Q1
First, human societies and the networks that connected them became much more complex.A second major development was theColumbian Exchange of plants, animals, and microorganisms between Afroeurasia and the Americas. It followed the success of European sea captains in permanently linking the two hemispheres.A third change was the emergence of a truly global economy. This was another consequence of the Great Global Convergence, which linked together all major regions, except Antarctica, in a single web of exchange.The remarkable rise of European political and military power relative to the rest of the world was the fourth major change. The fifth great change was the development in western Europe of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment and the subsequent diffusion of their ideas to other parts of the world, as women and men grappled with them in a variety of ways.
Q2
Big Era Six was characterized by two contrasting major trends in human demography. On the one hand, it was a period of major population increase in Afroeurasia. The world’s population increased from about 375 million in 1400 to 954 million in 1800. On the other hand, it saw a catastrophic collapse in the population of the Americas as a whole, which plummeted from at least 50 million in 1500 to perhaps 10 million by 1600.
Q3
The Great Dying caused massive social, economic, and cultural upheaval in numerous Amerindian societies. This was probably the major factor in the disintegration of the Aztec and Inca empires. The calamity also had a major impact on the development of the new Spanish empire in the Americas. The population loss meant that the Spanish faced severe shortages of labor and rapidly shrinking taxes. They therefore had to create an administrative system that gave priority to the mining industry and ensured the continued export of silver.
Q4
The Americans and the Aztecs
Q5
Sugar itself had a transforming effect on the Atlantic world in Big Era Six. The sugar boom brought riches to some Europeans and Africans but a death sentence to many others. The swelling consumption of sugar, coffee, tea, and cacao transformed the diets and daily habits of ordinary Europeans and linked them by invisible economic threads to enslaved Caribbean and Brazilian workers.
Q6
A primary reason for the rise of European power was the military and fiscal revolution. In the military sphere, Europeans adopted gunpowder weaponry, which had originally been pioneered in China. This soon led to advances in strategy, tactics, fort-building, and discipline.
Q7
Europe’s transformation was also the product of internal cultural trends. Following its recovery from the devastating plagues, climatic deterioration, and warfare of the fourteenth century, Europe underwent a multi-dimensional revival.
Q8
In Europe, the fragmenting of religious doctrine that accompanied the Protestant Reformation, the sudden linkup with the Americas, and the continuing flow of knowledge from distant parts of Afroeurasia produced multiple shocks to the Christian worldview. Such newness and change provoked a searching examination of the place of humans in the cosmos and nature. In the absence of any single controlling religious authority to stop them, scholars like Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Pascal, and Newton put forward philosophical and scientific ideas that challenged older ways of thinking.
Q9
Six interrelated factors were particularly important:
First, a revolutionary transformation occurred in human use of energy. Until the nineteenth century, the energy basis of human society had been biomass energy, mainly the burning of wood to produce heat, plus human and animal muscle power.
Second, unprecedented global population growth accompanied the fossil fuel revolution.
Third, an industrial transformation got under way. In the Industrial Revolution, humans—western Europeans at first—learned to exploit coal and steam energy to mass produce goods with machines and to sell them worldwide.
Fourth, a revolution took place in communications and transport. Unprecedented numbers of people in this era took advantage of steamships and railroads to migrate long distances within continental spaces as well as across oceans.
Fifth, the modern revolution was partly a democratic revolution. Popular revolutionary movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries dramatically reshaped ideas about government and political power.
Finally, the era witnessed the rise of new colonial empires. Using new technologies of warfare and political control that came out of the Industrial Revolution, the empires of several European states greatly increased in size during this era.
Q10
Indigenous population declined in this era because the population was growing and the Europeans were very against the Indigenous people.
Q11
The Industrial Revolution transformed the ability of humans to reshape the world’s environment. Deforestation increased on a global scale. So too did water pollution from chemical and agricultural discharges into lakes and streams, and atmospheric pollution from the burning of huge amounts of coal. The advent of railroads and steamships also hastened the diffusion of plants and animals to new parts of the world. This was an extension of the Columbian Exchange of biota that occurred in the previous Big Era. The spread of new plants, such as maize, wheat, and cassava into areas where they had previously been unknown, underwrote large population increases. But environmentally adverse consequences also occurred. For example, in 1859 a farmer in Australia introduced a few rabbits for hunting. Within a few years rabbits were hopping across the continent by the millions, ravaging crops as they went. By 1950, Australia’s rabbit population numbered 500 million and continued to wreak havoc on agriculture.
Q12
In the first phase of the Industrial Revolution (1750-1840), entrepreneurs and workers harnessed coal and steam power to drive industrial machinery and vastly increase production.Also, the modern world economy became increasingly organized on the basis of an international division of labor. Around 1800, for example, sugar was the world’s most important commercial crop. When necessary, however, European powers were willing to gain economic advantages using strategies that contradicted the free market.In the second half of the era, European and American governments followed suit, establishing, by armed intervention, privileged enclaves in Southeast Asia and China.Following the discovery of gold in California in 1849 and later discoveries in Australia, Alaska, and South Africa, a new cycle of global economic growth set in.Between 1880 and 1914, the world economy underwent a second major wave of expansion. Global growth increased threefold, world trade fourfold, and international investment eightfold. The era also saw major economic consolidation. In accord with liberal principles that valued accumulation of private capital and the sanctity of property, new cartels and trusts were formed whose wealth dwarfed any business organizations previously known in history.