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Course: World History Project AP® > Unit 4
Lesson 1: 4.0—Technological Innovations and Exploration- BEFORE YOU WATCH: Unit 4 Overview - Transoceanic Interconnections
- WATCH: Unit 4 Overview
- READ: Unit 4 Introduction: Transoceanic Interconnections 1450 to 1750
- READ: Origins of Oceanic Connections
- READ: The Cosmopolitan Indian Ocean
- READ: Data Exploration - War and Peace
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READ: Origins of Oceanic Connections
From 1450 to 1750, European mariners used technologies gained through centuries of trade to explore the world, connect its oceans, and enrich some European states.
The article below uses “Three Close Reads”. If you want to learn more about this strategy, click here.
First read: preview and skimming for gist
Before you read the article, you should skim it first. The skim should be very quick and give you the gist (general idea) of what the article is about. You should be looking at the title, author, headings, pictures, and opening sentences of paragraphs for the gist.
Second read: key ideas and understanding content
Now that you’ve skimmed the article, you should preview the questions you will be answering. These questions will help you get a better understanding of the concepts and arguments that are presented in the article. Keep in mind that when you read the article, it is a good idea to write down any vocab you see in the article that is unfamiliar to you.
By the end of the second close read, you should be able to answer the following questions:
- What does the author say was the biggest motivation behind the Europeans’ voyages of exploration?
- Why were the small islands off the coast of West Africa important to European expansion?
- The author argues that the European voyages were based off of ideas and technology gained through trade. What are some examples?
- These voyages were dangerous. Why did explorers, merchants, and rulers accept the risks?
- What advantages did joint stock companies provide?
Third read: evaluating and corroborating
Finally, here are some questions that will help you focus on why this article matters and how it connects to other content you’ve studied.
At the end of the third read, you should be able to respond to these questions:
- Using evidence from the article, describe the extent to which this article explains how cross-cultural interactions resulted in the diffusion of technology and facilitated changes in patterns of trade and travel from 1450 to 1750.
- Economic systems both shaped and were shaped by European voyages of exploration. Can you think of one economic cause that led to these voyages? Additionally, what is one effect these voyages had on economic systems?
Now that you know what to look for, it’s time to read! Remember to return to these questions once you’ve finished reading.
Origins of Oceanic Connections
By Bennett Sherry
From 1450 to 1750, European mariners used technologies gained through centuries of trade to explore the world, connect its oceans, and enrich some European states.
Origins of oceanic distortions
Take a look at the two maps below. On the top is the Mercator projection, named after a Flemish cartographer. Looks familiar, right? Chances are, your understanding of the world is based on this map. This map is a lie. It distorts the north and south poles, making regions there appear larger compared to the equator. Why does this matter? For a start, it makes Europe look bigger than it is. Greenland looks much larger than Mexico, but in reality, they’re around the same size. Canada looks to be about the same size as Africa, but Africa is three times larger. The map on the bottom is the Robinson projection, a more accurate (still imperfect) representation of the continents.
So, why the lies? Well, feel free to verify this with your geometry teacher, but there’s no truthful way to represent a three-dimensional sphere that’s been flattened into a two-dimensional image. And the Mercator map is especially distorted because it was created in 1569, during the age of European exploration. The Mercator projection was designed to help European navigators sail in straight lines across the oceans. But it has created cultural misconceptions about the size and importance of different regions. Its use in textbooks has reinforced the idea that Europe is the most important region in world history. The oceanic explorations that started in the fifteenth century connected the world and reshaped our understandings of it in many other ways.
An age of exploration
In the fifteenth century, a number of Europeans set out on ocean voyages of exploration. It’s important to note that these explorers did not “discover” the Americas or the Pacific Islands. Their voyages shocked the Afro-Eurasian world, but there were people living in these places for thousands of years. You might as well say that the Taino people “discovered” Europeans when Christopher Columbus first arrived in the Bahamas.
The Europeans were interested in spreading Christianity and in reaping personal glory, but their biggest motivation was to find a sea route to the Indian Ocean. The Silk Road had been efficiently moving commodities from Asia to the Mediterranean for thousands of years. So why were Europeans so desperate to find a new route? Well, European economies and populations had recovered from the Black Death, and people were eager to use their wealth to buy luxuries from Asia. But the Ottoman Empire controlled trade between the Mediterranean and Asia. That meant they could tax these luxuries and use the profits to fund wars against the Hapsburg monarchs, who ruled Spain for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For Catholic monarchs in Iberia (Spain and Portugal)—who fought a series of wars to drive Muslim powers from the Iberian Peninsula—this was unacceptable. Italian merchants, especially from Venice, continued to trade with the Ottomans.
As Europeans sought new sea routes, they depended on knowledge passed down through generations by many people from many places. Venetian and Genoese sailors pioneered sea routes from the Mediterranean to the North Atlantic in the thirteenth century. Italian banks funded Iberian explorers. Arab mariners sailed down the West African coast. Vikings and fishermen had been traveling as far as Iceland for centuries.
But what really launched oceanic connections was the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of islands off the West African coast, including the Canary Islands and Madeira. In the fifteenth century, these islands became waypoints where ships could resupply on their way across the Atlantic. The islands became laboratories of capitalism that forever reshaped production and distribution methods. It was on islands like Madeira that Europeans first experimented with large-scale sugar production, enslaving the islands’ indigenous populations—and North Africans—to work on plantations. Columbus brought the first sugar cane plants to the Caribbean from Madeira, where his father-in-law owned a sugar plantation.
