Christe A. McMenomy and Karl Oles for Scholars Online
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14: Mon, Oct 21, 2024
Please read the chapter and take the quiz by midnight on Mon, Oct 21, 2024.
Please also post in the forum for the day a short essay in response to this question:
Check out the comments about the Songhay Empire on page 453. What resources were important in funding that empire? How were those resources involved in the end of that empire?
Check out the comments about South Central Africa on page 455. Can you find the region of the “Great Lakes” on the map? What resources were important in he life of those kingdoms? Note the distinction between the “Tutsi cattle breeders” and the “Hutu farmers.” The conflict between these groups continued into the 20th Century, culminating in a civil war in the 1990s in which it is estimated that more than one million people died.
Check out the comments about Coastal Africa/Trade Forts on page 457. Why did the Portuguese build forts along the African coast? Which resources were the Portuguese interested in at first, before the slave trade took over as the chief focus?
Slaves themselves are a resource. Read the paragraph about “Chattel Slavery” on page 460, along with the note in the margin. What is distinctive about a “chattel” slave? How did plantations depend on slaves? Can you explain the statement on page 461 that, at least in the early days of the slave trade, “it was economically more desirable to literally work slaves to death and buy more than to make the investments necessary to cultivate families”?
Why is sugar a valuable crop? Why is tobacco a valuable crop?
Can you summarize how the “Atlantic system” of trade, also called the “triangular trade” worked?
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