Mercantilism and Drive for Colonization

1. Mercantilism and Drive for Colonization

2. How did the evolution of European society contribute to the discovery of the New World?

3. To begin to understand the drive to colonize, you must first understand that European society has evolved through phases

4. First there was the Ancient World, circa 3000s BC - 400s AD Egypt Rome Greece

5. The last great ancient kingdom was Rome, which extended throughout the Mediterranean and Europe at its peak and dominated most of what the European people knew of the world. Rome had a very advanced Society and Economy

6. In the 400s “Vandals” from Northern Europe sacked the capital city of Rome, ending the ancient Roman empire

7. Western Europe then fell into a period of decline known as the Middle Ages or Medieval Period. All the knowledge and advances of ancient Rome were lost. In the emerging system of Feudalism, there were few cities and no money and most people lived on large self-sufficient plantations known as manors and owned by one lord. The lord often lived in a castle and had his own army known as knights to protect the people that lived there. Most of these people were illiterate farmers who had to give their crops to the lord to live on his land and get his protection. These poor landless peasants were known as serfs.

8. In the more Eastern European part of the old Roman Empire, centered in what is now Greece and Turkey, a new kingdom emerged known as the Byzantine Empire. The Byzantines maintained a lot of the advanced knowledge and culture of the older kingdom, including science, trade, money and more urban communities. The Byzantine Empire’s capital was Constantinople (Byzantium), later Istanbul.

9. The Byzantines maintained an elaborate trading system with the advanced cultures of the East, such as China. This trade includes such things as silk, spices to make their food more editable, and even drugs such as opium for pain

10. Just less than a thousand years ago, just after 1000 AD, the Islamic faith had grown and a new Islamic empire had taken over Jerusalem, which Christians saw as the land of Jesus and center of their faith

11. The Pope called for the lords in the medieval manors to send their knights to liberate the Christian holy lands. These series of attacks became known as the Crusades. These crusades were critical to European history because the knights were exposed to the knowledge, science, trade and advanced culture of the Byzantines. When they returned they were no longer satisfied with their self-sufficient manors and wanted what they had seen.

12. After the Crusades the new trading networks that went to Medieval Western Europe led to a new period in Western European history – the Renaissance. In the Renaissance, people left their feudal manors and went to new cities where they could trade. Money began to develop and people began once again to embrace science and technological advances. Humanism, a faith in mankind’s ability to think and reason, began to spread

13. The emerging trading routes were dangerous and suffered from frequent attacks. Some lords were smart and offered to use their knights to protect the trade in exchange for some of the profits. As these lords began to accumulate wealth, they used it to expand their power and eventually conquered their neighboring lords and manors. As the land and wealth began to consolidate, these new powerful lords became the first kings, their growing manors the first countries

14. The rise of these new nation states, circa 1400s – 1700s, led to the beginning of the modern world. The Middle Ages got its name by being between the ancient and modern worlds.

15. The new nation states competed for money and power, believing that the wealth of the world was finite. In other words, if a rival king got rich, then your opportunity for wealth was less. The drive for colonization, therefore, grew from the kings’ efforts to augment their new nation’s power and prestige. You cannot understand the drive for colonization without understanding the competition between nation states that grew out of the Renaissance and the new modern world.

16. What exactly led to the discovery of the New World?

17. In 1453 a new Islamic Empire emerged, capturing Constantinople and virtually all of the Byzantine Empire. This kingdom, later known as the Ottoman Empire, cut the lucrative trade routes to the Far East that the new kings and nation states relied upon. The kings and new nations rushed to find alternative ways to get to the Far East.

18. Given the growth of science and humanism, European shad developed a better sailing boat known as the caravel. It was faster and carried more goods. What was below Africa was unknown to Europeans, and many nations began to consider a sea route below Africa to the Far East

19. Portugal was the first nation to make it all the way to India and the Far East, and by the early 1500s had established forts along the African coast to help prevent other nations from using the route

20. Humanistic thinkers had concluded that the world was round, and thus the new nation of Spain funded the explorer Christopher Columbus to travel westward across the Atlantic to get to the Far East.

