Transcript for:
Chapter 1 Overview of Early American and European History

hello and welcome to history 1301 the first part of US History my name is Dr Jessica Bic and we'll be starting with chapter one today uh chapter one is titled A New World and that's literally what we're going to be talking about today now before we get into talking about different cultures and history that happened in the area that we nowadays know as the United States of America I want to point out that human beings originated probably on the continent of Africa several thousand years ago and then eventually made their way out of Africa into places like Europe and Asia across the Asian continent and then across a land bridge from Asia to what is nowadays Alaska then from there down North American continent and eventually into South America now the year that you usually hear when a contact was made between the so-called old world and the new world which I'll explain that in just a second is is the year 1492 now in the year 1492 CE it's estimated that about 70 million people lived on the continents of North and South America that made those two continents roughly equal to the population of the continent of Europe at the same time the two populations of human beings living on Earth at this time simply did not know that the other existed people living in what came to be known as the so-called old world which refers to the continents of Europe Europe Asia and Africa did not know that there were two gigantic continents on the other side of the planet which will eventually be called the new world which we nowadays know as the continents of North and South America these two bodies of human beings lived on two separate sides of the planet Earth and they did not know that the other existed on the other side of the planet now if you're wondering what about the other continents it's still going to take a bit more time in human history for the Australian continent to be added to the to a part of the otherwise unknown world and a little bit longer from there for the continent of Antarctica to be added as well so starting in Asia the very first migrants that eventually came to the new world the first to settle in what eventually became what we know nowadays as the United States were actually very culturally diverse and this is what we think we know about these earliest humans to live in what eventually becomes America now thousands of years ago the last Global Ice Age happened and the Ice Age trapped much of the world's water supply in enormous Continental sized glaciers about 20,000 years ago ice sheets some of which were over a mile thick extended all the way across North America as far south as the modern-day area that we know as the state of Illinois as you can see in this map on the slide here now with so much of the world's water captured in these massive eye sheets Global sea levels were actually much lower than they are today and there was actually a land bridge which connected the continent of Asia in North America across what is nowadays known as the bearing straight that little tail that kicks off at the end of Australia and the Very Far Eastern end of Russia actually you could walk across them the water was very very low the ocean levels were down and so there was a physical land bridge that you could walk across from Asia to North America now these people probably migrated anywhere between 15,000 to about 60,000 years ago coming out of Central and Northern Siberia probably coming across that bearing land bridge but there are other scientists and anthropologists who have sucess who have suggested that other ancestors probably crossed over the seas and voyaged along the Pacific Coastline after they traveled across the Pacific Ocean and landed on the Pacific Coastline of what is nowadays Canada and the United States of America then those people probably traveled along riverways and settled where local ecoystems permitted now of these migrants from Asia to the Americas many groups over time made their way further down south into the continent of South America but once they crossed the bearing land bridge some people's branched off and settled down along the way some people settled up in the north when they branched off and settled down down in Canada others went a little bit further south and settled what is in what is nowadays the United States of America others went a little bit more south and went into Central America and then finally about 11,000 years ago we think that human beings made it to the very furthest southern tip of the continent of South America now again the first human settlers probably reached the furthest southern tip of South America about 11 ,000 years ago and everywhere in between started to eventually be filled in with different settlement groups these early people who came to the Americas were migrants they moved around all the time and these early migrants probably lived off of hunting large game like bison uh which are basically you know just a bigger version of Buffalo woolly mammoths and other large mammals like woolly rhinoceros and saber-tooth tigers and things like that now if you're wondering about woolly mammoth wooly Mammoth actually lived as far down as Central America during the last ice age in fact numerous mammal fossils have been pulled out of the Trinity River near Dallas and there was an entire Mammoth herd that actually died and was preserved and then was discovered as far south as wo Texas in an area that's nowadays called the wo Mammoth National Monument if you ever have the urge to go down there and visit and see how mammoths used to live here in Texas but back to the Point uh as the LI last ice age started to come to an end temperatures in the climate uh and water levels all around the world began to rise dramatically and as the temperature got warmer animals such as the woolly mammoth and the giant bison were hunted basically into Extinction somewhere around the year 9000 BCE as well so at this point with their food sources dwindling these first settlers in the Americas simply had to adapt in order to be able to survive basically they had to find some new food source to sustain themselves and their families as the animals started to di off now when human populations grew while the food supply was changing early Native American people simply had to turn to farming and agriculture in order to have enough food to survive at first people would gather and collect together wild fruit and vegetable sources but eventually when wild Food Supplies could no longer support such a large population of people and their giant sources of meat didn't really exist anymore having gone extinct human beings finally started to develop farming which allowed these Native American settlers to have a much more secure supply of food in the future now the most important Native American adaptation to the end of the last ice age was the domestication of plants and the start of early human farming now during these very early days of Agriculture women's knowledge of plants was key it was fundamental in the development of farming and as a result women's status in society slightly improved because over time women came to serve as the principal Farmers for many Native American societies these societies later developed full-blown agriculture including usually the cultivation of plants like maze which is actually an earlier ancestor of what we nowadays know as corn but they also cultivated squash and beans and those three categories of vegetables enabled large settled civilizations to eventually emerge in the Americas now by the way those three vegetables beans corn and squash are typically known as the quote unquote Three Sisters in most North American indigenous groups those three plants are completely unique to North and South America they don't exist in Europe or Asia or Africa or Australia or Antarctica they only can be found natively in North and South America and all three of those plants support the growth of each of the other in that Triad these three plants actually work best when they're all planted together now another thing to note is also between the years 8000 BCE and about 1,500 BCE important social changes were happening usually related to this new Agri ulture thing that was starting to develop at this point men and women began to assume very specialized roles in society for example men were the ones who did the hunting and fishing to provide meat for the diet of their people and women usually stayed back in the uh settled area and harvested and prepared foods and started to care for children while men were away from home over time what are known as culture areas began to form all over the Americas culture areas are geographical regions inhabited by peoples who all share similar basic patterns of subsistence and social organization and you can see a variety of different culture areas that formed in what is nowadays the United States and Canada on this map on the slide here now Regional variations did eventually develop but all of these native cultures remained in contact with each other through the development of extensive trade networks Exchange networks crossed all over North America carrying local Goods such as Foods plant dyes and medicines pottery and quarried rock of various kinds and transitioned them all over North America trade networks also distributed goods from very far away including shell beads from the coastlines copper that had been mined out of the Great Lakes region and Micah that had come from the Appalachians although trading networks did span the North American continent Native American groups and culture areas remained incredibly diverse now in some regions of what we nowadays know as the United States of America agriculture was basically impossible in areas far to the North like the Arctic and subarctic regions growing food in the ground is impossible because the ground is basically Frozen in those areas the so-called Inuit peoples remained nomadic and actually roamed along the coastlines to follow animal herds for food or to fish along the coastlines as they went in other regions abundant natural food sources were available that made agriculture unnecessary in some places for example in the Pacific Northwest of what we nowadays know as the states of Washington and Oregon in those areas abundant natural resources were so widely available that the native peoples who lived in those areas did not need to farm they didn't need to develop agriculture they just had enough wild Food Supplies to keep everyone fed and happy um in addition in the area that we nowadays know as Southern California the native peoples there lived in very small villages that were usually built near natural oak tree Groves and those peoples were able to gather and eat acorns as a large part of their diet and thus they never really needed to develop agriculture or the domestication of plants to feed everyone in their society either now in many of your usual history classes here in the United States you often times hear of the so-called old world and the so-called new world and I want to explain those terms for you so that we're all in the same page the old world just so that we're all using the same vocabulary here Old World refers specifically to the parts of the world including the continents of Europe Asia and Africa the reason why it's called the old world is because people living on these three continents had known about each other and interacted with each other for thousands of years but this was the extent of those people's Known World they didn't know that there were other places in other lands and other human beings that were living outside of Europe Asia and Africa but eventually those people living in the new in the old world will become very aware of an entirely New World which refers specifically to the continents of new North and South America to which the people of the old world had no idea even existed until Christopher Columbus went out and then returned to Spain after his famous voyage in 1492 and vice versa when I say vice versa what I mean here is that people living in the New World in North and South America they didn't know that people lived in the old world either uh the new world was not aware of the existence of any other outside groups of human beings living on any other land mass anywhere else in the world now oldw World cultures Europe Asia and Africa had known about each other's existence for quite some time a person living in what is nowadays the modern day nation of France might not have ever met a person from China or from the African continent but in general they all knew that others existed and the known world was populated by different civilizations and other far-flung areas now this is before the old world and the new world make contact with each other and in this time where contact hasn't happened yet we are going to eventually have three very broad very different cultures and populations that will start interacting with each other on a large scale for the very first time in history once that contact between old world and new world is made and those three distinct populations are Europeans the indigenous peoples of North Central and South America and Africans so I'd like to talk very briefly about what was happening in those three cultures leading up to the year 1492 CE and let's start with the cultures of North and South America now several large civilizations formed in the Americas Most in the area nowadays known as meso America which stretches from the nation of Mexico down into Central America the first major Mesoamerican civilization was known as the MCH the MCHS were the first major city builders in all of the Americas thech lived mainly along the Gulf Coast of what is nowadays Mexico from the year 1200 BCE to about 400 BCE and then after the alch eventually died off two of the most important of the Mesoamerican groups that formed later were the Mayans and the Aztecs now the Mayans followed pretty closely in the footsteps of the MX the Mayans lived in the southern Yucatan area of the modern-day nation of Mexico and were known for their very Advanced writing system and calendar systems if you've ever heard of the Mayan calendar or any of that this is who we're talking about uh the other group are the Aztecs and the Aztecs were a culture of warrior peoples who dominated the valley of Mexico from around the year 1,100 CE until their eventual Conquest in the Years between 1519 and 1521 by a group of Spanish soldiers led by a man named hernand Cortez Aztec civilization centered completely around a massive giant pyramid at the capital city of tanakon which is not that far away from the modern-day Mexico City footprint on this map you can see in uh