Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  22. Quoted in Fernández-Armesto, 97.

  23. Ibid., 54–108.

  24. Tantalizing hints of pre-Norse voyages to the New World abound, including Roman coins found in Venezuela and textile patterns characteristic of Asia found in pre-Columbian Latin American artifacts. See Stephen Jett, Crossing Ancient Oceans (New York: Springer, 2006).

  25. Zweig, 26.

  26. Acemoglu et al., 1231–1294.

  27. A. R. Disney, Twilight of the Pepper Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 21.

  28. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 20–22.

  29. Morison, 368–374.

  30. M. N. Pearson, “India and the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century,” in India and the Indian Ocean, 78.

  31. Roteiro, xix.

  32. Ibid., 20–21.

  33. Ibid., 25.

  34. Ibid., 26.

  35. Ibid., 35.

  36. Ibid., 45.

  37. Sanjay Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 121–128.

  38. Ibid., 121.

  39. Roteiro, 48.

  40. Ibid., 60.

  41. Ibid., 62.

  42. Ibid., 68.

  43. Ibid., 173.

  44. Earl J. Hamilton, “American Treasure and the Rise of Capitalism,”Economica 27 (November 1929): 348.

  45. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 206.

  46. William Brooks Greenlee, trans., The Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil and India (London: Hakluyt Society, 1938), xxiii–xxviii, 83–85.

  47. Quoted in Subrahmanyam, 205.

  48. Ibid., 214.

  49. Ibid., 215.

  50. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, xxiii.

  51. Ibid., 227.

  52. Genevieve Bouchon and Denys Lombard, “The Indian Ocean in the Fifteenth Century,” in India and the Indian Ocean, ed. A. D. Gupta and M. N. Pearson (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1987), 55–56.

  53. Quoted in Silverberg, 216.

  54. Pearson, “India and the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century,” 67–68.

  55. Ibid., 87.

  56. Serrão’s original vessel had become too decrepit to proceed. The ship that came to grief under his command was a local junk purchased en route. See Leonard Y. Andaya, The World of Maluku (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993), 115.

  57. Quoted in Zweig, 52.

  58. Zweig, 33–69.

  59. One of the vessels returned home after a mutiny; one was lost in rough seas; one (as with da Gama’s voyage) was abandoned to combine crews; and one, the Trinidad, was captured by the Portuguese. Of the thirty-one men on the Victoria who completed the circumnavigation, thirteen were captured by the Portuguese in the Cape Verde Islands but were eventually returned to Spain. See Tim Joyner, Magellan (Camden, ME: International Marine, 1992), especially the crew roster and accounting, 252–265.

  60. Ibid., 192–240.

  61. Pearson, “India and the Indian Ocean in the Sixteenth Century,” 90.

  62. Quoted in Frederic C. Lane, “The Mediterranean Spice Trade: Further Evidence of Its Revival in the Sixteenth Century,” American Historical Review, 45:3 (April 1940): 589.

  63. Ibid., 587.

  64. Frederic C. Lane, “Venetian Shipping during the Commercial Revolution,” 228–234.

  65. Om Prakash, “European Commercial Enterprise in Precolonial Europe,” in The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), II:5, 45.

  66. Ibid., 581, 587–588. For a contrary view, see C. H. H. Wake, “The Changing Pattern of Europe’s Pepper and Spice Imports, ca. 1400–1700,” Journal of European Economic History 8 (Fall 1979): 361–403. Even Wake, however, admits that there was a significant flow of spices via the Red Sea and Venice in the sixteenth century.

  67. M. N. Pearson, The New Cambridge History of India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), I:1, 44.

  68. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 59.

  69. Charles R. Boxer, “A Note on Portuguese Reactions to the Revival of the Red Sea Spice Trade and the Rise of Atjeh, 1540–1600,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 10 (1969): 420.

  70. Ibid., 425.

  71. Charles R. Boxer, The Great Ship from Amacon (Lisbon: Centro de Estudios Históricos Ultramarinos, 1959), 1–2.

  72. Ibid., 22.

  73. Ibid., 15–16.

  74. Ibid., 16–18.

  75. M. N. Pearson, The New Cambridge History of India, I:1, 37–39.

  76. M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago Between 1500 and About 1630 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1962), 144.

  77. Ibid., 43.

  78. Prakash, 54.

  79. John Villiers, “Las Yslas de Esperar en Dios: The Jesuit Mission in Moro 1546–1571,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988, special issue): 597.

