Vocabulary

=**//Terms://**= __Atlantic system__: a trade system that moved cargo, resources, slaves, and cultures around the Atlantic.

__Atlantic Circuit__: a clockwise network of sea routes used to trade goods.

__Middle Passage__: is the branch of the Atlantic Circuit where the slaves were transported across the Atlantic Ocean from Africa to the Americas' plantation colonies.

__Chartered Companies__: groups of private investors who paid an annual fee to France and England in exchange for a monopoly over trade to the West Indies colonies.

__Dutch West India Company__: (1621-1794) A trading company chartered by the Dutch government to conduct its merchants' trade in the Americas and Africa.

__Capitalism:__ the economic system of a large financial institution--banks, stock exchanges, investment companies--that first developed in early Europe.

__Mercantilism:__ European government policies of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries designed to promote overseas trade between a country and it's colonies and accumulate precious metals by requiring the colonies to trade only with the motherland country.

__Manumission__: the legal grant of freedom by an owner.

__Maroons:__ Caribbean runaway slaves

__Plantocracy:__ a small number of very rich men who owned most of the slaves and most of the land.

__Driver:__ an appointed male slave whose job was to ensure that the gang completed its work

__Seasoning:__ a period of time when newly arrived slaves had to adjust to their new environment, during which on average one-third of the slaves died of an unfamiliar disease

__Songhai__: A people, language, kingdom, and empire in western Sudan in West Africa. At its height in the sixteenth century, the Muslim Songhai Empire stretched from the Atlantic to the land of the Hausa and was a major player in the trans-Saharan trade.

__Bornu__: A powerful West African kingdom at the southern edge of the Sahara in the Central Sudan, which was important in trans-Saharan trade and in the spread of Islam. Also known as Kanem-Bornu, it endured from the ninth century to the end of the nineteenth.

__Hausa__: An agricultural and trading people of central Sudan in West Africa. Aside from their brief incorporation into the Songhai Empire, the Hausa city-states remained autonomous until the Sokoto Caliphate conquered them in the early nineteenth century.