 I'm Salvatore Babonis and today's lecture is the emergence of the global world. In the past there were many human worlds, but today there is just one world. How did we get here? The disparate world systems of the world coalesced under the pressure of European expansion during what is often called the long 16th century of 1490 to 1640. This rise to global dominance was largely financed by the genocide of the peoples of South and Central America, which gave Europe the resources to dominate Africa and integrate India and China into a single Europe-centered world market. The basic global cultural economy established between 1490 and 1650 persists to this day. Many reasons are given for why Europeans were willing and able to integrate the world through force and trade after the mid-1400s. Some say that European competition driven by a system of small, warring states made Europeans especially effective at conquest. Some say that systematic maritime education under Prince Hevery the Navigator of Portugal led to Europeans being better able to sail around the world than other peoples. Some say that geography played a role favorable trade winds facilitated the crossing of the Atlantic Ocean. Others focus on the rise of finance capitalism towards the end of the Italian Renaissance. Whatever the reason, the European will to expand by sea was driven by the Italian desire to reach India to buy spices directed the source instead of having to buy them through middlemen via the Ottoman Empire. At the end of the Italian Renaissance, two commercial cities dominated Italy and vied for control of Mediterranean commerce. This map I have of Italy is actually drawn from a modern cruise ship advertisement. But even today, Venice and Genoa are major port cities, each looking in opposite way around the Mediterranean. Venice looks to the east towards Greece and Turkey and historically the Ottoman Empire. And Genoa looks west towards Spain, North Africa and ultimately out into the Atlantic. Portuguese sailors on the very western edge of Europe began to look for a sea route to India in the 1400s. They mapped the African coast bit by bit. They went a few hundred miles and established a fort, then another few hundred miles and established a fort navigating mile by mile along the coast. It took them decades just to get from Lisbon to present day Morocco and map that coastline sufficiently to be able to sail it safely. It took another 50 years for them to make it to the Cape of Guvidhup at the southern end of Africa. I amazingly, the Phoenician navigators of 2600 years ago circumnavigated Africa more quickly than the Portuguese trained by Prince Henry the navigator. Vasco da Gama finally reached India in 1498 and made a fortune from the voyage when he returned to Portugal. The reason it took Portuguese sailors nearly a century to reach India was that they were trying to crawl there along the coast against the prevailing wind and current. It turned out the proper way to reach India was to follow the North African coast until the end of the Sahara Desert and then to strike out west into the unknown, into the South Atlantic gyre, riding the wind and the waves in a big circle around which would then propel you around the Cape of Guvidhup and towards India. Coming back sailors had to be equally brave sailing along the coast and then striking out into the Atlantic to catch the North Atlantic gyre home. In fact it was on one of these voyages into the South Atlantic gyre that Portuguese sailors accidentally discovered Brazil and started their own empire in the Americas to rival the Spanish empire. By the time Portugal had reached India in 1498 their Spanish competitors were already in America. Though of course they didn't know it, they thought they were in India. Christopher Columbus's four voyages were financed by Italian financiers though he sailed in the name of the Spanish crown. He himself of course was from Genoa and spoke Italian, not Spanish. It took Spain and Portugal less than a century to conquer all of the major civilizations of what are now North and South America. Spain and Portugal conquered all of the existing settled communities. The areas of North America that were not colonized by Spain or Portugal and the Amazonian area that was not colonized or all areas that were characterized by pastoral and hunter-gatherer people that did not have pre-existing cities. When Hernán Cortés arrived in Mexico with 630 soldiers the Mexicans didn't know what to do with them. The Aztecs treated them as honored guests. They easily conquered the Aztec empire which had no tradition of warfare to the death of the kind the Spanish practiced. Just 15 years later, 15 years after the conquest of Mexico, the conquistador Francisco Pizarro conquered most of South America with an army of 168 soldiers. Unimaginably it only took 168 people to conquer all of South America partly because of technology. Spain had horses and guns but much more importantly because of the genocide of the Americas due to pandemics of smallpox, measles, typhus and all sorts of diseases that were endemic in Afro-Eurasia but had never been experienced by people in the Americas. It is estimated that up to 90 or 100% of the populations of lands colonized by Spain died of disease within 50 years of contact. The disease problem was so acute that Columbus was unable to pan for gold on his second voyage. He had promised the Spanish king and his Italian financiers that he would bring back lots of gold and he found a little bit of gold in a stream in what's now the Dominican Republic but he couldn't find anyone to pan for gold in the stream because all of his laborers died of disease and that was on his second voyage in 1494. In the two years between his first voyage and his second voyage