APWH
Ch 14: Empires and Encounters
Responses

Margin Review Questions 1. What enabled Europeans to carve out huge empires an ocean away from their homelands? • Europeans were much closer to the Americas than were their potential Asian competitors. • Europeans were powerfully motivated after 1200 to gain access to the world of Eurasian commerce. • Groups within European society—including competing monarchs, merchants, impoverished nobles and commoners, Christian missionaries, and persecuted minorities—all had strong, if different, motivations for participating in empire building. • European states and trading companies enabled the effective mobilization of both human and material resources. • European seafaring technology, built on Chinese and Islamic precedents, allowed Europeans to cross the Atlantic with growing ease. • European ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses initially had no parallel in the Americas. • Divisions within and between local societies provided allies for European invaders. • European germs and diseases to which Native Americans had no immunities decimated society after society, sometimes in advance of the Europeans’ actual arrival. 2. What large-scale transformations did European empires generate? • European empire building caused the demographic collapse of Native American societies. • Combinations of indigenous, European, and African peoples created entirely new societies in the Americas. • Large-scale exchanges of plants and animals transformed the crops and animals raised both in the Americas and in the Eastern Hemisphere. This was the largest and most consequential exchange of plants and animals to this point in human history, and it remade the biological environment of the planet. • The silver mines of Mexico and Peru fueled both transatlantic and transpacific commerce. • The need for plantation workers and the sugar and cotton trade created a lasting link among Africa, Europe, and the Americas, while scattering peoples of African origins throughout the Western Hemisphere. • The “Columbian exchange” produced an interacting Atlantic world connecting four continents. • New information flooded into Europe, shaking up conventional understandings of the world and contributing to a revolutionary new way of thinking known as the Scientific Revolution. • Profits from the colonial trade provided one of the foundations on which Europe’s Industrial Revolution was built. • Colonial empires provided outlets for the rapidly growing population of European societies and represented an enormous extension of European civilization. • Colonial empires of the Americas facilitated a changing global balance of power, which now thrust the previously marginal Western Europeans into an increasingly central and commanding role on the world stage. 3. What was the economic foundation of colonial rule in Mexico and Peru? How did it shape the kinds of societies that arose there? • The economic foundation of colonial rule lay in commercial agriculture and in silver and gold mining based on forced labor and wage labor by indigenous populations. • On this economic base, a distinctive social order grew up, replicating something of the Spanish class hierarchy while accommodating the racially and culturally different Indians and Africans as well as growing numbers of racially mixed people. Spaniards, mestizos, and Indians represented the major social groups in the colonial lands of what had been the Inca and Aztec empires, while African slaves and freemen were far less numerous than elsewhere in the Americas. The society was dominated by Europeans, but with a rather more fluid and culturally blended society than in the racially rigid colonies of North America. Mestizos in particular found some social movement possible. 4. How did the plantation societies of Brazil and the Caribbean differ from those of southern colonies in British North America? • The social outcomes of these plantation