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August 20 - November 13, 2022
had its own army and the power to wage war and colonize foreign lands.
captured a key fort held by the Portuguese in 1605 and forcibly removed all other traders.
no cloves could be grown or traded in their territories.
The Dutch also took control of the Banda Islands, intending this time to monopolize mace and nutmeg.
made up of many small autonomous city-states, and there was no hierarchical social or political structure.
no central authority
In 1621 he sailed to Banda with a fleet and proceeded to massacre almost the entire population of the islands,
a plantation society.
The Dutch spread the strategy they perfected in the Moluccas to the entire region, with profound implications for the economic and political institutions of the rest of Southeast Asia.
turned inward and abandoned trade.
several states abandoned producing crops for export and ceased commercial activity.
In 1635 the
Burmese moved their capital from Pegu, on the coast, to Ava, far inland up the Irrawaddy River.
by the end of the eighteenth century, nearly all were part of European colonial empires.
this expansion sowed the seeds of underdevelopment in many diverse corners of the world by imposing, or further strengthening existing, extractive institutions.
Before the early modern period, there was a vibrant slave trade in East Africa, and large numbers of slaves were transported across the Sahara to the Arabian Peninsula. Moreover, the large medieval West African states of Mali, Ghana, and Songhai made heavy use of slaves in the government, the army, and agriculture, adopting organizational models from the Muslim North African states with whom they traded.
development of the sugar plantation colonies of the Caribbean beginning in the early seventeenth century that led to a dramatic escalation of the international slave trade and to an unprecedented increase in the importance of slavery within Africa itself.
well over
10,000,000 Africans were shipped out of the continent as slaves.
Most slaves who were shipped to the Americas were war captives subsequently transported to the coast. The increase in warfare was fueled by huge imports of guns and ammunition, which the Europeans exchanged for slaves.
put in motion a particular path of institutional development in Africa.
The slave trade initiated two adverse political processes.
First, many polities initially became more absolutist, organized around a single objective:
warring and slaving ultimately destroyed whatever order and legitimate state authority existed in sub-Saharan Africa.
Institutions, even religious ones, became perverted by the desire to capture and sell slaves.
in some places it did lead to the rise of powerful states whose main raison d’être was raiding and slaving.
Slave Coast.
Akan Wars, as Asante defeated one independent state after another.
Beginning in the late eighteenth century, a strong movement to abolish the slave trade began to gain momentum in Britain, led by the charismatic figure of William Wilberforce.
1807 the abolitionists persuaded the British Parliament to pass a bill making the slave trade illegal. The United States followed with a similar measure the next year.
stationing naval squadrons in the Atlantic to try to stamp o...
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not until 1834 that slavery itself was abolished in t...
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slavery had become much more prevalent within Africa itself.
In the place of slavery came “legitimate commerce,” a phrase coined for the export from Africa of new commodities not tied to the slave trade.
they could be profitably put to work, under coercion, in Africa, producing the new items of legitimate commerce.
many of the political institutions the slave trade had wrought in the previous two centuries were unaltered and patterns of behavior persisted.
result slavery, rather than contracting, appears to have expanded in Africa throughout the nineteenth century.
In most parts of colonial Africa, slavery continued well into the twentieth century.
“dual economy” paradigm, originally proposed in 1955 by Sir Arthur Lewis,
many less-developed or underdeveloped economies have a dual structure and are divided into a modern sector and a traditional sector.
the “problem of development” has come to mean moving people and resources out of the traditional sector, agriculture and the countryside, and into the modern sector, industry and cities.
border between the state of KwaZulu-Natal, formerly Natal, and the state of the Transkei. The border follows the Great Kei River.
another example of underdevelopment created, not of underdevelopment as it naturally emerged and persisted over centuries.
South Africa and Botswana, as we will see later, did avoid most of the adverse effects of the slave trade and the wars it wrought.
these societies did not feel the brunt of many of the adverse currents that hit West and Central Africa.
The isolation of these places changed in the nineteenth century.
European expansion into the interior began soon after the British took over Cape Town from the Dutch during the Napoleonic Wars.
1835, when the remaining Europeans of Dutch descent, who would become known as Afrikaners or Boers, started their famous mass migration known as the Great Trek away from the British control of the coast and the Cape Town area.
the discovery of vast diamond reserves in Kimberly in 1867 and of rich gold mines in Johannesburg in 1886.
Boer Wars in 1880–1881 and 1899–1902.
