The Europeans were enabled to carve out huge empires an ocean away from their homelands because of many reasons. For starters, Europeans were much closer to the Americas than they were to their potential Asian competitors. Also, groups within European society—including competing monarchs, merchants, impoverished nobles and commoners, Christian missionaries, and persecuted minorities—all had strong, if different, motivations for participating in empire building. European seafaring technology, built on Chinese and Islamic precedents, allowed Europeans to cross the Atlantic with growing ease, so of course they wouldn’t want to go a harder route and take any chances. In addition to using technology, European ironworking technology, gunpowder weapons, and horses initially had no parallel in the Americas. Lastly, European germs and diseases to which Native Americans had no immunities decimated society after society, sometimes in advance of the Europeans’ actual arrival.
pg . 406
European empires generated many large-scale transformations. European empire building caused the demographic collapse of Native American societies while combinations of indigenous, European, and African peoples created entirely new societies in the Americas. Large-scale exchanges of plants and animals transformed the crops and animals raised both in the Americas and in the Eastern Hemisphere. The silver mines of Mexico and Peru fueled both transatlantic and transpacific commerce.The need for plantation workers and the sugar and cotton trade created a lasting link among Africa, Europe, and the Americas, while scattering peoples of African origins throughout the Western Hemisphere.
pg . 410
The economic foundation of colonial rule in Mexico and Peru was commercial agriculture and the mining of silver and gold. This economic base created a distinct social order similar to the Spanish class hierarchy while accommodating racially and culturally different Indians and Africans as well as racially mixed people.
pg . 412
Brazilian slaves were treated more harshly than North American slaves and North American slaved reproduced more slaves. In Brazil they continually imported slaves and some owners were setting their slaves free. In Brazil, blacks and mixed race people had more economic opportunity. Also in North America there were very clearly defined races categorized as white, red, black whereas in Brazil they created new races from the mixed races that emerged.
pg . 415
The British settler colonies were less prominent and felt they had the leftovers because they were the last to establish a colonial presence in the Americas. They also came from a more rapidly changing society than their counterparts and were more numerous. They were less interested in spreading Christianity as well.
pg . 417
The fur trade Russia was motivated to grow its empire by a number of different reasons. Some of the main reasons were security, economical purposes, and their growing population. Russia in some senses was having "border wars" with other countries,
