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17th century

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spaces in Afro-Eurasia began to be filled in by competing empires

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colonization of distant lands increased this velocity

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particularly after:

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1644 China: beginning of Qing dynasty

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1648 Europe: signing of the Peace of Westphalia

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regimes resolved inner conflicts, but this intensified the external conflicts with other empires

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led to a shift in the way peoples saw each other

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e.g. the product: tea

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unique since it was a tropical commodity such as coffee or sugar, but its major source was not in the New World

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only produced in a few places in Asia

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China enjoyed for a time a monopoly in tea exports for global consumption

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shipped out of China by Buddhist monks

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they knew the characteristics of tea, e.g. to allow them to stay awake at night learning for their own ordination exams

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they guarded the secrets of tea production very carefully

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they controlled supply which insured that tea was not cheap, because a prestige good

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by 18th century, tea exports in China were booming

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one pound of tea was being imported to England per person

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how is tea relevant in the way peoples saw each other:

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to think like a global historian is to consider connections that at first may not seem like they have an obvious connection with each other

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what was the connection between a tropical commodity like tea, and intellectual transformations that went on in another part of the world

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tea was intimately related to the birth of leisure time

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the tea house

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like the coffee house, the tea house was accompanied by the gathering of men who exchanged the news of the day, read books, circulated magazines, and talked about ideas, discoveries, science, and other people and peoples

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it was the tea house and the activities that went on inside and around it that was associated most closely with the birth of the public sphere, and from this forum will spring new ideas

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one of these sets of ideas we call the Enlightenment and it was nurtured by the cocktail of these newly globally imported commodities of tea, and coffee and sugar

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this widespread circulation of knowledge and ideas led to the concept of global science

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areas such as China and India would be drawn increasingly into a European orbit

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changed the core of Europe by creating new sources of wealth and power

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the production of books

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became articles that people would produce and sell in the market place

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a press revolution

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Diderot's encyclopedie

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28 volumes

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a phenomenon of the ages

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the beginning of the mass production of books

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the commodification and circulation of knowledge itself

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division of labor to produce books

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lowered the cost of magazines and books to fuel this print revolution

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l'encyclopedie

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claimed to collect "all the knowledge scattered over the face of the earth"

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libraries

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book-lending clubs

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now sailing voyages to the New World had a different purpose

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not as de Gama in the late 15th century, to sail into Calcutta in order to skim the wealth off of another powerful society

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18th century voyages were launched increasingly to study other places, biology, zoology and the peoples who who lived in those places

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they were scientific expeditions to understand the world

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to bring home knowledge for mass consumption and commodified

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e.g. Captain James Cook

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galvanized the European imagination as the heroic scientist

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sponsored by the Royal Society

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new species, exotic animals, plants, bugs

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what the giraffe once was to Chinese, the kangaroo was to 18th century British biologists and zoologists

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Cook also brought back people, natives, particularly in the South Pacific

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ran into problems with Hawaii, where he tried to take local chieftains back but was attacked and killed by the local natives

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Cook was only an example of a larger pattern of Europeans to reach out into the world and study it, to systematize knowledge and classify it into categories