page_title: Western world
section_title: Colonial West: discovery of America, mercantilism and imperialism (15th–20th centuries)
hierarchical_section_title: Western world / Historical divisions / Colonial West: discovery of America, mercantilism and imperialism (15th–20th centuries)
context_page_description: The Western world, also known as the West, refers to various regions, nations and states, depending on the context, most often consisting of the majority of Europe, Australasia, and the Americas. The Western world is also known as the Occident, in contrast to the Orient, or Eastern world. It might mean the Northern half of the North–South divide. Western civilization is commonly said to include: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the United States, all European member countries of the EU and EFTA, plus European microstates.
  Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome are generally considered to be the birthplaces of Western civilization—Greece having heavily influenced Rome—the former due to its impact on philosophy, democracy, science, aesthetics, as well as building designs and proportions and architecture; the latter due to its influence on art, law, warfare, governance, republicanism, engineering and religion. Western civilization is also strongly associated with Christianity, which is in turn shaped by Hellenistic philosophy, Judaism and Roman culture.
context_section_description: Later concepts of a world of nation-states born by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, coupled with the ideologies of the Enlightenment, the coming of modernity, the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, would produce powerful social transformations, political and economic institutions that have come to influence (or been imposed upon) most nations of the world today. Historians agree that the Industrial Revolution has been one of the most important events in history.
  This process of influence (and imposition) began with the voyages of discovery, colonization, conquest, and exploitation of Portugal enforced as well by papal bulls in 1450s (by the fall of the Byzantine Empire), granting Portugal navigation, war and trade monopoly for any newly discovered lands, and competing Spanish navigators. It continued with the rise of the Dutch East India Company by the destabilising Spanish discovery of the New World, and the creation and expansion of the English and French colonial empires, and others.
  Due to the reach of these empires, Western institutions expanded throughout the world. Even after demands for self-determination from subject peoples within Western empires were met with decolonization, these institutions persisted. One specific example was the requirement that post-colonial societies were made to form nation-states (in the Western tradition), which often created arbitrary boundaries and borders that did not necessarily represent a whole nation, people, or culture (as in much of Africa), and are often the cause of international conflicts and friction even to this day. Although not part of Western colonization process proper, following the Middle Ages Western culture in fact entered other global-spanning cultures during the colonial 15th–20th centuries.
  With the discovery of the American continent or 'New World' in 1492–1493, the European colonial Age of Discovery and exploration was born, revisiting an imperialistic view accompanied by the invention of firearms, while marking the start of the Modern Era. During this long period the Catholic Church launched a major effort to spread Christianity in the New World and to convert the Native Americans and others. A 'Modern West' emerged from the Late Middle Ages (after the Renaissance and fall of Constantinople) as a new civilization greatly influenced by the interpretation of Greek thought preserved in the Byzantine Empire, and transmitted from there by Latin translations and emigration of Greek scholars through Renaissance humanism. (Popular typefaces such as italics were inspired and designed from transcriptions during this period.) Renaissance architectural works, revivals of Classical and Gothic styles, flourished during this modern period throughout Western colonial empires.
  In the 13th and 14th centuries, a number of European travelers, many of them Christian missionaries, had sought to cultivate trading with Asia and Africa. With the Crusades came the relative contraction of the Orthodox Byzantine's large silk industry in favour of Catholic Western Europe and the rise of Western Papacy. The most famous of these merchant travelers pursuing East–west trade was Venetian Marco Polo. But these journeys had little permanent effect on east–west trade because of a series of political developments in Asia in the last decades of the 14th century, which put an end to further European exploration of Asia: namely the new Ming rulers were found to be unreceptive of religious proselytism by European missionaries and merchants. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks consolidated control over the eastern Mediterranean, closing off key overland trade routes.
  The Portuguese spearheaded the drive to find oceanic routes that would provide cheaper and easier access to South and East Asian goods, by advancements in maritime technology such as the caravel ship introduced in the mid-1400s. The charting of oceanic routes between East and West began with the unprecedented voyages of Portuguese and Spanish sea captains. In 1492 European colonialism expanded across the globe with the explor
caption: The Industrial Revolution, which began in Great Britain in 1760s and was preceded by the Agricultural and Scientific revolutions in the 1600s, forever modified the economy worldwide.
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