Crossroads of Globalization
The First Year
The first year of the “Crossroads of Globalization” program will examine four hot spots in the Western Hemisphere. Potential locales include Potosí, Whydah, the Lower Savannah River, Beverwijck (later Albany), Detroit and Québec. Similarities in European overseas expansion are evident in each area: the problems in organizing and maintaining trade routes to the hot spot, the formation and mastery of protocols to facilitate interaction and exchange, and the adaptation and transformation of polities and economic behavior to accommodate international markets.
Potosí was a remote hot spot in the Bolivian Andes that brought together a diversity of people from Europe, Africa and South America, Potosí grew from a small hamlet in 1545 to over 120,000 inhabitants by 1620, and the city had great impact on the larger Andean region. Silver from Potosí was shipped by sea either to Manila or to Panama, where it was sent by boat and dragged overland across the Isthmus of Panama and then across the Atlantic to Spain. In this way, the Pacific trading zone became a vital component in both the Pacific and the Atlantic worlds. Globalization transformed Potosí’s environment and peoples, yet the locale had its own transforming power on the world economy: Potosí silver stimulated the creation of other hot spots, such as Manila and Havana. Potosí became the linchpin in the forging of complex trade routes linking South and North America to Europe, but also for establishing the first sustained and direct linkage between the Americas and Asia.
As Potosí connected continents, so, too did Whydah, though its impact was more confined to the Atlantic world. Whydah can be envisioned as the center of a wheel with spokes extending in all directions. An extraordinary hot spot in terms of the sheer variety of peoples engaged in exchange as traders or as commodities, it was neither an important link in an imperial chain like Potosí, nor a place at which a single European power could dominate and monopolize access. Yet it would be difficult to overestimate Whydah’s importance in the development of plantation slavery in the Americas, and capital accumulation in Europe.
Compared to Whydah and Potosí, the hot spot of the Lower Savannah River region had limited impact on empires and the larger story of globalization, but it did share transforming qualities upon a vast region. This hot spot remained relatively insignificant in terms of local governance—groups came and went with little attempt to control the area–the site had little inherent economic importance. But as a crossroads for diplomacy and trade between the English and a variety of indigenous peoples, it was a hot spot for globalization. New native polities formed in the larger region, becoming militarily powerful confederacies, in large part, to better treat with each other and the English at this hot spot. The English fumbled to establish political institutions to bring order to the area—their failure led to a pan-Indian war against nearby South Carolina, which nearly wiped out the colony; in the war’s aftermath the Lower Savannah River lost its purpose and disappeared as a hot spot.
Beverwijck and Detroit, both at the edge of empires (respectively Dutch and French), were similar to other hot spots in having an enormous reach into the interior continent. Beverwijck was similar to Whydah in that the Europeans did not travel from the hot spot into the interior. That role was filled by the Iroquois, who worked tirelessly to control other natives’ access to the hot spot. Iroquois warfare and trade extended hundreds of miles to the north, west and south, in large part to maintain their monopoly at Beverwijck. In contrast to the Dutch, the French used the hot spot of Detroit as a base from which to spread their influence among Native Americans through the Great Lakes and the Ohio Country. Detroit supported scattered French posts extending all the way to the Mississippi River Valley. But similar to Beverwijck, the French at Detroit could exert little actual control over the native populations of the region. Nevertheless, the impact of globalization, particularly trade, was huge among the indigenous peoples. Unlike the Lower Savannah River Valley, where natives responded by creating large confederacies, polities fractured and fluidity developed as a plethora of small communities developed in which members came and went—a different kind of response to the forces of globalization.
Finally, Québec also served as a hot spot for French-Amerindian interactions in Canada. As the political, military, economic and religious heart of the French empire in Canada, Québec wielded significant influence in all directions. Yet there were geographic limitations as well. As a result of its distance from so many activities and peoples within North America, Québec had to concede much of its power over Canadian affairs to small outposts, religious orders, and both official and unofficial traders. Conversely, native peoples sometimes dealt directly with Québec, and sometimes bypassed the administrative center in pursuit of their interests. Québec thus offers us a hot spot that frequently ran cold—and thus another avenue for examining the relationship between locale and globalization.
All together, these Atlantic World hot spots varied in terms of governance and purpose, but they all served as conduits for exchange that influenced the globalization of much larger regions and the imperial powers who conducted trade and diplomacy there.
