CULT 320 Globalization and

CultureFall 2014, Kara Heitz, 09/04/14

Questions:

1) What did the world look like c.1400 CE? And how did it get to the way it looked in 1775?

2) What were some of the cultural effects of these early globalization processes?

3) What is different (if anything) about the relationships between globalization and culture today?

Portrait of wealthy Dutch merchants, with trading ships that made them wealthy in the background (c. mid-1600s)

Coffeehouses became important meeting places in the 1700s in France for discussion of Enlightenment ideas such as freedom, equality, individual rights, etc. Discussions were fueled by coffee and sugar, two products whose presence in Europe was made possible through the Atlantic trading system based on colonialism, plantations, and slavery.

“The negative impact of the international slave trade on Africa was immense. It can be seen on the personal, family, communal, and continental levels. In addition to the millions of able-bodied individuals captured and transported, the death toll and the economic and environmental destruction resulting from wars and slave raids were startlingly high. In the famines that followed military actions, the old and very young were often killed or left to starve.…Besides its demographic toll, the slave trade, and the Africans' resistance to it, led to profound social and political changes. Social relations were restructured and traditional values were subverted. The slave trade resulted in the development of predatory regimes, as well as stagnation or regression. Many communities relocated as far from the slavers' route as possible. In the process, their technological and economic development was hindered as they devoted their energy to hiding and defending themselves.…In the end, the slave trade left the continent underdeveloped, disorganized, and vulnerable to the next phase of European hegemony: colonialism.”

(http://www.inmotionaame.org/migrations/topic.cfm;jsessionid=f8302122851410345234289?migration=1&topic=9&bhcp=1)

“Although indigenous people ranked below Spaniards in Spanish America’s social order, direct descendants of pre-Hispanic nobility were afforded certain political privileges, including the right to hold office in local government. In order to legitimize claims to noble lineage in the viceroyalty of Peru, members of the Inca elite often conspicuously displayed in their homes Europeanized portraits of their ancestors, the fourteen ancient Andean rulers.

The Inca had no pictorial portraiture tradition before the conquest. Soon after European contact, however, series of Inca kings painted by local artists in European portrait styles started to appear in indigenous and Creole inventories. This bust-length portrait series is based on a 1615 Spanish engraving “ (http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/opencollection/objects/2297/Manco_Capac_First_Inca_1_of_14_Portraits_of_Inca_Kings)

Manco Capac, First Inca, 1 of 14 Portraits of Inca Kings. Peru, probably mid-18th century.