European Colonies Across the World and Their

¶ … European colonies across the world and their relationships with the natives and competing colonial powers.

Development of European colonies throughout non-European territories began in the 15th century, and perhaps even earlier. For European explorers, their motivation was likely a combination of human curiosity, pursuit of adventure, and a possible economic payoff for discovering new trade routes. Such motivations typically compelled European explorers like Amerigo Vespucci, Magellan, Columbus, and others, to seek out undiscovered lands, peoples, and potential profits.

In particular, European colonization of non-European territories, in areas like the New World (now the Americas); Alaska; and Africa, permitted countries like Spain; Portugal; Italy; Great Britain; Holland, Russia, and various others, sometimes at the same time, to lay claim to foreign territories, and their indigenous peoples (often, as with the Spanish, in the guise of religion). Colonization by one European power also often led to competition from others; increasingly, nations like (for example) Spain and Portugal were exploring, colonizing, and attempting to reap profits within some of the same general areas, usually to the detriment of native peoples.

An example of European competition for colonized territories is shown in the movie The Mission, in which indigenous peoples of Chile are shown being hunted, captured, and sold into slavery by the Portuguese, while Jesuits from Spain try to protect them by building a mission, within which they are sheltered from Portuguese bounty hunters and taught trades and crafts (while also being inculcated with Catholicism). In the end, the Catholic Church itself fails to support the Jesuits in their missionary endeavor (the Jesuits have always been considered rebels of the Church), for both economic and political reasons. This film vividly shows how colonization by two competing European nations, with separate economic and religious motives, can result in cultural misunderstandings leading to violence and bloodshed.

European colonization across the world, from the 15th century on, was dominated by economic self-interest, and competitive desires for power, wealth, and influence. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of Spanish missionaries who founded missions throughout California, from San Diego to the Oregon border, where they housed and taught numerous Native Americans, while also forcibly converting them to Catholicism and using them for slave labor. Payoffs, for the Spanish, were both religious and economic, with economic interests likely being first and foremost, not only for Spain but for other European nations as well. Economically-motivated aggressive actions of the Spanish included the use of forced Native American labor for their own purposes, and their claiming of lands occupied for centuries by others. Though they would have been reluctant to admit it, the economic ambitions of Spanish explorers in California and other areas of what is now the American west were far more economically than religiously motivated. The same could be said of the motivations of the Dutch, the French, and the British in Africa; the Russians in Alaska; and the Portuguese in Africa and the Americas.