Vocab

• Christopher Columbus: Italian navigator who attempted to find a westward route to Asia under the sponsorship of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain; first European to discover the New World in 1492.

• Conquest of Constantinople: In 1453, the Ottomans conquered the Byzantine capital and ended the Eastern Roman Empire, giving rise to the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until WWl.

• Caravel: Inspired by the Arab dhow, a compact ship of Portuguese origin that featured triangular sails and a sternpost rudder making it capable of crossing oceans; used during the Age of Exploration.

• Dhow: Arab sailing vessels with one or more masts and lateen sails, used in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean region

• Lateen sail: Triangular sail that allowed ships to sail against the wind, increasing maneuverability and making early oceanic sailing possible..

• Junk: Chinese-built cargo ship with a stern-post rudder that allowed for efficient steering.

• Joint-stock companies: Large, investor-backed companies that sponsored European exploration and colonization in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; precursors to modern corporations; famous examples are the British East India Company & Dutch East India Company.

• Columbian exchange: Beginning with the explorations of Christopher Columbus, the interchange of plants, animals, pathogens, and people between the Old World and the New World. One example was the "Great Dying" during which indigenous American populations declined by as much as 70-90% due to infectious disease and imperial expansion.

• Mercantilism: Economic system focused on maintaining a positive balance of exports to imports that encouraged domestic employment; measured the economic strength of a state relative to its neighboring states.

• Sugar cultivation: Specialized resource extraction process that relied on African slave labor after indigenous populations were decimated by disease; foreshadowed the intensive manufacturing of the Industrial Revolution.

• Gunpowder: Chemical explosive developed by the Chinese; spread along trade routes like the Silk Road; Europeans introduced a slow-burning propellant to maximize the potential of explosive weapons.

• Mughal Empire: Empire that reunified India in 1526, advocated religious tolerance, and sponsored great art and architecture projects; later collapsed because of Hindu/Muslim conflict and the competition of European traders.

• Songhai: Successor of the Mali Empire in West Africa in the 1500s; instituted administrative and economic reforms throughout their realm; conquered by the Moroccans in 1591.

• Creoles: Persons of Spanish blood who were born in the Americas; descended from the Peninsulares who came from the continent.

• Mestizos: Persons of mixed European and indigenous descent in the Spanish colonies.

• Mulattos: Persons of mixed African and Spanish descent in the Spanish colonies.

• Manchu: Nomadic group from Northeast China who were the principal rulers of the Qing Dynasty; created a multiethnic Chinese state; later came into conflict with Europeans, particularly the Russian Empire.

• Peter the Great: Tsar of Russia from 1682 to 1725, he rapidly modernized Russia under autocratic rule; moved the capital to St. Petersburg to provide better access to Europe.

• Tokugawa Shogunate: Ruled Japan from 1600 to 1867; isolated Japan from the rest of the world, banned Christianity, and ejected foreign merchants other than a small number of Dutch and Chinese ships annually.

Daimyo: The class of lords in a feudal system centered on the relationship between lord and warrior or peasant, which was reformed during the Tokugawa Shogunate.

• Triangular trade: Trade route between Europe and Africa (manufactured goods), Africa and the New World (enslaved peoples), and the New World and Europe (raw materials like precious metals, sugar, and other agricultural products).

• Encomienda: Spanish system of land grants that allowed colonists in the Americas to force labor from indigenous populations. (related to the Spanish mita systems)

• Haciendas: Spanish system of landed estates in the colonies; owners practiced the encomienda system and later the repartimiento system of labor, where workers were paid.

• Queen Nanny of the Maroons was an 18th-century leader of a formerly enslaved group of African maroons. She and her followers fought a guerrilla war over many years against British authorities in the Colony of Jamaica, earning their sovereignty.

• Printing press: Invented in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg in 1456; made mass literacy possible and contributed to several important social movements, such as the Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment.

• Protestant Reformation: Movement questioning the practices of the Catholic Church during a period of social upheaval, particularly the selling of indulgences; commonly held to start with Martin Luther in Germany and his 95 Theses at Wittenburg; led to other reformers like John Calvin in Switzerland and John Wesley in England.

Scientific Revolution: Period in which scientists challenged traditional accounts of reality by investigating the nature of natural phenomena like astronomical events; led to the scientific method and progress in all of the natural sciences; early figures such as Galileo were persecuted by the Catholic Church.

• Enlightenment: Post-Renaissance period in European history devoted to the study and exploration of new ideas in science, politics, the arts, and philosophy.

• American Revolution: Conflict between American colonists and the British government, caused by growing resentments based on taxation and governing policies; Revolutionary War lasted from 1775 to 1781; ultimately ended in American independence and the first large-scale democracy since ancient Greece.

• French Revolution: Conflict between the Third Estate (peasants, townsfolk, and merchants) and the First and Second Estates (clergy and nobility, respectively) for political and social control; inspired by the American Revolution; various political factions competed for control of the government, with Napoleon Bonaparte ultimately seizing power in a coup.

• Maroon: Term for a nineteenth-century escaped slave in the Americas who established his or her own settlement away from plantations, causing tensions with colonial authorities; term is also used to describe the slaves' present-day descendants.

• Haitian Revolution: Slave revolt that lasted from 1791-1804 led by Toussaint L'Ouverture; the former French colony of Saint-Domingue became the independent nation of Haiti, the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere and the world's first black republic.

• Latin American independence movements: Movements against Spanish colonial rule in Central and South America in the 1810s and 1820s, which led to the independence of every nation in the region; inspired by the success of the Haitian Revolution; A key leader was Simón Bolívar.

