In the early 1500s, Europeans began founding new settlements in the Americas. Some came to get rich, others to win glory for their empires, a few to spread their faith. Some settlements withered and died, but others became profitable centers for international commerce as goods and people flowed across the Atlantic Ocean.

During this time, the European empires of Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden began to explore and claim the Americas and its natural resources and human capital, leading to the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, sometimes even the genocide of the Indigenous peoples in the Americas, and the establishment of several settler colonial states.

Europe’s period of exploration and colonization was fueled largely by necessity. Europeans had become accustomed to the goods from Asia, such as the silk, spices, and pottery that had for centuries traveled the Silk Road. By the middle of the 16th century, however, this trade was under threat.

In the 1500s, Spain surpassed Portugal as the dominant European power. This age of exploration and the subsequent creation of an Atlantic World marked the earliest phase of globalization, in which previously isolated groups—Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans—first came into contact with each other, sometimes with disastrous results.