*For "The Meeting of Cultures" Capitalism -An
economic system based on the investment of resources
(money, capital) in various enterprises in the hope of
making a profit.
Conquistador(s)- Spanish for
"conqueror. " Conquistadors (pl. ), such as Hernando
Corté s and Francisco Pizarro, led military
expeditions in the New World in order to claim lands and
resources for Spain and to subjugate the Native American
empires they encountered on their way.
Coureurs de
bois -Adventurous French trappers and fur traders
who penetrated far into the North American wilderness and
developed an extensive trade that became one of the
underpinnings of the French colonial economy.
Demography -The statistical study of human
populations, especially with reference to size, density,
distribution, and vital statistics such as sex or family
size. Using computers to store, sort, and retrieve the
considerable data available to them, historians have
conducted complex demographic studies and shed new light on
social life in early America.
Encomiendas -The
Spanish right to exact tribute and labor from Native
Americans on large tracts of land, granted by Don Juan de
Onate to favored Spaniards in what would become the
American Southwest.
Feudalism -a system of
political organization (as in Europe during the Middle
Ages) in which a vassal served a lord and received
protection and land in return
High Church -The
party within the Church of England that retained many of
the Catholic ceremonies and practices that the Puritans
opposed and wished to purge from the church.
Mercantilism -Economic philosophy popular in
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe which argued that
one person or nation could grow rich only at the expense of
another, and that a nation's economic health depended,
therefore, on a "favorable balance of trade" (selling as
much as possible to foreign lands while buying as little as
possible from them).
Mestizos -People of mixed
Spanish and Native-American blood, who came to numerically
dominate the colonies of the Spanish Empire.