The empire spread throughout a vast number of territories distributed across the globe (especially at one time in the 16th century) that are now parts of 60 different sovereign states. Portugal began establishing the first global trade network and one of the first colonial empires under the leadership of Henry the Navigator. This paradigm shifted by the time of the Ptolemaic Empire, the Seleucid Empire, and the Roman Empire.
European imperialism was born out of competition between European Christians and Ottoman Muslims, the latter of which rose up quickly in the 14th century and forced the Spanish and Portuguese to seek new trade routes to India, and to a lesser extent, China.Īlthough colonies existed in classical antiquity, especially amongst the Phoenicians and the Ancient Greeks who settled many islands and coasts of the Mediterranean Sea, these colonies were politically independent from the city-states they originated from, and thus did not constitute a colonial empire. Agreements were also made to divide the world up between them in 1479, 1493, and 1494.
The initial impulse behind these dispersed maritime empires and those that followed was trade, driven by the new ideas and the capitalism that grew out of the European Renaissance. Modern colonial empires first emerged with a race of exploration between the then most advanced European maritime powers, Portugal and Spain, during the 15th century. A colonial empire is a collective of territories (often called colonies), either contiguous with the imperial center or located overseas, settled by the population of a certain state and governed by that state.īefore the expansion of early modern European powers, other empires had conquered and colonized territories, such as the Romans in Iberia, or the Chinese in what is now southern China.
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