Word: 1660s
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...1660s, the labor equation changed: increased supplies made it cheaper to buy African slaves than white indentures, and the former were also considered less rebellious. The turn toward black slavery did not reduce the inflow of white immigrants, as happened in the sugar islands. Instead, a large white population developed of small and even midsize farmers who relied on their own or nonslave white labor. As the black population grew and increasingly became the labor force of élite whites, both attitudes and laws changed. By 1662 the children of all slave women were declared slaves in perpetuity. Five years...
...them: Venetian glass beads (blue ones were preferred), sheet copper (a commodity prized by the Powhatan, who wore pendants and other ornaments fashioned from the reddish metal), European coins (useless in Virginia) and metal tools (the Indians had ones made only from stone, wood, bone and shell). By the 1660s, when the English had established a number of settlements in the area, the Indians were even issued silver or copper badges that allowed them safe passage while conducting business with the foreigners...
...chief British official in China, Sir John Bowring, coined the dictum: “Free trade is Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ is free trade.â€More earnings from trade were also needed to pay for growing quantities of that essential British import, Chinese tea. In the 1660s, Britain imported some two lbs. of it; by the 1780s that had become 15 million lbs., and by 1830 it was 30 million. To balance this, the British needed to sell more to China—but the Chinese did not want nearly enough of what the British tried...
...dawn of the first millennium, a man could walk south from Ethiopia and get all the way to China. Six hundred years later, the Mediterranean was literally the center of the world, and the island now called Sri Lanka occupied the eastern half of the Red Sea. In the 1660s, the Mekong River, along with the Yangtze and the Salween, dangled like scraggly chin hairs from a Tibetan lake roughly the size of Taiwan. Or so it appeared on the most accurate European map from each of these eras...
Sometimes innovators don't even recognize the true import of their findings. In 1660s Germany, Magdeburg Mayor Otto von Guericke tries to solve the riddle of a compass needle that doesn't always point (as people thought it should) at the Pole Star. He rubs a model of the earth made of sulfur in order to attract his experimental compass needle. The rubbing produces a noise and a spark (which Guericke mentions in a casual footnote) that turns out to have been electricity...