1. David Stevenson<br />4/18/11<br />History 140<br />Mr. Arguello<br />Peoples and Empires Post 2<br />Las casas’s protests came when Spain was at its strongest state. 1555, Charles abdicated in favor of his son Philip, in 1580; Philip acquired the claim to the Portuguese empire. It lasted until 1640. In the 1560’s Spanish forces seized the Philippines and there plots began to invade China. Mateo Ricci knew nothing would come of this invasion but a loss for the Spanish forces. The decline of Spain began in mid-1500. In 1568 the Netherlands rose in revolt which led to a war for 80 years. After this war Spain was financially and morally bankrupt. At that time no one really understood inflation or had any idea how economics in general worked. They did not consider that the value of metals had risen. As a result, the economy of the Spanish slid into stagnation. Then the war of the Spanish occurred in 1700.<br />Topic 1: The Unification of Europe without Church<br />Europeans had taken possession of much of America and had established enduring footholds in Asia and Africa. This rapid overseas expansion had been made possible by social and economic changes in the European nation states – evolution of ships that use wind for their advantage. On April 18, 1521, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther appeared before Charles V at the imperial Diet at the city of Worms to answer charges on heterodoxy. The treaty of Westphalia created what has come to be called the Europe of Nations, “International Communities.” It would now no longer be possible for nations to fight among themselves over how to interpret God’s intentions for mankind. By the time the treaty was signed, the map of Europe had undergone a transformation. Mostly Protestant were in the North and mostly Catholics south. This divide was not only religious but also cultural, political and economical. Dominations of the lands were beyond the reaches of most European nations, but the seas were not. The power of Commerce involved not merely the exchange of goods but also contact between the people and a greater understanding and tolerance between them. Paradoxically, perhaps, the earliest European overseas empire to be almost wholly concerned with trade rather than conquest had been the Portuguese. The Portuguese tried to establish trade in Africa, but were thwarted off by the skill of the African, the climate and the disease that came from there. The only true colony the Portuguese established anywhere was in Brazil. <br />Trade was an entirely different way of perceiving both what an empire was and what it might become. England’s great rival for empire in the Americas and lesser degree in India was France. In 1756 the two nations went to war, the French and Indian war, was the first prolonged conflict between two European powers that was fought very extensively in their overseas territory. In 1763 they signed the Treaty of Paris, which gave Britain all of North America and the French kept India. The Seven Years War left Britain the most powerful of the European nations and left it with a crippling debt. In 1775 the British prepared to fight a long and bitter war against the American colonies. It would spell defeat for Britain because of the long trip across the Atlantic. In the early decades of the 18th century the Asian world had also begun to change. The East India Company became the true ruler of India until its dissolution by the crown in 1858. Burke shared none of Las Casa’s faith in divine retribution – but it did threaten the collapse of what Burke thought of as “the civilization of Europe.” Burke’s warning, however, fell on deaf ears.<br />Topic 2: Slavery and the Final Frontier<br />The British concern to build an empire of liberty failed in the long run due to slavery. Slaves were everywhere, the silent and silenced masses, the peoples with whose labor Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism had been created. Modern slavery was in many ways a new beginning and quite unlike its ancient and medieval predecessors. It began August 8, 1444, when the first cargo of 235 Africans taken from Senegal was put ashore at the Portuguese port of Lagos. A slave market was created and the traffic in black gold had begun. Modern slavery was the creation of a new form of empire building. The European demand for slaves effectively transformed what had been a local commercial practice into the greatest force immigration in human history. Between 1492 and 1820, 5 or 6 times as many Africans went to America as white Europeans. Few had died in the ancient world as a consequence of the trade; countless millions perished during the infamous “middle passage” between Africa and the Americas. The vast majority of modern slaves, however, and all those employed on the plantations in America were Africans, who had clearly not been acquired in a “just” war. As protests against slavery, and in particular the slave trade, mounted, it became increasingly difficult to find any sustainable argument for its existence. Slave could, after all, breed with their masters – a persistent fear in slaveholding societies. They could converse with their masters, and they could even, unlike sheep, rise in revolt against their masters, as Benjamin Franklin observed. Diderot praised it, of “an enjoyment in one’s own mind,” to which all human beings are entitled. The slaves denied this feature of what it is to be a person, was thus reduced to a level lower even than that of the dogs the Spaniards had brought with them to America. As humans, the Africans had an absolute right to freedom, but this did not make them the equal of the Europeans. Slavery of any for kind – for there are many informal kinds still in existence – came to an end in the terrorist of the European overseas empires during the first decades of the 19th century. Slaving had become a capital offence. A painful period in human history, which had lasted for millennia, civil was within Africa. By the middle of the 18th century, the earth’s entire surface had been explored, charted, and in some cases colonized by the Europeans. All, that is, except one area: the Pacific. The pacific had, of course, had been crossed and recrossed many times since the circumnavigation of the fleet that had set out in 1519 under the command of Magellan. In the 18th century the pacific became the final frontier. In 1766, a French nobleman, mathematician and explorer named Antoine de Bougainville left Nantes on the frigate la boudeuse headed out into the Pacific. “All are encouraged to follow the inclination of their hearts or the law of their census, and are publicly applauded for doing so. The air they breathe, their songs, their dances, which are almost always accompanied with lascivious gestures, all speak at every moment of the pleasures of love.”<br />“These people,” Bougainville concluded, “live only in the tranquility and the pleasure of the census.” Because of this he called the island the New Cythera, after the island off the Peloponnese on which Venus was born. We, of course, know it as Tahiti. Bougainville made Tahiti famous throughout Europe. In the years that followed his voyage, British and French ships would sail across the entire length and breadth of the Pacific ocean, until virtually every island had been mopped, and in most cases formally, if also only fleetingly, “possessed” by one or another of the European powers. European disease is tranquility turn to despair by Christian missionaries. The Pacific islands were not however merely the Rococo pleasure grounds that Bougainville’s and Commerson’s descriptions had made of them. They were also revictualing places for European merchant ships and potential stage on the route to the fable southern continent, thus should it have existed. Both French and Britain watch anxiously by Spain which still look upon the Pacific as its own special spear of influence, had vague but quite evident the signs on the potential riches of the southern ocean. <br />