Brief summary of potential hot spots for the “Crossroads of Globalization” program for 2007-2008
Potosí—location in the Andes of the world’s greatest silver mines, where indigenous peoples, imported African slaves, and Spanish all labored and interacted.
Whydah—most important port in the African slave trade, where Europeans competed with one another to obtain slaves.
Lower Savannah River—key locale in English trade relations with the peoples of the American Southeast. Also central for the conduct of the Indian Slave Trade.
Beverwijck—small fortified Dutch village at the head of navigable waters on the Hudson River 150 miles north of New Amsterdam where trade and diplomacy were conducted with Iroquois—furs from over 1,000 miles away traded there, in dyadic tension with the French on the St. Lawrence Seaway and the English Puritan colonies to the east.
Detroit—French outpost crucial for diplomatic and trade relations with Algonquins throughout the Great Lakes in the 18th century, inland hub of a tenuous continental empire.
Québec—French capital and economic center, with much engagement of native peoples throughout Canada
The Second Year
The second year program will focus exclusively on the Iberian Empire but expand the Seminar geographically: Manila, Goa, Macao, Nagasaki, Havana, Vera Cruz, Salvador de Bahia, Sao Paulo, and Santa Fé and may include Mozambique and Mombassa in East Africa. The Iberian focus allows for greater points of continuity for examining the varieties within a single European experience, while the geographic shift prompts new levels of analysis of hot spots and the regions they served.
Manila became one of the most important hot spots in the entire world. The primary settlement of the Spanish Empire in Southeast Asia, Manila was the anchor of the Spanish galleon trade in American silver. Silver traded in Manila for Chinese silk and Southeast Asian spices fueled the commercialization and urbanization of the Chinese and Southeast Asian economies in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. It also engaged the local population into new cultures and economies, and stimulated the migration of over 30,000 Chinese to Manila by 1650, which added a new economic and cultural mix to the city. Manila connected the Americas to Asia, and impeded the globalization of other areas, such as California, which Spain purposefully stayed away from, in order to deter European interlopers from being attracted there and thus to the Manila-Acapulco trade route.
Capital of the “State of India,” Portugal’s empire in Asia, Goa played a key role in international commerce, and both ecclesiastical and political administration. The “Rome of the Orient,” from Goa missionaries were sent to China and other parts of Asia. The city also was the major supply station for Portuguese warships and merchant vessels returning to Europe from Asia. Goa’s political reach into the State of Indian was limited by the vast distances over which it attempted to administer, yet it helped shape the course of the Portuguese empire.
Established “informally” by Portuguese traders in 1553, Macao became Portugal’s most important city in Asia. From Macao, Portuguese ships conducted the silver for silk trade between China and Japan, but Macao also carried on extensive trade between Manila and China, as well as with the spice islands. Moreover, Macao was the main conduit for Portuguese diplomatic relations with much of Asia, and carved an existence in which the city was largely self-governing.
Founded before the sixteenth century, Nagasaki was one of several Japanese ports engaged in East Asian and Southeast Asian trade networks. Growing numbers of Europeans began arriving late in the century. Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s concern with Christian influence led him to restrict European trade primarily to Nagasaki. After the Spanish were forbidden to trade and the English lost interest, the Chinese and Portuguese remained active at Nagasaki, the principle port of foreign trade with Japan. Following purported involvement in the Shimabara Rebellion (1637), the Portuguese were expelled and Dutch traders joined the Chinese in Nagasaki for the rest of the Tokugawa era.
Havana was far removed from the centers of Amerindian population, mineral wealth, and political power in the Spanish Indies, yet it was a strategic city whose defenses protected the sea lanes from Europe to Mexico and Northern South America. This hot spot operated on several levels—imperial, regional and local—for a variety of peoples and groups negotiating their interests. Fleets from Spain still sailed through with European wares to exchange for Peruvian and Mexican silver. Havana and its trade routes attracted European pirates and privateers, who hoped to siphon off American riches, while other European interlopers planted their own settlements nearby in hopes of both imitating and reducing Spanish success. Although Havana was the linchpin of Spain’s defenses in the Caribbean, it also stood at the center of a violent and often unstable world, connected to the Spanish mainland (particularly Mexico) by commerce and the large subsidy paid to Cuba from the Mexican treasuries. In this way the city was the key point connecting Spain to the Spanish American mainland.
