Chapter 16: The Transatlantic Economy, Trade Wars, and Colonial Rebellion

By the close of the 1770s, many in Britain resented the mismanagement of the American war, the high taxes, and Lord North's ministry. In Northern England in 1778, Christopher Wyvil, a landowner and retired clergyman, organized the ________. Demanded moderate changes in the corrupt system of parliamentary elections. They organized corresponding societies elsewhere and intended that the association examine and suggest reforms for the entire government. The movement collapsed during the 1780s. However, its younger figures raised the issue of parliamentary reform after 1815.

Yorkshire Association Movement

There was also a variety of local officers, the most important of which were the ___ who presided over municipal councils. The monarchy usually gave these positions to people born in Spain.

corregidores

Expanding trade brought more Spanish merchants to Latin America. As a result the ___(persons of European descent born in the Spanish colonies) came to feel they were second-class subjects. Their resentment would provide a major source of the discontent leading to the wars of independence.

creoles

In the Americas, the slave population was divided among new Africans recently arrived, old Africans who had lived there for some years, and ___ who were the descendants of earlier generations of African slaves. Plantation owners preferred the two latter groups. They sold for higher prices.

creoles

The last period of the European Empire occurred during the late and mid 19th century, with the ___ of peoples who lived under European colonial rule

decolonization

India was regarded as a springboard into the even larger potential market of China. The original European footholds in India were called ___. Two circumstances in the mid-18th century changed the situation in India. First, the administration and the government of several Indian states had decayed. Second, Joseph Dupleix for the French and Robert Clive for the British saw the developing power vacuum as providing opportunities for expanding the control of their respective companies. Each of the two companies began to take over the government of some of the regions.

factories

To increase the efficiency of tax collection and end bureaucratic corruption, Charles III introduced the institution of the ____ into the Spanish Empire. These royal bureaucrats were patterned on the French intendants made famous as agents of French royal administration under Louis XIV

intendant

The second era-that of the ___ empires was one of colonial trade rivalry among France, Spain, and Great Britain. The various imperial ventures led to the creation of large navies and a series of major naval wars at the mid-18th century that in turn became linked to warfare on the European continent. The Anglo-French side of the contest has been compared to a second Hundred Years' War with theaters of conflict in Europe, the Americas, West Africa, and India. Finally, during the second period, both the British colonies and the Spanish colonies emancipated themselves from European control. This era of independence may be said to have closed in the 1820s

mercantile

The term ___ and __ were invented by later critics of the system whereby governments heavily regulated trade and commerce in hope of increasing national wealth.

mercantilism mercantile system

The colonial questioning of the tax-levying authority of the House of Commons was related to the protest of John Wilkes. Both the Americans and Wilkes were challenging the power of the monarch and the authority of Parliament. Both were protesting the power of a largely self-selected aristocratic political body.

movement for Parliamentary reform

The newly arrived Africans were subjected to a process known as ____ during which they were prepared for the laborious discipline of slavery and made to understand that they were no longer free. They might have received new names and may have had to learn the local European language. North American plantation owners were only willing to purchase such recently arrived Africans seasoned in the West Indies.

seasoning

Black slaves living in the Portuguese areas had the fewest legal protections. In the Spanish colonies, the church attempted to provide some protection for black slaves, but devoted more effort toward the welfare of Native Americans. ___were developed in the British and French colonies during the 17th century, but they provided limited protection to slaves while assuring dominance to their owners. Slave owners always feared a revolt and legislation was intended to prevent one. All slave laws favored the master rather than the slave. Slaves were often forbidden to gather in large groups lest they plan a revolt. In most of these slave societies, the law did not recognize slave marriages.

slave codes

Colonies existed to provide markets and natural resources for the home country. In return, the home country was to protect and administer the colonies.Both sides assumed the colonies were the inferior partner in the relationship. The home country and its colonies were to trade exclusively with each other. Governments tried to gorge systems of national commerce through navigation laws, __, and prohibitions against trading with the subjects of others monarchs.

