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1. Extent The Central African world is considered to include the greater part of modern Cameroon and the modern Central African Republic north of the vast tropical forest region, the river system of the Congo in the tropical rain forest, the extensive savanna landscapes of present-day Angola and Zambia, modern Zimbabwe, and Mozambique [3]; [4]; [18]. This region is characterized by five distinctive features.Helmut Bley 2. Developments within Africa (1) In the first place, the Central African world was profoundly affected by developments within Africa itself, espe…

1. Introduction 1.1. State formationThe term “Southern African world” is generally understood in a narrower and a broader sense. The stricter definition includes only the extent of what is now South Africa and the neighboring nations of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, and Namibia. The broader sense also extends to Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Angola, and Zambia.The peculiar dynamic that began to emanate from South Africa with the foundation of the European settlement at Cape Town (1652; see Cape Colony) has made it customary among historians, despite…

1. IntroductionMetropolis (from the Greek  metrópolis, “mother-city,” “capital city”) in the sense of “laboratory of modernity” [6] is a term generally applied to the major European cities of the 19th century (Town), especially Paris and London, with Berlin joining them at the end of the century. The term thus implies the character of a major city, a relationship with industrialization, and a role as a field of political and cultural experimentation. For the 20th and 21st centuries, the word metropolis refers t…

1. Macroregions in the early modern period 1.1. IntroductionThe Western African world probably exhibits the most sophisticated range of development of any African macro-region in the early modern period (see Eastern African world; Southern African world; Central African world). It was particularly shaped by a widely ramified intra-African network of societies and states, which from west to east extended from Mauretania to Cameroon, a distance of over 4,000 km. Furthermore, this Western African …

1. General remarks In the early modern period, societies outside Europe were subject to constant change – like all societies in historical processes. Initiatives focused on social changes can be interpreted as political, social, and economic reforms; they were both responses to internal crises and reactions to external influences, if not structural changes occasioned by conquest or large-scale migrations. Reforms also frequently took on a religious guise. In the context of increasing Eur…

1. LegendPrester John (Latin  Presbyter Iohannes) is the legendary figure of a Christian king believed to be variously in Asia or Africa in the late Middle Ages and early modern period, chiefly in Ethiopia. A number of European powers made efforts to find him in order to ally with him against the Islamic empires of the Near East. He was regarded as the ideal Christian king, and was enlisted as a measure against which contemporary rulers were judged (see fig. 1).The legend, the quest for the fabled king in the 14th century, and the hope for an anti-Islamic alliance with him…

1. Issue and problemsAny attempt at periodization on the scale of global history will face a number of dilemmas. In the context of global interaction, there is the problem of when European expansionism really began fundamentally to affect and influence major non-European societies. Clearly, it became a structuring force on a global scale primarily in the 19th century, with industrialization and the related phenomenon of imperialism, because those societies yielded to European hegemony and reacted w…

1. First and Second Empire: interpretations “British Empire” is a popular but misleading term. In the first part of the early modern period, British activities in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans are better described as an uncoordinated process of exercising influence. There were attempts to settle North America from around 1606. The East India Company, founded in 1600 (East India Companies), conducted activities on the Indian subcontinent. Privateers undertook actions against Spanish fleets, islands in…

1. The diversity of Africa 1.1. The view from outside Africa is generally seen as one entity [21]; [16], but from two different perspectives. Since the 1960s, historical study of Africa has focused on the subsaharan part of the continent. Afrocentric positions, represented for instance by the Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, object to this as a racist construct, particularly because it excludes Egypt, with its high culture of Antiquity [8].The term “Africa” itself, which dates from Roman times and has a similar history in Arabic usage, referred at the beg…

1. IntroductionIn discussions of the evolution of early modern global interaction, the emphasis as a rule has been on trade territories and relationships (World economy). Trade in raw materials (e.g. cotton, silk, dye, or wood), finished goods (e.g. textiles or metalware), colonial goods (especially coffee, cocoa, tobacco, and sugar), and precious metals (gold, silver, and copper) tied existing global production into new commercial exchange relationships and led to the emergence of new global pro…

