Introduction: The First Expansion of Europe

Abstract

By 1700 the older colonial empires were some two centuries old, and Europe took their existence for granted. Yet the first European expansion into Africa, Asia and America was one of the most surprising and significant facts of modern history. Looking back from the 1770s Adam Smith could state confidently that

The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history of mankind.¹

Smith was, of course, taking a narrowly Eurocentric view. Europe had no monopoly of distant trading or overseas empire. Turkish power still stretched from the western Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean. Hindus from India had colonized South-East Asia in earlier centuries and still controlled much of its trade. Muslims from the Middle East had spread over southern Asia, and Islamic rulers governed India and most of South-East Asia in the eighteenth century. Further east the Chinese empire was greater in size than anything in the experience of Europe, and many states of South-East Asia still recognized the overlordship of Peking.