The Rise of Global Markets

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the causes and consequences of European maritime competition between 1648 and 1815 (LO B; Skill 1.B; KC-2.2, KC-2.2.III).
• Account for KC-2.2.III.A: how European sea powers contested Atlantic influence across the eighteenth century, identifying the principal Anglo-French wars and their settlements.
• Account for KC-2.2.III.B: how Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British rivalries in Asia ended with British dominance in India and Dutch control of the East Indies.
• Account for the British conquest of Bengal: the Battle of Plassey (1757), the Battle of Buxar (1764), the 1765 Diwani, and the gradual extension of East India Company rule across the Indian subcontinent.
• Use Skill 1.B (Developments and Processes) to describe the eighteenth-century European maritime competition as a single connected historical development running from the post-Westphalia settlement to the Congress of Vienna.

Across the eighteenth century, European maritime powers fought for dominance in Atlantic and Asian commerce. KC-2.2.III captures the underlying point: commercial rivalries shaped diplomacy and warfare among early modern European states. The competition ran along two principal axes — the Atlantic (KC-2.2.III.A) and Asia (KC-2.2.III.B) — and the principal contestants were three eighteenth-century European maritime powers: Britain, France, and the Netherlands, with Spain and Portugal in declining roles. The eighteenth-century pattern emerged from the seventeenth-century commercial revolution covered in Topics 3.3 and 3.4 (mercantilism, the chartered companies, the Atlantic slave-labor system) and reached its resolution at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, by which time Britain had become the leading European maritime and commercial power.

KC-2.2.III.A captures the Atlantic side: European sea powers contested Atlantic influence across the eighteenth century. The principal rivalry was Anglo-French. The 1701-1714 War of the Spanish Succession (Topic 3.6) had transferred the asiento (the slave-trade contract supplying enslaved Africans to the Spanish American empire) and Gibraltar to Britain at the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. The 1739-1748 War of Jenkins' Ear (an Anglo-Spanish war over British smuggling in the Caribbean) and War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748, Topic 3.6) produced inconclusive Anglo-French conflict in North America (King George's War) and the Caribbean. The 1756-1763 Seven Years' War was the decisive Anglo-French conflict. Fought in Europe (the Prussian-British alliance against the French-Austrian-Russian coalition), North America (the French and Indian War), the Caribbean, India, and West Africa, the war ended with the 1763 Treaty of Paris.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris was the decisive eighteenth-century settlement. France ceded Canada and the eastern half of French Louisiana to Britain. Spain ceded Florida to Britain in exchange for the return of Cuba (which Britain had captured during the war). France retained the Caribbean sugar islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe (which the eighteenth-century French considered more valuable than Canada because of their sugar production); the small French Newfoundland fishing ports of Saint-Pierre and Miquelon; and limited trading posts in India. The settlement confirmed Britain as the dominant European power in North America east of the Mississippi and the dominant European power in India. The 1775-1783 American Revolution cost Britain the Thirteen Colonies but did not reverse British commercial primacy: Britain retained Canada, India, the British West Indies, and a globally dominant maritime position. The Napoleonic Wars consolidated this dominance through the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar and the subsequent Continental System, which made British naval supremacy global rather than merely Atlantic.

KC-2.2.III.B captures the Asian side: Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British rivalries in Asia ended with British dominance in India and Dutch control of the East Indies. The four-power Asian rivalry had a long history. Portuguese trading posts had been established in the early sixteenth century at Goa, Diu, and Hormuz (Indian Ocean) and Macau (China). The Portuguese empire declined across the seventeenth century as Dutch, English, and French competition intruded. Dutch trading dominance under the VOC (Dutch East India Company, founded 1602) consolidated in the seventeenth century: Batavia (modern Jakarta) became the VOC's Asian capital from 1619; the VOC controlled the Moluccan spice trade; the Dutch held Ceylon (modern Sri Lanka) from 1658. French efforts under the French East India Company (founded 1664 by Colbert) established trading posts at Pondichery, Chandernagor, and Mahé in India, but never matched Dutch or British scale. British efforts under the English East India Company (chartered 1600) established trading posts at Surat, Madras, Bombay, and Calcutta across the seventeenth century.

