(Vlib.iue.it World History, 2017) People that were once in debt began to pay back their extensive loans as the real value began to swiftly drop. Historians often call this period The Price Revolution. (Vlib.iue.it World History, 2017) Crops were transported over from the New World, such as Potatoes, tomatoes, squashes, pumpkins, beans, and other vegetables that drastically changed the European diet. Before the arrival of said plants the European diet relied on grain, mostly wheat, even this was hard to come by as there was not land to farm on. Cargo ships coming from the New World brought other resources needed for the growing industrial Europe, ship timbers, hemp rope, tar, furs, dyes such as indigo and red Brazil wood, dried fish, flaxseed oil, hides, and a mass of other materials. With the shipments of North American nicotine filled tobacco, the Aztecs’ caffeine infested cocoa, coffee from the Arabs, and tea from the Chinese, Europe had been thrusted into a ‘drug- consuming society’ (Vlib.iue.it World History, 2017). Europe has tasted wine and beer before this period but with the arrival of these stimulant drugs they had become addicted. While Europe gained these resources they explored inhabited continents, taking people and land for themselves. One of the continents widely affected was the Americas. Whenever European adventures arrived in the 15th century A.D, scholars estimate that
European exploration, exploration of regions of Earth for scientific, commercial, religious, military, and other purposes by Europeans, beginning about the 4th century bce. The motives that spur human beings to examine their environment are many. Strong among them are the satisfaction of curiosity, the pursuit of trade, the spread of religion, and the desire for security and political power. At different times and in different places, different motives are dominant. Sometimes one motive inspires the promoters of discovery, and another motive may inspire the individuals who carry out the search. For a discussion of the society that engaged in these explorations, and their effects on intra-European affairs, see European history. The earliest European empires are discussed in ancient Greek civilization and ancient Rome. The threads of geographical exploration are continuous and, being entwined one with another, are difficult to separate. Three major phases of investigation may nevertheless be distinguished. The first phase is the exploration of the Old World centred on the Mediterranean Sea, the second is the so-called Age of Discovery, during which, in the search for sea routes to Cathay (the name by which China was known to medieval Europe), a New World was found, and the third is the establishment of the political, social, and commercial relationships of the New World to the Old and the elucidation of the major physical features of the continental interiors—in short, the delineation of the modern world.
European Exploration: Fact or Fiction? Were the French the first Europeans to reach southern Africa? Was Christopher Columbus the first European to see South America? From southern Africa to Jamaica, navigate your way through this quiz of European exploration. Phoenician colonization in the Mediterranean From the time of the earliest recorded history to the beginning of the 15th century, Western knowledge of the world widened from a river valley surrounded by mountains or desert (the views of Babylonia and Egypt) to a Mediterranean world with hinterlands extending from the Sahara to the Gobi Desert and from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean (the view of Greece and Rome). It later expanded again to include the far northern lands beyond the Baltic and another and dazzling civilization in the Far East (the medieval view). The earliest known surviving map, dating probably from the time of Sargon of Akkad (about 2334–2279 bce), shows canals or rivers—perhaps the Tigris and a tributary—and surrounding mountains. The rapid colonization of the shores of the Mediterranean and of the Black Sea by Phoenicia and the Greek city-states in the 1st millennium bce must have been accompanied by the exploration of their hinterlands by countless unknown soldiers and traders. Herodotus prefaces his History (written in the 5th century bce) with a geographical description of the then known world: this introductory material reveals that the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea had by then been explored. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now Stories survive of a few men who are credited with bringing new knowledge from distant journeys. Herodotus tells of five young adventurers of the tribe of the Nasamones living on the desert edge of Cyrenaica in North Africa, who journeyed southwest for many months across the desert, reaching a great river flowing from west to east; this presumably was the Niger, although Herodotus thought it to be the Upper Nile.
Europeans have been interested in African geography since the time of the Greek and Roman Empires. Around 150 CE, Ptolemy created a map of the world that included the Nile and the great lakes of East Africa. In the Middle Ages, the large Ottoman Empire blocked European access to Africa and its trade goods, but Europeans still learned about Africa from Islamic maps and travelers, like Ibn Battuta. The Catalan Atlas, created in 1375, which includes many African coastal cities, the Nile River, and other political and geographical features, shows how much Europe knew about North and West Africa. By the 1400s, Portuguese sailors, backed by Prince Henry the Navigator, began exploring the West coast of Africa looking for a mythical Christian king named Prester John and a way to the wealth of Asia that avoided the Ottomans and the powerful empires of South West Asia. By 1488, the Portuguese had charted a way around the South African Cape and in 1498, Vasco da Gama reached Mombasa, in what is today Kenya, where he encountered Chinese and Indian merchants. Europeans made few inroads into Africa, though, until the 1800s, due to the strong African states they encountered, tropical diseases, and a relative lack of interest. Europeans instead grew rich trading gold, gum, ivory, and enslaved people with coastal merchants. In the late 1700s, a group of British men, inspired by the Enlightenment ideal of learning, decided that Europe should know much more about Africa. They formed the African Association in 1788 to sponsor expeditions to the continent. With the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808, European interest in the interior of Africa grew quickly. Geographical Societies were formed and sponsored expeditions. The Parisian Geographical Society offered a 10,000 franc prize to the first explorer who could reach the town of Timbuktu (in present-day Mali) and return alive. The new scientific interest in Africa was never wholly philanthropic, however. Financial and political support for exploration grew out of the desire for wealth and national power. Timbuktu, for instance, was believed to be rich in gold. By the 1850s, interest in African exploration had become an international race, much like the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union in the 20th century. Explorers like David Livingstone, Henry M. Stanley, and Heinrich Barth became national heroes, and the stakes were high. A public debate between Richard Burton and John H. Speke over the source of the Nile led to the suspected suicide of Speke, who was later proven correct. Explorers’ travels also helped pave the way for European conquest, but the explorers themselves had little to no power in Africa for much of the century. They were deeply dependent on the African men they hired and the assistance of African kings and rulers, who were often interested in acquiring new allies and new markets. Explorers' accounts of their travels downplayed the assistance they received from African guides, leaders, and even slave traders. They also presented themselves as calm, cool, and collected leaders masterfully directing their porters across unknown lands. The reality was that they were often following existing routes and, as Johann Fabian showed, were disoriented by fevers, drugs, and cultural encounters that went against everything they expected to find in so-called savage Africa. Readers and historians believed explorers' accounts, though, and it was not until recent years that people began to recognize the critical role that Africans and African knowledge played in the exploration of Africa. |
What were the effects of European exploration on Africa
Postagens relacionadas
direito autoral © 2024 cemle Inc.
