Unit 5: Foundations of the Atlantic World
The 1600s and 1700s were a time of profound religious, intellectual, and political turmoil. In Europe, the Protestant Reformation, which challenged the religious and political power of the Catholic Church, led to the Thirty Years' War in the early 1600s. The Thirty Years' War devastated much of Central Europe and led to profound divisions between Catholic and Protestant political states. In Africa and Asia, Islam continued to spread southward and eastward through trade networks, population migrations, and the activities of missionaries.
The Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Church's declining religious and political power led to the Enlightenment, a period that witnessed the development of intellectual movements promoting reason, democracy, political freedom, and rational inquiry. Enlightenment thinkers questioned civil authorities and developed new ideas about the relationship between a nation's government and its people. These ideas led to political revolutions to overthrow monarchical rule and install democratically elected governments in the late 1700s. The French Revolution in 1789 followed the American Revolution in 1776 and encouraged other revolutions throughout the Americas and parts of Europe.
Meanwhile, European merchants established maritime trade networks across the Atlantic Ocean and eastward to India and China. The Atlantic slave trade hauled 12.5 million people from Africa and probably resulted in the death of millions more. The merchants transported the people they enslaved from trading posts on the West African coast, transported their enslaved cargo to the Americas, and sold them to European settlers who forced the Africans to grow labor-intensive crops, such as sugarcane and tobacco, to export to Europe. The merchants bought furs, tea, sugar, spices, tobacco, and other luxury commodities to sell in Europe on their return voyage. This circular trade pattern dominated the Atlantic economy until the 1800s. European nations closely guarded their trade networks against rival states. For example, the Dutch East India Company had a private army and navy, which it used to defend its trade links with India and Southeast Asia.
Global trade altered production and consumption patterns worldwide and led to the rapid growth and development of England and the Netherlands at the expense of older colonial powers such as Spain and Portugal. In this unit, we examine the growth of global trade networks during the 1600s and evaluate the political, social, and cultural impact of these networks on the peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 5 hours.
Upon successful completion of this unit, you will be able to:
- discuss the reasons for the Protestant Reformation, the political impact that it had in Europe, and the response of the Catholic Church;
- connect technological advancements in trade and travel with the exploration of the Americas;
- describe various indigenous societies in the Americas and the consequences of their contact with Europeans; and
- explain the relationship between the discovery of the Americas and the Atlantic Slave Trade.
5.1: The Protestant Reformation
The Catholic Church's role and power in Europe were not stable or assured. By the 15th and 16th centuries, resentment was growing in different parts of Europe over the extent of its influence and its behavior, especially towards the acquisition of wealth. These criticisms ultimately led to what became known as the Protestant Reformation, which saw various denominations emerge that critiqued various aspects of Catholic doctrine and belief.
Read this text on the Protestant Reformation. It discusses Martin Luther's complaints against Catholicism, the spread of Protestantism across Europe, and the response of the Catholic Church. The religious wars continued into the 17th century and led to the Thirty Years War from 1618–1648.
Read this article on the political shockwaves that followed the Reformation, including the outbreak of war, which continued sporadically for more than a century in Europe.
Watch this video on the Protestant Reformation, Galileo, and the growing division between science and religious doctrine.
Read this text. It observes that the Catholic Church did not react passively to the Protestant Reformation.
5.2: Crossing the Atlantic
The discovery of the Americas was born out of frustration with attempts to access lucrative trade opportunities in East Asia. What they found in the Americas proved transformative. The Spanish and Portuguese Empires expanded considerably by conquering new territories, and wealth poured into their treasuries. The exchange of crops between Eurasia and the Americas set long-term social transformations in motion.
Read this text on how technological innovations in Europe made transatlantic journeys possible. It discusses the motives the Spanish and Portuguese had for exploring the Americas, the Treaty of Tordesillas, and the physical and cultural ramifications of the Columbian Exchange.
Watch this video, which outlines how global trade patterns affected the Americas.
Read this text on the Columbian Exchange, which caused a seismic event from an environmental perspective. Diets were globally transformed as crops such as tomatoes and potatoes traveled to Europe and Asia. However, this sea change had a dark side – diseases spread into previously unexposed populations, which led to mass death in the Americas.
5.3: Indigenous Americans
The Americas were home to several large societies before the Europeans arrived. While some groups lived in nomadic bands in a hunter-gatherer existence, large cities and well-developed agriculture existed in other parts of the two continents. When Spanish conquistadors came to Tenochtitlan, they were astonished at the size of the city, larger than anything in Spain, and how clean it was. Contact with
Europeans devastated these societies through disease and conflict.
Mercantilism was the accepted economic theory before Adam Smith's seminal work, The Wealth of Nations. The mercantile system assumed that national wealth and power are best served when countries increase exports and collect precious metals, goods, and raw materials.Read this text. What were indigenous societies in the Americas like in 1492? What different kinds of societies were there?
Read this short article on how the Aztecs built the city of Tenochtitlan. More than 140,000 people lived in Tenochtitlan In 1520, compared to only 50,000 in London, England.
Watch this video on the indigenous response to European arrival and subsequent colonization.
5.4: The Atlantic Slave Trade
During the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans forcefully transported nearly 12 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to obtain free labor to work on European and American-owned plantations and other economic enterprises. Transatlantic slavery redefined and divided individuals according to their skin color and ethnicity. Individuals were dehumanized according to their race and considered legal property with no chance of obtaining freedom. This type of chattel slavery differed radically from previous forms of slavery in Africa.
Read this text on the Atlantic Slave Trade. What was the human toll of the Middle Passage and other aspects of slavery? How did the free labor the enslaved Africans provided generate wealth and capital for plantation owners, textile manufacturers, other businesses, and future generations in the United States and Europe?
Watch this video on the British sugar islands of Barbados and Jamaica. It describes the Atlantic slave trade and 12 notable slave rebellions during this period, which most history books fail to mention.
Watch this video on the Atlantic slave trade. It considers the injustices the system imposed on the enslaved individuals and how it destroyed the communities where they had originated.
Watch this video, which describes how the Atlantic slave trade transported 12.5 million people from Africa and likely caused the death of millions more. The violence and forced migration caused long-term suffering at the individual and societal levels. In this video, three Ghanaian scholars offer a sense of its impact on the coast, the interior, and the far north of this region.
Unit 5 Assessment
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Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.
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