notes on half of chapter 14

Chapter 14 Economic Transformations

  • European empires in the Western Hemisphere grew out of an accident - Columbu's unknowing encounter with the Americans --- and that new colonial societies and new commercial connections across the Atlantic were the result 
  • The voyage of the Portuguese mariner Vasco da Game, in which Europeans sailed to India for the first time, was certainly no accident 
  • Portuguese effort to explore a sea route to the East by creeping slowly down the West Africa coast, around the tip of South Africa up the East Africa coast, and finally across the Indian Ocean to Calicut in southern India in 1489
  • There Europeans encountered an ancient and rich network of commerce that stretched from East Africa to China
  •  The most immediate motivation for this massive effort was the desire for tropical spices -- cinnamon, nutmeg, mace, clovers, and, above all, pepper -- which were widely used as condiments and preservatives and were sometimes regarded as aphrodisiacs 
  • Underlying the growing interest in Asia was the more general recovery of European civilization following the disaster of the Black Death in the early fourteenth century 
  • During the fifteenth century Europe's population was growing again and its national monarchies -- in Spain, Portugal, England, and France -- were learning how to tax their subjects more effectively snd to build substantial military forces equipped with gunpowder weapons
  • For many centuries, Eastern goods had tickled into the Mediterranean through the Middle East from the Indian Ocean commercial network
  • The source of supply of these much -- desired goods lay solidly in Muslim hands
  • Europeans were attractive in Eastern markets, they were required to pay cash --- gold or silver --- for Asian spices or textiles 

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