Chapter 18 - The Atlantic System and Africa, 1550-1800

Question 1

Atlantic system

Answer 1

The network of trading links after 1500 that moved goods, wealth, people, and cultures around the Atlantic Basin.

Question 2

chartered companies

Answer 2

Groups of private investors who paid an annual fee to France and England in exchange for a monopoly over trade to the West Indies colonies.

Question 3

Dutch West India Company

Answer 3

Trading company chartered by the Dutch government to conduct its merchants’ trade in the Americas and Africa.

Question 4

plantocracy

Answer 4

In the West Indian colonies, the rich men who owned most of the slaves and most of the land, especially in the eighteenth century.

Question 5

driver

Answer 5

A privileged male slave whose job was to ensure that a slave gang did its work on a plantation.

Question 6

seasoning

Answer 6

An often difficult period of adjustment to new climates, disease environments, and work routines, such as that experienced by slaves newly arrived in the Americas.

Question 7

manumission

Answer 7

A grant of legal freedom to an individual slave.

Question 8

marron

Answer 8

A slave who ran away from his or her master. Often a member of a community of runaway slaves in the West Indies and South America.

Question 9

capitalism

Answer 9

The economic system of large financial institutions - banks, stock exchanges, investment companies - that first developed in early modern Europe. Commercial capitalism, the trading system of the early modern economy, is often distinguished from industrial capitalism, the system based on machine production.

Question 10

mercantilism

Answer 10

European government of policies of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries designed to promote overseas trade between a country and its colonies and accumulate precious metals by requiring colonies to trade only with their motherland country. The British system was defined by the Navigation Acts, the French system by laws known as the Exclusif.

Question 11

Royal African Company

Answer 11

A trading company chartered by the English government in 1672 to conduct its merchants’ trade on the Atlantic coast of Africa

Question 12

Atlantic Circuit

Answer 12

The network of trade routes connecting Europe, Africa, and the Americas that underlay the Atlantic system.

Question 13

Middle Pasage

Answer 13

The part of the Atlantic Circuit involving the transportation of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas.

Question 14

Songhai

Answer 14

A people, language, kingdom, and empire in western Sudan in West Africa. At its height in the sixteenth century, the Muslim Songhai Empire stretched from the Atlantic to the land of the Hausa and was a major player in the trans-Saharan trade.

Question 15

Hausa

Answer 15

An agricultural and trading people of central Sudan in West Africa. Aside from their brief incorporation into the Songhai Empire, the Hausa city-states remained autonomous until the Sokoto Caliphate conquered them in the early nineteenth century.

Question 16

Bornu

Answer 16

A powerful West African kingdom at the southern edge of the Sahara in the Central Sudan, which was important in trans-Saharan trade and in the spread of Islam. Also known as Kanem-Bornu, it endured from the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth.