The Treaty of Tordesillas was signed in 1494 by the Spanish and Portuguese kingdoms. It was intended to divide the American continent, newly discovered to Europeans, between the two burgeoning empires. The Treaty of Zaragoza was signed in 1529 and was intended to divide the other side of the world, the Far East in particular, between the same two empires. The treaties were generally respected by the two powers themselves, but were generally ignored by the rest of the European powers once they arrived on the scene.

Although it is true that Spain was a reasonably prosperous European nation at the time of expansion into the Americas, and it is also true that the Spanish possessed superior technology that helped them to subdue the native population, the primary reason why Spanish expansion was able to proceed so quickly was the devastating impact on the native population of diseases brought from Europe to the New World. Smallpox, in particular, was almost apocalyptic in nature, killing as many as ninety percent of the native population in some areas. Essentially, the Spanish would show up, make contact, and within a few months the native people would be dying by the millions, their administrative capabilities completely neutered by the impact of death and suffering.

The Spanish and Portuguese were the primary nations involved in the first wave of European expansion in the sixteenth century. They were more politically unified than England and France and had much less religious diversity to contend with, whereas in France and England, the sixteenth century was a time of religious upheaval and civil wars. Both the English and French would start to get involved (along with the Dutch) in overseas expansion toward the end of the sixteenth century, and both had established colonies by the first couple of decades of the seventeenth century.

All of these individuals were notable Portuguese explorers except for Christopher Columbus, who was an Italian sailing under the patronage of the Spanish crown. While you might not have known that the answer to this question immediately, you could determine it through careful consideration of the accomplishments of each of these people. Vasco de Gama was the first person to sail around the Cape of Africa and reach India via the ocean, the longest recorded such voyage in human history at the time. This voyage allowed Portugal to control ocean trade with the Far East for much of the sixteenth century before their monopoly was broken by the excursions of the British, French, and Dutch.

The primary reason why the European colonial governments, particularly the Spanish and Portuguese at first, decided to start exporting slaves to the New World was the scarcity of labor caused by the massive population decreases experienced by the native people. Essentially, the Spanish and Portuguese colonists caused the death of so many native people through disease, warfare, and harsh labor conditions that they had to bring people in to provide the raw labor they needed to keep running their plantations.

The Spanish brought more gold and silver to Europe in the space of a couple of centuries than had been mined in the rest of European history collectively. In theory, this would have made Spain immensely wealthy, but Spain was massively in debt to individual investors from England and the Netherlands, and much of the wealth mined in the New World ended up concentrated in the hands of the merchants and bankers of Northern Europe. Inflation obliterated the Spanish economy, and Spain would never again be a major world power that could compete with England, France, and the Netherlands.

The early years of European exploration were dominated by the Portuguese. Portugal was quickly supplanted by the Spanish, who held the largest empire and the biggest navy for much of the sixteenth century. When the Spanish tried to invade England in 1588, their navy was obliterated. England’s rise to global naval supremacy began with the failure of the Spanish Armada.

In the thirteenth, fourteenth, and early fifteenth centuries, European economic power was concentrated in the Italian city-states. It quickly shifted to Spain and Portugal (the Iberian Peninsula) once the age of colonization began. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, power shifted again to Northern Europe as the influx of precious metals into Europe enriched the French, the English, and the Dutch.

Peter the Great is one of the most famous rulers in Russian history. He westernized and “modernized” Russian society by implementing many features of the societies of Western and Central Europe. He also dramatically expanded Russian territory, gaining for his state a port city on the Baltic and the Black Seas. His port city on the Baltic would come to be called St. Petersburg, and was for a long time the Russian capital.

The innovation in joint-stock companies revolutionized infant capitalism and allowed the Dutch and the British in particular to undertake expensive trading ventures that would otherwise have been impossible or extremely risky to finance for an individual. Joint-stock companies worked much like modern corporations, where individuals could purchase a share of the risk for a share of the profit.