You may return to the course syllabus or to the class sessions page.

Working American resources

The increasing integration of the Americas into the developing global economic system. Special attention will be given to the establishment of networks of major administrative, commercial, and production centers from Manila to Northwest Europe and Southwest Africa and to the development of the "plantation complex" as the focus of agricultural production, machine technology, labor migration, capital investment, and long-distance commerce.

Reading: Bakewell, chs. 9 & 10, and pp. 306-310; Thornton, ch. 5.

  1. In what ways did the exchange of plants, animals, and peoples between the Americas and Afroeurasia in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries affect the social and cultural environments of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and American Indians?
  2. Why did an active silver trade develop between Mexico and Manila?
  3. Why did chattel slavery become so much more important in the Americas than it was in Europe, despite the institution's importance in the ancient Mediterranean world and in the Ottoman empire?
  4. Why did sustained growth of the American Indian population begin only in the mid seventeenth century?
  5. What impact did pre-conquest American social and cultural environments have on the ability of Castilian and Portuguese conquerors to benefit from Western Hemisphere resources?
  6. Why did so few Europeans go to the Americas before 1800?
  7. What opportunities did American Indian peoples in Castilian and Portuguese controlled territories have to design their own social and cultural environments?
  8. What made the Castilian encomienda a desirable institution for Europeans in the Americas?
  9. Besides the encomienda, what other means were found to control the labor of indigenous peoples in Castilian America?
  10. Why did so many Africans go to the Americas before 1800?
  11. Why were slave masters so often little concerned about slave living conditions on sugar plantations?
  12. In what ways did the emerging Atlantic commercial economy transform agricultural production, manufacturing, and the uses of labor in Europe and the Americas?
  13. Why did slavery become the labor system for the production of American sugar?
  14. What factors made possible the Atlantic slave trade?
  15. What contributions did Africans make to the development of the Atlantic world?
  16. Why were Africans able to play such an important role in the making of the Atlantic world?
  17. Why did the Castilian and Portuguese governments permit systems of coerced labor to develop in their American territories?
  18. Why was slave labor popular with mine and plantation operators?

Mail questions now. Please include your name and e-mail address in the body of your message. 

All contents copyright © 1995-99.
J. B. Owens
All rights reserved.


Revised:  28 July 1999


URL:  http://www.isu.edu/~owenjack/spemp/reading.18.html