Technology & Exploration
What navigational instrument helped sailors determine their latitude?
What is the astrolabe?
What was the transfer of plants, animals, diseases, and people between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres called?
What is the Columbian Exchange?
What European country established trading posts along the African coast to control trade?
What is Portugal?
What economic system focused on accumulating gold and silver and increasing a nation's wealth and power?
What is mercantilism?
What was the name of the social hierarchy in Spanish colonial America that ranked people according to ancestry and race?
What is the casta system?
What type of sail allowed ships to tack into the wind?
What is the lateen sail?
What disease devastated Indigenous populations in the Americas because they had no immunity to it?
What is smallpox?
What 1494 agreement divided newly claimed lands in the Americas between Spain and Portugal?
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas?
According to mercantilism, what was the primary purpose of colonies?
What was to enrich the mother country by providing raw materials and serving as markets for its goods?
What African queen resisted Portuguese expansion and fought to protect her kingdoms of Ndongo and Matamba?
Who is Queen Nzinga?
What Portuguese ship combined square and lateen sails, allowing it to travel quickly while carrying cargo?
What is the caravel?
Name two major food crops introduced from the Americas to Europe.
What are maize and potatoes?
What two Indigenous American empires were conquered by the Spanish during the 1500s?
What are the Aztec and Incan Empires?
What type of company allowed private investors to pool money together and share the profits and losses of overseas exploration?
What is a joint-stock company?
What 1680 uprising involved Indigenous people driving the Spanish out of present-day New Mexico for over a decade?
What was the Pueblo Revolt?
What Dutch ship was designed exclusively for trade, requiring fewer workers and carrying more cargo than traditional merchant ships?
What is the fluyt?
Why did Europeans increasingly import enslaved Africans to work on plantations in the Americas instead of relying on Indigenous labor?
Indigenous populations declined from disease, and those who were enslaved could often escape because they knew the land.
What joint-stock company helped Britain expand its political and economic influence in India?
What is the British East India Company?
What three regions were connected through the triangular trade system, and what was transported along each leg?
Europe sent manufactured goods to West Africa; enslaved Africans were transported to the Americas; raw materials traveled from the Americas to Europe.
What group of escaped Russian serfs organized as free peasants in the steppes and participated in rebellions?
Who were the Cossacks?
What Portuguese explorer reached India by sailing around the southern tip of Africa in 1497–1498?
Who is Vasco da Gama?
Identify two major environmental consequences of European agricultural expansion in the Americas.
What are deforestation and soil depletion? Other acceptable answers include water shortages and pollution.
What existing Incan labor system did the Spanish exploit to force Indigenous people to work in silver mines?
What is the mit'a system?
What was the economic transformation called that resulted from the massive influx of gold and silver from the Americas into global markets?
What was the Commercial Revolution?
What term describes the blending of different religious traditions, such as African traditional religions and Christianity in the Americas and Africa?
What is syncretism?