Colonialism
ABSTRACT 
This lecture lays out the transitions that took place beginning in the 16th to the colonial world order. It discusses the nature of colonialism in general terms and more particularly the new economies and architectures of the Spanish, French and English empires.

KEY PEOPLES AND EMPIRES
•	Portuguese Empire (mainly 16th century): economic opportunity, pepper, spice trade.
•	Dutch Empire
•	Spanish Empire (mainly 16th and 17th centuries): South American Conquest, gold, silver, tobacco, hacienda, Jesuits, Escorial
•	French Empire (mainly 17th and 18th centuries): slavery, fur, coffee, Mini Ice Age, Versailles, Enlightenment (J.J. Rousseau and Laugier)
•	English Empire (mainly 18th and 19th centuries): Blenheim Palace, tea, coffee, sugar, cotton, tobacco, botany, China trade, opium, India, Industrial Revolution
•	Russian Empire (mainly 18th and early 19th centuries): Fur, gold, St. Petersburg, Winter Palace

KEY PLACES
•	Palazzo D’Oro, Venice, 1430
•	Monastery of St. Jerome, Lisbon Portugal, 1501 (the Pepper Cathedral)
•	Potosi Silver Mine, Bolivia
•	Escorial, (near Madrid, Spain), 1570s
•	Versailles, France, 1670s and onward
•	Blenheim Palace, ca. 1710, England
•	Stratford Hall (plantation), Virginia, 1730s
•	London Coffee Houses
•	Tea House at the Marble House, Newport R.I. (1925)

NOTES ON SELECT TERMS
Valladolid debate 1550
Held in the Spanish city of Valladolid, it consisted of two opposing views about the colonization of the Americas. Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas Bartolomé de las Casas argued that the American Indians were free men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology.

Opposing him was fellow Dominican Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who insisted that "in order to uproot crimes that offend nature" the Indians should be punished and therefore reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology and natural law.
Though there was no winner, the tide did begin to turn and natives were seen as “human” (with the exception of African slaves) though with much lower standing than the Europeans.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) 
Rousseau criticized earlier theories for asserting that since man in a "state of nature” has no idea of goodness he must, therefore, be naturally wicked. On the contrary, Rousseau holds that "uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature.” Rousseau asserted that the stage of human development associated with what he called "savages" was the best and most optimal in human development, between the less-than optimal extreme of brute animals, on the one hand, and the extreme of decedent civilization on the other. “Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man."