Trade, Labor, and Power in the Transoceanic World (1450–1750)

Maritime empire

A state whose power depends heavily on controlling ocean routes, ports, and overseas territories (often alongside some land control) to dominate trade and project influence.

Chokepoint

A strategic narrow passage or key port where ships must pass or stop, allowing a state to control trade and movement.

Sea lanes

Safe, predictable ocean routes used for long-distance shipping and trade; controlling them helps secure commerce and empire.

Joint-stock company

A business organization where many investors pool capital to fund risky voyages and share profits (and losses), reducing individual risk.

Chartered company

A state-authorized company granted special rights (often monopolies) and sometimes quasi-government powers like making treaties, raising armies, or governing territory.

Dutch VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie)

A major Dutch chartered company in the Indian Ocean that combined trade with state-like power, including forts, armed force, and coercive diplomacy to shape markets.

British East India Company

A British chartered company with state backing and monopoly privileges that helped expand British power through trade and, at times, governance and military force.

Mercantilism

An early modern economic worldview that treated trade as a competition for power; states sought to export more than import, accumulate precious metals, and use colonies for raw materials and captive markets.

Monopoly trading system

Imperial trade rules that restricted colonial commerce to the mother country or approved merchants, channeling profits and goods through the imperial center.

Navigation laws

State laws regulating shipping and colonial trade routes to enforce mercantilist goals and keep colonial commerce under imperial control.

Tariffs

Taxes on imported (or sometimes exported) goods used to raise revenue and/or steer trade in favor of the imperial economy.

Navy

A state’s war fleet used to protect shipping, attack rivals, and secure sea routes—central to maintaining maritime empires.

Coastal forts

Fortified positions along coasts used to defend ports, control trade routes, and support naval enforcement far from the homeland.

Fortified trading post

A defended commercial enclave used to store goods, tax or redirect trade, and project power without conquering large inland territories.

Viceroyalty

A major administrative division in Spanish America governed by a viceroy, part of a layered bureaucracy for territorial control.

Plantation

A large agricultural enterprise producing cash crops for export (e.g., sugar, tobacco), typically relying on intense, often coerced labor.

Atlantic system

A transatlantic network linking European manufactured goods, African captive labor, and American plantation/mining output into an interconnected economic system.

Manila Galleons

Spanish Pacific trade route linking Spanish America and the Philippines, carrying American silver to Asia and returning with Asian luxury goods like silk and porcelain.

Coerced labor

Labor extracted through force or legal compulsion (e.g., enslavement or forced labor drafts), common in colonial economies and a major source of resistance and instability.

Maroon communities

Independent settlements formed by formerly enslaved people who escaped, representing a major form of resistance to slavery.

Pueblo Revolt (1680)

A large-scale Indigenous uprising in New Mexico against Spanish colonial policies, including forced labor and religious suppression.

Peninsulares

Iberian-born officials and elites in Spanish America who typically held the highest colonial offices, symbolizing imperial authority.

Creoles

American-born people of European descent in Spanish America who could be wealthy but often resented exclusion from top offices held by peninsulares.

Casta system

A Spanish American social classification system that ranked people by perceived ancestry (European, Indigenous, African, and mixtures), shaping legal rights, taxes, and prestige.

Chattel slavery

A form of slavery in which enslaved people are treated as inheritable property; in the Atlantic world it became increasingly legalized and tied to ancestry, hardening racial hierarchies.