AP WORD UNIT 4

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Maritime Empires

Empires based on sea power that expanded through naval technology, exploration, and control of trade routes across oceans during 1450–1750, allowing states to build overseas colonies and dominate global trade. These empires, such as the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire, used ships, navigation tools, and military force to control ports, resources, and trade networks across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Adoption and Innovation of Maritime Technologies

A cause of exploration in the 1400s–1600s was the improvement and use of new maritime technologies such as the astrolabe, magnetic compass, caravel, and lateen sail, which allowed sailors to navigate more accurately and travel longer distances across open oceans. These innovations enabled European powers like the Portuguese Empire and Spanish Empire to explore, trade, and establish maritime empires across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Caravel

A small, fast, and highly maneuverable sailing ship developed by the Portuguese during the 1400s that used lateen sails to travel effectively against the wind, allowing longer ocean voyages and exploration along coasts and across the Atlantic, helping powers like the Portuguese Empire expand trade and exploration routes.

Growth of State Power

A cause of exploration in the 1400s–1600s was the increasing power of centralized governments, which allowed monarchs to fund voyages, build navies, and compete for wealth and territory. Strong states like the Spanish Empire and Portuguese Empire used their resources to support explorers and establish overseas empires.

Mercantilism

An economic system in which governments sought to increase wealth and power by accumulating precious metals like gold and silver and maintaining a favorable balance of trade, leading states to establish colonies as sources of raw materials and markets for finished goods. This system guided policies in empires like the Spanish Empire and British Empire, where colonies existed to benefit the mother country economically.

Joint-Stock Company

A business organization in which investors pooled money to fund large trading ventures and shared the profits and risks, allowing for more expensive and long-distance overseas trade. These companies, such as the British East India Company and Dutch East India Company, played a major role in expanding European trade and influence across Asia, Africa, and the Americas.

Dutch East India Company

A powerful joint-stock company that controlled trade in the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, using military force, trade monopolies, and fortified ports to dominate the spice trade and expand its economic influence overseas. It acted like a state by having the power to wage war, make treaties, and govern territories, showing how private companies could play a major role in building maritime empires.

Portuguese Maritime Empire

A maritime empire was created in the 1400s–1600s through exploration along the African coast and into the Indian Ocean, using advanced navigation technology, fortified trading posts, and naval power to control key sea routes and dominate trade in spices, gold, and other valuable goods. The empire was not based on large land conquest but on a network of coastal forts and ports (like Goa and Malacca) that allowed Portugal to control trade and collect profits from ocean routes.

Spain Maritime Empire

A maritime empire created in the late 1400s–1600s through overseas exploration, conquest, and colonization after voyages like Columbus’s journey in 1492, leading to control of large territories in the Americas. They used military force, alliances with local groups, and systems like encomienda to exploit Indigenous labor and resources, especially silver and gold, while spreading Christianity and building a global empire connected by Atlantic trade routes.

French Maritme Empire

A maritime empire during the 1500s–1600s that focused less on large-scale conquest and more on trade, alliances, and settlement in North America and parts of the Caribbean, as France built a maritime empire based on the fur trade and resource extraction. French explorers like Jacques Cartier traveled along the St. Lawrence River, and French settlers established colonies such as Quebec, often cooperating with Indigenous peoples for trade rather than large-scale conquest.

English Exploration and Colonization

A maritime empire during the 1500s–1700s that involved sending explorers like Sir Walter Raleigh and settlers to establish overseas colonies and expand trade networks. They founded colonies in North America, such as Jamestown and Roanoke, as well as plantation colonies in the Caribbean like Barbados, which produced cash crops like tobacco and sugar using indentured and enslaved labor. They also established trading posts in India through Joint-Stock Companies, but early expansion there was limited because they were restricted by the Mughal Empire.

