Mediterranean sphere/Atlantic sphere: capital, sugar, wool
A discussion of fifteenth-century economic opportunities viewed from Iberian
perspectives. We will also consider the Saharan caravans linking the
peripheral zones of West Africa and the western Mediterranean.
Reading: Russell-Wood, introduction and chs. 1 and 2; Thornton, introduction
and ch. 1.
- What were the major social, economic, political, and cultural features of
the Iberian monarchies that stimulated exploration and conquest overseas?
- What major technological innovations were made by Iberian peoples in
shipbuilding, navigation, and naval warfare?
- Why have historians paid so much more attention to European migration to
the Americas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than to the much
larger African migration?
- "Is it correct to see Africa as being on a lower level of development than
Europe and this imbalance as being the cause for the slave trade?"
(Thornton 1998: 6)
- "Did Africans participate in the Atlantic trade as equal partners, or were
they the victims of European power and greed?" (Ibid.: 6)
- "Were the African slaves in the Americas too brutalized to express
themselves culturally and socially, and thus, to what degree was their
specifically African background important in shaping Afro-American culture?"
(Ibid.: 6)
- Was the Atlantic trade "economically essential to African well-being or
development" (Ibid.: 7)?
- Why were Africans able to control "the nature of their interactions with
Europe" (Ibid.: 7)?
- Why did Cape Bojador represent such an obstacle for Europeans trying to
reach by sea African regions further south?
- What role did wind and current play in the construction of the Atlantic
world in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?
- What were the three great river systems of West Africa?
- What were the great rivers of West Central Africa?
- What American river systems were connected to the Atlantic zone?
- Why were European shipbuilders the first to construct adequate vessels for
long-distance voyages in the Atlantic?
- Why did Portuguese mariners increasingly undertake in the fifteenth
century voyages into parts of the Atlantic previously unknown to them?
- Why was West African gold of such importance to European commercial life?
- Why did the Portuguese monarch João II become the first ruler of
his kingdom to sponsor Atlantic expeditions?
- Why did sugar become a major export crop for the Madeira Islands despite
their somewhat isolated location out in the Atlantic?
- Why were Europeans able to dominate Atlantic trade in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries while they were unable to do so in the Indian Ocean and
South China Sea?
- Why didn't Europeans conquer parts of West Africa and enslave the
population as they had conquered the Canary Islands and enslaved the people
there?
- Why did the Portuguese so willingly give up in West Africa their patterns
of trade-and-raid or raid-and-conquer? Since the Portuguese were so willing
to insert themselves into the peaceful trading relations in West Africa, why
were they later so unwilling to so insert themselves into the equally peaceful
trading relations of India?
- What factors permitted Castilian wool to become an important commodity in
European trade?
- Why did the Castilian cities of Burgos and Medina del Campo emerge as
important European economic centers in the late fifteenth century?
- Why did the wool trade from northern Castile to northern Europe become
such an important economic and social factor in the lives of people in central
and southern Castile?
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J. B. Owens
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Revised: 28 July 1999
URL: http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/reading.06.html