The British conquest of Bengal began with the Battle of Plassey on 23 June 1757. The Bengali nawab Siraj ud-Daulah had attacked the British East India Company's Calcutta trading post in 1756 (the “Black Hole of Calcutta” episode) and provoked a Company punitive expedition led by Robert Clive. At Plassey, Clive's small force (roughly 3,000 troops, mostly Indian sepoys with British officers and a small artillery contingent) defeated Siraj's army of roughly 50,000 through a combination of tactical discipline, alliances with rival Bengali nobles, and the bribery of Siraj's principal commander Mir Jafar (who held back his troops at the decisive moment). Mir Jafar replaced Siraj as nawab, ruling effectively as a British client. The 1764 Battle of Buxar against a coalition of the new nawab of Bengal Mir Qasim, the nawab of Awadh, and the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II confirmed British military supremacy in northern India.

The 1765 Diwani — the right to collect Bengal land-tax revenue, granted by the Mughal emperor Shah Alam II to the East India Company in exchange for protection — transformed the Company from a trading enterprise into a territorial state. The Company governed Bengal as a subordinate dependency of the Mughal Empire in legal form, but as an independent territorial power in practice. Bengal's tax revenues (annually around £3 million in the late 1760s) financed further British military expansion. By 1818 the Company controlled most of the Indian subcontinent through a combination of direct rule (Bengal, the Madras Presidency around Madras, the Bombay Presidency around Bombay) and subsidiary alliances with princely states (Hyderabad, Mysore, the Maratha confederacy, and others). The British Crown took over from the Company in 1858 (Topic 7.4) and ruled India directly until 1947.

The Dutch East Indies followed a different trajectory. The VOC had built its commercial empire in the seventeenth century around the spice trade in the Moluccas (the Spice Islands of modern eastern Indonesia) and the broader Indonesian archipelago. By the early eighteenth century the VOC controlled Java's principal ports and had consolidated dominance over Indonesian commerce. Across the eighteenth century, however, the VOC declined: corruption in its overseas administration, mismanagement, and Anglo-French competition for Asian trade eroded its profitability. The 1799 liquidation of the VOC by the Batavian Republic (the Dutch revolutionary state allied with France) transferred the Dutch East Indies to direct Dutch state control. After the Napoleonic Wars, the Dutch state continued to rule the East Indies through a system of forced cultivation of export crops (the Cultivation System or Cultuurstelsel, formalized in 1830) and indirect rule through local sultans and princes. The Dutch East Indies became modern Indonesia in 1945-1949 after a post-World War II independence struggle.

Topic 5.2's central message is that the eighteenth-century European maritime competition was a single connected historical development running across the period and producing the structural conditions of late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European overseas empire. Skill 1.B asks students to describe this competition as such — to specify the connections between the Anglo-French Atlantic rivalry, the Asian four-power competition, the British conquest of Bengal, and the Dutch consolidation in the East Indies. The result was that by 1815, Britain had emerged as the leading European maritime and commercial power, with India as the “jewel in the crown” of an empire that would dominate nineteenth-century European overseas politics.

Three sources documenting the eighteenth-century maritime competition: the Treaty of Paris of 1763 confirming the Anglo-French settlement, Robert Clive on the Battle of Plassey, and a contemporary description of the VOC's Asian trade empire.

1. (Causation) Account for KC-2.2.III: how did commercial rivalries shape diplomacy and warfare among early modern European states? Cite specific examples of the Anglo-French rivalry across the eighteenth century.
2. (Causation, Skill 1.B) Account for the Anglo-French Atlantic competition (KC-2.2.III.A). Describe the four major eighteenth-century Anglo-French wars and their settlements as a single connected historical development.
3. (Causation) Account for the Battle of Plassey (1757) and the British conquest of Bengal. What specific combination of factors (tactical discipline, alliance with rival Bengali nobles, bribery of Mir Jafar) produced the decisive outcome?
4. (Causation) Account for KC-2.2.III.B: how did Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British rivalries in Asia end with British dominance in India and Dutch control of the East Indies? Why did France not develop a comparable Asian commercial empire?
5. (Causation) Compare the British conquest of Bengal with the Dutch conquest of Java. What similarities and differences mark the two cases of European territorial control of major Asian regions?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.