Conclusion

A radical decline in temperatures worldwide made the seventeenth century a time of famine, death, epidemic disease, and political turmoil that contributed to regime change in China, Persia, and England and threatened the rulers of the Ottoman and Mughal Empires. By the 1750s, the world’s regions were more economically connected than they had been a century and a half earlier. The process of integrating the resources of separated worlds, which had begun with Christopher Columbus’s voyages, intensified during this period. Traders shipped a wider variety of commodities—from Baltic wood to Indian cotton, from New World silver and sugar to Chinese silks and porcelains—over longer distances. People increasingly wore clothes manufactured elsewhere, consumed beverages made from products cultivated in far-off locations, and used imported guns to settle local conflicts.

This integration and expansion of consumer opportunities came at a heavy price for Indigenous peoples. Nowhere was it more costly than in the Americas, where colonization and exploitation led to the expulsion of Indigenous peoples from their lands and the decimation of their numbers. Nonetheless, in North America, Indigenous peoples still held most of the land during a dynamic period of change that saw the emergence of the Lakota and Comanche Empires. The cost was also very high for the millions of Africans forced across the Atlantic to work New World plantations and for the millions more who did not survive the journey.

Silver was the product from the Americas that most transformed global trading networks and that showed how greater entanglements could both enrich and destabilize. Nearly one-third of the silver from the New World ended up in China as payment for products like porcelains and silks that consumers still regarded as the world’s finest manufactures. But if China’s economy remained vibrant, silver did play a part in the fall of one dynasty and the rise of another. For the Ottoman and Mughal Empires, the influx of silver created rampant inflation and undermined their previous economic autonomy. Although Spanish colonizers mined New World silver and shipped it to western Europe and Asia, it was Spain’s main competitors in Europe, the British, French, and Dutch who gained the upper hand in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Certain societies coped with increased commercial exchange, environmental change, and internal challenges more successfully than others did. The Safavid and Ming dynasties could not withstand the pressures; both collapsed. The Spanish, Ottoman, and Mughal dynasties managed to survive but faced increasing pressure from aggressive rivals. For newcomers to the integrating world, the opportunity to trade helped support new dynasties. Japan, Russia, and England emerged on the world stage. But even in these newer regimes, commerce and competition did not erase conflict. To the contrary, while the world was more fully integrated in economic terms than ever before, greater prosperity for some hardly translated into peace for most.

More information

A timeline showing events from circa 1600 to 1750. The timeline shows various events represented by diamonds and lines color coded by region of the world that are situated between and around lines representing 1600, 1650, 1700, and 1750. In the Americas, the sugar complex emerges in the Caribbean region in the seventeenth century, French and Dutch merchants establish fur trade in North America seventeenth century, and the British defeat French forces in North America during the Seven Years’ War in 1756 to 1763. In Africa, there is a Massive expansion of the Atlantic slave trade from 1650 to 1800 and the Asante state is founded in 1701. In South Asia, Aurangzeb’s expansion weakens the Mughal dynasty from 1658 to 1707 and the British assume control of French interests in South Asia during Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763. In East Asia, Tokugawa shogunate is formed in Japan in 1603, the Ming dynasty falls and the Qing dynasty founded in 1644, and the British assume control of French interests in South Asia during Seven Years’ War from 1756 to 1763. In Europe, England, France, Netherlands pursue mercantilist expansion abroad from 1600 to 1800, the Thirty Years’ War is placed at 1618 to 1648, and the Seven Years’ War is placed at 1756–1763. In the Islamic world the Safavid dynasty collapses in 1722 and Köprülü reforms stabilize Ottoman Empire in the mid-seventeenth century. In Russia, the Romanov dynasty is founded in 1613, Russia expands into Siberia in the seventeenth century, and Peter the Great reigns from 1682 to 1725.