this sort of orangey beige color that indicates the area of the Aztec Empire and the green section on the map in the uken peninsula there that references the area controlled by the Mayan empire now the Aztecs made a name for themselves by conquering neighboring peoples in order to create a seemingly ever expanding Empire for themselves but neighboring peoples usually gave in and submitted to the Aztecs out of fear rather rather than out of trust and So eventually people in the outer Circles of the Aztec empire had come to fear and really not get along with their Aztec overlords that will become important in just a moment moving up to the area that's in the modern-day country of the United States or what we know nowadays as the United States in the Eastern portion of what is nowadays known as the United States hundreds of people inhabited small towns and Villages scattered all the way from the Gulf of Mexico in the South all the way up to the present day nation of Canada these indigenous peoples on the East Coast tended to live off of corn squash and beans and supplemented their diets by fishing and then hunting deer turkeys and other animals for protein um on the other side of what is nowadays the United States on the densely populated Pacific ocean coastline on the west coast hundreds of distinct groups resided in independent Villages and lived primarily by fishing hunting sea mammals and also Gathering wild plants and nuts as part of their diet in fact as many as 25 million salmon swam up the Columbia River system every single year providing people who lived anywhere near that River with vastly abundant food sources now in the interior of the United States in the area that's kind of between the East and West coasts in the area known as the Great Plains the Great Plains was populated with millions of Buffalo and many groups who lived on the Great Plains of what is nowadays the United States were Hunter groups uh these groups would track animals on foot before the arrival of horses horses did not exist natively in North Central or South America horses are only going to be introduced to indigenous peoples of the Americas once contact is made and once the people of Spain introduced those animals to the Americas now the native peoples who were Hunters who would track animals like Buffalo uh would usually follow the Buffalo herds for part of the year and then live in agriculturally focused communities in the river valley ways when they were not on the hunt so in the interior of modern day America as I said the area referred to as the Great Plains different indigenous groups like The the mandans and the pones typically settled along river valleys and were semi-nomadic in these communities women were typically in charge of farming and men would go out in search of animals like bison and others to hunt native Societies in the Great Plains were highly gendered but much more equal than the system of gender relations that is developing at the same time over on the European continent in most Native American communities women had responsibility for farming and for running households including literally building the houses that their families lived in although most diplomatic and military leaders in these groups were usually men women generally made decisions about food cultivation food storage and preparation they participated in group councils especially when matters within the realm of women were being considered including whether or not a group should go to war or whether or not a Waring people should make peace because of women's roles in lifegiving and in providing food for battles and for soldiers and also their interest in maintaining peace and diplomacy now many North American societies were actually matrilineal that means that people would Trace their family descent through the mother's line and children would automatically become members of the mother's family or Clan and not necessarily the Fathers as in today's modern-day more patrilineal societies that we have experience with um in these matol lineal societies women generally had a great deal of power over their own sexuality including being able to choose who they wanted to marry and had the ability to initiate divorces as well now in the area specifically that stretches along the Mississippi River Valley all the way to the Atlantic Ocean around 3,500 years ago a group of people known Loosely as the Mississippian civilizations centered their communities in the lower part of the Mississippi River Valley around a series of dozens and dozens of semicircular man-made mounds and established very extensive trading networks all throughout the North and South American continents these people were generally known as the mound building peoples now we call them the mound builders because they were known for building large earn man-made monuments sometimes in just regular heaps of dirt on the ground you know just circular structures uh but sometimes built in very strange shapes like the shapes of snakes and birds in fact you can see on this particular slide Mound a mound has been built in the shape of a snake on the far left side of the of of the slide we see the curly tail of the snake and then we see an undulating body up and down across the middle of the slide and then on the far top right there's a little triangle that indicates the snake's head with its tongue sticking out there which is pretty interesting but most of the Mounds were just regular heaps of dirt on the ground and most of these Mounds were actually huge burial sites if you were to dig into any of these Mounds you would find that they were filled not just with dirt rocks but with all sorts of implements from jewelry to tools the last big mound building culture was known generally as the Mississippian and they lived all throughout the Mississippi River Valley usually in pretty large densely populated areas in fact the largest city north of the nation of Mexico was a city known as Cahokia which still exists it's right across the Mississippi River from the present day location of the city of St Louis Missouri and this is actually on this slide an artist rendition of what Cahokia looked like at its peak at its peak actually the city of Cahokia probably had about 30,000 residents living in it which made Cahokia roughly equivalent in size to the city of London at the exact same time so that's nothing to you know uh demean this is a huge area now eventually these groups in the Great Plains the Center of America uh began to decline overall due to constant Warfare and changing climates and then around the year 125 CE a medieval warm period came to an end and a much colder much less climate predictable era known as the little Ice Age kicked off in 1250 CE once the climate became colder large scale agriculture became much more difficult to conduct and large centralized societies and urban populations became impossible to sustain so people began to move out of Mississippian and Southwestern cities into much smaller scale more ecologically sustainable towns and surrounding small farming areas and the cities basically disappeared and as Warfare and political instability increased groups like The iroy Peoples and the Huron moved into more fortified towns and started to form alliances with each other known as confederacies and these were created in an effort to group together during very prolonged periods of hardship and War so for example amongst the iroy people five different nations the Mohawks the onidas the onondagas the cugas and the CNAs came together into a Confederacy which was known as the great League of peace and power sometime around the year 1450 CE in an effort to diminish internal conflicts amongst their people and to increase their Collective Strength against enemies in the future now numerous land systems exist existed amongst Native American groups generally however specific families or towns of native peoples would sometimes claim the right to farm on certain pieces of land and Nations or confederacies might also claim some areas for Hunting Fishing and Gathering but the actual ownership of land was a concept that most Native American people did not subscribe to at all to the immediate north of what is nowadays the nation of Mexico many Native American peoples created vast societies which were usually centered around growing a very drought resistant variety of the plant known as maze which again is a very early relative of what we know it know nowadays as corn if you think of uh corn how it has those silks or those strings in it whenever you shuck or take the husk off of corn Maye basically had a lot more of those strings and there were a lot fewer kernels on the corn cob so to speak that's what maze was like it was a very hairy kind of woolly version of what we nowadays know as corn so for over 3,000 years in the area that is now known as modern-day Colorado Utah Arizona and New Mexico there lived a very early farming Community known as the puebloan or the peblo peoples and these were made up of different tribes and clans like the Hopi and the zouri people and their ancestors ERS when Spanish explorers eventually came to what what we nowadays call the American southwest those Spanish explorers started to call some of the people that they encountered in the southwest Pueblo Indians because those native people lived in towns or pblos that had very complex irrigation Dam and Canal systems that helped them grow crops in this area because as you might know if you've ever been to the American southwest there was very little rain in this otherwise desert-like area so they needed to have massive irrigation systems in order to grow any kind of plants and the people living in these Pueblo uh settlements also engaged in some long distance trade with other groups as well nowadays the puebloans are mostly known for the very unique dwellings that they created for themselves immediately prior to contact with the Spanish originally and people lived in small villages but sometime after the year 1200 CE puebloan people started to literally carve homes and buildings into the stone walls of the Canyons in the area sort of like what is here on the slide um but also around the year 1200 CE the climate in the American southwest started to grow a little bit colder in this area and it became harder and harder year after year to grow enough food to feed everyone living in these areas and one of the last areas that I very briefly want to go over before we get into a new uh civilization a new group of people um are native peoples who lived in the Caribbean islands now in the Caribbean islands uh these islands were originally populated by people who originally lived on the mainland of North and South America but people began to go out to the Islands sometime around the year 5000 bcec uh Caribbean Islanders uh traded all throughout the Caribbean with people living on other Islands but they also traded with peoples in meso America and South America by using canals to go back and forth between the islands and the mainlands of the continents in the year 1492 CE when the very first Europeans started to arrive in the new world it's estimated that as many as 4 million people probably lived in the Caribbean islands alone and in these Societies in the Caribbean powerful Chieftain ruled over Villages and usually conducted war and diplomacy with groups that lived on other islands in the islands though a pretty unique pattern started to develop there would be long periods years and years of Peace would follow after years and years of warfare and then go back and forth peace and War peace and War in fact when the Europeans first arrived in the Caribbean islands the islands were in a period of immense volatility they had just ended a very long period of harsh intensive Warfare and many groups in the Caribbean islands were just starting to gather themselves together after years of brutal fighting and things were still on a very uncertain footing and all of these things affected just how the Europeans viewed the indigenous people and how the indigenous people reacted to the Europe Europeans that they encountered when Columbus and his men first landed in the Caribbean islands when those Europeans first arrived native peoples in North Central and South America were tremendously diverse and were differentiated by things like language custom political system clothing housing structures and religious beliefs and another thing to note is that all of these indigenous peoples did not consider themselves to be one unified people with any kind of common cultural or racial identity the people living in North Central and South America did not think of themselves as Native Americans or as indigenous people they thought of themselves as members of different cultural areas like you see labeled on this map instead of all indigenous people or all Indians which again that that particular term is a misnomer in and of itself and we'll get to that in just a second the next group that I want to talk about are people who are coming from Africa more specifically folks who came from the western coast of Africa and eventually made contact with people who were living in North America North Central and South America for about 300 years after contact was made between the old world and the new world in 1492 for 300 straight years six out of every seven people who crossed over the Atlantic Ocean from the old old world to the new world originated in Africa so it's very important to know about what African societies were like at this time now African societies varied enormously from very large centralized states to very stateless non uh non-centered societies that were common in central Africa in West Africa though it was very sparsely populated areas where people lived were actually densely populated with most settlements actually occurring along the Atlantic ocean coastline similar to Native Americans and Europeans West Africans did not consider themselves to be all one unified people in fact West African people spoke dozens of different languages and hundreds of different dialects they also lived under a variety of different political systems too in the late medieval and early modern eras right leading up to contact between the old and the new world most West African people lived in towns that were centered around kinship and family networks which were run by Elders in their communities just like in Native American societies women in many parts of West Africa were solely responsible for farming and Land Management in their communities but there were actually some parts of West Africa that were ruled by large centralized empires in fact the largest of these Empires uh was centered around the great city of timbuk 2 timbuk 2 was one of