Laura Handly

EF Block
12/15/09
Chapter Eighteen Vocabulary

tobacco (459) – this new world leaf which had long been used by Amerindians for
recreation and medicine was finding a new market among 17th century Europeans; some
people opposed it, but by 1614 tobacco was reportedly being sold in seven thousand
shops in and around London

chartered companies (460) – groups of private investors who paid an annual fee to France
and England in exchange for a monopoly over trade to the West Indies colonies

Dutch West India company (460) – trading company chartered by the Dutch government to
conduct its merchants’ trade in the Americas and Africa

Dutch’s entry into African slave trade (460) – combined economic and political moves; the
Dutch West India company seized the important West African trading station of Elmina
from the Portuguese and took their port of Luanda on the Angolan coast; from these
coasts the Dutch shipped slaves to Brazil and the West Indies

soil exhaustion (463) – one of two negative effects of plantations; repeated cultivation of a
single crop removes more nutrients from the soil than anima fertilizer and fallow periods
can restore; instead of rotating sugar with other crops in order to restore the nutrients
naturally, planters found it better to clear new lands when needed

deforestation (463) – another negative effect of plantations; continued a trend begun in the
16th century, the Spanish had cut down some forests in the Caribbean to make pastures for
the cattle that they introduced; sugar cultivation rapidly accelerated land clearing

plantocracy (463) – in the west Indian colonies, the rich men who owned most of the
slaves and most of the land, especially in the eighteenth century

driver (464) – a privileged male slave whose job was to ensure that a slave gang did its
work on a plantation

iron muzzle (465) – when slaves fell behind in work or openly rebelled they were punished
many ways, including this mechanism which covered their faces and kept them from
eating and drinking

short life expectancy of slaves (465) – life expectancy for slaves in nineteenth-century
Brazil was 23 for men and 25.5 for women; this was because poor nutrition and over
work was common (also lowered fertility, so birth rate was much less on plantations than
death rate); slave owners in the Caribbean and in parts of Brazil felt that it was cheaper to
important a new slave from Africa than raise one on a plantation; disease was the greatest
killer to the slaves
seasoning (466) – an often difficult period of adjustment to new climates, disease
environments, and work routines, such as that experienced by slaves newly arrived in the
Americas

grands blancs (467) – the great whites who were at the top of free society, they were the
wealthy owners of large sugar plantations who dominated the economy and society of the
entire island

manumission (467) – a grant of legal freedom to an individual slave

maroons (467) – a slave who ran away from his or her master, often a member of runaway
slaves in the west Indies and south America

capitalism (468) – the economic system of large financial institutions- banks, stock
exchanges, investment companies- that first developed in early modern Europe;
commercial capitalism is the trading system of the early modern economy whereas
industrial capitalism is the system based on machine production

mercantilism (468) – European government policies off the sixteenth, seventeenth, and
eighteenth centuries designed to promote overseas trade between a country and its
colonies and accumulate precious metals by requiring colonies to trade only with their
motherland country

Jean Baptiste Colbert (469) – King Louis XIV’s minister of finance from 1661 to 1683,
chartered French East India and French West India Companies to reduce French colonies’
dependence on Dutch and English traders

Middle Passage (469) – the part of the Atlantic Circuit involving the transportation of
enslaved Africans across the Atlantic to the Americas

goods traded to the Royal African company (473) – 60% Indian and European textiles,
30% hardware and weaponry, 7% cowrie shells, 3% beads and other jewelry

Bight of Biafra (475) – in contrast to the Gold and Slave Coasts where strong kingdoms
dominated, this densely populated interior contained no large states; even so, the
powerful merchant princes of the coastal ports made European traders give them
presents; there were no large scale wars, meaning no POW; main source of slaves were
from kidnapping innocent people

Songhai (477) – a people, language, kingdom, and empire in western Sudan in West
Africa; at its height in the sixteenth century, the Muslim Songhai Empire stretched from
the Atlantic to the land of the Hausa and was a major player in the trans-Saharan trade

Hausa (480) – an agricultural and trading people of central Sudan West Africa; aside from
their brief incorporation into the Songhai Empire, the Hausa city-states remained
autonomous until the Sokoto Caliphate conquered them in the early nineteenth-century
Bornu (480) – a powerful west African kingdom at the southern edge of the Sahara in the
Central Sudan, which was important in trans-Saharan trade and in the spread of Islam,
also know as Kanem-Bornu, it endured from the ninth century to the end of the
nineteenth century

Mai Ali (480) – a Bornu king who conspicuously displayed his kingdom’s new power ad
wealth while on four pilgrimages to Mecca from 1642 to 1667; on the last, an enormous
entourage of slaves, said to be about fifteen thousand, accompanied him