Merry Wiesner-Hanks

Microhistory and world history

The term The Columbian Exchange was popularized by Alfred W. Crosbys seminal 1972 book, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492, which emphasized the transfers of the diseases, plants and animals introduced as a consequence of the continuous communications between the New World-North and South America, and the Old-Europe, Asia and Africa. The Columbian Exchange begins in the first global age, starting in the mid-fifteenth century, and was dominated by Spain and Portugal until the mid-seventeenth century. The Columbian Exchange resulted in the transfer of Old World diseases to the Americas, and vice versa. The time of arrival of the diseases varied depending on the nature of the disease and the mode of transmission. Old World plants preferred by the Europeans took slow and tenuous root in the Caribbean islands. Specimens of many of the animals of the Americas were sent to Europe for display and study, but none became popular food items save for the turkey.

Christianity in Europe and overseas

The standard distinction between settled societies and nomadic or seminomadic peoples captures contrasts in the scale and organisation of warfare. Nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples, who generally relied on pastoral agriculture or slash-and-burn shifting cultivation, were less populous and their governmental structures were less developed. The timing and rate of change are also issues in assessing whether there was a Military Revolution in the early modern period. The standard account posits one period of revolution from 1560 to 1660, indecisiveness and stagnation, then a second period of revolution that began with the outbreak of the War of American Independence in 1775 and continued with the French Revolutionary Wars to 1815. The Ottoman army, and even more the navy, of 1600 were very different from those of 1450, such that there was a sustained transformation in Ottoman war-making. The political culture of the Ottoman court and public finances also failed to support the enhancement of Turkish military capability.

Imperial competition in Eurasia: Russia and China

The greatest of the early modern imperial enterprises in terms of physical extent was the joint Hispano-Portuguese monarchy of the period 1580 to 1640. From the last quarter of the sixteenth century onwards then, the idea of an integrated global history based on the existence of worldwide networks of trade, exchange, conquest and circulation can be thought to have at least partly become a reality. The trade between India and Central Asia, or India and East Africa, involved a considerable degree of differentiation and specialization. Europes share of population was 16 percent in 1400, and over 19 percent four centuries later. The most substantial transformation in the negative direction was caused by the American population collapse of the sixteenth century, with only a partial recovery being evident even as late as 1800, based in part on processes of migration, very largely from Africa and Europe.

Crossroads region: Central Asia

The early modern world was organic in the sense that humans got energy mostly by tapping and concentrating solar flows to grow food, and to heat their homes and to make other industrial products. Epidemic disease, famine, war, and other disasters kept human life expectancy much shorter than it is today. The Columbian Exchange refers to the exchange of plants, animals, and pathogens between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia following Christopher Columbuss voyage to the Americas in 1492. For Europeans who came to the Americas in the century after conquest, the New world appeared to be a cornucopia, stocked with natures bounty there for the taking. The early modern period also saw the extension throughout the world of a particular kind of legal framework for human interaction with nature, built on idea of private ownership of property. States, markets, productive agriculture, and rising populations moved environmental change in America before 1492, in East and South Asia, and in Africa.

Islam in the early modern world

Interactions among cultures, by 1400 CE, did not involve the peoples of the Americas with those of Eurasia and Africa. This chapter looks at interactions centered on China, Islam, South Asia, and the eastern Mediterranean. It discusses the new global interactions of the Europeans with the great civilizations of the Americas and of Africans with Europeans in Africa and the Americas. There was a logic of political advantage and cultural content in the interactions between Mongols and Tibetans. Careful recording of lineages of teacher-student relations was important both in Islam and in other Chinese traditions, Confucian and Buddhist. The reach of Islam into the unbelieving world was strongly supported by Sufism, and eventually by impressive continuities of Sufi lineages and lodges. The eastern Mediterranean was the scene of dramatic clash of civilizations in the world of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The chapter also explains about Spaniards, Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, Neo-African cultures, and extra-European interactions.