European colonization of the Americas
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving European countries, took place primarily between the late 15th century and early 19th century. The Norse settled areas of the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short-term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 AD. However, due to its long duration and importance, the later colonization by Europeans, after Christopher Columbus’s voyages, is more well-known. During this time, the European colonial empires of Spain, Portugal, Great Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden began to explore and claim the Americas, their natural resources, and human capital, leading to the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, and genocide of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the establishment of several settler colonial states.
The rapid rate at which some European nations grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 15th century because it had been preoccupied with internal wars and it was slowly recovering from the loss of population caused by the Black Death. The Ottoman Empire's domination of trade routes to Asia prompted Western European monarchs to search for alternatives, resulting in the voyages of Christopher Columbus and his accidental arrival at the New World. With the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Spain agreed to divide the Earth in two, with Portugal having dominion over non-Christian lands in the world's eastern half, and Spain over those in the western half. Spanish claims essentially included all of the Americas; however, the Treaty of Tordesillas granted the eastern tip of South America to Portugal, where it established Brazil in the early 1500s, and the East Indies to Spain, where It established the Philippines. The city of Santo Domingo, in the current-day Dominican Republic, founded in 1496 by Columbus, is credited as the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the Americas.
By the 1530s, other Western European powers realized they too could benefit from voyages to the Americas, leading to British and French colonization in the northeast tip of the Americas, including in the present-day United States. Within a century, the Swedish established New Sweden; the Dutch established New Netherland; and Denmark–Norway along with the Swedish and Dutch established colonization of parts of the Caribbean. By the 1700s, Denmark–Norway revived its former colonies in Greenland, and Russia began to explore and claim the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California. Russia began colonizing the Pacific Northwest in the mid-18th century, seeking pelts for the fur trade. Many of the social structures—including religions, political boundaries, and linguae francae—which predominate in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century are the descendants of those that were established during this period.
Violent conflicts arose during the beginning of this period as indigenous peoples fought to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing European settlers and from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with European technology. Conflict between the various European colonial empires and the American Indian tribes was a leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, although some parts of the continent gained their independence from Europe by then, countries such as the United States continued to fight against Indian tribes and practiced settler colonialism. The United States for example practiced a settler colonial policy of Manifest destiny and Indian removal. Other regions, including California, Patagonia, the North Western Territory, and the northern Great Plains, experienced little to no colonization at all until the 1800s. European contact and colonization had disastrous effects on the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their societies.
Western European powers
Norsemen
explorers were the first known Europeans to set foot in North America. Norse journeys to Greenland and Canada are supported by historical and archaeological evidence. The Norsemen established a colony in Greenland in the late tenth century, which lasted until the mid 15th-century, with court and parliament assemblies taking place at Brattahlíð and a bishop located at Garðar. The remains of a settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, Canada, were discovered in 1960 and were dated to around the year 1000. L'Anse aux Meadows is the only site widely accepted as evidence of pre-Columbian trans-oceanic contact. It was named a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1978. It is also notable for its possible connection with the attempted colony of Vinland, established by Leif Erikson around the same period or, more broadly, with the Norse colonization of the Americas. Leif Erikson's brother is said to have had the first contact with the native population of North America which would come to be known as the skrælings. After capturing and killing eight of the natives, they were attacked at their beached ships, which they defended.Spain
Systematic European colonization began in 1492. A Spanish expedition sailed west to find a new trade route to the Orient, the source of spices, silks, porcelains, and other rich trade goods. Ottoman control of the Silk Road, the traditional route for trade between Europe and Asia, forced European traders to look for alternative routes. The Genoese mariner Christopher Columbus led an expedition to find a route to East Asia, but instead landed in The Bahamas. Columbus encountered the Lucayan people on the island Guanahani, which they had inhabited since the ninth century. In his reports, Columbus exaggerated the quantity of gold in the East Indies, which he called the "New World". These claims, along with the slaves he brought back, convinced the monarchy to fund a second voyage. Word of Columbus's exploits spread quickly, sparking the Western European exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas.Spanish explorers, conquerors, and settlers sought material wealth, prestige, and the spread of Christianity, often summed up in the phrase "gold, glory, and God". The Spanish justified their claims to the New World based on the ideals of the Christian Reconquista of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims, completed in 1492. In the New World, military conquest to incorporate indigenous peoples into Christendom was considered the "spiritual conquest". In 1493, Pope Alexander VI, the first Spaniard to become Pope, issued a series of Papal Bulls that confirmed Spanish claims to the newly discovered lands.
