Europe and Asia after Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the vast continent that would later become known as the Americas. Fig. – Merchants from Venice and the Orient exchanging goods, from Marco Polo, Book of Marvels , fifteenth century. Fig.
– Silk route trade as depicted in a Chinese cave painting, eighth century, Cave , Mogao Grottoes, Gansu, China. (Here we will use ‘America’ to describe North America, South America and the Caribbean.) In fact, many of our common foods came from America’s original inhabitants – the American Indians. Sometimes the new crops could make the difference between life and death. Europe’s poor began to eat better and live longer with the introduction of the humble potato.
Ireland’s poorest peasants became so dependent on potatoes that when disease destroyed the potato crop in the mid-1840s, hundreds of thousands died of starvation. . Conquest, Disease and Trade The pre-modern world shrank greatly in the sixteenth century after European sailors found a sea route to Asia and also successfully crossed the western ocean to America. For centuries before, the Indian Ocean had known a bustling trade, with goods, people, knowledge, customs, etc.
criss-crossing its waters. The Indian subcontinent was central to these flows and a crucial point in their networks. The entry of the Europeans helped expand or redirect some of these flows towards Europe. Before its ‘discovery’, America had been cut off from regular contact with the rest of the world for millions of years.
But from the sixteenth century, its vast lands and abundant crops and minerals began to transform trade and lives everywhere. Precious metals, particularly silver, from mines located in present- day Peru and Mexico also enhanced Europe’s wealth and financed its trade with Asia. Legends spread in seventeenth-century Europe about South America’s fabled wealth. Many expeditions set off in search of El Dorado, the fabled city of gold.
The Portuguese and Spanish conquest and colonisation of America was decisively under way by the mid-sixteenth century. European conquest was not just a result of superior firepower. In fact, the most powerful weapon of the Spanish conquerors