The East India Companies

Patricia Ibarra

Andrews

World History 11

28 January 2013

            I found it interesting how the Dutch took control over the shipping but also the production of cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace. And how they took control over a number of small spice-producing islands, forcing the people to sell only to the Dutch and destroying the crops of those who refused. I found it very inhumane how the Dutch killed, and enslaved and left to starve overall the entire population of about 15,000 people and who later replaced them with Dutch planters, using a slave labor force to produce the nutmeg crop. During the seventeen century it had been going pretty well for the Dutch because they were able to control the trade in nutmeg, mace, and cloves and to sell the spices to Europe and India. This also would benefit the Dutch because Europe and India had to pay fourteen to seventeen times the price that was paid in Indonesia.

            Also when reading about how people would hunt animals for their furs, was something that was really popular during the little ice age because it increased the demand for a lot of fur, since it was very cold. But the furs still kept being used even when it got close to July, which seems strange because normally by that time it’s pretty hot and everyone probably would be wearing more cool clothes for the heat. The use of fur also made the prices rise, like for good quality beaver pelt. The main way that the people would receive the furs were by the Indians, who would bring the fur and skin to their coastal settlements and later would be taken away to the trading posts in the interior of North America. There the Europeans would buy the furs with their exchange of guns, blankets metals, rum. This was their way of paying back to the Native Americans and shows how little and cheap their labor force was.

Colonies of Sugar

Patricia Ibarra

Andrews

World History 11

28 January 2013

            When reading about the Colonies of Sugar, it was interesting how sugar was very valuable because it was much in demand in Europe, where it was used as medicine, spice, sweetener, preservative, and also in sculptured forms like a decoration that signified highest status. The Arabs who introduced it into the Mediterranean mainly produced the sugar production. Later the British, French, and the Dutch turned their Caribbean territories into productive sugar producing colonies, breaking the Portuguese and Brazilian control. Sugar had transformed Brazil and the Caribbean because of the production that went towards, like growing the sugarcane and processing it into usable sugar. This type of production made slave labor very tiring because it was intensive. Slaves who produced the sugar, worked under severe conditions. Working in the heat made it exhausting and hard to work in, especially because of the fire from the cauldron, which were used to turn raw sugarcane to crystallized sugar. I couldn’t imagine how hard it must have been for a slave during that time period because the workload that they had to put in was a lot. And also it’s sad to hear that because of the working conditions, many slaves had high death rates, five to 10 percent per year. This required plantation owners to keep importing new slaves in order to keep doing the job.

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