Vera Cruz also served as an administrative hot spot for the American mainland, and the city had the peculiar characteristic of going through cycles of hot and cold. The inhospitable climate of Vera Cruz meant that for long periods it became little more than a sleepy hamlet, to be altered every few years by bustling economic and military activity when the fleets from Spain arrived to exchange European goods for Mexican silver and tropical produce. During these periods of intense commercial activity, merchants from Mexico City and other parts of New Spain arrived for the trade fair and left when it was over. In its active stage, Vera Cruz had intensive interactions with other hot spots and regions, as its influence extended in numerous directions.
The city of São Paulo was founded in 1554 by a group of Jesuits, who established a mission in the plateau thirty miles inland from the port city of Santos, as a staging ground for converting the local indigenous population of the interior region. Through most of the colonial period, São Paulo remained an isolated and relatively poor frontier town of only a few thousand inhabitants, but it became the “gateway” for the exploration and demographic expansion into the interior of Portuguese Brazil. By the seventeenth century the city served as the staging ground for the bandeirantes, slaver hunters who ventured into the interior in search of indigenous captives to work on the thriving sugar plantations of the coast. These bandeirantes often learned indigenous languages, married Amerindian women, and explored large tracts of the Brazilian frontier. They were among the first to discover the Brazilian gold fields in the interior province of Minas Gerais, and the gold trade became a major economic activity in eighteenth-century São Paulo, connecting this rustic and remote frontier city to Europe and wider world. From a center for procuring slave labor to an entrepot to the gold mining regions of the interior, São Paulo played a major role in the socioeconomic development of Portuguese Brazil. Today the city is the economic hub of the modern nation of Brazil, with over 20 million inhabitants and a diverse economy that accounts for approximately 30% of the Gross Domestic Product of the country.
On the northernmost reach of Spain’s American empire, the Santa Fé hot spot involved relatively little in terms of trade, but much in terms of cultural exchange and military impact. From Santa Fé, the Spanish administered a mission system that made great inroads on the cultural life of the Pueblo, while forcing the Navajo and Apache to contend with a Spanish-Pueblo military alliance. The Pueblo Rebellion of 1680, however, compelled Spain to recast the functioning of this hot spot, so that forced cultural transformation of native peoples declined, though slave raiding and trade increased, setting in motion events that would transform the entire American Southwest in the coming century.
Brief summary of potential hot spots for the “Crossroads of Globalization” program for 2008-2009
Manila—Spanish outpost in Asia serving as a major entrepôt for trade between Chinese, Japanese, Southeast Asian and European merchants. Much of the silver from Potosí and Mexico’s mines was dispersed from Manila throughout Asia. It was a multicultural city with a small Spanish population, a native Pilipino presence and a large (30,000) resident Chinese population by 1650.
Goa—Captured by Albuquerqe in 1510 and made Capital of the State of India. Served as the place to victual Portugal’s Asian fleet.
Macao—Portugal’s major city for conducting intra-Asian trade, and a key link in the silver-silk spice trade that connected Asia to Europe and the Americas.
Nagasaki—The principle port for foreign trade with Japan, particularly with China and the Portuguese.
Havana— linchpin of Spain’s Caribbean defenses and administrative center of the Spanish Empire in the Caribbean. Havana was supported by large annual subsidies from Mexico and it remained the central Caribbean trading port for the Spanish Caribbean through the nineteenth century.
Vera Cruz—Spanish administrative port city for New Spain (Spanish North America), which served as the only port licensed to trade between Mexico and Europe. It held this monopoly until 1789, when the crown allowed imperial free trade, but it still maintained its control over the bulk of the trade with Mexico and the outside world into the nineteenth century.
Salvador de Bahia—the capital of colonial Brazil until the mid-18th century. Salvador was a principal hub of the slave trade and the sugar industry in the New World.
São Paulo—territory that was home to the “bandeirantes,” who contributed to expansion of Brazilian territory beyond the frontier designated by the Treaty of Tordesillas, and helped to spark the gold rush centered in eighteenth-century Minas Gerais.
Santa Fé—northernmost outpost of Spanish empire in North America and the only point of contact with Europeans for numerous native peoples of the American Southwest.