Silver speeded up the development of a mestizo society in Latin America, and it also speeded up the development of global trading connections. Silver and gold from Mexico and Peru went to Spain in armed convoys, where they supplied the Spanish monarchy with one-fourth of its total income. Beginning in the 1560s several huge silver-ships also sailed every year from Acapulco in Mexico to Manila in the Spanish colony of the Philippines. There the silver was traded to Chinese merchants for silk, porcelain, spices, and other luxury goods, to be sold to European mine-owners and city-dwellers in Latin America or carried still further to wealthy nobles in Spain. Those Chinese merchants also bought Japanese silver, and took it all to China, where the economy was expanding and needed more and more silver to make coins. Silver taken to Spain paid for equipment and supplies for both mines and sugar plantations in the colonies, and also for guns and tools taken to West Africa, where they were traded for slaves. American silver and gold contributed to the inflationary “price revolution,” and often ended up with German bankers who had loaned money to Charles V to finance his election as emperor or to later Spanish kings to finance their wars.
Global connections were not just a matter of metals and money, however, but also the intentional and unintentional sharing of many things, for European voyages linked parts of the world that had been cut off from each other for tens of thousands of years. These links were sometimes disastrous, as in the spread of infectious diseases to people in the Americas who had no immunity. But other links were very beneficial. Food crops and animals traveled both ways across the Atlantic and later the Pacific in what the environmental historian Alfred Crosby termed the “Columbian exchange.” Europeans brought horses, cattle, pigs, sheep, and chickens from Europe to the Americas, where
They often escaped into the wild and thrived; a herd of a hundred cattle that the Spanish abandoned in the grasslands of the Rio de la Plata area in what is now Argentina grew within several decades to over ioo, ooo. They also brought wheat, which grew well on the plains of both North and South America, along with wine-grapes, apples, and olives. From Africa they brought bananas, coffee, and coconuts. They took maize and potatoes back to Europe, growing them first as food for animals and gradually as food for humans as well. Tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes, peanuts, and manioc went from South America to Africa and Asia, as did pineapples and avocados. (About 30 percent of the foods eaten in the world today originated in the Americas.) This exchange of plants and animals improved nutrition around the world, and allowed a slow increase in the total global population, despite the tremendous loss of life because of epidemic disease.
The Columbian exchange involved products that brought pleasure as well as nutrition. We have already traced sugar’s travels from Asia to the Americas; chocolate, which the Aztecs believed had been brought from paradise, went in the other direction. Both the Aztecs and the Mayas cultivated the cacao beans from which chocolate is made, and Cortes took them to Spain. Like the Aztecs, the Spanish developed the habit of drinking cups of chocolate, which they sweetened with imported sugar. (Aztecs and Mayas drank their chocolate, a word that comes from the Maya words for “sour water,” unsweetened.) Drinking chocolate spread to France and England, where by the i6oos people were also drinking coffee imported from Arabia and Africa, and by the 1650s tea imported from India and China.
By the early 1600s global trade was providing another addictive substance along with the caffeine found in chocolate, tea, and coffee - nicotine. Native Americans grew and smoked tobacco long before Columbus, who took some tobacco seeds back with him to Spain, where farmers began to grow tobacco for use as a medicine that helped people relax. The French ambassador at Lisbon, Jean Nicot (1530-1600) - whose name is the origin of nicotine and of the botanical name for tobacco, Nicotiana - introduced the use of tobacco in France, originally in the form of snuff. English merchants brought tobacco to the Ottoman Empire, where coffeehouses filled with pipe smoke became popular places for men to gather. Ottoman religious leaders complained that coffeehouses kept people away from their religious duties, and Sultan Murad IV (ruled 1623-40) outlawed both coffee and tobacco, but his measures were ineffective.
Though products were exchanged in all directions, they were carried primarily in western European ships. Europeans were one group among many in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, but elsewhere they came to dominate oceanic shipping. This provided great profits, and allowed them to dictate the terms of trade even in areas where they did not have colonial empires. This trade also stimulated the growth of many industries in Europe, from ship-building to textiles, as Europeans increasingly
Exported manufactured goods in exchange for unprocessed or partially processed raw materials, such as sugar, precious metals, and timber.
The first century of European colonization also had political effects, for the creation of the first global empires meant that arenas of conflict and sources of power were no longer confined to Europe itself. The conquest of the Americas initially glorified the Spanish (and to a lesser degree the Portuguese) monarchy and the Catholic Church; both acquired immense new lands to rule and people to govern. The wealth brought by Spain’s overseas colonies made it the most powerful country in Europe around i6oo, a connection that was widely recognized, as English and French actions to weaken Spain always involved cutting off trade with the Americas. Western European countries came to view overseas possessions as essential adjuncts to their military and economic power, which helped foster nationalism by encouraging a race for trade, treasure, and colonies. English pirates - often dignified by the term “privateer” - were motivated primarily by a desire for wealth in their attacks on the Spanish treasure fleet and South American ports, but they often obtained the approval of the English monarch, and were expected to provide a cut of their haul to the national treasury. Sir Francis Drake (i543?-96), for example, the most famous of these “sea dogs,” got money, ships, and eventually a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth. He seized Spanish ships, commanded English warships against the Spanish Armada in 1588, and looted Spanish towns in the Caribbean and on the north coast of South America, termed the “Spanish Main.” On his trip around the world in the late 1570s, he raided the west coast of South America, where the towns were completely unfortified. Drake began his career as a slave-trader, and ended it as a member of the House of Commons.
Hatred of Spain was enhanced in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries by stories that circulated orally and in print about Spanish atrocities in the New World. This “Black Legend” (in Spanish Leyenda Negra) was based especially on the writings of Bartolome de Las Casas (1474-1566), a Spanish Dominican missionary who became bishop of Chiapas in Mexico in 1544. Las Casas took part in royal investigations into the treatment of Indians, and in response to assertions by various officials that enslaving them was justified because Indians were less than human, he published a series of essays in 1552-3 detailing, condemning, and probably exaggerating Spanish abuses. In Las Casas’s writings, all Indians were childlike innocents and all the Spanish were violent, cruel, and greedy. His writings led to a royal prohibition of the enslavement of Indians, though this was widely ignored, and may have played a role in the increasing importation of African slaves, which Las Casas endorsed, though he later regretted this. Translated into other European languages, often with titles such as “The Tears of the Indians,” his writings provided a justification for New World conquests by other European nations and became a staple of Protestant propaganda.
World History
