European Commercial Expansion in Early Modern Asia

European Commercial Expansion in Early Modern Asia
Author: Om Prakash
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 364
Release: 1997
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN:

Regular commercial contacts between Europe and Asia date back to at least the early years of the Christian era, but the pattern of trade underwent a structural modification following the Portuguese discovery of a route to the East Indies via the Cape of Good Hope. This volume illustrates the consequences of the arrival of large numbers of Europeans in the East. Europeans both participated in, modified and exploited existing trade relationships in the Indian Ocean and the Pacific. The studies reprinted here show how some environments, such as Japan, were hostile, whilst most states welcomed the European commercial contact. The necessity for Europeans to pay for Asian goods using precious metals is emphasised by the inclusion of articles in monetary transfers in Asian trade, a phenomenon which provides a link between economic developments in the Americas and those in Asia from the 16th century onwards.

History of International Relations

History of International Relations
Author: Erik Ringmar
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2019-08-02
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1783740256

Existing textbooks on international relations treat history in a cursory fashion and perpetuate a Euro-centric perspective. This textbook pioneers a new approach by historicizing the material traditionally taught in International Relations courses, and by explicitly focusing on non-European cases, debates and issues. The volume is divided into three parts. The first part focuses on the international systems that traditionally existed in Europe, East Asia, pre-Columbian Central and South America, Africa and Polynesia. The second part discusses the ways in which these international systems were brought into contact with each other through the agency of Mongols in Central Asia, Arabs in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, Indic and Sinic societies in South East Asia, and the Europeans through their travels and colonial expansion. The concluding section concerns contemporary issues: the processes of decolonization, neo-colonialism and globalization – and their consequences on contemporary society. History of International Relations provides a unique textbook for undergraduate and graduate students of international relations, and anybody interested in international relations theory, history, and contemporary politics.

The Indies of the Setting Sun

The Indies of the Setting Sun
Author: Ricardo Padrón
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2020-07-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 022645567X

Padrón reveals the evolution of Spain’s imagining of the New World as a space in continuity with Asia. Narratives of Europe’s westward expansion often tell of how the Americas came to be known as a distinct landmass, separate from Asia and uniquely positioned as new ground ripe for transatlantic colonialism. But this geographic vision of the Americas was not shared by all Europeans. While some imperialists imagined North and Central America as undiscovered land, the Spanish pushed to define the New World as part of a larger and eminently flexible geography that they called las Indias, and that by right, belonged to the Crown of Castile and León. Las Indias included all of the New World as well as East and Southeast Asia, although Spain’s understanding of the relationship between the two areas changed as the realities of the Pacific Rim came into sharper focus. At first, the Spanish insisted that North and Central America were an extension of the continent of Asia. Eventually, they came to understand East and Southeast Asia as a transpacific extension of their empire in America called las Indias del poniente, or the Indies of the Setting Sun. The Indies of the Setting Sun charts the Spanish vision of a transpacific imperial expanse, beginning with Balboa’s discovery of the South Sea and ending almost a hundred years later with Spain’s final push for control of the Pacific. Padrón traces a series of attempts—both cartographic and discursive—to map the space from Mexico to Malacca, revealing the geopolitical imaginations at play in the quest for control of the New World and Asia.

South Asia

South Asia
Author: Donald Frederick Lach
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 680
Release: 1993
Genre: Asia
ISBN: 9780226467542

Between Europe and Asia

Between Europe and Asia
Author: Mark Bassin
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Total Pages: 409
Release: 2015-06-18
Genre: History
ISBN: 0822980916

Between Europe and Asia analyzes the origins and development of Eurasianism, an intellectual movement that proclaimed the existence of Eurasia, a separate civilization coinciding with the former Russian Empire. The essays in the volume explore the historical roots, the heyday of the movement in the 1920s, and the afterlife of the movement in the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The first study to offer a multifaceted account of Eurasianism in the twentieth century and to touch on the movement's intellectual entanglements with history, politics, literature, or geography, this book also explores Eurasianism's influences beyond Russia. The Eurasianists blended their search for a primordial essence of Russian culture with radicalism of Europe's interwar period. In reaction to the devastation and dislocation of the wars and revolutions, they celebrated the Orthodox Church and the Asian connections of Russian culture, while rejecting Western individualism and democracy. The movement sought to articulate a non-European, non-Western modernity, and to underscore Russia's role in the colonial world. As the authors demonstrate, Eurasianism was akin to many fascist movements in interwar Europe, and became one of the sources of the rhetoric of nationalist mobilization in Vladimir Putin's Russia. This book presents the rich history of the concept of Eurasianism, and how it developed over time to achieve its present form.