most of the people of the island had died. In 1501, just 9 years after Columbus's first discovery of America, Spain was already buying slaves from Africa to make up for labor shortages in its Caribbean colonies. In 1600, just 800 years after the conquest of the Americas, Brazilian exports of sugar produced by slaves were twice as large as all exports from the United Kingdom. This shows that within 100 years the economy of the Americas went from Columbus panning for gold in a stream to a massive plantation export economy that was as large or larger than the economy of the European continent itself. Brazil is a great example of the demographic genocide that occurred in the Americas. Today, fewer than 0.5% of Brazil's population is Native American. There are more Japanese Brazilians than there are Brazilians of Native American descent. In these years between 1490 and 1640 the entire world came to be incorporated into what we call the modern world system centered on European colonial and trading networks. All of the major civilizations of the world were incorporated into this system, some through conquest like the Aztec and Inca peoples of the Americas, others through trade like India and China. An influx of gold and silver from the Americas into the old world economy of Afro-Eurasia led to a price revolution in which the prices of most goods rose simultaneously all over the world. It's a simple principle of economics that when there is more money in a system, when the money supply expands by a factor of two or three as it did when Spain discovered silver in Mexico and in Peru, prices go up. The year 1640 represents a kind of turning point or a point of consolidation. The spread of the world market by that point was relatively complete. All of the world or all major areas of the world had been connected into the modern world system by around 1640. The price revolution caused by the massive influx of silver from the Americas had mostly been completed throughout the entire world. By 1640, the era of rapid massive global social change was coming to an end and the world entered a period of relative normalcy that would last until the current day. Across this newly integrated global world system, human relationships came to be monetized everywhere. In China, there was a transition from taxes in kind. People had to perform labor every year on the canals and on their feudal estates and instead they would just pay tax and silver so they would work for themselves and pay a tax to the government and to their lords. In Mexico, the Hacienda system was introduced and indigenous people were forced to work on large farms instead of in their own peasant communities. In Brazil, slaves were bought or stolen from Africa and brought into staff massive commercial sugar plantations. In Europe, the Thirty Years' War ended feudalism as an economic system. All of these processes were, for the most part, complete by around 1640 or 1650. The period from 1492 to 1640 was one of incredible global social change and in the Americas, complete genocide. But by 1640, the modern world as we know it today had largely taken shape. The global world system that arose during this period is known as the modern world system because of its association with modernity and the modern age. Etymologically, modern just means current, but in the social sciences, the word is used to refer to a specific cultural economic and political syndrome. Modernity as a term refers to the breakdown of traditional forms of authority, church, family, monarchy, and their replacement with individualism. Modern as a time period in European history starts with the Italian Renaissance and the rise of the Renaissance man, the great individuals like Galileo, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo. Modern as a cultural system refers to a way of life that stresses individual personal fulfillment. Modern as an economic system refers to the use of money and markets in contrast to the feudal system where people owed labor as a responsibility. And modern as a political system refers to various creeds of popular sovereignty, sometimes used in support of democracies and sometimes dictatorships. Both democracy and dictatorship are modern political forms because they emphasize the role of the individual and the individual's loyalty to the system. They both involve direct ties between the individual and the government, not mediated by family, church, and tradition. The modern era has been coming to an end for a long time now. Most people would use the word postmodern to describe the age in which we live. But the characteristics of postmodernity have not yet become clear. We all know that the world has changed, but we're not exactly sure what it has changed into. As with the shift to modernity, the shift to postmodernity doesn't have a specific date. The shift from feudalism to modernity took around 150 years. Well, the shift to postmodernity clearly was underway starting in 1945. Since 1945, humanity has had the ability to completely destroy itself, and that ability has placed limits on individual ambition. We no longer live in the modern era of the individual. But exactly what kind of era we live in is still open to interpretation. Key takeaways. First, the modern world system integrated the entire world into a single global system around the years 1490 to 1640. Second, the European genocide of the Americas resulted in the deaths of 90 to 100% of the population in most of the settled regions of Central and South America. And finally, modernity itself refers to the breakdown of traditional forms of authority in the modern era. Thank you for listening to this lecture. For more information about me and my popular writing, go to salvatorbonus.com, where you can also sign up for my