British & European colonization
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Modern colonization may be said to date from the explorations of the sixteenth century, and to have evolved as a result of the demands of trade. The main thread in the history of English expansion is entwined with the history of over/ seas trade routes; indeed, they are the constant elements in British imperial growth until the end of the nineteenth century. Up to the middle of the fifteenth century, the world in European eyes was a confined and conjectural entity whose centre of gravity was the Mediterranean Sea. Trade routes from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf and from south/east and central Asia converged at its eastern extremity, but the areas round and beyond these ancient corridors lay in the mists.
When Marco Polo made his astonishing journey across central Asia in the thirteenth century, contemporary maps were apt to be a wild confusion of misapplied scriptures. Later on, after he had dictated his travels, Polo's embroidered story of the fabulous court of Kublai Khan provided the first full account of the Chinese East the European world had ever had placed before it. It was a good book and it broke fresh ground, but nothing of its content can explain its subsequent influence on world history, which was so out of proportion to its literary quality and historical substance. This volume of travel, describing golden cities and strange customs, possibly had more influence on world history than any other book except for the Bible, the Koran or Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. When Columbus sailed westward he was looking not for America, but China and the Indies. And long after Columbus, the romance and wealth of the East drove explorers east, west and south/west in search of the land of the Great Khan and Chinese trade.
Logically, the first colonizing and exploring powers should have been England and France. Both were strategically placed in relation to Atlantic routes. Both had royal revenues and kings whose ambitions were certain to focus on outside adventure. But at the critical moment for both nations, the Hundred Years War began. The battles of Crecy and Poitiers, and the exhausting campaigns which followed, cost both England and France the lead as exploring and colonizing countries, while in England the Wars of the Roses added a further agonizing handicap. Consequently, at the time when Columbus discovered America and da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, neither England nor France had become maritime powers of sufficient strength to challenge either Portugal or Spain. Both Iberian nations were resolute to find new trade routes; both of them sought connections with the East. And the whole of modern history gathers in a large degree about their grand adventures.
The Portuguese and Spanish discoveries had a momentous revolutionary effect on the economic outlook of Europe. They initiated an era of acquisitive capitalism which was to change the face of the globe. After 1450, slaves and gold, pearls and ivory were among the new incentives that were to spur Western endeavour. Portugal started first, partly because she was first freed from the menace of Moorish invasions, but chiefly because a great ruling house, in the fifteenth century, produced two distinguished men of thought and action, Henry the Navigator and Emmanuel the Fortunate.
The seafaring impetus acquired under Henry the Navigator and his school continued after Henry's death, and led to the achievements of Diaz and da Gama in the decade between 1488 and 1498. Thanks to the absence of any strong Asian naval power (save only the Chinese, whose isolationist rulers had deliberately turned their backs on maritime expansion before the end of the fifteenth century) the Portuguese were able to secure the mastery of the Indian Ocean with astonishing speed. Goa, a land,locked island, became the head, quarters of their Eastern empire. The capture of Malacca by Albuquerque in 1511 secured a central emporium for the spice trade, as well as the strategic key to the trade of the South China Sea and the Indonesian Archipelago. With the seizure of Hormuz in 1515, Portugal obtained control of the Persian Gulf and one of the two routes by which the spice trade was carried on with the Levant. Albuquerque attempted to block the alternative Red Sea route by taking Aden.
Although he narrowly failed, the Portuguese could, none the less, enter the Red Sea at will, even though they never succeeded in closing it to the Moslems. The Portuguese were enterprising sailors, but their kingdom was almost enveloped by the land frontier of Spain, and therefore too vulnerable to thwart Spanish ambitions even on water. By 1585 they had capitulated, and for more than half a century remained an annex of Spain. Admittedly, Portugal had acquired Brazil, which she was able to retain under the Papal division line of 1494.
But Brazil was a possession held on sufferance and left largely to manage its own affairs; it was always at the mercy of the major power. During the greater part of the sixteenth century, the course of events in the New World that Columbus had revealed after 1492, was shaped by Spain, because Spain held command of the sea without serious competitor. Absorbed in the Indian Ocean, Portugal was never a serious Atlantic rival. Spanish colonization may be dated from 1492 when Columbus touched the island of San Salvador in the West Indies.
Between that point and 1531, there began an epoch of imperial expansion so extraordinary that fiction cannot keep pace with fact in the Spanish history of these years. In 1498 Columbus touched the mainland; in 1512, the Spaniards concluded that there was an ocean between the New World and Asia; in 1513, Balboa actually saw the Pacific Ocean; in 1519 Magellan started on his great voyage which proved that too,far east was to be west and vice versa. Between 1518 and 1521 Cortez invaded and conquered Mexico and in 1531-32 an even richer country was discovered by Pizarro - Peru. Spain now possessed two American empires.
