One Lump or Two? - MS. KEESE'S WEBSITE

 One Lump or Two? Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492. For centuries before, East Asia and the Mediterranean had built vast trade networks over sea and land. Ideas, goods, and technologies spread along these networks throughout Afro-Eurasia.Yet the voyage of Columbus changed things. It allowed European explorers to connect the four world zones. This was called the Columbian Exchange. It also opened up new exchange networks. By the seventeenth century, the English, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese had settled colonies throughout the Americas. The slave trade across the Atlantic was up and running. Cruel slave labor was used to produce goods to sell in Europe and Asia.How do we move from Columbus discovering the New World to European colonies spread everywhere? What systems had to be developed to support these settlements? I think the answer is capitalism. People wanted certain goods. Someone was going to find a way to sell them those goods. The Europeans stepped in. Before, it was the Asians who generally played this role.The Europeans had very limited trade with Asia at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The Asians didn’t want to buy what the Europeans were producing. In fact, it was the opposite. The Europeans wanted goods made in Asia.The Europeans now wanted to become major global economic players. To do this, they first needed to produce goods that many people wanted. They had to move the goods, and to?buy and sell them. To do all this, they needed cash.Silver and Gold“God, gold, and glory” are said to be what brought the first Europeans to the Americas. Did they find their gold? The table below shows what was exchanged between Spain and South America from 1493 to 1550.This small chart tells me a lot. The Spanish began by bringing weapons, horses and other basic goods to the New World. These items helped the Spanish carve out a place in the New World. Weapons and horses gave them power over native people.?The Spanish landed first in the West Indies. They were searching for gold. Once they found it, they began to send it back to Spain. The royal Spanish government wanted to control this new trade connection. It ruled in 1504 that all trade with the New World must go through the Spanish port of Seville. That way, the government could supervise and regulate the trade. It also helped to centralize it in one place. (None of this is in the chart – it’s information I gathered from the sources listed at the bottom of this page.)Historians have benefited from Spain's policy. It created written records of everything that passed through the port. It also set an example for the world of how trade could be recorded.Let’s look at the chart again. It seems that by 1521, the Spanish had built settlements in the New World. How do we know? We can see that they began to import consumer goods (basic products like food or clothing). They brought fewer guns and horses. They probably had all the guns and horses they needed by then. I also see that the Spanish were sending dyes and pearls back to Spain. Both of these were expensive luxury items. They were in high demand in Europe.By 1550, the Spanish were importing different items to the New World. Now they were bringing in the comforts of home: wine, cloth, books. They were settled in now, maybe missing their homeland. They couldn’t produce these items yet in the Americas.We can also see that mercury was sent to the New World. It is used to refine silver. This means that the Spanish were refining their own silver in the Americas. They weren't just sending it back to Spain as a raw material. By 1550, the exports back to Spain expanded. Now they included animal hides (used to make clothing), tobacco, and sugar.The Spanish were sending a lot of tobacco and sugar back across the Atlantic. From this, we can assume that they had established plantations. We can also assume that these large farms were successfully producing tobacco and sugar.From the chart we can see that within 60 years, the Spanish: found silver and gold, set up colonies in the New World, and produced goods that were in demand back in Europe.Trade wasn’t just happening across the Atlantic Ocean. It was happening across the Pacific Ocean too. The Spanish government controlled all trade across the Atlantic. It couldn’t easily control the Pacific trade, though.Let's take a look at the Trans-Pacific Trade chart shown above. There is information on what was being exchanged between the ports of Acapulco (Mexico) and Manila (Philippines).The chart shows that silver flowed into Asia as much as it flowed into Europe. It’s interesting that much of the silver trade in the Pacific appears to be “illegal.” It was not controlled by the Spanish crown. This is important because it shows that the Spanish could not keep a total control of the silver trade. They had no monopoly. The illegal trade also means that mining and selling silver was not being controlled. Too much of it was produced. After a while, silver lost value around the world. (If there’s too much of something, it often becomes less valuable.)Some people illegally traded silver to buy Asian goods. They did it behind the back of the Spanish government. In the end, Spain's strategy backfired. The Spanish lost control of the silver trade. Other players — like the English and Portuguese — now entered this market.TeaNow we know a bit more about Spanish trade: legal and illegal, trans-Atlantic and trans-Pacific. I’m wondering what the French and British were up to. What kinds of trade networks were they setting up in the New World?The Europeans were generally looking for luxury items — goods that rich people wanted and were willing to pay for. One example of this is in the growth of a market for tea.Today, tea is famous as a drink the English people love. But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, only the very wealthy could afford tea. How does a product get adopted by an entire nation of people? How are all countries' economies affected when a product is now in demand worldwide?Tea is made from the leaves and flowers of the plant?Camellia sinensis. It is native to Asia. The Chinese were the