This Fleeting World

56 This Fleeting World
Spanish ships, followed a century later by Dutch and English ships, seized
important trading ports and began to cut in on local trade, particularly in
spices. However, they had little impact on the major polities of the region.
In the Americas European weaponry, the breakdown of traditional political
and economic structures, and, perhaps most important of all, the impact
of Eurasian pathogens such as smallpox crippled the Aztec and Inca empires
and secured for the Spanish government an astonishing windfall of
trade goods and precious metals that funded the first empire to straddle
the Atlantic Ocean. As we have seen, European diseases were particularly
destructive in the Americas because most natives lacked immunity to the
diseases that had spread through Afro-Eurasia through many centuries.
Control of global trade networks brought European states great commercial
wealth, but it also brought an influx of new information about
geography, the natural world, and the customs of other societies. The
torrent of new information available to European intellectuals may have
played a critical role in undermining traditional certainties and creating the
skeptical, experimental cast of mind that we associate with the so-called
scientific revolution. Deprived of old certainties by a flood of new knowledge,
European thinkers had to think everything over anew, and they had
to experiment with new ideas.
However, no region on Earth was entirely unaffected by the creation of
the first global system of exchanges. The exchange of goods between the
Americas and Afro-Eurasia stimulated population growth throughout Afro-
Eurasia as crops such as maize, cassava, and potatoes spread to China,
Europe, and Africa, where they supplemented existing crops or allowed
people to cultivate lands unsuitable for other crops. The abundant silver
of the Americas gave a huge boost to international trade, particularly after
Chinese governments began to demand the payment of taxes in silver
from the 1570s, pulling more and more silver toward what was still the
largest single economy in the world. New drugs such as tobacco and coca
became available for the first time to Afro-Eurasian consumers, whereas
older drugs, such as tea, circulated more widely, stimulating consumer
demand in cities from Istanbul to Mexico City.
Perhaps most important of all, the position of Europe within global networks
of exchange was transformed. As long as the world was divided into
separate zones, Europe could be little more than a marginal borderland of
Afro-Eurasia. The hub of Eurasian networks of exchange lay in the Islamic