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2 - “Exhausting the Earth”: environment and history in the early modern world

from Part One - Global matrices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 May 2015

By
Robert B. Marks
Edited by
Jerry H. Bentley ,
Sanjay Subrahmanyam  and
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Jerry H. Bentley
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii, Manoa
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
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Summary

The early modern world was "organic" in the sense that humans got energy mostly by tapping and concentrating solar flows to grow food, and to heat their homes and to make other industrial products. Epidemic disease, famine, war, and other disasters kept human life expectancy much shorter than it is today. The "Columbian Exchange" refers to the exchange of plants, animals, and pathogens between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia following Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492. For Europeans who came to the Americas in the century after conquest, the "New" world appeared to be a cornucopia, stocked with nature's bounty there for the taking. The early modern period also saw the extension throughout the world of a particular kind of legal framework for human interaction with nature, built on idea of private ownership of property. States, markets, productive agriculture, and rising populations moved environmental change in America before 1492, in East and South Asia, and in Africa.
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge World History , pp. 29 - 53
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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References

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