tariffs

The major sources for slaves were slave markets on the West African Coast from Senegambia to Angola. Slavery and an extensive slave trade had existed in West Africa for centuries. Political and military conditions in Africa and warfare among various African nations created a supply of slaves that certain African societies were willing to sell to Europeans. European slave traders did not confront a passive situation in West Africa over which they exercised their will by force and commerce. Rather , they encountered dynamic African societies working out their own internal historic power relationships and rivalries in which Africans sold and acquired other Africans from different regions and nations as slaves

the slave trade

Until the mid-18th century, the primary purpose of the Spanish Empire was to supply Spain with the precious metals mined in the New World. Because Queen Isabella of Castile commissioned Columbus, the technical legal link between the New World and Spain was the crown of Castile. The Castilian monarch assigned the government of America to the Council of the Indies with which the monarch nominated the __ of New Spain. They served as the chief executives in the New World and carried out the laws issued by the Council of the Indies

viceroys

Toward the end of the War of the American Revolution, calls for parliamentary reform arose in Britain. The method proposed for changing the system was the extra-legal ____ ____

Association Movement

In March 1770, the ___ in which British troops killed 5 citizens took place. That same year, Parliament repealed all of the Townshend duties except the one on tea.

Boston Massacre

In part, as a result of the events in North America, a dramatic shift of alliances took place. British King ____ who was also the Elector of Hanover in Germany thought the French might attack Hanover in response toe the conflict in America. In 1756, Britain and Prussia signed the Convention of Westminster, a defensive alliance aimed at preventing entry of foreign troops into the German states. The convention meant that Great Britain, the ally of Austria since the wars of Louis XIV had now joined forces with Austria's major 18th century enemy

George II

The Prussian seizure of Silesia led to new political allegiances. Maria Theresa's great achievement was not the reconquest of Silesia but the preservation of the Habsburg Empire as a major political power. She was 23 and had just succeeded to the throne when the invasion happened. She granted new privileges to the nobility and recognized ___ as the most important of her crowns and promised the Magyar nobility local autonomy

Hungary

Shared language enabled the slaves to communicate among themselves during a revolt. In the ___ slave revolt (1739) the slave owners believed that their slaves had communicated among themselves by playing African drums.

South Carolina

The British drive for revenue began in 1764 with the passage of the ___ under the ministry of George Grenville. Smugglers who violated the law were to be tried in courts without juries.

Sugar Act

Each of the viceroyalties was divided into several subordinate judicial courts known as ___.

audiencias

The West Indies raised tobacco, cotton, indigo, coffee, and sugar for which there existed huge markets in Europe. ___ had become a staple rather than a luxury. Only slave labor would allow its cultivation.

sugar

The American colonies had been loss. Economically, this loss did not prove disastrous. British trade with America after independence actually increased.

wrap up

Before the European discovery of the Americas, sugar was a luxury product that had to be imported at great expense from the Arab world or the Spanish and Portuguese islands off the coast of Africa which were too arid for the plant to flourish. The ____ is ideal for sugar cane. Columbus carried it to the New World in 1493

Caribbean

In India both Britain and France traded through privileged chartered companies that enjoyed a legal monopoly. The _____ was the English institution, and the French equivalent was the Compagnie des Indes.

East India Company

France and Great Britain continued to struggle in the Ohio River Valley and in upper New England. These clashes were the prelude to what is known as the ____ which formally erupted in 1755.

French and Indian War

Far more slaves were imported into the West Indies and Brazil than into North America. Citizens of the United States marked the beginning of slavery in 1619 with the arrival of African slaves on a Dutch ship into ____

Jamestown

The ___ extended the boundaries of Quebec to include the Ohio River valley. The Americans regarded this act as an attempt to prevent their mode of self-government from spreading beyond the Appalachian mountains.