Dutch Maritime Empire

They created a maritime empire in the 1600s due to strong commercial interests, advanced shipping technology, and the desire to dominate the highly profitable spice trade. Through Joint-Stock Companies they established trading posts, naval bases, and monopolies across the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia, especially in places like Indonesia. Their empire was based on controlling trade routes rather than large territorial conquest, relying on naval power, joint-stock investment, and fortified ports to maintain economic dominance.

The Columbian Exchnage

The transfer of new diseases, food, plants, and animals between the Eastern and Western hemispheres. (environmental)

Transfer of Disease

Europeans introduces smallpox and Measles to the Americas. This wiped of 50% of the population, including 90% in some areas. Malaria was also prominent, which was carried by mosquitoes

Transfer of foods

European settlers brought wheat, olives, and grapes, and brought asian foods like rice, sugar, and bananas.

American food introduced was potatoes and maize. Contributed to healthier populations, longer lifespans, and a population boom. Enslaved Africans brought okra/rice to the Americas

Cash cropping

The production of agricultural goods specifically for sale and export rather than for local consumption (sugar cane), which became widespread in colonial economies during 1450–1750.

Transfer of Animals

The transfer of domesticated animals between the Old World and the Americas during the Columbian Exchange, which greatly changed agriculture, transportation, and diets. Horses introduced by the Spanish Empire spread across the Great Plains and transformed many Indigenous societies by making hunting and travel faster and more mobile.

Japan’s Resistance

This state resisted Western intrusion in the 1600s–1800s because leaders wanted to maintain political stability, protect traditional culture, and prevent foreign influence, especially Christianity, from weakening state control. The Tokugawa Shogunate restricted European contact by expelling most foreigners and allowing only limited Dutch and Chinese trade through Nagasaki, effectively isolating them from most Western influence.

Fronde Rebellion

A series of civil wars in France (1648–1653) where nobles and common people revolted against the increasing power of the monarchy, especially during the rule of Louis XIV’s early reign, because of heavy taxation, economic hardship, and resistance to growing royal absolutism that reduced the power of traditional elites. But it ultimately failed, allowing the monarchy to become even stronger under Louis XIV’s absolute rule.

Maroon Societies

Communities formed by escaped enslaved Africans in the Americas during 1450–1750 who established independent settlements, often in remote or difficult-to-reach areas, where they resisted colonial control, preserved African cultural traditions, and sometimes launched raids or negotiated treaties with European colonial governments.

Asante Empire

A powerful West African state that thrived during 1450–1750 by controlling and taxing regional trade networks, especially in gold, ivory and enslaved people. Its growth was closely tied to increased contact with European traders along the coast, who exchanged goods like firearms for gold and captives.

Kingdom of Congo

This African state developed a trade relationship with Portugal in the 1400s–1600s that initially brought wealth, new goods, and Christianity to the region, strengthening the kingdom’s connections to global trade networks. However, over time, this relationship increasingly focused on the Atlantic slave trade, which led to social disruption, population loss, and internal instability as local leaders competed for access to European goods and power.

Indian Ocean Trade Network Changes and Continuity

In this network of exchange,

Changes: Entrance and massive power grabs of European states into this network

Continuity: Middle Eastern, South, East, and Southeast Asian merchants continued to use the network like the Gujaratis.

Over land routes, the Asian land-based powers still controlled them almost entirely.

Peasant and artisan labor continued too

Atlantic Trade Network

A new global trade system that developed after 1492 connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas, where goods, people, plants, animals, and diseases were exchanged across the Atlantic Ocean. This system, transformed economies and societies by introducing new crops to different continents, expanding plantation agriculture in the Americas, and creating a forced labor system based on the transatlantic slave trade. (economical and political)

Good traded across American network

Maize, potatoes, and sugar from the Americas, exchanged through the Atlantic Ocean trade system, became staple crops in Europe and contributed to population growth by increasing food availability and agricultural productivity.

