Kōkiri Learn

Week 4 of 5

New sea routes, empires and the people who paid the price

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Session 1 · TRACE: Causes & Consequences

Why sail around the world?

  1. 10 minCause chain: in 1453 the Ottoman Empire took Constantinople. Spices were already expensive. Why might Portugal and Spain look for a sea route instead?
  2. 20 minVoyages on the map: Dias round the Cape of Good Hope (1488), Columbus across the Atlantic (1492), da Gama to India (1498), Magellan's crew around the world (1519–1522). Compare with Zheng He's much larger Chinese fleets (1405–1433).
  3. 15 minPacific lens: Pacific navigators had already crossed thousands of kilometres of ocean using stars, swells and birds. Then Abel Tasman reached Aotearoa in 1642 for the Dutch East India Company, looking for trade. What did each kind of voyaging aim for?
  4. 5 minSort consequences into short term and long term.

Session 2 · TRACE: Causes & Consequences

Conquest, colonisation and the slave trade

  1. 10 minSet the tone: this is a hard history about real people. We will be honest, respectful and careful with our words.
  2. 15 minConquest and colonisation: in the Americas, Spanish forces conquered the Aztec and Inca empires, and diseases brought by Europeans killed a very large share of the people. Trading companies from the Netherlands and Britain took control of spice lands in Asia.
  3. 15 minThe transatlantic slave trade: from the 1500s to the 1800s, about 12.5 million African people were forced onto ships to the Americas to work on sugar, tobacco and cotton plantations. Read about their resistance, from revolts to the Haitian Revolution, and about Olaudah Equiano, who bought his freedom and wrote about his life.
  4. 10 minCause and consequence map: link spices and sugar, profits, ships, plantations and the enslaved people whose labour built colonial wealth. Who gained? Who lost? Who resisted?

Getting started

Use a cause-and-consequence chain with picture prompts: want → route → voyage → empire → consequences.

Stretch

Find out how Britain ended the slave trade (1807) and slavery in its colonies (1833), and who pushed for it, including formerly enslaved campaigners.

Checkpoint

Each student can explain one cause of the Age of Exploration and one consequence for people already living in the lands Europeans reached.

Useful this week