first to drink tea. In China, it was grown and drunk for its health benefits. The popularity of the drink increased over time. It became the national beverage of China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 BCE).Tea was central to Chinese life and culture. But how did it become a staple in England?One source tells us that tea became fashionable in England thanks to Queen Catherine of Braganza. She was a Portuguese princess — and a huge tea fan. The Portuguese had been buying tea from China since the fifteenth century. In 1662, she?married King Charles II of England. Their marriage introduced tea to England. ?When Queen Catherine began drinking tea, it became fashionable at the royal court. Eventually this culture of tea spread to everyone. As a result, tea had become the most popular beverage in Great Britain by the eighteenth century. However, there was one major problem: During the seventeenth century, tea was mainly produced in China. The Chinese tightly controlled the amount of tea that was exported. How did the British convince the Chinese to loosen their control over the tea trade? Over about 100 years, imports of Chinese tea to Britain increased hugely. In?1700 it was just?400,000 pounds, but by 1808 Britain was importing 26 million pounds a year. That’s a lot of tea!It seems that the British paid a high price for their tea. Let’s look at the figures in the “Value of Tea Exported from China to England” table. We can conclude that it cost England one ounce of silver for every pound of tea. That cost wasn’t just for the tea. It also included the cost of transporting the tea across the seas from China to England.By 1700, a large British company controlled the tea trade from the East. It had a monopoly on trading tea, meaning that it controlled the trade. The company was the British East India Company (BEIC). It set up its East Asian office in the port city of Canton, China.Its monopoly allowed much more tea to enter Great Britain. As a result, prices dropped. As the price of tea fell, more people began to drink it because it was cheaper. By the 1720s, tea became the most popular Chinese export. The BEIC became extremely wealthy. In fact, more than half of the value of BEIC’s Asian exports was in tea!So while the British weren’t producing tea, they controlled the market of transporting and selling it. The Portuguese were the original European importers of tea. The British had now left them far behind.FurFur was popular in Europe since the 1500s. Prices began to rise, though, because fur became harder to get. Some animals had been overhunted. This began to change as European nations entered the New World and set up colonies.The Dutch, English, and French were in North America trading for fur even in the early 1500s. They bartered with Iroquois Native American tribes — trading European goods for fur pelts. The Europeans traded for all types of furs, including fox and mink. Yet beaver fur was the most valuable. Why? Beaver fur is tough, waterproof, and soft. It can easily be made into hats, coats, boots, and other products.In fact, beaver hats were the most fashionable hat in Europe for hundreds of years. Beaver pelts were sent from North America to Europe and Russia. There, they were transformed into hats and other wearable goods. These fur items were then sold all over Europe. In Europe, both the upper and middle classes were willing to pay good money for beaver-fur products. Some of this money filtered back to the European colonists. Some also filtered back to the indigenous people of North America: the ones who had trapped and traded the pelts.Let’s look at another example of trade in North America. This time, it’s from the French.From 1722 to 1723, three French forts near the Great Lakes traded the goods listed below. They traded for them with the native people in the region, who were mainly the Huron and Iroquois nations. Here is what they received in exchange for about 8,000 beaver pelts:1,605 sewing needles632 catfish hooks273 men's woolen shirts336 women's woolen shirts214 children's woolen shirts217 butcher knives2,109 other knives243 pounds of red and yellow copper cauldrons328 axes59 guns4,493 gun flints3,640 pounds of shot and balls6,463 pounds of flourFrench exports from North America to Europe:1620 to 1630: About 30,000 beaver skins a year1680s: About 140,000 beaver skins a year1800: About 200,000 beaver skins a yearInformation in lists taken from Adams, Esther. “Landscape Teaching Unit 6.4 The Global Economy Takes Shape 1500-1800 CE.” World History for Us All. PDF file, 17.It seems the Huron and Iroquois found the French-produced goods useful. Making things like needles, fish hooks, axes, knives, and guns all required metal, blacksmiths, and machinery. The French had these tools. The Huron and Iroquois did not.It also seems that the French wanted beaver pelts very badly. How do we know this? Imagine how hard it must have been to haul huge amounts of goods across the Atlantic, then across land and river — just to trade with the Native Americans.The English also wanted to trade with the Native Americans. In 1670, they established the Hudson Bay Company, which was similar to the British East India Company. The French, British, and Russians continued to compete throughout the eighteenth century.Here’s what I’ve learned so far from the silver, tea, and fur trades: Large amounts of silver entered into the global market in the sixteenth century. This allowed Europeans to position themselves at the center of a new and vast trading network.The Europeans did not produce tea and fur themselves. Instead, they created systems to obtain, transport, and sell these items in European markets. Europeans competed with each other to control each trade — in other words, to create a monopoly.The English were the most skilled at this. They often piggy-backed on what the French, Portuguese, and Spanish had started.The new networks created wealth among the middlemen — the transporters and traders. They also established systems of trade and transport by sea. In turn, these led to the next phase of global exchange: the use of slavery to produce raw materials and goods. ................
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