| Term | Definition |
|---|
| chartered company | Group of private investors who paid an annual fee to France and England in exchange for a monopoly over trade to the West Indies colonies. |
| manumission | A grant of legal freedom to an individual slave |
| capitalism | The economic system of large financial institutions-banks, stock exchanges,investment companies-that first developed in early modern Europe. |
| mercantilism | European government policies of the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries designed to promote overseas trade between a country and its colonies and accumulate precious metals by requiring colonies to trade only with their motherland country. |
| Janissary | Infantry, originally of slave origin, armed with firearms and constituting the elite of the Ottoman army from the 15th century until the corps was abolished in 1826. |
| Devshirme | "Selection" in Turkish. The system by which boys from Christian communities were taken by the Ottoman state to serve as Janissaries. |
| Sikhism | Indian religion founded by the guru Nanak in the Punjab region of northwest India. After the Mughal emperor ordered the beheading of the ninth guru in 1675, Sikh warriors mounted armed resistance to Mughal rule. |
| daimyo | Literally, great name. Japanese warlords and great landowners, whose armed samurai gave them control of the Japanese islands from the 8th to the late 19th century. Under the Tokugawa Shogunate they were subordinated to the imperial government. |
| samurai | Literally "those who serve", the hereditary military elite of the Tokugawa Shogunate. |
| Tokugawa Shogunate | (1600-1868) The last of the three shogunates of Japan. |
| Macartney Mission | (1792-1793) The unsuccessful attempt by the British Empire to establish diplomatic relations with the Qing Empire. |
| Scientific Revolution | The intellectual movement in Europe, initially associated with planetary motion and other aspects pf physics, that by the 17th century had laid the groundwork for modern science. |
| Enlightenment | A philosophical movement in 18th century Europe that fostered the belief that one could reform society by discovering rational laws tha governed social behavior and were just as scientific as the laws of physics. |
| Constitutional Convention | Meeting in 1787 of the elected representatives of the thirteen original states to write the Constitutional of the United States. |
| Estates General | France's traditional national assembly with representatives of the three estates, or classes, in French society: the clergy, nobility, and commoners. The calling of the Estates General in 1789 led to the French Revolution. |
| Declaration of the Rights of Man | (1789) Statement of fundmental political rights adopted by the French National Assembly at the beginning of the French Revolution. |
| Jacobins | Radical Republicans during the French Revolution. They were led by Maximilien Robespierre from 1793 to 1794 |
| Congress of Vienna | (1814-1815) Meeting of representatives of European monarchs called ro reestablish the old order after the defeat of Napolean I. |
| Revolutions of 1848 | Democratic and nationalist revolutions that swept across Europe. The monarchy in France was overthrown. In Germany, Austria, Italy, and Hungary the revolutions failed. |
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