Describe the world in 1750: the powerful Eurasian land-based empires, coastal African kingdoms, and growing European maritime empires, and explain how their interactions reshaped global trade networks (Framework Key Idea 10.1).

What this topic is asking

Framework Key Idea 10.1 opens the Global II course by describing the world in 1750, the starting point for the modern era. It asks you to picture a world dominated by large land-based empires in Eurasia, coastal kingdoms in Africa, and growing European maritime empires, and to explain how their interactions reshaped global trade networks. This sets the stage: the revolutions, industrialization, and imperialism of the rest of the course all grow out of this 1750 world.

The land-based empires of Eurasia

These empires were gunpowder empires: they had used cannon and firearms to conquer and hold large territories. They taxed agriculture and trade, supported great cities, and produced goods, such as Indian cotton cloth, Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain, that the rest of the world wanted.

African kingdoms and the coast

West Africa had powerful states such as the Ashanti (Asante) and Oyo empires, while the Swahili city-states on the East African coast traded across the Indian Ocean. African kingdoms traded gold, salt, ivory, and increasingly enslaved people to European merchants on the coast. The transatlantic slave trade was already a central, brutal feature of the Atlantic world, with European demand driving the capture and sale of millions of Africans into slavery in the Americas.

The European maritime empires

European states were strong at sea, not on land in Asia.

The Atlantic empires of Spain and Portugal still held large colonies in the Americas, while Britain, France, and the Netherlands had Atlantic colonies and a growing share of seaborne trade. In Asia and Africa, however, Europeans mostly held coastal trading posts, forts, and a few footholds, because the land empires were far too strong to conquer. Trade was run through chartered joint-stock companies, above all the British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company (VOC), which were given monopolies by their governments to trade in spices, textiles, and tea.

How interactions reshaped global trade

By 1750 several developments had woven the world together more tightly than ever before:

• The Columbian Exchange (the transfer of crops, animals, people, and diseases between the Americas, Europe, and Africa after 1492) had reshaped diets and populations on every continent. American crops such as the potato and maize spread to Eurasia and Africa; Old World diseases had devastated the Americas.
• The transatlantic slave trade connected Africa, the Americas, and Europe in a triangular system, supplying forced labor for the plantations that produced sugar, tobacco, and other cash crops.
• Silver from the Americas, mined in places like Potosi, flowed across the Pacific and the Atlantic and into China, oiling global commerce.
• European chartered companies pushed into the Indian Ocean and Asian trade, competing with and depending on the great land empires.

The pattern to remember is that Europeans did not yet rule Asia or inland Africa, but they increasingly controlled the sea lanes and the long-distance trade, setting up the imbalance that the next century would deepen.

Try this

Q1. Name the four major land-based empires of Eurasia in 1750. [Recall]

• Cue. The Ottoman, Safavid, Mughal, and Qing empires.

Q2. Explain why Europeans held mainly coastal trading posts in Asia in 1750 rather than large inland territories. [Short explanation]

• Cue. The Asian land empires were far too strong and populous to conquer, so Europeans traded from coastal posts and forts to access valuable Asian goods rather than ruling territory.