Transoceanic Interconnections (1450–1750)
What you must know
After 1492 the Atlantic replaced the Mediterranean as the center of gravity of world commerce, creating the first sustained link among all major ocean basins. The Columbian Exchange moved maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cacao and tobacco eastward and wheat, horses, cattle, sugar and - decisively - smallpox and measles westward, with catastrophic demographic consequences in the Americas that in turn created labor demand. Europeans answered it with coerced systems: encomienda, hacienda and the Inca-derived mit'a in Spanish America; indentured servitude; and, increasingly, chattel slavery organized through the Middle Passage, justified in racial terms and centered on plantation sugar, then cotton. Portuguese feitorias, the VOC and English East India Company, joint-stock financing and mercantilist doctrine tied colonial wealth to state power, while the Treaty of Tordesillas split Spanish and Portuguese claims. In the Americas a casta hierarchy encoded race, and viceroys and audiencias administered empire. Culturally, syncretism appeared in religion (Vodun, Santería) and language. Meanwhile the Renaissance, Reformation, printing press and Scientific Revolution reworked European intellectual life, and Enlightenment arguments later gave critics of slavery and absolutism their vocabulary.
Traps
Slavery long predates 1492; what was new was its racialized, hereditary, Atlantic-scale form. Do not equate encomienda (a labor grant) with mit'a (a rotational labor draft) or hacienda (a landed estate). Mercantilism is not free trade. The Columbian Exchange was not only crops - diseases and animals reshaped societies. And resist the claim that the American demographic catastrophe was caused mainly by warfare.
Worked example
For any Atlantic-system question, trace a commodity chain: who supplied the land, who did the labor, who shipped it, who profited, who absorbed the risk? Sugar answers: Caribbean plantations, enslaved Africans, Portuguese and Dutch carriers, European consumers.