Transoceanic Connections

What the Indian Ocean gave sailors, and the Atlantic did not

The Topic 2.3 chapter sets out the Indian Ocean system. The monsoon reverses twice a year with great reliability, so a captain knew months in advance when he could sail east and when he could come home. Voyages ran between known ports along coasts, with landmarks, pilots and centuries of accumulated route knowledge written into pilot books. Dhows and junks were superbly suited to it, and the junk in particular, with watertight bulkheads and a stern-post rudder, was arguably the most capable vessel afloat.

Now take that captain to the Atlantic. There is no seasonal reversal to carry him home. Beyond the coastal shelf there are almost no landmarks, only a few scattered islands, and past the Canaries there was, for European sailors, no accumulated route knowledge because nobody had come back to write any. The prevailing winds off West Africa blow steadily from the northeast, which is to say they push a ship south and hold it there. And the distances are such that a voyage means weeks out of sight of land with whatever food and water you loaded at the start.

So four problems, and it is worth writing them as questions because each section below answers one: What kind of ship can work against the wind and still carry enough cargo and provisions to matter? How do you know where you are with no coast in view? How do you get home against a wind that blows the wrong way? And how do you know any of this in advance, when nobody has done it before?

Why this is not a story about European cleverness

A caution worth taking early, because it shapes how the whole unit reads. Europeans did not work out the Atlantic first because they were better sailors or better engineers; on the evidence of Topic 2.3 they were neither. Part of the reason is that they were the ones with the problem.

China had the ships, the navigation and the capital to sail as far as East Africa, and the Topic 2.3 chapter explains why the Ming court stopped sending its great treasure fleets after 1433 (Chinese merchants kept trading across Southeast Asia). Indian Ocean merchants already had a working trade system reaching from Africa to China; sailing west into empty ocean solved no problem they had. Europe sat at the far end of that system, and why its rulers wanted to reach Asia by sea is the subject of Topic 4.2.

The honest version of this topic, and the one that will serve you in every later unit, is that borrowed tools, new ships and one genuine discovery about the wind let European sailors cross the Atlantic and come back. Keep that shape and the whole unit stops sounding like a story about who deserved to win.

The margin

Pepper grew on the Malabar coast of India and cost little there. By the time it reached a European table it had crossed the Indian Ocean, been sold at a Red Sea or Gulf port, carried overland through Mamluk Egypt or Ottoman territory, taxed at each transfer, sold again to Venetian merchants who held privileged access to those markets, and shipped to European ports. Most of those margins went to Muslim states and merchants, and the last to Venice, and the retail price at the end was a large multiple of the price at the source. One historian's figures (M. N. Pearson): a kilo of pepper that cost 1 or 2 grams of silver where it grew cost 10 to 14 in Alexandria, 14 to 18 in Venice, and 20 to 30 elsewhere in Europe.

That is the economic motive stated properly, and notice what it implies. The prize was not "spices are valuable," it was cutting out the chain. A European power that reached the source by sea would buy at Calicut prices and sell at Lisbon prices, capturing every margin between. It would also, as a bonus its rulers cared about, stop enriching the Muslim states and the Venetian republic that currently collected them.

Historians since A. H. Lybyer in 1915 have made the necessary correction here: the Ottomans did not close the overland routes, spice prices did not jump after 1453, and no blockade forced Europe to sea. The trade continued. What drove the search was the cost and the number of hands it passed through, which is a motive of a completely different kind and a much better one to write.

The crusading inheritance

Portugal's oceanic program did not begin with a caravel. It began in 1415 with the capture of Ceuta, a Muslim port in North Africa, which is a crusading operation in the tradition of the Iberian reconquest. Spain's westward bet comes in a year that makes the same point without comment: 1492 is both the fall of Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, and Columbus's first voyage, funded by the monarchs who had just completed that conquest.

