It was not until the union of Aragon and Castille and the completion of the reconquista that the large nation became fully committed to looking for new trade routes and colonies overseas. The issue of defining areas of influence became critical. It resolved by Papal intervention in when the Treaty of Tordesillas divided the world between the two powers. The Spanish received everything west of this line, territory that was still almost completely unknown. Columbus and other Spanish explorers were initially disappointed with their discoveries.
Unlike Africa or Asia the Caribbean islanders had little to trade with the Spanish ships. The islands thus became the focus of colonization efforts. It was not until the continent itself was explored that Spain found the wealth it had sought in the form of abundant gold. In the Americas the Spanish found a number of empires that were as large and populous as those in Europe. However, the Spanish conquistadors, with the aid of the pandemics of disease their arrival unleashed, managed to conquer them with only a handful of men.
Once Spanish suzereignancy was established the main focus became the extraction and export of gold and silver. The nations outside of Iberia refused to acknowledge the Treaty of Tordesillas. The ivory diptych sundial was a specialty of manufacturers in Nuremberg. It also has a small opening for inserting a weather vane in order to determine the direction of the wind, a feature useful for navigators.
However, its primary use would have been meteorological. Voorhies, James. Levenson, Jay A. Circa Art in the Age of Exploration. Exhibition catalogue. Washington, D. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Table of Contents Expand. The Birth of the Age of Exploration. The Discovery of the New World. Opening the Americas. The End of the Era.
Contributions to Science. Long-Term Impact. Amanda Briney. Geography Expert. Amanda Briney, M. Updated January 24, Impact of the Age of Exploration Explorers learned more about areas such as Africa and the Americas and brought that knowledge back to Europe.
Massive wealth accrued to European colonizers due to trade in goods, spices, and precious metals. Methods of navigation and mapping improved, switching from traditional portolan charts to the world's first nautical maps. New food, plants, and animals were exchanged between the colonies and Europe. Indigenous people were decimated by Europeans, from a combined impact of disease, overwork, and massacres.
The workforce needed to support the massive plantations in the New World, led to the trade of enslaved people , which lasted for years and had an enormous impact on Africa. After his ships sustained serious damage in a storm off the coast of Cuba, Columbus and his men remained stranded on Jamaica for a year.
Help finally arrived and Columbus and his men arrived in Castile in November An agreement was reached in with the Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided the world between the two powers. In the treaty, the Portuguese received everything outside Europe east of a line that ran leagues west of the Cape Verde islands already Portuguese , and the islands reached by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage claimed for Spain—Cuba, and Hispaniola. The Spanish Castile received everything west of this line, territory that was still almost completely unknown, and proved to be mostly the western part of the Americas, plus the Pacific Ocean islands.
After Columbus, the Spanish colonization of the Americas was led by a series of soldier-explorers, called conquistadors. The Spanish forces, in addition to significant armament and equestrian advantages, exploited the rivalries between competing indigenous peoples, tribes, and nations, some of which were willing to form alliances with the Spanish in order to defeat their more powerful enemies, such as the Aztecs or Incas—a tactic that would be extensively used by later European colonial powers.
The Spanish conquest was also facilitated by the spread of diseases e. This caused labor shortages for plantations and public works, and so the colonists initiated the Atlantic slave trade. Of equal importance was the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire. After years of preliminary exploration and military skirmishes, Spanish soldiers under Francisco Pizarro, and their native allies, captured the Sapa Inca Atahualpa in the Battle of Cajamarca.
It was the first step in a long campaign that took decades of fighting, but ended in Spanish victory in and colonization of the region as the Viceroyalty of Peru. The conquest of the Inca Empire led to spin-off campaigns into present-day Chile and Colombia, as well as expeditions towards the Amazon Basin. The Portuguese Ferdinand Magellan died while in the Philippines commanding a Castilian expedition in , which was the first to circumnavigate the globe.
Therefore, Spain sought to enforce their rights in the Moluccan islands, which led a conflict with the Portuguese, but the issue was resolved with the Treaty of Zaragoza From there, the goods were transshipped across Mexico to the Spanish treasure fleets, for shipment to Spain. The Spanish trading post of Manila was established to facilitate this trade in Throughout the 17th century, the British established numerous successful American colonies and dominated the Atlantic slave trade, which eventually led to creating the most powerful European empire.
