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Chapter 4 • Political Transformations, 1450–1750 213

new information flooded into Europe, shaking up conventional understandings of the AP ® EXAM TIP
world and contributing to a revolutionary new way of thinking known as the Scientific Understand this
Revolution. The wealth of the colonies — precious metals, natural resources, new food explanation of the long-
crops, slave labor, financial profits, colonial markets — provided one of the foundations term effects of the
on which Europe’s Industrial Revolution was built. The colonies also provided an outlet Columbian exchange.
for the rapidly growing population of European societies and represented an enormous
extension of European civilization. In short, the colonial empires of the Americas greatly
facilitated a changing global balance of power, which now thrust the previously marginal
Western Europeans into an increasingly central and commanding role on the world
stage. “Without a New World to deliver economic balance in the Old,” concluded a
prominent world historian, “Europe would have remained inferior, as ever, in wealth and
power, to the great civilizations of Asia.” 11

Comparing Colonial Societies in the Americas

Finding the Main Point: In what different ways did European colonialism take shape
in the Americas?
European colonial empires — Spanish, Portuguese, British, and French alike — did
not simply conquer and govern established societies, but rather generated wholly
new societies, born of the decimation of Native American populations and the intro-
duction of European and African peoples, cultures, plants, and animals. European
colonial strategies were based on an economic theory known as mercantilism,
which held that governments served their countries’ economic interests best by
encouraging exports and accumulating bullion (precious metals such as silver and
gold). In this scheme of things, colonies provided closed markets for the manu-
factured goods of the “mother country” and, if they were lucky, supplied great
quantities of bullion as well. Such an outlook fueled European wars and colonial
rivalries around the world in the early modern era.
Meanwhile, in the colonies themselves, empire took shape in various ways. Some
differences derived from the contrasting societies of the colonizing powers, such as
a semi-feudal and Catholic Spain and a more rapidly changing Protestant England.
The kind of economy established in particular regions — settler-dominated agricul-
ture, plantations based on slave labor, ranching, or mining — likewise influenced the
colonies’ development. So too did the character of the Native American cultures — the
more densely populated and urbanized Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations dif-
fered greatly from the more sparsely populated rural villages of North America.
Furthermore, women and men often experienced colonial intrusion in quite AP ® EXAM TIP
distinct ways. Beyond the common burdens of violent conquest, epidemic dis- Remember these
ease, and coerced labor, both Native American and enslaved African women had examples of how
to cope with the additional demands made on them as females. Conquest was Amerindian women were
treated by both native
often accompanied by the transfer of women to the new colonial rulers. Cortés, men and Europeans
for example, commanded the Aztec ruler: “You are to deliver women with light after the European
12
skins, corn, chicken, eggs, and tortillas.” Soon after conquest, many Spanish men conquest.
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