Two specific religious motives, beyond a general desire to spread Christianity. First, outflanking the Islamic world: if a Christian power could reach the sources of the spice trade and the West African gold by sea, it would divert wealth away from the states it had spent centuries fighting. Second, the legend of Prester John, a powerful Christian monarch believed to rule somewhere beyond the Islamic lands, whose alliance would let Christendom attack from both sides. The legend was persistent enough that Portuguese expeditions were sent overland to look for him, and it is a real motive in the documents rather than a colorful detail.

The contract, which is the best evidence of all

Why did a crown back this rather than leave it to merchants? A trading voyage to a known port is a risk merchants can judge, as the Topic 2.1 chapter describes. A voyage to find out whether a route exists may bring back nothing at all, may take decades of repeated attempts, and pays off mainly as a route nobody else knows, which is exactly the kind of prize a ruler values and a merchant cannot sell.

So states stepped in, in two ways. Sometimes the crown paid most of the cost itself. Sometimes it licensed a merchant or a captain to explore at his own cost, in return for a share and a claim: Portugal leased the Guinea trade to the merchant Fernão Gomes in 1469 on condition that he explore a hundred leagues of new coast a year, and England's Henry VII let John Cabot sail "at their own proper costs and charges" for a fifth of the gains. Either way the crown paid in the currency it had: monopoly rights, titles, and a share of whatever came back. The agreement Columbus obtained from the Spanish monarchs before sailing, the capitulaciones, promised him the title of Admiral of the Ocean Sea, the governorship of lands he discovered, and a tenth of the wealth obtained from them, with the offices to be hereditary.

Where crowd diseases come from

Many of the great infectious killers of Afro-Eurasia crossed to humans from animals. Measles is closely related to a cattle disease, influenza circulates among birds, pigs and people, and others have animal reservoirs or close animal relatives. That kind of crossing needs sustained contact between large numbers of people and large numbers of animals, which is what farming villages with cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, horses and chickens provide.

Do not push that further than it goes. New studies of ancient DNA, including the DNA of the germs themselves, have made several of these histories more complicated over the last two decades, and smallpox and tuberculosis no longer trace to a herd animal in any simple way, so "cows gave us this one, pigs gave us that one" is a model to use with care. Animals are a large part of the ecological story rather than the single origin of every great killer.

The second condition is population density. A disease that confers lifelong immunity on survivors burns out in a small community, because it runs out of people who can catch it. Only in a large, connected population can it become endemic, circulating permanently and infecting each new generation of children.

Afro-Eurasia had both conditions for millennia, and the trade networks of Unit 2 stitched its populations together, which is why the Topic 2.6 chapter has a pandemic in it. The result is a population in which most adults had survived several of these diseases in childhood and carried immunity to them.

The Americas had neither condition in the same measure. The domesticated animals were the llama and alpaca in the Andes, the guinea pig, the turkey and the dog, none of them living in the crowded, continuous proximity to humans that European livestock did. So although the Americas had their own diseases, they had not generated the same family of crowd infections, and the populations of the two hemispheres had been effectively separated since the peopling of the Americas.

What "no immunity" actually means

A virgin soil epidemic is an outbreak in a population with few people carrying prior immunity to a pathogen. Immunity to smallpox is acquired rather than inherited: a European adult was resistant because he had survived the disease as a child, not because of anything in his ancestry. Where almost nobody has had it, the pathogen reaches every age group at once instead of only children, which is the part that turns an epidemic into something else.

That is the mechanism to write, and it is about proportions rather than absolutes: not everyone is infected and not everyone who is infected dies, but enough adults are sick at the same time that the society stops working. When every adult is sick simultaneously, nobody plants, nobody harvests, nobody hauls water, nobody nurses the sick, and nobody leads. People die of hunger, thirst and neglect who would have survived the infection itself. Then the next disease arrives, into a population already weakened and disorganized, and after it the next: smallpox, then measles, then influenza, then typhus, in waves across decades.

Some of the killers also needed carriers, and the ships brought those too. Black rats came ashore with the cargo. Malaria, which most scientists now think reached the Americas with Europeans and enslaved Africans, is spread by mosquitoes, and the mosquito that carries yellow fever most likely crossed from West Africa in ships' water casks. The College Board calls these disease vectors, and its word for how they crossed is "unintentional."

Add the conditions colonization created, forced labor, relocation, warfare, disrupted farming, and the deaths add up. Disease is the largest single factor. It was not a natural disaster that happened to strike at the same time as conquest: it traveled along the routes conquest opened, and it struck people whom conquest was already stripping of food, of their own labor and of the order of their lives.

What the chain gets right, and what it leaves out

It gets one link right. Disease emptied land of workers, in the Caribbean almost entirely within a few decades, and the new plantations of sugar, and later tobacco, needed a great many workers. That is a real connection between this topic and the next.

It leaves out the rest. The plantation worked by enslaved Africans was not invented in the Americas: on Madeira, sugar was grown with enslaved workers, including Canary Islanders and Africans, before 1492, and a Portuguese trade in enslaved Africans along the West African coast already existed, as the Topic 4.2 chapter describes. Europeans chose to bring that system across the Atlantic and to expand it. Disease created a shortage of workers; it did not decide who would be enslaved. People decided that.

How the labor systems worked, from the Spanish grants of Indigenous labor to chattel slavery on the plantations, is the subject of Topic 4.4. For this topic, the honest sentence is the qualified one.

Why rivals built empires at all

The College Board puts the cause in three words: the maritime empires were "driven largely by political, religious, and economic rivalries." Each word does work. Political: Portugal and Spain divided their claims in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494; the Dutch Republic fought Spain for its independence from 1568; England and France fought each other for colonies through the 1600s and 1700s. Religious: papal bulls of the 1450s framed Portuguese expansion as war on Muslim powers and a Christian mission, and after the Reformation, Protestant England and the Dutch fought Catholic Spain. Economic: West African gold, Asian spices and American sugar, and the profits of carrying them.

Rivalry also explains why the empires kept changing hands. When one state found a route or a rich coast, the others came after it. The Dutch took Elmina from Portugal in 1637 and Malacca in 1641; the English and French built colonies of their own in North America and the Caribbean in the early 1600s.

What Portugal actually seized

Portugal's first great post was in Africa: the fortress of São Jorge da Mina, Elmina, built on the Gold Coast in 1482 to buy gold. In Asia, Afonso de Albuquerque took Goa in 1510, and by 1530 it was the capital of the Estado da Índia, Portugal's network of eastern posts. Malacca, taken in 1511, controls the main strait between the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. Hormuz, taken in 1515, sits at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. Add fortified posts down the East African coast and along the Indian shore.

Every one of them is a port, and several, Malacca and Hormuz above all, sit at chokepoints. None of them is a province. The Portuguese held dozens of fortified points and almost no land behind them, which is exactly what a network built to tax movement, rather than to own land, looks like. A trading post made money for the king who backed it and the merchants who traded through it, the College Board's words, in two ways: by buying goods where they were produced, and by taxing other people's ships.

The tax was the cartaz, a pass that a merchant ship bought from the Portuguese, which committed it to calling at a Portuguese port, paying duties there and carrying none of the goods Portugal claimed for itself. A ship sailing without one could be seized by Portuguese patrols.

The merchants who kept trading

The cartaz changed who taxed the ocean. It did not change who traded on it. Gujarati merchants from western India kept shipping cotton cloth across the ocean, often buying a pass and sailing on, and ships from Gujarat's ports kept carrying cargo and pilgrims to the Red Sea. Swahili Arab traders kept the ports of the East African coast trading. Javanese merchants kept carrying rice to Malacca, whoever held it. And the Omanis pushed Portugal back: they drove the Portuguese from Muscat in 1650 and took Fort Jesus at Mombasa in 1698.

