Guaranteed 5 and A+: AP WORLD Units 5 and 6 STUDY GUIDE
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AP World History: Modern
Institution
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Explain the advantages of European explorers.
1) Geography; countries on the Atlantic rim of Europe (Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France)
were simply closer to the Americas than Asian competitors (Portugal and Spain stick out
into Atlantic more than others so close).
2) New kings and kingdoms wanted to show power by funding explorations.
3) Fixed winds of Atlantic that blew steadily in the same direction provided a far different
maritime environment than alternating monsoon winds of Indian Ocean, one that forced
Western mariners to innovate in ways that made their ships more maneuverable.
4) Europeans had advantages (mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship design
based on earlier models from the Indian Ocean and Chinese regions)
5) Sldo ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses had no parallel in the
Americas.
6) Various people of Aztec Empire resented Mexica domination and willingly joined
conquistador Hernan Cortes and much of Inca elite actually welcomed the Spanish
invaders and willingly settled down with them to share rule of Andean farmers and
miners.
7) Civil war in Incan empire helped Europeans but most important was germs and diseases
with which Native Americans had no familiarity.
Explain European motives for exploration.
1) Rich markets of the Indian Ocean world provided little incentive for its Chinese, Indian, or
Muslim participants to venture much beyond their own watersbut Europeans were
motivated.
2) European elites wanted to gain access to world and once Americas were discovered,
natural resources and highly productive agricultural lands drove further expansion.
3) Drive to expand beyond Europe was also motivated by enduring rivalries of competing
European states.
4) For many centuries, Eastern goods came to Mediterranean through the Middle East from
the Indian Ocean commercial network and Venice largely monopolized the European
trade in Eastern goods, so European powers disliked relying on Venice and Muslims
(need to bypass them).
5) But also problem of having to pay a tax in cash (gold or silver) for Asian spices or
textiles, but rich silver deposits of Mexico and Bolivia provided a temporary solution to
this problem.
6) Missionaries were inspired by spreading Christianity and persecuted minorities were in
search of a new start in life.
Describe the significance of the Great Dying and the Little Ice Age.
- Long isolation from the Afro-Eurasian world and the lack of most domesticated animals
meant the absence of acquired immunities to Old World diseases such as smallpox and
influenza.
- 90% of population died; similar in Dutch and British territories of North America
, - As the Great Dying took hold in the Americas, it interacted with another natural
phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age (period from 13th to 19th century of unusually
cool temperatures)
Explain the General Crisis.
- Driven be Great Dying and Little Ice Age.
- Much of China, Europe, and North America experienced cold winters and regions near
the equator experienced extreme conditions resulting, for instance, in the growth of the
Sahara Desert.
- Wet, cold summers reduced harvests in Europe while severe droughts ruined crops in
many other regions, especially China.
- Led to famines, epidemics, uprisings, and wars.
- Collapse of Ming dynasty in China, nearly constant warfare in Europe, and the civil war
in Mughal India all occurred in the context of the General Crisis which only subsided
when more favorable weather patterns took hold.
- Thus climate plays an important role in shaping human history.
Explain the Columbian Exchange.
- Great Dying and Little Ice Age created labor shortage and made room for immigrant
newcomers, both colonizing Europeans and enslaved Africans.
- Enormous network of communication, migration, trade, disease, and transfer of plants
and animals all generated by European colonial empires in the Americas was called the
Columbian exchange.
- Various combinations of indigenous and African peoples created new societies in the
Americas; Europeans and Africans brought germs but also wheat, rice, sugarcane,
grapes, and many garden vegetables and fruits.
- Domesticated animals like horses, pigs, cattle, goats, and sheep, from Old World made
possible the economies.
- American food crops like corn, potato, and cassava spread widely in Europe where they
provided nutritional foundation for the population growth (can grow in winters).
- Potatoes allowed Ireland’s population to grow and then condemned many of the Irish to
starvation or emigration when an airborne fungus from Americas destroyed crop.
- But benefits were unequally distributed as peoples of Africa and Americas experienced
social disruption, slavery, disease, and death while Europeans reaped greatest rewards.
- Wealth of colonies - percious metals, new food crops, slave labor - provided one of the
foundations on which Europe’s Industrial Revolution was built.
Explain how the Columbian Exchange spread to other continents.
- In China, corn, peanuts, and sweet potatoes supplemented the rice and wheat to sustain
China’s modern population explosion.
