What’s the Significance?
Indian Ocean commercial network, 672–74
trading post empire, 673
Philippines (Spanish), 674–75
British/Dutch East India companies, 676–77
Tokugawa shogunate, 678
“silver drain,” 679–82
Potosí, 680
“soft gold,” 686–87
African diaspora, 693–95
Benin/Dahomey, 695
Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, 696–97
Big Picture Questions
Next Steps: For Further Study
Glenn J. Ames, The Globe Encompassed: The Age of European Discovery, 1500–1700 (2007). An up-to-date survey of European expansion in the early modern era.
Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (1998). An account of the early modern world economy that highlights the centrality of Asia.
Erik Gilbert and Jonathan Reynolds, Trading Tastes: Commodity and Cultural Exchange to 1750 (2006). A world historical perspective on transcontinental and transoceanic commerce.
David Northrup, ed., The Atlantic Slave Trade (2002). A fine collection of essays about the origins, practice, impact, and abolition of Atlantic slavery.
John Richards, The Endless Frontier (2003). Explores the ecological consequences of early modern commerce.
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (1998). A well-regarded but somewhat controversial account of the slave trade, with an emphasis on African authorities as active and independent players in the process.
Jerome S. Handler and Michael L. Tuite Jr., “Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas: A Visual Record,” http://hitchcock.itc.virginia.edu/Slavery/index.php. An immense collection of maps and images illustrating the slave trade and the life of slaves in the Americas.