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  • Hi I'm John Green and this is Crash Course European History.

  • So, last time, we were focusing on queens and kings and rivalries.Today we're gonna

  • take a break from struggles over religion and political disputes that made for so much

  • violence and look instead at some basics of everyday life--the foods people ate centuries

  • ago, the kinds of things people bought and sold, and changes in the kinds of lives people

  • could hope to live.

  • I know developments in agriculture and commerce may seem like sidelines to the main political

  • show—I mean, there's a reason it's called Game of Thrones and not like, Game of Slightly

  • Improved Seed Quality--but I'd argue that history is about how people lived, and what

  • we might learn from their lives.

  • And if you think about our lives today, our leaders are important.

  • Our forms of government are important.

  • But as Miroslav Volf said, Politics touches everything, but politics isn't everything.

  • On a day-to-day basis, our lives are also shaped by the kinds of goods and services

  • available to us, and our professional and personal opportunities.

  • Whether you go to school, whether you get enough to eat, the kinds of freedom you do

  • and do not enjoy... those are the big questions we're exploring today.

  • INTRO The citizens of many European nations today

  • have long life expectancies, and a top standard of living.

  • Europe also comprises the largest developed economic market place and a major region of

  • trade.

  • But in 1500, that was hardly the case.

  • In the early fourteenth century a major famine erupted, with further famines across the centuries.

  • We've talked about the Black Death.

  • Trade was local and regulated by guildsthat is, by organizations of individual artisans

  • and traders that determined the number and type of goods that could be produced and marketed.

  • In the late middle ages Europe was a subsistence economy, with little if any agricultural surplus.

  • If princes could satisfy their appetite for food and drink on a regular and reliable basis,

  • they were virtually alone in experiencing a consistently happy and full stomach.

  • In 1500, Europe was not exceptional in life expectancy or in many other measures of well-being.

  • But in the early modern period, roughly between 1500 and 1750 the situation gradually improved,.

  • And I know that seems impossible, given all the religious strife, and wars, and massacres

  • we've discussed in this series so far.

  • But during this period, population actually rose;

  • In Britain, for instance, the population almost doubled between 1700 and 1800.

  • Historians attribute this rise to developments in agriculture, sometimes called an agricultural

  • revolution that unfolded alongside all that warfare.

  • And there was also a growth in commerce, often called a commercial revolution, and of course,

  • the Columbian exchange, which made new nutritious foods--from potatoes to corn--available to

  • Europeans.

  • But the agricultural revolution was also driven by innovation that dramatically boosted agricultural

  • yields in Europe between 1500 and 1800.

  • Let's go to the Thought Bubble.

  • For starters, it was discovered that planting certain crops, like turnip and clover, could

  • replenish soil, which was one example of crop rotation--farmers would plant one crop in

  • a field one year, and then another the next year, rotating 2 or at times three crops to

  • add nutrients to the soil. and the great thing about crop rotation is

  • that it decreased the amount of farmland that needed to remain fallow each year--that is,

  • unplanted.

  • Secondly, with the Dutch pioneering some advances, land reclamation occurred across Europe.

  • This entailed converting marshes and other previously unusable land into farmland.

  • and Third, common lands were enclosed.

  • Enclosure occurred when wealthier farmers bought up or simply took common land (land

  • that had been open to community use).

  • Private farms were able to innovate faster than communities,

  • which required consensus in group decision-making.

  • And fourth, there were new inventions such as the seed drill and a plow that could be

  • drawn by two instead of six or eight farm animals.

  • The new plow cut down on expenses and the seed drill made planting more accurate with

  • less wasted seed.

  • Both of these new tools, by the way, copied Chinese inventions.

  • But while enclosure and more mechanized farming practices did mean more overall food, and

  • therefore more overall wealth, not everyone benefited, because a decrease in common land

  • meant that fewer people had direct access to land for their own use.

  • Thanks, Thought Bubble.

  • So one example of all these innovations can be seen in the life of [[TV: Elizabeth of

  • Sutherland]] Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, who inherited some 800,000 acres in Scotland.

  • Stan, hold on a second.

  • Is that a trout in her hair?

  • Is is a feather?

  • Was there some kind of hair fish trend at the time?

  • Let's move on from lighthearted hair fish jokes and talk about people being wrested

  • from their land.So, Elizabeth removed hundreds of tenants from her estate, then created unified

  • acreage for farming and raising sheep with the help of day laborers.

  • These landless workers were cheaper, and also unlike the tenant farmers who had lived on

  • the land previously, day laborers did not have longstanding claims to inhabit and work

  • the land, calledtenancy.”

  • The Countess was known for chasing villagers away from their land with her own hands, and

  • also for innovations that increased productivity even as Sutherland's former tenants became

  • homeless.

  • So more overall food, but on land controlled by fewer people.

