In world history, no continent has possessed so many different forms of colonies and none has so incomparably defined access to the world by means of a civilising mission as a secular programme as did modern Europe. When Spain and Portugal partitioned the world by signing the Treaty of Tordesillas on 7 June 1494, they declared a genuine European claim to hegemony. A similar claim was never staked out in this form by a world empire of Antiquity or a non-European colonial power in the modern period, such as Japan or the USA. The extraordinary continuity of Chinese colonialism or that of the Aztecs in Central America before the other coloniesarrived is indeed structurally comparable to modern European expansion. But similar to the Phoenician …show more content…
No European country remained exempt – all directly or indirectly participated in the colonial division of the world. The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) put global power thinking into words that perceived of colonial possessions as a political, economic and cultural right, last not least even as an obligation to a civilizing mission that was only definitively shaken with the independence of India in 1947.(“ed tech 2,1997”).The two dates mark the start and downgrade of a major problem in the history of Europe, even its most momentous, that the always states the colonial rule caused complex competitions among Europeans just as much as among the indigenous biggest populations in the colonies, that it was able to simultaneously create cooperation and close webs of relationships between conquerors and the conquered, and that it was never at any time free of violence and war, despotism, arbitrariness and lawlessness. (“History Today, 1997”) This turns the simultaneity and multitude of European colonialisms and imperialisms into a border-bridging experience. Few transnational aspects of the European history to illustrate the diversity of a European nation as