Jan. 20

Columbus and New World Explorations I

I. On 11 October 1492, Christopher Columbus recorded in his journal that land had been sighted.

A. If any date is most appropriate for the beginning of a course on modern Europe, October 12, 1492 is it.
B. What was the significance of the discovery? Very briefly, all items to which we will return:

1. Columbus (and the subsequent voyages, of course) linked the entire globe for the first time in human history.
2. Rise of European hegemony.
3. New World became a source of enormous wealth.
4. And the labor power for that wealth came from Europe, as the discoveries set off one of the great waves of human migration in history, and, of course, from Africa, in the greatest wave of slave buying and selling ever.
5. The discoveries had profoundly unsettling effects on European society. New wealth is always unsettling; it threatens the existing social hierarchy, relations among states become more competitive.
6. Even more importantly, Europeans had to assimilate into their Christian world view peoples whom they had never before encountered. Were they also God´s creation?

II. Okay, so what did Columbus think he was up to, and how did he get to one of the Bahmanian islands in 1492? (Which one remains to this day unclear.)

A. Process of European expansion since very late eleventh century.
B. 1453 and Turkish seizure of Constantinople.
C. Allure of spices and more difficult trade now with Ottomans in eastern Mediterranean.
D. Portugese efforts down African coast through much of the fifteenth century, and the colonization of the Azores, Madeira, Canary Islandy, and Cape Verde Islands.
E. Technological advances in shipping and in navigation techniques.

What do you need to go? Royalty and patron/client. But Columbus´ very access to the crown dependent on family ties.

III. The major question and its problems: why the west?

A. Combination of factors, viz:

1. Missionary character of Christianity, distinctive among most world religions.
2. Fortuitious circumstances:

a. Geography--seaboard states of the Atlantic.
b. The commercial and population expansion from the depths of the Black Death.
c. The accumulated knowledge in the course of the fifteenth century in association with *Renaissance* questing spirit.

3. But critically in combination with these factors, the particularities, indeed, the peculiarities, of the European state system.

a. The competition it fosters, which we will see time and again, that leads to one exploration after another, one effort after another to establish a commercial monopoly.
b. In contradistinction to an empire.

IV. So, with Columbus´ voyages, we see many of the themes that will preoccupy us over the next weeks and months: the rise of European hegemony; the trading systems that emerged; new ways of thinking about the world, in no small part fostered by the realization that the world is much larger than anticipated; the development of state powers; the character of family ties. Next time we´ll look more closely at the character of the New World systems, and especially the slave trade.