(TIS) Maritime Empires Lesson

Maritime Empires Lesson

As the period flourished, a variety of factors, both internal and external, will contribute to state formation, expansion and decline.   Governments will keep order in a variety of ways such as administrative establishments, guidelines, and measures. These governments will acquire, keep, and exert power in many different ways and for many different purposes thus creating maritime empires that would span the globe for some countries. Europeans will establish many new trading posts in both Africa and Asia establishing themselves in both Atlantic trade as well as Indian Ocean trade and will prove to be profitable for both monarchs and merchants alike. As rulers of Europe sought to expand their influence through mercantilist policies and practices they will employ a variety of methods to accomplish this. Some monarchs will fund explorers themselves while in other countries joint-stock companies will be utilized by merchants and rulers alike in help fund exploration and will help countries to complete with one another in global commerce.  

 

Using these monopoly companies, Europe will facilitate a new global circulation of goods and flow of silver, especially for the Spanish. This silver would then be used to purchase Asian goods for the Atlantic trade network and also appease Chinese demand for silver. As these new systems grew, they will integrate with the existing Afro-Eurasian commercial practices to create a new transoceanic market.  

 

In the Indian Ocean

In the Indian Ocean, with the arrival of Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch merchants, some disturbance will occur as well as restructuring of existing trade networks there but trade will continue to flourish and include intra-Asian trade and Asian merchants. However, despite the profitability of this new trade system, some Asian states, such as Ming and Qing China as well as Tokugawa Japan, will seek to limit their contact as they will view this as an economic and cultural disruption to their countries and this adopt restrictive or isolationist trade policies to limit their contact.  

 

Impact in the Americas

The world's productive system systems will continue to be very much centered on agriculture but major changes will happen in agricultural labor with the Atlantic slave trade and the encomienda system in the Americas, as well as with the systems and locations of manufacturing as manufacturing shifts to the industrialized Europe. This them will impact gender and social structures, as well as environmental processes across the globe. As mercantilism rises, European countries will seek colonies as sources of raw materials as well as ready markers for their manufactured goods this shifting productive systems where everything would have previously occurred in the same country or continent/hemisphere.   As far as social structure the caste system will greatly impact the Americas as more and more mixed race individuals are born in Spanish America with the unions of whites, natives and Africans.

 

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