1. From European Exploration to Maritime Empires
Galleons and Caravans
Guido van Meersbergen
Week 9. Thursday
30 November 2016
From European Exploration to Maritime Empires

2. 1. The Nature of Maritime Empires
- Interpretations 1: Risk of Eurocentrism
“As the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity”
David Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some are So Poor (London: 1998), p. xxi.
“By emphasizing sea-based empires, historians [… ] have depicted a thriving Europe, future ruler of the world, propelled by an admirable curiosity, building its economic might and displaying its military strength across great oceans”
C. K. Woodworth, ‘Ocean and Steppe: Early Modern World Empires’, Journal of Early Modern History, 11/6 (2007), p. 505

3. 1. The Nature of Maritime Empires
- Interpretations 2: Revisionism
European “discoveries” were in reality a European encounter with vast land empires
Costs of empire: human, environmental, economic
Early modern global trade may not have made Europe rich at all
Expansion an uneven and piecemeal process yet with long-lasting consequences for all areas of the world
The teleology of empire should be challenged (e.g. “Vasco da Gama-era”)
Importance of cross-cultural collaboration

4. 1. The Nature of Maritime Empires
- Characteristics
Importance of commerce
Non-contiguous
Variety
Network of trading posts, factories, fortresses
Plantation and settlement colonies (sugar, cocoa, cotton)
Mix of state ventures and private initiative
Ethnic and social variety: indigenous peoples, slave populations, settlers from across Europe
Civilizing mission -> evangelization
Example of variety: ‘…Portugal’s essentially maritime empire based on trading posts in Africa and Asia, and […] Spain’s territorial empire, based on conquest and settlement in the Caribbean and the American mainland.’ J.H. Elliott, ‘Iberian Empires’, in Hamish Scott (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern European History, : Volume II: Cultures and Power (Oxford: 2015)
Strong ‘civilizing’ mission

5. 2. The Portuguese Empire

6. North and West Africa (1415-)

7. The Atlantic Islands (1420-)
Note: Canary Islands had had links with the Roman Empire and Arab world. First Renaissance European contact made by Genoese in 1310s; increasing contact throughout 14th century. Conquered by Spain

9. Treaty of Tordesillas (1494)

10. Brazil
(1500-)

11. SLAVE IMPORTS Brazil British Caribbean Spanish Americas Totals
241,917
34,686
276,603
405,117
313,301
910,361
1,628,779
2,139,819
175,438
2,210,931
4,526,188
218,475
860,589
2,376,141
3,455,205
2,763,411
1,591,245
5,532,119
9,886,775

12. Asia (1498-) - The Estado da Índia
Portuguese Asia c. 1580

13. The Jesuit fathers. Detail from ‘The Portuguese arriving in Japan’, paper screen. Japan, 17th century. The Getty.

14. The Crisis of the Estado
Limits of expansion: encounter with expansionist Safavid and Mughal empire (loss of Hormuz 1621)
2. The Dutch VOC and WIC take over Northeast Brazil ( ), Elmina (1637), Malacca (1641), Sri Lanka (1658)
3. loss of key nodes of exchange in the Indian Ocean (momentum shifted to the Dutch and English)
‘The successive loss of many key geographical positions […] eventually led to the gradual degradation of the network and the transformation of the Portuguese Empire in Asia into a handful of disjointed and dispersed territorial holdings’ – Jorge Flores, ‘The Iberian Empires, 1400 to 1800’, in: Jerry H. Bentley et al (eds.), The Cambridge World History (2015)

15. What sort of Empire was this?
“The Portuguese empire was a vast, global administrative and economic system that linked continents, peoples, and economic organisations in a network of exchange”
S.B. Schwarz, ‘The Economy of the Portuguese Empire’, p. 19.
“[Portuguese empire was] less a territorial empire than an imperial framework within which trade, plunder, settlement and local alliances jostled and interacted with one another’- J.H. Elliott, ‘Iberian Empires’
1. The Empire stretching over Asia, Africa and America had some common features:
- Portuguese population moved to all of these areas
- the Portuguese mixed with local populations
- there was an active willingness to convert people.
2. An overlap between its formal structure and its informal one.
3. This was as much a centralised empire as an empire of links

16. 3. The Spanish Empire

17. Voyages of Christopher Columbus, 1492-1503

18. Pre-conquest America

19. Tenochtitlán and the Gulf of Mexico, unknown artist, 1524 [based on map presented to Cortes by Mexica peoples in Library of Congress

20. Moctezuma II (c. 1466-1520), last Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlan
Moctezuma II (c ), last Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlan. Captured and killed during Spanish conquest of Mexico led by Hernán Cortés
Source: Florentine Codex
Atahualpa (c ), last sovereign Inca emperor. Captured and executed during Spanish conquest of Peru led by Francisco Pizarro

23. Casta Painting. Museo Nacional del Virreinato, Mexico, 18th century

24. 4. The Dutch, British and French Empires
Albert Eckhout, oil on canvas, c
Eight portraits, depicting Tapuya, African, Tupi and mulatto man and woman

26. Algonquians as painted by John White in 1585, British Museum

29. North America ca 1750

31. Conclusion
Similarities and differences between land and maritime empires
Decline of land empires and rise of maritime empires
Just a western European story?

32. Giancarlo Casale, The Ottoman Age of Exploration (Oxford: 2010), p. 81.