1. Expanding Global Trade and Conflicting World Views

Question 1

What is bride wealth?

Answer 1

In early modern Southeast Asia, a sum of money the groom paid the bride or her family at the time of marriage. This practice contrasted with the dowry in China, India, and Europe, which the husband controlled.

Question 2

What’s a caravel?

Answer 2

A small, maneuverable, three-masted sailing ship developed by the Portuguese in the fifteenth century that gave the Portuguese a distinct advantage in exploration and trade.

Question 3

What is Ptolemy’s Geography?

Answer 3

A second-century work translated into Latin around 1410 that synthesized the classical knowledge of geography and introduced latitude and longitude markings.

Question 4

What was the Treaty of Tordesillas?

Answer 4

The 1494 agreement giving Spain everything west of an imaginary line drawn down the Atlantic and giving Portugal everything to the east?

Question 5

What was a conquistador?

Answer 5

Spanish for “conqueror”; a Spanish soldier-explorer, such as Hernán Cortés or Francisco Pizarro, who sought to conquer the New World for the Spanish crown.

Question 6

What was the Aztec Empire?

Answer 6

An alliance between the Mexica people and their conquered allies, with its capital in Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City), that rose in size and power in the fifteenth century and possessed a sophisticated society and culture, with advanced mathematics, astronomy, and engineering.

Question 7

What was the Inca Empire?

Answer 7

The vast and sophisticated Peruvian empire centered at the capital city of Cuzco that was at its peak in the fifteenth century but weakened by civil war at the time of the Spanish arrival.

Question 8

What were viceroyalties?

Answer 8

The name for the four administrative units of Spanish possessions in the Americas: New Spain, Peru, New Granada, and La Plata.

Question 9

What were captaincies?

Answer 9

A system established by the Portuguese in Brazil in the 1530s, whereby hereditary grants of land were given to nobles and loyal officials who bore the costs of settling and administering their territories.

Question 10

What was the encomienda system?

Answer 10

A system whereby the Spanish crown granted the conquerors the right to forcibly employ groups of indigenous people as laborers and to demand tribute payments from them in exchange for providing food, shelter, and instruction in the Christian faith.

Question 11

What was the Columbian exchange?

Answer 11

The exchange of animals, plants, and diseases between the Old and the New Worlds.

Question 12

What was the Valladolid debate?

Answer 12

A debate organized by Spanish king Charles I in 1550 in the city of Valladolid that pitted defenders of Spanish conquest and forcible conversion against critics of these practices.

Question 13

What was Black Legend?

Answer 13

The notion that the Spanish were uniquely brutal and cruel in their conquest and settlement of the Americas, an idea propagated by rival European powers.

Question 14

What was the Afroeurasian trade world prior to the era of European exploration?

Answer 14

The Afroeurasian trade world linked the products and people of Europe, Asia, and Africa in the fifteenth century. The West was a marginal player in this trading system. Nevertheless, wealthy Europeans were eager consumers of luxury goods from the East, which they received through Italian middlemen.

Question 15

How and why did Europeans undertake ambitious voyages of expansion?

Answer 15

As Europe recovered after the Black Death, new European players entered the scene with novel technology, eager to spread Christianity and to undo Italian and Ottoman domination of trade with the East. A century after the plague, Iberian explorers began overseas voyages that helped create the modern world, with immense consequences for their own continent and the rest of the planet.

Question 16

What was the impact of Iberian conquest and settlement on the peoples and ecologies of the Americas?

Answer 16

Before Columbus’s arrival, the Americas were inhabited by thousands of groups of indigenous peoples with distinct languages and cultures. These groups ranged from hunter-gatherer tribes organized into tribal confederations to settled agriculturalists to large-scale empires containing bustling cities and towns. The best estimate is that the peoples of the Americas numbered between 50 and 60 million in 1492. These numbers were decimated, and the lives of survivors radically altered, by the arrival of Europeans.

Question 17

How was the era of global contact shaped by new commodities, commercial empires, and forced migrations?

