Assess the impact of the opening of the Atlantic World in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries on the future economic development of the Caribbean region

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The University of the West Indies

St. Augustine

Faculty of Humanities and Education

Department of History

Coursework Assignment

Name: Lyndon C. Harrington

ID#: 809001640

Course: Caribbean Economic History (Hist. 2005)

Lecturer: Dr. Heather Cateau

Question #1: Assess the impact of the opening of the Atlantic World in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries on the future economic development of the Caribbean region

Greed is an excessive desire to possess wealth or goods; the word greed in Latin can also be known to mean avarice or covetousness and like the sins of lust and gluttony, the sin of greed is one of excess. Now define irony, the same people who came to the Caribbean to colonize in the name of God were compelled by greed. Saint Thomas Aquinas, can be quoted as saying that greed was "a sin against God, just as all mortal sins, in as much as man condemns things eternal for the sake of temporal things." This is beside the point, however, if we look at the opening of the Atlantic World as what it represented other than what it was at surface level, the assessment would be greater. It is premised that, following the rise of sustained European contact with the New World in the 16th Century, the continents that bordered the Atlantic Ocean - the Americas, Europe and Africa - constituted a regional system or common sphere of economic and cultural exchange. During this time the Atlantic Ocean served as a major highway, allowing people and goods to move easily between Europe, Africa and the Americas. These interactions and exchanges transformed European, African and American societies led to the creation of new peoples, cultures, economies and ideas throughout the Atlantic arena. The Atlantic World provides a comprehensive and lucid history of one of the most important cross-cultural encounters in human history. The European drive to expand, as well as the creative ways in which the peoples living along the Atlantic's borders were able to adopt and co-exist sustained the growth of empires, economies and trade in the Atlantic World.i

All of the seas of the world are one, and knowledge of continuous sea passages from ocean to ocean around the world - established knowledge, not geographical hypothesis - was the outcome of the century or so of European maritime questing, which in European history books, is generally described as the Great Age of Discovery. The only major connecting passages known and regularly used by European shipping were the straits which join the Mediterranean and the Baltic with the North Atlantic, and the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. No ship had penetrated the Caribbean, the Mediterranean of the Americas. Columbus did not discover a new world; he established contact between two worlds, both inhabited, both in human terms already old. European maritime prowess, according to Phillip Curtain "was the decisive factor shaping the Atlantic World." The Europeans were the first to transform the Atlantic Ocean from a great and seemingly impassible barrier into a highway of trade and communication. European mariners and traders as well as colonists, soldiers and missionaries spanned the ocean on behalf of princes, merchants, the church and of course their own private interests. After the Treaty of Tordesillas and the division of the world by Pope Alexander VI in 1493, the Spanish and Portuguese were given, each, their own claim to the world, the New World going to Spain and Africa and India going to the Portuguese.
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The history of the Atlantic world begins with the crossing by Christopher Columbus in 1492. When he died in 1509, four transatlantic voyages later, he still had not realized that his mission had failed. Columbus had sailed westward from Spain, hoping to find a faster route to southern and eastern Asia. Despite his steadfast belief to the contrary, he never approached those destination. Instead Columbus and his crew happened upon a vast land mass which we now call the Americas. Although a great sailor, when in the Americas Cristobal Colon never knew exactly where he was; he could ...

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