Lesson Plans

The Western Heritage ©2000

by Kagan, Ozment, and Turner

Focus Lesson 9

Chapter 17: "The Transatlantic Economy, Trade Wars, and Colonial Rebellion"

AP* Course Description

1. Intellectual and Cultural History
   • Major trends in literature and the arts
   • Intellectual and cultural developments and their relationship to social values and political events
   • Developments in social, economic, and political thought
   • Changes in elite and popular culture, such as the development of new attitudes toward religion, the family, work, and ritual
   • Impact of global expansion on European culture
2. Political and Diplomatic History
   • The rise and functioning of the modern state in its various forms
   • Relations between Europe and other parts of the world: colonialism, imperialism, decolonization, and global interdependence
   • The extension and limitation of rights and liberties (personal, civic, economic, and political); majority and minority; political persecutions
   • The growth and changing forms of nationalism
   • Relationship between domestic and foreign policies
   • Efforts to restrain conflict: treaties, balance of power, diplomacy, and international organizations
   • War and civil conflict: origins, developments, technology, and their consequences
3. Social and Economic History
   • The shift in social structures from hierarchical orders to modern social classes: the changing distribution of wealth and poverty
   • The development of commercial practices and their economic and social impact
   • The growth of competition and interdependence in national and world markets
   • Private and state roles in economic activity
   • Development of racial and ethnic group identities

Key Components

• Instructor's Manual: pp. 34–35
• Study Guide and Workbook, Vol. II: pp. 39–49
• Test Item File: pp. 89–94

Key Web Sites

• The Rise, Decline, and Reemergence of Classical Liberalism

Key Words and Terms

Suggested Pacing

Test Strategy

Key Concepts

• Mercantilism and its impact
  Understanding of the theory of mercantilism and its political and social ramifications is essential to understanding Europe in the eighteenth century. Prior to this time, European conflict was focused on religious issues, a remnant of the Reformation. However, by the eighteenth century European nations were looking outward and had begun to create empires. Now nation-states came into conflict with one another over territorial possessions and the right to trade with one another's colonies. In addition, European nations played off against one another in an effort to achieve a balance of power. Alliances were made, broken, and remade. These conflicts had a tremendous impact on developments in the Americas. Britain and France, especially, would see their European conflicts spill over into their American colonies.
  
  
• African slave trade
  In the Americas, the use of Africans as slaves began in the islands of the Caribbean and moved westward to Latin America and northwestward to the British colonies on the mainland. Initially, finding cheap labor to work sugar cane plantations in the West Indies was the motivation for enslaving Africans. By the end of the 1500s, in the West Indies and in major cities of South America, there were as many or more enslaved Africans as there were white colonists. While slavery did not continue to grow in much of South America, the institution prospered in Brazil, the islands of the Caribbean, and the North American colonies of Great Britain. Slavery became fundamental to the triangle trade that developed between Europe and Africa, Africa and the Caribbean islands, and the Caribbean islands and Europe or the Caribbean islands and the British mainland colonies. As the authors of the text note, the slave trade "touched most of the economy of the transatlantic world." It was not just slavers and slave owners who prospered from slavery, but anyone who dealt with the results of the work of slaves, such as textile mill owners whose employees took raw cotton and turned it into cloth.

Summing Up Student Understanding

• the British-French rivalry led to wars both in Europe and in their colonies in the Americas and Asia
• the Spanish economy prospered from the bullion exported from its colonies
• the wars of the mid-eighteenth century were, in part, a response to the growing conflicts between England and France
• the American War for Independence was a direct reaction to British mercantile policies
• the African slave trade was a consequence of the desire of European nations to build powerful empires

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Aspects of Western Civilization, Vol. I, edited by Rogers—Chapter 10, All Sections
• Sources of the West, Vol. I, edited by Kishlausky—Part III, "The New Worlds"