New Countries: Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in the Americas, 1750-1870
408
New Countries: Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in the Americas, 1750-1870
408eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Contributors. Alfredo Ávila, Roberto Breña, Sarah C. Chambers, Jordana Dym, Carolyn Fick, Erick Langer, Adam Rothman, David Sartorius, Kirsten Schultz, John Tutino
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822374305 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/17/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 408 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
New Countries
Capitalism, Revolutions, and Nations in the Americas, 1750â"1870
By John Tutino
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2016 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7430-5
CHAPTER 1
THE AMERICAS IN THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL CAPITALISM
JOHN TUTINO
In 1500, the Americas were home to powerful states concentrated in western highlands, cultivating communities along Atlantic coasts and in eastern woodlands, and diverse hunting, gathering, and farming peoples in vast interiors. The peoples of the hemisphere faced war and trade, production and migration — yet lived in a world of their own. They were only connected to Europe, Africa, and Asia after Iberians arrived in the 1490s, an accident of Europeans' search for new routes to trade with Asia. China produced silks and porcelains, South Asia made printed cotton cloth, and Southeast Asia provided pepper, cinnamon, and other spices — all coveted by European consumers. Asians sought little made by Europeans; rather, they demanded payment in money, gold and silver, for their fine manufactures and rare commodities. China and South Asia were economic powers around 1500. Europe could charitably be called an emerging region.
Trade between Asia and Europe had a long history. Overland excursions departed Krakow and other towns in Eastern Europe with silver to swap for silks and other luxuries. Traders from Venice and Genoa sailed through the Bosporus and across the Black Sea to meet overland caravans heading east. Others landed in the eastern Mediterranean to deal with Muslim merchants who moved money and goods across the Levant and on to South Asia and China. The old trades were limited in two ways: Europe produced little gold and limited silver, the latter mostly in Germanic lands; and land routes and sealanes required traders to deal with intermediaries aiming to profit and states demanding revenue for protection. Still, trade flourished for centuries.
When fifteenth-century Portuguese mariners, often funded by Genoese bankers, aimed to sail around Africa to trade directly with South Asia, their goal was to enter established trades while limiting the involvement of merchants and monarchs along the way. When Columbus, a Genoese mariner sailing for Castile, headed west across the Atlantic, his goal was the same — however poor his global geography. For a time, the Americas became an obstacle in the search for direct trade with Asia (while Columbus insisted he had already arrived there). Soon enough, however, the hemisphere, long a world to itself, became a key producer of commodities that accelerated trades that for the first time were truly global. Spanish American gold and especially silver stimulated trade everywhere. Meanwhile, the Atlantic Americas produced rising quantities of sugar, sending the sweet that was also a preservative and in time became a staple to Europeans in exchange for growing numbers of enslaved Africans — people who were made commodities of trade, drawing their continent ever deeper into global circuits of profit and degradation.
The incorporation of the Americas into four European empires — first Spanish and Portuguese, later British, and French — grounded the first world economy. The empires spread European ways of rule and promises of justice; they promoted Christianity (with diverse emphases), and promised salvation to those who embraced new truths. They also aimed to subordinate native American majorities — while the smallpox and other diseases that came as fellow travelers from the Old World decimated indigenous numbers. Then, to replace the dying and replenish laboring populations, Europeans turned to buying young African men (and women too), setting them to work in pursuit of profit — justifying their enslavement with racial and religious legitimations.
The taking of the Americas into the European empires inserted the hemisphere in global trades — the founding moment of the world economy. In the sixteenth century and long after, the pivotal exchange was Asian manufactures for bullion — drawing Asian wares to Europe. The gold and silver that stimulated expanded trades came primarily from Spanish America. Most went to Spain, passed through Western Europe and Mediterranean cities, often sent to Muslim ports, and then on to South Asia and China — drawing Asian goods in return flow. After 1570, an important second flow sailed from Acapulco to Manila, where a Chinese merchant community assembled wares from across Asia — Chinese silks and porcelains, Indian cottons, Island spices — for shipment across the Pacific to Spain's America, which thanks to booming silver economies had means to buy them. After 1600, transpacific trade took up to a third of American silver for the next century — evidence of a truly global commercial economy. Meanwhile, sugar made by slaves sold out of Africa shaped Brazil in the seventeenth century, the greater Caribbean in the eighteenth. Silver, sugar, and slaves made the Americas pivotal to a new world economy for centuries — until everything changed around 1800.