Quebec Act

The Commonwealthmen including John Trenchard and ____ had relentlessly criticized the government patronage and parliamentary management of Walpole and his successors. They argued that such government was corrupt and undermined liberty.

Thomas Gordon

Spain had a viceroyalty of New Spain (North America), viceroyalty of New Granada (Central America), viceroyalty of Peru, viceroyalty of Brazil, and viceroyalty of La Plata

Viceroyalties

The late 18th century Bourbon reforms did stimulate the imperial economy. Trade expanded and became more varied. These reformers however brought the empire more fully under direct Spanish control. Many ___(persons born in Spain) entered the New World to fill new posts which were often the most profitable jobs in the region.

peninsulares

Maria Theresa's foreign minister, _____ had long hoped for an alliance with France to help dismember Prussia. The Convention of Westminster helped make possible this alliance. France would now fight to restore Austrian supremacy in central Europe.

Prince Wenzel Anton Kauntiz

Once _____ became secretary of state in charge of the war in 1757, he pumped huge sums into the coffers of Frederick the Great. He regarded the German conflict as a way to divert French resources and attention from the colonial struggle. He later boasted of having won America on the plains of Germany

William Pitt the Elder

The Wilkes affair confirm the American colonists' fears about a monarchical and parliamentary conspiracy against liberty. The Wilkes affair displayed the ___ power of the monarch and the corruption of the House of Commons.

arbitrary

Coromantee was the predominant language on Jamaica. In South Carolina and on St. Domingue, most African slaves poke Kikongo to each other. It would take more than two generations for the colonial language to dominate and the result was often a ___ combining an African and European language. Some Africans maintained a loyalty to the Islamic faith of their homeland.

dialect

Different nations dominated the slave trade in different periods. During the 16th century, the Spanish and Portuguese were most involved. The Dutch supplanted them for most of the 17th century. During the late 17th and 18th centuries, the English and French were the chief slave traders

slave trade periods

Most African slaves transported to the Americas were eventually converted to Christianity. In the Spanish, French, and Portuguese domains they became Catholic. In the English colonies they became Protestant. Both forms of Christianity preached to slaves to accept their slavery and a natural social hierarchy with their masters at the top.

Christianity

Throughout the 18th century, the colonists had become familiar with a series of British political writers in addition to Locke called the ____ who held republican political ideas.

Commonwealthmen

In 1766, Parliament repealed the Stamp Act but through the ____ said it had the power to legislate for the colonies

Declaratory Act

Economic writers believed mercantilism was necessary for a nation to gain a favorable balance of gold and silver __. They regarded __ a the measure of a country's wealth. The mercantilist statesmen and traders regarded the world as an area of scarce resources and economic limitations. They assumed only modest levels of economic growth were possible. Before agricultural and industrial expansion, the wealth of one nation may expand only it its armies or navies conquered the domestic or colonial territory of another area.

bullion

The House of Commons ruled that issue number 45 constituted ___, and it expelled Wilkes. However, Wilkes received widespread support.

libel

In 1768, Wilkes returned to England and was reelected to Parliament, but the House of Commons under the influence of the king refused to seat him. He was elected 3 more times. After the fourth election, the House of Commons ignored results and seated government-supported candidate. Large demonstrations of shopkeepers, artisans, and small property owners supported Wilkes as did aristocratic politicians who wished to humiliate the king. "_____" became the slogan of political radicals and many noble opponents of the king. Wilkes was seated in 1774, after having become the lord mayor of London

"Wilkes and Liberty"

The third stage of European contact with the non-European world occurred in the 19th century. European governments carved out new formal empires involving the direct European administration of indigenous peoples in __ and ___. These empires also included new areas of European settlement such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Algeria. The bases of these empires were trade, national honor, Christian missionary enterprise, and military strategy. Unlike the previous two eras, these empires were based on free labor, not forced labor

