Chapter 13: Political Transformations: Empires and Encounters, 1450-1750

Why was it so easy for Europeans to conquer the Americas? As is often the case, there is no single answer for why this was the case.  For starters, the Europeans had a relative geographical advantage in that countries such as Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France were and are simply closer to the Americas than any potential Asian competitors were.  In addition, European innovations in mapmaking, navigation, sailing techniques, and ship designs enabled Europeans to penetrate into the Atlantic .  Another factor behind the European domination was that the rich markets along the Indian Ocean provided little incentive for Chinese, Indians, or Muslims to explore beyond their own waters.  On the other hand, Europeans had strong incentives for doing so, as they held a rather marginal position within the Eurasian trade world and hoped to gain more access to that system.  The discovery of the Americas eventually provided the means to do so, thanks to the windfall of natural resources there that proceeded to drive even further expansion that would ultimately underpin the long-term growth of the European economy.  In addition to this, the rulers of European countries were also driven by the enduring rivalries among competing states.  As far as their military victories, they were often helped by divisions within the local societies of the areas they conquered.  Perhaps most significantly of all, however, was the germs and diseases which the Europeans, likely unknowingly, carried with them.  While they were safe from these diseases due to having built up immunity over the years from exposure to animals, the Native Americans had no such biological resistance, and the diseases soon decimated up to 90% of the native population, which led to the collapse of Native American societies, in what is referred to as the Great Dying.  Regardless of the reasons for their domination of the Americas, the European acquisition of empires had a profound global significance.  In sharply diminishing the population of the Americas, the Great Dying created a massive labor shortage, which helped make room for new immigrants, including both European colonists and African slaves.  The end result was that various combinations of indigenous, European, and African peoples created entirely new societies in the Americas.

However, the Europeans weren't the only people to carve out empires in the early modern era.  Russia, for example, established the world's largest territorial empire by conquering adjacent territories, including Siberia, which, while a vast barren wasteland, provided a link to Asian trading networks through its animal pelts, which were in great demand on the world market.  Meanwhile, the Chinese expanded their own empire by pushing deep into Central Eurasia.  Turko-Mongol invaders from Central Asia established the Mughal Empire, bringing most of Hindu South Asia, including India, under a single Muslim-ruled political system.  In addition, the Ottoman Empire brought Muslim rule to a largely Christian population in southeastern Europe and Turkish rule to largely Arab populations in North Africa and the Middle East.  While none of these empires had the global reach or impact of Europe's American colonies, they still gave rise to profoundly important cross-cultural encounters, with legacies that echoed for many centuries.