Tuesday 22 June 2010

Cultures in Contact

In 1500 Britain was a small country on the edge of Europe just recovering from over a hundred years of war.
In other parts of the world there were much bigger, richer empires:

The Aztecs in Central America
The Ming in China
Benin, Mali and Songhay in West Africa
The Incas in South America
The Mughals in India

400 years later in 1900 Britain was the richest, most powerful country in the world.
All the above empires had fallen.
Their were now controlled by Europeans.
Britain was rich: Asia, Africa and Latin America had become much poorer.

How and why did this happen?
Create a presentation with images and your own words with your answer to this.
There are many different factors. See if you can make links between them.

Use the worksheet you did yesterday to help you.
You can also ‘google’ key words like slave trade, British Empire, Kingdom of Benin, opium wars, Captain Cook, Scramble for Africa etc etc.

These pages take you some other links:
Slave trade (scroll right down for the links)
British Empire

British Museum