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The country that undertook the most
ambitious voyages of discovery was Portugal. From these
voyages, Europe would discover the entire coastline of
Africa and build the first European settlements south of the
Sahara. From the Portuguese, Europe would also learn the
efficient human commerce: the profitable buying,
selling, and distributing of human beings from Africa as
slaves to Europeans, a form of mercantilism that would leave
a permanent stamp on European and world culture.
It is not unfair to say that Portugal's
emergence as the first great exploring country was due to a
single person, Prince Henry the Navigator, who lived from
1394-1460. Henry was mainly interested in expanding the
mercantile opportunities available to Portugal and
secondarily interested in spreading Christianity. He was
called "The Navigator" because he founded the first school
of navigation in Europe. The graduates of this school would
lead expeditions further and further south along the coast
of Africa. While Europeans were intimately acquainted with
North Africa, the continent south of the Sahara was a great
unknown.
In the early 1400's, the Portuguese began
to export black Africans as slaves in northern Africa. These
slaves were kidnapped or purchased by Islamic slave traders
south of the Sahara and then transported north to be sold to
the Portuguese. In 1441, the Portuguese reached the Senegal
River in West Africa and found that they could acquire black
Africans without having to go through the slave traders,
thus eliminating the cost of at least some middle men in the
commerce in human lives: instead of dealing with Islamic
traders, the Portuguese would deal directly with black
Africans by either purchasing or kidnapping human beings.
The first Portuguese ship to arrive in West Africa south of
the Sahara was also the first European ship to bring back a
cargo of humans directly taken, rather than bought, from
Africa. The Portuguese were delighted, and soon they set up
an energetic trade route to West Africa. Within a decade,
Portugal was importing around a thousand African slaves per
year to be sold to wealthy Europeans.
The Portuguese, however, were looking for
more than just human cargo: they were looking for gold in
Africa as well. In 1471, they discovered a gold rich region
along the southern coast of West Africa (the "Gold Coast"),
and trade with Africa took off. The Portuguese leased land
from local rulers and set up forts and primitive
settlements: the first European settlements in Africa south
of the Sahara.
The Portuguese didn't stop there, however.
They were convinced that Africa must have a southern
extremity and that trade with the east would be possible by
ship alone if they could reach that extremity. All they
would have to do was to travel south, go around the southern
extremity of Africa, and then proceed north and east to
India and China. In 1487, Bartolomeo Diaz navigated to the
southern extremity of Africa, which he named the Cape of
Good Hope, and started heading north along the eastern coast
of Africa. His crew, however, began to grumble and he turned
back. In 1497, five years after Christopher Columbus landed
in America, Vasco da Gama navigated around the Cape of Good
Hope and sailed all along the eastern coast of Africa,
stopping at the numerous Muslim trading cities that extended
from Sofala to Ethiopia. In 1498, he reached the western
coast of India: he was the first person to sail a ship
directly from Europe to India.
In India, da Gama loaded his ships with
spices and returned to Europe. His voyage had been sponsored
by merchants hoping to break the Muslim stranglehold on the
spice trade; da Gama had shown that European merchants could
sail to India directly and not deal with middlemen.
Portugal then embarked on voyages of
aggression rather than discovery. Their goal was to squeeze
the Muslims out of the spice trade by attacking Muslim ships
and Muslim trading cities both in India and eastern Africa.
In 1510, the Portuguese set up a permanent settlement and
fort at Goa (present day Bombay) in India.
Within a few decades, the Portuguese
managed to reach China and to drive the Muslims almost
completely out of the spice trade. How? Basically, they
muscled them out. The Portuguese had one and only one goal in
mind: a complete monopoly over the spice trade. They were
willing to do anything whatsoever to gain that monopoly and
there was no question that their naval technology outclassed
that of their Muslim and Indian counterparts.
These actions, however, radically changed
the relationship between Europe and the rest of the world.
Until the Portuguese pursuit of the spice monopoly, European
powers approached Muslim, African, and eastern states and
cultures with a high degree of respect. From the Portuguese,
the Europeans learned a new, aggressive type of relationship
and the non-European countries adjusted accordingly. The
European discovery of the world, it seems, also meant the
discovery of global conflict.
Richard Hooker
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