Much of the ocean's trade stayed intra-Asian trade: trade between one Asian port and another, in Asian goods. European merchants often made their money by joining it, carrying goods from one Asian port to the next, as the Portuguese did between China and Japan (section 02). That is why the College Board says the old networks "continued to flourish": the newcomers disrupted and taxed them, and the merchants who ran them kept them going.

Why ports and not provinces

This is the mechanism the section turns on. Portuguese naval artillery could out-shoot the fleets it met in the Indian Ocean and could batter a harbor, which is how the Portuguese won at Diu in 1509. But a ship's guns cannot occupy a river valley. Ashore, out of range of the guns, the Portuguese faced Gujarat, Vijayanagara, the Safavids, the Ottomans and Ming China (and, after 1526, the Mughals), states with armies, revenues and populations many times their own. Their empire took the shape of their advantage: decisive at sea and at the water's edge, small fifty miles inland.

The older forms that continued

In many African societies, slavery was old and took forms unlike the plantations. Enslaved people, often captives from wars, were taken into households, where they worked, served or married, and over time they or their children could become part of the family. In Kongo, a king's letter of 1550 speaks of a rival's relatives "even if they are slaves," and Heywood concludes that domestic slaves in elite households were counted as part of the extended family. That was not freedom: enslaved people could still be sold. But it was not slavery passed down forever.

Captives were also carried out of Africa by older routes than the Atlantic: north across the Sahara to North Africa and the Mediterranean world, and east across the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to Arabia, Persia and India. Those trades were centuries old before 1500 and went on through this whole period alongside the Atlantic trade.

What the plantations changed

Sugar, and later tobacco, needed huge numbers of workers, and the plantations of Brazil and the Caribbean bought enslaved Africans to do the work. The estimates in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database show the change in one comparison: about 278,000 Africans were forced onto ships bound for the Americas in the whole 1500s, and more than 2.5 million in the fifty years from 1701 to 1750.

The CED names three kinds of change. Demographic: on Barbados enslaved Africans outnumbered Europeans by the late 1600s, and across the British, French and Dutch Caribbean colonies Africans and their descendants became most of the people. Social: plantation slavery was for life and inherited, and colonial law tied it to race; Virginia's law of 1662 made the children of enslaved women enslaved. Cultural: African languages, beliefs and foods crossed with the people who carried them, and how they mixed with American and European cultures is Topic 4.5.

The idea, and what follows from it

The idea starts from a belief: a kingdom's strength is the gold and silver it holds, and one kingdom's gain in trade is another's loss. If that is true, three policies follow. Sell more than you buy, because the difference arrives as gold and silver. Protect your own makers with taxes on foreign goods, because buying foreign goods sends money out. And keep the colonies' trade for yourself: colonies should send raw goods home and buy the home country's finished goods, and trade with no one else.

This set of ideas is now called mercantilism, but its critics named it. Adam Smith in 1776 called it the "mercantile system," and the word mercantilism came into use later still. The people who held these ideas did not call themselves mercantilists. One of them, Thomas Mun, a London merchant and a director of the English East India Company, put the first policy in a sentence: England "must ever observe this rule; to sell more to strangers yearly than wee consume of theirs in value." His book was printed in 1664, after his death.

Rulers wrote the idea into law. Spain's Casa de Contratación, founded in Seville in 1503, licensed and registered the trade with Spain's American colonies, and silver crossed the Atlantic in fleets guarded by warships. England's Navigation Act of 1651 said goods from Asia, Africa and the Americas could come into England only in English ships; it was aimed at Dutch shippers, who carried much of Europe's trade. Acts from 1660 listed colonial goods, sugar and tobacco among them, that could be shipped only to England. In France, the minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert used tariffs, royal support for workshops and royal trading companies from the 1660s.

A company that could go to war

A voyage to Asia cost a fortune and ships were often lost. A joint-stock company spread that risk: it sold shares to many investors, who split the profits and the losses. The English East India Company was chartered by Elizabeth I in 1600. In 1602 the States General of the Dutch Republic chartered the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the VOC, and gave it, for twenty-one years, the only right of any Dutch merchant to trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. The VOC kept its capital in the company rather than paying it out after each voyage, and its shares were bought and sold in Amsterdam.