After the final Reconquista of Iberia, the Treaty of Tordesillas was ratified by the Pope, the two kingdoms of Castile and Portugal in 1494. The treaty divided the entire non-European world into two spheres of exploration and colonization. The longitudinal boundary cut through the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern part of present-day Brazil. The countries declared their rights to the land despite the fact that Indigenous populations had settled from pole to pole in the hemisphere and it was their homeland.
After European contact, the native population of the Americas plummeted by an estimated 80%, due in part to Old World diseases carried to the New World. Smallpox was especially devastating, for it could be passed through touch, allowing native tribes to be wiped out, and the conditions that colonization imposed on Indigenous populations, such as forced labor and removal from homelands and traditional medicines. Some scholars have argued that this demographic collapse was the result of the first large-scale act of genocide in the modern era.
File:Capitulo-CIX.jpg|thumb|The silver mountain of Potosí, in what is now Bolivia. It was the source of vast amounts of silver that transformed the world economy.
For example, the labor and tribute of inhabitants of Hispaniola were granted in encomienda to Spaniards, a practice established in Spain for conquered Muslims. Although not technically slavery, it was coerced labor for the benefit of the Spanish grantees, called encomenderos. Spain had a legal tradition and devised a proclamation known as The Requerimento to be read to indigenous populations in Spanish, often far from the field of battle, stating that the indigenous were now subjects of the Spanish Crown and would be punished if they resisted. When the news of this situation and the abuse of the institution reached Spain, the New Laws were passed to regulate and gradually abolish the system in the Americas, as well as to reiterate the prohibition of enslaving Native Americans. By the time the new laws were passed, in 1542, the Spanish crown had acknowledged their inability to control and properly ensure compliance with traditional laws overseas, so they granted to Native Americans specific protections not even Spaniards had, such as the prohibition of enslaving them even in the case of crime or war. These extra protections were an attempt to avoid the proliferation of irregular claims to slavery. However, as historian Andrés Reséndez has noted, "this categorical prohibition did not stop generations of determined conquistadors and colonists from taking Native slaves on a planetary scale,... The fact that this other slavery had to be carried out clandestinely made it even more insidious. It is a tale of good intentions gone badly astray."
A major event in early Spanish colonization, which had so far yielded paltry returns, was the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire. It was led by Hernán Cortés and made possible by securing indigenous alliances with the Aztecs' enemies, mobilizing thousands of warriors against the Aztecs for their own political reasons. The Aztec capital, Tenochtitlan, became Mexico City, the chief city of the "New Spain". More than an estimated 240,000 Aztecs died during the siege of Tenochtitlan, 100,000 in combat, while 500–1,000 of the Spaniards engaged in the conquest died. The other great conquest was of the Inca Empire, led by Francisco Pizarro.
During the early period of exploration, conquest, and settlement, 1492–1550, the overseas possessions claimed by Spain were only loosely controlled by the crown. With the conquests of the Aztecs and the Incas, the New World now commanded the crown's attention. Both Mexico and Peru had dense, hierarchically organized indigenous populations that could be incorporated and ruled. Even more importantly, both Mexico and Peru had large deposits of silver, which became the economic motor of the Spanish empire and transformed the world economy. In Peru, the singular, hugely rich silver mine of Potosí was worked by traditional forced indigenous labor drafts, known as the mit'a. In Mexico, silver was found outside the zone of dense indigenous settlement, so laborers migrated to the mines in Guanajuato and Zacatecas. The crown established the Council of the Indies in 1524, based in Seville, and issued laws of the Indies to assert its power against the early conquerors. The crown created the viceroyalty of New Spain and the viceroyalty of Peru to tighten crown control over these rich prizes of conquest.