From the very first decades, scientific advances played essential roles in European overseas expansion. Improved astronomical instruments and calculations and an array of new navigational devices and cartographic techniques made the Portuguese voyages into the uncharted South Atlantic possible. Subsequent voyages of exploration and (for the Europeans) discovery led to further refinements of both instruments and navigational data and stimulated the introduction of ever more sophisticated ways of measuring time, distance, and location. Scientific curiosity was among the main motives of Europeans who planned or led expeditions of discovery and conquest. Astronomers and cartographers often sailed with explorers and merchants for the express purposes of testing new instruments, taking astronomical or meteorological readings from distant latitudes, and charting regions that had hitherto been unknown to the Europeans. The application of the data gathered on these voyages to improving maps,...
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Adas, M. (2016). Colonialism and Science. In: Selin, H. (eds) Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7747-7_8518
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