Diversified economies of Native America

Rise of the Ottoman Empire blocks Asian trading routes of the Italian city-states

Europeans fish off North American coast

Portuguese traders explore African coast

Christopher Columbus explores the Bahamas and West Indies (1492–1504)

Pedro Alvares Cabral makes landfall in Brazil (1500)

Spanish conquest of Mexico and Peru (1519–1535)

Rise of monarchical nation-states in Europe

Aztecs and Incas consolidate their empires

Probable founding of the Iroquois Confederacy

Rise of the Songhai Empire in Africa

Protestant Reformation (1517) sparks century of religious warfare

Henry VIII creates Church of England (1534)

Founding of Jesuit order (1540)

Castile and Aragon joined to create Spain; the Inquisition helps create a sense of Spanishness

John Calvin establishes a Protestant commonwealth in Geneva, Switzerland

Growth of the outwork system in English textile industry

Spanish encomienda system organizes native labor in Mexico

Inca mita system is co-opted by the Spanish in the Andes

Castilians and Africans arrive in Spanish America in large numbers

English colonies in Newfoundland, Maine, and Roanoke fail

Elizabeth’s “sea dogs” plague Spanish shipping

English monarchs adopt mercantilist policies

Defeat of the Spanish Armada (1588)

Philip II defends the Roman Catholic Church against Protestantism

Elizabeth I adopts Protestant Book of Common Prayer (1559)

English conquest and persecution of native Irish

Growing Protestant movement in England

First staple exports from the English mainland colonies: furs and tobacco

Subsistence farms in New England

Transition to sugar plantation system in the Caribbean islands

First set of Anglo-Indian wars

African servitude begins in Virginia (1619)

Caribbean islands move from servitude to slavery

James I claims divine right to rule England

Virginia’s House of Burgesses (1619)

English Puritan Revolution

Native Americans rise up against English invaders (1622, 1640s)

Persecuted English Puritans and Catholics migrate to America

Established churches set up in Puritan New England and Anglican Virginia

Dissenters settle in Rhode Island

Pilgrims and Puritans seek to create godly commonwealths

Powhatan and Virginia Company representatives attempt to extract tribute from each other

Tobacco trade stagnates

Maturing yeoman economy and emerging Atlantic trade in New England

Growing gentry immigration to Virginia

White indentured servitude shapes Chesapeake society

Africans defined as property rather than people in the Chesapeake

Restoration of the English crown (1660)

English conquer New Netherland (1664)

Metacom’s War in New England (1675–1676)

Bacon’s Rebellion calls for removal of Indians and end of elite rule

Salem witchcraft crisis (1692)

Social mobility for Africans ends with collapse of tobacco trade and increased power of gentry