• Nationalism: The tendency of people to see themselves as part of a broader community with unifying forces such as common territory, history, culture (religion) and language; this sense of national identity and pride both fueled the expansion of empires and often occurred as a reaction against imperial rule.

• Adam Smith: Scottish economist whose 1776 work The Wealth of Nations advocated a laissez-faire policy toward economics (minimal government interference), making him one of the fathers of modern capitalism.

• Factory system: System of labor that uses rigorous mechanization and large numbers of unskilled workers to mass-produce goods that were once made skillfully by hand; developed during the Industrial Revolution; the use of inter- changeable parts simplified assembly but made work repetitive.

• Global division of labor: The system in which industrialized societies utilized the raw materials of less industrialized societies (e.g., cotton from India, rubber from Brazil, metals from Central Africa) to facilitate large-scale manufacturing and transportation; the growth of these industrialized societies provided an impetus for imperialist conquests later in the nineteenth century. Sometimes referred to as dependency theory.

• First Industrial Revolution: Rapid development and industrial production that occurred in European countries and the United States between 1760 and 1820; the development of the steam engine allowed steamships and early locomotives to rapidly increase the speed at which goods, people, and ideas spread.

Second Industrial Revolution: Continuing industrialization that occurred between 1870 and 1920, which included revolutionary new methods of producing steel, chemicals, and electrical power; changed society in Western Europe, Japan, and the United States by introducing new ways of working and living. Railroads: Steam-powered locomotives invented in England in the 1820s; started a "transportation revolution" in which mass-produced goods could be transported over- land more quickly and inexpensively than ever before; by 1900, virtually every industrialized nation had a well-developed railroad system.

• Liberalism: Political and economic ideology based on Enlightenment philosophies that advocated for constitutional government, separation of powers, and natural rights, as well as limited government involvement in the regulation of the new industrialized economy.

• Socialism: Utopian ideal developed in response to the poor working conditions faced by factory workers; in this radical form of society, the workers would run the economy in a self-sufficient manner and share everything fairly, thereby eliminating the wealthy classes.

• Communism: Extreme form of socialism in which governments centrally plan the economy; inspired by The Communist Manifesto (1848), which advocated the overthrow of the bourgeoisie (capitalist middle-class) by the proletariat (working class).

• Tanzimât Movement: Period of reform in the Ottoman Empire, lasting from 1839 to 1879, that resulted in a modernized infrastructure, a new legal code modeled after the French system, and religious equality under the law.

• First Opium War: Conflict waged between China and Great Britain in 1839 after Chinese customs officials refused British imports of Indian opium due to the addictive effects it had on Chinese workers; this war weakened the Qing Dynasty and made China more vulnerable to unequal trade with the West.

• Second Opium War: Conflict between China, Great Britain, and France that lasted from 1856 to 1860; spurred by the desire of the European powers to further weaken China's position in trade negotiations, to legalize the opium trade, and to expand the export of indentured workers from China.

• Taiping Rebellion: Christian-based uprising led by Chinese scholar Hong Xiuquan that lasted from 1850 to 1864; the violent reaction by the imperial court left China financially strained and caused the bloodiest civil war in world history.

• Boxer Rebellion: Movement undertaken by a secret society of Chinese and backed by Empress Cixi that sought to rid China of foreigners and foreign influence; the Boxers were defeated by a multinational force that included the United States, Russia, and Japan.

• Meiji Restoration: Successful rebellion in which young reform-minded Japanese sought to overthrow the isolationist Tokugawa Shogunate and restore the power of Emperor Meiji; sparked by contact between Japan and the United States; following the restoration, Japan experienced rapid industrialization and modernization.

• Imperialism: Policy of a country extending its rule over other countries, often by force; the world saw a wave of imperialism from 1750 to 1900 in particular, which was spurred by industrial countries' need for raw materials and for markets for their goods, as well as justified by various cultural, racial ideologies about the superiority of imperial powers.

• Social Darwinism: Popular nineteenth-century theory used to justify capitalism and imperialism; drew on evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin's view of "survival of the fittest." Scientific Racism is a term closely associated with Social Darwinism.

• Indian Rebellion (Sepoy Mutiny) of 1857: Conflict fought in India between the British and the Indian soldiers in British service; the British victory strengthened the legitimacy of their rule, but contemporary Indians often remember the Sepoy Rebellion as the first move towards Independence from Britain.

Congo Free State: Colony in Central Africa established in 1885 by Belgium’s King Leopold II:; named "Free State," it consisted of a series of large rubber plantations worked by forced labor in brutal weather and working conditions; in the 1960s, it declared independence, became the nation of Zaire, and is currently known as the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

• Indentured servants: System of coercive labor in which workers are contracted to work for a fixed period of time, usually for a low wage, in exchange for land or other assistance. Was revived in 19 century after the abolition of slavery.

• Chinese Exclusion Act: Law enacted in the United States in 1882 that severely limited immigration from China, which had been prevalent earlier in the nineteenth century during the time of the California Gold Rush and the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad.

• Emancipation of slaves: Process by which slavery was abolished and slaves were granted their freedom; partly the result of slave resistance movements, the abolitionist movement and industrialization's demand for wage laborers; between the 1830s and the 1880s, every industrialized nation and its colonies gradually abolished slavery, turning to other labor systems such as wage labor and indentured servitude.

Emancipation of serfs: Process by which serfdom was abolished in Russia and serfs were granted freedom from their feudal obligation to a lord; the result of Russian Tsar Alexander's attempt to modernize the Russian economy after being beaten by industrialized powers in the Crimean War.

• Feminism: Movement undertaken by women that emerged in the context of the Atlantic revolutions and the industrial revolution; challenged established gender roles and advocated for increased political and legal rights for women.