European Settlement of the Americas †The True Story :: American America History

European Settlement of the Americas The True StoryOne of the most most-valuable events in the history of the last half millennium is the European baring of the Americas. The traditional story of the contact explains the Europeans eventual success by crediting the brilliant technology and military prowess of the Europeans. If the traditional story mentions luck at all, it is in explaining the Europeans good fortune at finding such a sparsely populated pristine continent. While it is true that European charge technology was more sophisticated than that of the native peoples of the Americas, European conquering and geographic expedition of the Americas was as much the result of three non-technological factors as of the sophistication of European ship technology. The first was Europes relative deliberateness in comparison to the sum and Far East, the indorsement was macro-evolutionary factors such as geography and relative overlook of natural resources, and the third was plain dumb luck.Europes biggest motivation for westward exploration was a require to access slew with the Far East. It was the continents relative backwardness that prevented their achieving this access through eastward movement. The land route to the Indies was blocked because of European inability to compete with the Turks, whose Ottoman Empire stretched across the main trade routes. Carlo Cippola remarks on the irony that as Europeans were expanding on the sea, on her eastern mete she was spiritlessly retreating under the pressure of the Turkish forces. (Note 1) As a result, European nations who wanted the ability to trade with China and the rest of the Indies for goods such as silk and spices were coerce to find another route, since they were not strong enough militarily to get by the Turks on land and gain access through the Middle East.The second factor of backwardness that spurred westward exploration was the fragmented nature of Europes governmental system. Because the cont inent was home to many separate and competing nation states, each commonwealth was forced to find its own route. This competition also increased the desire for Eastern goods, since these goods represented wealth and thus the ability to pay for big-ticket(prenominal) wars and triumph over neighboring states. If the European continent had been one unite body politically, the desire for Eastern goods might have been less, and westward exploration of the Americas might never have occurred since all of Europe could have benefited from the Lusitanian route to the Indies around Africa.