Navigating the Globe
Labor & The Middle Passage
Controlling Asia
Spanish America
Exchange & Empires
100

This technological instrument allowed sailors to determine their latitude by observing the sun or stars.

What is the Astrolabe?

100

This term refers to the brutal, forced transport of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic.

What is the Middle Passage?

100

The powerful Dutch armed corporation (Joint-Stock Company) that focused on achieving a total monopoly over nutmeg and cloves.

What is the VOC (Dutch East India Company)?

100

The single most decisive factor for the demographic collapse of the Aztec and Inca Empires.

What is Smallpox (or Old World Diseases)?

100

This European economic policy stated that colonies exist only to enrich the mother country.

What is Mercantilism?

200

The Ottoman conquest of this key city in 1453 spurred Europeans to find a new sea route to Asia.

What is Constantinople?

200

This economic and military cycle describes how African rulers exchanged captives for firearms, which were then used to raid for more captives.

What is the Gun-Slave Cycle?

200

The policy used by the Qing Dynasty to restrict all European trade to the single port of Guangzhou (Canton).

What is the Canton System?

200

The Spanish labor system that granted settlers the right to demand labor or tribute from Indigenous people in a given area.

What is the Encomienda System?

200

The Native American strategy of exploiting the rivalry between the French and English to gain better trade deals and military alliances.

What is the Play-Off System?

300

This Portuguese explorer was the first European to successfully sail around Africa's Cape of Good Hope to reach India in 1498.

Who is Vasco da Gama?

300

The primary cash crops (like sugar and tobacco) grown on American plantations that drove the scale of the transatlantic slave trade.

What are Cash Crops?

300

This was the name of the license or permit system the Portuguese navy required local merchants to buy to trade in the Indian Ocean.

What is the Cartaz System?

300

The rigid social hierarchy in Spanish America that was based primarily on racial purity and place of birth.

What is the Casta System?

300

This animal, introduced from Europe during the Columbian Exchange, profoundly changed the life and warfare of plains Native American groups.

What are Horses?

400

This fast, highly maneuverable Portuguese ship had triangular Lateen Sails, allowing it to sail against the wind.

What is the Caravel?

400

The phase of of the Triangular Trade, which involved goods like guns and liquor moving from Europe to West Africa.

Leg 1

400

This was the massive flow of New World silver into Qing China to settle the trade imbalance for Chinese goods.

What is the Silver Drain?

400

The primary commodity that became the lifeblood of Spanish colonial wealth, extracted from mines like Potosí.

What is Silver?

400

Two New World crops (tuber and grain) that had the most positive impact on global population growth in Europe and Asia.

What are Potatoes and Corn?

500

This explorer led the first expedition to circumnavigate (sail around) the globe, proving that Columbus's route was not a short cut to Asia.

Who is Ferdinand Magellan? 

500

States like Ashanti grew powerful in West Africa by using profits from the slave trade to build professional armies and centralized bureaucracies.

What are centralized states?

500

The Japanese policy, also known as "Seclusion," that banned Christianity and restricted foreign trade almost exclusively to the Dutch at Nagasaki.

What are the Sakoku Edicts?

500

The adapted Inca labor draft system that forced Indigenous men to work in the dangerous silver mines.

What is the Mita System?

500

Unlike the French, the English colonies grew much faster because they focused on this goal instead of just the fur trade.

What is permanent settlement and large-scale agriculture?