unit 5

The Navigation Acts

Between 1651 and 1696 the English Parliament passed a series of "Navigation Acts" that applied mercantilist economic theory to the relationship that England had with its colonies. "The acts defined the colonies as both suppliers of raw materials and as markets for English manufactured goods. Merchants from other nations were forbidden from doing business in the English colonies, and colonial commodities were required to be transported in English vessel" (Faragher 77).

The Stono Rebellion

On September 9, 1739 a slave rebellion occurred in South Carolina. The rebellion began on the banks of the Stono River, twenty miles south of Charles Town. The slaves were headed toward Florida, where the Spanish governor had promised freedom to all British runaway slaves. Before the rebellion was squashed by South Carolina planters, twenty-three whites and forty-five to fifty slaves were killed. Stono was the most violent slave uprising of the colonial period.

Slave Codes

a series of laws that were passed mainly in the Southern colonies during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century that denied slaves basic civil rights.

The Triangle Trade

a term that is sometimes used to describe the economic system that developed on the Atlantic linking Europe, Africa, North and South America, and the Caribbean. It is typically envisioned as constituting a single trading network. Although the system was more complex than the term "triangular trade" implies, it is still a useful concept because it underscores the key role that the slave trade played in this system. Within the context of the triangle trade, the "middle passage"--that leg of the triangle in which slaves from West Africa were shipped to the New World slave colonies—played a pivotal role.

Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745-1797)

an African slave who purchased his freedom and became an advocate for the anti-slavery cause. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, was "the prototype for dozens of other slave narratives in the nineteenth century."

Mercantilism

an economic theory which holds that a nation's wealth and power are directly related to the amount of gold and silver that it can control. Since there is a limited amount of gold and silver in the world, mercantilists believed that the various nations of the world had to compete with one another in order to acquire as much gold and silver as possible. What one nation could acquire and control, another nation could not have. The key to acquiring gold and silver was for a nation to establish a favorable balance of trade with its trading partners. Ideally, a nation should become economically self-sufficient, while maintaining a favorable balance of trade with other nations. That way, a nation would accumulate the gold and silver of its trading partners, while not surrendering any of its own. Colonies were useful in this scheme because they supplied the mother country with raw materials that could be turned into manufactured goods in the mother country. They were also useful because they could be treated as captive markets for the sale of the mother country's manufactured goods. In effect, mercantilism, as an economic doctrine, justified the exploitation of a nation's colonies by the mother country. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--due to its belief that the world contained a limited amount of gold and silver and its associated belief that nations would have to compete with one another for this limited amount—the mercantilist doctrine was used to justify wars between Europe's various states.