Why Did Europe Conquer the World?

Why Did Europe Conquer the World?
Author: Philip T. Hoffman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2017-01-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0691175845

The startling economic and political answers behind Europe's historical dominance Between 1492 and 1914, Europeans conquered 84 percent of the globe. But why did Europe establish global dominance, when for centuries the Chinese, Japanese, Ottomans, and South Asians were far more advanced? In Why Did Europe Conquer the World?, Philip Hoffman demonstrates that conventional explanations—such as geography, epidemic disease, and the Industrial Revolution—fail to provide answers. Arguing instead for the pivotal role of economic and political history, Hoffman shows that if certain variables had been different, Europe would have been eclipsed, and another power could have become master of the world. Hoffman sheds light on the two millennia of economic, political, and historical changes that set European states on a distinctive path of development, military rivalry, and war. This resulted in astonishingly rapid growth in Europe's military sector, and produced an insurmountable lead in gunpowder technology. The consequences determined which states established colonial empires or ran the slave trade, and even which economies were the first to industrialize. Debunking traditional arguments, Why Did Europe Conquer the World? reveals the startling reasons behind Europe's historic global supremacy.

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800

The Jews and the Expansion of Europe to the West, 1450-1800
Author: Paolo Bernardini
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Total Pages: 600
Release: 2001
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781571814302

Jews and Judaism played a significant role in the history of the expansion of Europe to the west as well as in the history of the economic, social, and religious development of the New World. They played an important role in the discovery, colonization, and eventually exploitation of the resources of the New World. Alone among the European peoples who came to the Americas in the colonial period, Jews were dispersed throughout the hemisphere; indeed, they were the only cohesive European ethnic or religious group that lived under both Catholic and Protestant regimes, which makes their study particularly fruitful from a comparative perspective. As distinguished from other religious or ethnic minorities, the Jewish struggle was not only against an overpowering and fierce nature but also against the political regimes that ruled over the various colonies of the Americas and often looked unfavorably upon the establishment and tleration of Jewish communities in their own territory. Jews managed to survive and occasionally to flourish against all odds, and their history in the Americas is one of the more fascinating chapters in the early modern history of European expansion.

U.S. History

U.S. History
Author: P. Scott Corbett
Publisher:
Total Pages: 1886
Release: 2024-09-10
Genre: History
ISBN:

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.

Empires of the Weak

Empires of the Weak
Author: J. C. Sharman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691210071

What accounts for the rise of the state, the creation of the first global system, and the dominance of the West? The conventional answer asserts that superior technology, tactics, and institutions forged by Darwinian military competition gave Europeans a decisive advantage in war over other civilizations from 1500 onward. In contrast, Empires of the Weak argues that Europeans actually had no general military superiority in the early modern era. J. C. Sharman shows instead that European expansion from the late fifteenth to the late eighteenth centuries is better explained by deference to strong Asian and African polities, disease in the Americas, and maritime supremacy earned by default because local land-oriented polities were largely indifferent to war and trade at sea. Europeans were overawed by the mighty Eastern empires of the day, which pioneered key military innovations and were the greatest early modern conquerors. Against the view that the Europeans won for all time, Sharman contends that the imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a relatively transient and anomalous development in world politics that concluded with Western losses in various insurgencies. If the twenty-first century is to be dominated by non-Western powers like China, this represents a return to the norm for the modern era. Bringing a revisionist perspective to the idea that Europe ruled the world due to military dominance, Empires of the Weak demonstrates that the rise of the West was an exception in the prevailing world order.

Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles

Rivalry for Trade in Tea and Textiles
Author: Chris Nierstrasz
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 241
Release: 2015-09-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 1137486538

The rivalry for trade in tea and textiles between the English and Dutch East India companies is very much a global history. This trade is strongly connected to emblematic events such as the opening of Western trade with China, the Boston Tea Party, the establishment of British Empire in Bengal and the Industrial Revolution.