Early Globalization: The Atlantic World, 1492–1650

This is Unit Two, and it covers the years from fourteen ninety-two to sixteen fifty — the century and a half in which the three worlds of Unit One were forced into contact. The unit has a habit worth watching for. Again and again it takes the familiar version of a famous event and replaces it with a more complicated one that the evidence actually supports. By the end you will be able to trace how Portugal's island colonies and coastal forts became the template the Atlantic trade was built on. You will be able to explain why Tenochtitlán fell, and name the two factors an account resting on Spanish arms leaves out. You will be able to distinguish the branches of the Reformation by what each objected to. You will be able to compare the early English, French and Dutch footholds by what each depended on to survive. And you will be able to state what mercantilism required of a colony, and what the Columbian Exchange carried in each direction.

Before Spain sailed west, Portugal had already built the machinery. Islands first, as staging points, and then a fort on the African coast.

Start with the islands, and with what was already growing on them.

USH1 0151 Portugal's Atlantic Islands

Prince Henry drove the exploration; Portugal colonised the Canary, Cape Verde, Azores and Madeira. Sugar plantations rose there, worked by enslaved Africans, and a papal grant gave Portugal everything south of Cape Verde.

Then the fort, and one detail of its design that tells you the whole situation.

USH1 0152 Elmina Castle

Elmina Castle, built in fourteen eighty-two in present-day Ghana. Its cannons faced the sea because Portuguese traders feared European rivals more than Africans. A dungeon below, residences and a chapel above.

Now the voyage everyone knows, told with the parts that usually get left out — the rejections, the reports home, and the fact that the name on the map is not his.

First, why five different courts turned him down.

USH1 0153 Why Columbus Was Rejected

Genoa, Venice, Portugal, England and Spain all refused, because their nautical experts agreed his estimate of the Atlantic was far too low. The experts were right. A continent he did not know existed saved him.

The voyage itself, and a word that came out of it and never left.

USH1 0154 The 1492 Voyage

Three ships, landfall October twelfth, fourteen ninety-two in the Bahamas, then Hispaniola. He called the Taíno he met Indios, which gave rise to Indian for any native people, and believed to the end he had reached the East Indies.

Next, the documents these men sent home, and how to read them.

USH1 0155 Probanzas de Méritos

Probanzas de méritos were reports written to the crown to win royal patronage. The course calls them filled with distortions and fabrications — and still useful, for showing what Europeans expected to find.

Then the diplomacy, which explains a language boundary that still exists.

USH1 0156 The Treaty of Tordesillas

Portugal claimed the discoveries under an earlier papal grant, so Spain turned to a Spanish-born Pope. The fourteen ninety-four treaty drew a line through South America: Spain west, Portugal east. That is why Brazil is Portuguese.

And finally, the man whose name the hemisphere carries.

USH1 0157 Vespucci and the Naming

Vespucci, an Italian sailing for Portugal, realised these were lands unknown to Europeans — which Columbus never did. Waldseemüller attached America to his fifteen oh seven map.

Now the unit's central correction. A city of over two hundred thousand people fell to a few hundred Spaniards, and the reason is not the one usually given.

Begin with what Cortés did on arriving, and how it went wrong for him.

USH1 0158 Cortés Enters Tenochtitlán

He entered in fifteen nineteen, astonished by the causeways and fascinated by the gold, and took Moctezuma hostage. After the Spanish murdered hundreds of high-ranking Mexica at a festival, the city rose and Cortés fled.

Here is the explanation the course puts in place of the familiar one.

USH1 0159 Why Tenochtitlán Fell

Central Mexico was already simmering with conflict, and Cortés built alliances with peoples ready to rebel — the Tlaxcalan alone providing as many as two hundred thousand fighters. The Spanish also carried smallpox, which the course says mattered far more than force of arms.

And the person without whom Cortés could not have spoken to anyone.

