Social Structures, 1450-1750 Flashcards
~Social stratification
● high degree
~Urbanization
● greater extent
~Coerced labour
● More varieties of coerced labour appeared during this period and the number of people forced into it increased significantly
~Secondary status for women
Perpetuation of it
~Class diversification
greater
~Elite classes
● Political centralization forced elite classes to adapt to new realities or risk losing their power
~Literary rates
● Tended to improve, especially in urban settings, as did greater accessibility to art and culture
~Plantation/cash-crop monoculture
● Prevailed especially in Europe’s overseas colonies, were extremely labor-intensive
● Placed immense strain on peasant populations and typically invovled coerced labor, if not outirght slavery
~Expansion of state power
● Gernemtns centralized, their power to affect peasant communities grew
● Taxation, serfdom, conscription
~Taxation
● Grew more efficient during these years
● More burdensome
~Conscrition
● More serfs and peasants were drafted into armies that were growing larger as states centralized
~Food shortages
● Happen when states proved unable or unwilling to assist rural populations when floods or bad harvests
~Food riots/peasant uprisings
● Conditions in the countryside caused enough frustration and esperation to trigger them
~German Peasants’ War
● Largest social disturbance in Europe prior to the French Revolution
● In the 1520s, 300,000 rebelled against landowners and aristocrats in central Europe
~Ikko-ikki revolts and Shimabara rebellion
● Late 1400s through the mid-1500s and again in the 1630s
● Both pitted peasants against samurai landowners and high taxes
~Cossack and serf uprisings
● Russia experienced nemerous uprisings in the 1600s and 1700s, including that of Stenka Razin in 1670 and the Pugachev revolt in the 1770s which shoook the regime of Catherine the Great to its foundations
~Li Zicheng
● Ming dynasty was brought down by a peasant war launched in the 1630s led by him
● He called for the abolition of grain taxes and the redistribution of land from the upper classes to the farmers
● He ruled briefly as China’ “Dashing King” until the Manchus toppled him in 1644 and established the QIng Dynasty
~Urban working classes and servant classes
● THe gorwing importance of artisanry, manufacturing, shopkeeping, unskilled labour and domestic servitude to middle-and upper-class households led to the enlargment of these classes ● They tended to be near the bottom of the hierarchy in most societies and many of them suffered poverty and related hardships
~Middle classes
● Mianly in urban settings
● Included highly stilled artisans, professionals such as lawyers and physicians and merchants and bankers
● Placed a high premium on initiative, hard work, and education
~Middle-class frustrations
● The economic importance increased but the elite classes looked down at them
● THey were mostly categorized as commoners and they had to pay taxes
~Elite classes
● Continued to hold onto their power and privileges, although political centralization and hcanign economic circumstances forced them to make various adjustments
● New elites arose in many societies to coexist alongside traditional elites, and in some cases replaced them or threatened to do so
~Political centralization
● Deeply affected aristocrats and nobles whose authority depended on inherited status and landownership
● They had provided military leadership and local governance in decentarlized or feudal systems
● Power shifted decisively to the monarch in many places
● Nobles and aristocrats often found themselves compelled by monarchs to serve their state more actively
~European nobles
● During and after Renaissance, they served as officers in their nations’ rapidly expanding armies and navies, and as civil servants in their govenrmts’ grwoing bureaucracies due ot pressue from their monrachs
~Zamindars
● As the Mughal empire strengthened its hold over Indai, landowning zamindars who had previously enjoyed much local autonomy, were increasinly incorporated into the Mughal system as local officials and reigional governors
~Daimyo
● Japan’s samurai landowning nobility
● Tended ot be masters of their own domains during the fuedal disunity of the 1400s and 1500s but were forced into loyalty and service by Japan’s unifiers in the late 1500s and early 1600s and especially by the Tokugawa shogunate in the 1600s and 1700s
~Create/elevate new elites and military professional
● Sometimes based on skill or merit instead of hereditary status ● Confucian examination system ● Salaried samurai ● Devshirme system ● Nobles of the robe
~Confucian examination system
● Confucian examination systehm continued ot produce a mandarin class of bureaucrats who served the government regardless of what dynastry happened to be in charge
~Salaried samurai
● Took up administrative and bureaucratic posts in a Japan that had been made more peaceful by unification after about 1600 snad no longer requried their traditional warrior skills
~Devshirme system
● The Ottoman system recruited boys from the empire’s Christian populations
● Provided the sultan and his government not just with janissary gunpowder troops but also civil servants
● WHile both groups remained slaves, they converted to Islam and enjoyed elite status and many privileges
~Nobles of the sword
● In Europe during the 1600s
● In honor of hte military roles they had played since hte middle ages
● Poweful traditional aristocrats
~Nobles of the robe
● Louis XIV of France transferred many nobles of the sword to nobles of the robe
