MR. GREEN
AP EUROPEAN HISTORY
UNIT 8
CHAPTER 19
The Expansion of Europe in the Eighteenth Century
Essay prompts:
1. Discuss agricultural improvements in the Netherlands and England in
the 17th and 18th centuries, define “protoindustrialization,” and explain
how the “putting out” system of manufacturing worked in the
European countryside.
2. What accounted for the dramatic population increase in Europe during
the eighteenth century.
3. Explain how European nations developed world trade during the
eighteenth century and how the mercantile policies of the English
(later British) governments brought England great wealth and world
empire. And finally, discuss the consequences of European expansion
for the common people.
4. II. Classroom discussion topics…yes, you will need to be able to
discuss these in class!
1. “Jethro Tull and His Age.” Who was Jethro Tull? What did he
contribute to the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century?
MR. GREEN
AP EUROPEAN HISTORY
UNIT 8
2. “Women and the Agrarian Revolution.” What was the role of women in
the agrarian revolution of the eighteenth century? Were rural peasant
women less restricted than women of the towns and cities?
3. “The Negative Side of European Expansion: The Slave Trade.” What
factors led to the Atlantic slave trade? What were Europeans’
attitudes toward people of color in the eighteenth century?
4. What factors enabled the English to lead the agricultural revolution?
5. Discuss how the putting-out system worked.
6. What were the effects of the enclosure system?
7. How was European competition manifested in the European colonies?
8. What did it take for an eighteenth-century peasant family to survive?
Was the eighteenth century a period of spiraling inflation?
GLOSSARY
Agricultural revolution – the period from the mid-seventeenth century on in
Europe during which great agricultural progress was made and the fallow was
gradually eliminated. (p. 633)
Atlantic slave trade – forced migration of millions of Africans to work in
servitude during the eighteenth century. By the peak decade of the 1780s,
shipments of black men and women averaged about 80,000 per year. (p. 650)
Common lands – the open meadows maintained by villages for public use. (p.
631)
Cottage industry – “domestic industry,” a stage of rural industrial
development with wage workers and hand tools that necessarily preceded
the emergence of large-scale factory industry. (p. 641)
Creoles – people of Spanish blood born in America. (p. 654)
Crop rotation – the system by which farmers would rotate the types of
crops grown in each field as to not deplete the soil of its natural resources.
(p. 633)
Debt peonage – a system which allowed a planter or rancher to keep his
workers/slaves in perpetual debt bondage by periodically advancing food,
shelter, and a little money; it is a form of serfdom. (p. 654)
Economic liberalism – based on the writings of Adam Smith, it is the belief
in free trade and competition. Smith argued that the “invisible hand” of free
competition would benefit all individuals, rich and poor. (pp. 655-6)
MR. GREEN
AP EUROPEAN HISTORY
UNIT 8
Enclosure – the idea to enclose individual share of the pastures as a way of
farming more effectively. (p. 633)
Famine foods – the foods eaten by a desperate population – chestnuts, bark,
dandelions and grass – in attempts to escape starvation. (p. 630)
Mercantilism – system of economic regulations aimed at increasing the power
of the state. (p. 645)
Mestizos – the offspring of Spanish men and Indian women. (p. 654)
Navigation Acts – the result of the English desire to increase both military
power and private wealth, required that goods imported from Europe into
England and Scotland be carried on British-owned ships with British crews or
on ships of the country producing the article etc. (p. 645)
Open-field systems – a system of village farming developed by peasants
where the land was divided into several large fields which were in turn cut
into strips. There were no divided fences or hedges and it was farmed as a
community. (p. 630)
Proletarianization – the transformation of large number of small peasant
farmers into landless rural wage earners. (p. 637)
Putting-out system – term used to describe the 18th century rural industry.
(p. 641)
VI. Individuals in Society
Olaudah Equiano
The slave trade was a mass migration involving millions of human beings. It
was also the sum of individual lives spent partly or entirely in slavery.
Although most of those lives remain hidden to us, Olaudah Equiano (1745–
1797) is an important exception.
Equiano was born in Benin (modern Nigeria) of Ibo ethnicity. His father, one
of the village elders (or chieftains), presided over a large household that
included “many slaves,” prisoners captured in local wars. All people, slave and
free, shared in the cultivation of family lands. One day, when all the adults
were in the fields, two strange men and a woman broke into the family
compound, kidnapped the eleven-year-old boy and his sister, tied them up,
and dragged them into the woods. Brother and sister were separated and
Olaudah was sold several times to various dealers before reaching the coast.
As it took six months to walk there, his home must have been far inland.
MR. GREEN
AP EUROPEAN HISTORY
UNIT 8
The slave ship and the strange appearance of the white crew terrified the
boy. Much worse was the long voyage from Benin to Barbados in the
Caribbean, as Equiano later recounted. “The stench of the [ship’s] hold . . .
became absolutely pestilential . . . [and] brought on a sickness among the
slaves, of which many died. . . . The shrieks of the women and the groans of
the dying rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable.” Placed
on deck with the sick and dying, Equiano saw two and then three of his
“enchained countrymen” escape somehow through the nettings and jump into
the sea, “preferring death to such a life of misery.”*
Equiano’s new owner, an officer in the Royal Navy, took him to England and
saw that the lad received some education. Engaged in bloody action in Europe
for almost four years as a captain’s boy in the Seven Years’ War, Equiano
hoped that his loyal service and Christian baptism would help to secure his
freedom. He also knew that slavery was generally illegal in England. But his
master deceived him. Docking in London, he and his accomplices forced a
protesting and heartbroken Equiano onto a ship bound for the Caribbean.
There he was sold to Robert King, a Quaker merchant from Philadelphia who
dealt in sugar and rum. Equiano developed his mathematical skills, worked
hard to please as a clerk in King’s warehouse, and became first mate on one
of King’s ships. Allowed to trade on the side for his own profit, Equiano
amassed capital, repaid King his original purchase price, and received his
deed of manumission at the age of twenty-one. King urged his talented
former slave to stay on as a business partner, but Equiano hated the
limitations and dangers of black freedom in the colonies—he was almost
kidnapped back into slavery while loading a ship in Georgia—and could think
only of England. Settling in London, Equiano studied, worked as a hairdresser,
and went to sea periodically as a merchant seaman. He developed his ardent
Christian faith and became a leading member of London’s sizable black
community.
Equiano loathed the brutal slavery and the vicious exploitation that he saw in
the West Indies and Britain’s mainland colonies. A complex and sophisticated
man, he also respected the integrity of Robert King and admired British
navigational and industrial technologies. He encountered white oppressors
and made white friends. He once described himself as “almost an
Englishman.” In the 1780s he joined with white and black activists in the
antislavery campaign. He wrote his Interesting Narrative, a well-documented
autobiographical indictment of slavery. Above all, he urged Christians to live
MR. GREEN
AP EUROPEAN HISTORY
UNIT 8
by the principles they professed and to treat blacks equally as free human
beings and children of God. With the success of his widely read book, he
carried his message to large audiences across Britain and Ireland and
inspired the growing movement to abolish slavery.
Questions for Analysis
1.
What aspects of Olaudah Equiano’s life as a slave were typical? What
aspects were atypical?
2.
Describe Equiano’s culture and personality. What aspects are most
striking? Why?
VII.KEY TERMS
1. open-field systems
10. Putting-out system
2. agricultural revolution
11. Debt patronage
3. common lands
4. enclosure
5. mercantilism
6. cottage industry
7. crop rotation
8. Creoles
9. Atlantic slave trade
12. Mestizos
13. Economic liberalism
14. Famine foods
15. Navigation Acts
16. Proletarianization