The Americas in the World Economy: The Challenge
A new and more global understanding of the economic history of the world has emerged in recent decades. Through the twentieth century, the rise of European — or, better, Western European and North American — hegemony was presumed, and mostly explained by cultural characteristics and innovative efforts within European domains in analyses ranging from Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism to the works of Douglass North, beginning with The Rise of the Western World (with Robert Paul Thomas) and culminating in Understanding the Process of Economic Change. The rise of China in the 1990s opened scholars to new visions. Asia was rediscovered, and the era of European hegemony was recognized as relatively brief — beginning about 1800 and of uncertain longevity as the twenty-first century began. The new understanding began with recognition of the long historic primacy of Asia in Andre Gunder Frank's ReOrient and Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence. In different ways, they emphasized the economic dominance of Asia in the sixteenth century and the late rise of Europe as the nineteenth began. The new challenge focuses on explaining, not presuming, the rise of Europe — a task begun by Pomeranz and continued by many, including Prasannan Parthasarathi in his bluntly titled Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not. The new vision gained powerful synthesis in Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium.
The Americas are everywhere in the new vision: the stimulus of New World silver from the sixteenth century; the Atlantic economy of sugar, slavery, and more from the seventeenth. Pomeranz explains the rise of British hegemony around 1800 by two factors: access to local coal for energy and to American lands for raw materials and markets. Still, the place of the Americas in global economic history comes late in Pomeranz and remains limited in most syntheses. They focus on a shifting balance between China and Western Europe, with the Islamic world and South Asia as essential participants and intermediaries. The Americas appear often as suppliers of silver and sugar, but rarely as major participants in the world economy — until the rise of the United States toward industrial hegemony in the late nineteenth century.
Here, I sketch an emerging understanding of global economic history after 1500 — pointing to ways that the Americas were pivotal participants. I then turn to the two great economies tying the Americas to global production and trade — silver; and sugar and slavery — and to the links integrating them. With that foundation, I explore the ways that wars and shifting trades rooted in global strategic-economic changes helped set off the conflicts that led to new countries across the Americas after 1760 and how those conflicts were pivotal to accelerating the global turn that consolidated the British-ruled industrial capitalism that shaped the nineteenth century. I conclude by surveying the very different opportunities and challenges faced by the emerging countries of the Americas in the new industrial world. Brazil, Cuba, and the United States prospered for decades supplying staples raised mostly by slaves; all ended slavery after 1860 — but only the United States found industrial power in late nineteenth century. In contrast, the silver economies of Spanish America collapsed as Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia became nations. They struggled for decades. So did Haiti — where slave revolution led to withdrawal and then exclusion from global trades — and Guatemala, which had never lived the stimulus of silver and contributed only dyestuffs to the new economy of the early nineteenth century.
The transformation of the global economy and the rise of new countries across the Americas between 1750 and 1870 were inseparable processes. Yet their integration is little understood, in good part because scholars of New World nation-making focus insistently on internal (and sometimes transatlantic) social and political developments while globally oriented analysts of economic history attend minimally to the Americas. This essay aims to deepen understanding of — and expand conversations about — the integration of the Americas in the world in a key era of global change.