The charter is what made the company a tool of the state. It let the VOC build forts, keep soldiers, make treaties with Asian rulers and wage war. A monopoly meant that the profits of the Asia trade went to one national company rather than being competed away among Dutch merchants, which is exactly what a mercantilist government wanted, and the company's guns meant that rulers could fight rivals through it. The College Board's sentence names both uses: rulers and merchants used these companies "to finance exploration," and rulers used them "to compete against one another in global trade."

Who the trade took

About two of every three captives carried across the Atlantic were male. European buyers paid more for young men to work the plantations, and African sellers often kept women and children, whom African buyers valued. In some regions, especially parts of West Central Africa, that left communities with more women than men.

Historians argue that this changed family life where the trade hit hardest. Women did more of the farming, and more women and girls were enslaved within Africa itself, because local buyers wanted the people the Atlantic market wanted less. Some historians, Patrick Manning among them, argue that the shortage of men also made polygyny, men taking several wives, more common; others find the evidence for that thin. Some regions lost population, or grew more slowly than they would have, while states that sold captives grew richer. The College Board names these "demographic changes in Africa that resulted from the trade of enslaved persons."

A mixed Atlantic world

In the Americas, Africans, Indigenous Americans and Europeans lived side by side, usually because some of them were forced to, and each shaped what came out. The College Board's words are "the mixing of African, American, and European cultures and peoples, with all parties contributing to this cultural synthesis."

Food: dishes across the Atlantic world combined African, American and European ingredients and ways of cooking, and enslaved West Africans brought rice-farming knowledge, though historians still argue over how much it shaped rice growing on coasts such as Carolina's. Language: new languages called creoles formed, such as Haitian Creole and Papiamentu. Most of their words come from a European language, and much of their grammar and sound shows the influence of African languages; linguists still debate exactly how they formed. Music and faith mixed too, as section 06 shows.

Pulling power inward

Centralization means a ruler gathering power that others used to share. Topic 3.2 showed the tools: officials and soldiers who owed everything to the ruler, such as the Ottoman devshirme; tax systems that answered to the center; and a court, like Louis XIV's at Versailles, where great nobles spent their time under the king's eye instead of building power on their own lands.

Every one of those tools took something from someone. A king who wanted more taxes took money from towns, landowners and peasants. A king who wanted the final word took it from the judges, nobles and local assemblies who had shared it. A tsar who wanted his landholders to keep their workers took freedom of movement from the peasants. So the people who pushed back against centralization were usually the state's own subjects. These were internal challenges, from inside the state.

Pushing power outward

Expansion means a state reaching over new lands and peoples. Topics 4.2 to 4.5 showed the maritime empires doing it: forts on the coasts of Africa and Asia, colonies in the Americas, tribute and forced labor, missionaries, and the plantation economy built on enslaved Africans. Land empires expanded too: the Mughal emperors pushed south into the Deccan, and Russia pushed east and south.

Expansion took land, harvests, labor and faith from people who had never agreed to be ruled. So the people who pushed back against expansion were usually at the edges of a growing state: kingdoms it wanted to conquer, and peoples it had only recently claimed. These were external challenges, from outside the state that was pushing. (External here does not mean European states fighting each other over trade. That is Topic 4.5.)

Palmares: a state in the hills

In the hills behind the sugar coast of northeastern Brazil, people who escaped slavery built Palmares. Communities like this are called maroon communities, and in Brazil a quilombo or mocambo. Palmares was not one hideout but a cluster of many fortified towns, joined for defense, with a capital, leaders, farms, and trade with nearby settlers, who sold them guns, powder, cloth and tools for food. First reported in the late 1500s, it lasted most of the 1600s and held thousands of people: people born in Africa, people born in Brazil, and some Indigenous people and Europeans hiding from the colonial authorities.

