Drill 7 · Multiple Choice · Unit 3: Land-Based Empires
AP World History Unit 3 Drill 7 is a Multiple Choice practice drill covering Unit 3: Land-Based Empires. It contains 5 original questions created by Brian Stewart, a Barron's test prep author with over 20 years of tutoring experience.
This drill focuses on how rulers of land-based empires from c. 1450 to c. 1750 used art, architecture, religion, and taxation to consolidate power. Read the passage carefully, then answer all five questions.
Adapted from a modern historian's account.
"Across the diverse land-based empires of the early modern period — Ottoman, Mughal, Safavid, Qing, and Aztec alike — rulers confronted a common challenge: how to project authority across vast territories populated by subjects of varied languages, religions, and customs. The solutions they devised were remarkably similar in structure if not in content. Monumental architecture announced imperial power to all who entered capital cities. Patronage of religious institutions bound the sacred and the political together. Revenue systems extracted wealth from agricultural production while creating networks of local intermediaries who depended on imperial favor. And everywhere, rulers wrapped themselves in the language of cosmic or divine sanction: the Ottoman sultan as shadow of God on earth, the Mughal emperor as light of the world, the Chinese emperor as Son of Heaven, the Aztec ruler as intermediary between humans and the sun. The specific traditions differed; the political logic was universal."