Pre- colonial period:

• From the perspective of ancient and medieval Western civilization, the known world extended from northern Europe to the Sahara Desert, from the Atlantic Ocean to India. The ancient Greeks and Romans traded with distant Asian cultures via intermediate states; goods were shipped overland or by combined land/sea routes. In the medieval period, the Byzantine Empire maintained these trade links; Western European trade collapsed with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, then recovered in the later Middle Ages.
• The Mongol Empire (ca. 1200-1300), which came to encompass the full width of Asia, which simplified Eurasian trade by cutting out middleman states. But while the Mongols were happy to trade with the West, the Ottomans were not at all satisfied. With the decline of the Mongols and the rise of the Ottoman Empire (ca. 1300-WWI), conventional trade with Asia was blocked, forcing Europe to seek ocean routes.

 

Age of Discovery:

 

Early modern period:

 

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• The European empires (France, Russia, and the Netherlands) greatly expanded their Asian territory during the nineteenth century. France conquered eastern Indochina (Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia). Russia expanded eastward and southward, and Dutch control was extended across most of Indonesia. Thailand was the only Southeast Asian nation to evade conquest.
• Most of Africa was conquered by European powers in the Scramble for Africa (ca. 1880-WWI); only Liberia and Ethiopia remained independent. The two primary participants in the Scramble were Britain (which seized a wide strip of territory from Egypt to South Africa) and France (which governed most of West Africa). The five secondary participants were Spain, Portugal, Italy, Germany, and Belgium.

 

Essential Humanities. “European Colonialism.” Accessed 21 Aug, 2018. http://www.essential-humanities.net/history-supplementary/european-colonialism/.

 

-PRACHITI KAMATH