USH1 0160 Malintzin

Malintzin, a Nahua woman given to Cortés as tribute, translated in his dealings with Moctezuma. Some view her as a traitor, others as a victim. Their son Martín may have been the first mestizo.

Three more expeditions followed, and the metal they sent home paid for something Europe still visits museums to see.

The three names, and the thing that travelled with all of them.

USH1 0161 Pizarro, de Soto, Coronado

Pizarro captured Atahualpa in fifteen thirty-two and founded Lima, before being assassinated by a rival. De Soto crossed ten present-day states seeking gold. His people carried European diseases everywhere they went.

And what the American bullion funded once it reached Spain.

USH1 0162 The Siglo de Oro

A golden age: the Habsburgs financed painters, sculptors, musicians, architects and writers. Cervantes gave us a man who reads so much chivalry he can no longer tell reality from fiction.

Meanwhile Europe was breaking apart over religion. Four figures, and what matters is that they objected to four different things.

Luther first, and what he actually wanted.

USH1 0163 Luther's Three Grievances

He objected to the selling of indulgences, the Church's taxation of ordinary Germans, and mass in Latin, which taught them nothing. He hoped to reform the Church from inside, and triggered the Reformation instead.

Calvin next, whose doctrine relocated authority entirely.

USH1 0164 Calvin and Predestination

A French lawyer leading from Geneva, stressing predestination: God selected a few for salvation and destined everyone else to damnation. His commonwealth answered to its reading of scripture, not to any prince.

Henry the Eighth, whose break was not about doctrine at all.

USH1 0165 Henry VIII and the Church of England

A devout Catholic whom the Pope had named Defender of the Faith. Refused an annulment, he created the Church of England with himself at its head. Anne Boleyn also produced no male heir, and was executed.

Then his two daughters, and where England settled.

USH1 0166 Mary, Elizabeth, and the Settlement

Mary tried to restore Catholicism, earning the name Bloody Mary for burning Protestants. Elizabeth reigned from fifteen fifty-eight to sixteen oh three, and the Church of England kept the hierarchy and many rituals of the Catholic Church.

Inside that settlement sat people who thought it had not gone nearly far enough — and around it, a Europe willing to kill over the question.

Who the Puritans were, starting with the word itself.

USH1 0167 Who the Puritans Were

They worked to erase every vestige of Catholicism from the Church of England. The term was a pejorative — many saw them as holier-than-thou frauds — and those in power treated them as a security threat.

Two events that show what the age was prepared to do.

USH1 0168 The Armada and St Bartholomew's Day

Philip the Second sent over thirty thousand men and one hundred thirty ships against England in fifteen eighty-eight, and a storm and English sea power destroyed it. In France, Catholic troops killed unarmed Protestants in violence claiming nine thousand lives.

And how England fought back, at a profit.

USH1 0169 English Privateers

Elizabeth approved privateers — captains permitted to raid the enemy at will — primarily to block Spanish efforts at eliminating Protestantism. They extracted over one hundred thousand pounds a year from Spanish Caribbean vessels.

Now England tries to stay. Five entries: one colony that vanished, one that nearly did, and two that became models.

The first attempt, and the only trace it left.

USH1 0170 Roanoke

Raleigh's Roanoke put one hundred seventeen people on an island off present-day North Carolina, with poor relations with the local Croatans. Returning in fifteen ninety, Governor White found the colony gone and one word carved into a fence.

The financial invention that made the next attempt possible.

USH1 0171 Joint Stock Companies and Jamestown

A joint stock company was a new arrangement where investors provided the capital and assumed the risk to reap significant returns. The Virginia Company sent one hundred forty-four men and boys in sixteen oh six, many of them younger sons without inheritance prospects.

What that first winter was actually like, in a survivor's words.

USH1 0172 Jamestown's First Winter

George Percy recorded a small can of barley boiled in water for five men a day, and cold river water to drink, with bodies trailed out of cabins three or four in a night. Thirty-eight of one hundred forty-four survived.

Meanwhile in the Caribbean, the colony that set the pattern.

