AP World: Unit 4 Vocab

Def: 17th century Angolan queen who fought internal and neighboring enemies by partnering with the Portuguese and then partnering with the Dutch to unsuccessfully stop the Portuguese from taking over her country

Sig: resistance to European expansion by a powerful female African monarch who took over a neighboring country (Matamba) and established it as a trading power and the gateway to the Central African interior while stirring rebellions against the Portuguese who had taken over her native Ndongo homeland

Def: A triangle trading system on which Africa depended on goods, the Americas depended on slaves, and Europe depended on cash crops


Sig: brought about the dominance of Northern European countries in global trade and as the masters of the American colonies

Def: small oceangoing ships invented by the Portuguese in the 15th century which allowed them access to coastal waters and to explore upriver

Sig: Allowed for the discovery and swift colonization of the Americas and elsewhere by Western European nations

Def: an innovative large merchant ship of a kind operating in European waters in the 14th to the 17th century

Sig: was the model for the galleons used by the Spanish to haul new world wealth to Europe while defending themselves with cannons

Def: the art and science of map-making and superimposing political, cultural, or other non-geographical divisions such as national borders on maps

Sig: new techniques such as the Mercator projection allowed for a better understanding of land layout and led to increasing global exploration in the 16th-18th centuries

Def: a hierarchical system of race classification created by Spanish elites in Hispanic America and the Philippines during the 17-18th centuries

Sig: Was used for social control and determined a person's importance in society, thereby impacting every aspect of life, including economic status and taxation

Def: a direct response by the Catholic Church to the Protestant Reformation by attempting to reform the church to stop spread of Protestant ideas and win back converts

Sig: new religious orders to gain conversions were founded, who were dedicated to the reaffirmed doctrines of the Catholic Church, which saw only minor reforms

Def: the owning of human beings as property to be bought, sold, given, and inherited which came to rise as part of the Triangular Trade

Sig: Enabled the increase of the plantation system and racial tensions

Def: global exchange between the New and Old Worlds of plants, food, animals, people and diseases

Sig: killed off the majority of the native populations in the Americas through disease and the food products exchanged increased global population while some of them led to the forced migration of many people, especially from Africa

Def: any white person of European descent (usually Spanish or French) born in the West Indies or certain parts of the Americas

Sig: considered socially inferior to European-born residents of the colonies, peninsulares, as they received more land and power in the colonies

Def: a labor system that forced Native Americans to labor on land, typically originally given to conquistadors, as a cheap labor source

Sig: harsh treatment led to Native Americans dying, leading to the increased importation of slaves from Africa

Def: large mostly self-sufficient profit-making estates (primarily agricultural plantations)

Sig: tying the Native Americans into a peonage system of service (even as they called them 'free wage earners') led to many revolts even as the system endured into the late 20th century

Def: a system of coerced labor in which people from Europe promised to work for a certain amount of time in the New World in exchange for their paid passage there

Sig: developed due to a demand for cheap labor in North America but lasted for a short period of time, especially in the south, as plantation owners began looking for a cheaper supply of labor by the early 17th century- African slaves

Def: a profitable commercial venture that enabled exploration by bringing together many investors and merchants in order to minimize the risks and costs of the investment (i.e. the Dutch East India Company and the British East India Company)

Sig: a significant element of mercantilism and operated with their own military - brought raw materials, resources, and wealth back to the mother country, dramatically increasing European power around the world

Def: Triangular sail that was developed in Indian Ocean trade that allowed a ship to sail against the wind

Sig: a European technological development that was influenced by cross-cultural interactions with the Islamic and Asian world

Def: Nomadic people from north of the Great Wall who invaded China and established a dynasty, claiming the "Mandate of Heaven" and adopting the Confucian belief and political administration system

Sig: opened up trade with Europeans and the limitations on the power and freedoms of the ethnic Chinese Han people, as well as intermarriage with them, dramatically increased the power of the dynasty during this time

Def: from SE USA to Brazil, groups of runaway slaves who gathered in mountainous, forested, or swampy areas and formed their own self-governing communities, raided plantations for supplies, and used guerrilla warfare to defend themselves from slave owners and bounty hunters

Sig: the existence of these continuities remained a continuous example of successful slave resistance to chattel slavery in the Americas

Def: economic system in Incan society where people paid taxes with their labor and what they produced; primarily used in the silver mines in South America

Sig: adopted by the Spanish to use indigenous labor in encomienda - was in evidence in the mining for silver in Potosi

Def: economic system stretching between the Chesapeake Bay and Brazil that produced crops, especially sugar, cotton, and tobacco, using slave labor on large estates

Sig: a significant factor driving the Columbian Exchange and the need for coerced slave labor

Def: followed Martin Luther's publication of the 95 Theses and was a movement to reform the Catholic Church but it resulted in the second major split within Christianity instead

Sig: each side branded the other as heretics and their own religion as the one true faith; led to the creation of new Protestant churches in England and Switzerland AND provided a motive to Catholics to earn more converts in America than the Protestants

Def: The effort by Christian leaders to drive the Muslims and Jews out of Spain, lasting from the 1100s until 1492

Sig: evidence of differential treatment of religious groups in Spain that eventually led to their expulsion but also allowed for the Ottoman Empire to absorb them and their talents to their benefit (Jews were allowed their own self-governance in Ottoman lands)

Americas as mined by the Spanish in Mexico and Peru that was increasingly demanded in global exchange

Sig: was the world's first global currency (coins called "pesos de ochos") that united the entire world in trade for the first time

Def: due to a shortage of copper coins and falsification of records by local landholders, Ming policy starting in 1522 was to combine land and labor tax into one national tax to be paid in the form of silver

Sig: prototype of the modern taxation system but also increased China's demand for New World and Japanese silver

Def: the combining of different beliefs, religions and schools of thought into new belief systems, such as Santeria in Cuba and Vodun in Haiti (Catholicism+Native American+West African beliefs)

Sig: these cultural blendings became a central feature of a country's identity, such as in Mexico and Cuba, and also allowed African slaves to secretly thwart the efforts of Spanish missionaries to convert them to Christianity

Def: began by the Portuguese who implemented control over trade routes from West Africa to East Asia by forcing merchant vessels to pay duties at fortified trading sites and buy safe-conduct passes to trade on the routes

Sig: dramatically increased European power in these areas without the need to create land empires

Def: a major step in the art/science of navigation perfected by Portuguese navigators in the mid-late 15th century, using the dependable phenomenon of the great permanent wind wheel, the North Atlantic Gyre

Sig: the European sea empires would never have been established had the Europeans not figured out how the trade winds in the Atlantic worked