1.8 Colonial Expansion and Columbian Exchange

Portugal built a trading-post empire. It set up fortified posts called factories at places like Elmina on the West African coast (1482), Goa in India (1510), Malacca in Southeast Asia (1511) and Macau in China (1557). It controlled sea lanes and taxed trade rather than ruling big populations. In Brazil, by contrast, Portugal took land and built sugar plantations.

Spain built a settler and conquest empire in the Americas. The crown granted colonists encomiendas, the right to demand labor and tribute from Indigenous people in return for supposedly protecting them and teaching them Christianity. In practice it was often brutal. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas condemned Spanish cruelty, and the crown's New Laws of 1542 tried, with limited success, to restrict the encomienda.

Colonial society became a hierarchy of race and birth. Spaniards born in Spain held the top posts, American-born Spaniards (creoles) came next, then people of mixed ancestry, with Indigenous and African people at the bottom.

The Columbian Exchange, a term coined by historian Alfred Crosby, is the transfer of plants, animals, diseases and people between the Americas and Afro-Eurasia after 1492.

Indigenous Americans had never been exposed to Eurasian diseases, so they had no immunity to them. Smallpox, measles and influenza killed enormous numbers, often before Europeans even arrived in an area. Estimates of how many people lived in the Americas in 1492 vary widely, but historians agree that many regions lost most of their population, in many places up to 90 percent, within a century. War, forced labor and famine added to the death toll.

This population collapse is one big reason Europeans turned to enslaved African labor (see 1.9). Horses and cattle also changed Indigenous ways of life, and grazing animals transformed the land.

American crops eventually boosted Europe's food supply. Potatoes and maize grow well on poor soil and produce many calories per acre. Adoption was slow at first, but by the 1700s potatoes were a staple in Ireland, Germany and elsewhere, helping population growth (see 4.4).

Europe's busiest trade moved west, from Mediterranean ports like Venice and Genoa to ports facing the Atlantic. Seville, Lisbon, Antwerp and later Amsterdam and London boomed. New goods like tobacco, sugar and cocoa slowly changed what Europeans consumed.