How the Atlantic Reordered Europe's Wealth by 1648

The idea

The exam's questions on exploration and on economic change belong to one story, and the anchor's two chapters tell it from the ships to the counting-house. Portugal went first and south: Henry's captains down Africa, Dias round the Cape in fourteen eighty-eight, da Gama to India in fourteen ninety-eight, and a sea empire of forts and cannon that took the spice trade from the Venetians and Arabs without taking any land. Spain went west: Columbus in fourteen ninety-two by miscalculation, Tordesillas in fourteen ninety-four dividing the globe, Magellan's ship home in fifteen twenty-two, and then the conquests, Cortes with allies and smallpox at Tenochtitlan in fifteen twenty-one, Pizarro in a civil war at Cajamarca. What crossed decided everything. Disease went west and killed most of the hemisphere; crops went both ways; silver went east from Potosi after fifteen forty-five and raised every price in Europe, the price revolution, then passed on through Spain toward India and China. Spain ruled what it took by viceroys, encomienda and hacienda, argued with itself through Las Casas and the New Laws, and sorted its subjects into castas, while sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean demanded labor and the Atlantic slave trade, begun in the sixteenth century, grew in the seventeenth into the largest forced migration in history. And the wealth did not stay with Spain. Kings still thought wealth was a fixed pie of land and bullion, mercantilism, and Spain was its type; but in Amsterdam merchants who were despised by nobles built exchanges and banks, chartered the VOC in sixteen oh two as a joint-stock company with a monopoly and a fleet, took Portugal's posts, and by sixteen thirty-seven had even invented the bubble. By sixteen forty-eight the center of Europe's economy had moved from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, from Venice to Amsterdam, and from bullion to shares.