Did the Age of Exploration bring more harm than good?

This era besides saw large-scale european interest in the slave trade. By 1820, it ’ s thought that more than 10 million west Africans had found themselves unwilling slaves in the Americas. Their own societies were destabilised and depopulated. For them, the Age of Exploration undoubtedly brought more damage than commodity. For the autochthonal inhabitants of the Americas, the likely benefits of touch with other peoples were far outweighed by the brutality of european seduction and colonization, and the ravages of european diseases that cut a swaddle through the populations. The experiences of the Taino of Hispaniola and the Beothuk of Newfoundland painfully demonstrate the damage brought about by the Age of exploration : both were among the peoples the Europeans first encountered in the Americas, and both are now extinct. We have so far to even amply understand what was lost in this devastation. For many Europeans, the answer was more much favorable. Europe was able to establish huge trade companies that frequently tapped into local barter systems and created a ball-shaped commodity net. Conquest and colonization drew wealth and power into the European sphere, allowing that area to assume a military position of global authority. In the process, Europe became richer than it had always been ahead. even some of the flora and fauna exchanged proved enormously profitable for Europe. Though the potato later became associated with the catastrophic Irish dearth in the 1840s, the introduction of that one crop alone helped Europe sustain a huge british labour party pull in the face of a massive population growth in the eighteenth century .

Reading: Did the Age of Exploration bring more harm than good?

Considering the issue from a global perspective rather than a regional one, it becomes more of a philosophical question. The Age of Exploration provided opportunities for societies and cultures to interact ; it brought all parts of the world into contact with each other, paving the way for the globalize economies we see today ; it enabled a cognition net to extend across the unharmed earth. In a sense, our modern world is built on the back of the changes introduced by the european Age of Exploration – so it becomes a question of judgment on the modern worldly concern .
Margaret Small is lecturer in early modern history at the University of Birmingham, with a focus on European exploration and colonisation in the 16th century

François Soyer: “The Portuguese took the decisive first steps in the creation of a lasting European stranglehold on world trade”

As the inaugural monarchy to send explorers beyond the geographic limits of Europe, Portugal can claim the claim of instigator of the alleged Age of Exploration. From 1415, portuguese merchants and mariners explored the coasts of western Africa, reaching the cape of Good Hope in the 1480s. Seeking to establish direct deal links with Asia, in 1497 a evanesce under the command of Vasco da Gama sailed around the Cape to India, followed by annual expeditions. From 1497 to 1510, the Portuguese established domination in the indian Ocean, in the face of stiff opposition from Muslim and Hindu rivals. In 1500, the expedition of Pedro Álvares Cabral was blown off naturally on its way to India and reached the shores of Brazil .
The impact of the Portuguese Age of Discovery on modern world history can not be overstated. On an economic level, it initiated a revolution in populace trade. Spices and other asian goods that had previously transited to Europe via the Islamic global were now directly imported by Portuguese ( and former by Dutch and British ) ships. To this was late added the lucrative run of sugar and diamonds from Brazil. The portuguese frankincense took the critical first steps in the creation of a durable european stranglehold on global barter. In call on, this ensured european economic prosperity and global political hegemony until the twentieth hundred .
But the human toll was very intemperate. The portuguese placement in Asia was parlous and dependent upon the forecast practice of military force and ferocity against competitors – for exemplar, the butcher of the Muslim population of Goa. Most importantly, the Portuguese initiated the transatlantic slave craft. The Portuguese and other Europeans oversaw the forced removal of millions of west Africans, and their dispatch to the mines and fields of the Americas – men and women whose lineage, sweat and lives contributed to the enrichment of european empires. In the end, the answer to the question of whether the era brought more damage than adept depends on whether we approach it from the perspective of the self-proclaimed european explorers or the peoples ( asian, african and american ) with whom they came into contact .
François Soyer is senior lecturer in history at the University of New England at Armidale, New South Wales, Australia

Graciela Iglesias-Rogers: “Exploring entails entanglements of all sorts; some are desirable, others not”