the biggest cities in the world at this time with somewhere around 70,000 people living in the city in the 15th century and Timbuktu was the capital city of the so-called sonai Empire the sonai were a very powerful West African state that flourished between the years of 1450 and 1591 but all throughout West Africa the series of different trading Empires like the Sanai but also other groups like The Asanti the dhomi and the oo flourished uh taking advantage of their position between different trade routes particularly trade routes coming out of the Mediterranean and kingdoms farther on the southern portion of the African continent and trade networks also linked Inland and Coastal States throughout the continent as well along these trade networks gold salt and human beings being being traded as slaves were routinely traded around but West African societies were usually composed of some very highly skilled Artisans and metal workers who ended up producing massive bronze sculptures and gold weights um actually on this slide we have a picture of what are known as the benine bronzes which were made by people who lived in the uh area that is nowaday known as the African nation of Benin which captured the history and told the story of their glorious past of people living in various parts of Western Africa but most West African people at this particular time in the 1400s were actually farmers in their day-to-day lives men prepared the fields for planting tilling up the ground and women were the ones who cultivated and planted and then later harvested any crops in addition women also traded Goods at marketplaces and were in charge of caring for small livestock that the family might own men were usually responsible for hurting large animals like cattle and for hunting other animals for extra meat in their community's diets but overall things like rice Millet peas okra melons and yams were cultivated in Western Africa and those plants are going to spread around the world in coming centuries along with products from the Americas Europe and Asia as well now naturally occurring there are massive seams of gold and precious minerals and metals that can be found in the African continent and over the centuries Legends and stories of massive amounts of West African gold made their way into Europe and European Traders and soldiers really wanted to get their hands on some of that African gold but for the most part European people could usually not get very far into Africa particular L if they traveled by land if you traveled by land you would have to go through the area that nowadays is known as the nation of turkey and then you could cross into the African continent in the area that we nowadays know as the modern country of Egypt but very powerful North African people usually controlled access very strictly further into the continent starting in Egypt powerful Muslim Traders did not want to allow Europe an into the continent to go around and pick up whatever supplies they wanted these North African middlemen made their living made their fortunes made their livelihoods by telling Europeans to stay right here you can't come into the continent but let us know what you're looking for and we'll go get it for you and bring it to you but they would not allow Europeans to get very far into the continent on their own so Europeans found that they had very limited access to the African continent but then the Portuguese began to establish their position as International Traders starting in the 1430s the Portuguese decided that they would circumvent the North African Gatekeepers who controlled land routes into Africa by simply hopping onto ships and then sailing down Africa's western coastline the Portuguese rarely ended up establishing any kind of settler colonies in West Africa but instead would set up Trading posts all along the coastline in order to exchange goods with people who lived in the more interior regions of Africa um usually what would happen is you would have a ship leaving out of Portugal they would sort of Leap Frog down the western coastline of the African continent and they would drop off a few people build a small Trading Post on the coastline and they would stock up those Trading Post with Portuguese goods and they would tell the people they left behind here trade these Goods with people living inside of the African continent and we'll be back in a couple of months to pick up everything that you've gathered and we'll resupply you with things to trade with African people as well but as it turns out the Portuguese found that gold was not the greatest source of wealth to be found on the African continent at the time the Portuguese quickly found out that there was far more money to be made in the slave trade than actually mining for gold in Africa now it has to be said slave markets were already established in Africa when the Portuguese arrived but it also must be said and it can't be emphasized enough that slavery was a very different situation as it was practiced in Africa at the time now as in most parts of the world at the time slavery was one of was just one of several different kinds of labor systems available it was not the basis of the entire economy as it would later become in large part of the Americas under European colonization slavery as it was practiced in Africa was first and foremost not always a permanent lifelong condition typically people who were enslaved were usually War captives criminals who were working off a debt to their society or people who owed an enormous amount of debt that they couldn't potentially pay off you would serve for a few years as a slave to somebody and work off your debt slaves in West Africa usually worked within the family households of their owners or sometimes they might work on Public Works projects like building roads or or helping to develop trade routes slaves usually had very well-defined rights in Africa such as being allowed to own their own property and being allowed to marry free persons in fact it was not uncommon for African slaves to to work as slaves for just a short period of time until whatever their debt might have been was paid off in fact many of West Africa's rulers were recent converts to the Islamic religion and the Islamic religion specifically forbids the enslavement of fellow Muslim adherence it allowed for the enslavement of non-muslim people who were captured in Warfare as long as the owner of those slaves provided religious instruction to the slave so in this way slavery was more war-based and religion-based but not at all race-based and not an inherited position in Africa people who were slaves were not always going to be slaves for the rest of their lives and any children that were born to these slaves were not automatically born as slaves themselves as would later happen in the Americas also there wasn't very much physical coercion involved in most forms of African slavery practice in Africa and in fact many Europeans were known to say at the time that slaves in Africa were slaves in name only they weren't necessarily treated cruy at all but the Portuguese began to buy African slaves from African slave trading networks and they did not have the same definition of slavery that people of Africa did Portuguese slave Traders would immediately transport those enslaved African people across the Atlantic ocean usually to the new world where they intended on keeping those slaves for lifetimes of hard backbreaking work and they would completely switch up the rules and regulations of slavery as it came to be practiced in the new world Christopher Columbus was actually not at all the first European to reach the Americas in all of world history in fact the Viking raids of the 9th century CE continued out of the Scandinavian Nations into the Mediterranean and all the way across the Atlantic Ocean Viking explorers started in Scandinavia then first went to places like Iceland in the west then from Iceland to Greenland and then finally to an area that they eventually called vinand or Vinland strong evidence demonstrates that there was at one point around the year 1000 CE a temporary Viking settlement in the area that we nowadays know as New Finland in Canada which again the Vikings called vinand because of the naturally occurring Wild Grape vines that grew there but let's look at what the world was like according to many Europeans in the immediate leadup to the much very very publicized contact that was finally made between the old world and New World via Christopher Columbus's journeys of exploration and over to the new world so when Christopher Columbus left the country of Spain in 1492 he was actually leaving behind a continent that was smack dab in the middle of a process C of still recovering from a nasty intense period of warfare and rampant disease that had happened back in the 14th century perhaps most importantly the European continent in 1492 was still over 150 years later still bouncing back from the devastating Black Death plague epidemic that killed as many as a third and in some cases even more of Europe's population between the years 134 7 and 1351 now so many people were killed during the Black Death that those who were left behind faced a massive shortage of workers to keep Society functioning since so few people were left alive in the aftermath of the Black Death uh there weren't very many people left alive to work and so those who were workers uh they began to demand increased wages for doing work at the same time the governments all around Europe tried to control this new chance at Power and money that had been placed in the hands of some of the lowest working classes in Europe oftentimes governments would harshly suppress workers when workers tried to resist government control but the shortage of Labor in Europe also made people like the Spanish and the Portuguese a little bit in the Future Turn increasingly to using a African slaves whenever they needed a bunch of new workers to work in the so-called New World once contact was made between the old and the new world another thing to note in Europe right before contact is made is that centralization and concentration of political power in the late medieval period happened just before the Voyages of Discovery and exploration began and Spain is perhaps the best example of power consolidation leading almost the immediately to exploration because Spain in the early 1400s was not known as Spain it was technically split into two very different kingdoms now this map I'm sure it looks very different from other maps of Europe that you may have seen in the past but this is actually a map of what the different nations and states in Europe look like in the year 1444 about a little bit less than 50 years before Columbus left across the Atlantic Ocean and then ended up stumbling into the new world uh if you look in the area on the Iberian Peninsula where you normally would find Spain marked you will see that there is a yellow region known as Castile and then a little kind of purpley triangular portion immediately to the right of Castile known as Aragon um so Spain did not actually exist it was actually very separate kingdoms the kingdom of Aragon and the much wealthier and much more powerful Nation or Kingdom of Castile uh this is basically what Spain was before those two regions Consolidated and came together and the way that Aragon and Castile came together to make the nation of Spain was when Ferdinand the king of Aragon decided to marry Isabella the queen of Castile when they were married the two kingdoms were brought together and were from there on out ruled by the royal couple jointly as the new nation of Spain and other things to note about this this map of Europe in 1444 notice that a lot of the modern-day Nations that you might be looking for don't really exist on this map for example France is actually split into dozens of little duchies and counties and city-state areas there is no Germany in place of Germany we have something known as the Holy Roman Empire which is actually about 300 plus different cities and local principalities that are not a unified Nation there is no Italy um and a lot of other nations are in very different shapes from what you might expect but this is really what Europe look like on the eve of the Voyages of exploration and Discovery right before contact was made between the old world and the new world now one of the first major efforts of the royal couple of Ferdinand and Isabella after they brought Spain together into one nation was to work on trying to kick out all other people living in Spain that they perceived as Rivals to their power this in particular included kicking out the very last remnants of what had previously been a large population of Muslims who had one time controlled almost all of the nation of Spain and kicked those people out of their very last holdouts in Spain now this process of kicking out all non-catholic people out of Spain was referred to by the king and queen of Spain as the Reconquista which is the Spanish word meaning essentially reconquest however I have to point out that the term Reconquista is actually inappropriate it's a it's a misnomer uh that's because there was no Spanish Nation uh in the time when North African Muslims first came to the area that we refer to as Spain all the way back in the 8th Century CE it was actually a group of very powerful nor African Muslims that controlled the lands that would eventually become Spain for a very long time in Spain's past going back to around uh the 700s CE Spain never really controlled any of that land in the first place so technically Ferdinand and Isabella weren't reconquering anything Spain had never existed before they United together in marriage and Spain had never really controlled or conquered any of that territory in the first place now even though uh Muslim people were being persecuted in Spain at this time some Muslims and a few Jewish people still lived in Spain even after their leaders their Muslim and Jewish leaders in the area had been militarily defeated and so to force uh to force complete assimilation with the official religion of Spain at the time which was the Catholic Christian religion Ferdinand and Isabella came up with an idea about making all remaining non-catholics living in Spain to either immediately convert to the Catholic religion or leave the country on the pain of death so essentially you had three options if you were a Muslim or Jewish person living in Spain at this time you could convert to Catholicism and you better do it sincerely because there are going to be government officials that will come around and test you on your knowledge of the Catholic faith you could leave Spain and get out of there leave behind all of your