Voyages of discovery and the start of the Industrial Revolution

Why Europeans looked for new sea routes

• Gold (wealth): spices, cotton, silk and gems came from the East through Arab and Islamic lands. That route was costly and uncertain, so a direct sea route promised big profits.
• God: explorers wanted to spread Christianity in the lands they found.
• Glory: explorers hoped to become famous by finding new lands.
• The Renaissance spirit of inquiry made Europeans curious about other lands and peoples.
• Kings and rich people paid for the voyages to gain trade and colonies. Prince Henry of Portugal, known as Henry the Navigator, was a famous patron. Your NIOS lesson calls him King Henry, but he was a prince, a son of the king of Portugal.
• New tools: the compass, the astrolabe (to find position from the sun and stars), astronomical tables and better maps.

Famous explorers

Activity: trace the three sea routes on a world map

Take a blank world map and three colours, one for each explorer. Draw each route as a line with arrows and label the places.

1. 1
   Columbus (1492): start in Spain. Draw a line west across the Atlantic Ocean to the islands of the Caribbean Sea, near America. Label it 'Columbus: thought he had reached India'.
2. 2
   Vasco da Gama (1497 to 1498): start at Lisbon in Portugal. Go south along West Africa and round the Cape of Good Hope.
3. 3
   Continue da Gama's line north along East Africa, then east across the Arabian Sea to Calicut in India. Label it 'sea route to India'.
4. 4
   Magellan (1519 to 1522): start in Spain. Cross the Atlantic to South America and sail south through the strait at its tip, now the Strait of Magellan, into the Pacific Ocean.
5. 5
   Continue Magellan's line across the Pacific to the Philippines, then back through the Indian Ocean, round the Cape of Good Hope, to Spain. Label it 'first voyage round the world'.
6. 6
   Record in your notebook: the oceans each route crossed, the longest route, and the route that opened direct trade with India.

What the voyages led to

• Trading posts and colonies in Africa, America and Asia.
• Trade shifted from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
• New goods in trade: tobacco, potato, molasses (sugar syrup) and ostrich feathers.
• The cruel slave trade: Africans were captured, shipped across the Atlantic and sold to work on plantations in America.
• The colonies did not grow richer; their wealth flowed to Europe.
• European merchants piled up wealth and invested it in new machines, which led to the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution begins in England

The Industrial Revolution was the shift from making goods by hand to making them with machines. It began in England from about 1750. English merchants had gathered huge wealth from overseas trade. Colonies supplied raw materials and bought finished goods. England also had plenty of coal and iron. So capitalists, people who invest money to earn profit, paid for new machines. Machines took over work once done by people and animals, and production rose many times over. But society became unequal. It split into the capitalists or bourgeoisie, who owned the factories, and the workers or proletariat, who sold their labour. Lesson 4 covers this revolution in detail.