  • So obviously, this Agricultural Revolution entailed massive social dislocation that included

  • the rise of poverty, migration of disenfranchised farmworkers to cities and also to other continents,

  • and even as overall agricultural production rose, some among the poor starved.

  • And this period of European history is still widely debated in part because ideas of private

  • property and inequality of wealth remain resonant today, but whether this modernization helped

  • or hurt humanity again depends on your perspective.

  • To some, it was fatal.

  • To many, it meant trauma and impoverishment as people were removed from lands their families

  • had farmed for generations.

  • But these changes also helped fuel greater overall food production, population growth,

  • larger cities, and more space for all kinds of specialized labor, from shoemaking to theater.

  • I mean, it's no coincidence that Shakespeare and Marlowe were writing as English agricultural

  • production started to increase.

  • Another ingredient in the rising population and overall output of food was the inflow

  • of novel plants from the Americas and other parts of the world.

  • Potatoes and maize, for example, were grown on the marginal land that was previously seen

  • as unfit for agriculture.

  • Farmers started experimenting with all the new crops, but especially with maize and potatoes

  • that could produce super-abundant...did the world just open?

  • Is there a potato in the center?

  • There's a lot of candidates for most important plant of the last 500 years, but I'm gonna

  • say it's the potato.

  • They contain lots of carbohydrates, and whatever micronutrients are.

  • You can turn them into both French fries and tater tots, the world's two most important

  • foods.

  • But most importantly, you don't need great soil to have great potatoes.

  • Just ask Idaho!

  • [[TV: Rice]] In addition to the transfer of crops, knowledge about agriculture was transferred

  • from Africa and the Americas to Europe.

  • Women in both the Americas and Africa had made their regions food-rich, as European

  • traders and invaders testified, and their knowledge of crops and irrigation techniques

  • allowed, for instance, rice to be grown in much larger quantities in European colonies.

  • [[TV: Slave Trade]] Much of what Europeans learned about agriculture from Africans came

  • from enslaved women agriculturalists.

  • Slavery has existed for millennia, but slaves have experienced very different lives depending

  • on culture, and religion, and occupation, and gender.

  • [[TV: Slaves at Work]] Before 1650, the Atlantic slave ships took an annual total of 7,500

  • Africans to the Western Hemisphereand that number was comparable to other slave routes,

  • such as the one in South Asia or the Ottoman Empire.

  • The vast majority went to Mexico and South America.

  • European ships transported other slaves from the Indian Ocean across the Pacific, many

  • of them to Mexico.

  • But, beginning in the late seventeenth century, there was a massive upsurge in African slavery

  • that sought to replace the labor of the native American populations that had been utterly

  • devastated by disease and warfare.

  • In particular, slave labor was used to fill the world's increasing demand for commodities

  • and consumer goods.

  • Europeans came to depend on sugar, and tobacco, and coffee, and tea--all of which was produced

  • primarily via forced labor.

  • [[TV: Mansa Musa]] And racism developed alongside the growth of the African slave trade.

  • At first, Europeans were in awe of African wealth in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,

  • as it motivated their first contacts.

  • They craved African gold and found African men and women stately--“intelligent and

  • rich,” as one Portuguese trader wrote.

  • However, greed for profit took over and as the indigenous Amerindian population declined,

  • the desire for slaves grew, and to justify slavery, European descriptions of Africans

  • became contemptuous and dehumanizing.

  • [[TV: Slave Ship]] As dehumanization progressed, Europeans treated Africans as morally and

  • intellectually inferior, and used those incorrect constructions to justify their horrendous

  • treatment of Africans, packing them into slave ships and subjecting them to the lethal middle

  • passage across the Atlantic.

  • African kings and independent African traders fed the rising demand for slaves.

  • In those days of state consolidation African rulers sought funds for weaponry, which Europeans

  • provided in exchange for slaves.

  • More advanced weaponry then allowed leaders to capture additional people to sell to European

  • slavers for yet more weapons.

  • European slavers mostly operated along the West African coast, while Arabs took slaves

  • from East Africa to sell to India or into the Middle Eastern markets.

  • The Saharan slave trade went northward, transporting many women slaves to serve as domestics and

  • as sex workers.

  • But the European slave was by far the largest, and the dehumanizing racism that has endured

  • to this day.

  • [[TV: Slaves at Work]] In the eighteenth century, one million slaves worked in the sugar industry

  • and diamond and gold mines of Brazil.

  • These industries were tremendously lucrative, and in that sense, slavery both produced and

  • was a product of growing European wealth.

  • The conditions of slavery were truly dire: Torture, beatings, overwork, and malnutrition

  • were routine.

  • And because the system itself did not treat them as humans, enslaved people had very little

  • recourse, and there was always the knowledge that you could be separated from your children,

  • from your family, at any time, because you were treated legally and practically as property.

  • The slave trade itself was part of a web of interactions that is still being understood.

  • Historians used to talk of