possessions and start over somewhere else in the world or if you wanted to stick around in Spain and remain a Muslim or a Jewish person the state would execute you they would kill you now a small handful of Muslims and very few Jewish people remained in Spain um at the time and so uh they were given the options to either convert or be killed um so at this point uh after a few years of uh initiating this policy Ferdinand and Isabella finally considered their task of trying to quote unquote reconquer Spain for the Catholic religion to be finally completed in the year 1492 and to celebrate the completion of the Reconquista program Ferdinand and Isabella decided that they would spend some money and one of the things that they ended up spending money on was financing a traveling sailor trip that he had proposed to them years before now we'll get back to to Christopher Columbus in just a second but something else that I want to mention before we go any further is that outside of the confines of the nation of Spain the rest of the continent of Europe was undergoing massive change at this time as well and these changes are going to have implications on what happens after contact is made between the old and new worlds religious differences different philosophies of government and new business innovations that were made in Europe will have far-reaching Ram ramifications post contact and in fact many of these historical European events effects can still be felt in America to this very day and the biggest event which happened in the European continent at around the same time as the Voyages of exploration and contact was the Reformation the Reformation began in the early 1500 s and it caused widespread and profound changes in all sorts of different European cultures including the political systems of Europe now until the time of the Reformation in the early 1500s if you were a Christian person living in Europe you had no other choice no other alternative but to be a Catholic now of course if you lived in Far Eastern Europe or Russia you could be a member of the Orthodox church but outside of Far Eastern Europe almost every single person who was a Christian Living in Europe was a Catholic now as we saw in Spain people of non-Christian faiths did exist in some pockets in Europe but they were mostly oppressed violently and then driven out of most of the areas of Western Europe in the leadup to 1492 now over time over centuries some of those Christian people began to feel that the Catholic Church Church could make some improvements that it could actually function a lot better than it was currently and in the early 1500s the man whose portrait you see on this slide a German monk named Martin Luther became incensed over what he perceived as widespread corruption that he saw happening all around him within the Catholic church and thanks to the relatively new invention of the moving printing press a couple of decades earlier when when Johan Gutenberg in Germany came up with the movable printing press uh Martin Luther's religious ideas were able to be written down printed and then spread far and wide very very quickly all over the European continent eventually some really important princes and other rulers particularly in the Holy Roman Empire also known as Germany in general um some of those rulers when they read Martin Luther's ideas began to agree with Luther and they uh and what started as originally a religious dispute very very quickly morphed into a political flasho for all of human history not only did a number of rulers of small German states like a lot of the religious ideas and reform ideas for the Catholic church that Luther had but others tried desperately to Halt the spread of Luther's ideas now the princes and leaders who supported Martin Luther protested to the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire that this new alternative Christian faith should be legal and because they protested to the emperor they came to be known as Protestants or Protestants that's where that name comes from but the Reformation didn't stop with Martin Luther as the Reformation continued some religious leaders felt that Martin Luther didn't actually go far enough in his critiques of the Christian religion and one of those people was a man named John Calvin now John Calvin was originally born in France but he ultimately found a massive power base for himself and his new religious ideas in Switzerland uh John Calvin actually approached religion with a much more radical mindset than even Martin Luther did and he also tended to interpret the text of the Christian Bible very differently as well in fact John Calvin preached that in his estimation in his studies of the Bible he taught that every single person on Earth who's come in the past and history or who will come in the future that we don't even know uh know about just yet that every single person that will ever live on the face of the planet Earth had a predetermined fate that was already planned out by God and there was nothing that you could do to change your destiny John Calvin called this predestin predestination people on Earth were either members of God's special elect group and were ultimately meant to go to heaven or the vast majority of human beings on Earth were chosen to go to hell before they were born before there were even any people on Earth and again there was nothing that you could do about your predesigned predestined fate now Calvin's religious beliefs are generally referred to as Calvinism and we will talk about Calvinism again so remember that word so as the years went on through throughout the 1500s and into the future in Europe more religious groups sprang up and either flourished or were there for a brief Shining Moment and then disappeared But ultimately the Reformation as a movement completely fragmented Europe's religious unity up until this point everyone who was a Christian Living in Western Europe was a Catholic but after the Reformation there started to be different options for Christian faith after this split happened religious wars between Protestants and Catholics became a recurrent Hallmark of European civilization unfortunately for hundreds of years to come from this moment on out the main point of contention amongst most European communities ultimately boils down to Catholic versus Protestant this will be a recurring theme now changes that originally sprang from the Reformation movement continued for more than a century and those changes are going to definitively shape and reshape life as it eventually comes to take form in the new world and the Voyages of exploration and Discovery were inspired by a whole slew of different motives some princes and rulers saw the potential to make money for themselves and their communities by funding Voyages of exploration other leaders were inspired to explore in the thought that they might be able to more easily spread their particular version of Christianity or more specifically uh for some Nations to spread Catholicism or to spread Protestant Christianity to new lands and new peoples once contact was made between the old world and the new world so European Voyages of Discovery were again of course inspired by a whole bunch of different motives some European rulers wanted to make money others wanted to spr spread their particular version of religion or Catholic religion to new lands and new peoples but ultimately bottom line most rulers European rulers who ended up going over to the new world were exploring for commercial or monetarily based motives now amongst the commercial motives for exploration out into the Seas there was always the lure of the incredibly lucrative exotic spice trade now the reason why spices could bring in so much money for people who traded in these Goods was the fact that spices could alter the flavor of what was otherwise an incredibly Bland and monotonous diet for most European people and spices could also t uh mask the taste of rotting food as well so spices were ultimately worth their weight and gold if you could make your bowl of mush taste even a little bit different by adding a little bit of salt or adding a little bit of cinnamon or adding whatever the case may be to your bowl of GRL people were willing to pay a premium price for it so spices like black pepper cinnamon Ginger and Nutmeg were all known to people in Europe but those plants ultimately only came from Asia and traditionally if people in Europe wanted to have access to those spices you had to travel thousands and thousands of miles over land and if you wanted to trade those goods from Asia all the way over to Western Europe Europe those goods had to change hands several times across in countless innumerable middlemen and Traders all the way across the Asian continent across the Middle East and then through most of Europe as well So eventually people living in Far Western Europe people like the Spanish and the Portuguese eventually the Dutch and the French and the English uh eventually wanted to cut out all of those trading middlemen and develop their own direct access to Asia so that their Traders could sail to Asian areas pick up those spices and bring them directly back to the people who lived in Western Europe now in addition to spices and other luxury goods like tea and Porcelain that could only be obtained in Asia over the centuries as I mentioned earlier there were those Legends and stories of massive amounts of West African gold that eventually made their way to Europe and European Traders wanted to get their their hands on some of that gold but again for the most part Europeans could not get into Mainland Africa if they traveled by land because North African Muslim Traders were very powerful Gatekeepers and they would not usually allow Europeans into the continent of Africa now those Traders did not want to allow Europeans into the continent because ultimately those Europeans would be undercutting their trade role and would be sort of doing away with their livelihood those powerful Muslim traders in places like Egypt didn't want Europeans to be able to wander all over the African continent and just pick up and take home with them whatever they wanted to so ocean exploration to try to find seab based water routes to Asia and also into Africa seem to be the best option for many Western European rulers now one of the first things that Europeans needed to do in order to be able to explore the oceans and to go out on the oce a bit further was to build sturdier ships and to make much more reliable navigation tools for Sailors in order to be able to travel beyond the site of land out in the water it used to be that if you got into a boat anywhere in the old world you had to always keep the shoreline in your eyesight if you wandered out too far into the ocean and lost sight of where the land was you could be irrevocably lost and no one would ever see you again you could get disoriented ented not know which way to turn to go back to land and you would never be heard from again so in the early 15 Century a man named Prince Henry of Portugal who's also sometimes known as Prince Henry the Navigator because he invested a lot of his fortune in sailing ended up sponsoring the efforts of Master ship Builders and navigational tool makers and by the time we get to the year 1500 ship builders in Europe had perfected a new style of boat called the car AEL which was sturdy narrow and much more suitable for open Ocean Travel than other previous ships European Navigators also perfected the use of the magnetic compass and then perfected an instrument known as the astrolab which you can see in the bottom leftand corner of this slide astrolabes allowed Sailors to determine exactly what their precise point was on a map even out in the middle of the ocean using stars in the sky and using one's relation to a star's location in the sky to accurately pinpoint where you were on the map and sailing directly from the European continent down to Africa is actually not all that difficult to begin with in fact there's a picture here on this slide which shows you just how close the far southern tip of Spain is from the very Northern tip of the continent of Africa at the narrowest point of an area known as the straight of Gibralter just between southern Spain and the North African nation of Morocco it is just nine miles of water travel from Europe to Africa but before technological advances really began to allow 1400 Sailors to deviate too far from the western or sorry from a visible Shoreline most western Europeans would typically cling to the coastline of West Africa and sort of Leap Frog down the West African Coastline for many years the Portuguese were some of the first people to turn to trade using the oceans and seas to established their position as International Traders starting in the 1430s slowly but surely Portuguese Sailors at first began to travel down the western coastline of Africa they established trading posts all along that western coastline and would then trade for things like gold and ivory and even spices along the way eventually in the year 1488 a Portuguese explorer named Bartholomew Diaz reached the very bottom tip of the continent of Africa in an area nowadays known as the Cape of Good Hope and in doing so Bartholomew Diaz proved to the rest of the world that the continent of Africa actually had an end that it was finite nobody really knew the full extent of the African continent there were theories that the land might continue to uh extend down into the South and might actually wrap around uh the other side of the world and you know come back out in the far Arctic North but 11 years after Diaz found or ran into the Cape of Good Hope it was 11 years later before another Portuguese explorer this one named Vasco deama ended up going around the Cape of Good Hope and D was actually able to reach the nation of India by a waterbased route only and by proving that you could sail from Europe all the way around the bottom of the African continent and eventually reach India by SE that was a game Cher um this opened up a viable but admittedly very very long and very very dangerous ocean-based route which could start in Europe and get to Asia completely sailing on the open oceans now Christopher Columbus was impelled by the desire to ultimately reach the Asian nation of China uh he also wanted to possibly spread his own catholic christian religion and he was also drawn by the simple lure of exploring the unknown now wherever they stopped along the African or Asian coastlines the Portuguese very very rarely established full-blown settler communities they weren't interested in sending hundreds or thousands of people from Portugal to settle in these new far-flung areas and instead the Portuguese