Palmares beat back expedition after expedition, Portuguese and Dutch. In 1678 its leader, Ganga Zumba, accepted a treaty with the colonial government: freedom for those born in Palmares, in exchange for returning other runaways. Many in Palmares rejected it, and the next leader, Zumbi, fought on. In 1694 a large army of hired frontier fighters took the main town, and in 1695 Zumbi was found and killed. November 20, the day of his death, is now Brazil's Day of Black Consciousness.

Jamaica: freedom by treaty

After the English took Jamaica from Spain in 1655, people who escaped slavery built communities in the island's mountains, the Jamaica Maroons, and many more joined them over the following decades. For years the colony sent soldiers against them and could not win. In 1739 it signed treaties instead. The Maroons led by Cudjoe were promised that they would be "for ever hereafter in a perfect state of freedom and liberty," with 1,500 acres of land for themselves and their descendants.

The same treaty made them promise to send back any enslaved person who ran away to them, and to "take, kill, suppress, or destroy" other rebels on the island. Organized resistance forced a colony to recognize the Maroons' freedom, and the colony turned the Maroons into a guard for slavery.

Stono: a march for freedom

In North America, on Sunday, September 9, 1739, about twenty enslaved people gathered by the Stono River near Charleston, South Carolina, broke into a store for guns and powder, and marched south. They were heading for Spanish Florida, where the Spanish king had promised freedom to people who escaped the English colonies and became Catholic. Others joined until there were as many as a hundred. Several of the rebels came from Kongo, where Catholicism was widespread.

By that afternoon the colony's militia broke up the march, and over the following weeks and months it hunted down the survivors; one leader was not caught until 1742. Somewhere between twenty and forty white colonists died, along with dozens of rebels. The accounts disagree: one written that year counted about twenty white and forty Black dead. South Carolina answered the Stono Rebellion with the Negro Act of 1740, which tightened control over every enslaved person in the colony: it made freeing an enslaved person depend on a special act of the assembly and put every militiaman on patrol duty.

Spain and Portugal push a group out

In January 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella took Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain. On 31 March they ordered every Jew in their kingdoms who would not become Christian to leave by the end of July. Jews could take their goods, but not gold, silver or coins. Historians' estimates of how many left run from about forty thousand to two hundred thousand. Many others converted and stayed, and historians disagree about which group was larger. Many of the exiles crossed into Portugal.

Four years later, in December 1496, Portugal's king Manuel I ordered the Jews out of his kingdom too. In 1497, instead of letting most of them leave, he had them baptized by force. In both kingdoms, converts and their descendants were then watched for signs that they still practiced Judaism in secret, and Spanish "purity of blood" rules barred people with Jewish or Muslim ancestors from some offices, colleges and religious orders, even if they were Christians themselves.

This is what the College Board means by a state that suppressed diversity. Spain wanted one religion under the crown, and it was willing to lose thousands of skilled subjects to get it. Portugal, pressed by Spain as a condition of a royal marriage, forced most of its Jews to be baptized rather than let them go.

The Ottomans take them in, and how they ruled Christians and Jews

The Ottoman sultan Bayezid II let the refugees settle in his empire. Thousands came, to Istanbul, to Salonica (today Thessaloniki, in Greece) and to other cities, where Jewish communities already lived. In Salonica the newcomers set up congregations named after the places in Spain and Portugal they had come from, and by the 1500s Jews were the largest group in the city, which they stayed for centuries. Exiles from Spain set up Istanbul's first printing press, which printed books in Hebrew.

Why would a Muslim sultan welcome them? Because they were useful. The refugees were merchants, doctors, craftsmen and taxpayers, and an empire gains from people like that. A remark is often quoted in which Bayezid mocks Ferdinand for making his own kingdom poor and the sultan's rich. It is very likely a later story, but it captures the reasoning.

