Africa
The global spread of African peoples via the slave trade.
What is the African Diaspora?
A global industry in which French, British, and Dutch traders exported fur from North America to Europe, using Native American labor and with great environmental cost to the Americas. A parallel commerce in furs operated under Russian control in Siberia.
What is the Fur Trade?
Between 1500 and 1866, this trade in human beings took an estimated 12.5 million people from African societies, shipped them across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage, and deposited some 10.7 million of them in the Americas as slaves; approximately 1.8 million died during the transatlantic crossing.
What is the Transatlantic Slave System?
Form of imperial dominance based on control of trade through military power rather than on control of peoples or territories.
What are Trading Post Empires?
Nickname used in the early modern period for animal furs, highly valued for their warmth and as symbols of elite status.
What is Soft Gold?
The massive, interconnected web of commerce in premodern times between the lands that bordered the Indian Ocean (including East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia); the network was transformed as Europeans entered it in the centuries following 1500.
What is the Indian Ocean Commercial Network?
The small number of African women who were able to exercise power and accumulate wealth through marriage to European traders.
What are Signares?
The standard Spanish silver coin used by merchants in North America, Europe, India, Russia, West Africa, and China.
What is a Piece of Eight?
Private trading company chartered by the English government around 1600, mainly focused on India; it was given a monopoly on Indian Ocean trade, including the right to make war and to rule conquered peoples.
What is the British East India Company?
An archipelago of Pacific islands colonized by Spain in a relatively bloodless process that extended for the century or so after 1565, a process accompanied by a major effort at evangelization; the Spanish named them the Philippine Islands in honor of King Philip II of Spain.
What are the Philippines?
West African kingdom (current-day Nigeria) whose strong kings sharply limited engagement with the slave trade.
What is Benin?
Free communities for formerly enslaved people in remote regions of South America and the Caribbean; the largest such settlement was Palmares in Brazil, which housed 10,000 or more people for most of the seventeenth century.
What are Maroon Societies?
Private trading company chartered by the Netherlands around 1600, mainly focused on Indonesia; it was given a monopoly on Indian Ocean trade, including the right to make war and to rule conquered peoples.
What is the Dutch East India Company?
The capital of the colonial Philippines, which by 1600 had become a flourishing and culturally diverse city; the site of violent clashes between the Spanish and Chinese residents.
What is Manila?
West African kingdom in which the slave trade became a major state-controlled industry.
What is Dahomey?
City that developed high in the Andes (present-day Bolivia) at the site of the world's largest silver mine and that became the largest city in the Americas, with a population of some 160,000 in the 1570s.
What is Potosi?
Term often used to describe the siphoning of money from Europe to pay for the luxury products of the East, a process exacerbated by the fact that Europe had few trade goods that were desirable in Eastern markets; eventually, the bulk of the world's silver supply made its way to China.
What is the Silver Drain?