The first of the five phases was by far the longest, lasting roughly three and a half centuries.

This was a period of unprecedented growth in western Europe’s formal power and informal influence overseas. Expansion did not proceed evenly through­out phase 1 but rather in spurts, the most notable being the early sixteenth century in the Indian Ocean basin, 1520s through 1650s in the New World, and 1750S-1760S on the Indian subcontinent.

As noted in chapter 1, the phase began with the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, followed two decades later by Gil Eannes’s voyage past Cape Bojador. An event marking the phase’s end was the British Parliament’s Regulating Act of 1773. This was a response to the substantial increase in administrative responsibilities assumed by the royally chartered English East India Company following the victory of its troops over a local ruler’s forces at Plassey (Bengal) in 1757. The Regulating Act broke new ground by asserting some parliamentary authority over company employees. In authorizing appointment of the first governor-general of the company’s possessions, the act showed greater metropolitan commitment to political control in an impor­tant Old World region.

The century and a half following Eannes’s voyage was a period of recorded maritime exploration unequalled before or since. Fifteenth-century explorers sailing south so as to sail east—among them Eannes, Diogo Cao, Bartolomeu Dias, and Vasco da Gama—produced maps outlining the shape of Africa and the western Indian Ocean. These explorers also charted the direction of winds and currents. While sailing the Atlantic they had to rely on their experience. In the Indian Ocean they could rely on others’: Da Gama drew upon Arab knowledge of winds and currents to make the final Mombasa-Calicut leg of his voyage to India in 1497-98. Knowledge the early explorers accumulated was passed on to fellow Europeans, making it vastly easier for later generations to make long-distance voyages.

An alternative route to the east—by sailing westward—was first attempted by Christopher Columbus and shortly afterward by John Cabot. Both men believed they had reached Asia. Successors like Amerigo Vespucci, Giovanni da Verrazzano, Juan Diaz de Solis, Sebastian Cabot, Jacques Cartier, Martin Frobisher, and Henry Hudson realized that a “new world” intervened between Europe and Asia. These men combined in varying degrees the original European search for a sea passage to Asia with the search for greater knowledge of the Americas, whose minerals, lands, and plants were increasingly valued for their own sake. The first circumnavigation of the globe by Ferdinand Magellan and Juan Sebastian de Elcano (1519-22) and the subse­quent globe-circling expedition led by Sir Francis Drake (1577-80) gave Europeans a relatively accurate sense of the westward edge of the Americas, the vastness of the Pacific, and island chains off the southeast Asian mainland.

An ambitious new phase of maritime exploration was launched in 1768, at the very end of phase 1, with the first of Capt. James Cook’s three voyages to locate what was believed to be a large continent (Terra Australis) in the Pacific’s far southern reaches.

With new knowledge came new power. The early explorers’ reports stimulated initiatives to gain military and commercial supremacy on the high seas. West Euro­pean dominance was never contested in the Atlantic, Caribbean, and Pacific. The Indian Ocean and waters off the eastern and southeastern Asian coast, however, were different. The Portuguese quickly became the single most important maritime power in this huge region with their victory over a much larger Egyptian-Gujarati flotilla off Diu (1509), seizure of the strategically key ports of Malacca (1511) and Hormuz (1515), and establishment of trading enclaves in the Spice Islands. But neither the Portuguese nor agents of other European trading states arriving later could stamp out competition from Asian merchants along the lucrative routes linking East Africa, the Arabian peninsula, India, the southeast Asian islands, and the China coast.

Exploration of continental interiors was uneven during phase 1, most of it taking place in the New World. Spaniards and others searching for gold and silver mapped much of present-day Mexico, the southern United States, Colombia, Vene­zuela, Peru, and Bolivia within fifty years of Hernan Cortes’s arrival (1519) on the American mainland. Further to the north fur trappers, traders, and missionaries, mostly of French origin, penetrated deep into what is now the Canadian and mid­west U.S. hinterland by the seventeenth century. Of enormous help to early explorers of North America was ready waterborne access to inland areas. The Gulf of Mexico, Hudson’s Bay, the St. Lawrence and Mississippi rivers, and the Great Lakes facilitated travel to the interior. The absence of Old World equivalents to these features of North American geography contributed to a very different outcome in Asia and Africa: there, Europeans were virtually confined to coastal zones.

