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West Africa and the Atlantic

Reading: Thornton, ch. 2

1. What were the motives, nature, and short-term significance of the major Iberian military and commercial expeditions to Sub-Saharan Africa in the fifteenth century?
2. What was the relationship of African trade with the Portuguese in the fifteenth century to overall economic production and trade in West Africa?
3. What is the importance in a hierarchical society of the importation of novel luxury goods produced at some distance locus?
4. What factors lead to changes in fashion/taste/demand for certain products?
5. Why did governments in the first global age so often feel that they had to control the long-distance trade involving their subjects?
6. Why were Italian merchants so often involved in Castilian and Portuguese economic ventures in the Atlantic?
7. Why did European traders in the Atlantic so often try to resort to monopoly practices?
8. What factors did a government have to consider when deciding to establish a trade monopoly in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries?
9. Why was the Portuguese Crown never able to dominate West African trade with Europe?
10. Why were the chartered trading companies of northern European countries unable to impose trade monopolies in West Africa?
11. To what extent did Iberian ideas about market control derive from Muslim examples?
12. Despite all the African and European attempts at control, why did African trade remain competitive from the period of first European contact through the seventeenth century?

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Revised:  28 July 1999

URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/reading.07.html