Essay On European Interaction

During the 15th and 16th centuries, European interaction and exploration began to increase. Europeans interacted with an abundant amount of societies that were all different from one another such as; The Americas, West Africa, and China. Throughout all of those societies, interactions differ exceedingly. Specifically in both the Americas and China had very dissimilar interactions with the Europeans. In the Inca and Aztec Empires, Europeans gained dominance and power as opposed to China, which failed to take over. Because Portugal didn 't have any pre-existing knowledge of China, it allowed the Chinese to gain power and dominance over the Portuguese; whereas the Inca and Aztecs did not have knowledge of the Spaniards allowing the outcome of

As Tome Pires leads the first diplomatic mission to china, something no Portuguese had ever done before, He and the others encountered with the Chinese courts for violating Chinese law. “ He apparently offended the local Chinese officials in many ways, for example, by building a stone fort at the mouth of the Canton River and hanging one of his crew on Chinese soil.” Without any knowledge of the Chinese law and customs, the Portuguese were quick to offend and disrespect Chinese grounds permitting the outcome of violence and China to gain dominance. The Portuguese also advance to take action without knowing any background about the country. Gordon states, “The Portuguese approach was utterly unlike that of the Chinese. Instead of generalized dominance through diplomacy and recognition of local their strategy were, in fact, much closer to that of Genghis Khan: seize the trading cities and important resources, destroy resistance, tax trade, and make conquest pay for itself.” With the Portuguese oblivious to the Chinese thoughts and having no knowledge of the country itself, gave a benefit to China to gain control and killing the Portuguese along the way for the laws they have broken. These actions the Portuguese took defined the consequences of gruesome violence and the interaction to become one-sided: with China being the most