What’s the Significance?
Big Picture Questions
The experience of empire for conquered peoples was broadly similar whoever their rulers were. Does the material of this chapter support or challenge this idea?
In thinking about the similarities and differences among the empires of the early modern era, what categories of comparison might be most useful to consider?
Have a look at the maps in this chapter with an eye to the areas of the world that were not incorporated in a major empire. Pick one or more of them and do a little research as to what was happening there in the early modern era.
Looking Back: Compared to the world of the fifteenth century, what new patterns of development are visible in the empire-building projects of the centuries that followed?
Next Steps: For Further Study
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History (2010). Chapters 5–7 of this recent work describe and compare the empires of the early modern world.
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra and Erik R. Seeman, eds., The Atlantic in Global History (2007). A collection of essays that treats the Atlantic basin as a single interacting region.
Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian Voyages, the Columbian Exchange, and Their Historians (1987). A brief and classic account of changing understandings of Columbus and his global impact.
John Kicza, Resilient Cultures: America’s Native Peoples Confront European Colonization, 1500–1800 (2003). An account of European colonization in the Americas that casts the native peoples as active agents rather than passive victims.
Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created (2011). A global account of the Columbian Exchange that presents contemporary scholarship in a very accessible fashion.
Peter Perdue, China Marches West: The Qing Conquest of Central Eurasia (2005). Describes the process of China becoming an empire as it incorporated the non-Chinese people of Central Asia.
Willard Sutherland, Taming the Wild Fields: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe (2004). An up-to-date account of Russian expansion in the steppes.
“1492: An Ongoing Voyage,” http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/1492.exhibit/Intro.html. An interactive Web site based on an exhibit from the Library of Congress that provides a rich context for exploring the meaning of Columbus and his voyages.