The Americas in the World Economy: An Emerging Vision
It is a truism that a global economy could only develop in the sixteenth century when European empires began to incorporate the Americas into trade networks linking Europe, Africa, and Asia. Still, it is important to recognize the importance of long-distance trade before 1500. For centuries, trade linked Western Europe and East Asia, sometimes passing overland, sometimes taking mostly water routes from the Middle East via South Asia to China. Luxuries such as spices and silks generally traveled west, exchanged for silver or furs or other primary goods. Those trades also touched Africa via the Indian Ocean and across the Sahara. Luxury goods of high value to low weight ruled early commerce, generating wealth for traders, revenue for rulers, and prestige for rich consumers. Different ports and centers of trade, diverse producers and consumers, were favored or prejudiced over time. Throughout, Europe mostly produced primary goods and bought luxuries; centers of innovative production and trade moved around the Islamic world, South Asia, and China, while trade linked diverse Eurasian societies.
A second "world economy" integrated much of the Americas before 1500. Dependence on archaeology has left knowledge of the hemisphere focused on sites of power and symbols of rule and religion along with material products from crops to pottery. We lack the travel and trade narratives that tell so much of what we know about early Eurasian exchanges. Still, recent studies show that during the first millennium (CE) trade linked diverse peoples from the highland basins of central Mexico ruled by the great city of Teotihuacan, through Gulf lowlands where Olmecs had earlier ruled, highland Oaxaca led by Monte Albán, to the Maya zones of Yucatán and Guatemala. Imperial centers rose and fell — as in Eurasia — but trade persisted, as did war. War and trade shaped both Eurasia and Mesoamerica through the first millennium.
Commercial integration drove north from Mesoamerica in the second millennium. After the fall of Teotihuacan, Tula and its Toltec rulers consolidated power in central Mexico, keeping trade alive with Mayas far to the southeast while pressing northward. Centers of power and enclaves of cultivation reached the upper Río Grande Valley (now greater New Mexico), linked by trade and cultural exchange to central Mexico. Waterborne trade followed the Gulf Coast and went up the Mississippi to bring Mesoamerican trade, goods, and cultural contacts to Cahokia — a state emerging near the confluence of the Ohio, Missouri, and Mississippi Rivers. The spread of maize, Mesoamerica's great contribution to the Americas and the world, across North America to coastal New England long before 1500 reveals very wide exchanges.
While trades within Mesoamerica and linking that region to North America are best known, there is evidence of ties to South America as well. Maize became a major crop in Andean valleys in the first millennium; the Tarascan regime of western Mesoamerica resisted Mexica (Aztec) expansion in the fifteenth century in part thanks to copper metallurgy gained from Andean contacts. In the Andes, the Inca state remains famous for pressing power and exchange outward from Cuzco, integrating regions now highland and coastal Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia and reaching southern Columbia and northern Chile and Argentina. Scholars insist that exchange was not trade inside the Inca domain and that it operated through hierarchies of reciprocity organized by local, regional, and imperial lords. Still, exchange was everywhere, tied to military power and regime rule, and legitimated by claims of reciprocity (that masked and perhaps limited inequities). Seen in its larger function, Inca exchange was not radically different from Eurasian trades, where military power was always a factor, state sanction essential, and claims of mutual benefit constant. The Inca perhaps took the fusion of regime and exchange to an extreme, but the integration was far from unique.
Before 1500 — and long after — the Eurasian and American "world economies" were what Findlay and O'Rourke call polycentric. No single city, regime, or region of power dominated. Places of rule might be pivots of trade; often they were separate — as when inland capitals dealt with coastal ports of trade. Over time, political regimes rose and fell; commercial nodes and trade routes shifted too. Still, trade persisted, stimulating production of luxury goods, precious metals, and more; profiting merchants and funding regimes and their militaries on land and sea. Because of high transport costs, long-distance trade focused on goods of high value and low weight. Trade thus stimulated production, generated wealth, and sustained powerful states; yet every center of power and trade in the early world economies had to be supplied with food, cloth, combustibles, and building materials by local and regional producers.
