Timeline: Transformations of North America, 1450–1700

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WORK, EXCHANGE, & TECHNOLOGY PEOPLING POLITICS & POWER IDEAS, BELIEFS, & CULTURE IDENTITY
1450

  • 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
1550

  • 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
1600

  • 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
1700

  • 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