usually set up trading posts all along the coastlines so that their Traders could exchange goods with people living in more interior regions of Africa and Asia but again pretty quickly Europeans found out that gold was not the biggest Money Maker that could be found on the African continent the Portuguese quickly found out that a lot more money could be made in the slave trade than in mining for gold or trading for spices and as you know slave markets were already established in Africa when the Portuguese arrived but again slavery was a very different situation in Africa than what the Europeans had in mind now Europeans only quote unquote discovered the Americas because they were interested in finding a sea route to places like India China and the islands of the East Indies which had long been the basis of a very lucrative but very timec consuming landbased trade in things like Silk tea spices porcelain and other luxury goods that originated in Asia in fact Christopher Columbus and no European really discovered the Americas at all because think about it how can one person quote unquote discover a place where millions of people already live and have lived lived for thousands and thousands of years that's like uh if I were to come to your house and say oo I discovered this house it belongs to me now and kick try to kick your family out of that area so in 1492 the year that Christopher Columbus actually went across the Atlantic Ocean and then landed on a small island in the Caribbean Sea there were already somewhere around 70 million people living on the continents of North and South America that made North and South America's population roughly equal to the population of the continent of Europe at that exact same time so don't make any mistakes Christopher Columbus did not discover the Americas you can't discover a place where millions of people live and have been living for thousands of years he simply made contact between the old world and the new world for one of the first longlasting periods in human history but Christopher Columbus we have to clear up a couple of misconceptions about him Christopher Columbus was a very experienced Mariner and Explorer from the city state of Genoa in Northern Italy he was not himself Spanish or Portuguese but Christopher Columbus tried to find sea routes to places like China and India and Columbus believed that he could get to China and India by sailing across the Atlantic Ocean going west out of Europe Europe he thought that he would essentially Traverse the uh other side of the planet Earth and could very quickly bump into Far Eastern Asian Nations but unfortunately for Columbus most educated people and most European monarchs especially knew that Christopher Columbus was making a massive error in his sailing calculations most people knew that the Earth was round at this time this was something that people had known since the days of the ancient Greeks and probably even beforehand um but most monarchs realize that Christopher Columbus was actually vastly underestimating the actual size of the planet Earth he had significantly underestimated the circumference of Earth um instead of it being uh relatively the size of a basketball Christopher Columbus thought that the Earth was actually more the size of a grapefruit let's say a much smaller sphere than it actually was and again most educated monarchs in Europe at this time knew that Christopher Columbus was making a massive mistake in his calculations and so Christopher Columbus would actually travel around European courts all over the place uh from year to year and tried to sell his plan to sail west out of European nations and then immediately run into Eastern Asian Nations to anyone who he thought might have enough money to fund his expedition but most monarchs simply refused to provide him with any money because they thought that Columbus was obviously making some terrible mistakes in his calculations um and they would usually send him away packing without even listening to his full-blown Spiel for what he was proposing to do except one time when Christopher Columbus made another stop at the court of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of the newly United Nation of Spain now as you know Ferdinand and Isabella were in a mood to celebrate they recently had come to an the end of completing a task of trying to reconquer Spain which again they weren't really reconquering uh anything because Spain never had existed before this and Spain never really had full control over that land anyway but Ferdinand and Isabella considered their task of reconquering Spain for the Catholic religion to be completed in the year 1492 and this was a huge deal not just for the people of Spain but for Ferdinand and Isabella especially both of their ancestors had fought Muslim people in Western Europe for almost 500 straight years up until this point and when Ferdinand and Isabella killed off or ran off the very last remaining remnants of those original Muslim people who came to Western Europe hundreds of years ago they felt like now was the time to celebrate and they wanted to celebrate the completion of their Reconquista and they actually uh basically seized all of the wealth of the fleeing Muslim and Jewish people who were kicked out of Spain and so they had a lot of money on their hands and it was burning a hole in their pocket so at this point when Christopher Columbus came around uh you know to try to sell his idea of you know taking a short trip from the west and then running into Eastern Asia Ferdinand and Isabella finally decided that they might spend a little bit of the money that they had recently come into to Finance on a be bones way Christopher Columbus's journey now Ferdinand and Isabella basically tossed a couple of coins to Christopher Columbus in the hopes that they would basically make him go away um Columbus had been trying to get money from monarchs and rulers all over Europe for years at this point but everyone had turned him down thinking that his plan to sail west and then eventually reach Asia was a suicide mission but because Ferdinand and Isabella had some money to SP SP they ended up giving him just enough money for his trip uh to pay the wages of sailors and to outfit three small ships but they never expected really to see Columbus again they thought that he would Sail Out into that vast ocean out into the west and that he would obviously end up starving to death before he ever reached Asia but at least he wouldn't show up at their Court every year trying to sell the same uh journey to them as he did year after year after year so Ferdinand and Isabella gave Columbus just enough money to outfit three ships the N the Pinta and the Santa Maria and after about 33 State straight days out on the open ocean Columbus's Sailors were on the brink of rising up in Mutiny against them against their Captain Columbus uh they were running out of food they were running out of fresh water to drink some Sailors had begun the starvation process and were starting to eat their own shoes because because they had nothing to eat but at the end of 33 days on October 12th 1492 land was finally spotted and Columbus and his his three ships landed in an island in the Bahamas and then quickly sailed to the much larger island of Hispanola Hispanola for those of you who are wondering are nowadays SP is is an island split between the modern-day nations of Haiti on one side and the Dominican Republic on the other and then finally Columbus and his ships sailed to the island of Cuba as well now the whole entire time that he was there Christopher Columbus legitimately thought that he was in the Asian nation of India he was trying to get to China in the first place but when he landed in the Bahamas the people that he encountered on that island didn't look anything like what he had read about in books people from China looking like now the people in the Bahamas did actually somewhat slightly res resemble uh descriptions of people who lived in India so Columbus thought that oh maybe my ships got blown slightly off course and we're really actually in the nation of India so Columbus began to call the people that he encountered on those islands Indians and this is a mistake that we are still continuing with to this day whenever you hear anybody refer to the indigenous peoples of North Central or South America as Indians now most educated people in Europe were well aware that the Earth was round so Columbus was not proving that the Earth was round uh he was not trying to disprove that the Earth was flat nobody really thought the Earth was flat at this time the problem with Columbus's calculations was that he had actually vastly miscalculated the circumference of the earth and thought that the planet was much much smaller of a sphere than it really was and he thought that you could easily get to Asia from Europe by sailing directly west but instead of taking a short trip across the ocean and running into Asia very quickly in reality Christopher Columbus ended up encountering a whole new set of continents on his way to Asia and Columbus was never actually convinced that he had stumbled across an entirely new world as many Europeans later ended up calling the land that he had bumped into now immediately upon Landing Columbus and his men began to to explore the land where they had sort of you know landed and immediately became violent with the native people and started demanding gold payment from the natives that they had just met and Columbus was also very upset as well that the islands did not actually seem to have much gold and so Columbus at this point began to think that maybe the native people themselves could be a source of wealth for himself if he started selling them as slaves now Columbus eventually did have to go back to Europe and when he left the new world he brought back with him 10 native people who again he referred to as Indians and the name sort of ended up sticking these men were brought back to Spain to show his patrons Ferdinand and Isabella hey look what I found the very next year in 1493 Columbus was uh provided with funding for a return Journey this time around he was given even more ships and more men and Columbus is going to initiate the very very beginnings of what eventually will come to be known as Spanish colonization of the new world but Columbus's treatment of the people that he encountered in the so-called new world was always right from the bat atrocious indigenous women were raped and assaulted with impunity and all native peoples who Columbus account encountered were required to pay him quote unquote taxes in terms of heaps of of gold dust if you were an indigenous person and you didn't end up bringing enough Gold Dust to Captain Christopher Columbus he would chop off your hands as a punishment and many people simply bled to death after suffering such a devastating wound and those who survived could not work to help their fam stay alive and they became a burden on their families Columbus also immediately initiated a slave trade using the indigenous peoples of the Americas in the hopes of making the same kind of money that some European slave traders of African slaves had already started making on the other side of the world and Columbus ended up making a total of four voyages into the Caribbean but every single time he crossed the Atlantic Ocean he never ever accepted that he had stumbled across a new world in fact Christopher Columbus went to his grave ridiculed for continuing to insist that he had actually reached India and that he was going back and forth between Spain and India on all of these trips most people in Europe even if you weren't all that well educated immediately recognized that Columbus had not bumped into India but that he had actually stumbled across a whole new world after Columbus's initiation of contact with the new world other European explorers began to rush to the new world to try to stake their claims on territory and and to try to make a fortune or Garner some kind of Fame for themselves or the Nations that they represented now obviously at first Spanish soldiers made up a large portion of those who came from Europe to the Americas at least for the first couple of years and the Spanish Soldiers and Sailors that came over to the new world were known as conquistadors the conquistadors were Spanish soldiers originally who had learned to fight and had years of experience fighting in the Reconquista in Spain against Muslim and Jewish populations but once the Reconquista was over they decided to continue in their violent conquests and fighting over in the new world scores of seasoned soldiers from Spain hoped that they might be able to find Fame and Fortune for themselves in the new world and some of these conquistadors ended up conquering vast amounts of territory and large numbers of people this includes in the year 1519 a man named hernand Cortez who was one of several prominent conquistadors who ended up conquering whole entire regions and peoples in the case of hernand Cortez this included Conquering the entire Aztec empire that we talked about earlier in this chapter when Cortez and his men arrived on the coast of modern-day Mexico Aztec Messengers who were on the beach immediately rushed a message that light-skinned men with oddly colored hair and beards on their faces wearing shiny metallic clothing had arrived off of floating mountains on the ocean and rushed that message to the Aztec leader montazuma in the city of tanakon but montazuma immediately perceived this message as a bad terrible Omen and it turns out monuma was right to feel bad about the coming of the Spanish now the Spanish conquistadors who came to Mexico came armed with guns and riding horses and consider this the Aztec people had never seen a horse in their lives and they only had Spears and swords made from much softer metals like bronze than the steel and iron weapons and the gunpowder based weapons that Europeans had access to also when Cortez first arrived in what we nowadays know as Mexico it was at a particularly difficult moment in the history of the Aztec people as you know the Aztecs had become infamous for conquering smaller neighboring tribes all of these tribes deeply resented the harsh militaristic rule of the Aztecs and these people turned out to be more than willing to help the Spanish when the Spanish arrived and indicated that they wanted to defeat the Aztecs but perhaps most important to the the eventual defeat of the Aztec Empire by the Spanish was the factor of European disease so Europeans brought a lot more than just guns horses and a seemingly unquenchable thirst for gold to the new world they also brought dozens of diseases to the new world to which the native