Human migration is a process of movement of people from one country to another, usually from one country to another. It usually includes long-distance travel across geographical areas. Colonialism is the act or policy of controlling other individuals by creating colonies, usually for economic gain. As part of colonialism, colonialists may impose their culture’s religion, language, and economy. International administrations control the colonized region to gain from its population and resources. Although colonialism dates back to ancient times, it is most closely connected with the 15th-century European colonial period when certain European powers created colonizing empires. The following paper will describe the social and economic factors that contributed to the mass movement of people between Africa, America, and Europe and highlight the structure of the new world societies.
Social and Economic Factors that Influenced Migration
Economic considerations play a significant role in all human migrations, but they are particularly relevant in the context of migration. Pull Factors are those that cause people to want to do something. Push variables such as more employment and the economy tend to be the polar opposite of pull forces. For instance, opportunities represent a push factor since people are increasingly being pushed to hunt for opportunities outside their communities due to a lack of economic opportunity. However, it is difficult to identify this instance only based on push factors because the variables linked with the home country are frequently just as relevant as the elements related to the target country in this situation. Generally, searching for employment opportunities caused individuals to move from one of the three continents to another. Aside from humanitarian reasons, forced migration also was employed for commercial benefit. It can be as seen by the forced transportation of more than 20 million men, women, and children to the Americas during the 16th and 18th centuries (Parker, 2010). The forced immigrants were lured to economic considerations.
People’s movement in Africa was facilitated through trade, which has played an essential role throughout history. The need to acquire goods that one never produced via trade prompted individuals to move from continent to another. Trade between Arab and European merchants through well-established shipping routes to the Malay peninsula and the Indonesia and Philippines archipelagos. There were well-established commercial routes connecting India with the Arab world and West Africa (Parker, 2010). Some of these trade routes developed by the ancient Trans-Saharan trade helped West Africans interact with the Europeans, giving a leeway for the entry of new people into Africa.
Social Factors
Religion is one of the key social reasons that forced people to move from one place to another to satisfy their beliefs. In Pennsylvania, refugees such as Mennonites settled there after facing persecution from other groups back in their home country. Similarly, other people like the Jews were persecuted in Germany, and the Puritans were discriminated against and subjugated in England. During the early modern era, migration within Europe occurred as religious groups such as Jews and Huguenots tried to escape victimization. Catholic Christianity was forcedly exercised on conquered communities or the enslaved people by Spanish and Portuguese lords. Their civilization mission to the entire world included this action, which they considered part of their “civilizing quest.” To carry out the difficult task of teaching Christianity to indigenous and African populations, hundreds of thousands of clergies, monks, and leaders of religious organizations migrated to the Americas. Instead, a fused religion like Manichaeism evolved, incorporating elements of classical Christian doctrine with the existing beliefs of the African peoples (Parker, 2010). Generally, religion is then a significant factor in social migration.
Seasonal or cyclical migration contributed to causing people to move from one region to another within the three continents. This migration describes people who travel to another country and then return to their home country yearly, a common occurrence in workers’ lives throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. This period of international migration is associated with the growth of America as an economic force and the industrialization of Australia and New Zealand during this period of history (Parker, 2010). In the working lives of blacksmiths, acrobats, and singers who traveled in small social classes throughout South Asia, cyclic migration was a regular part of their profession. The need to escape poverty and harsh governments in one’s country made workers look for better places that would not overtax or exercise heavy customs on their work similar to what most countries did. They were attracted by the potential of economic opportunity and settled mainly in America and former colonies.
Structure of the New World Societies
Global human migrations have altered the physical appearance of continents and regions and the racial, ethnic, and linguistic makeup of their people throughout recorded history. The geography of Europe, for example, is the result of multiple critical early migrations, including those of the Germanic tribes, the Slavs, and the Turks, to name a few examples. Before the arrival of the first European settlers in the New World, the Church, sickness, and the presence of great metropolitan centers governed the form of European communities (Parker, 2010). The spread of illness ravaged several great towns during the Middle Ages, decreasing the population and concentrating the inhabitants’ wealth.
