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The Age of Discovery was a period of European history from approximately 1418 to 1799, during which time seafaring European nations explored regions across the globe, adopted colonialism as a national policy, and established global trade through their burgeoning colonial empires. Notable colonial empires included the Spanish Empire in the Americas and the Philippines; the Portuguese Empire in Brazil, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia; the British Empire in North America, Belize, and the Caribbean, the Dutch Empire in New Netherland, the Caribbean, Africa, India, and Southeast Asia; the French Empire in Canada and the Caribbean; the Russian Empire in Siberia and Alaska; and the Swedish Empire in New Sweden. The Age of Discovery was made possible by technological advances such as the compass and the light caravel ship, and, as the author Jared Diamond would later coin, "guns, germs, and steel" (Europe's use of deadly firearms, its inadvertent use of biological warfare against the Native Americans, and its use of steel for armor and swords). The Age of Discovery was often accompanied by the formation of European overseas colonies and empires, the spread of Christianity and European culture worldwide, the rise of global trade, the mapping of the world, and, occasionally, colonial conflicts such as the Anglo-Spanish War, the Dutch-Portuguese War, the Anglo-Dutch Wars, and the French and Indian War. The Age of Discovery came to an end in the 18th century, by which time the American Revolutionary War inspired wars of decolonization such as the Haitian Revolution and the South American Wars of Liberation.

History[]

The Portuguese, led by Henry the Navigator, were the first to engage in overseas exploration, exploring Madeira and the Azores in 1419 and 1427, West Africa in 1434, and the sea route to India in 1498. The Spanish sent Christopher Columbus to find another sea route to India, only for him to discover the "West Indies" in the Americas, ultimately leading to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. From 1519 to 1522, the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan became the first explorer to circumnavigate the globe. from the 16th to 18th centuries, the European powers established colonies and trading posts around the world, from the Americas to East and South Asia, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific. These voyages were often accompanied by the spread of Christianity, particularly by the Spanish and Portuguese, who were zealous in their mission to spread Roman Catholicism to indigenous people (with the help of the Society of Jesus); the Protestant powers generally focused on establishing international commerce rather than on their "civilizing mission" in the Americas, and the Thirteen Colonies in the present-day United States more often warred with the Native American peoples rather than tried to convert or "civilize" them.

The Age of Discovery was mostly at an end by the 19th century, with some of the last major discoveries including James Cook's Pacific exploration and the Russian colonization of Alaska. Starting with the American Revolutionary War of 1775-1783, many of the European powers' American colonies began to break free of colonial rule, culminating in the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 and the South American Wars of Liberation from 1810 to 1824. The decline of European rule in the Americas led to the European powers refocusing on establishing colonial empires elsewhere, leading to the rise of New Imperialism in Africa and Asia during the 19th and 20th centuries, which, unlike the Age of Discovery, often emphasized the exploitation of natural resources, alliances with local elites, and the European-led "civilization" and "uplift" of indigenous peoples rather than the establishment of permanent European colonies overseas (through European emigration and settlement) and the conquest and destruction of local civilizations.

The Age of Discovery led to a wide transfer of plants (such as tomatoes, corn, peanuts, and potatoes from the Americas, and apples from Europe), animals (turkeys from America, and horses, cows, and pigs from Europe), food, human populations (including settlers from Europe and slaves from Africa), diseases (which wiped out millions of Native Americans), and culture between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, the mapping of the world, and contact between distant civilizations.

The concept of the "Age of Discovery" has long been criticized by indigenous peoples and left-wing thinkers around the world, arguing that the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, and Asia amounted to genocide and wars of aggression, that the spread of Western civilization came at the expense of indigenous and enslaved populations, and that the term "Age of Discovery" itself was Eurocentric in outlook, as most of the lands "discovered" by the Europeans were already inhabited. During the George Floyd protests of 2020, large numbers of American progressive activists called for (or engaged in) the tearing down of monuments to figures such as Christopher Columbus, Abraham Lincoln, and Andrew Jackson, whom they accused of perpetrating atrocities against Native Americans. In Britain, protesters sympathetic to the American Black Lives Matter movement tore down the status of Charles II of England, Oliver Cromwell, Francis Drake, and Edward Colston for their roles in the Atlantic slave trade during the Age of Discovery.

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