  80. Paramita R. Abdurachman, “‘Niachile Pokaraga’: A Sad Story of a Moluccan Queen,” Modern Asian Studies 22, no. 3 (1988, special issue): 589.

  81. Andaya, 116–141.

  82. Disney, 20–21.

  Chapter 8

  1. Homer H. Dubs and Robert S. Smith, “Chinese in Mexico City in 1635,”Far Eastern Quarterly 1, no. 4 (August 1942): 387.

  2. Horace Stern, “The First Jewish Settlers in America: Their Struggle for Religious Freedom,” Jewish Quarterly Review 45, no. 4 (April 1955): 289, 292–293, quote, 293. The assertion that the twenty-three were in fact the first Jews in North America is a matter of some dispute. See, for example, Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Jewish History,” Modern Judaism 10, no. 3 (October 1990): 244–245.

  3. Philippa Scott, The Book of Silk (London: Thames and Hudson, 1993), 22, 24, 33.

  4. In tropical regions, the flow of surface air is toward the equator. As this air mass moves in that direction, it finds itself rotating toward the east more slowly than the earth below it, because of the increase in the diameter of the earth toward the equator (resulting in a higher velocity of rotation); thus, it moves relatively toward the west—the Coriolis effect. At higher latitudes in both hemispheres, the opposite occurs. The air masses move toward the poles, and as they do so, they find themselves moving eastward more rapidly than the earth below, since the decrease in the earth’s diameter at higher latitudes means a smaller velocity of rotation; at the poles, the velocity of rotation is zero. This is also the reason why storm systems rotate clockwise in the northern hemisphere and counterclockwise in the southern hemisphere. (It has nothing to do, however, with the rotation of drain whirlpools, which is random—the Coriolis effect is not strong enough over small distances to affect the water in your sink or bathtub.)

  5. J. H. Parry, review of “Friar Andrés de Uraneta, O.S.A.,” Hispanic American Historical Review 47, no. 2 (May 1967): 262. Although Arellano, who had abandoned the main force of Urdaneta’s expedition just after it left Manila, arrived in Mexico first, he kept poor logs and was later reprimanded; it is Urdaneta who is remembered as the route’s pioneer. For the conventional view crediting Urdaneta, see Thor Heyerdahl, “Feasible Ocean Routes to and from the Americas in Pre-Columbian Times,” American Antiquity 28, no. 4 (April 1963): 486.

  6. William Lytle Schurz, “Mexico, Peru, and the Manila Galleon,” American Historical Review 1, no. 4 (November 1918): 390.

  7. Ibid., 394–395.

  8. Dubs and Smith, 387.

  9. Ibid., 398.

  10. Ibid., 391.

  11. Ibid., 387.

  12. Sugar consumption from http:­/­/­www.fao.org­/­documents­/­show_cdr.asp? url_file=­/­docrep­/­009­/­J7927e­/­j7927e07.htm. EU population of 457 million from http:­/­/­www.cia.gov­/­cia­/­publications­/­factbook­/­rankorder­/­2119rank.html; U.S. population of 299 million from http:­/­/­www.census.gov­/­population­/­www­/­popclockus.html. Medieval European consumption from Henry Hobhouse, Seeds of Change (New York: Harper and Row, 1986), 44.

  13. Norge W. Jerome, in James M. Weiffenbach, ed., T
aste and Development: The Genesis of Sweet Preference (Washington D.C.: National Institutes of Health, 1974), 243.

  14. Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power (New York: Penguin, 1986), xxi, 6.

  15. Paul Hentzner, from http://www.britannia.com/history/docs/hentzner.html.

  16. J. H. Galloway, “The Mediterranean Sugar Industry,” Geographical Review 67, no. 2 (April, 1977): 182–188.

  17. Mintz, 23.

  18. Galloway, 180.

  19. Alberto Vieria, “Sugar Islands” and “Introduction,” in Stuart B. Schwartz, ed. Tropical Babylons (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 10, 62–73.

  20. Jonathan I. Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 161–168.

  21. Stern, 289. For a detailed historical analysis, see Arnold Wiznitzer, “The Exodus from Brazil and Arrival in New Amsterdam of the Jewish Pilgrim Fathers, 1654,” Publication of the American Jewish Historical Society 44, no. 1 (September 1954): 80–95. By the latter account, the twenty-three Sephardic Jews from Brazil were not the first in New Amsterdam, since they were met and assisted by two Ashkenazic Jews.