populations had absolutely no immunity or exposure or defenses against diseases like influenza smallpox typhus and measles had existed for centuries if not thousands of years in the old world and as a result most Spaniards were not too terribly affected by those diseases yes of course many people would die from those diseases but there was a chance no matter how small it may have been that Europeans could actually survive one of these diseases after years and years of building up immunity and uh essentially just sort of getting used to those diseases but over in the new world where people had never been exposed to these kinds of pathogens before those same diseases were ultimately devastating to local native people and ended up killing millions in the story of Cortez one of Cortez's Men actually arrived in the new world when he was just getting over a pretty mild case of smallpox that Soldier ended up Surviving his infection but it is actually estimated that over 40% of Mexico's total population was dead from that one case of small small pox within just one year in fact by the time we get to the year 1521 Cortez had actually managed to conquer the entire Aztec Empire and a little bit later after that by the time we get to the year 1600 actually the population of Mexico had declined from more than 15 million people before contact was made with Europeans to less than 1 million people about 100 years later that is a massive loss of life but another instance where one Conquistador and a couple of his men were able to uh completely defeat entire empires of people in the new world is the case of pizaro and the Inca in the year 1532 uh Conquistador named Francisco pizaro and about 180 Spanish men encountered what was known as the Inca Empire in the South American continent the Inca Empire was one of the most modernized and advanced nations in the new world the Empire stretched from the modern day nation of Ecuador all the way down the continent to the nation of what we nowadays know as Chile and the Incan Empire was connected with excellent networks of roads and bridges that even spanned all throughout the Andes mountain ranges but when pizaro first arrived on the doorstep of the Incan Empire it was again a particular moment of weakness for the Inca people you see just a year before pizaro showed up the longstanding ruler of the Inca people had died it's thought from a case of smallpox and a civil war had immediately broken out between his various Sons for who would next control the Inca Empire in fact one son a man named Adel haapa had just recently ended the Civil War announcing himself as the new leader of the Inca people but when pizaro met Adel haapa he immediately captured Adel haapa and then demanded a massive Ransom in both gold and silver if the Inca people wanted to see their Emperor alive again but despite the fact that the Inca people paid the ransom that the Spanish demanded and then even more after that pizaro still had Adel haapa murdered in front of his people and then afterward extended his own control over the entire Inca Empire so at this point just a couple of decades into the 1500s Spain's New World Empire now stretched throughout the islands of the Caribbean into the nation of Mexico and down into the South American continent into what we nowadays know as Peru and Spain exerted massive control over every single little tiny town and Village in the new world all in an effort to squeeze a as much wealth out of the native people living there as possible for Spain's benefit Colonial rulers then turned the native inhabitants into slave workers and tried to force the native people of South America to work in Silver Mines in PE in places like Peru and Bolivia and for people living in the Caribbean islands they were forced as slaves to work on Big Sugar plantations that the Spanish developed in the islands tens of thousands of indigenous people ended up dying as a direct result of this forced labor combined with the exposure to new European diseases at the same time and as the native populations of the new world began to dwindle into surprisingly low numbers the Spanish increasingly began to start using African slaves on their plantations and mines in the New World in subsequent years now immediately once contact was made between the old world and the new world a transatlantic flow of goods and people mixed millions of years of completely separate Evolution between the two parts of the world throwing together plants animals and cultures that had never been exposed to each other before this is known as the Colombian Exchange and the Colombian Exchange transformed both of the old world and the new world now the Colombian Exchange actually worked in both directions between old world and new world but in general the impact was perhaps most striking in the new world this is because up until the point that contact was made the Americas had been completely isolated from the rest of the world for several Millennia and there are a bunch of different diseases animals and plants that were exchanged between the old world in the new world diseases that originated in the old world and were then introduced to the New World included smallpox measles the plague typhus influenza yellow fever dpia scarlet fever and whooping cough and in the other direction it has actually been theorized that the disease known as syphilis had existed as a basic nuisance itchy skin condition amongst populations in the new world for Millennia but once that disease was exposed to European Sailors in the new World it transformed into a devastating deadly sexually transmitted infection when it got into European populations and became the deadly disease that we know as syphilis still to this day in terms of animals Europeans introduced animals like horses cattle pigs sheep goats donkeys mules and honeybees as useful animals to the new world but they also introduced somewhat less desirable animals an like black rats and cockroaches uh that went from Europe to the new world as part of the Colombian Exchange now on the other side of this exchange the new world did not have many animals that had never been seen before in the old world but there are at least two um animals that the old world had never seen before that lived in the new world and those were llamas and turkeys Europeans had never seen those animals before and so those are two sets of animals that were introduced from the new world back to the old world now as for plants the old world ended up introducing crops like wheat sugar barley apples pears peaches plums cherries coffee and rice as well as some weeds like dandelions to the new world and in exchange the new world presented things like maze beans potatoes peanuts sweet potatoes squash Tomatoes avocados Pine Apple Chili Peppers and a plant known as cacao which when it goes over to the new world will be used to make what we nowadays know as chocolate but overall the impact of war enslavement and especially the diseases introduced by Europeans to the new world ended up being a demographic disaster for the native peoples living in the new world whose population began to fall dramatically in fact in the 50 years after European contact was made it's estimated that about 80 million native people that's about 1 or 20% of all of humankind living on Earth at that time died by the mid 1500s though the Spanish ended up establishing a massive Global Colonial Empire that spanned from Europe to the Americas and also included land in Asia the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean were no longer seen as barriers they were now highways that moved people and goods including things like gold and silver that were mined in places like Mexico and Peru and ship them over to Spain and from Spain Spanish monarchs would spend some of that gold and silver on their colonies in places like the Philippines and in China the Spanish Empire in the new world actually encompassed some of the most populated and ultimately mineral rich areas of the new world to be found and actually included a handful of large cities such as the city of tanakon which was now known as Mexico City and the Spanish system of colonial government ended up being a very elaborate hierarchy of different appointed bureaucrats and lawyers under the ultimate authority of the Spanish monarchy with a significant role carved out for the Catholic Church especially when it came to administering and dealing with the native population ations elected assemblies where you can vote for your city councilors or Mayors or local leaders did not exist in the Spanish new world or in Spain for that matter at this time but for the first couple of decades that the Spanish were in the new world the Spanish did not end up importing African slaves in large numbers because they relied on the dwindling but still relatively substantial native population to do all hard Agricultural and Mining labor as slaves although Spaniards who were born in Spain ruled over the colonies they unlike English colonists who are going to come to the New World later are going to Grant native peoples some very limited rights and ultimately hoped to one day assimilate native peoples into overall Spanish society and to make them members devout members of the Catholic Church the Spanish Empire over time became increasingly dominated by a new group of people known as the mesiso people mesiso people are people of mixed native and European Origins and essentially what would typically happen is that a white European Spanish father would end up having children with indigenous women and the resulting children would have a mixed native and European Heritage but from there Spain also ended up introducing a very strict racial hierarchy system and applied it to their new world Empire this new racial hierarchy system is very convoluted but at the very very top of the hierarchy in the new world you would have white European Spanish born Spaniards at the very very top of the hierarchy and then beneath them you would have 100% white European descended people who weren't born in Spain but who were born in the Americas to parents who had been born in Spain those were the Creole people and then immediately beneath the Creoles came the meso people mesos are again people who of who are of mixed or combined European and Native Heritage then beneath the meso you have other various mixed parentage groups and then beneath those mixed parentage groups you had the native peoples who were called by the Spanish Indios then you had Asian originating people who were known as chinos beneath them and then at the very bottom of the hierarchy you had African people who were known as Negros uh at the very very bottom of this Spanish Colonial system unfortunately contact between the old world and the new world was frequently accompanied by some pretty profound misunderstandings religious practices were a leading source of serious misunderstanding and event LED some European Christians to openly condemn native peoples as devil worshippers simply because their religious practices were unfamiliar to Europeans another area that Europeans generally did not accept when it came to Native Society was the fact that Native American groups's gender roles were much less restrictive than they were over in Europe and this offered yet another source of constant misunderstanding between Europeans and Native Americans now Europeans regarded men as Superior to women in every imaginable aspect the Spanish generally greatly disapproved of the much less restrictive gender roles given to women in Native American societies Europeans objected to women's dominant roles in Native American farming and essentially came to assume that Native American men simply hunted for recreational and Leisure Leisure purposes and not for food and thus Europeans automatically assumed that Native American men and thus Native American societies were ultimately naturally lazy but land use Customs also differed between Europeans and Indigenous peoples and this led to immense conflicts between European Notions regarding land ownership and Native traditions of mostly communal land usage and sharing now in the minds of most most Europeans the Spanish being one of many these three differences the differences in religious practices gender roles and uh land usage were perceived as so insurmountable and so incompatible that Europeans basically assumed what was known as a quote right of Conquest over all of the land and all of the people living in the new world basically what this means is that European people felt that in their interpretations the people living in the new world were simply less advanced than themselves and thus could and should be dominated and ruled over their land should be taken away their rights denied simply because European people believed that their particular way of life their particular religions and their cultures were better than those of the indigenous peoples of North and South America now at this time and still unfortunately to this day most Europeans believed in the inherent superiority of their cultures and their societies over those of the natives and so Europeans did not really question whether or not they had a right to conquer the Native American people and to place an even finer point on the importance of religion in this whole confl this whole mess just before large scale European colonization of the new world began European nations had fought against each other in a series of nasty bloody religious wars as part of the reformation and this ended up establishing a precedent amongst European peoples for conquering other groups and conquering other cultures based on religious and cultural Notions of superiority and others inferiority in almost all European cultures at the time inequality was deeply built into virtually every social relationship possible at the very very top of European hierarchies the king or the queen or the Monarch claimed that they ruled over all other people through the ultimate authority of God people of high rank demanded deference and gring from people who were beneath them in the social scale even within family units men always exercised authority over their wives and the children in their household and in many European cultures the moment that a woman got married that woman completely surrendered her own unique legal identity and she ultimately became the property of her husband women could not own their own property and could not sign contracts in their own names women could not control their wages if they worked women could not uh write separate wills and women could not go to court to seek a divorce the husband in a married relationship was the only person who conducted business and who was allowed to testify in