Silver

A highly valuable precious metal that became one of the most important global trade goods during the 1450–1750 period, especially after large amounts were extracted from mines in the Americas and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean trade system and Pacific routes. It was used as currency in global trade networks, particularly in China, where high demand made it a key driver of global economic exchange and increased interconnection between Europe, the Americas, and Asia. It maintained the Atlantic System

Coerced Labor

A system in which people are forced to work against their will through violence, legal control, or economic pressure, commonly used in colonial empires during 1450–1750 to produce cash crops and extract resources for global trade.

Mit’a system

A system of coerced labor deployed by the Inca’s, it required their subjects to provide labor on state projects for a certain number of days per year. (for the good of their people). The Spanish used this system from the Inca’s. (to for the good of ppl only in the Spanish state)

Chattel Slavery

A form of slavery in which enslaved people are treated as complete property that can be bought, sold, and inherited, with no rights or legal freedom, which became a major system in the Americas during 1450–1750 as part of plantation economies linked to the Atlantic Ocean trade system.

Effects of African (Chattel) Slavery

Significant Gender imbalances where 21 male slaves vs women slaves.(especially in West African States)

Changing Family structures - Polygyny (men marrying more than 1 women)

Cultural Synthesis - Growing Emergences of Creole (mixed)languages in the Caribbean and Brazil.

indentured servitude

A labor system in which individuals worked for a fixed number of years in exchange for passage to the Americas, food, and shelter, but without wages or freedom during the contract period. In the British Empire, in colonies like Virginia, many Europeans worked as indentured servants on tobacco plantations for several years in exchange for passage to North America.

Encomienda System

A labor system used by the Spanish Empire in the Americas in which Spanish colonists were granted control over Indigenous labor and tribute in a specific area, supposedly in exchange for protection and Christianization, but in practice it led to forced labor, exploitation, and severe population decline among Indigenous peoples during the 1450–1750 period. (nothing to do with ladno ownership)

Hacienda

A system of large agricultural estates in Spanish America during the 1450–1750 period where landowners controlled vast areas of land and used Indigenous and mixed-race laborers who were often tied to the land through debt peonage or coercion. (not much different that slavery)

Changes in Christianity (CHANGING BELIEF SYSTEMS & SOCIAL HIERARCHIES)

Was the global spread of the religion through missionary activity, especially by the Jesuits, a Catholic religious order that traveled to Asia, Africa, and the Americas to convert people to their religion and adapt teachings to local cultures in order to gain converts? These missions were often supported by European maritime empires and connected to expanding global trade networks

Treatment of Jews (CHANGING BELIEF SYSTEMS & SOCIAL HIERARCHIES)

The treatment of Jewish communities during this period showed diversity because it varied widely depending on the region and ruler—ranging from acceptance and relative tolerance to discrimination, forced segregation, or expulsion. In some places, Jews were allowed to live in protected communities and participate in trade and finance (Ottomans) while in others they faced persecution or were forced to leave due to religious intolerance or political scapegoating. (Spain and Portugal)

Caste System

A system employed by the Spanish where people were ranked based on ancestry, race, and birthplace. At the top were Europeans born in Europe, followed by Europeans born in the Americas, then mixed-race groups, and at the bottom were Indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans, who faced the most restrictions and exploitation within colonial society.

Qing Dynasty’s rise of new elites (CHANGING BELIEF SYSTEMS & SOCIAL HIERARCHIES)

This state maintained the civil service exam system to recruit educated Han Chinese officials while reserving top military and political positions for Manchu elites, creating a dual system that balanced cooperation and control.

The struggles of Existing Elites (CHANGING BELIEF SYSTEMS & SOCIAL HIERARCHIES)

As Russian rulers centralized power during the 1450–1750 period, they faced resistance from powerful aristocratic elites known as boyars, who had traditionally held land and political influence. Leaders like Peter the Great worked to weaken the boyars by reducing their political independence, forcing them into state service, and creating a more modern, Western-style bureaucracy to strengthen absolute control over the state.