Indian Ocean Commercial Network
1450-1750 : The massive, interconnected web of commerce in premodern times between the lands that bordered on the Indian Ocean (including East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia); the network was badly disrupted by Portuguese intrusion beginning around 1500. For many centuries, Eastern goods had trickled into the Mediterranean through the Middle East.
Trading Post Empire
1450-1750 : The Portuguese created this in the Indian Ocean; they aimed to control the commerce, not large territories or populations, and to do so by force of arms rather than by economic competition. This was in seek of the monopolization of the space trade that the Portuguese king grandly entitled. This was a form of imperial dominance based on control of trade rather than on control of subject peoples.
Philippines (Spanish)
1450-1750 : An archipelago of Pacific islands colonized by Spain in a relatively bloodless process that extended for the century or so after 1565, a process accompanied by a major effort at evangelization; the Spanish named them the Philippine Islands in honor of King Philip II of Spain. Beyond missionary enterprise, other features of Spanish colonial practice in the Americas found expression
British/Dutch East India Companies
1450-1750 : Private trading companies chartered by the governments of England and the Netherlands around 1600; they were given monopolies on Indian Ocean trade, including the right to make war and to rule conquered peoples. They received charters from their respective governments granting them trading monopolies and the power to make war and to govern conquered peoples. Thus established their own parallel and competing trading post empires, with the Dutch focused on the islands of Indonesia and the English on India.
Tokugawa Shogunate
1450-1750 : The military rulers of Japan who successfully unified Japan by the early seventeenth century and established a "closed door" policy toward European encroachments. They largely closed their country off from the emerging world of European commerce, although they maintained their trading ties to China and Korea.
"Silver Drain"
1450-1750 : Term often used, along with "Specie Drain", to describe the siphoning of money from Europe to pay for the luxury products of the East, a process exacerbated by the fact that Europe had few trade goods that were desirable in Eastern markets; eventually the bulk of the worlds silver supply make its way to china. This demand set silver in motion around the world, with bulk of the worlds silver supply winding up in China and much of the rest elsewhere in Asia. Chinese, Portuguese, and Dutch traders flocked to Manila to sell Chinese goods in exchange for silver. The routes operated by this were extraordinarily numerous.
Potosi
1450-1750 : City that developed high in the Andes (In present day Bolivia) at the site of the worlds largest silver mine and that became the largest city in the Americas, with a population of some 160,000 in the 1570's. The city arose from a barren landscape, high in the Andes a ten-week mule trip away from Lima. Its size is now equivalent to that of London, Amsterdam or Seville. Its wealthy European elite lived in luxury, with all the goods of Europe and Asia at their disposal. This city sometimes referred to as a "portrait of hell".
"Soft Gold"
1450-1750 : Nickname used in the early modern period for animal furs, highly valued for their warmth and as symbols of elite status; in several regions, the fur trade generated massive wealth for those engaged in it. The profitability of that trade un furs was the chief incentive for Russia's rapid expansion during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries across Siberia, where it of fur- bearing animals was abundant.
African Diaspora
1450-1750 : Name given to the spread of African peoples across the Atlantic via the slave trade. The transatlantic spread of African peoples injected into these new societies issues of race that endure still in the twenty-first century. It also introduced elements of African culture, such as religious ideas, musical and artistic traditions, and cuisine into the making of American cultures
Benin / Dahomey
1450-1750 : A west-African kingdom ( in what is now Nigeria) whose strong kinds sharply limited engagement with the slave trade. A West African kingdom that became strong through its rulers' exploitation of the slave trade.