Prologue Historical Dynamics of Change

The opening century of the four hundred years of Atlantic history explored in this volume can be understood historically only in terms of the cards that the entrants into it brought to the table. The hands they held were similar—in fact global—in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. The historical dynamics that motivated and enabled the players in all three regions revolved around very longterm struggles among powerful military interests, who thrived by conquest of accessible lands and the populations living on them. Other, commercial, interests were also at play in AfroEurasia. Merchants thrived by moving through the surrounding uninhabited spaces—often deserts—and also on the seas and oceans. The customary perspective on these processes tends to celebrate “civilizations”—expansive “empires” and the luxuries supported by the wealth appropriated through conquests—thus taking militarism and commerce for granted. This volume balances this familiar story with the more local perspectives of small communities in most of Africa and Native America, as well as more of the ordinary villages in Europe and small communities in the Americas. It also historicizes the triumphs of conquest by emphasizing the costs of achieving them, and even more of maintaining them through time. There is nothing stable about history: continuity is fragile and requires effort to achieve. Taking a very longterm view, the military conquests prominent in the history of Eurasia were costly and destructive and in the long run tended to burn the aggressors out. On this millennial scale, merchants, on the other hand, tended to accumulate wealth in enduring forms and to grow in financial strength. They invested their excess assets in military regimes that were reaching the logistical limits of plundering and in agricultural and other producers, as well as in more remote, and independent, communities. These relatively isolated communities, in turn, extracted commodities of value to visiting traders, and did so—without abandoning their own strategies of mobility, diversity, and mutual obligations—to invest in productive, but immovable and costly, infrastructure. Militarists and merchants thus drew similarly on resources external to the structured cultural or political domains within which they competed. The balances among the strategies of local communities, merchant commerce, and military conquest varied by region—Africa, the Americas, and Europe—and within each region as well. This prologue sketches specifics of these variations relevant to what motivated European merchants and militarists to venture out into what became a fastchanging Atlantic World. The results everywhere were enabling for some, if also at the expense of others. But these