While trade promoted continuing exchanges and constant wars, the local economies that supplied trades and sustained regimes varied widely. Production might depend on small growers and artisans, large-scale producers, or a mix; labor could be bound, drafted, or negotiated, paid well, poorly, or not at all. Cities and ports might draw sustenance by trade, tributes, or taxes. Local markets might be vibrant or limited. Concentrations of profit and power could be great or limited; inequities and exploitations could be limited or deeply debilitating. The key is that in polycentric commercial economies, trade linked centers of power and production across long distances, over time favoring some, weakening others. Commerce stimulated and sustained local and regional diversities of power and production — while all interacted in war and trade.
Polycentrism continued to mark the larger world economy that began when Europeans linked the Americas, Eurasia, and Africa after 1500. The inclusion of the Americas brought rising flows of silver after 1550, of sugar after 1600 — and the growing trade in slaves they stimulated. American silver paid for Chinese silks and porcelains, Southeast Asian spices, and Indian cottons; sugar and silver stimulated the soaring demand for slaves. And in the profitable process, European and Euro-American merchants found newly pivotal roles while demanding and funding protection by newly powerful European regimes becoming oceanic empires.
Europeans were not suddenly dominant, as too many histories suggest. But they shifted from struggling as marginal participants often subject to Islamic and other intermediaries to gain Asian wares, to become traders in control of key commodities and linking American, Asian, African, and European markets and producers. Portuguese, Dutch, and English traders sailed directly to South and East Asian ports; Spanish American merchants delivered silver to Chinese merchants entrenched at Manila, exchanging it for wares from China, the islands, and South Asia. Into the eighteenth century, industrial primacy in silks and porcelains remained with China; South Asia made cotton goods coveted in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Europeans became traders of rising importance thanks to control of the world's primary sources of silver, the profits of Atlantic sugar and slave trades, innovations in sailing technology, and rising naval power.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from New Countries by John Tutino. Copyright © 2016 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ixIntroduction: Revolutions, Nations, and a New Industrial World / John Tutino 1
Part I. Hemispheric Challenges
1. The Americas in the Rise of Industrial Capitalism / John Tutino 25
2. The Cádiz Liberal Revolution and Spanish American Independence / Roberto Brena 71
Part II. Atlantic Transformations
3. Union, Capitalism, and Slavery in the "Rising Empire" of the United States / Adam Rothman 107
4. From Slave Colony to Black Nation: Haiti's Revolutionary Inversion / Carolyn Fick 138
5. Cuban Counterpoint: Colonialism and Continuity in the Atlantic World / David Sartorius 175
6. Atlantic Transformations and Brazil's Imperial Independence / Kirsten Schultz 201
Part III. Spanish American Inversions
7. Becoming Mexico: The Conflictive Search for a North American Nation / Alfredo Avila and John Tutino 233
8. The Republic of Guatemala: Stitching Together a New Country / Jordana Dym 178
9. From One Patria, Two Nations in the Andean Heartland / Sarah C. Chambers 316
10. Indigenous Independence in Spanish South America / Erick D. Langer 350
Epilogue. Consolidating Divergence: The Americas and the World after 1850 / Erick D. Langer and John Tutino 376
Contributors 387
Index 389
What People are Saying About This
"New Countries offers a powerful correction to Atlantic and world histories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that still privilege Anglophone or Francophone worlds when explaining the rise of democratic republicanism and industrialization. It bridges the often arbitrary colonial-national divide while addressing many of the most active debates in Latin American history, including critiques that the literature so concerned with culture and politics has neglected the economic realm. This volume wisely insists we separate them at our peril."
"A remarkable and challenging collection of essays brought together by a historian who has challenged us in expansive ways on his own. Students at all levels and in several disciplines interested in what a global perspective might look like and how we might better think about the development of nations, empires, and capitalism will find New Countries both stimulating and valuable."
"This wonderful anthology offers something more important than the sum of each of its stellar essays. New Countries reestablishes the coherence (even as it recognizes the diversity) of early nineteenth-century movements across the Americas. It should be read not just by historians of Latin America but by all scholars interested in new international history, particularly the New World origins of modern systems of exploitation, principles of sovereignty, and ideas of liberation."