Question

What were some of the new trade goods entering the world markets in the sixteenth century? How would European demand for these products affect overseas trade and colonization? (500 words) (essay format)

Answer 1

Answer: There were many new trade goods entering the world markets in the sixteenth century from colonies in America. To begin, there were food products and other agricultural things to be traded. Many fast-growing foods helped Europe's population grow. The Dutch control the trade in cloves with ruthless efficiency.

European demand for these products affect overseas trade and colonization. So over the years there occurred a decided shift in the composition of demand for goods produced in the colonial areas. Spices, sugar, and slaves became relatively less important with the advance of industrialization, concomitant with a rising demand for raw materials for industry (e.g., cotton, wool, vegetable oils, jute, dyestuffs) and food for the swelling industrial areas (wheat, tea, coffee, cocoa, meat, butter).

This shift in trading patterns entailed in the long run changes in colonial policy and practice as well as in the nature of colonial acquisitions. The urgency to create markets and the incessant pressure for new materials and food were eventually reflected in colonial practices, which sought to adapt the colonial areas to the new priorities of the industrializing nations. Such adaptation involved major disruptions of existing social systems over wide areas of the globe. Before the impact of the Industrial Revolution, European activities in the rest of the world were largely confined to:

• Occupying areas that supplied precious metals, slaves, and tropical products then in large demand
• Establishing white-settler colonies along the coast of North America
• Setting up trading posts and forts and applying superior military strength to achieve the transfer to European merchants of as much existing world trade as was feasible.

However disruptive these changes may have been to the societies of Africa, South America, and the isolated plantation and white-settler colonies, the social systems over most of the Earth outside Europe nevertheless remained much the same as they had been for centuries. These societies, with their largely self-sufficient small communities based on subsistence agriculture and home industry, provided poor markets for the mass-produced goods flowing from the factories of the technologically advancing countries; nor were the existing social systems flexible enough to introduce and rapidly expand the commercial agriculture (and, later, mineral extraction) required to supply the food and raw material needs of the empire builders.