Life – a user's manual Part II - Boksidan

Japan
England
Spain
China
Portugal
Turkey
Austria
France
Denmark
Figure 3. The larger nations that existed in fairly orderly form in 1400 and still do (besides Ethiopia and Thailand,
whose former extent I do not know), and their approximate borders at that time. In 1400 Sweden did not
exist because we were in "union" with Denmark, between 1389 to 1521.
Beijing was founded in 1400 and became the nation's capital.
The Portuguese and the Spaniards began in the 1400s to explore the world, for various reasons, probably
mainly:
- The Portuguese had developed a kind of good ocean sailing vessels (the caravels).
- Their economies were dependent on gold and silver currency, but low availability of the metals had
plunged them and many other European countries in a recession.
- The trade route to India was controlled by the Ottoman Empire and they closed the way for other nations
(first it was the spices and silk that attracted the Europeans, later they began to also import cotton fabrics
and carpets, perfumes, tobacco and basic commodities like rice, salt and wheat).
These explorations led to that the Spaniard Christopher Columbus reached America in 1492, and also to that
the Portuguese sailed along the coast of Africa in search of a waterway to India. The Portuguese established
coastal colonies to ensure supply stores along the way and to acquire slaves (but the interior of the continent
remained unexplored by Westerners until the 1800s). These efforts eventually led to Portuguese trading
posts in India.
1480 the Grand Duchy of Moscow liberated itself from the Mongols, who at that time ruled large areas of
land in today's Russia in particular. The city became the center of the new kingdom Russia and it expanded
strongly well into the 1900s.
The European trade with slaves from Africa was officially launched the year 1496 th .
The same year the Spaniards founded the first city in the New World, with the construction of Santo
Domingo, which is now the capital of the Dominican Republic.
Around 1520 was the Aztec empire was destroyed by the Spaniards. Ten years later, they had beaten also the
Incas. This allowed the Spaniards to seize their production of gold and silver, which made Spain rich and
powerful. The main source of silver was a mine in the Andes which in 1570 had a population that was
almost as big as the one in Paris (120 000 people).
1532 was the starting point of the first permanent Portuguese settlement in Brazil.
In the mid 1500s, slaves overtook the position of being the most important African export goods from gold.
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