21. Columbus discovered the New World in 1492 and at first believed he had found the Far East. Columbus then made several unsuccessful voyages to find the fabled wealth and empires of the Far East

22. Actually, the seafaring and raiding peoples of Scandinavia, the Vikings, had over 500 years earlier ventured to North America but had ceased exploration because they had found no wealth to plunder. Their efforts were soon forgotten.

23. The Spanish soon learned that it was not the Far East but a new world. They were fortunate to find that this new world contained a great amount of gold. The result was that during the 1500s, Spain developed an elaborate colony known as New Spain which mined and exported gold back to Spain itself. Centered in the Caribbean and what is now Mexico, New Spain actually claimed lands that extended from the western part of what is now the United States all the way down to the west coast of South America. By the middle of the 1500s, Spain was the dominant power in Europe

24. To have the necessary labor for their gold mines in New Spain, the Spanish made slaves of the Native Americas. Native American empires such as the Incas and Aztecs were quickly conquered, and great numbers of Indians died due to diseases and overwork.

25. How did the other new European nations such as England, the Netherlands and France react to the discovery of the New World and the great power of Spain?

26. At first the other European countries searched for a so-called “Northwest Passage” that could serve as a new all-water route to the Far East trade. It was, however, impossible as it was blocked with ice.

27. In time the other European powers began to claim the American lands still available. They were, however, disappointed to find that unlike New Spain there was no readily available gold. French Dutch English Portuguese

28. If there was no readily available gold, why did nations such as England, France, and the Netherlands establish colonies in the New World? How did it benefit them?

29. The medium of exchange between nations became gold and silver, minted into coins. Since the amount of gold and silver in the world was limited, it meant that if some other king was acquiring more gold and silver, there was less for you

30. No European country was self-sufficient; they all needed some natural resources that could only be had by paying with gold or silver to a competing king. If a country, however, imported more than they exported, they would lose gold and silver and suffer in the international competition. Colonies could solve this problem. They could provide the natural resources that a country needed, and thus the gold and silver would go to the colony and not the competing king. In turn, the colony needed manufactured goods which it could not produce on its own. It, therefore, would buy these manufactured products from the king and, as a result, the gold and silver would return to the king.

31. While the natural resources traded varied, the key was controlling the trade between the mother country and the colonies. In theory, both the colonies and the mother country would benefit. The efforts to develop colonies and control their trade was known as Mercantilism. Mercantilist policies were absolutely critical to the drive to establish and manage colonies.

32. Another motive for colonization was the increasing number of poor peasants in the cities, which brought disease and crime. During the Renaissance, the feudal lords had found that the new trade meant producing wool by raising sheep was more profitable than growing crops. Since the lords needed less labor on their land to raise sheep, they fenced in their property – known as the Enclosure Movement – and forced their landless serfs off their manor. These peasant serfs then flooded the new cities and caused problems.

33. The new kings realized that getting the urban peasants to the colonies would serve two purposes: rid the cities of urban crime and diseases and provide the colonies with the labor they needed.

34. It should be noted that the crown had help in encouraging migration to the New World with the publication of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, which presented a fictional island in the Atlantic that was perfect

35. Besides the economic issues, what were the religious motives for colonization?

36. During the Middle Ages there was only one Christian church in Europe, the Roman Catholic Church led by the Pope in the Vatican in Rome

37. The Roman Catholic Church had strict rules that had to be followed, rigidly enforced by the Pope and the church’s established hierarchy. It taught that anyone could be saved but that the only way to reach heaven and achieve salvation was to follow the church’s sacraments.

38. During the Middle Ages most people were illiterate and the only person who could really read was the feudal manor’s Catholic priest, who taught how to interpret the Bible and thus enforced the Church’s doctrine

39. This began to change when in the middle of the 1400s Johannes Gutenberg invented the moveable-type printing press

40. Since it was easier and cheaper to produce books, the number of Bibles exploded. In time people began to learn how to read, and soon they began to disagree with what the Roman Catholic priests taught.