Africa Asia

The major islands of the French West Indies fell to British fleets. Income from the sale of captured sugar helped finance the British war effort. In India, the British forces under Robert Clive defeated France's Indian allies in 1757 at the ___. This opened the way for the eventual conquest of India by the British East India Company

Battle of Plassey

A crucial change occurred in the Spanish colonial system in the early 18th century. The War of the Spanish Succession and the Treaty of Utrecht replaced the Spanish Habsburgs with the ___ of France on the Spanish throne

Bourbons

After the Treaty of Paris , the British government faced two imperial problems. The first was the cost of maintaining the empire. Domestic taxation rose considerably. The British felt it was rational for the colonies to bear part of the cost of their protection and administration. The second problem was the vast expanse of new territory in North America that the British had to organize.

British financial problems

The imperial reforms of ____ were the Spanish equivalent of the new colonial measures the British government undertook after 1763.

Charles III

Parliament was not insensitive to the demands of the Association Movement. In 1780, the Commons passed a resolution that called for lessening the power of the crown. In 1782, Parliament adopted a measure for economical reform which abolished some patronage at the disposal of the monarch. These did not prevent the king from appointing a minister of his own choice. In 1783, shifts in parliament obliged Lord North to form a ministry with ____, a longtime critic of the king

Charles James Fox

In 1767 ____, the British finance minister led Parliament to pass a series of Revenue acts relating to colonial imports. The minister sent its customs agents to enforce the laws. To protect these new officers, the British sent troops to Boston in 1768.

Charles Townshend

The American colonists established revolutionary but orderly political bodies that could function outside the existing political framework: the congress and the convention. These began with the Stamp Act Congress of 1765 and culminated in the ____ of 1787. The legitimacy of these congresses and conventions lay not in existing law but in the alleged consent of the governed.

Constitutional Convention

The Casa de Contracion was the most influential institution of the Spanish Empire. Its members worked closely with the ___ (Merchant Guild) of Seville and other groups involved with American commerce in Cadiz

Consulado

By 1775 after Lexington and Concord and Bunker Hill, George III had declared the colonies in rebellion. In 1776, the ___ opened American trade ports to the trade of all nations, not just Britain

Continental Congress

The War of the American Revolution continued until 1781 when the forces of George Washington defeated those of ___ at Yorktown. The Treaty of Paris concluded the conflict.

Cornwallis

As an ally of France, Spain emerged as one of the defeated powers in 1763. Charles III attempted to reassert Spain's control of the empire. Like his Bourbon predecessors, he emphasized royal ministers rather than councils. Thus, the role of the ____ and the Casa de Contracion diminished.

Council of the Indies

William Pitt the Elder was no longer in office. George III and Pitt had quarreled over policy and the minister had departed. His replacement was the ___.

Earl of Bute

In preparation for future wars,the rulers of Prussia, Russia, and Austria pursued a mode of activist government known as __ __. The mid-18th century wars set in motion most of the major political developments of the next half century.

Enlightened Absolutism

The __ domains covered the Saint Lawrence River valley and the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. They included islands of Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) on western part of Hispaniola, Guadeloupe, Martinique, stations in India, and on West coast of Africa.

French

Before the 18th century, little or no moral or religious stigma was attached to slave owning or slave trading. It had a continuous existence in the Mediterranean world. After the conquest of Constantinople (1453), the Ottoman Empire forbade the exportation of white slaves from regions under its control. The Portuguese then began to import African slaves into the ___ from the Canary Islands and West Africa. Black slaves from Africa were not uncommon in other parts of the Mediterranean and a few found their way into Northern Europe.

