European History/Early Modern Colonialism and Commerce

The Columbian Exchange

As Europeans explored, colonized, and exploited the “New World” in the late 1400s and 1500s, they brought new animals, plants, diseases, and ideas with them, and when they returned, they brought the American versions of these goods and living things back to Afro-Eurasia. Since the Americas and Afro-Eurasia had not been previously connected, and their ecosystems evolved separately. This exchange of plants, animals, and ideas brought unprecedented changes to both the Americas and Afro-Eurasia. In 1972, historian Alfred Crosby coined the term “the Columbian Exchange” to describe this transfer of microbes, plants, and ideas.

Specifically, European explorers brought foods such as wheat, sugar, and coffee to the Americas; they imported livestock such as horses, cows, sheep, and pigs. Europeans also brought ideas like the alphabet and weapons such as gunpowder, but perhaps the most impactful element that Europeans transferred to the Americas was disease. Smallpox, typhus, the flu, and measles devastated native populations.

On the other hand, Europeans carried crops like potatoes, tomatoes, corn, tobacco, and chocolate back to Afro-Eurasia.  Potatoes were high in nutrients and easier to grow than wheat, so European societies quickly adopted them. Most importantly, potatoes helped support the massive population growth of Europe in the 18th century. Crops like tobacco and sugar contributed to a consumerist culture in Europe.  Furthermore, Europeans transported animals from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia: turkeys, llamas, alpacas, and guinea pigs. Explorers did bring syphilis from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia, but it did not have the devastating impact that diseases from Europe had in America.

Historians often depict the decline of the indigenous population of America as inevitable due to native populations not possessing immunity to European diseases. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European diseases contributed to an unprecedented deterioration in indigenous population, which declined by an estimated 90%. However, the idea that this demographic shift was solely due to European disease erases the conscious efforts of European colonists to subjugate native peoples. European colonizers fought wars with indigenous groups and supported conflicts between tribes, contributing to the decline in native populations. They forced natives to labor in mines, in which many natives perished from overwork. Furthermore, European colonizing powers seized land, leading to a decreased area of land for natives to cultivate food. Colonizers also disrupted native trade networks, further contributing to food shortages and making natives dependent on colonizers. In these awful conditions, alcohol became addictive and deadly, leading to a breakdown of order and responsibility in native societies.

Mercantilism

Jean-Baptiste Colbert
Finance Minister of Louis XIV

Mercantilism is an economic theory that was a commonly practiced in Europe from the 16th-18th century, especially by absolute monarchs. It promoted governmental regulation of a nation’s economy for the purpose of augmenting state power at the expense of rival national powers. Its main belief was that exports should be encouraged by the government and imports should be minimized as much as possible.

Colonialism

According to mercantilism, the wealth of a nation was based on how much "bullion", usually gold or silver, a nation had. Because of this, nations believed that wealth was limited, meaning that in order to get more wealth, another nation would have to get less wealth. This belief encouraged European nations to colonize as much of the New World as they could in order to increase their power.

Mercantilism ensured that a colony only provided its raw materials to its mother nation in exchange for manufactured goods from the mother nation. For example, Great Britain would get raw materials, such as sugar, tobacco, tropical fruits, and gold, primarily from their colonies. In exchange, the mother nation would provide the colony with manufactured goods. The colony would also be prohibited from manufacturing their own goods, giving the mother nation a monopoly over the colony and allowing the mother nation to profit.

France

Under Louis XIV especially, France had a mercantilist economy. His economic policies were mostly headed by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, who helped France prosper economically by raising tariffs and encouraging major public works projects.

The Triangular Trade

The triangular trade was the system of trade that developed during the Age of Exploration. It can be divided into three parts:

• West African slaves being sent to work in the Americas.
• Raw materials produced from the Americas being sent to Europe.
• Manufactured goods from Europe being sent to Africa.

Depiction of the classical model of the triangular trade

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

The transatlantic slave trade was the part of the Triangular Trade that occurred between Africa and the Americas.

