Show:
SHIPS & STARS
SETTING SAIL
THE EXCHANGE
EMPIRES AT SEA
PUSHING BACK
100
Chinese invention that let sailors find direction far from land.
What is the magnetic compass? — MC TIP: Borrowed, not invented, by Europeans. That direction of transfer gets tested.
100
Sailing for Spain, he reached the Caribbean in 1492.
Who is Christopher Columbus? — MC TIP: 1492 is the hinge date. Anything Atlantic before it is wrong.
100
Name for the transfer of plants, animals, people, and disease between hemispheres after 1492.
What is the Columbian Exchange? — MC TIP: The single most consequential process in the unit.
100
Economic policy holding that colonies exist to enrich the mother country.
What is mercantilism? — MC TIP: Colonies supply raw materials and buy finished goods. That is the whole rule.
100
Forced voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.
What is the Middle Passage? — MC TIP: One leg of the triangular trade. Know which leg carried what.
200
Triangular sail that let a ship make progress against the wind.
What is the lateen sail? — MC TIP: Adapted from Indian Ocean shipping. Europe assembled other people's technology.
200
Portuguese captain who reached India by sea in 1498.
Who is Vasco da Gama? — MC TIP: A sea route to Asia is the actual goal. The Americas were in the way.
200
Disease that killed the largest share of Indigenous Americans.
What is smallpox? — MC TIP: No prior exposure means no immunity. Demographic collapse follows.
200
Spanish system granting colonists control over Indigenous labor in exchange for ‘protection.’
What is the encomienda? — MC TIP: Forced labor with a legal wrapper. It collapses as the population dies.
200
Communities formed by enslaved people who escaped and lived independently.
What are maroon societies? — MC TIP: Resistance took many forms. Open revolt was only the most visible.
300
Ship design combining square and lateen sails, built for open-ocean voyages.
What is the caravel? — MC TIP: Small, fast, and able to sail into the wind. That combination opens the Atlantic.
300
1494 agreement dividing newly encountered lands between Spain and Portugal.
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas? — MC TIP: It is why Brazil speaks Portuguese and the rest of Latin America speaks Spanish.
300
American crop that fed Europe's population boom, especially in the north.
What is the potato? — MC TIP: Calories per acre. It also sets up the Irish famine much later.
300
Bolivian mountain whose silver poured into the global economy.
What is Potosí? — MC TIP: American silver buys Asian goods. That is what ties the world into one economy.
300
1680 uprising that expelled the Spanish from New Mexico for over a decade.
What is the Pueblo Revolt? — MC TIP: Attacks on local religion are the usual trigger for Indigenous revolt.
400
Instrument that measured the angle of the sun or a star above the horizon to fix latitude.
What is the astrolabe? — MC TIP: Islamic in origin. Another borrowed technology in the European toolkit.
400
Portuguese prince who funded Atlantic voyages and gathered navigators and mapmakers.
Who is Prince Henry the Navigator? — MC TIP: State sponsorship is the point. Exploration was a government project, not private adventure.
400
European animal that reshaped life and warfare on the North American plains.
What is the horse? — MC TIP: Indigenous peoples adapted European imports on their own terms.
400
Dutch and English corporations that pooled investor capital and spread the risk of long voyages.
What are joint-stock companies? — MC TIP: The VOC and the EIC. Private capital doing state work.
400
Spanish colonial ranking that fixed legal status according to birthplace and ancestry.
What is the casta system? — MC TIP: Peninsulares, creoles, mestizos, Indigenous, enslaved Africans. Know the order.
500
Detailed sailor-made charts of coastlines, harbors, and compass bearings.
What are portolan charts? — MC TIP: Practical knowledge accumulated by working sailors, not by scholars.
500
English and Dutch expeditions spent a century hunting for this northern shortcut to Asia.
What is the Northwest Passage? — MC TIP: Latecomers took the worst routes. It explains where they ended up colonizing.
500
American crop adopted widely across Africa and China, where it supported major population growth.
What is maize? — MC TIP: The exchange was not one-way and not only Atlantic. Watch for Afro-Asian effects.
500
Forced labor draft the Spanish imposed in Peru, borrowing its name and structure from the Inca.
What is the mita? — MC TIP: Colonizers reused existing systems. Potosí ran on this.
500
1637 uprising of Japanese Christian peasants that pushed the shogunate into near-total isolation.
What is the Shimabara Rebellion? — MC TIP: Not every state welcomed contact. Japan and China limited it deliberately.