To answers these questions, I divide my essay into three major key questions. Trade, Migration, and Empires. And put these phenomenon into a new Hybrid cultures that we called “Baroque Cultures”.
Trade
Westerners’ contact with Asia’s vibrant commercial networks intensified by some of greatest world traveller from Europe. As example, Magellan (and Cano) having successfully circumnavigated the globe and gave Europeans access to a region they called the New World. Although Christopher Columbus did not intend to “discover” America when he went looking for Asia, his voyages convinced Europeans that there were still new territories to exploit and people to convert to Christianity. Moreover, in colonizing the Americas, Europeans drew on connections with West Africa.
Trade then become a new motivation for Europeans to govern and to conquer vast lands out of their sights. The trade from colonial territories as a way of productions factories and plantation to support the living days of the europeans trigger the need of high and intensified labors. Indeed, African laborers became vital to agriculture and mining in the American colonies. Soon the New World’s riches were prominent participants in the commercial circuits of Afro-Eurasia.
The Columbian Exchange marked a new kind of trade. A New trade system that would lead to a first globalised world and the baroque world and a living of europeans with interconnected and interdependent world between Old world and New world and its impact and formed a time of globalisation of “Silver and Slaves”.
Migration
As mention before, The trade and silver mines need labors to run the economies. The Conquest shifting to become Colonialization. Colonies produces raw material for the purposes of europeans. The interdependent era also begin with migration of people from Europe to the new world. But, the fact we have to understand is, the migration was greatly filled with a migration of slaves from Africa to America. The majority who move from the eastern side of Atlantic to western side of the Atlantic of the new side of the new world were not infact europeans. This is not europeanization but actually it is Africanization of the new world. African slave trade between 1492-1776 cause more than 5,5 million African slave migrated and only 1,1 million european migrated.
They came involuntary, they were forced and coerced. As commodities, they shipped abroad with slave vessels. A ship specially design to to carry cargo of human being. The role of the traders and prince from Africa itself made this happened. The trader needs labor, and because of war between tribes and kingdom in Africa, the tribe who lost their war automatically became slaves. Children, Men, Women and they sold to the european traders who came from the new world. This trades then pushing the frontier and penetrated into the hinterland of Africa. Looking for slaves and war between tribes. New kingdom arose, such as Kingdom of Congo that would feed the flow of humans and of gold outwards and fuel the chronic warfare within Africa.
These million of African slaves brought to America as a slave and working in plantation. Especially mines, and raw material plantation. Sometimes they managed to escape and the fugitive slaves from Africa then made their own town, villages, and create a new combination of cultures, American cultures with influenced by African cultures. Also their belief systems. This is the time who shaped also the baroque era. A mixture era of inter-cultures, inter-race and it was results from the “first globalisation”.
As mention before, the Silver mines become important to this trade system. Because the silver coins became universal exchange rate and world-wide accepted. Spanish doubloom at that time become a univesal coin of trade. A first trade currency accept in all over the world of new trade. This condition made more and more slaves trade happened. Everyone pay the slave to work in silver mines, with silver itself.
As a results, new world conquered, and then colonialized, slavery was ramping up extractor of slaves from interior of Africa.
Spread of Empire and Enslavement.
Spreads of empire also a factor that must not forgotten. The spread of Spanish civilization, Gold Gospel and Glory of the european to the new world and to the rest of the world would become a factor that a predecessor for hybrid cultures. The new govern-world would be necessary because more and more, many preachers and social activist at that time felt that it was a right thing to find the new world and to conquer it. But it was not the right thing to genocide the indigenous people. Bartolome de las Casas was one of them. To debate whether europeans could enslave Indians eventhough He encourage the conquest itself. Enslavement is a forbidden act because Indians has souls. God has created them, and as god’s creature, they could not be enslaved. They are savages but innocent. From this time, the cultures of baroque will arise. Indians and slaves were guided to the “light” and baptisted. Many people also having a family of mixture between european and Indians. Even in the latter era, to African.
Baroque Cultures
This age then, bring a new cultures and intellectual age,that we know as the Baroque Age, bringing the parts of the Atlantic system together. There was a mixing people who quickly began to borrow from each other, marry to one another. To produce neither Indian nor white, neither african nor european. We began to see the mixtures of people. They became alamgamated in the same way that the institution of the colonies were amalgamated. Mestizo is a mix child of european men married with indian women. Mestizo in this era not only product of spanish hybrid relationship, but also other conqueror and colonial ruler, such as in new france, we see the phenomenon of the Metis, a french-indian.
In these mixed, baroque, shifting and amalgamating world, elites would drink beverages that were sweetened by world sugar in cup that were made of porcelain imported from china, from Canton to Cuba. The dinner table had all of the emblems of mixed and combine system. In baroque worlds, new peoples, new races, prayed to gods that grand fathers had never even heard of while using rituals of belief that they never known before. This baroque era also an era of convey of new faith to the old belief system.
The remarkable of this baroque world, the ways in which impurity, mixture, bastard cultures, could be the products of this meeting of peoples of different faith cultures, and commodifies baroque. Baroque itself derived from portuguese term to say about peculiar beauty of a deformed and uneven pearl. A new ways of seing the world. Baroque world also marked with a freedom of women to follow their hearts, a freedom for mixing both of races and just follow the heart and love. Creating a new race, mixed race and in the future, this will lead to a “nation” point of view. Baroque culture also mixed of culture and made a new “nation” cultures. Voodoo in Haiti was an example of mixed of African culture to the new mixed culture. The spanish culture in Latin America personalized and mixed an become a new cultures of the New world.
Works Cited
Jeremy Adelman, Lecture 4 Atlantic Ocean Worlds (Baroque Worlds), Coursera
Jeremy Adelman, Indian Ocean Worlds, Lecture 5, Coursera
World Together World Apart, WW Norton, Chapter 12, Contact, Commerce, and Colonialization , 1450 – 1600
