Week 2 Day

1: Exploration
and Early
Colonization
 KEY TERMS
• Age of Discovery • Hernan Cortes
• Chattel
• Encomienda
• Ferdinand and Isabella
• Prince Henry the Navigator • Christopher Columbus
• Vasco Da Gama • Amerigo Vespucci
• Mariner’s Astrolabe • Gold Made of Flesh and Blood
• Caravel
• Silk Road
• Sugar
• Foundation of Transatlantic Slave Trade
• Columbian Exchange
 SLAVERY BEFORE CHATTEL SLAVERY
Chattel Slavery is defined by total ownership of the
Slavery in African and the Americas enslaved person by law. The person is more like
before Chattel Slavery livestock than in other forms of slavery.
• The Custom in African was that War Captives Lost
their Freedom if Captured in Battle, therefore they
could be traded by opposing leaders to the Iberian
explorers in exchange for manufactured goods.
• In the Americas, subjugated groups were made to
work or pay tribute to others and war captives
were kept or traded as slaves.
• In both cultures slavery was based more on
kinship than color, and enslaved persons were not
generally treated as personal property. Slave
“owners” had the right to the labor of other
people (eg crops) but did not own them as a
commodity.
Iberian Exploration

• Three hundred years before Columbus, the

Crusades linked Europe and Asia.
• Spain and Portugal Sought a Direct Route to Asia
by Exploring West.
• Ferdinand and Isabella united Spain’s most
powerful kingdoms.
• Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal Invested
heavily in Exploration.
• The Iberians were Equally Interested in Economic
and Religious Benefits of Exploration.
• Vasco Da Gama Reached India by sailing around
Africa in 1499.
 Technology and World Exploration
THE CARAVEL was smaller and more maneuverable, THE MARINER’S ASTROLABE could measure
yet it could carry large loads, and it was very fast latitude by measuring the height of the noon sun
with all sails up. or a known star
BEFORE TOBACCO AND RICE
AND COTTON THERE WAS
SUGAR

• Domesticated in Papua New Guinea in

about 9000 to 8000 BCE.
• By the 7th Century Sugar Crystals were
Transported along the Silk Road.
• Sold to the very wealthy through Venice.
King Henry III spent $450 dollars in today’s
money for 3 pounds of sugar.
• The rich were addicted by 1453 when the
Ottoman Empire attacked Constantinople
blocking the sugar trade—Enter Portugal.
 PORTUGAL AND THE SUGAR
TRADE: SWEETNESS AND POWER
• Sugar was first produced in New Guinea in 8000 B.C., but was not known in most of
Northern Europe until the 11th Century.
• In the Second Half of the 1400s the Portuguese Expanded Sugar Production in their
colonies off the coast of Africa and in West Africa.
• This led to the Start of the Slave Trade in the Atlantic.
• Sugar is Extremely Laborious to Grow = 14 Month Growing Season in Tropical
Climate.
• Columbus Brought Sugar Home From His Second Voyage to the New World.
• First Grown in the “New World” in Hispaniola in 1501.
• By 1550 the Spanish and Portuguese had 3000 Sugar Mills.
• Sugar required slaves and the movement of people and goods between Europe,
Africa and the Americas became known as the Triangle Trade or Colombian
Exchange.
• Sugar—Slaves—Colonization……Became Interlocked = Foundation of the Trans-
Atlantic Slave Trade.
• ***Anthropologist Sidney Mintz published the influential book Sweetness and
Power in 1986***
CHRISTOPHE
R COLUMBUS
• Columbus was an Italian Explorer who, financed
by Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain made Four
Trips to the “New World”. He was searching for
Asia, and never understood he was exploring a
new continent.
• He was in search of Gold and other riches but
immediately recognized he had found Gold made
of Flesh and Blood.
• To fund his second trip he promised the Spanish
Crown great riches = “With fifty men they can all
be subjugated and made to do what is required
of them.”—Christopher Columbus
The Columbian Exchange
DISEASE WAS ALSO A LARGE PART OF
THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE.
LACKING THE IMMUNITY EUROPEANS
HAD OBTAINED THROUGH
CENTURIES OF EPIDEMICS NATIVE
AMERICANS WERE RAVAGED BY
DISEASE.
• SEVERAL SCHOLARS ESTIMATE AS MUCH AS 90%
OF THE NATIVE AMERICAN POPULATION WAS
DESTROYED BY 1642 (150 YEARS). THE BLACK
PLAGUE IN EUROPE KILLED AT MOST 35% OF THE
POPULATION.
 “Burn the Ships,” or the First of Many Cool
Things Nobody Actually Said.
• Born in 1485, Hernan Cortes received Encomienda (a
grant of the right to labor of certain natives) in Cuba.
• In 1519 he led an expedition to Mexico.
• Fearing a Mutiny when he turned an effort to trade
into an effort to conquer the Aztec Empire. He
Scuttled his Ships.
• Cortes captured Aztec leader Montezuma and gained
control of the gold and silver mines.
• Smallpox and Alliances with other Native Groups
helped Cortes captured an Empire of around 1
million People.
• Smallpox “spread over the people as great
destruction. Some it covered on all parts—their
faces, their heads, their breasts, and so on. There
was great havoc. Very many died of it. . . . They could
not move; they could not stir.”—A Spanish Soldier.
SPANISH CONQUEST
“We came here to serve God
and the king, and also to get
rich.”
• The Empires The Spanish Discovered in Central
and South America dwarfed population centers
like Cahokia and Chaco Canyon
• The Aztecs were the largest Empire when
Europeans began colonizing the New World.
Their Empire was centered around Tenochtitlan.
• The Aztec Empire was large and controlled by
city states.
• After 2 Bloody Years Hernan Cortes Conquered
The Empire and Helped Make the Spanish
Extremely Wealthy.
• Their Method of Conquering and Ruling Native
Americans in the New World was Brutal.
• Francisco Pizarro Was Aided by Smallpox, Which
Arrived Before He did, in Conquering the Inca
Empire in 1533.
• Because there were so few Women in the New
World the Spanish tolerated interracial marriage.
This was not the case in British North America. =
A HYBRID CULTURE.
 ENSLAVED
WOMEN
• “Black women are not spared
having to work in an exhausting
manner in the mills and cane fields
just as the men and children do.”--
Zacharias Wagner (A German Who
Worked For the Dutch East India
Trading Company).
• All Non-Christians Were Treated
More Like Livestock than Human
Beings.
Why is it Called
America?
• Amerigo Vespucci made one
expedition on behalf of Spain and
one on behalf of Portugal to the
New World in the early 1500s.
• He claimed to know that Brazil
was actually part of a new
continent, not previously known
in Europe.
• A Cartographer named Martin
Waldseemuller created a map in
1507 that recognized Vespucci by
calling a new western continent,
“The New World,” America.