Chapter 1 - World Tour 1650
North America
Most of the continent still belongs to to the indigenous peoples → different tribes led to a wide diversity between regions.
Eastern Woodland Indians: agriculture is the basis of the economy. They are sedentary, living in farming villages and larger towns. They hunted and trapped.
Conquistadores: Spanish and Portugese soliders and explorers who sought to conquer and colonize new territories, often leading to significant cultural exchanges and conflicts with indigenous populations.
Chartered company: a group of investors pooled their resources to establish a commercial enterprise, often granted exclusive rights by a government to trade in a specific region or commodity.
3 main types of English colonies
Charter colonies: colonies established by a charter granted by the crown, allowing settlers to govern themselves with a degree of autonomy.
Proprietary colonies:colonies owned by individuals or families who received the land from the crown, granting them significant control over governance and land distribution.
Royal colonies:colonies directly controlled by the crown, where the governor was appointed by the monarch and had limited autonomy, ensuring that royal interests were prioritized.
Coureurs de bois: “runners of the woods” → French fur traders who ventured into the wilderness, establishing trade relationships with Indigenous peoples and contributing to the expansion of the fur trade in North America.
The introduction of European settlers into North America led to the Indigenous peoples being exposed to new diseases they had no natural immunity to, such as smallpox, measles, and so on. This created a ripple effect throughout the Indigenous tribes.
In addition to Indigenous folk being wiped out thanks to the introduction of new diseases, European settlers eventually saw them as more of an “obstacle” instead of something beneficial. European settlers began moving Indigenous tribe members out of their regions slowly and much like the introduction of sickness, this also created a ripple effect throughout the Indigenous population.
Because many Indigenous tribes were moved out of their region and pushed further out west, tribal war became a norm, as well as cultural disruption.
South America
Encomiendos: grants of land and labor given to Spanish settlers, which allowed them to exploit Indigenous labor for agricultural and mining activities.
Casta system: an elaborate system of social classes, ranking individuals based solely on their ancestry. This system was made after there was a heavy gender differentiation between the Spanish men and women, leading to a lot of intercourse in between races.
Outside of the casta system were the Peninsulares and the Creoles. Peninsulares were people of Spanish descent born in Spain: for them was reserved the highest offices in government. Creoles were people of Iberian descent, but they were still born in Spain. However, they were reserved lower offices which eventually led to resentment and rebellion.
The casta system begins with the Mestizos, people that were both Indian and European. Far below them are the Mulattoes, people born of African and European ancestry. These people are treated as almost below human, and they are allowed to a standard education, but nothing more than that.
West Africa
Henry the Navigator: between roughly 1425 and 1460, he sponsored a series of exploratory voyages down the Coast of Africa in an effort to find a way to essentially “avoid” Africa when trading with Asian countries.
Dahomey and Asante: both kingdoms had economies based on waging war to capture slaves and territory. It was almost like a contractual agreement: the more slaves, the more territory that belonged to them.
East Africa
Swahili: a fusion of Arabic and local Bantu dialect. It was indirectly made due to the high volume of trade, and became a sort of “coastal” language.
Bantu: a herding and farming culture that slowly colonized most of the sub-Saharan Africa over the course of the centuries.
South Africa
Boers/afrikaners: Independent farmers working vast cattle stations
North Africa
The Maghreb: north of the Atlas mountains along the coast of what is now modern Morocco.
Japan
Shogunate: a military dictatorship ruled by a “seii taishogun”, which is generally shortened to “shogun”.
Toyotomi Hideyoshi: a peasant born ruler who essentially took the position of Oda Nobunaga after his suicide. Oda considered Toyotomi the only one good enough for the job, but Toyotomi’s peasant origins made him too humble to accept a role as powerful as Shogun, even though Japan was united underneath him. He was instead appointed “kampaku”, which roughly translates to imperial chancellor.
Tokugawa Shogunate: the Tokugawa shoguns had the same goal as the Hideyoshi, including a stable Japan that kept the family in power for as long as possible. They ruled until 1868.
Kirishitan: a corruption of the word “Christian”, meant to cast shame upon Japanese Catholic converts. Hideyoshi persecuted Christians under his rule and mandated for Buddhist priests to keep records of their behaviour.
China
Jesuits in China: essentially Chinese missonaries that spread the Christian word. They converted much of the country to Christianity.
Nurhachi: leader of the Jranzhou Jurchen tribe
Qing Dynasty: Wu Sangui proclaimed his nephew the Shunzi emporer, therefore beginning the dynasty.
Cohongs: licencsed Chinese merchant guilts that were in charge of trading.