The Ottoman Empire already ruled millions of Christians and Jews, and it governed them by an old rule of Islamic law: they were protected subjects. They could practice their religion. Their own religious leaders ran their marriages, inheritances, schools, charity and family courts, and answered to the state for their community's taxes and good behavior. That is accommodation: making room for a group's differences. For the state, it was also cheap. It did not have to build courts and schools for every faith; it let each community run its own and collected a tax.

You may read that this was called the millet system. Use the word carefully. The tidy picture of a few neatly separated communities, each under one official chief, is mostly a nineteenth-century arrangement read backward into earlier centuries. Between 1450 and 1750 the arrangements were looser and were made community by community and city by city.

The Ottoman cavalry and their timars

For centuries the core of the Ottoman army was the sipahi, a cavalryman who held a timar: the right to collect the taxes from a piece of land, in return for riding to war when the sultan called and bringing armed men with him. A timar was not the holder's property, and it was not supposed to pass automatically to his son.

From the late 1500s, wars were won more and more by infantry with guns, paid in cash, like the Janissaries of Topic 3.1. The sultan needed money more than he needed horsemen. So the state turned more and more timar land into tax farms: the right to collect a district's taxes, sold to whoever offered the treasury the most. From 1695 the state began selling these rights for life. The sipahis faded. Some families held on to their timars, and the timar system was not abolished until 1831, but the sipahis no longer led the army. Tax farmers and powerful provincial families, who grew rich and influential collecting taxes, rose in their place. Historians no longer call this simply the empire's "decline": the state changed shape and kept going.

The Russian boyars

The boyars were Russia's great noble families. They sat on the tsar's council, the Boyar Duma, and competed for posts by the rank of their families. Earlier tsars had already curbed them: Ivan IV seized boyar lands and killed many boyars in the years of terror called the oprichnina, from 1565 to 1572. In 1682 the old system of seats by family rank was ended.

Peter the Great went further. He replaced the boyar council with a Senate he appointed, in 1711. He ordered nobles and officials to shave their beards and dress like western Europeans, and taxed those who would not. He made every nobleman serve the state, in the army or the government, for life. And in 1722 his Table of Ranks set out fourteen ranks of service in the army, the government and the court. A man's place depended on the rank he earned, and a commoner who rose high enough became a noble.

The title "boyar" faded away. The nobles did not. They kept their estates and their power over their serfs, which the Law Code of 1649 (Topic 4.6) had tightened. They lost their independence and kept their privilege.

French nobles at court, and the English exception

In France, Louis XIV had seen the Fronde as a boy (Topic 4.6). As king he centralized power. He relied on royal officials, the intendants, to run the provinces, and in 1682 he moved his court and government to his palace at Versailles, where great nobles spent their days near him, competing for offices, pensions and his favor, instead of raising armies at home. The French nobility kept their titles, their land and their freedom from the main tax, the taille. What they lost was the power to defy the king.

But the power of old elites could rise as well as fall. In England in 1688, seven leading Englishmen, most of them nobles, with a bishop among them, invited William of Orange to bring an army. King James II fled. Parliament, a body of landowning nobles and gentry, gave the crown to William and Mary and, in the Bill of Rights of 1689, set limits on the monarchs who came after them. There the old elite won.

Borrowed tools, new ships, known winds

Europe built its ocean road from borrowed knowledge (Topic 4.1). Sailors in China were steering by a magnetized needle, the compass, by about 1100, and Europeans were writing about the compass by about 1190; historians still debate how it traveled west. The astrolabe began as a Greek idea that astronomers in the Islamic world made precise, and it reached Europe through Muslim Spain. Tables of the sky, which told a pilot where the sun should stand on each day of the year, were built by Muslim and Jewish astronomers in Toledo; the almanac of Abraham Zacuto, printed in Portugal in 1496, came from that line. And the triangular lateen sail, which lets a ship work forward against the wind, had been used on the Mediterranean since Roman times and was common across the seas of the Islamic world.