  22. J. E. Heeres, Het Aandeel der Nederlanders in de Ontdekking van Australië 1606–1765 (Leiden: Boekhandel en Drukkerij Voorheen E. J. Brill, 1899), xii–xiv. Also see Estensen, 126–127.

  23. Ibid., 156–164. For a more detailed description of the Batavia disaster, see Mike Dash, Batavia’s Graveyard (New York: Crown Publishers, 2002).

  24. John J. McCusker, Money and Exchange in Europe and America, 1600–1775 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 7–8.

  25. Kristof Glamann, Dutch-Asiatic Trade 1620–1740 (’s-Gravenhage, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981), 64–65.

  26. Jeremy N. Green, “The Wreck of the Dutch East Indiaman the Vergulde Draek, 1656,” International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 2, no. 2 (1973): 272–274, 278–279. For a more accessible discussion, see Miriam Estensen, Discovery, the Quest of the Great South Land (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 193–194.

  27. Donald Simpson, “The Treasure in the Vergulde Draek: A Sample of V. O. C. Bullion Exports in the 17th Century,” Great Circle 2, no. 1 (April 1980): 13.

  Chapter 9

  1. Derek Wilson, The World Encompassed: Francis Drake and His Great Voyage (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 60–63.

  2. Marguerite Eyer Wilbur, The East India Company (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1945), 5–9.

  3. The most immediate effect of the closure of the Iberian ports on long-distance trade was that it cut off Holland, and other European nations, from supplies of Spanish salt, vital for the preservation of fish. As early as 1599, about 120 Dutch ships, along with dozens of others from England, France, and Italy, were calling annually at the salt flats at Punta de Araya in what is now Venezuela. See Philip Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 90.

  4. Charles Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire (New York: Penguin, 1988), 21.

  5. Arthur Coke Burnell, ed., The Voyage of John Huyghen van Linschoten to the East Indies (New York: Burt Franklin, 1885), I:xxvi.

  6. Ibid., 112.

  7. John Bastin, “The Changing Balance of the Southeast Asian Pepper Trade,” in M. N. Pearson, Spices in the Indian Ocean World (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), 285.

  8. Ibid., 25.

  9. Ibid.

  10. Michael Greenberg, British Trade and the Opening of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 2.

  11. Wilbur, 18–24.

  12. Charles R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 110.

  13. Three centuries later, the American economist Irving Fisher would observe that where the houses were made of mud and straw, interest rates were high; where they were made of bricks, interest rates were low. See Irving Fisher, The Theory of Interest (Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1977), 375–382.

  14. Data adjusted to year 2006 dollars from the year 1990 data from Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris: OECD, 2001), 264. Data recomputed for the U.S. CPI as of 2006.

  15. Sidney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 137–138.

  16. Jan De Vries and Ad Van Der Woude, The First Modern Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26–28.

  17. Israel, 21–22.

  18. Ibid., 75.

  19. Quoted in T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 9.

  20. At the exchange rate in 1600 of approximately ten guilders per English pound sterling.

  21. Wilbur, 21. See also Jonathan B. Baskin and Paul J. Miranti, A History of Corporate Finance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 75.

  22. Meilink-Roelofsz, 195–196.

  23. Vincent C. Loth, “Armed Incidents and Unpaid Bills: Anglo-Dutch Rivalry in the Banda Islands in the Seventeenth Century,” Modern Asian Studies 29, no. 4 (October 1995): 707.

  24. Meilink-Roelofsz, 193.

  25. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 75.

  26. Andaya, 152–155.

  27. Israel, 185.

  28. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 107.

  29. Ibid., 164.

  30. Loth, 705–740. The Dutch eventually took Run in 1666, during the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and they formally acquired it in the next year in the Treaty of Breda. Just as the Dutch had gained actual control of Run at the time of the treaty, so too were English troops in possession of Manhattan, for which it was famously “exchanged.”

  31. Niels Steensgaard, The Asian Trade Revolution of the Seventeenth Century (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1974), 345–397.

  32. Meilink-Roelofsz, 222–225.

  33. Boxer, The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 128.

  34. Ibid., 265–267. Quote in C. R. Boxer, Jan Compagnie in Japan, 1600–1850 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1950), 90.