It was characterized by the exchange of African men, women, and children slaves to the Americas which lasted from the mid-sixteenth century until the 1860s. European traders loaded African captives mostly from West Africa and sent them to work in the sugar plantations in the Caribbean colonies. The trade was initiated by the Portuguese and Spanish colonizers.

The Zong Massacre

In August of 1781, the Zong, a British slave ship owned by a group of wealthy merchants and slavers based in Liverpool, set sail from Ghana for Jamaica. Onboard the ship were 442 enslaved Africans, double the number the ship was designed to carry. Due to alleged navigational errors, the trip took longer than expected, and the ship ran low on water. Luke Collingwood, the ship’s captain, subsequently decided to throw 133 enslaved Africans overboard. As was common practice, the Zong’s shipowners had taken insurance for their “cargo” of enslaved people and attempted to make a claim for compensation. However, the insurers, a syndicate of Liverpool slave-ship owners, refused to pay and the case went to court in London in March 1783. The insurers’ appeal claimed the loss of the enslaved Africans was the result of the mismanagement of the ship (i.e. an insufficient water supply and navigational errors) rather than the blatant cruelty of mass murder. Ultimately, the court ruled in the insurers’ favor.

The Zong massacre was widely publicized and, as a result, the abolition movement gained momentum. However, it was not an isolated event during the transatlantic slave trade. Around 1.5 million people died on the Middle Passage, the slave-trade route from West Africa to the West Indies. Onboard slave ships, European slave traders chained captured African people, giving them around the space of a coffin. The overcrowded ships lacked ventilation, and diseases like dysentery spread like wildfire. Enslaved Africans were frequently thrown overboard or committed suicide by throwing themselves overboard; sharks even learned to follow the slave ships.

Even before the birth of modern capitalism, enslaved Africans were treated like inanimate cargo. However, as the slave trade expanded to unprecedented numbers, countries began to deregulate the slave trade. The free market that European thinkers fought for was built on the mass enslavement of the African people. The dependency of the free market on slave labor became entrenched into society, even influencing Adam Smith’s famous Wealth of Nations. The Zong case exposed the brutality and disregard of human life during the trans-Atlantic slave trade as business owners valued making a profit more than the wellbeing of real people. At the expense of human life, Europe profited greatly from the exploitation of enslaved Africans for free labor. As journalist Blake Smith described in reference to early slave traders, “It is a grotesque irony that this pioneering free-trader could equate ‘liberty’ and the slave trade….”

The Silver Trade

Spain had gained lots of silver from its colonies, especially in the Potosí silver mines, located in modern-day Bolivia. They traded most of its silver to the Chinese in exchange for popular goods, such as silk and porcelain.

Many scholars consider the silver trade to mark the beginning of a genuinely global economy, with one historian noting that silver "went round the world and made the world go round."

Private Companies

The original motive for exploration was to find another route to India and to dominate the Indian Ocean trade. This created competition, as the Dutch, English, and French created companies to challenge Portuguese control over the East Indies.

The Dutch East India Company

The Dutch East India Company, also known as Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, abbreviated as VOC, was the first joint stock company in the world and is sometimes considered to have been the first multinational corporation. This company was very powerful and was able to gain a monopoly over the Indian Ocean trade throughout the 17th century and early 18th century by taking over previous Portuguese holdings. However, it started to decline as the British East India Company gained power.

The British East India Company

The British East India Company was a joint-stock company created during the reign of Elizabeth I. They initially struggled to gain power because of competition with the Dutch East India Company, so they prioritized gaining a foothold in mainland India and improving relations with the Mughal Empire. However, after the four Anglo-Dutch Wars, the British East India Company was able to weaken Dutch control of the East Indies.

References

European History
01. Background • 02. Middle Ages • 03. Renaissance • 04. Exploration • 05. Reformation
06. Religious War • 07. Absolutism • 08. Enlightenment • 09. French Revolution • 10. Napoleon
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