The West Expansion

Rise of the West The “Rise of the West” is an accurate depiction of the time between 1500 and 1900 because the Europeans expanded to the Americas, then the Indian Ocean, then lastly the Pacific. However, the expansion that allowed Europeans to gain ever-increasing dominance within the world economy, was the Atlantic expansion, which was formerly dominated by China. They dominated it through the export of bullion and the trade of sugar and slaves. On the other hand, China’s economy slowly declined relative to Europe, due to the changes that China experienced (Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda Walton). The “commercial revolution” was the startling economic growth and technological advances that took place in China from the eighth

China’s technological and economic development slowed, and may have even stopped for a while, due to the Mongol conquest in the mid-thirteenth century. This event certainly had a big impact on the Chinese economy, distributing not only domestic trade and production but foreign as well. The Mongol conquest may have also had a more faint long-term intellectual and cultural influence that were demonstrated a biased attitude toward the outside world that contradicted sharply contradicted with previous eras of intense engagement with the non-Chinese world, such as the Tang. In the early fifteenth century, long before Europe circumnavigated the earth, the Chinese government sponsored seven gigantic maritime expeditions with hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of men that reached the distant coastlines of the Arabian peninsula and East Africa. No more were sent out after the last three expeditions in 1433, despite clearly the Chinese had the navigational technology to begin voyages of global exploration. China’s view of their centrality and self-sufficiency is why they withdrew from such ventures at this point. China’s disengagement from

The European economy became transformed when the duties and self-supporting feudal-manorial system of services gave way to an urban economy based on trade and money and controlled by merchant-manufacturers. Rulers of city-states and monarchies, even the pope, would turn to these merchant-manufactures because they became very wealthy and ask them for the cash wealth they needed to maintain and extend their power. In proportion to the princes’ dependence on the prosperous merchant class, the political impact of this urban elite to take over that of land holding feudal vessels. As their influence grew, the urban wealthy progressively influenced state politics. What merchant-manufacturers wanted and needed was exemption from the frivolous restrictions of a immovable medieval economy that was largely self-sufficient, ad in which trade and production for profit were hindered by such arrangements and restraints such as road duties, tariffs, and the concepts of fair price and the prohibition of interest. The needs of bankers and merchant-manufacturers to expand their enterprises and increase profits brought the into competition with the norms of the medieval agrarian and feudal society (Candice Goucher, Charles LeGuin, and Linda