  35. Israel, 172–175.

  36. Ibid., 177.

  37. Ibid., 91–92.

  38. De Vries and Van Der Woude, 642–646; quote, 643.

  39. Hobhouse, 105.

  40. Glamann, 27–34.

  41. Ibid., 108–111.

  42. Israel, 199–202.

  43. Ibid., 208–224, 262–269, 287.

  Chapter 10

  1. Arthur Meier Schlesinger, “The Uprising Against the East India Company,” Political Science Quarterly 32, no. 1 (March 1917): 60–79.

  2. Ibid., 67–68.

  3. Quoted ibid., 69.

  4. Quoted ibid., 70.

  5. Jean de La Roque, A voyage to Arabia foelix through the Eastern Ocean and the Streights of the Red-Sea, being the first made by the French in the years 1708, 1709, and 1710 (London: Printed for James Hodges, 1742), 296–297.

  6. Ibid., 309.

  7. Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988): 22–26.

  8. La Roque, 335.

  9. Ibid., 313.

  10. Ibid., 321; Hattox, 36–37.

  11. La Roque, 336; also Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer, The World of Caffeine (New York: Routledge, 2001), 14.

  12. Quoted in Weinberg and Bealer, 13.

  13. Ibid., 15.

  14. Quoted in Fernand Braudel, Capitalism and Material Life 1400–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), 184.

  15. The first known mention of coffee by a European was probably by the famous German physician Leonhard Rauwolf, who encountered it in the course of a journey to the Levant in the 1570s, searching for medicinals to trade. See William H. Ukers, All About Coffee (New York: Tea and Coffee Trade Journal Company, 1935), 21.

  16. Ibid., 46.

  17. David Liss, The Coffee Trader (New York: Random House, 2003), 15.

  18. Douglass C. North and Barry R. Weingast, “Constitutions and Commitment: The Evolution of Institutional Governing Public Choice in Seventeenth-Century England,” Journal of Economic History 49 (December 1989)
: 803–32.

  19. Homer and Sylla, 124, 155. These figures are for loans to the crown, secured by taxes. In 1726, when attached to a lottery ticket—a common “kicker” to medieval government borrowing—rates fell as low as 3 percent.

  20. Glamann, 204–206, calculated at four hundred pounds per bahar.

  21. For coffee prices at Mocha, see Glamann, 205. The price of 0.8 guilder per pound is calculated from a lading price of 245 Spanish reales per local bahar, 735 pounds at Mocha, with a conversion rate of 2.4 guilders per real. For more on weights and currencies in the coffee markets, see Glamann, 304.

  22. Ibid., 200–201.

  23. Ibid., 207–211.

  24. Re. Dutch Clergyman, Boxer, Jan Compagnie, 61, and quote, Braudel, 186.

  25. Boxer, Jan Compagnie, 61–62.

  26. Jonathan F. Wendel and Richard C. Cronin, “Polyploidity and the Evolutionary History of Cotton,” Advances in Agronomy 78 (2003): 139–186.

  27. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society (London: Europa, 1982), 36–37.

  28. A person-day is a measure of work, defined as that done by one person in one day.

  29. Hobhouse, 144. The figure of thirteen person-days is arrived at from the sum of the total person-days divided by eight pounds.

  30. Audrey W. Douglas, “Cotton Textiles in England: The East India Company’s Attempt to Exploit Developments in Fashion 1660–1721,” Journal of British Studies 8, no. 2 (May 1969): 29.

  31. Ibid., 30.

  32. Defoe’s Review (New York: Columbia University Press, 1938); see no. 43 (January 6, 1712), 8.

  33. Ibid., no. 11 (January 26, 1706), 3.

  34. Douglas, 33.

  35. Ramkrishna Mukherjee, The Rise and Fall of the East India Company (Berlin: VEB Deutsher Verlag der Wissenschaften, 1958), 226.

  36. Ibid., 282.

  37. Alfred C. Wood, A History of the Levant Company (London: Frank Cass, 1964), 1–11, 102–105.

  38. Ibid., 103–104.

  39. Ibid., 104.

  40. Ibid., 104–105.

  41. Thomas Mun, England’s Treasure by Foreign Trade, in Lenoard D. Abbot, ed., Masterworks of Economics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 6. Mun occupied the curious position of being both a mercantilist and a supporter of the EIC; he argued that the EIC could acquire more specie from the reexport of the calicoes it sent to Europe than it spent in India for them. See William J. Barber, British Economic Thought and India 1600–1858 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 10–27.