1. Europeanization of the world?Until long into the 20th century, western historians and scholars investigating European expansionism and the creation of colonial empires outside Europe spoke as a matter of course and without hesitation of the “Europeanization of the world.” Historians and cultural scientists today use this term with considerably more refinement or refrain from using it altogether – not only because “Europeanization” is no longer a fact since the completion of decolonization …

1. Atlantic expansion and its impact on the European states 1.1. Discovery of America, prior history and consequencesThe voyage of discovery of Christopher Columbus, who on 12 October 1492, while searching for a westerly route across the “Ocean Sea” to India, became the first European to sight islands on the western edge of the Atlantic Ocean, heralded a new phase of history, both for Europe and for the continent hitherto unknown to Europeans: a phase of global interaction. From now on, the history of the two si…

1. Introduction and concept The history of the early modern period is the history of the first modern global society. It is still commonplace to interpret it as a period of untrammeled European expansionism. This, however, is uncritically to project the ascendancy of the highly industrialized states of Europe and the United States back into earlier periods, ignoring the fact that this ascendancy only came about in the late 19th century (Industrialization). Through haste and generalization, the slave…

1. DefinitionsThe term  world system is used to denote major historical units of an economic and political nature, with geographical and historical boundaries. They need not embrace the entire world in the geographical sense, but represent a self-contained world with a special self-perception. Clearly several “worlds” of this sort can exist side by side (e.g the Atlantic world, Chinese world, Southern African world). The system constitutes a self-contained unit – that is, a zone or large reg…

1. Introduction The term “free-trade imperialism” was coined to reflect the fact that European expansionism in the first half of the 19th century was motivated by the desire not so much to acquire colonies as to establish informal control on the basis of superior production of goods in the Age of Industrialization, the resultant financial muscle, and modern naval and military technology. This policy of informal control was pursued outside Europe by Great Britain in particular, but also by other European Great Powers.The most important instruments were trade agreements (whic…

1. IntroductionSocieties in which slavery and the slave trade were of significance are generally classified as either “societies with slaves” or “slave societies.” There were only a few instances of the latter in the early modern period. Their defining characteristic was that their social structure and economy were founded on slavery, and had to be secured by means of the slave trade, slave reproduction, and various forms of coercion.The systemic function of a slave society is most clearly apparent in the accusations that emerged as slavery came to an end. F…

1. Concept Race in anthropology is far more of a socially imagined category than a biological reality [12. 71]. “Races are the result, not the premises of racialist arguments” [8. 10]; [12]. They thus arise from imagined human worlds and are ultimately topical constructs of meaning. Racism is both a social practice and a discursive construction that is freighted with power [18. 176]. It is polymorphic and flexible to the point that scholars offer different definitions of it, hence the plea to operate with the plural “racisms” [2]. In terms of history, it is suggested that rac…

1. IntroductionIt is striking in the context of the world history of the early modern period and the global interaction that characterized it that the dominance of nomadic and cattle-farming societies over sedentary peasant societies waned from around the 15th century. Nomads had become strong in Asia and Africa thanks to the military superiority of their mounted armies, generally in combination with the recruitment of sedentary peasants [28], the conquest of cities, the seizure of administrative structures, and the securing of major transregional tradin…

1. Concept and terminologyViolence (Latin violentia, “violence,” “impetuosity”;  vis, “hostile force”) is the use of force to inflict injury or damage or to intimidate. To use force is to exercise physical power to overcome resistance (although from the perspective of the victim, it represents an infringement of or interference with the physical integrity of the person). Modern discussions among scholars of social and cultural science thus treat specific acts of violence in the sense of Latin vis. There is increasing criticism of extensions of the concept of violence…

1. Introduction 1.1. Early modern and modern colonialismAnalysing early modern colonialism within the context of European expansionism is of necessity an attempt to highlight the differences between early modern colonialism and its successors of the late nineteenth and early 20th centuries. As a rule the term colonialism tends to be more widely associated with its varieties of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.This kind of colonialism, especially its late 19th and early 20th century brands, differed from the early modern type as a result of the increa…