During the Middle Ages, European cultures relied on the feudal society to coordinate labor and power. Europeans functioned under the idea of private ownership instead of the collective African or Native American cultures that existed at the time of their founding. These civilizations were bound together with the Christian Church, which acted as the organizing organization for many Europeans’ everyday lives and served as the cornerstone of their civilization. One of the things that the Mongol Empires conveyed throughout Europe in their conquests was the so-called “Black Death,” also known as the Bubonic Plague. Flying insects and rodents, which carried illness in the baggage of overland traders and the cargo holds of merchant ships, were the most common vectors of disease in ancient times. It is estimated that about 40% of Europe’s population perished once the Black Death finally reached the continent from the East (Parker, 2010). Generally, Europe constituted a structure fabricated by feudalism that Christianity controlled.
In specific ways, the Black Death had a role in the fall of the Mongol Empire. In their stead, several new empires arose, and the Silk Road was once again seen as a hazardous and inefficient trading route, as it had been throughout the Mongol era. Since the Black Death decimated the Mongol and the overland commerce routes to Asia, Europeans started looking for alternative means of conducting business with the European Union. A sea passage to the East was what European nations hoped to find instead. Europeans brought in all of the significant domesticated animals from the Old World, including horses, cattle, sheep, farm animals, and various grains and crops. Corn, potatoes, and tomatoes are just a few of Europeans’ products back from the New World. They quickly became vital in Africa and Eurasia as they spread over the continent (Parker, 2010). Unequivocally, world pandemics such as the Black Death ruined the topographical outlook of most kingdoms’ structures like that of the Mongols.
The smallpox virus was at the center of the deadliest pandemic globally, probably the most critical biological entity to be shared between the hemispheres. European colonizers and Africans had invested thousands of years both having suffered and tried to build up resistance to epidemics, whereas Native Americans had not. Native Americans had developed no immunity to Eurasian illnesses due to years of isolation from the western hemisphere. The reason was that nearly all diseases that affect living beings also evolved varieties of conditions that affect domesticated animals, known as zoonotic diseases (Parker, 2010). All humongous species of animals that can be domesticated were Eurasian in source except llamas, whereas Native Americans did not.
The European colonization of the New World, which began with Christopher Columbus, brought these pandemic infections into the world all at the same time. Native Americans perished at a rate of up to 90% within a few generations following Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas (Parker, 2010). This disease-caused destruction was referred to as the Great Dying because it occurred due to the Europeans’ first contact with the Americas. As a result of their employment of steel weapons and horses, the Spanish and Portuguese managed to win several notable military encounters with indigenous troops. However, the Spanish and Portuguese’s actual military edge lay in biological warfare, something they had no way of anticipating when they arrived.
Complex and unique civilization was established due to the fusion of the three separate cultures, including European, African, and indigenous American. The three groups comprised all cultural’ concepts, practices, languages, and customs (Parker, 2010). During the early sixteenth century, Spanish explorers came across enormous expanses of a country that contained significant evidence of advanced societies that had previously been abandoned and whose former occupants had been killed by illness. That is to say, Europeans conquered the Americas in record time not because Europeans were substantially more militarily strong than Native Americans but because the vast majority of the latter already were dead as a result of illness when Europeans arrived. During this historical period, Europeans served as imperial overlords, repressing both Africans and indigenous cultural elements wherever they appeared, although this proved problematic over time.
The populations for the three countries varied greatly, with Africa having a larger number of people than the other two continents. According to the United Nations, approximately 1.4 million Europeans lived in the Americas in 1700, with 12 million people living in Africa (Parker, 2010). This demographic difference resulted in a scenario in which Europeans strictly regulated the lives of enslaved people and imposed harsh penalties for even the most minor violation. Specifically, European institutions and ideologies ruled the new societies. Europe law, traditions, political structures, and religious traditions predominated. Spain and Portugal’s colonial authorities managed the land following the encomienda system. The Spanish leader accorded a piece of land to the colonization nobles, a class known as encomenderos (Parker, 2010). Therefore, these elites primarily “purchased” the enslaved indigenous Africans who lived on their territory. It was an exact duplicate of the feudal system that already had operated in medieval Europe, except that enslaved people could not gain their liberty under this system.
Reference
Parker, C. (2010). Global Interactions in the Early Modern Age, 1400–1800. Cambridge University Press.