Drill 10 · Multiple Choice · Unit 4: Transoceanic Interconnections
AP World History Unit 4 Drill 10 is a Multiple Choice practice drill covering Unit 4: Transoceanic Interconnections. 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 the labor systems that sustained European maritime empires in the Americas from c. 1450 to c. 1750, including the encomienda, chattel slavery, and indentured servitude. Read the passage carefully, then answer all five questions.
Adapted from a modern historian's analysis of labor systems in the colonial Americas.
"The colonial economies of the Americas were built on coerced labor. What is remarkable is not the fact of coercion — forced labor had deep roots in both the pre-Columbian Americas and in European serfdom — but the specific sequence of labor systems that European colonizers introduced as circumstances changed. The encomienda tied indigenous labor to Spanish landholders but depended on an indigenous population that disease was rapidly destroying. Indentured servitude brought European laborers under fixed-term contracts that promised freedom after service, but this supply proved insufficient for expanding plantation agriculture. Chattel slavery, drawing on existing African slave-trading networks and the brutal efficiency of the plantation system, ultimately prevailed because it offered landholders a self-reproducing, legally permanent, and racially identifiable labor force. Each transition reflected not moral evolution but economic calculation."