In early February this year, scientists announced the discovery of a huge hide net of towns, farms and highways beneath the trees of a distant Guatemalan jungle. The find suggests that about 1,200 years ago the area supported a Maya population of up to 20 million people – roughly equivalent to half of Europe ’ s population at the time. A game-changer for archaeologists, this discovery highlights a helplessness in the hardened question : there is no such thing as an ‘ Age of Exploration ’. It is built-in in human nature to look out into the unknown. This discovery underlines the fact that we have been exploring since time began : the earliest inhabitants of the Americas did it, expanding their territories ; the spanish Conquistadors and former adventurers did it ; and humans will continue doing it in the future .
Archaeologists had assumed that Maya cities were isolated and self-sufficient ; now it seems that a far more building complex, interconnected society flourished. Yet this discovery owe a lot to the pioneer scientific expeditions of Ramón Ordóñez ( 1773 ), José Antonio Calderón ( 1784 ), Antonio del Río ( 1786 ), Alexander von Humboldt ( 1803–04 ), José Luciano Castañeda ( 1805–07 ) and, crucially, Juan Galindo ( 1831–34 ). Galindo was no great scientist ; the Dublin-born son of an English actor, he set off for the Americas to volunteer in the latin american wars of independence, and became governor of the Guatemalan department of Petén .
uniquely positioned to navigate through the Hispanic-Anglosphere, his greatest contribution consisted of bright accounts of Maya ruins, published in London and New York. His reports captured the imaginations of many people, including John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood who, between 1839 and 1842, followed his trail to become founders of Classic Maya studies. Exploring entail entanglements of all sorts ; some are desirable, others not. The latest discovery adds credibility to the theory that social dynamics linked to the depletion of natural resources explain the collapse of the classic Maya around AD 900. Laser pulse technology, alternatively of machetes, allowed the stripping aside of tree canopy from aerial images to reveal the ancient civilization underneath, therefore proving that exploration and natural and inheritance preservation can be compatible activities .
Graciela Iglesias-Rogers is senior lecturer in modern European and global Hispanic history at the University of Winchester

Emma Reisz: “Disease was largely an accidental means of conquest – but was devastating in its effects”

During the Age of Exploration, Europeans connected the universe into a single navigational system, triggering an era of imperial contest as european states expanded across the earth through trade, colonization and compulsion. This produced many of the ball-shaped interconnections that underpin the advanced worldly concern – but these were established at a huge homo cost, paid by some populations and not others. Benefits such as access to new foods and luxuries, and to new scientific cognition, accrued disproportionately ( but not entirely ) to Europeans .
conversely, the harms were largely experienced by the rest of the world. The slave craft was the most crying model, enriching Europe and its colonists through the distress of Africans. Disease was largely an accidental means of conquest but was devastating in its effects, as infections endemic to the Old World ravaged populations in the Americas and Australasia. It was not certain at the begin of the fifteenth century that Europeans would dominate global nautical networks. The expeditions of chinese admiral Zheng He along the rim of the indian Ocean ( 1405–33 ) had much in common with those of Henry the Navigator on the other side of Afro-Eurasia. When Vasco district attorney Gama arrived in east Africa in 1498, his sailors were mistaken by the locals for taiwanese.

By the mid-15th century, though, the Ming court had abandoned nautical expansion, and taiwanese proto-colonialism around the indian Ocean ended. Zheng He ’ second expeditions had relatively little impact on world history, whereas the maritime route from Europe to India that district attorney Gama established transformed ball-shaped trade. Had early globalization been Sino-European rather than entirely european, the proportion of harms to benefits might have been no more equitable for the remainder of the populace, however. In 1411, Ming forces overthrew the Kotte baron in Sri Lanka, and in a c1431–33 dedication Zheng He boasted that “ the countries beyond the horizon and from the ends of the land have all become [ taiwanese ] subjects ”. Europeans were not singular in seeking to profit from maritime expansion – though in the early modern global they were uniquely successful in doing then .
Emma Reisz is lecturer in history at Queen’s University Belfast

Glyn Williams: “Pacific islanders adopted new ideas and techniques from European explorers”

