answer• Europeans for the first time operated on a global scale, forging new trade networks across the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.
• They also facilitated the full integration of fur-supplying regions into wider trade networks.
• But in other ways, the Europeans assimilated older patterns, as in the Indian Ocean, where they sought to dominate previously established trade routes, and they continued to trade many of the same products.
14. Describe and account for the differing outcomes of European expansion in the Americas (see Chapter 14), Africa, and Asia.
• In the Americas, Europeans conquered the region politically and dominated it economically. The primary reasons for this were the devastation caused to Native American populations by European diseases and the technological advantages that Europeans possessed when they arrived.
• In Africa, Europeans established much stronger trade relationships and set up several trading posts on the east coast of Africa. However, they made no effort to conquer large territories, in large part because the most attractive regions for European conquest, such as West Africa, possessed too many deadly tropical diseases against which Europeans had little immunity.
• In Asia, Europeans (aside from the Spanish, who succeeded in establishing a colonial state in the Philippines) sought to found trading post empires, with mixed success. The Dutch were able to dominate several Spice Islands, and both the British and the Portuguese were able to set up fortified trading posts along the Indian Ocean coast. But none of these powers ever tried to conquer large territories, and in some cases, such as in Japan, the Europeans were only able to trade under conditions set by the local authorities. These developments show that, while the Spanish and Dutch were able to dominate relatively small regions, the larger established civilizations of Asia were too powerful for the Europeans to hope to rule, and in any case the great distances between Asia and Europe made such a colonial empire impractical.