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Systematic European colonization began in 1492. A Spanish expedition sailed west to find a new trade route to the Orient , the source of spices, silks, porcelains, and other rich trade goods. Ottoman control of the Silk Road , the traditional route for trade between Europe and Asia, forced European traders to look for alternative routes.
Like the other European colonists, the French began their colonization via commercial activities, starting with the establishment of a factory in Surat in 1668. The French started to settle down in India in 1673, beginning with the purchase of land at Chandernagore from the Mughal Governor of Bengal, followed by the acquisition of Pondicherry ...
986: Norsemen settle Greenland and Bjarni Herjólfsson sights coast of North America, but doesn't land (see also Norse colonization of the Americas). c. 1000: Norse settle briefly in L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. [4] c. 1450: Norse colony in Greenland dies out.
Furthermore, local tribal leaders did not simply give up their own people for the aforementioned commodities but rather through intertribal wars, debts, and civil crime offenders. [5]: 54 Labor in the Spanish and Portuguese colonies became scarce. European diseases and forced labor began killing the indigenous people in insurmountable numbers.
Colonists from Europe saw the American landscape as wild, savage, dark, a waste, and thus needed to be tamed in order for it to be safe and habitable. Once cleared and settled, these areas were depicted as "Eden itself." [94] The advent of European colonization resulted in the disruption of existing social structures in indigenous lands.
Despite several significant transoceanic and transcontinental explorations by European civilizations in the preceding centuries, the precise geography of the Earth outside of Europe was largely unknown to Europeans before the 15th century, when technological advances (especially in sea travel) as well as the rise of colonialism, mercantilism ...
1556 Portuguese colonization of Timor. 1557 Portuguese construction of trading post in Macau. 1556-1599 Spanish conquest of Philippines. 1598: Dutch established colony on uninhabited island of Mauritius; they abandon it in 1710. [1] 1608: Dutch opened their first trading post in India at Golconda. [2]
In a complementary analysis, Gerner Hariri observed that areas outside Europe which had State-like institutions before 1500 tend to have less open political systems today. According to the scholar, this is due to the fact that during the colonization, European liberal institutions were not easily implemented. [ 45 ]