Ships, Sails & Power
(TEC / GOV)
(TEC / GOV)
This ship design combined speed, maneuverability, and ocean durability, giving Portugal a strategic advantage in Atlantic and Indian Ocean exploration.
The caravel
This Old World pathogen caused the most dramatic demographic collapse in the Americas after 1492.
Smallpox
This economic theory held that colonies existed primarily to benefit the mother country through controlled trade and bullion accumulation.
Mercantilism
This labor system granted Spanish settlers control over Indigenous labor in exchange for Christianization.
Encomienda System
This European religion spread across the Atlantic world through missionaries and colonial governments after 1492.
Catholic Christianity
This imperial strategy relied on controlling ports and sea lanes instead of conquering entire regions.
Trading-post or Maritime Imperialism
This New World crop transformed European diets and contributed to massive population growth after 1600.
The potato
This Atlantic trade network connected Europe, Africa, and the Americas through manufactured goods, enslaved labor, and raw materials.
The Triangular Trade
This was a successful Indigenous uprising against Spanish colonization in New Mexico, led by the spiritual leader Popé, uniting various communities to drive out the Spanish for 12 years by destroying churches, killing settlers, and expelling authorities due to religious oppression, forced labor, and cultural suppression.
Pueblo Revolt
These belief systems blended African religious practices with Catholicism in the Atlantic world.
Syncretic religions such as Vodun, Santería, or Candomblé
_________ led the 1498 voyage which fundamentally altered Afro-Eurasian trade networks by establishing a direct maritime connection between Western Europe and the Indian Ocean, weakening the dominance of Muslim and Italian intermediaries.
Vasco da Gama
This colonial economic system that emerged from the Columbian Exchange relied on monocrop agriculture and enslaved labor.
The plantation system
This Bolivian silver mine, controlled by the Spanish, became the backbone of the first global currency system.
Potosí
These communities of escaped enslaved Africans formed autonomous societies in the Caribbean and Brazil.
Maroon societies
This Catholic missionary order sought to convert China by adapting Christianity to Confucian traditions.
The Jesuits
This explorers 1492 voyage exemplifies how the post–Reconquista consolidation of royal authority in Iberia transformed medieval exploration into a state-sponsored, mercantilist enterprise aimed at bypassing Ottoman-controlled trade routes and funding Christian expansion through overseas extraction.
Christopher Columbus
This trade network had massive demographic impacts, reshaping the populations of three continents between 1500–1800.
Transatlantic Slave Trade
These state-backed corporations allowed merchants to pool capital, reduce individual risk, and dominate overseas trade.
Joint-stock Companies
This regional uprising in late 17th-century India emerged in response to Aurangzeb’s centralized authority and religious intolerance, significantly weakening Mughal control in the Deccan and accelerating imperial decline.
The Maratha Revolt
This colonial Latin American social structure legally ranked individuals based on ancestry, reinforcing racialized inequality under Spanish rule.
The Casta System
This political change after 1450 enabled European monarchs to fund exploration, enforce monopolies, and build overseas empires.
The rise of centralized, fiscally powerful states
This environmental consequence of plantation agriculture permanently altered Caribbean and Brazilian ecosystems.
Deforestation and soil exhaustion - caused by sugar monoculture?
This trade route linked American silver to Asian markets, completing the first truly global commercial circuit.
Manila Galleon Trade
This labor draft system, originally used by the Inca and later exploited by the Spanish, forced Indigenous peoples to work in mines and plantations.
The Mita System
Despite the spread of Christianity and global cultural exchange, this long-standing social continuity remained embedded in family structure, labor systems, and political authority across Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the early modern period.
Patriarchy / Patriarchal Policies