By Dr Michelina Andreucci

THE Age of Exploration, started with the Portuguese, was the beginning of territorial expansion for several European countries that were hitherto pre-occupied with internal wars and were slowly recovering from vast losses of populations, brought about by the bubonic plague in the second half of the 14th Century; a highly infectious febrile disease caused by rats.
The sea offered the only refuge from death.
Numerous naval expeditions across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans were undertaken with many previously unknown territories being ‘discovered’ during this period.
It marked the arrival of settlers and invaders to previously unknown continents, including the western coast of Africa, Africa that continued into the late 19th Century, and ended with the exploration of the Polar Regions in the 20th Century.
Overseas explorations led to contact and exchanges between the Old World, Europe, Asia and Africa; and the New World, the Americas.
It led to the rise of global trade, European colonisation and empires.
It was the most significant of global events in history regarding ecology, agriculture and cultures.
European exploration and colonisation following the Age of Discovery led to enslavement, exploitation, military conquest, and economic dominance of Europe and its colonies over all indigene populations.
The indigenes were abused and driven off most of their lands, reduced to small, dependent minorities.
The Age of Discovery also allowed the spreading of Christianity throughout the world and the propagation of diseases that decimated entire populations.
While over the centuries, the Europeans had developed high degrees of immunity to their diseases, most indigenous people had no immunity, resulting in a high rate of mortality, due to outbreaks of ‘Old World’ infectious diseases such as smallpox, measles, flu and cholera; just as it happened in Africa.
Over 150 years, after Christopher Columbus’ voyages, Americas’ indigenous populations plummeted by an estimated 80 percent; from an estimated 50 million in 1492 to only eight million in 1650.
After learning of Portuguese and Spanish sailing exploits the French, English and, much later, the Dutch also entered in the race of exploration from about 1495, and from 1497, a number of other explorers started heading west.
Meanwhile, protected from direct Spanish competition by the treaty of Tordesillas, Portuguese east-ward exploration and colonisation between 1497-1513, continued apace.
In 1498, Vasco da Gama reached India.
This firmly established Portuguese influence in the Indian Ocean.
By following Muslim and Chinese traders’ maritime trade routes, the Portuguese sailed to coastal enclaves maintaining trading ports in Congo (M’banza), Angola, Somalia, the City of Cape Good Hope (Natal), (Cidade do Cabo da Boa Esperança in Portuguese), Tanzania (Kilwa Kisiwani), Kenya (Malindi) and Mozambique (Sofala), the kingdoms of Munhumutapa in Zimbabwe which covered Zimbabwe, parts of Angola and Tanzania in the north, Mozambique in the east and South Africa in the south.
They traded spices, dried meat, fish, flour, garlic, wine, leather, furs, skins, whaling; even hemp and opium and every other commodity from Africa; but mainly slaves, gold, ivory and hardwoods.
By the 16th Century, Portuguese traders had introduced maize and cassava from Brazil into Africa; becoming staple foods replacing the indigenous African crops.
England purchased a number of territories in North America, such as Louisiana from France and New Mexico from Mexico.
As a result of the American War of Independence, Britain lost her first ‘Empire’ of 13 colonies and turned her attention towards colonising Asia, Africa and the Pacific region.
Voyages of discovery to what they thought to be ‘Terra Incognita’, during the era of the Age of Discovery were extremely profitable for some, but proved catastrophic for most indigenous people they came into contact with.
The lure of cheap land, religious freedom and the right to self-determination became very enticing.
However, as more nations gained an interest in the colonisation of the Americas and elsewhere, territorial competition became increasingly fierce.
Domination of the new trans-oceanic links by European powers led to the Age of Imperialism.
Eventually, European colonial powers controlled most of the world.
Their insatiable appetite for new land, empires, commodities, slaves and trade had great affect on the other areas of the globe.
African slaves were mostly captured by coastal tribes who sold them in exchange for rum, guns, gunpowder and other goods.
An estimated 12 million people were captured and forced to work on various plantations in the Caribbean, Brazil, Mexico and the US as cheap slave labourers.
In the early history of sugar, Islamic and European-owned plantations paid relatively high wages for this labour intensive and profitable crop.
However, as time progressed, the European-sugar plantation owners reconsidered the use of highly paid labour and made the transition to the exploitation of people to meet the growing global sugar demand.
Indigenous native Americans were exempted from slavery since a papal bull Sublimis Deus in 1537, graciously acknowledged that indigenous native americans possessed souls, thus prohibiting their enslavement.
In the 16th Century, the Spanish colonisers brought the new crops from the Americas to Asia, thus contributing to the Asia’s population growth.
The Chinese also purchased new world crops from the Spanish Empire, including sweet potatoes, maize and peanuts.
These could be cultivated on lands where traditional Chinese staple crops such as wheat, millet and rice could not grow, also facilitating a population rise in China.
After the introduction of sweet potatoes (mbambaira) to China around 1560, they gradually became the traditional food for the lower classes, which until then had been rice. Asian rice, with a single genetic origin from the wild rice ‘Oryza rufipogon’, was domesticated between 8 200-13 500 years ago in the Pearl River Valley region of China, from where rice cultivation spread to South and South-east Asia.
By the 1st Century BC the Chinese had innovated the hydraulic-powered trip hammer, mainly to pound, decorticate, and polish grain that otherwise would have been done manually.
The Chinese also began using a square-pallet chain pump system by the 1st Century AD, powered by a waterwheel or oxen pulling an on a system of mechanical wheels that was used to lift water from a lower to higher elevation in filling irrigation canals and channels for agricultural farmland.
The chain pump was also use in public works to provide water for urban and palatial pipe systems.
Heavy ploughs had been developed by the end of the late 2nd Century, with iron ploughshares and mouldboards that spread slowly west, revolutionising farming in Northern Europe by the 10th Century; though similar designs were known in Italy by the 7th Century.
The Columbian Exchange also witnessed the rise of luxury goods such as sugar.
Once the colonised lands emerged as profitable plantation lands, it necessitated cheap or free labour to produce.
Hence the Spanish and other colonisers increased the importation of Africans as enslaved labourers, altering global demographics.
The global exchange of previously indigenous crops and livestock breeds and people that occurred after 1492 with crops moving in both directions across the Atlantic Ocean, from the New World to the Old World, caused population growths around the world and had a lasting effect on many cultures.
The system of slavery transmitted not only people, but also their cultures to new regions.
Dr Michelina Rudo Andreucci is a Zimbabwean-Italian researcher, industrial design consultant lecturer and specialist hospitality interior decorator. She is a published author in her field.
For views and comments, email: linamanucci@gmail.com