● Civil servants and administrators who were promoted to the nobility by Louis himself and who therefore owed their aristocratic status to the king rather than tot heir own distinguished family tree
● THis ensured their loyalty to and continued dependnece on the goodwill of the king
~Serfdom
● Binding of peasant laborers to the land in a way that left them unfree, although not technically enslaved
● Had been practiced in medieval Europe and elsewhere, mainly in centralized, feudal conditions
~Arab slave trade
● Exported AFrican capitves throughout the Middle East and the Indian Ocean basin
~Yasak
● The combination of labor obligations and tribute payments
● Russia forced native populations in Siberia to work for them and also to provide them with a yearly quota of fur pelts and other goods between the 1500s and 1700s
~Encomienda system
● Declared all Amreican natives to be Spanish subjects and used many of them as slaves in mines, on sugarcane farms, and elsewhere
● Abolished in 1543
~Tears of the Indians
● THe monk Bartolome de las Casas protested the cruelty cuase dby the encomienda system
~Mit’a system
● Inca rulers had previously used in the Andes to harness labor in a manner similar to serfdom in South America
~Haciendas/estancias/latifundias
● Intensive cultivation of a single crop on large estates
● Cuased by the rise of plantation monocultrue
● Required an immense amount of labor and encouraged the employment of native workers on harsh terms and for little pay
~Slave labor from Africa
● Spanish and Portuguese came to rely heavily on them
● Slave labor resulted in North America as plantation monoculture spread to there
● Crops most directly connected with this trend were sugarcane in the Caribbean and South America and cotton in North America
~Atlantic slave trade
● Became a central part of the European economy and a primary factor in Europe’s ability to generate such great welath from the 1500s onward
● The numbers grew and the conditions became harsher as Spnaish and Portuguese started to ship slaves to the Americas in the 1500s
● Brazil was the largest slaveholding country
● Part of the triangular trade
~Middle Passage
● Notoriously appalling conditions
● Slaves were packed into boats as tightly as possible
● Chinaed, lying on their backs, surroudned by hundreds of other bodies, all in darkness, slaves endured a nightmarishly claustrophobic sea journey that lasted for weeks
~Religious intoleration in Europe
● Protestants and Catholics regularly persecuted each other
● Anti-Semitism was rampant throughout the continent
● Anti-Islamic
~Anti-Semitism
● Jews were stereotyped by European Christians as greedy because of their success since the Middle Ages in fields like banking and commerce and tey were further resented because of the popular but misguided belief that they bore responsibility from Biblical times for the death of Jesus
~Anti-Islamic tendencies
● Tensions stirred up by the Spnish Reconquista and the Ottoman Empire’s campaigns against Constantinople and the Balkans
~Religions in Middle East
● ALthough violence an dpersecution were not unkonw, both Ottoman Turky and Safavid Persia officially operated according to mudarra
~Mudarra
● A policy of relative religious tolerance
● Non-Muslims were alloed to convert to Islam if they wished but were not forced ot do so
● Dhimmis did not have equal rights
~Dhimmis
● Non-believers
~Jizya
● Special tax paid by dhimmis
~Millet
● To administer its non-Muslim subjects, the Ottoman empire organized each religious minority into a unit called a millet
● THree millets existed before the 1700s (Jews, Armenian Christians, Greek Orthodox Christian)
~Religions in Mughal India
● Muslim minority ruled a Hindu majority, as well as a growing population of Sikhs, religious policy varied widely
● Benevolence of Akbar the Great to Islamic militancy of Aurangzeb
~Arkbad the Great
● Abolished the jizya tax for Hindus int he late 1500s and encouraged friendly relations among those of all faiths
~Aurangzeb
● Imposed Sharia law on India’s Hindus in the late 1600s and whose persecuation of the Sikhs caused them to revolt and to establish their own state in Punjab
~Race-based hierarchies
● Qing dynasty
~Qing dynasty in China
● For many eyars after the 1644 establishment of the dynasty, the ruling Manchus, who comprised less thean 5% of the population, stratified society according to race
● THey forced their CHinese subjects to wear certain clothes and to braid their hair into long queues
● Males had to shave their foreheas
~Mixed populations in Americas
● Europeans had children with Native Americans or transplanted Africans or as Africnas had children with Native AMericans
● Peninsulares and criollos enjoyed elite status
● Those of mixed blood and native ancestry were nearer the bottom, and slaves were on the lowest rung of the social ladder
~Metizos/metis
● Most common names for the offspring of Europeans and American natives
~Mulattos
●European and African descent
~Zambo
● Mixed African and Native American heritage
~Creole culture
● Came to mean someone of mixed descent
● The emergence of creole cultures enriched the cultures of hte New World
~Peninsulares
● Pure bred Spanish who settled in the New World adn remained at the tope
~Criollos/Creole
● Europeans born in the New World
~Republica de Indios
● An administrative unit that resembled the Ottoman millet in that it kept natives under Spniash jurisdiction and harnessed their labor and taxes but allowed a certain degree of social and cultural autonomy
~Improving conditions for women
