Expansion and Contraction: Europe's Reach, 1492–1991

The idea

The exam's phrase for this half of Western civilization is Europe's expansion and its outposts, then its imperial contraction and new forms. Read as one curve, the five centuries cohere. The curve rises in fourteen ninety-two, when Columbus sails on Isabella's crusading zeal and commercial hope, and Spain's conquests deliver bullion, catastrophe for native peoples, and, within a generation, a turn to enslaved African labor. It rises again in the seventeenth century, when the Dutch and British replace bullion with commodities, invent the exchange, the bank and the corporation, and build trade empires whose plantations make the Atlantic slave trade the crime at capitalism's first phase. By eighteen hundred Europe controls about a third of the globe. The Industrial Revolution then gives it a technological lead the anchor insists was short, under a century, and that lead, telegraph, quinine and modern weapons, carries the share past eighty percent by nineteen hundred: India under a hundred thousand officials, Africa scrambled in twenty years, plunder economies of land, materials and labor. The curve peaks in nineteen twenty, when Europe controls more of the world than it ever had or would again. Then it falls, and falls faster than it rose. The First World War ends three empires and drains the victors. The Second leaves Europe in ruins and two superpowers outside it. Between nineteen forty-seven and the nineteen sixties, Asia and Africa take independence as quickly as they had lost it, sometimes by negotiation, as in Ghana, sometimes by war, as in Algeria and Vietnam, while the non-aligned refuse the Cold War's sides. What Europe builds in place of empire are the new forms the exam names: social democracy at home, the Economic Community and then the Union among states, and a boom that runs until the oil embargo of nineteen seventy-three. In nineteen ninety-one the Soviet half of the continent's postwar order dissolves, and the curve of European reach that began in fourteen ninety-two ends where the course's history ends.