Answer 17

The centuries-old Afroeurasian trade world was forever changed by the European voyages of discovery and their aftermath. For the first time, a truly global economy emerged in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and it forged new links among far-flung peoples, cultures, and societies. The ancient civilizations of Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia confronted each other in new and rapidly evolving ways. Those confrontations often led to conquest, forced migration, and brutal exploitation, but they also contributed to cultural exchange and new patterns of life.

Question 18

How did new encounters shape cultural attitudes and beliefs in Europe and the rest of the world?

Answer 18

The age of overseas expansion heightened Europeans’ contacts with the rest of the world. These contacts gave birth to new ideas about the inherent superiority or inferiority of different races. Religion became another means of cultural contact, as European missionaries aimed to spread Christianity in both the New World and East Asia. The East-West contacts also led to exchanges of influential cultural and scientific ideas.

Question 19

Who were the Ottomans?

Answer 19

The Ruling house of the Turkish empire that lasted from 1299 to 1922.

Question 20

What was a sultan?

Answer 20

An Arabic word used by the Ottomans to describe a supreme political and military ruler.

Question 21

What were viziers?

Answer 21

Chief assistants to caliphs.

Question 22

What was a devshirme?

Answer 22

A process whereby the sultan’s agents swept the provinces for Christian youths to be trained as soldiers or civil servants.

Question 23

What were janissaries?

Answer 23

Turkish for “recruits”; they formed the elite army corps.

Question 24

What is a concubine?

Answer 24

A woman who is a recognized spouse but of lower status than a wife.

Question 25

What is a shah?

Answer 25

Persian word for “king.”

Question 26

Who were the Safavid?

Answer 26

The dynasty that ruled all of Persia and other regions from 1501 to 1722; its state religion was Shi’ism.

Question 27

Who were the Qizilbash?

Answer 27

Nomadic Turkish Sufis who supplied the early Safavid state with military troops in exchange for grazing rights.

Question 28

Who are ulama?

Answer 28

Religious scholars who interpret the Qur’an and the Sunna, the deeds and sayings of Muhammad.

Question 29

Define Mughal

Answer 29

A term used to refer to the Muslim empire of India, which was the largest, wealthiest, and most populous of the Islamic empires of the early modern world.

Question 30

Define sepoys

Answer 30

The native Indian troops who were trained as infantrymen.

Question 31

How were the three Islamic empires established, and what sorts of governments did they set up?

Answer 31

Turkish ruling houses: Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal.

1. Ottoman-Dominated with military aggressiveness, technologically advanced with cannons, and used artillery and siege weapons to targeted cities. Leadership and political agility gave the population the illusion that they were not under control at all.
2. Safavid-(Persia)
3. Mughal-(India)

Question 32

What cultural advances occurred under the rule of the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires?

Answer 32

All three Islamic empires presided over extraordinary artistic and intellectual flowering in everything from carpetmaking to architecture and gardening, from geography and astronomy to medicine. At the same time, new religious practices (and conflicts) emerged, and people found new outlets for socializing and exchanging ideas. Artistic and intellectual advances spread from culture to culture, probably because of the common Persian influence on the Turks since the tenth century. This exchange was also aided by shared languages, especially Arabic, Turkish, and Persian. Persian was used as the administrative language by the Mughals in India, and Arabic was a lingua franca of the entire region because of its centrality in Islam. In Ottoman lands, both Persian and Arabic were literary languages, but Turkish slowly became the lingua franca of the realm.

Question 33

How did Christians, Jews, Hindus, and other non-Muslims fare under these Islamic states?

Answer 33

Drawing on Qur’anic teachings, Muslims had long practiced a religious tolerance unknown in Christian Europe. Muslim rulers for the most part guaranteed the lives and property of Christians and Jews in exchange for their promise of obedience and the payment of a poll tax. In the case of the Ottomans, this tolerance was extended not only to the Christians and Jews who had been living under Muslim rule for centuries but also to the Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, and other Orthodox Christians in the newly conquered Balkans. In 1454 Rabbi Isaac Sarfati sent a letter to the Jews in the Rhineland, Swabia, Moravia, and Hungary, urging them to move to Turkey because of the favorable treatment there. A massive migration to Ottoman lands followed. When Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain expelled the Jews in 1492 and later, many migrated to the Ottoman Empire.

