Global Connections

AP World History: Europe and the World: 1450-1750

In 1700, after two centuries of European involvement in south and southeast Asia, most of the peoples of the area had been little affected by efforts to build trading empires and win Christian converts. European sailors had added several new routes to the Asian trading network. The most important of these were the link around the Cape of Good Hope between Europe and the India Ocean and the connection between the Philippine Islands and Mexico in the Americas. The Europeans’ need for safe harbors and storage areas led to the establishment and rapid growth of trading centers such as Goa, Calicut, and Batavia. It also resulted in the gradual decline of existing indigenous commercial centers, especially the Muslim cities of the Swahili coast of Africa and the fortress town of Malacca. The Europeans introduced the principle of sea warfare into what had been a peaceful commercial world. But the Asian trading system as a whole survived the initial shock of this innovation, and the Europeans eventually concluded that they were better off adapting to the existing commercial arrangements rather than dismantling them.

Because exchanges had been taking place between Europe and Asia for millennia, few new inventions or diseases were spread in the early centuries of expansion. This low level of major exchanges was particularly striking compared with the catastrophic interaction between Europe and the Americas. But, as in Africa, European discoveries in the long-isolated Western Hemisphere did result in the introduction of important new food plants into India, China, and other areas from the 1600s onward. The import of silver was also an addition to wealth and adornment in China. Otherwise, Europeans died mainly of diseases that they contracted in Asia, such as new strain of malaria and dysentery. They spread diseases only to the more isolated parts of Asia, such as the Philippines, where the coming of the Spanish was accompanied by a devastating smallpox epidemic. The impact of European ideas, inventions, and modes of social organization was also very limited during the first centuries of expansion. Key European devices, such as clocks, were seen as toys by Asian rulers to whom they were given as gifts.

During the early modern period in global history, the West’s surge in exploration and commercial expansion touched most of Asia only peripherally. This was particularly true of East Asia, where the political cohesion and military strength of the vast Chinese empire and the Japanese warrior-dominated states blocked all hope of European advance. Promising missionary inroads in the 16^th century were stifled by hostile Tokugawa shoguns in the early 17^th century. They were also carefully contained by the Ming emperors and the nomadic Qing dynasty in the mid-1600s. Strong Chinese and Japanese rulers limited trading contacts with the aggressive Europeans and confined merchants to a few ports that were remote from their capitals. In its early decades, the Ming dynasty also pursued a policy of overseas expansion that had no precedent in Chinese history. But when China again turned inward in the last centuries of the dynasty, a potentially formidable obstacle to the rise of European dominance in maritime Asia was removed. China’s strong position in global trade continued, in marked contrast to Japan’s greater isolation. But even China failed to keep pace with changes in European technology and merchant activity with results that would show more clearly in the next stage of global interconnections.

Adapted from Peter Stearns, World Civilizations.