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Period 1
Overseas Exploration and Colonial Expansion
AP® TOPICS 1.6, 1.7, 1.8, 1.9

Before 1450 Europeans were relatively marginal players in a centuries-old trading
system that linked Africa, Asia, and Europe. Desire for luxury goods, including
spices, silk, gold, and ivory, led Europeans to seek out better and more direct access to
trade, which resulted in a new Portuguese commercial empire
along the African coast and the Indian Ocean, and
the accidental discovery of the Western Hemisphere. Religious
fervor was another important catalyst for expansion, as
Europeans sought to counter Islam and spread Christianity. Introduction to
Within a few decades, European colonies in North and South
America joined this worldwide web of commerce. Capitalizing
on the goods and riches they found in the Americas, and on
Bedford, Freeman & Worth Publishers.
advances in navigation, cartography, and weapons, Europeans
came to dominate the trading networks. The Portuguese and this sample.
Spanish, followed by the French, English, and Dutch, built
For review purposes only. Not for redistribution.
political empires of truly global proportions, and governments
Uncorrected proofs have been used in
motivated by an economic theory known as “mercantilism” and Worth Publishers.
by a desire for power sought to grab as much trade as possible.
The migration of people to the New World resulted in an British Museum, London, UK/Werner Forman/
by Bedford, Freeman &
exchange of animals, plants, and disease known as the Columbian Universal Images Group/Getty Images
exchange, in which Old World diseases such as smallpox killed the vast
majority of people in the Western Hemisphere. Europeans brought in
enslaved Africans to work New World plantations, especially those for sugar, creating
a slave trade that grew to massive proportions and contributed to growing racial
prejudice and inequality. Global contacts also created new forms of cultural exchange.
Europeans struggled to understand the peoples and societies they encountered and
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sought to impose European values, including Christianity, on them, but indigenous
people also resisted and blended their own traditions with European ones, creating
Distributed
distinctive cultural forms. (Chapter 3: European Exploration and Conquest)

Capitalism and Social Hierarchies
AP® TOPICS 1.10, 2.6

Cultural and political changes were intertwined with elites. Despite the growth of cities, most people
economic and social ones. First in Italy and then in continued to live in the countryside, paying rent,
growing cities in northern Europe, merchants and taxes, and labor services, their hard work occasion-
bankers grew wealthy from trade and money- ally punctuated by family, religious, and communal
lending, developing new business procedures and rituals and festivities. In western Europe even the
institutions, such as double-entry bookkeeping, joint poorest peasants were personally free, while in
stock companies, and banks, as part of the commer- eastern Europe peasants toiled as serfs for noble
cial revolution that ultimately helped to lay the landowners. Neither the Renaissance nor the
foundation for a capitalist economic system. This Reformation upset the widely held idea that men
hierarchy of wealth did not mean an end to the should be dominant and women subordinate,
prominence of nobles, however, as new commercial although in reality a few women were rulers and
elites intermarried and integrated with traditional most women and girls worked alongside male family

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