Question 34

How were the Islamic empires affected by the gradual shift toward trade routes that bypassed their lands?

Answer 34

It has widely been thought that a decline in the wealth and international importance of the Muslim empires could be directly attributed to the long-term shift in trading patterns that resulted from the discoveries of Columbus, Magellan, and other European explorers. The argument is that new sea routes enabled Europeans to acquire goods from the East without using Muslim intermediaries so that the creation of European colonial powers beginning in the sixteenth century led directly and indirectly to the eclipse of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. Recent scholars have challenged these ideas as too simplistic. First, it was not until the eighteenth century that political decline became evident in the three Islamic empires. Second, Turkish, Persian, and Indian merchants remained very active as long-distance traders into the eighteenth century and opened up many new routes themselves. It is true that in the Islamic empires New World crops like potatoes and sweet potatoes fueled population increases less rapidly than in western Europe and East Asia. By 1800 the population of India was about 190 million, that of Safavid lands about 8 million, and that of Ottoman lands about 24 million. (By comparison, China’s population stood at about 300 million in 1800 and Russia’s about 35 million.)

Question 35

What common factors led to the decline of central power in the Islamic empires in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries?

Answer 35

By the end of the eighteenth century, all three of the major Islamic empires were on the defensive and losing territory. They faced some common problems — succession difficulties, financial strain, and loss of military superiority — but their circumstances differed in significant ways as well.

Question 36

Define Protestant Reformation

Answer 36

A religious reform movement that began in the early sixteenth century and split the Western Christian Church.

Question 37

Define Jesuits

Answer 37

Members of the Society of Jesus, founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, whose goal was the spread of the Roman Catholic faith through schools and missionary activity.

Question 38

Define moral economy

Answer 38

The early modern European view that community needs predominated over competition and profit and that necessary goods should thus be sold at a fair price.

Question 39

Define Thirty Years’War

Answer 39

A large-scale conflict extending from 1618 to 1648 that pitted Protestants against Catholics in central Europe, but also involved dynastic interests, notably of Spain and France.

Question 40

Define sovereignty

Answer 40

Authority of states that possess a monopoly over the instruments of justice and the use of force within clearly defined boundaries and in which private armies present no threat to central control; seventeenth-century European states made important advances toward sovereignty.

Question 41

Define absolutism

Answer 41

A political system common to early modern Europe in which monarchs claimed exclusive power to make and enforce laws, without checks by other institutions; this system was limited in practice by the need to maintain legitimacy and compromise with elites.

Question 42

Define divine right of kings

Answer 42

The belief propagated by absolutist monarchs in Europe that they derived their power from God and were only answerable to him.

Question 43

Define mercantilism

Answer 43

A system of economic regulations aimed at increasing the power of the state derived from the belief that a nation’s international power was based on its wealth, specifically its supply of gold and silver.

Question 44

Define constitutionalism

Answer 44

A form of government in which power is limited by law and balanced between the authority and power of the government, on the one hand, and the rights and liberties of the subject or citizen, on the other; it includes constitutional monarchies and republics.

Question 45

Define republicanism

Answer 45

A form of government in which there is no monarch and power rests in the hands of the people as exercised through elected representatives.

Question 46

Define Puritans

Answer 46

Members of a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century reform movement within the Church of England that advocated purifying it of Roman Catholic elements, such as bishops, elaborate ceremonials, and wedding rings.

Question 47

Define Bill of Rights of 1689

Answer 47

A bill passed by Parliament and accepted by William and Mary that limited the powers of British monarchs and affirmed those of Parliament.

Question 48

Define Navigation Acts

Answer 48

Mid-seventeenth-century English mercantilist laws that greatly restricted other countries’ rights to trade with England and its colonies.

Question 49

Define Cossacks

Answer 49

Free groups and outlaw armies living on the borders of Russian territory from the fourteenth century onward. In the mid-sixteenth century they formed an alliance with the Russian state.

Question 50

How did the Protestant and Catholic Reformations change power structures in Europe and shape European colonial expansion?

