Ap World Big Picture Questions Ch.14

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APWH Ch 14: Empires and Encounters Responses Margin Review Questions 1. What enabled Europeans to carve out huge empires an ocean away from their homelands? • Europeans were much closer to the Americas than were their potential Asian competitors. • Europeans were powerfully motivated after 1200 to gain access to the world of Eurasian commerce. • Groups within European society—including competing monarchs, merchants, impoverished nobles and commoners, Christian missionaries, and persecuted minorities—all had strong, if different, motivations for participating in empire building. • European states and trading companies enabled the effective mobilization of both human and material resources. • European seafaring technology, built on Chinese and Islamic precedents, allowed Europeans to cross the Atlantic with growing ease. • European ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses initially had no parallel in the Americas. • Divisions within and between local societies provided allies for European invaders. • European germs and diseases to which Native Americans had no immunities decimated society after society, sometimes in advance of the Europeans’ actual arrival. 2. What large-scale transformations did European empires generate? • European empire building caused the demographic collapse of Native American societies. • Combinations of indigenous, European, and African peoples created entirely new societies in the Americas. • Large-scale exchanges of plants and animals transformed the crops and animals raised both in the Americas and in the Eastern Hemisphere. This was the largest and most consequential exchange of plants and animals to this point in human history, and it remade the biological environment of the planet. • The silver mines of Mexico and Peru fueled both transatlantic and
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