- In Africa, corn took hold quickly and was used as a cheap food for the human cargoes of
the transatlantic trade.
- American stimulants such as tobacco and chocolate were also used and tea from China
and coffee from the Islamic world also spread globally/
,NOTE: Women lost much of their earlier role as food producers due to male-dominated hunting
with domesticated animals.
Explain mercantilism in the Americas.
- European colonial empires like the Spanish, Portuguese, British and French, did not
simply conquer and govern established societies but rather generated wholly new
societies.
- European colonial strategies were based on mercantilism (the government serves their
countries’ economic interests best by encouraging exports and imports only from
colonies).
- Colonies provided markets of the mother country.
- Kind of economy established in particular regions like settler-dominated agriculture,
slave-based plantations, ranching, or mining, influenced the colonies’ development and
so too did the character of the Native American cultures (the more densely populated
and urbanized civilizations differed greatly from the more sparsely populated rural
villages).
- Conquest was often accompanied by the transfer of women to new colonial rulers and
Spanish men married elite native women for cementing new relationships and also
advantageous for some of the women involved (could inherit estates).
Describe the triangle trade system.
1) Sugar, rum (which comes from fermented sugarcane), and cod were shipped from New
World to Europe.
2) Silver or commercial products were shipped to Africa and exchanged or slaves.
3) Slaves were then sent to New World for production of sugar.
Describe labor in the Spanish Americas.
- Economic prosperity of colonial societies lay in commercial agriculture, much of it on
large rural estates, and in silver and gold mining.
- Native peoples, rather than African slaves or European workers, provided most of the
labor, despite their much-diminished numbers.
- Labor was coerced, often directly required by colonial authorities under a legal regime
known as encomienda.
Describe the social hierarchy in the Spanish Americas.
- A distinctive social order grew up, replicating something of the Spanish class and gender
hierarchy while accommodating the racially and culturally different Indians and Africans
as well as growing numbers of racially mixed people.
1) At the top were male Spanish settlers, who were politically and economically dominant
and seeking to become a landed aristocracy; saw themselves not as colonials but as
residents of Spanish kingdom, subject to the Spanish monarch yet separate and distinct
from Spain itself and deserving of a large measure of self-government.
, 2) Descendants of the original conquistadores sought to protect their privileges against
immigrant newcomers; Spaniards born in the Americas (creoles) resented the superiority
of those born in Spain (peninsulares).
3) Problem that few of Spanish women so led to emergence of mestizo, or mixed race
population.
4) Such mixed-race people were divided into dozens of separated groups known as castas
(castes), based on their precise racial heritage and skin color
5) Mestizos were largely Hispanic in culture, but Spaniards looked down on them during
music of the colonial era, regarding them as “illegitimate”
6) Mestizas, women of mixed racial background, worked as domestic servants or in their
husbands’ shops, wove cloth, and manufactured candles and cigars, in addition to
performing domestic duties (a few became wealthy).
NOTE: The more European blood a person had (or more whiter), the higher they stood on the
social ladder.
Describe the lives of surviving Native Americans in Spanish America.
- Many learned Spanish, converted to Christianity, moved to cities to work for wages, ate
the meat of cows, chickens and pigs; used plows and draft animals rather than traditional
digging sticks (but Spanish legal codes defined Native American women as minors
rather than responsible adults).
- Maize, beans, and squash persisted as the major elements of Indian diets in Mexico.
- Christian saints in many places blended easily with indigenous gods while belief in
magic, folk medicine, and communion with the dead remained strong.
- Native Americans still sought an education, wealth, and some European culture might
“pass” as mestizo and more fortunate mestizo families might be accepted as Spaniards
over time.
Describe the colonies in the Caribbean.
- Profitable sugar which was much in demand in Europe as medicine, spice, sweetener,
and a preservative.
- Produced through labor-intensive work almost exclusively for export while importing their
food and other necessities.
- Europeans learned the technique from Arabs and used it to their Atlantic island and then
to the Americas.
- Portuguese planters of Brazil dominated the world market for sugar then the British,
French, and Dutch turned their Caribbean territories into highly productive
sugar-producing colonies, breaking the Portuguese and Brazilian monopoly.
- Massive use of slave labor where absence of Native American population so turned to
Africa and the Atlantic slave trade for an alternative workforce.
Explain the conditions of the sugar plantations, especially for women.
- Horrendous conditions; more male slaves than female slaves were imported from Africa,
leading to major and persistent gender imbalances.
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