What roles do sugar and slavery play in the expansion of European empires?
Sugar was becoming very popular in Asia and was quickly discovered by the Europeans. The Portuguese had to find new land to grow the sugar cane because it was required to have the right conditions to grow. This is when the Portuguese found the Guanches, an African tribe in order to take care of the sugar cane. This helped the Portuguese become very wealthy.
What were the three major crops developed in the Americas? What impact did they have?
The three major crops were corn, beans and squash which all had nutritional needs that sustained the cities and civilizations.
They ruled their empire through a decentralized network of subject peoples that paid regular tribute–including everything from the most basic items, such as corn, beans, and other foodstuffs, to luxury goods such as jade, cacao, and gold–and provided troops for the empire.
The Spanish was trying to take control over North and Central America. They were taking away valued goods from the Native Americans and made money off of it.
Sugar, a wildly profitable commodity originally grown in Asia, had become a popular luxury among the nobility and wealthy of Europe. The Portuguese began growing sugar cane along the Mediterranean, but sugar was a difficult crop.
The Portuguese found that sugar was a high profitable crop that they can get wealthy off of and decided to take action in the market with it. They enslaved Africans during the time they grew crops so they could make a higher profit in the business.
Native Americans passed stories down through the millennia that tell of their creation and reveal the contours of indigenous belief.
Native Americans were the first group of people to be in North America, long before Columbus and the Europeans came. How could they take credit for finding this land first?
The last global ice age trapped much of the world’s water in enormous continental glaciers. Twenty thousand years ago, ice sheets, some a mile thick, extended across North America as far south as modern-day Illinois and Ohio.
The ice age across North America left many people to panic on how they were going to survive these harsh temperatures. They had to find many ways to stay warm and finding food was tough because they would be trapped from going out in the cold.