An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450 to 1800
2 total works
These 15 articles follow on from those in The Global Opportunity in that they examine how and why the Europeans expanded worldwide. Part one explores the means in terms of science, technology and material resources; part two examines the motives, primarily as a result of restricted resources in Europe; while part three concludes with the reasons that the expansion continued and grew - the momentum.
Though usually depicted as an aspect of the "European miracle", it is argued that imperial expansion is better understood as a world-wide phenomenon of the late medieval and early modern period, in which expanding societies grew outwards and collided from widely separated centres. This first volume in the Expanding World Series examines the potential for worldwide expansion by any region, whether it was China, the Middle East, Africa or the Americas, at the end of the Middle Ages and then explores why these nations failed or gave the initiative to the Europeans.