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In: Economics

What social, economic and political trends in Europe stimulated the exploration of the new world in...

What social, economic and political trends in Europe stimulated the exploration of the new world in the 15thand 16th centuries?

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The Age of Discovery, also known as the Age of Exploration and the Great Navigations, was a period in European history from the early 15th century to the early 17th century. During this period, Europeans engaged in intensive exploration and early colonization of many parts of the world, establishing direct contact with Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania. Historians often refer to the Age of Discovery to mean the pioneering period of the Portuguese and Spanish long-distance maritime travels in search of alternative trade routes to the Indies. The contact between the “Old World” of Europe and the so-called “New World” of the Americas produced what is called the Columbian Exchange: the wide transfer of plants, animals, foods, communicable diseases, people (including slaves), and culture between the Eastern and Western hemispheres.In the 100 years from the mid-15th to the mid-16th century, a combination of circumstances stimulated men to seek new routes, and it was new routes rather than new lands that filled the minds of kings and commoners, scholars and seamen. First, toward the end of the 14th century, the vast empire of the Mongols was breaking up; thus, Western merchants could no longer be assured of safe-conduct along the land routes. Second, the Ottoman Turks and the Venetians controlled commercial access to the Mediterranean and the ancient sea routes from the East. Third, new nations on the Atlantic shores of Europe were now ready to seek overseas trade and adventure.By 1500 the population in most areas of Europe was increasing after two centuries of decline or stagnation. The bonds of commerce within Europe tightened, and the “wheels of commerce” (in the phrase of the 20th-century French historian Fernand Braudel) spun ever faster. The great geographic discoveries then in process were integrating Europe into a world economic system. New commodities, many of them imported from recently discovered lands, enriched material life. Not only trade but also the production of goods increased as a result of new ways of organizing production. Merchants, entrepreneurs, and bankers accumulated and manipulated capital in unprecedented volume. Most historians locate in the 16th century the beginning, or at least the maturing, of Western capitalism. Capital assumed a major role not only in economic organization but also in political life and international relations. Culturally, new values—many of them associated with the Renaissance and Reformation—diffused through Europe and changed the ways in which people acted and the perspectives by which they viewed themselves and the world.In the second half of the 15th century, Europe entered an age of discovery which resulted in new, increasingly dense relationships with territories and populations all over the world. This also involved geographical, geological and other discoveries, as knowledge of the shape and layout of the world and the location of resources entered the Western consciousness. But there was also an important ethno-anthropological aspect to the discoveries, as the variety of peoples and forms of social organization affected European reflections on human society, culture, religion, government and civilization through a continuous interplay between the testimonies of travellers and the work of scholars at home.The term discovery is controversial as it implies a passivity on the part of indigenous populations, who were "found" by Europeans. This asymmetrical view denies an autonomous existence to indigenous populations before the arrival of Europeans. Since the early 1990s, historians have increasingly replaced the term "discovery" with "encounter", which is perceived as more neutral and implying a reciprocity rather than the subject-object relationship implied by the term "discovery". The term "encounter" is also free of the ideological connotations that terms such as "conquest" and "expansion" imply, and "encounter" is compatible with a transcultural approach to global history. The adoption of a more neutral term does not, however, alter the fact that a process of European penetration into regions of the world previously unknown to Europeans did occur, and through this process Europeans "discovered" for themselves new species and ecosystems, and new peoples and societies. During this process, European perceptions of the encountered "others" were dominated from the outset by a hierarchical perspective. "Diversity" in the sense of divergence from European norms usually implied "inferiority". "Otherness" was associated in the minds of Europeans with lower levels in the hierarchy of civilization.Besides redistributing the world's resources in Europe's favour and increasing Europe's global power, these processes had two interrelated, long-term consequences. Firstly, they provided a new stimulus to European thinking on nature, man, society, religion, law, history and civilization, and brought into being new areas of intellectual enquiry, such as anthropology, comparative history, linguistics, biology and sociology. Secondly, they produced an impressive array of printed travel accounts and historical writings, through which the deeds of European adventurers, conquistadores and navigators entered into national historical narratives. Travel and voyage accounts such as the Jesuits' multi-volume Relations suprovided fundamental information for historians and philosophers, as well as providing inspiration for literary works. Such publications brought the experience of new worlds into the purview of cultivated Europeans.


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