Title: Answer Key for Chapter 1 Essay Questions
Course: SkillsCom HST 201 14.2

All questions worth 4 points.

1. Answers should include:

• | On balance, European incursion into the Americas produced considerable death, misery, and forced cultural change, though there were plenty of examples of resistance and avoidance of these consequences.
• | Densely settled indigenous populations such as the Aztecs in Tenotchitlán were decimated by smallpox and other diseases to which they had no immunity.
• | Though Aztec society was militarily strong, the impact of these diseases proved to be a decisive blow.
• | Once a region was under Spanish political control, missionaries were sent in to replace native belief systems with Christianity.
• | Frontier revolts by native peoples were frequent. One of the more famous revolts was that of the Pueblo Indians in 1680.
• | European greed proved to be a powerful force as settlers sought the advantage of the New World’s natural resources and arable land.

2. Answers should include:

- Europeans brought new crops to the Americas, such as sugar and bananas, as well as horses and domestic livestock.

- In exchange, the Americas offered crops new to the Europeans, such as maize, tomatoes, and peppers.

3. Answers should include:

- Spaniards encountered two complex civilizations, the Aztec and the Inca, that differed from the smaller tribal groups encountered elsewhere.
- Once conquest was largely complete, male Spaniards mixed with indigenous females, not always forcefully. On other European colonial frontiers, native and European societies were kept separate.
- There was a huge difference in scale between Spanish and other European settlement patterns, as Spanish colonial territory spanned all of the Americas south of the Rio Grande, with one large exception, Brazil, and several smaller exceptions, the Caribbean islands.
- The Spanish colonial order established systems of labor and tribute exploitation such as the encomienda, while northern Europeans were content for the most part with displacing native peoples from their land.
- Spanish settlers made a major effort to convert natives to Christianity, whereas other Europeans made only minor efforts to do so.

4. Answers should include:

- English colonization of Ireland began in the sixteenth century with colonists fanning out to claim land and exploit the native population. The assumption behind these bold moves were rekindled in the Americas.
- The English viewed the Irish as “savages,” in large part because of Ireland’s Catholicism.
- In Ireland, the English adopted a plantation model, separating themselves from the native population, a pattern they replicated in the New World.
- In addition to attempting to subdue the native population of Ireland, English colonists set up a separate society alongside the Irish.
- An example of England’s hostile treatment of the Irish comes from Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who violently suppressed Irish rebellions, then went on to establish a colony in Newfoundland, though this colonization was unsuccessful in the end.

5. Answers should include:

- More than half of new arrivals to the New World from 1500 to 1800 were Africans, greatly outnumbering any single European migrant group and therefore radically changing colonial demographics.

6. Answers should include:

- Africans came from a diverse collection of societies, including kingdoms such as Mali and Ghana.
- Many Africans taken from West Africa were Muslims, while others maintained the polytheistic traditions of their ancestors.
- Africans were involved in a variety of economic activities from fishing to agriculture to trading prior to their enslavement. In the early colonial period, the vast majority of Africans brought to the Americas were involved in plantation sugar production, a grisly business with a high mortality rate.

7. Answers should include:

- In England, Spain, and the Netherlands, mercantilism was tied to the emergence of the middle class, whereas in Germany and France, the government rather than individuals pursued mercantilism.
- Spain and England passed laws in an effort to exert national control.
- The Caribbean economy was an exception to the mercantilist rule in the sense that island colonies were connected across national lines there.