The foundations of the British Empire were laid when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. Spain put limited efforts into exploring the northern part of the Americas, as its resources were concentrated in Central and South America where more wealth had been found.
Cabot sailed in , five years after Europeans reached America, and although he successfully made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland mistakenly believing, like Christopher Columbus, that he had reached Asia , there was no attempt to found a colony.
Cabot led another voyage to the Americas the following year, but nothing was heard of his ships again. No further attempts to establish English colonies in the Americas were made until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century. In the meantime, the Protestant Reformation had turned England and Catholic Spain into implacable enemies.
In , the English Crown encouraged the privateers John Hawkins and Francis Drake to engage in slave-raiding attacks against Spanish and Portuguese ships off the coast of West Africa, with the aim of breaking into the Atlantic trade system. Drake carried out the second circumnavigation of the world in a single expedition, from to , and was the first to complete the voyage as captain while leading the expedition throughout the entire circumnavigation. With his incursion into the Pacific, he inaugurated an era of privateering and piracy in the western coast of the Americas—an area that had previously been free of piracy.
In , Elizabeth I granted a patent to Humphrey Gilbert for discovery and overseas exploration. That year, Gilbert sailed for the West Indies with the intention of engaging in piracy and establishing a colony in North America, but the expedition was aborted before it had crossed the Atlantic. In , he embarked on a second attempt, on this occasion to the island of Newfoundland whose harbor he formally claimed for England, although no settlers were left behind.
Gilbert did not survive the return journey to England, and was succeeded by his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, who was granted his own patent by Elizabeth in Later that year, Raleigh founded the colony of Roanoke on the coast of present-day North Carolina, but lack of supplies caused the colony to fail.
Colonies in Guiana, St Lucia, and Grenada failed but settlements were successfully established in St. Kitts , Barbados , and Nevis The colonies soon adopted the system of sugar plantations, successfully used by the Portuguese in Brazil, which depended on slave labor, and—at first—Dutch ships, to sell the slaves and buy the sugar.
To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of this trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in the Navigation Acts that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies.
In , England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in succeeded in colonizing the Bahamas. African slaves working in 17th-century Virginia tobacco cultivation , by an unknown artist, In , the Royal African Company was inaugurated, receiving from King Charles a monopoly of the trade to supply slaves to the British colonies of the Caribbean. Until the abolition of the slave trade in , Britain was responsible for the transportation of 3.
The introduction of the Navigation Acts led to war with the Dutch Republic. In the early stages of this First Anglo-Dutch War , the superiority of the large, heavily armed English ships was offset by superior Dutch tactical organization. English tactical improvements resulted in a series of crushing victories in , bringing peace on favorable terms. This was the first war fought largely, on the English side, by purpose-built, state-owned warships. In , Plymouth was founded as a haven for puritan religious separatists, later known as the Pilgrims.
Fleeing from religious persecution would become the motive of many English would-be colonists to risk the arduous trans-Atlantic voyage; Maryland was founded as a haven for Roman Catholics , Rhode Island as a colony tolerant of all religions, and Connecticut for Congregationalists. The Province of Carolina was founded in In , the colony of Pennsylvania was founded by William Penn.
The American colonies were less financially successful than those of the Caribbean, but had large areas of good agricultural land and attracted far larger numbers of English emigrants who preferred their temperate climates. From the outset, slavery was the basis of the British Empire in the West Indies.
For the slave traders, the trade was extremely profitable, and became a major economic mainstay. Map of the British colonies in North America, to Although Britain was relatively late in its efforts to explore and colonize the New World, lagging behind Spain and Portugal, it eventually gained significant territories in North America and the Caribbean. France established colonies in North America, the Caribbean, and India in the 17th century, and while it lost most of its American holdings to Spain and Great Britain before the end of the 18th century, it eventually expanded its Asian and African territories in the 19th century.
The French first came to the New World as explorers, seeking a route to the Pacific Ocean and wealth. In , Francis sent Jacques Cartier on the first of three voyages to explore the coast of Newfoundland and the St. Lawrence River. He attempted to create the first permanent European settlement in North America at Cap-Rouge Quebec City in with settlers, but the settlement was abandoned the next year.
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