court in the name of everyone else in that family men had the exclusive right to their wife's quote unquote company which included domestic labor but also unfortunately sexual relations everywhere in Europe at this time Family Life always assumed complete male dominance and female submission in indeed European political writers of the 16th century explicitly compared the king's authority over his people and his subjects with a husband's perceived authority over his wife and other members of his family like children both of these relationships were deemed by most European people to be naturally ordained by God and in Europe women's freedoms were dramatically more restricted than women living in North America or even West Africa and the Spanish in particular embraced their perceived religious mission to try to convert native people to their particular brand of Christianity which was Catholicism with the Protestant Reformation dividing up the Catholic Church beginning in the year 1517 the Spanish from that point forward believed that they had an extra special mission to convert native peoples in the new world to Catholicism to save them not just just from their own allegedly devil worshipping practices but also to save them from Protestant Christianity as well and this eventually became folded into part of the Spanish people's hopes to someday assimilate native peoples into Spanish society and one day in the distant future potentially raise indigenous peoples in the Americas to the level of European civilization but SC Spanish colon izers also tended to see native peoples as a Workforce that the Spanish could use to extract gold and silver and ultimately enrich the Spanish nation and in the process the Spanish ended up working thousands and thousands of native people to death the Spanish though believed that they were giving the native people access to Freedom by offering them a chance to convert to Catholicism but at the same time they were also exploiting those native people in order to make Spaniards and the Spanish Crown immensely rich in the minds of some conquistadors even if native peoples were now being worked to death in Spanish Minds as slaves at the very very least those native people now had the chance to go to Catholic Christian Heaven when they died if they ended up being converted through force or not whereas before Europeans arrived in the new world Spanish people felt that those native folks would never have been able to know about Christianity and thus would have been doomed to burn in hell for all of eternity when they died even if they happened to live much happier and more peaceful lives on Earth before the European Spanish came along so the Conquistadors in some ways thought that they were doing a favor to Native people by offering them the chance to convert to their religion which was Catholicism now the Spanish and most other European communities treated indigenous people terribly in response to eventually hearing terrible rumors about the way that native people were being treated in the new world eventually the head of the Catholic Church a man named Pope Paul III hoping to make the indigenous peoples of the Americas into devout subjects of Europe's far-flung Catholic monarchs the pope tried to Outlaw the enslavement of native people in the new world but not very many Spanish colonists listened to or heeded these laws put in place by the Pope in fact in the year for sorry 1542 Spain initiated a series of quote unquote new laws that again tried to officially Outlaw the enslavement of native people but again not very many people living in the new world listen to these new rules and thus continue to use native peoples as slaves that they treated as less than human but eventually someone began to vocally speak out against the poor treatment of indigenous peoples and this person's name was Bartholomew deasus Bartholomew deasus was actually a Catholic Dominican priest who was living in Cuba and in his years living in Cuba he eventually started to see some of the worst treatment of the native people by Spanish colonists in the new world and and very quickly uh father balamu deasus began to criticize his fellow Spaniards living in the new world for what he considered to be their shocking atrocities and cruelties committed against the native peoples uh father deasus also vehemently impo opposed the enslavement of native peoples and insisted when no other Europeans did that native peoples of the new world were actually rational human beings and not Savage entities who should not and could not be denied access to their basic freedoms and access to their land but unfortunately while this all sounds great for uh Native people who are being enslaved it was father deus's suggestion for what groups should be used as slaves if natives were no longer allowed to be enslaved that sort of darkened his memory in history in fact Bartholomew deasus did suggest at the same time that he he criticized the treatment of native people that in the future Spanish people living in the new world might instead start trying to import African slaves in order to protect native peoples from being exploited and brought into slavery Lascassas tended to write down a lot of his criticisms of the treatment of native people and these criticisms eventually spread throughout Europe what came to be known as the black Legend of Spain being painted as exceptionally brutal and violent and exploitative colonial power in reality all European Empires that ended up forming over in the new world were violent and highly exploitative but the black Legend of Spain would provide a very potent justification for other sometimes Protestant European powers when they decided that they wanted to try to challenge Spain's predominance as a colonial power in the new world now father deasus and other Spanish people believed that the colonist cruel treatment of the native people of the new world was ultimately undermining Spain's mission to try to convert and assimilate native people into Spanish society and the Catholic religion but some Spanish colonists fiercely resisted Imperial reforms such as the outlawing of native slavery by openly rebelling against the Spanish Crown in the year 1550 the Spanish government tried to slightly make life just a sliver better for native peoples as a result of the backlash that the Spanish people had received from the most recent publication of Bartholomew deus's complaints and the Spanish government reacted by abolishing the old encomenda system in the encomenda system Spanish colonists had the right to rule over all conquered native lands and to force all Native people living on that land to work for them as slaves that was the encomenda system when the Spanish government got rid of the encomenda system they ultimately replaced it with a new system known as the repart Mento system in the repartimiento system native peoples were legally considered free people and were entitled to wages for their work but were still required every single year to perform a certain fixed amount of labor for Spanish land owners now now under the reparti Mento system native peoples were no longer technically considered slaves but the native people were still very heavily exploited by Spanish landlords and Catholic priests in subsequent years so obviously Spain immediately carved out a giant chunk of the new world and claimed it for its own Empire but soon after Columbus first returned to Spain in 1492 other nations quickly jumped into the exploration fry Portugal immediately acquired a very sizable piece of the continent of South America for themselves and competition eventually became so Fierce between Spain and Portugal for claiming land in the new world that in the year 1494 just two years after Columbus initiated contact between the old and the new world the pope decided to intervene yet again and the pope actually took a map of the world and split the new World in half or so he thought he divided the Known World in a document known as the Treaty of torus between the nation of Spain and the nation of Portugal now the Treaty of torus limited Portugal's New World Holdings to the area that we nowadays still know as Brazil but also protected Portugal's territories and settlements in places like Africa and Asia Spain on the other hand was given all of the rest of the continent of South America to the west of Brazil and this is actually why still to this day almost all nations of South America speak Spanish but in the nation of Brazil people there speak Portuguese the Spanish are eventually going to over time start to explore into North America as well in search of gold usually but exploration into North America turned out to be much less rewarding ing because Spanish explorers found very little gold and very little else that they valued every time they went into North America for example in the year 1528 a Spanish Expedition into the area that we nowadays know as Florida immediately ended in disaster when Spanish conquistadors Landing in Florida provoked an attack by local Apache native peoples almost everyone that was part of the Spanish expedition to Florida in 1528 ended up being killed in this attack by the Apache but a small handful of men including a man named Alvar Nunes cabesa devaka ended up escaping the slaughter and for the next eight straight years cabesa devaka walked and traveled all throughout North America before he finally made his way to Mexico City and was able to hop on a ship and get back to Spain once cabesa Daka got home to Spain he started to tell Spanish people back at home that while he was on his 8year sojourn across the southern part of North America that he had seen evidence of a massively wealthy Empire that existed deep inside of North America he said that the city that he saw uh was made of gold and silver and that all of the buildings were just encrusted with jewels like diamonds and rubies and sapphires and emeralds and cabesa deaka never actually got to go into this city of gold and precious uh minerals but he saw it from a distance he saw it sparkling on the horizon as he was walking through the desert areas of what is nowadays the American southwest and he started to write down his Memoirs um once he was back in Spain the travel Memoirs of cabesa devaka in subsequent years have given us some of the earliest written records of Native American communities at the very very first point of contact with European people and cabesa daka's Memoirs eventually inspired even more Spanish conquistadors to try to go to North America to find treasure especially to find that lost city of gold that cabesa deaka was always talking about in fact explorers like hernand DeSoto eventually explored all the way from Florida to the Mississippi River another Conquistador named Francisco Vasquez de Coronado he spent years exploring modern-day Arizona looking for those fabled Cities of Gold that cabesa Daka had said were there but unfortunately for Coronado he never found the cities of gold as it turns out the Cities of Gold never really existed what probably happened is that cabesa devaka was starving to death his body was shutting down he was dehydrated and he probably saw a mirage a visual Mirage out on the horizon in the desert as his body and his brain were starting to die um he never actually saw a city of gold but that didn't stop him from telling tales about it once he got back to Spain so even though no Conquistador and nobody has ever found the lost city of gold along the way the Spanish did end up setting up a fortified foothold in the town of St Augustine Florida but never really managed to expand beyond that footprint because the Spanish in Florida ended up constantly antagonizing many surrounding native groups in the area but between the years 1500 and 1650 it has been estimated that over 181 tons of gold and over 16,000 tons of silver were shipped from the new world directly to Spain and this massive influx of precious metals in Spain had a lot of unforeseen consequences throughout the European continent the Spanish monarchs ended up spending those mountains of gold and silver just as soon as they got it into their hands sometimes wasting massive fortunes on parties and luxury goods in fact over time prices for goods in Spain began to dramatically increase due to the huge piles of gold and silver that the Spanish royal family was spending as quickly as they possibly could and to make matters worse many experienced Traders and what we would nowadays called Bankers or economists had been driven out of Spain during the Reconquista so Spain did not even end up making very many lasting or good investments in the infrastructure or the economy of their nation of Spain and eventually after enough years the treasure ships that were loaded up in the new world started to bring noticeably less and less silver over to Spain but that didn't stop the Spanish royal family from continuing to spend as if the supplies of gold and silver were never ending in fact Spain eventually wound up severely in debt in the 1600s and the government actually had to declare bankruptcy multiple times in subsequent years the first area to be thoroughly colonized by the Spanish and what became modern-day United States was actually Florida in Florida the Spanish conquistadors ended up wiping out a very small settlement of French settl who had come there a few years earlier in the hopes of preventing any future French colonization in Florida and the Spanish also wanted to keep an eye on and eventually end rampant piracy that was happening in nearby Waters off the coast of Florida but despite considerable Spanish efforts to try to BU build towns and Forts and try to convert the native people in Florida to the Catholic religion nevertheless the Spanish presence in Florida remained small for for decades to come but in the southwestern portion of what we know nowadays as the United States in the year 1598 the first major Spanish Expedition into the area which was led by a conquistador named wand on came to the area searching for the Lost Cities of Gold but when onate was attacked by natives of the aoma people in the present day area known as New Mexico the Spanish retaliated against the attacks of a handful of Spanish soldiers by wiping out and killing and enslaving thousands of native inhabitants in the area subsequently hearing about the harsh treatment of the native people in the southwest by onate onate was eventually recalled by Spanish authorities and in the aftermath a period of much more stable much less violent Colonial Spanish rule was initiated with the establishment of a new Spanish colony which was called New Mexico and the establishment of its capital city Santa Fe which means the Holy Faith in Spanish in reference