Answer 50

As a result of a movement of religious reform known as the Protestant Reformation, Western Christendom broke into many divisions in the sixteenth century. This splintering happened not only for religious reasons but also because of political and social factors. Religious transformation provided a source of power for many rulers and shaped European colonial expansion.

Question 51

How did seventeenth-century European rulers overcome social and economic crisis to build strong states?

Answer 51

Historians often refer to the seventeenth century as an “age of crisis” because Europe was challenged by population losses, economic decline, and social and political unrest. These difficulties were partially due to climate changes that reduced agricultural productivity. But they also resulted from military competition among European powers, the religious divides of the Reformations, increased taxation, and war. Peasants and the urban poor were especially hard hit by the economic problems, and they frequently rioted against high food prices.

Question 52

What was absolutism, and how did it evolve in seventeenth-century Spain, France, and Austria?

Answer 52

Rulers in absolutist states asserted that, because they were chosen by God, they were responsible to God alone. Under the rule of absolutism, monarchs claimed exclusive power to make and enforce laws, denying any other institution or group the authority to check their power. This system was limited in practice by the need to maintain legitimacy and compromise with elites. Spain, France, and Austria provide three key examples of the development of the absolutist state.

Question 53

Why and how did the constitutional state triumph in England and the Dutch Republic?

Answer 53

While most European nations emerged from the crises of the seventeenth century with absolutist forms of government, England and the Netherlands evolved toward constitutionalism, which is the limitation of government by law. Constitutionalism also implies a balance between the authority and power of the government, on the one hand, and the rights and liberties of the subjects, on the other.

Question 54

How did European nations compete for global trade and empire in the Americas and Asia?

Answer 54

For much of the sixteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese dominated European overseas trade and colonization (see “Conquest and Settlement” in Chapter 16). In the early seventeenth century, however, England, France, and the Netherlands challenged Spain’s monopoly. They eventually succeeded in creating overseas empires, consisting of settler colonies in North America, slave plantations in the Caribbean, and scattered trading posts in West Africa and Asia. Competition among them was encouraged by mercantilist economic doctrine, which dictated that foreign trade was a zero-sum game in which one country’s gains necessarily entailed another’s loss.

Question 55

How did Russian rulers build a distinctive absolutist monarchy and expand into a vast and powerful empire?

Answer 55

Russia occupied a unique position among Eurasian states. With borders straddling eastern Europe and northwestern Asia, its development into a strong imperial state drew on elements from both continents. As in the Muslim empires in Central and South Asia and the Ming Dynasty in China, the expansion of Russia was a result of the weakening of the great Mongol and Timurid Empires. After declaring independence from the Mongols, the Russian tsars conquered a vast empire, extending through North Asia all the way to the Pacific Ocean. State-building and territorial expansion culminated during the reign of Peter the Great, who turned Russia toward the West by intervening in western European wars and politics and forcing his people to adopt elements of Western culture.

Question 56

Define Copernican hypothesis

Answer 56

The idea that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe.

Question 57

Define law of inertia

Answer 57

A law formulated by Galileo stating that motion, not rest, is the natural state of an object and that an object continues in motion forever unless stopped by some external force.

Question 58

Define law of universal gravitation

Answer 58

Newton’s law that all objects are attracted to one another and that the force of attraction is proportional to the object’s quantity of matter and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them.

Question 59

Define empiricism

Answer 59

A theory of inductive reasoning that calls for acquiring evidence through observation and experimentation rather than reason and speculation.

Question 60

Define Enlightenment

Answer 60

An intellectual and cultural movement in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the wider world that used rational and critical thinking to debate issues such as political sovereignty, religious tolerance, gender roles, and racial difference.

Question 61

Define sensationalism

Answer 61

An idea, espoused by John Locke, that all human ideas and thoughts are produced as a result of sensory impressions.

Question 62

Define philosophes

Answer 62

A group of French intellectuals who proclaimed that they were bringing the light of knowledge to their fellow humans.

Question 63

Define deism

Answer 63

Belief in a distant, noninterventionist deity, shared by many Enlightenment thinkers.

Question 64

Define general will

Answer 64

A concept associated with Rousseau, referring to the common interests of all the people, who have displaced the monarch as the holder of sovereign power.

