Chapter 13

The chapter starts off talking a lot about the European advantages, the Great Dying, and other events that happened along the way. The European were as much close to the American empires. The countries rimmed off Europe as Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France. These countries were very close to the Americas then the Asian continent. The Europeans innovated in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques and ship design building to cross the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean, and Chinese regions. Also, the European had the advantage as in geography, disease (contact with animals), manifest destiny, they didn't assume bad intent, they also had weapons as in swords and horses, lastly they competed with other European nations. The European populations grew as their economy did which was based off on wheat and livestock. They also had grain, sugar, meat, and fish meant that the Europe had and also needed a larger land base to support the expansion of its economy. Something interesting was that Chinese and Islamic precedents allowed them to cross the Atlantic with growing ease as in transporting people and supplies. In addition, their ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses initially had no parallel in the Americans.

The Great Dying happened because the European had the advantage, 'disease', 90% died within the decade,and  rationalized it was okay to use their advantage. The Caribbean islands vanished within the fifty years of Columbus's arrival. A great many died from this plague and many other just died from hunger. People could not get up to find food and everyone else was too sick to care for them, so they starved to death in their own beds. Another thing, that I found interesting was that sugar was produced by pioneers by Arabs, who were introduced into the Mediterranean, European learned a lot of techniques and transferred it to the Atlantic island and then into the Americas. Sugar then transformed Brazil and the Caribbean. The production was both growing largely in the sugarcane and processing it into useable sugar, very labor intensive and could profitable occur into a large scale.

European women joined the colonial migration to the North America at an early date. Slavery was too different. It was somewhat less harsh in the North America than in the sugar colonies. By the 1750  slaves in what become the United States proved able to reproduce themselves, and by the time of the Civil War almost all the North American slaves had been born in the New World. More slaves were voluntarily set free by their owners in Brazil than in North America.