to the massive importance of the Catholic religion in the Spanish New World colonies by the time we get to the year 1680 though a very small number of mostly meso Spanish colonists ruled over the Pueblo peoples that live in modern-day New Mexico over time even though the meso population was small tensions arose over the over the colonists violent exploitation of native people's labor and the Spanish people's increasingly harsh efforts to try to forcibly convert natives to the Catholic religion and the Spanish also trying to forcibly eliminate indigenous religious practices and beliefs among other fact factors all of these things eventually led to an uprising or a Revolt in that same year that drove the Spanish out of New Mexico and for a brief period in time did actually restore native autonomy in the southwest this Uprising was led by an indigenous man named Pope Pope was a native religious leader who had earlier been arrested and punished by the Spanish for practicing what the Spanish called sorcery but what was in reality the indigenous religious practices of the Pueblo people so led by Pope the Pueblo people ended up attacking and nearly killed off the entire meso population of Spanish colonists and they destroyed in the process every symbol and icon of Spanish culture and Catholic religion that they came across this peaceful sort of reestablishment of native domination in the American southwest lasted for about a dozen years but after about 12 years the Spanish were able to regroup group and they violently ended up reconquering New Mexico this time for good but the new world attracted other curious European groups outside of Spain and Portugal French Settlement eventually focused in the regions that are nowadays known as Canada and in the American Southeast now even as other European powers openly called out Spain's terrible treatment of native peoples all of those European powers all all aspired to match the Spanish Empire's incredible wealth and power in the new world and during the 17th century we are going to see rival French Dutch and eventually English colonies established all throughout North America the French though were the first beyond the Spanish who settled in North America and the French hoped that they could find gold in North America and they also were hoping to locate what was known as the Northwest Passage which would essentially allow for a water-based shortcut sort of leapfrogging over North America and allowing ships to sail easily to Asia but failed initial settlements by the French were followed up by permanent settlements all throughout the Mississippi River Valley and along the St Lawrence River in what eventually came to be known as Canada which at the time was called New France and the French government actually Limited French migration to the new world and this kept the number of French colonists living in the new world relatively small over time but for French people who did move over to the new world the fur trade became the focus of French colonization and this led to extensive ties between the French and Native Americans in what is today Canada and the northern portions of the United States French colonists were always very few in number and they right from the start embraced the fur trade rather than agriculture or farming to make a living in the new world French colonists right from the start depended on maintaining friendly relations with with local native groups in order to have access to the fur trade and the French kind of like the Portuguese were not as interested in acquiring land as some other European colonists were and France was a nation that did not really care about heavily populating its new world colonies the reason for this was that France was already a fairly huge Nation itself and France didn't really need more room to put all of the people living in their country like the small nation of England eventually did nor did it turn out were the French all that interested in trying to exploit the native people's labor like the Spanish did so the French actually ended up creating very elaborate military commercial and even diplomatic connections with Native groups and the French created longlasting alliances with native peoples that ultimately are going to be unparalleled in North America for their durability and strength native peoples in North America believed that trade required the constant giving of gifts to prove and keep friendship relationships and the French actually turned out to be the most successful of European colonist in understanding this aspect of native trade and trade ultimately benefited both native peoples and the French as native peoples usually received metal weapons and goods like wool blankets and glass beads that they couldn't acquire in North America that they could only get from Europeans and the French in turn would trade these goods for Furs but even though the French were much more friendly and congenial with native peoples that they encountered in the new world European trade nonetheless eventually led to problems for the native people in particular beaver pelts were a very highly sought after lucrative trade item in Europe beaver pelts were actually prized in Europe to make the fanciest of hats if you've ever seen a top hat or a tricorner hat like what George Washington wore or any of Napoleon's famous hats all of those hats were made out of beaver fur so as a result of the intense need in Europe for beaver pelts both Natives and French colonists in the new world found themselves very quickly hunting beavers at very unsustainable levels and eventually they found that they had to travel further and further Inland to find any beavers to hunt and eventually both sides as well as other native groups started to actively and directly compete for access to land and a diminishing number of beavers to hunt over time and while not very many French people actually moved permanently to the new world those who did move over to New France mostly went for economic reasons to either set up fur trading posts or to establish fishing camps some Frenchmen who came to the new world worked as independent fur Traders and would go off to live amongst the native people in order to get even better access to more fur bearing animals some of these Frenchmen even ended up intermarrying with native women and had children and families that went on for Generations Nations these independent Frenchmen who ended up living amongst the native people were usually called Courier de Bois which means in French Woods Runners but even though the French treated the native peoples much more fairly than the Spanish or the Portuguese or the English French colonialism all the same ended up bringing the same diseases and warfare to Native populations especially as the fur trade and the introduction of European Commodities had the ensity to intensify conflicts between different Native groups and as Wars between European colonists living on the North American con continent eventually came to embroil Native groups that were Allied to various different European powers another European Empire that developed in the new world was that of the Dutch although the nation of the Netherlands is very very small in both size and in terms of population the Netherlands was in the 1600s the center of a worldwide Maritime Empire that was based on trade culture Enlightenment and the Dutch also invented many business practices like the joint stock company that ended up being critical to the birth of modern capitalism just FYI a joint stock company is a business entity in which shares of the company's stock can be bought and sold by shareholders in an effort to raise money to eventually establish new colonies in the New World by the time we get to the year 1600 the Dutch were actually emerging as the world's leading economic power the Dutch were a very prosperous nation and they were involved in several trades and areas of manufacturing but the main source of income for people in the Netherlands came through Commerce the buying and selling of goods on a massive scale they were based on worldwide trade and the Dutch also founded companies that completely controlled colonies all over the world for example the Dutch East India company was founded originally in the year 16002 to serve as a direct competitor to the nation of Portugal and Portugal's almost exclusive claim up to that point to trade any Goods that originated in Asia eventually though the Dutch were able to take over the Spice Islands which nowadays we know as the nation of Indonesia and a few other islands like Sri Lanka and Sumatra and the Dutch became a huge factor in the international spice trade the Dutch also tended to establish trading posts that were dotted all along the coastline of Africa and throughout the Indian Ocean as well very similar to the Portuguese on the African continent along the so-called Gold Coast the Dutch quickly became known for establishing SL slave trading posts the Dutch also came to the new world when a man named Henry Hudson was brought in to explore New York Harbor and the river that eventually came to bear his name as the Hudson River in the year 1609 which set the stage for the eventual establishment in the year 1624 of the city of New Amsterdam which was originally a very small Dutch outpost on the island of manhatt hatan that eventually grew to become the basis for the City of New York as we know it nowadays now the Dutch kind of like the Portuguese were not settlers they were focused ultimately on trade which partially explains the extremely diverse community that eventually ended up developing in the city of New Amsterdam the Dutch were also very well known in Europe at this time for tolerating different religious practices and as such Dutch North American ameran settlements usually included a very uh vast population of different religious groups including Quakers Catholics and Protestant groups but also Muslims and Jewish populations who came to New Amsterdam from all over Europe but it's probably because the settlers of New Amsterdam were so diverse that it actually ended up hampering the sense of the development of a community in New Amsterdam over time and thus New Amsterdam was always a very small very weak Outpost of an otherwise worldwide Dutch trading empire the Dutch were again very tolerant of the practice of different religions which was fairly unique amongst European nations at the time and their settlements all around the world included incredibly diverse populations of Muslims Jews Catholics Protestants and refugees from all over the rest of the world even though the Netherlands was exceptional in its commitment to things like freedom of the press and massive religious toleration the new world colonies of New Netherlands were hardly governed in any kind of democratic fashion New Amsterdam which was sort of the center of the New Netherlands settlement in North America was basically ruled by a group known as the Dutch West India Company the West India Company was a Dutch joint stock company that provided the seed money to fund the foundation of the colony of New Netherlands and as such the company actually ran day-to-day Affairs and government in the Dutch colonies in the new world and as such the Dutch colonies completely lacked any kind of elected assembly or any kind of Town Council which was actually pretty common back in the Netherlands at the time another thing that made the Dutch colonies in the new world very different was that in the new world Dutch slaves did have some very basic rights also women who were part of the Dutch colonies usually enjoyed far more freedoms than women living anywhere else on the European continent or in North America and obviously religious toleration was exceptionally Broad and this ultimately led to the most religious and ethnic diversity of V developing in New Netherlands and in New Amsterdam amongst all other North American european-based colonies now over time the Dutch West India Company did gradually begin to loosen up its control over New Netherlands and actually tried to offer incentives to try to encourage Dutch people to settle in their new world colonies including offering large landed Estates for people who were known as petrun runes were fabulously wealthy business shareholders who would agree to transport tenants to their large land Holdings in the new world who would then rent Land from the land owner and perform agricultural labor now several patroons did end up taking advantage of this offer and they established massive landed Estates all throughout the New Netherlands Colony usually where these patroons would rule autocratically over their tenants in a kind of mini feudalistic system with the Patroon kind of acting as the local Monarch or ruler but despite the Netherlands best efforts to attract a variety of different settlers to the New World New Netherlands and New Amsterdam actually continued to remain a very tiny Outpost in a global Dutch Empire and another thing that sort of detracted from the growth of Dutch settlements in the new world was that the the Dutch unfortunately had a tendency to send rather aggressive and usually pretty inept Governors to try to take control of and Lead New Amsterdam and these Governors tended to provoke loal local Native American groups which sometimes led to absolutely terrible Slaughters and massacres for example in the year 1645 the governor of New Amsterdam ended up murdering an entire Camp of refugee native people who had come to the walls of the city of New Amsterdam begging for assistance and protection from another local neighboring uh Native group and the reason that the governor gave for massacring these native people was because these native people did not immediately pay him taxes for the privilege of being protected within the walls of the city of New Amsterdam but these massacres usually led to immediate retaliatory attacks from other local native groups and that overall had the tendency to further weaken the colony itself so this is actually our very last slide so to conclude dramatic changes were occurring in North America all throughout the 16th century the Aztec and the Incan Empires collapsed and huge numbers of the M native population in North and South America ended up dying off from exposure to European diseases but in the year 1600 North am America was still for the most part under the control of native groups as Europeans began to start to establish strong colonies at this point only in Mexico and the Caribbean but as we continue to move on we will see more European exploitation and colonization of the new world and the growth of what will eventually turn out to be North America and the United States of America as we know them today