The moment Age of Exploration, extending over the long eighteenth hundred, was most noteworthy for Europe ’ randomness expansion into the Pacific – or, as Alan Moorehead saw it in his influential 1967 book The Fatal Impact, Europe ’ south ‘ invasion ’ of the huge ocean and its 25,000 islands. Following the voyages of Cook and his contemporaries in the irregular one-half of the eighteenth hundred, Tahiti became the geographic and emotional center of Polynesia, praised by the french internet explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville as “ the glad island of Cythera… the true Utopia ”. In prison term, these idyllic impressions were modified as evidence was found throughout the Pacific of human sacrifice, infanticide and cannibalism, and by the end of the century few argued that the islands should be left untouched by european contact .
This came at a cost : the lives of the inhabitants of the Pacific, from Hawaii in the north to New Zealand in the south, were disrupted by the uncontrolled activities of whalers, traders and beachcombers, themselves frequently the rejects of club. They used the islands for victualling and refitting, using as payment the deadly combination of firearms and liquor. The only protective influence came from missionaries – but their presence, excessively, had a fundamental effect on the islands ’ traditional societies .
This ‘ fateful impact ’ dissertation has remained compelling, but in recent decades its conclusions have been challenged by scholars – anthropologists a well as historians – working with local preferably than european sources. Islanders gradually came to be seen not as helpless victims of technologically superior newcomers but as participants in a procedure of reciprocal exploitation. This collaboration was seen most clearly in the emergence of three island kingdoms : Tahiti ( ruled by Pomare ), Hawaii ( ruled by Kamehameha ) and Tonga ( ruled by Taufa ‘ ahau ). The details of how these centralised kingdoms emerged disagree, but each of these rulers used european alliances to strengthen his position. More by and large, islanders adopted raw ideas and techniques ; in celebrated New Zealand historian Kerry Howe ’ s words, they “ proved adaptable, resourceful, and resilient ”. The arrival of
Europeans marked a turning point in Pacific history but, despite population losses from disease and war, it did not have in the farseeing term the catastrophic impact once suggested .
Glyn Williams is emeritus professor of history at the University of London, and author of books including Naturalists at Sea: Scientific Travellers from Dampier to Darwin (Yale, 2013)

Julia McClure: “The idea of the ‘Age of Exploration’ whitewashes history, giving a more noble and scholarly appearance to an age of imperialism”

This is a trick question. It embeds european explorers between the 15th and 17th centuries in a noble narrative of discovery, giving the false mental picture that they travelled beyond their localities for the expansion of human cognition. Columbus ’ s ‘ discovery ’ of America in 1492 is much taken as the get down point for the alleged ‘ Age of Exploration ’ – a sharpen of deviation that signposts four ideological problems .
beginning, taking 1492 as a doorsill contributes to the Eurocentric plan of modernity that, among other things, overlooks the intellectual plangency and transcultural exchanges of the global Middle Ages, from the technological advances of Song-dynasty China to the golden long time of Islamic science. Second, the Columbus expedition was not motivated by the expansion of cognition but by the learning of resources – and when the anticipated riches did not materialise, Conquistadors looked to the people and the natural resources of the Americas as a source of wealth .
Third, the ‘ discovery ’ of the ‘ New World ’ did not mark an epistemic rupture ; Columbus went to his dangerous quite unaware that he had stumbled upon a new celibate. Many of the ‘ explorers ’ who followed in his footsteps did not discover something modern but, quite, encountered disconnected versions of themselves, their desires and ambitions. The terminology of the Americas betrays how late-medieval imaginations ordered the New World : for case, the Amazon took its name from Greek mythology .
finally, the ‘ Age of Exploration ’ construct has prioritised european perspectives and cognition. What of the Amerindians looking back at the Europeans exploring their world ? many aspects of their histories have yet to be told. The idea of the ‘ Age of Exploration ’ does more injury than good, because it whitewashes history, giving a more lord and scholarly appearance to what was actually an senesce of imperialism. Europeans may have increased their cognition of the flora, fauna, and topographies of the global in this period, but they frequently did sol at the expense of autochthonal cognition and value systems. Whatever the orientations of new histories of global cognition, we must never overlook the critical relationship between cognition and power.