Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
continent may have been a key step on the path to the modern ideology of the
individual.”
As the
fi
first of the European powers to in
fi
ltrate Asia and set up foreign
colonies, Portugal, the world-system's
first hegemon, played a uniquely impor-
tant role in the construction of the colonial world system. Portugal's invasion
of the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century pulled the plug on the
centuries-old Arab-Asian trade and set the stage for the Ottoman conquest of
the Arab world (Wink 1993). Portugal's seizure of Malacca in 1511 was
followed in short order by their acquisition of Timor, Macau, and Formosa.
Given how far such places were from Europe—a round-trip voyage to Asia
could take three years—direct control over colonial entrepots was often loose
at best. Nonetheless, colonialism bound Europe and Asia into increasingly
intertwined entities. For instance, the Portuguese knew well the importance
of Southeast Asia to Europe: explorer Tome Pires, for example, claimed that
“Whoever is lord of Malacca has his hands on the throat of Venice” (Abu-
Lughod 1989:291), perhaps the clearest statement of the interdependencies
that colonial time-space compression created.
In the New World, Portuguese and especially Spanish colonialism quickly
integrated vast domains into the European sphere of control, annihilating
Native American civilizations in a process that Blaut (1993) and Frank (1998)
credit with jump-starting the capitalist economy. Subsequent to the genocidal
extermination of tens of millions of Native Americans, the New World was
methodically transformed into a global periphery that aided greatly in the
development of Europe, allowing that continent to escape domestic eco-
logical constraints by tapping into new supplies of
fi
fish, lumber, minerals, and
other resources (Marks 2007). Of course, chronic labor shortages in the West-
ern Hemisphere were alleviated largely through the forced importation of
10 to 20 million African slaves, a phenomenon that re
fi
ects the repeated
misery visited upon that highly marginalized continent by successive waves of
capitalism. In keeping with early modernity's maritime emphasis, Spanish
colonialism generated a series of coastal entrepots such as Havana, Veracruz,
and Cartegena. Sugar plantations, which became prototype factories of a
sort, were among the
fl
first to subject their labor force to the discipline of
industrial time, obliterating indigenous time conceptions in the process. One
measure of the global time-space compression that ensued during the
Columbian encounter was the di
fi
usion of the chili pepper, which, within
decades after 1492, had become a staple of the cuisines of China, Thailand,
Vietnam, and South Asia (Wilson 1999).
But by far the most important contribution of the New World to the Old
was silver, of which ten times more than gold was shipped back to Spain in
galleons (
ff
(financing luxuries such as the palace at El Escorial). Silver became
a primary medium for integrating the world's spaces in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and the force that produced a series of distinctively
novel geographies. For example, in addition to the lucrative mines in Mexico,
the Spanish brie
fi
fl
y transformed the silver mining city of Potosí, in Bolivia,
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