(^78) › STEP 4. Review the Knowledge You Need to Score High
It also had lasting effects on Spain and, eventually, the rest of Europe:
• A steady rise in prices, eventually producing inflation, due to the increase in available
wealth and coinage
• An eventual rise of a wealthy merchant class that sat uneasily in the traditional feudal
social structure of Europe
• Raised expectations for quality of life throughout the social structure of Europe
England, France, and the Triangular Trade Networks
By 1600, England and France were endeavoring to form their own colonies in the New
World. They founded settler colonies in North America through the formation of joint
stock companies (which allowed private investment combined with investment by the
Crown). These colonies soon thrived, initially with considerable help from, and later at the
expense of, the indigenous populations.
In the eighteenth century, England and, to a lesser extent, France surpassed Spain,
Portugal, and Holland as the dominant economic powers in Europe and in the New World.
They did so by controlling the majority of the increasingly lucrative Triangular Trade
Networks that connected Europe to Africa and the Americas. The phrase “Triangular
Trade Networks” refers to a system of interconnected trade routes that quadrupled foreign
trade in both Britain and France in the eighteenth century. Here are three characteristics
of the Triangular Trade Networks:
• Manufactured goods (primarily guns and gin) were exported from Europe to Africa.
• Slaves were exported to serve as labor in European colonies in North America, South
America, and the Caribbean.
• Raw materials (especially furs, timber, tobacco, rice, cotton, indigo dye, coffee, rum, and
sugar) were exported from the colonies to Europe in exchange for slaves and manufac-
tured goods.
Before the eighteenth century, the primary destination of Africans taken into slavery by
their rivals had been either the Mediterranean basin or Asia. The eighteenth-century expan-
sion of the European colonies greatly increased the demand for African slaves and reoriented
the slave trade to the West. The majority of slaves were destined for the West Indies and
Brazil, with about 10 percent going to colonies in North America. The transportation of
African slaves across the Atlantic Ocean on European trade ships was known as the Middle
Passage. As many as 700 slaves per ship were transported, chained below deck in horrific
conditions. It is estimated that somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 Africans were
transported each year during the height of the eighteenth-century slave trade.Review Questions
Multiple Choice
Questions 1–3 refer to the following passage:
The great city of Tenochtitlan is built on the salt lake.... [C]onsidering that these people were
barbarous, so cut off from the knowledge of God and other civilized peoples, it is admirable
to see to what they attained in every respect....
It happened... that a Spaniard saw an Indian... eating a piece of flesh taken from the
body of an Indian who had been killed.... I had the culprit burned, explaining that the cause12_Bartolini_Ch12_075-080.indd 78 13/04/18 1:29 PM