Effects of the discoveries and empires
Before the discovery of America and the sea route to Asia, the Mediterranean had been the trading and naval centre of Europe and the Near East. Italian seamen were rightly considered to be the best, and they commanded the first royally sponsored transatlantic expeditions—Columbus for Spain, John Cabot for England, and Giovanni da Verrazano for France.
Europe’s shift to the Atlantic
Until then the Western countries had lain on the fringe of civilization, with nothing apparently beyond them but Iceland and small islands. With the discovery of the Cape route and America, nations formerly peripheral found themselves central, with geographical forces impelling them to leadership.
The Mediterranean did not become a backwater, and the Venetian republic remained a major commercial power in the 16th century. Venice’s decline came in the 17th, though the Venetians were still formidable against the Turks. As the more powerful Dutch, French, and English replaced the Eastern pioneers of Portugal, however, the burden of competition became more than the venerable republic could bear. The last decisive naval battle fought wholly by Mediterranean seamen was Lepanto (Náupaktos, Greece), where Don John of Austria, in 1571, commanding Spanish and Italian galleys, defeated an Ottoman fleet. Although Atlantic powers thereafter often fought in the Mediterranean, they mainly fought each other, while the Italian cities became pawns in international politics. The nation-state was superseding the small principality and city-state, a trend that had begun before the discoveries. The new nations lay on the Atlantic; and, though Spain and France had Mediterranean frontages, the advantage went to those seaports belonging to substantial countries with ready access to the outer world.
Changes in Europe
The opening of old lands in Asia and new ones in America changed Europe forever, and the Iberian countries understandably felt the changes first. The Portuguese government, for a time, made large profits from its Eastern trade, and individuals prospered; but Oriental luxuries were costly compared with the European goods that Portugal offered, and the balance had to be made up in specie. This eastward drain of gold and silver had gone on long before Portuguese imperial times, but it was now intensified. Much of the bullion reaching the Orient did not circulate but was hoarded or made into ornaments; consequently, there was no inflation in Asia, and prices there did not rise enough to create a demand for Western goods, which would have reversed the flow of bullion from the West. The Portuguese obtained most of the precious metal for this trade from spice sales through Antwerp and from Africa. The drain proved critical, and, by the reign of John III, the government found itself hard pressed economically and forced to abandon overseas posts that were a financial burden. Later, beginning in the 17th century, Portugal drew its own supply of jewels and gold from Brazil.
Spain’s case was the reverse; although the first American lands discovered yielded little mineral wealth, the mines of Mexico by the 1520s and those of Potosí (in modern Bolivia) by the 1540s were shipping to Spain large quantities of bullion, much of it crown revenue. This did not furnish Charles V and Philip II their largest income; Spanish taxation still exceeded wealth from the New World, yet American silver and gold proved sufficient to cause a price revolution in Spain, where costs, depending on the region, were multiplied by three and five during the 16th century. The Spanish government wished to keep bullion from leaving the kingdom, but high prices in Spain made it a good market for outside products. Spanish industry declined in the 16th century, in part because of the sales taxes imposed by the crown, which necessitated more buying of foreign merchandise. Great quantities of bullion had to be poured out to finance the expensive Spanish European empire and the costly wars and diplomacy of Charles V and Philip II, both of whom were constantly in debt.
Price rises followed in other countries, largely from the influx of Spanish bullion. In England, where some statistics are available, costs by 1650 had risen by 250 percent over those of 1500.
The European commercial revolution, which brought increased industry, more trade, and larger banks, had begun before the discoveries, but it received stimulus from them. Bullion from America helped create a money economy, replacing the older and largely barter exchange—a trend accentuated by greater European mineral production in the early 16th century. The trade emporiums of Italy and the Baltic Hanseatic League declined and were largely replaced by those of the Dutch Republic, England, and France. Joint-stock companies made an impressive appearance, notably the East India Companies of the Dutch Republic, England, and France in the 17th century. The mercantile theory that precious metals constitute the true wealth, though it had attracted advocates for a long time, now came into full vogue and continued to dominate economic thinking.