USH1 0173 Barbados and Sugar

England took five islands between sixteen twenty-four and sixteen thirty-two, growing tobacco first and then sugar. The course calls Barbados the first English colony dependent on enslaved people, and a model for those on the mainland.

And the northern landing, with one phrase to read carefully.

USH1 0174 Plymouth and the Mayflower Compact

The Pilgrims were Separatists who insisted on breaking from a Church of England they saw as corrupt. One hundred two Mayflower migrants signed a compact the course calls an agreement to help each other, which some interpret as democratic.

Two other empires were on the same coast, both running on the same commodity, and one of them behaved unlike all the rest.

France and the Dutch, and what set France apart.

USH1 0175 New France and New Netherlands

Champlain founded Quebec in sixteen oh eight, and uniquely among imperial powers France fostered good relations with native peoples, allying with the Huron against the Iroquois. Both empires ran on fur, the Dutch from New Amsterdam on Manhattan.

Back to the Spanish empire and the question every colony had to answer: who does the work, and under what claim.

The legal instrument, and the gap between its theory and its practice.

USH1 0176 The Encomienda

The encomienda granted conquistadors legal rights to native labour, conceived as reciprocal — labour in exchange for Christian conversion. In practice the course says Spaniards ruthlessly exploited it, seeing native people as little more than beasts of burden.

Its most famous critic, who began on the other side of it.

USH1 0177 Las Casas and the Black Legend

Las Casas held an encomienda and enslaved people himself, then in fifteen fifteen released them and began advocating humane treatment. Spain's rivals seized on his writings to present their own colonisation as more humane. That is the Black Legend.

And a correction the course states directly.

USH1 0178 African Labour, and One Correction

By the mid-sixteenth century Africans were an increasingly important labour force, classified as non-Christians to justify enslavement. But the course insists it is wrong to assume all Africans came as captives — some were free men who served as conquistadors alongside Cortés.

Underneath all of this sat an economic theory. Knowing it explains why a permanent labour supply came to seem necessary.

The doctrine itself, and what it demanded of a colony.

USH1 0179 Mercantilism

Mercantilism rested on the premise that only a limited amount of wealth, measured in bullion, existed in the world. Colonies existed to strengthen the colonising nation, exporting raw materials exclusively home and forbidden to buy from anyone else.

And what that economy did to things that had not been priced before.

USH1 0180 Commodification

Commodification turned items previously used for ritual purposes into European commodities with monetary exchange value — corn beer the Inca had drunk only ritually became something bought and traded. The course says this recast native economies.

Two entries left, and they cover what actually crossed the ocean in both directions: plants, animals, diseases, and one change in how Europeans decided what was true.

The exchange itself, and the thing it carried that killed the most people.

USH1 0181 The Columbian Exchange

Out of the Americas came maize, potatoes, tobacco, beans, squash, peppers and cacao; in came rye, wheat, rice, sugar, tea, and pigs, horses, cows and chickens. It also carried smallpox, measles, malaria and plague. Tobacco became the first truly global commodity in the fifteen nineties.

And how the peoples receiving those diseases understood what was happening.

USH1 0182 Disease and Mourning Wars

Native peoples had no immunity, and disease decimated some populations and wholly destroyed others. Eastern groups read the deaths as hostile acts and raided in mourning wars, taking prisoners to replace the dead.

Look at what you can now do. You can trace the template — Portugal's islands, its sugar, and a fort whose cannons faced the sea — through to the Atlantic labour system that followed. You can explain why Tenochtitlán fell, and name the two things a story about Spanish steel omits: tens of thousands of native allies, and smallpox. You can distinguish the reformers by their objections — indulgences and Latin mass, predestination, an annulment refused, and a settlement that kept the old hierarchy. You can compare the footholds: a colony that vanished, one that survived on thirty-eight people, an island that became the model, and two fur empires, one of which made allies. And you can state what mercantilism demanded, and what moved in each direction across the ocean.