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Looking back at my Prelim answer, I was wrong with my educated (?) guess of Spain as the center of the world. Though Spain, with their expeditions and through their conquering nature, certainly contributed to the success of the real hub of the world in 1500, they were not the front-runners, China was. I honestly had not thought about any country in Asia when giving my initial answer (perhaps because of the early Euro-centered education I received that we all discussed?).
China was the center of the world in 1500 for many reasons: their population tripled, urbanization spiked, and productive capacity boomed. It really boiled down to the fact that all money (mainly silver) was flowing into China while manufactured goods were flowing out. At the …show more content…
This arrangement had not always been so. There were other powerful empires leading up to the reign of the Ming dynasty, but as they say, nothing lasts forever. Both the Aztec and Inca empires had seen population growth and territorial expansion, but in terms of trade they were not far-reaching, and once the Spanish moved in, both empires fell. In India, the Mughals ruled a large area and were certainly powerful, but there were constant feuds involving several internal conflicts like succession issues that harmed both progress and stability. The Mughals had trouble with institutionalization and consolidation as their rulers had always held nomadic succession practices. They had united South Asia, but the commercial economy that drove their success ended up being the problem and aided the push for imperial unity. The Maratha and British East India Trading Company, who were living on the coasts, turned their attention to maritime trading. Suddenly, overland trade began to see a drop off while maritime trade began to increase. The English, Dutch and French East India Trading Companies emerged at this change and were powerful, acting as armed fleets instead of mere merchant ships. They were able to operate independently of the countries that owned them, creating that much more competition for trade. The Portuguese seized the port of Goa, which only further drove the efforts of the …show more content…
The increase came with the help of the emergence of new crops from the Columbian Exchange that were able to be grown in China. This aided in making the larger population both possible and easier to sustain. The American crops helped China recover from a “high-level equilibrium trap” in which China’s own land was not able to provide enough food to sustain the massive population

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