Discovery introduced Europe to new foods and beverages. Coffee, from Ethiopia, had been consumed in Arabia and Egypt before its wide European use began in the 17th century. Tobacco, an American plant smoked by Indians, won an Old World market despite many individual objectors; the same proved true of chocolate from Mexico and tea from Asia. The South American potato became a staple food in such places as Ireland and central Europe. Cotton, from the Old World, took firm root in the New, from which Europe received an enormously increased supply. Sugar, introduced to the American tropics, along with its molasses and rum derivatives, in time became the principal exports of those regions. Spice was certainly more plentiful than before the discoveries, though the Dutch, when they controlled the East Indies, were able to limit production and thus to keep the price of cloves and nutmegs high.
The influence of the discoveries permeated literature. Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, printed in 1516 and dealing with an imaginary island, was suggested by South America. The Portuguese poet Luís de Camões recounted the voyage of Vasco da Gama, though fancifully, in epic verse. Michel de Montaigne discoursed upon American Indians, some of whom he had seen in France. Christopher Marlowe’s drama Tamburlaine (1587), though based on the life of the Asiatic conqueror, was an exhortation to his fellow Englishmen to penetrate the New World.
Historiography acquired a broader base by taking the newly discovered lands into account. Astronomy was revolutionized by European penetration of the Southern Hemisphere and discovery of constellations unknown before. Map makers, typified by the Fleming Gerardus Mercator and the Dutchman Abraham Ortelius, portrayed the world in terms that are still recognizable.
Colonies from northern Europe and mercantilism (17th century)
The northern Atlantic powers, for understandable reasons, acquired no permanent overseas possessions before 1600. The United Provinces of the Netherlands spent the final decades of the 16th century winning independence from Spain; France had constant European involvements and wars of religion; England, matrimonially allied with Spain as late as 1558, was undergoing its Protestant Reformation and long was unwilling to challenge predominant Spain openly in any manner.
The Dutch
Although England’s defeat of Philip II’s Armada in 1588 helped to lessen Spanish sea power, it was the Dutch who early in the next century really broke that power and became the world’s foremost naval and commercial nation, with science and skills commensurate with their prowess. Only late in the 17th century did they decline, because of Holland’s limited size and the inferiority of its geographical position to England’s. The Dutch, meanwhile, penetrated all the known oceans, including the Arctic, and waged unrelenting war against the Iberian kingdoms.
The Dutch coveted the Portuguese commercial empire more than the Spanish continental one. They took much of the Portuguese East and invaded Brazil (1624–54), the richer half of which they controlled for a time. They also penetrated Portuguese Angola, which they desired because the slaves it exported were beginning to work the Brazilian plantations. They ultimately failed in the South Atlantic, though they gained Dutch Guiana (now Suriname), Curaçao, and what later became British Guiana (Guyana). Meanwhile, Willem Schouten, one of their free-lance voyagers, had made the discovery of Cape Horn in 1616.
Eastern pursuits
The Dutch States-General, in 1602, chartered the United East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, popularly called the Dutch East India Company), a joint-stock enterprise with investment open to all. In control was a board of 17 directors, the so-called Heeren XVII, who received a monopoly of navigational rights eastward around the Cape of Good Hope and westward through the Strait of Magellan. They could make treaties with native princes on behalf of the States-General (from which they were scarcely separable), establish garrisoned forts, and appoint governors and justices. The company had no interest in extending Protestantism, and there was no mention of religious conversion, though Calvinist ministers later gained converts in the East, mostly in communities previously made Catholic by Portuguese Jesuits.
The company established headquarters first at Bantam in Java in 1607, later moving them to Jacatra, renamed Batavia (now Jakarta), in the same island. Its two main objectives were the ouster of European competitors—Portuguese, English, and Spanish—and dominance of local trade, previously in native hands. Portuguese vigour had somewhat declined, and the Dutch were victorious in most armed encounters. They also squeezed out the English, whose own East India Company thereafter concentrated efforts in the Indian peninsula.
The principal builder of the Dutch Oriental empire was Jan Pieterszoon Coen, company governor general from 1618 to 1623 and again from 1627 until his death in 1629. Financially, local trade monopoly was even more important than the expulsion of white competitors. The extension of Dutch control to islands beyond Java had started before the governorship of Coen, who accentuated the process. He and other company officials behaved ruthlessly; for example, when the inhabitants of the nutmeg-growing island of Great Banda (modern Pulau Banda Besar in Indonesia) resisted the Dutch in 1621, Coen had 2,500 of the inhabitants massacred and 800 more transported to Batavia. Company policy was to restrict clove production to Amboina and a few neighbouring islands firmly under Dutch control. To insure this, about 65,000 clove trees were destroyed in the Moluccas, and Dutch subjection of Macassar made the monopoly virtually complete. In 1656 the famous Moluccas were described as a wilderness. Besides being a conqueror, Coen was an able businessman and an economist. When he died he was engaged in gaining a monopoly of the pepper of interior Sumatra, which was later sealed off securely by the fall of Portuguese Malacca in 1641.