● Individual women from small but important segments of society (aristocracy and emerging middle class) gained ecuation, became active in business and became artists and writers
● Those of all classes gained more control over when and whom they married as well as over issues like divorce, childbirth, and inheritance
~Education
● Many Catholic nuns achieved a high elvel of education ● Protestantism's emphasis on literacy led upper- and middle-class women to attain at least some learning ● A number of prominent baroque and eighteenth century painters were women and womern also truend to wriign, philosophy and scientific research
~Gender inequality
● Legally and eonomiclaly, woemn remained subservient
● Witch hutns
● Catholicism and the new Protestant faiths used scripture to justify the view that women were inferior to and more sinful than men
● Even during the Englihtenmen tof the 1700s, very few among Europe’s otherwise more liberal thinkers were willing to entertain the notion of wommen’s equality
~Harem
● Both among the Ottomans and the Persian Safavids, the haren was not simply a collection of concubiens for hte ruler’s pressue
● Insteadk it was a complex social network that included most female members of the imperial family and invovled itslef with the raising of children and pursuit of the arts
~Polygamy
● Much rarer in the Muslim world that is generally believed
~Seclusion of women
● Practiced consistently throughout the Muslim world and among most classes
~Muslim women’s rights
● Certian rights with respect to owning and inheirting property, they ahd few rights within marriage or when it came to divorce
● Althougth they could testify in court, their testimony was not coutned as equal to a man’s
~Women in Mughal India
● Had more rights than their Hindu ocunterparts who remained subject ot the caste system and sati ritual
● Secultion of women applied both to Muslim women and Hundu women of high caste and when Mughal rulers chose in the 1600s to impose Sharia law on non-Muslims, these restrictions fell on Hundu women, not just Muslims
~Foot binding
● In China, foot binding became more widespread, and Confucian doctrie continued to justify a secondary status for women
~Women in Japan
● Stratification of Japanese society by the Tokugawa shogunate placed heavier restrictions on the behavior of women, especially if they belonged to the samurai class
● Obliged to obey their husbands or face death, women in Tokugawa-era Japan had little authority over property and recieved less education than men, even if artistic and cultural pursuits were encouraged among elite women
~Geishas
● Some women gained sttatus and fame in Japan as geishas
● Spencial courtesnas valued not just as sex objects but for their musical, artistic, and conversational kills
~Matrilineal
● Several African societies were matrilineal and relatively willing to accept female leadership (Queen Nzinga of Angola during the late 1500s and early 1600s)
~Women in Africa
● Throughout the continent, gender and family relations were affected by Islam’s deepening presence, which led to more veiling and seclusion, and also by the arrival of Europeans and Arbas along the coasts
● The escalation of the Arab and Atlantic slave trades had the effect of breaking apart many families, even in the interior, beyong the direct reach of foreigners
~Local women in colonies
● Often played crucial roels during the economic and politicla encounters that unfolded between the outsiders and their own people
- Portuguese and other Europeans who arrived in Souttheast Asia found themselves heavily dependnt (cultural orientation and social connections) on the local women they took as mistresses or wives
- Hernan Cortes’s success was partly due to the guidance and diplomatic skills of his native mistress Malinche
- Pocahontas heled John Smith in America
~What are some examples of intensified peasant labour?
● Expansion and greater systemization of cotton production in India
● Enlargement of silk production in China
~What did urbaniztion lead to?
● Greater social mobility ● Resulted in greater class diversification
~Where did merchants hugely influence social and political roles?
● England
● Netherlands
● Italian city-states (espeiclaly Florence and Venice)
● Swahili city-states
~What were the traiditional roles of elite classes?
● It meant that while they were theoretically subject to their monarchs, they wielded a great deal of power in their own lands
● There wer often clahses between the will of the monarch and that of the nobility
~What economic challenges did traditional elites face during this era?
● Because their wealth depended so much on landownership and profits derived from agricultural production, the rising importance of trade and commerce did not work in their favor
● THose who failed ot display a certain amount of adaptability would fall behind or suffer serious consequences
~What was an example of serfdom?
● Most notably in Russia during the 1400s and 1500s and was exported to the Siberian frontier in the 1600s and 1700s
● Became increasingly important in Japan during this period
~What rights did dhimmis not hae?
● They could not serve in the military
● THeir testimony in trials was given less weight than that of Muslims
● THey had under the caliphs, the paid jizya
~What do some families saw the devshirme system as?
● An opportunity for their sons to rise up in the world
~What were the important female monarchs in Europe of the period?
● Isabella of Catile
● Elizabeth I of England
● Maria Theresa of Austria
● Catherine the Great of Russia in the late 1700s
