Historical Terms and Concepts

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Hernán Cortés

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Spanish conquistador who led the expedition that conquered the Aztec Empire in modern Mexico.

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Great Dying

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Term used to describe the devastating demographic impact of European-borne epidemic diseases on the Americas, with up to 90 percent of the pre-Columbian population dying.

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Little Ice Age

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A period of unusually cool temperatures from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, most prominently in the Northern Hemisphere.

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General Crisis

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The near-record cold winters in the mid-seventeenth century, sparked by the Little Ice Age, leading to famines, uprisings, and wars.

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Columbian Exchange

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The network of transatlantic communication, migration, trade, and the transfer of diseases, plants, and animals during European exploration and colonization of the Americas.

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Mercantilism

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The economic theory that governments served their countries’ economic interests by encouraging exports and accumulating bullion, fueling European colonialism.

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Mestizo

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A term used to describe the multiracial population of Spanish colonial societies in the Americas, criticized for being associated with colonialism and racial stratification.

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Mulattoes

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A derogatory term used to describe people of mixed African and European origin.

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Settler Colonies

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Imperial territories where Europeans settled permanently in substantial numbers, such as British North America and Portuguese Brazil.

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Russian Empire

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A Christian state centered on Moscow that expanded into northern Asia and westward into the Baltics and Eastern Europe by 1800.