41. This was the beginning of the Protestant Reformation, which like mercantilism had a profound influence on why many European colonies grew.

42. The Protestant Reformation began with Martin Luther, who taught that all you needed was a belief in God and the ability to follow the Bible to reach salvation. Anyone could be saved, but no one needed the Roman Catholic Church. Luther was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church, but his ideas spread and new “Lutheran” churches grew despite persecution by the Catholics

43. A little after Luther a new “Protestant” faith emerged in the 1500s with John Calvin. Since God was all-knowing, Calvin taught, he already knew the past, present and future. He knew everything. He knew what would happen before it happened, and he therefore knew who would reach salvation. People did not know who was saved or one of God’s predestined “Elect.” If, however, one was unholy and sinful, clearly God had not selected them. Accordingly, the new Calvinists sought to live an often austere, holy life devoid of sin, hoping that God would reveal to them that they were one of the predestined Elect. The Calvinists obviously did not think that everyone could be saved like both the Roman Catholic Church and the Lutheran churches. The Calvinists did not get along with the Lutherans, although they too faced horrible persecution by the Roman Catholic Church.

44. Since most of the new European nations’ governments were Catholic, the Protestant Reformation disrupted politics and governance and caused tension, conflict, and often violence throughout the 1400s and 1500s. In a general sense, when a religious group found itself persecuted, migration to the New World was sometimes an attractive alternative. There they could practice their faith without government persecution. At the same time, often the monarch agreed that if the religious minority were to leave it would help not only get rid of a problem at home but also add to the growth of his nation’s colonies. The new religious migrants would only have to agree to follow his mercantilist trade restrictions. In the broadest sense this was the how religious turmoil of the Protestant Reformation led to colonization.

45. The Protestant Reformation did not affect every nation the same. Some nations, like France and Spain, remained solidly Roman Catholic. Many of the Northern European countries, however, were greatly impacted by the Protestant Reformation. The Germanic states became mostly Protestant, as did Holland. Whatever their respective faith, the governments would persecute their minorities. Only in Holland was there any evidence of religious tolerance of minorities.

46. The Protestant Reformation was particularly difficult and convoluted in England, where it played out over almost a century. England remained Roman Catholic but in the 1500s the king, Henry VIII, found that he could not sire a male heir by his wife. He sought a divorce, which was only available though the Pope and rarely granted. When the Pope said no, Henry created his own church, the Anglican Church or the Church of England, with the king – himself – as its head. He granted himself a divorce and married a new wife.

47. When Henry died in 1553, his first daughter, Mary Tudor, had who been raised by her Catholic mother, whom Henry had divorced, inherited the throne. She was so brutal in persecuting the new Anglicans, she became known as Bloody Mary. When she died in 1558, her half sister, Elizabeth I, born to a later Anglican wife of Henry, took the throne. She was Anglican like her own mother, and persecuted Catholics. But at the same time, however, she developed a very Catholic-like theology for her Anglican Church. Anyone could be saved, but they had to follow the sacraments of the Anglican Church. Queen Elizabeth Queen Mary Tudor or “Bloody Mary”

48. This angered English Calvinists, who believed in predestination. They therefore sought to make the Anglican Church more Calvinist and less Catholic-like. They said they wanted to “purify” the Anglican Church of all vestiges of Catholicism. They became known as Puritans. Elizabeth did not like the Puritans even as she did not like the Catholics. Puritans In England

49. When Elizabeth died in 1625, James I took over. The number of Puritans had begun to grow and James brutally persecuted them. James I also persecuted English Catholics but, as we will see, it was during his reign when a great number of English Puritans fled for the new world King James I (1603-1625)

50. The years that followed saw additional religious turmoil between English Catholics, Anglicans, and Puritans. During the 1640s there was even an English Civil War, in which the Puritans won and disposed with any king. Later the monarchy was reestablished, but the religious turmoil continued to drive people to the New World