Iberian Peninsula

The British colonies included colonies along North Atlantic seaboard, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Bermuda, Jamaica, and Barbados. Also had a few trading stations at ___

India

The Dutch controlled Surinam or Dutch Guiana in South America, Cape Colony, and trading stations in West Africa, Sri Lanka, and Bengal in India. They controlled the trade with ___ in what is now Indonesia. They opened these markets in the 17th century. They made important technological innovations in sailing

Java

The political radical and member of Parliament ___ published a newspaper called The North Briton. In issue 45, he criticized Lord Bute's handling of the peace negotiations with France. He was arrested under a general warrant issued by the secretary of state but was released. Later the courts ruled that the vague kind of warrant which he had been arrested was illegal.

John Wilkes

George III believed that Parliament should function under royal control rather than aristocratic management. When he appointed the Earl of Brute as his first minister, he ignored the great Whig families that had run the country since 1715. Between 1761 and 1770, George tried one minister after another but each failed to gain enough support from the various factions of the House of Commons. Finally, in 1770 he turned to ___ who remained the king's first minister until 1782. The Whig families and other political spokespersons claimed the king was attempting to impose tyranny by curbing the power of a particular group of the aristocracy

Lord North

The mid-18th century lead the major states of Europe into prolonged warfare. The statesmen of this period assumed that warfare could further national interests. Nations often viewed periods of peace as opportunities to recoup their strength so they could start fighting again to seize another nation's territory or disrupt another empire's trading monopoly. During the 18th century, the fundamental areas of great power rivalry were the overseas empires and central and eastern Europe.

Mid-18th century wars

Philip V and his successors tried to use French administrative skills to reassert the imperial trade monopoly which had decayed under the Spanish Habsburgs and thus to improve the domestic economy. Under Philip V, Spanish coastal patrol vessels tried to suppress smuggling in American waters. An incident arising from this policy led to war with England in 1739 just as Phillip established the viceroyalty of ____

New Granada

The Spanish tried to restrict all trade within their Latin American Empire to a few designated ports. The most famous port was ___ in Panama.

Portobello

Since the Renaissance, European contacts with the rest of the world have gone through four distinct stages. The first was European discovery, exploration, initial conquest, and settlement of the New World. This phase witnessed the penetration of Southeast Asian markets by ___ and the ____. This period closed by the end of the 17th century

Portugal Netherlands

After 1765, Charles III abolished the monopolies of Seville and Cadiz and permitted other Spanish cities to trade with America. He also opened more South American and Caribbean ports to trade and authorized commerce between Spanish ports in America. In 1776 he organized another viceroyalty in the region of ___ which included modern day Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia.

Rio de la Plata

The West Indies was a hotbed for trade rivalry and illegal smuggling. The Spanish maintained coastal patrols which boarded and searched English vessels to look for contraband. In 1731, during one such boarding operation, there was a fight and the Spaniards cut off the ear of an English captain named ____. He carried about his severed ear preserved in a jar of brandy. In 1738 he showed his ear to British Parliament as an example of Spanish atrocities to British merchants in West Indies. In late 1739, Britain went to war with Spain. It became the opening encounter to a series of European wars fought across the world until 1815

Robert Jenkins

William Pitt the Elder wanted all of North America east of the Mississippi for Great Britain and that was what he won. He sent English and colonial troops against the French in Canada. Never had so many soldiers been devoted to colonial welfare. The French military administration was corrupt and France could not supply its North American forces. In 1759 on the Plains of Abraham overlooking the valley of Saint Lawrence River at Quebec City, the British army under ____ defeated the French under Louis Joseph de Montcalm. The French Empire in Canada was ending.

Sam Wolfe

In 1756, Frederick II opened what would become the Seven Years' War by invading ____. He considered this to be a strike against a conspiracy by Saxony, Austria, and France to destroy Prussian power. In 1757, France and Austria made a new alliance dedicated to the destruction of Prussia. Sweden, Russia, and many of the smaller German states joined them.

Saxony

The colonial political structures functioned to support Spanish commercial self-interests. The Casa de Contracion (House of Trade) in ___regulated all trade with the New World. Cadiz was the only port authorized for use in the American trade.