The geographic distribution of territorial claims paralleled that of inland ex­ploration. From the start of Europe’s relationship with the Americas a pattern was established by which newly found lands were quickly (and unilaterally) declared under the authority of the monarch sponsoring an explorer’s voyage. Columbus’s first action after landing on the island of Guanahani on October 12,1492, was to claim it for Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand. Three days later he wrote in his journal, “It was... my wish not to pass any island without taking possession of it,” adding the comforting thought that “when one had been annexed, all might be said to have been.”¹ The royal standard Columbus planted on Guanahani was only the first of a series of flags thrust boldly into the soil by explorers and conquerors in the Americas.

Europeans had a special sense of possessiveness about the New World. Their characterization of the hemisphere as new suggests they considered it untouched land whose destiny went unfulfilled until Europeans reached it and transformed a vast, hitherto unowned territory into productive, commercially valuable property. A corollary to this view was that the New World’s indigenous inhabitants were inter­lopers on land they occupied.

Initially, of course, the new arrivals could not match their grandiose political claims with comparably effective action on the ground. Still, it is striking how rapidly European power was projected over large areas of the New World. In 1519 Cortes and his men marched two hundred miles from the tropical lowlands of Vera Cruz over lofty mountain passes to the Aztec capital at Tenochtitlan, in the heart of what is now Mexico. Francisco Pizarro and his men set out in 1531 from Panama on a venture that took them hundreds of miles along the spine of the Andes to the mountain fast­ness of Cuzco, capital of the Inca Empire. The remarkably swift conquest of these two extensive, populous, land-based empires, coupled with an ongoing search for sources of the mineral wealth so abundantly evident in Tenochtitlan and Cuzco, brought large numbers of Spanish fortune seekers deep into the interior of Central and South America within a few decades of Cortes’s landing at Vera Cruz. An estimated quarter million Europeans emigrated to Spain’s American possessions between 1493 and 1579.² Once arrived, they moved off in many directions, establish­ing not one but several frontiers depending on their primary activity.

Occupation of the North American interior did not occur to any substantial degree until the end of phase 1. Still, from the early sixteenth century indigenous peoples could not ignore the presence of European traders, missionaries, and sol­diers on or near the continent’s major waterways.

In the Old World, Europeans exerted influence and some degree of territorial control back of the coastline: the Spanish in Luzon Island (Philippines), the Dutch around Batavia in Java (Dutch East Indies), Portuguese prazeros in the Zambezi Val­ley (Mozambique), farmers and herders descended from Dutch and French Hugue­not settlers who migrated inland from Cape Town (South Africa), and agents of the English East India Company who controlled tax collection in Bengal by the 1760s. But the far more common pattern was small coastal enclaves whose principal pur­pose was commerce with peoples living outside the enclaves’ borders. Trading ports in Africa included St. Louis, Goree, Elmina, Sào Tome, Luanda, Sofala, Mombasa, and Malindi. Asian examples included Hormuz, Diu, Goa, Colombo, Pondicherry, Madras, Calcutta, Malacca, Macao, and Deshima Island in Nagasaki harbor. In con­trast to the New World pattern, Europeans did not typically claim large swaths of inland territory when they arrived. Indeed, in many cases they did not even pretend to rule enclaves where their traders were active. For it was dear, at least at the outset, that many ports were governed by local rulers and that Europeans were there by permission.

In North Africa and in South and East Asia Europeans encountered highly organized polities which they were unable to conquer. Perhaps the most dramatic setback occurred in 1578, when King Sebastian of Portugal led a large army into the Moroccan interior in a holy war against the infidels. The ensuing Battle of El Ksar-el- Kabir was a disaster for Portugal.

Japan’s rulers imposed severe limits on European activities. The strong reac­tion against missionaries, traders, and diplomats that informed official policy in the early seventeenth century was to remain in effect, self-consciously isolating Japan from the West, for almost 250 years. Catholic missionaries were expelled and Japa­nese converts persecuted. European traders were confined to a small, artificial island in Nagasaki Bay. Among Europeans the Japanese preferred to deal with the Dutch, who were believed incapable of mounting a military threat. Holland posed no re­ligious threat either, as its Protestants, unlike Catholic missionaries from Spain and Portugal, were not active proselytizers.

Morocco and Japan are extreme examples. But many other Old World polities were able and willing to rebuff European advances during phase 1. Whereas in the New World only a few months or years typically elapsed between initial culture contact and a decisive display of the invader’s military superiority, in many parts of the Old World these two events were separated by centuries. Large portions of the Old World succumbed only after the Industrial Revolution’s technological break­throughs gave outsiders a new power edge.