How Did European Expansion And Colonization

European Expansion, Exploration, and Colonization.

European expansion, exploration, and colonization took place in the 1400s-1700s. As you probably inferred, Europe was expanding, exploring, and colonizing different places around the world. European exploration, expansion and colonization consisted of five main countries, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Great Britain. But we will call them the fab 5. Portugal’s Ferdinand Magellan was the first to circumnavigate the world. This became a major step in exploration. Spain sent Christopher Columbus in 1492 to find a trade route to Asia by sea, so they could buy spices for a lower price. But Christopher Columbus unknowingly stumbled across the North American Bahamas. Thinking he was in India, he gave the natives the famous name Indians. After his amazing discovery, the whole fab 5 came to colonize “the new world”. This led to colonization.

The fab five took their own places in north and South America. Soon though, things would get bad. France took the mid U.S and east Canada with trade posts. Britain took the east coast of present day U.S with settler. Spain took the South American and western U.S coast and Florida with plantation. Portugal took present day Brazil with all of them. Problems occurred with many of them: Spanish conquistadors were greeted with respect from natives, but the conquistadors enslaved them. This didn’t make living on the land easy. The French had good relations, unlike Britain and Spain who fought France and the natives for land in the French and Indian war from 1754-1763 on the French-British boarder. Brittan and Spain won, and so they divided the territory between