Seville

In 1740 Prussian king Frederick II seized the Austrian province of ___ in eastern Germany. The invasion shattered the provisions of the Pragmatic Sanction and upset the continental balance of power. The king treated the House of Habsburg as another German state rather than as the leading power in the region.

Silesia

Just as British merchant interests had pushed ____ into war with the Spanish, aggressive court aristocrats compelled Cardinal Fleury, first minister of Louis XV, to abandon his planned naval attack on British trade and instead to support the Prussian aggression against Austria, the traditional enemy of France. The French move against Austria brought Great Britain into the continental war, as Britain sought to make sure the Low Countries remained in the friendly hands of Austria, not France.

Sir Robert Walpole

In 1765 Parliament passed the ___ which out a tax on legal documents and other items such as newspapers. The money from these taxes was to be spent in the colonies.

Stamp Act

The Americans responded that they alone through their colonial assemblies had the right to tax themselves and that they were not represented in Parliament. In 1765, the ___ met in America and drew up a protest to the crown. There was much disorder in the colonies, particularly Massachusetts, roused by the Sons of Liberty. The colonists agreed to refuse to import British goods.

Stamp Act Congress

The ____ of 1763 ended the Seven Years' War. Silesia remained Prussian.

Treaty of Hubertusburg

_____(1763): Britain received all of Canada, the Ohio River Valley, and the eastern half of the Mississippi River Valley. Britain returned Pondicherry and Chandernagore in Inaida and the West Indian sugar islands of Guadeloupe to France. Defeat convinced many in France of the necessity for political and administrative reform. Because of the financial burdens of the wars, every power had to increase its revenues to pay its debt and finance its next combat.

Treaty of Paris

The ____(1713) established the boundaries of empire during the first half of 18th century. Except for Brazil governed by Portugal and Dutch Guiana, Spain controlled all mainland South America. It ruled Florida, New Mexico, California, and the Southwest. The Spanish governed Central America, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Trinidad, and the eastern part of Hispaniola, modern day Dominican Republic

Treaty of Utrecht

Colonial trade followed a geographic triangle. European goods-often guns-were carried to Africa to be exchanged for slaves who were often then taken to the West Indies where they were traded for sugar and tropical products which were then shipped to Europe. Not all ships carried all three legs of the triangle.Another trade pattern existed between New England and the West Indies with New England fish, rum, or lumber being traded for sugar.

Triangle trade

After the Seven Years' War Frederick II came to be called Frederick the Great. Two factors in addition to Frederick's leadership saved Prussia. Britain furnished considerable financial aid. Empress Elizabeth of Russia died. Her successor was ____ (he was murdered the same year), whose admiration for Frederick was boundless. He made peace with Prussia

Tsar Peter III

The British-French conflict expanded when France supported Spain against Britain in the New World. France could not bring sufficient strength to the colonial struggle. Having chosen to continue the old struggle with Austria, France lost the struggle for the future against Great Britain. The _____ ended in a stalemate in 1748 with the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle. Prussia retained Silesia and Spain renewed Britain's privilege from the Treaty of Utrecht (1713) to import slaves into the Spanish colonies.

War of the Austrian Succession

By the early 18th century, mercantilist assumptions were far removed from the economic realities of the colonies. The colonial and home markets simply did not mesh. Spain could not produce enough goods for South America. Economic production in the British North American colonies challenged English manufacturing and led to British attempts to limit certain colonial industries such as iron and hat making. Colonists of different countries wished to trade with each other. English colonists could by sugar more cheaply from the French ____ than from English suppliers. The 18th century became the "golden age of smugglers"

West Indies

In 1783, the king approached ____, son of William Pitt the Elder, to manage the House of Commons. During the election of 1784, Pitt constructed a House of Commons favorable to the monarch. In 1785, he attempted one measure of modest parliamentary reform. When it failed, the young prime minister abandoned the cause of reform.

William Pitt the Younger