EFFECTS: CHANGING SOCIAL HIERARCHIES

• ethnic and religious diversity

  • jews were exiled from spain
  • jews tried to find refuge in portugual
  • portugual was creating ties with spain, so portugual exiled jews as well
  • jews saw refuge in the ottoman empire after ottoman empire opened them with welcome arms
• rise of new political elites

  • spanish imposed a new social hierarchy known as the casta sustem on their colonial holdings in the Americas
  • organized colonial society into a series of ranks based on race and ancestry
  • depended on how much spanish blood was in them
  • prior to the imposing of the casta system, native peoples were part of a wide variety of linguistic and cultural groups, but the casta system erased much of that cultural complexity and ordered their society by the standsrds of a small minority of Spanish elite
  • transition from the Ming to the Qing Dynasty in China
• the struggles of existing elites

  • russian boyars made up the aristocratic land-owning class in Russia
  • they exterted great power in the administration of the empire for centuries until absolutist peter the great rose to power in russia
  • peter wanted to take all the power he could from those boyars and keep it to himself
  • when the boyars opposed this, peter went ahead and abolished the rank of boyar
  • peter required anyone who wanted bureaucratic employment to serve the state directly