European Exploration, Columbian Exchange, and Global Trade (1450–1750)

A comprehensive vocabulary review based on Units 22.1 and 22.2 lecture notes covering European maritime expansion, commercial institutions, the Columbian Exchange, and coercive labor systems.

trading posts

Trading centers established by Europeans in foreign territories to control commerce, often focused on valuable goods such as porcelain, silk, and spices, allowing Europeans to interact with foreign rulers without occupying vast regions.

Afonso d'Albuquerque

A Portuguese military commander who helped establish Portugal's dominance in the Indian Ocean by seizing strategic ports and naval chokepoints, forcing merchant vessels to purchase passes, and crushing rival trade networks.

cartaz

A naval trade license or pass issued by the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean that forced merchant ships to pay duties to trade legally and avoid having their ships and cargo confiscated.

joint-stock company

A privately owned business supported by investors who bought shares, pooling capital for commercial voyages and distributing financial risk across many shareholders.

British East India Company

A joint-stock company established in 1600 through a royal charter that created trading posts in India focusing on textiles, spices, and silk, eventually intervening in regional politics to expand territorial control.

VOC

The Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (Dutch East India Company), chartered in 1602 to control Asian trade, which formed a monopoly over spices like cloves, mace, and nutmeg and utilized armed force to secure its commercial dominance.

Seven Years' War

A major conflict between Britain and France driven by imperial competition over trade and overseas territory, culminating in Britain gaining predominant influence over India.

Columbian exchange

The widespread transfer of plants, animals, culture, human populations, communicable diseases, and ideas between the Americas, West Africa, and the Old World in the 15th and 16th centuries following European maritime voyages.

Diseases & the Columbian Exchange

Afro-Eurasian pathogens (such as smallpox, measles, typhus, and influenza) to which indigenous American populations had no immunity, wiping out between $50\%$ and $90\%$ of native inhabitants and creating severe labor shortages that stimulated the transatlantic slave trade.

Afro-Eurasian Crops to the Americas

Agricultural products brought from the Eastern Hemisphere to the Americas—including sugarcane, wheat, rice, okra, coffee, and bananas—where labor-intensive cash crops like sugarcane spurred the expansion of plantation systems and enslaved labor.

Crops from the Americas to Afro-Eurasia

Nutrient-dense Western Hemisphere crops—such as potatoes, maize, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, squash, and cassava—that enriched food supplies and fueled significant population growth and urbanization across Afro-Eurasia.

precious metals in the Americas

Gold and especially silver extracted from American centers like Potosí and Zacatecas using forced indigenous and African labor, which served as a global currency and financed European trade with Asia while sparking severe inflation in Spain and Europe.

Coercive labor systems

Compulsory labor arrangements utilized by colonizers to extract resources like silver and cash crops, including the encomienda system, the mita system, and chattel slavery, which imposed extreme physical hardship and high mortality on laborers.

Treaty of Tordesillas

A 1494 agreement between Spain and Portugal that divided non-European lands along a meridian located $370\text{ leagues}$ west of the Cape Verde Islands, awarding Spain the territories to the west (the Americas) and Portugal the lands to the east (Brazil and Afro-Asian trade routes).