Introduction
The sixteenth-century expansion of European powers launched a new phase in world history. In this section we track the expansion from Europe towards both the east and west. That European domination would later spread such an iron grip over so much of the world can be misleading.
Felix Hinz’s spirited account of the Spanish conquest of South America from the late 1490s reminds us of both the perilous and precarious nature of these enterprises. Luck played a significant role, and many of the reasons for conquistador victory were entirely outside their control. The spectacular successes that saw the fall of the Inca and Aztec Empires also need to be read against Spanish failures that descended into torture, starvation and cannibalism. Much of the initiative came from private adventurers. It was only subsequently that the Spanish Crown intervened and sent civil servants to build up a more secure and stable administration.In his account of the Portuguese sea-borne expansion into Asia, Jorge Flores points out that in entering the Indian Ocean, Europeans were one more set of newcomers in an extremely complex region with a long history of previous incursions by foreigners. Flores turns the usual scholarly focus on an exotic ‘other’ on its head by taking as his subject the question of how Asians viewed the Portuguese. The ‘Franks’ and their culture inspired both disgust and desire. Asians found them simultaneously strange and familiar, and sought to fit them into existing cosmologies that were themselves undergoing transformation.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are widely recognised as a turning point in European expansion. The ‘Revolutionary Age’ was also a time of profound political upheaval within the Atlantic world colonies and Europe itself. Three of our chapters investigate particular aspects of this paradoxical moment in which struggles for liberty coincided with almost a third of the world’s population being brought under imperial rule.
Trevor Burnard asks why the planter classes of the Atlantic world rebelled against their metropolitan centres when the relationship between imperial centres and their planter-class colonists appears to have been so symbiotic.
The Age of Revolutions, he argues, was not a reaction against empire—rather, it was a response to empire. It did not in fact contribute much to the end of slavery in the British, French or Iberian colonies of the region. With the rise of the abolition movement in Britain itself, however, that nation’s imperial turn towards Asia and the South Pacific conformed to a radical new idea: that empire and slavery were incompatible.Michael A. McDonnell and Kate Fullagar connect the two axes of this imperial turn by taking the perspective of the indigenous peoples of the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean worlds as their starting point. The view from the other side of the frontier offers the possibility to shift our conception of what drove imperial history. Indigenous resistance forced Europeans to continually reassess and debate the foundations of imperial policy and practice. Central as it was to imperial expansion, violence was not the only outcome of the encounters between ‘natives’ and ‘newcomers’, and the complications of this process matter in our understandings of both the past and the present.
Pernille Roge’s account of British, Danish and French imperialism shows us a ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1780s and 1790s, long before the more usual late nineteenth-century use of this term. Once more, debates over slavery and the slave trade were crucial. Abolition was a key driving force in the paradoxical extension of empire in the name of liberty. Such projects laid the foundation for Europeans’ nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonisation of new parts of the globe.