The European Overseas Empires

Europe is a relatively small continent, especially compared to Asia or Africa, but during the last five hundred years European countries have controlled a huge part of the world, including almost all of Africa and the Americas. The nature of this control varied, from the benign to the genocidal, and the reasons also differed, from country to country, from era to era, from simple greed to ideologies of racial and moral superiority such as The White Man's Burden. They are almost gone now, swept away in a political and moral awakening over the last century, but the after effects spark a different news story almost every week.

Why Explore?

There are two approaches to the study of the European Empires. The first is straightforward history: what happened, who did it, why they did it and what effect this had, a narrative and analysis of politics, economics, culture and society. The overseas empires began to form in the fifteenth century. Developments in shipbuilding and navigation, which allowed sailors to travel across the open seas with much greater success, coupled with advances in maths, astronomy, cartography and printing, all of which allowed better knowledge to be more widely spread, gave Europe the potential to extend over the world.

Pressure on land from the encroaching Ottoman Empire and a desire to find new trade routes through to the well-known Asian markets – the old routes being dominated by Ottomans and Venetians – gave Europe the push... that and the human desire to explore. Some sailors tried going round the bottom of Africa and up past India, others tried going across the Atlantic. Indeed, the vast majority of sailors who made western 'voyages of discovery' were actually after alternative routes to Asia...the new American continent inbetween was something of a surprise.

Colonialism and Imperialism

If the first approach is the sort you will encounter mainly in history textbooks, the second is something you'll encounter on the television and in the newspapers: the study of colonialism, imperialism and the debate over the effects of empire. As with most 'isms', there is still an argument over exactly what we mean by the terms. Do we mean them to describe what the European nations did? Do we mean them to describe a political idea, which we will compare to Europe's actions? Are we using them as retroactive terms, or did people at the time recognise them and act accordingly?

This is just scratching the surface of the debate over imperialism, a term thrown out regularly by modern political blogs and commentators. Running alongside this is the judgmental analysis of the European Empires. The last decade has seen the established view – that the Empires were undemocratic, racist and thus bad – challenged by a new group of analysts who argue that the Empires actually did a lot of good. The democratic success of America, albeit achieved without much help from England, is frequently mentioned, as are the ethnic conflicts in African 'nations' created by Europeans drawing straight lines on maps.

Three Phases of Expansion

There are three general phases in the history of Europe's colonial expansion, all including wars of ownership between the Europeans and indigenous people, as well as between the Europeans themselves. The first age, which began in the fifteenth century and carried on into the nineteenth, is characterised by the conquest, settlement and loss of America, the south of which was almost entirely divided between Spain and Portugal, and the north of which was dominated by France and England. However, England won wars against the French and Dutch before losing to their old colonists, who formed the United States; England retained only Canada. In the South similar conflicts occurred, with the European nations being almost thrown out by the 1820s.