Week 3 Readings

Chapter 15: Global Commerce

In chapter fifteen the author talks about commerce between different empires and what they traded and how they expanded their empires. The Portuguese, Spain, the East India companies all had their own strategies for taking over the trade routes and creating a monopoly over some of items that they traded. For example the Portuguese created the “trading post empire” in the Indian Ocean. Yet silver became very important in trading. The use of silver became important in the network of exchange in Eurasia. I never realized how valuable silver became before the use of gold. During this time period everyone wanted silver. Because of silver, the Pacific commerce was created. Also the Spanish America became very wealthy because of the silver since they produced eighty-five percent of the silver. But unfortunately it hurt the Spanish economy by causing inflation.

            Later in the chapter the author discusses the commerce of people. In other words the trade of slaves. I found it interesting that not all of the slaves had back breaking jobs. There were some that were involved in the military and politics. This was shocking because I have only learned about slaves being forced to work on plantations or be given life threating jobs. I also found interesting was the graphs. I understand and can see why as the years go on in the first the number of slave that came to the Americas increased and then after the year 1775 the number of slaves began to decrease. This is because at firs the demand for slaves slowly increased and then in 1787 slavery in the northern states was abolished in the Americas causing a decrease in the amount of slaves that were imported in the Americas. I found the other graph about the destination of slaves in the eighteenth century shocking because British North America and U.S. had the lowest percentage of slaves compared to other nations. I thought they would be a country with the most amount of slaves because mainly we hear about the slave trade that happened in north America. Because of the slave trade it had a great impact on Africa. As a result their population decreased and they did not benefit from it economically.