Transoceanic Interconnections unit test
A test on this unit alone, marked as a percentage and a letter grade — for the test your class is actually sitting, rather than for May. Answer everything, then submit once: seeing the answer to question 3 before attempting question 4 makes the final percentage meaningless.
Trading-post empire
Mercantilism
Serfdom intensifying after 1500
Middle Passage
Joint-stock companies
Sequence of Atlantic labor
Repartimiento
Why sugar drove coerced labor
Palmares
Prince Henry of Portugal
Causes of European exploration
Coerced syncretism
Short answer 1. Define or explain: Casta paintings
3 ptsShort answer 2. Define or explain: Casta system
3 ptsShort answer 3. Define or explain: Motive, means, enabling condition
3 ptsShort answer 4. Define or explain: Dahomey and Oyo
3 ptsFree response
3 ptsSHORT-ANSWER QUESTION 1 (required). Read the summary of the source. A passage from a 1988 academic book by Jack Weatherford, a United States anthropologist, argues that the European discovery of the Americas hurt Africa even as Asia briefly gained. In the first paragraph he claims that American silver and gold destroyed the African gold markets and the trade networks that depended on them, so that cities such as Timbuktu and the Songhai Empire crumbled as merchants abandoned the ancient trade routes. In the second paragraph he argues that, with their traditional Mediterranean trade in cloth, beads, leather, and metals in decline, African merchants were left with only one commodity Europeans wanted — enslaved people — and that a centuries-old, small-scale trade in enslaved people to the Middle East became a boom after the opening of the Americas. He concludes that Africans "became victims of the discovery of America as surely as did the American Indians."
A. Identify one claim that the author makes in the first paragraph about the effect of the discovery of the Americas on Africa.
B. Describe one economic change in the Americas that occurred as a result of the developments discussed in the second paragraph.
C. Explain one reason why "American Indians" "became victims of the discovery of America," as suggested by the author in the last sentence of the passage.