Norse no relation Exploration of North America
During the Age of Discovery, a large scale colonization of the Americas, involving a number of European empires, took place between around 1492 and 1800. The Norse had explored and colonized areas of Europe and the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 CE. However, the later colonization by the European powers involving the continents of North America and South America is arguably more well-known.During this time, several empires from Europe—primarily Spain, Portugal, Britain, France, Russia, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden—began to explore and claim the land, natural resources and human capital of the Americas, resulting in the displacement, disestablishment, enslavement, and in many cases, genocide of the indigenous peoples, and the establishment of several settler colonial states. Some settler colonies—including New Mexico, Alaska, the northern Great Plains, and the North-Western Territory in North America; the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the Yucatán Peninsula, and the Darién Gap in Central America; and the northwest Amazon, the central Andes, and the Guianas in South America—remain relatively rural, sparsely populated, and Indigenous into the 21st century. Russia began colonizing the Pacific Northwest in the mid-18th century, seeking pelts for the fur trade. Many of the social structures—including religions, political boundaries, and linguae francae—which predominate in the Western Hemisphere in the 21st century are the descendants of those that were established during this period.
The rapid rate at which Europe grew in wealth and power was unforeseeable in the early 15th century because it had been preoccupied with internal wars and it was slowly recovering from the loss of population caused by the Black Death. The Ottoman Empire's domination of trade routes to Asia prompted Western European monarchs to search for alternatives, resulting in the voyages of Christopher Columbus and the accidental re-discovery of the New World.
Upon the signing of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, Portugal and Spain agreed to divide the Earth in two, with Portugal having dominion over non-Christian lands in the eastern half, and Spain over those in the western half. Spanish claims essentially included all of the Americas, however, the Treaty of Tordesillas granted the eastern tip of South America to Portugal, where it established Brazil in the early 1500s. The city of Santo Domingo, in the current-day Dominican Republic, founded in 1498 by Columbus, is credited as the oldest continuously inhabited European-established settlement in the Americas.It quickly became clear to other Western European powers that they too could benefit from voyages west and by the 1530s, the British and French had begun colonizing the northeast tip of the Americas. Within a century, the Swedish had established New Sweden, the Dutch had established New Netherland, and Denmark–Norway along with the other aforementioned powers had made several claims in the Caribbean. By the 1700s, Denmark–Norway had revived its former colonies in Greenland, and Russia had begun to explore and claim the Pacific Coast from Alaska to California.
Deadly confrontations became more frequent at the beginning of this period as the indigenous peoples fought fiercely to preserve their territorial integrity from increasing numbers of European colonizers, as well as from hostile indigenous neighbors who were equipped with Eurasian technology. Conflict between the various European empires and the indigenous peoples was the leading dynamic in the Americas into the 1800s, and although some parts of the continent were gaining their independence from Europe by that time, other regions such as California, Patagonia, the North-Western Territory, and the northern Great Plains experienced little to no colonization at all until the 1800s. European contact and colonization had disastrous effects on the indigenous peoples of the Americas and their societies.
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