Batavia became the focal point of the Dutch East, and through it passed the commerce of China, Japan, India, Ceylon, and Persia, bound for Europe or other Oriental ports. The Dutch never monopolized the China trade because the Portuguese held Macau, the Spaniards held Manila, and the Japanese, for a time, engaged in this commerce. The Dutch gained a foothold in Formosa in 1624 but lost it to a Chinese pirate in 1662. After Japan became exclusionist in 1641, a trickle of Dutch trade continued to enter it through the small island of Deshima (now part of Nagasaki, Japan), even after the dissolution of the United East India Company in 1799.
The economy of Java changed somewhat after the importation of the coffee plant in 1696. Coffee, often simply called java, rapidly became a major island crop and was exported from there to Dutch America. The company had earlier brought coffee to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), but that experiment had failed when a blight attacked its leaves. The company ousted the Portuguese from Ceylon and dominated the island until it was itself dispossessed by the British in 1796. Under its jurisdiction, as earlier, the major Ceylonese export was cinnamon, though the Dutch also dealt in jewels and pepper and carried on a trade in elephants.
In their constant search for commercial outlets, the company’s officials sponsored new exploration. Coen’s ablest successor, Antonio van Diemen, governor general in 1636–45, sent Abel Tasman to investigate the great land (Australia) previously sighted by Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch seamen. Tasman sailed around the continent and discovered Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), Staatenland (New Zealand), and the Tonga and Fiji Islands, but their commercial possibilities seemed insufficient to warrant further attention.
Dutch penetration of the East was not colonization; small farmers and artisans neither could nor would compete with the abundant, cheap native labour. Those Dutchmen going eastward were company officials, seamen and soldiers, overseers of plantations and commerce, and a few scientists and Calvinist clergymen; there was no place for others.
The Dutch moved into uninhabited Mauritius, which they later abandoned and saw pass first to France and finally to Great Britain. The Heeren XVII felt the need of a station on the arduous voyage between the home country and the East. They obtained it at Cape Town (founded in 1652 by Jan van Riebeeck), which company ships thereafter regularly visited for fresh meat and vegetables to reduce scurvy. The town did not altogether live up to first expectations because the harbour was exposed, but the hinterland possessed a good climate and no dangerous natives. Beginning in the 1680s the company encouraged a moderate influx by Dutch families and French Huguenot exiles. Although the British conquered the colony in 1806, the descendants of these early settlers remained the largest white element and spoke a variant of Dutch, which became Afrikaans.
Western pursuits
Dutch activity in the South Atlantic, Guyana, the West Indies, and New Netherland (New York) was the work of the West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie), founded in 1621. This never proved as successful as the Heeren XVII’s generally profitable enterprise, but it did produce results. Except for the Cape, the only real Dutch colonization undertaking was New Netherland in North America, started in 1624 by the West India Company. Ft. Amsterdam, or New Amsterdam, was founded, and two years later the company agent Peter Minuit made a 60-guilder ($24) transaction with the local Indians for the purchase of Manhattan island. Dutch settlement along the Hudson from New Amsterdam to Ft. Orange (Albany) remained sparse; the company’s insistence on monopolizing the Indian fur trade discouraged Dutchmen from migrating there. Further, the policy of creating large patroon land grants, five in all, along the river under feudal proprietors, limited settlement. New Amsterdam itself became fairly thriving because it possessed the best harbour in North America. Many besides Dutchmen settled there; some came from nearby New England, and there was a sprinkling of French, Scandinavian, Irish, German, and Jewish inhabitants. The city was weakly defended and fell rather easily to an English fleet in 1664; it was renamed New York. Although the Dutch retook it briefly in 1673–74, the colony became permanently English by the Treaty of Westminster in 1674. The West India Company was then dissolved, to be reconstituted for exploitation of the Caribbean holdings but to attempt no further territorial expansion.