Question 65

Define economic liberalism

Answer 65

The theory, associated with Adam Smith, that the pursuit of individual self-interest in a competitive market would lead to rising prosperity and greater social equality, rendering government intervention unnecessary and undesirable.

Question 66

Define salons

Answer 66

Regular social gatherings held by talented and rich Parisian women in their homes, where philosophes and their followers met to discuss literature, science, and philosophy.

Question 67

Define enlightened absolutism

Answer 67

Term coined by historians to describe the rule of eighteenth-century monarchs who, without renouncing their own absolute authority, took up the call to reform their governments in accordance with the rational and humane principles of the Enlightenment.

Question 68

Define Haskalah

Answer 68

A Jewish Enlightenment movement led by Prussian philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Question 69

Define enclosure

Answer 69

The controversial process of fencing off common land to create privately owned fields that increased agricultural production at the cost of reducing poor farmers’ access to land.

Question 70

Define cottage industry

Answer 70

Manufacturing with hand tools in peasant cottages and work sheds, a form of economic activity that became important in eighteenth-century Europe.

Question 71

Define public sphere

Answer 71

An idealized intellectual space that emerged in Europe during the Enlightenment. Here, the public came together to discuss important social, economic, and political issues.

Question 72

What revolutionary discoveries were made in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and what was their global context?

Answer 72

Building on developments in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, tremendous advances in Europeans’ knowledge of the natural world and techniques for establishing such knowledge took place between 1500 and 1700. Collectively known as the “Scientific Revolution,” these developments emerged because many more people studied the natural world, using new methods to answer fundamental questions about the universe and how it operated. The authority of ancient Greek texts was replaced by a conviction that knowledge should be acquired by observation and experimentation and that mathematics could be used to understand and represent the workings of the physical world. By 1700 precise laws governing physics and astronomy were known, and a new emphasis on the practical uses of knowledge had emerged.

Question 73

What intellectual and social changes occurred as a result of the Scientific Revolution?

Answer 73

The Scientific Revolution was not accomplished by a handful of brilliant individuals working alone. Advancements occurred in many fields as scholars developed new methods to seek answers to long-standing problems with the collaboration and assistance of skilled craftsmen who invented new instruments and helped conduct experiments. These results circulated in an international intellectual community from which women were usually excluded.

Question 74

How did the Enlightenment emerge, and what were major currents of Enlightenment thought?

Answer 74

The political, intellectual, and religious developments of the early modern period that gave rise to the Scientific Revolution further contributed to a series of debates about key issues in late-seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the wider world that came to be known as the Enlightenment. By shattering the unity of Western Christendom, the conflicts of the Reformation brought old religious certainties into question; the strong states that emerged to quell the disorder soon inspired questions about political sovereignty and its limits. Increased movement of peoples, goods, and ideas within and among the states of Asia, Africa, Europe, and its colonies offered examples of shockingly different ways of life and values. Finally, the tremendous achievements of the Scientific Revolution inspired intellectuals to believe that answers to all the questions being asked could be found through the use of rational and critical thinking. Progress was possible in human society as well as science.

Question 75

How did Enlightenment thinkers address issues of cultural and social difference and political power?

Answer 75

The Scientific Revolution and the political and religious conflicts of the late seventeenth century were not the only developments that influenced European thinkers. Europeans’ increased interactions with non-European peoples and cultures also helped produce the Enlightenment spirit. Enlightenment thinkers struggled to assess differences between Western and non-Western cultures, often adopting Eurocentric views, but sometimes expressing admiration for other societies. These same thinkers focused a great deal of attention on other forms of cultural and social difference, developing new ideas about race, gender, and political power. Although new “scientific” ways of thinking often served to justify inequality, the Enlightenment did see a rise in religious tolerance, a particularly crucial issue for Europe’s persecuted Jewish population.

Question 76

How did economic and social change and the rise of Atlantic trade interact with Enlightenment ideas?

Answer 76

Enlightenment debates took place within a rapidly evolving material world. Agricultural reforms contributed to a rise in population that in turned fueled substantial economic growth in eighteenth-century Europe. A new public sphere emerged in the growing cities of Europe and its colonies in which people exchanged opinions in cafés, bookstores, and other spaces. A consumer revolution brought fashion and imported foods into the reach of common people for the first time.

