A shift in the economic center of gravityAsia was the center of global economic activity at the beginning of Big Era Six. Then a shift westward toward Europe began to occur, though not until the later eighteenth century. How did this come about, and what were the main consequences? The linking of Afroeurasia with the Americas was the most important factor. The sudden arrival in the sixteenth century of vast quantities of silver on world markets led to a rapid increase in commercial exchanges of all kinds. This was as true for Asia, where the economies of both China and India were based on silver coinage, as it was for Europe. And America was supplying increasing amounts of precious metals to the world market. In the long run, it seems clear that Europeans benefited the most from this development. But this was not apparent in the sixteenth century. In the early part of Big Era Six, European participation in the trade of Asia was seriously limited. Europeans did not produce any commodities or finished goods that Asians wanted to buy. American silver, which Native Americans and African slaves extracted from the earth, provided a solution for European entrepreneurs. They could purchase Asian commodities (pepper, spices, coffee, tea, porcelain, carpets, silk, and cotton cloth) with American silver and, to some extent, gold. Once Europeans with precious metals to sell entered the trade of Asia, they also profited as specialists in moving goods from one part of Asia or Africa to another—Chinese porcelain to India, for example, or Indian textiles to West Africa. The trade boom in maritime Asia soared to new heights between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. But this boom greatly benefited European states and merchants as well as Asian ones.
Changing conditions of production, consumption, and labor around the world greatly affected the lives of ordinary women and men. These transformations took place in work habits, incomes, diet, family structure, and in some places even the ratio of women to men. For example, in parts of tropical Africa, the slave trade removed so many young males from society that women came significantly to outnumber men. By contrast, in the densest plantation societies |
in the Caribbean and Brazil, enslaved men of African descent greatly outnumbered enslaved women.
Sugar itself had a transforming effect on the Atlantic world in Big Era Six. The sugar boom brought riches to some Europeans and Africans but a death sentence to many others. The swelling consumption of sugar, coffee, tea, and cacao transformed the diets and daily habits of ordinary Europeans and linked them by invisible economic threads to enslaved Caribbean and Brazilian workers. The silver mines and sugar plantations did much to create a new international division of labor in which Africans, Native Americans, and Asians increasingly supplied labor and raw materials, while Europeans made finished goods using complex technologies. |