Causation: Renaissance and Age of Discovery Practice Test

A scholar’s excerpt contends that European contact with the Americas triggered demographic catastrophe through disease, which then altered colonial labor demand. The scholar argues that population collapse pushed colonizers toward alternative labor systems, including coerced Indigenous labor where possible and increased reliance on enslaved Africans in plantation zones. Which development best fits this cause-and-effect explanation?

A historian’s 75–125 word excerpt argues that early modern European states increasingly treated overseas space as divisible and governable through law: treaties, papal bulls, and mapped meridians translated discovery into enforceable claims. The historian emphasizes that the drive to prevent conflict among Catholic powers created formal mechanisms for partitioning newly encountered lands. Which development was most directly caused by this legal-geographic approach to empire?