Chapter 14 (Part 1)

The most obvious thing that I got out of reading this section is that in this early modern economy the clear dominant leader was China. Everything that had to do with economy and trade was centered around China. Even though Europeans had control of the Americas and were getting all these natural resources they still had to trade with china to get things they needed. The Europeans still had to be apart of the the Indian Ocean trade( Sea Roads ). For a lot of them they were not very successful in doing so. The Spanish tried hard to control the spice trade but they tried to use too much force and were quickly pushed out by Indonesian people and European powers as well. The  Portuguese were a little more successful in that they didn't try to use as much force and tried to bribe and buy their way into the markets. The Dutch and British were probably the most successful in doing so, the dutch did use force as with the British didn't, the British also drove out the Portuguese. Despite all of their efforts though these markets did not really have a need for anything that the Europeans were trading. That was all until the silver boom, when China started taxing its people in silver the price of silver sky rocketed, and that was when Europeans powers really could get whatever they wanted from the Indian Ocean trade markets. Out of all the Europeans the ones who really controlled the Silver trade were the Spanish because they basically controlled the Americas were a lot of the silver came from.

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