia. Rome’s army was devastated. This plague was a very rapidly spreading disease, just like COVID-19. After the outbreak, Marcus Aurelius made the requirements for membership into Athens, Greece less harsh because there weren’t many surviving upper-class Athenians. This pandemic affected many people like COVID-19 is affecting many people today. https://www.biblicalar...
Post a Comment
Read more

Module 6: The End of the Empire

3) What international circumstances and social changes contributed to the end of colonial empires? The world wars weakened Europe and it discredited any sense of European moral superiority. Both the United States and the Soviet Union opposed the older European colonial empires even as they created empire-like international relationships of their own. The United Nations provided a prestigious platform from which to conduct anticolonial agitation. All this contributed to the global illegitimacy of the empire. By the twentieth century in Asia and the mid-twentieth century in Africa, a second or third generation of Western-educated elites, mainly male, had arisen throughout the colonial world. The young men were very familiar with European culture and were aware of the gap between their values and practice. They didn’t view the colonial rule as a vehicle for their peoples’ progress as their fathers had. There were also a lot of growing numbers of ordinary people who were also receptive ...
1 comment
Read more