Question 77

Define chattel

Answer 77

An item of personal property; a term used in reference to enslaved people that conveys the idea that they are subhuman, like animals, and therefore may be treated like animals.

Question 78

Define age-grade systems

Answer 78

Among the societies of Senegambia, groups of teenage males and females whom the society initiated into adulthood at the same time.

Question 79

Define oba

Answer 79

The title of the king of Benin.

Question 80

Define Taghaza

Answer 80

A settlement in the western Sahara, the site of the main salt-mining center.

Question 81

Define Tuareg

Answer 81

Major branch of the nomadic Berber peoples who controlled the north-south trans-Saharan trade in salt.

Question 82

Define cowrie shells

Answer 82

Imported from the Maldives, they served as the medium of exchange in West Africa.

Question 83

Define Coptic Christianity

Answer 83

Orthodox form of Christianity from Egypt practiced in Ethiopia.

Question 84

Define Swahili

Answer 84

Meaning “People of the Coast,” the term used for the people living along the East African coast and on nearby islands.

Question 85

Define Middle Passage

Answer 85

Enslaved Africans’ horrific voyage across the Atlantic to the Americas, under appalling and often deadly conditions.

Question 86

Define sorting

Answer 86

A collection or batch of British goods that would be traded for a slave or for a quantity of gold, ivory, or dyewood.

Question 87

Define shore trading

Answer 87

A process for trading goods in which European ships sent boats ashore or invited African dealers to bring traders and slaves out to the ships.

Question 88

What types of economic, social, and political structures were found in the kingdoms and states along the west coast and in the Sudan?

Answer 88

In mid-fifteenth-century Africa, Benin (buh-NEEN) and a number of other kingdoms flourished along the two-thousand-mile west coast between Senegambia and the northeastern shore of the Gulf of Guinea. Further inland, in the region of the Sudan (soo-DAN), the kingdoms of Songhai, Kanem-Bornu (KAH-nuhm BOR-noo), and Hausaland benefited from the trans-Saharan caravan trade, which along with goods brought Islamic culture to the region. Stateless societies such as those in the region of Senegambia (modern-day Senegal and the Gambia) existed alongside these more centralized states. Despite their political differences and whether they were agricultural, pastoral, or a mixture of both, West African cultures all faced the challenges presented by famine, disease, and the slave trade.

Question 89

How did the arrival of Europeans and other foreign cultures affect the East African coast, and how did Ethiopia and the Swahili city-states respond to these incursions?

Answer 89

East Africa in the early modern period faced repeated incursions from foreign powers. At the beginning of the sixteenth century Ethiopia faced challenges from the Muslim state of Adal, and then from Europeans. Jesuit attempts to substitute Roman Catholic liturgical forms for the Coptic Christian liturgies (see below) met with fierce resistance and ushered in a centuries-long period of hostility to foreigners. The wealthy Swahili city-states along the southeastern African coast also resisted European intrusions in the sixteenth century, with even more disastrous results. Cities such as Mogadishu, Kilwa, and Sofala used Arabic as the language of communication, and their commercial economies had long been tied to the Indian Ocean trade. The arrival of the Portuguese in 1498 proved catastrophic for those cities, and the Swahili coast suffered economic decline as a result.

Question 90

What role did slavery play in African societies before the transatlantic slave trade began, and what was the effect of European involvement?

Answer 90

The exchange of peoples captured in local and ethnic wars within sub-Saharan Africa, the trans-Saharan slave trade with the Mediterranean Islamic world beginning in the seventh century, and the slave traffic across the Indian Ocean all testify to the long tradition and continental dimensions of the African slave trade before European intrusion. The enslavement of human beings was practiced in some form or another all over Africa — indeed, all over the world. Sanctioned by law and custom, enslaved people served critical and well-defined roles in the social, political, and economic organization of many African societies. Domestically these roles ranged from concubines and servants to royal guards and advisers. As was the case later in the Americas, some enslaved people were common laborers. In terms of economics, slaves were commodities for trade, no more or less important than other trade items, such as gold and ivory.