Around those tools, Europeans built new ships: the small, light caravel to explore coasts, and the large carrack, with room for months of food, water, cargo and guns. Around 1600 Dutch shipbuilders designed the fluyt, which carried a large cargo with a small, cheap crew and made shipping goods much cheaper. And sailors learned the Atlantic's winds. To get home from West Africa, a ship swung far out to sea, west and north, until it caught the westerlies. Once ships could go and come back, again and again, the two halves of the world were joined, and trade was transformed.

Sugar, silver and cloth

The first economic development was new demand. Europeans wanted sugar and tobacco, crops grown on plantations in the Americas: huge farms growing one crop to sell (Topic 4.3). Buyers in Asia, Africa and Europe wanted cotton cloth woven in India and silk woven in China (Topic 4.5).

The second was silver. From 1545 the mountain at Potosí in the Andes, and from 1546 the mines at Zacatecas in Mexico, made Spanish America the world's largest source of silver. A large share of it ended up in China, where the Ming government collected most of its taxes in silver, so that millions of families needed it. From 1571, Spanish galleons carried silver across the Pacific from Acapulco to Manila, where Chinese merchants traded silk and porcelain for it.

The third was a set of rulers' tools. Mercantilist laws tried to keep a kingdom's trade for itself, and chartered companies, such as the English East India Company (1600) and the Dutch East India Company, the VOC (1602), could build forts, keep soldiers and make war (Topic 4.5).

The money was worth fighting over

Economic disputes led to rivalries and conflict between states. Off Diu, in India, a fleet of Mamluk Egypt and the sultan of Gujarat fought the Portuguese in 1509 and lost. In 1591 the army of Morocco's sultan, Ahmad al-Mansur, crossed the Sahara and defeated the Songhai Empire at Tondibi; the gold of West Africa and the salt trade were a large part of the reason. In 1623, on the spice island of Ambon, VOC officials executed English company men they accused of plotting against them. And England and the Dutch Republic fought three wars at sea between 1652 and 1674, largely over trade and shipping (Topic 4.5).

The continuities

Most people still farmed. In 1750, as in 1450, most of the world's people grew food, and the College Board's own sentence about this period begins with that fact: the world's productive systems "continued to be heavily centered on agriculture."

Much of the work itself stayed the same. A spinner in Holland, a weaver in India and a silk family in China did work their grandparents would have known, at home and as a family, with women and girls doing much of the spinning, and in China much of the weaving. Global demand made them work more. It did not replace them.

And the ladder stayed. Almost everywhere, a ruler who inherited the throne still sat at the top, and old nobles kept most of their privileges even when stronger kings squeezed them (Topic 4.7). Older forms of slavery went on inside Africa, and Gujarati, Swahili Arab, Omani and Javanese merchants kept the Indian Ocean trading, with Chinese and Armenian merchants in the markets around it; European merchants often made their money by joining that trade rather than replacing it (Topics 4.4 and 4.5).

Three ways evidence relates

A list of evidence is not an argument. An argument explains how the pieces of evidence relate to each other, and three relationships do most of the work. The first is this led to that: Europe's demand for sugar led to plantations in Barbados and Brazil, whose planters chose to buy enslaved Africans, which led to a huge slave trade, which left villages in West Central Africa with more women than men. One chain of causes links three continents.

The second is the same pattern, two places: a spinner in Holland and a weaver in India both did old work in larger amounts, for buyers far away. The third is a contrast: an Andean man drafted through the mit’a was taken far from his village to dig silver, while a weaver in India kept working at home, making more cloth than before for buyers overseas. A contrast shows where the new trade changed people's lives most and where least, and that is what lets an answer say how much changed.

Put the evidence together, and you can write a thesis, a claim that answers the question and that you can defend. A strong thesis names a change, a continuity, and the reason for the difference: where did the new trade change social structures most, where did it change them least, and why? You can argue more than one thesis from the same evidence. What you cannot do is leave out the evidence on the other side.