Introduction

The expansion of European colonial empires into Asia, Africa, and the Americas was a major world event. Before the mid-fifteenth century Europe was an ingrown, claustrophobic place. There were limited opportunities for individuals to break out of the rigid class structure which was based on limited land and constricted economic opportunities. There was constant conflict: In England, the Wars of the Roses; in France, religious war; in Spain, the fight to drive out the Moslems; and in eastern Europe, the threat of conquest from Ottoman Turkey. With the advent of European voyages of exploration the whole atmosphere changed. Governments were forced to think in global terms. Merchant classes now found the means to break medieval fetters and to lay the foundations for capitalism that launched the modern nation states of today.

The stay-at-home civilizations of the Americas, Africa, India, Southeast Asia and East Asia were challenged by the global commercial network that produced wealth through exchanges of goods. Some of these civilizations were subsequently conquered; others became marginalized in a world system that judged them "undeveloped" when faced with the technological change that followed closely on the heels of European empire expansion.

In the course of European expansion, European populations were planted in the Western Hemisphere and the New World became culturally European while Amerindian cultures were absorbed, pushed back or died out. In the New World, people would grow up speaking European languages and following European institutions. In Africa and Asia the European colonies did not last but the movements begun by the Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French and English explorers, colonizers, missionaries and merchants in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries still constitute a framework of global interrelationships that all peoples must contend with.