New ships, old tech
The Atlantic and Pacific oceans are big. Like, really big. And there’s a lot of wind. It blows. Knowing one’s latitude and direction was the difference between making a world-changing discovery and dying of thirst. The navigational advances that allowed Europeans to cross oceans were built upon previous technologies and knowledge that had made their way west through Afro-Eurasian networks.
Chinese and Arab cartographers made expansive and detailed maps, and Arab scholars translated ancient geography texts from Greek. The most accomplished mariner of the Islamic world was a man named Ahmad Ibn Majid. His book, Kitab al-Fawa’id, provided a guide to routes and ports around the Indian Ocean. Portuguese navigators and Jewish mathematicians cooperated to develop new techniques for determining latitude using trigonometry. To make their calculations, sailors used the astrolabe, which had made its way west through the Islamic world, and the magnetic compass, which was invented in China.
Before they could navigate across oceans, Europeans needed durable ships for the rough waters of the Atlantic. During the medieval period, European ships were mostly single-mast cogs or galleys with rows of oars. But these oar-powered ships were designed for coastal waters or inland seas. They were inefficient on open oceans. As Iberians started sailing the Atlantic, they developed the caravel and carrack ship designs. These ships had three or four masts and rear-mounted rudders (first used in ancient China). They adopted the lateen sails used in the Indian Ocean. Ships equipped with these triangular sails could sail against the wind. Since they didn’t need large crews of rowers, they could carry more food and cargo for longer oceanic voyages.
Risky business
Despite new technologies, these voyages were incredibly dangerous. For example, in the 1520s, Ferdinand Magellan—a Portuguese mariner employed by Spain—led the first circumnavigation of the globe. The voyage took three years, five ships, and 270 sailors—but only one ship and 18 sailors returned. Magellan was killed on an island in the Philippines. In the early sixteenth century, as many as half of all Portuguese ships setting out for the Indian Ocean were lost at sea. When a ship sank, investors lost not only the ship, but the cargo it carried.
So, if these voyages were so risky, why bother? Well, they made some people very rich. By the time goods from Asia reached Europe, they had traveled thousands of miles by ship and caravan, carried by dozens of merchants. And since each merchant had to make a profit, the goods that reached Europe were expensive. By sailing around Africa, the Portuguese opened a direct route—no need for the Silk Road and the Ottoman middlemen with their taxes. They made alliances with West African states and built fortified trading posts that gave them direct access to West African gold, bypassing the Tran-Saharan trade. So, even with losses at sea, Portuguese merchants were able to sell for lower prices than their Italian competitors. By cutting out the middlemen, Portuguese merchants were often able to offer lower prices than their Italian competitors on luxuries like gold, spices, and porcelain.
The Spanish, meanwhile, conquered land in the Americas that had large deposits of silver. They forced indigenous people to mine it. Then, using even larger ships called galleons, the Spanish pioneered routes across the Pacific Ocean. By the 1570s, they had started a thriving trade that sent Spanish silver to China and India by way of the Philippines. The trade in Spanish silver would drive the global market for the next two centuries.
The Portuguese and Spanish used violence to control access to resources and trade. But neither remained dominant for long. By the seventeenth century, their grip on global trade slipped as the Dutch, English, and others arrived in the Americas and the Indian Ocean.
Trading shares, not sharing trade
In 1600, the Netherlands was a small republic on the edge of Afro-Eurasia. They had only recently gained independence from Spain. But between 1600 and 1800, 49 percent of all ships in the Eurasian trade were Dutch. The Dutch developed financial technologies that supported their dominance: joint stock companies. Early versions of these financial models and credit systems had been pioneered in Asia. Joint stock companies are owned by many different shareholders. Institutions like the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, which opened in 1602, allowed Dutch citizens to invest in small shares of businesses. This limited risk by allowing people to invest money in several different businesses. So, if one ship sank, they didn’t lose everything. Limiting risk made people more willing to trust their money to Dutch merchants.
The most important joint stock companies were the East India Companies. The Dutch East India Company (VOC, from Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie) and the British East India Company (EIC) were the first, but others soon followed. These companies, owned by shareholders and backed by governments, held monopolies on trade between the Indian Ocean and their home ports. They acted almost like independent states in the Indian Ocean. They had armies. They could mint coin, build cities, conduct diplomacy, and start wars. They helped expand the reach of European empires around the world.
The explorers of Western Europe—and later, its trading companies—had the full power and wealth of European states backing them up. This was not unique. The Ming Empire funded Zheng He’s massive armadas. But Zheng He’s mission was diplomacy, not discovery or conquest. European monarchs expected explorers to find new routes and conquer new territory. As news of the Iberian explorations reached the rest of Europe, other states joined the competition, launching their own expeditions. European states funded explorers with the reasonable expectation that their voyages would result in new discoveries or new territories that would help their states gain an advantage in controlling global trade routes.
Author bio
Bennett Sherry holds a PhD in history from the University of Pittsburgh and has undergraduate teaching experience in world history, human rights, and the Middle East at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Maine at Augusta. Additionally, he is a research associate at Pitt’s World History Center. Bennett writes about refugees and international organizations in the twentieth century.
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What does the author say was the biggest motivation behind European's voyages of exploration(3 votes)
