The term "New World" was coined by Amerigo Vespucci in 1503, but the chapter argues that contact made the world new for Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples alike — not just a European 'discovery' of unknown lands.
Contact between Europeans and West Africans (mid-1400s on) built on prior trans-Saharan trade familiarity and Portuguese advances in Atlantic navigation (the Canary Current, wind/current knowledge from the grain and Atlantic Islands trade).
In West Africa, the Portuguese pursued trade, not conquest, operating from small fortified trading posts (feitorias) like Elmina (founded 1482) at African rulers' forbearance, since African states were militarily formidable.
West Africans had partial immunity to Old World diseases from centuries of trans-Saharan/Red Sea contact, so contact did not cause a demographic disaster in Africa; disease instead hit Europeans hardest (malaria, etc.).
Contact zones produced culturally mixed populations and go-betweens: Atlantic creoles in West Africa, mestizos in the Caribbean and Mexico — people who spoke multiple languages, intermarried, and mediated between cultures.
A new transatlantic slave trade in enslaved Africans grew out of pre-existing African slavery systems; African merchants and rulers were active participants; enslaved Africans were shipped to Iberia and the Atlantic Islands to grow sugar.
Columbus (1492) made contact with the Taino of Hispaniola; he exploited political divisions among Taino states to forge alliances (e.g., with cacique Guacanagari) and built the encomienda system, a tribute/labor system resembling feudalism.
The Caribbean experienced catastrophic depopulation: the Taino population fell from roughly 300,000 to about 60,000 within a decade and to near extinction by 1550, due to a combination of European disease (no prior immunity) and Spanish enslavement, forced labor, and brutality.
Bartolome de Las Casas, a former encomendero turned Dominican priest, became the leading defender of Native rights and helped push reforms restricting the encomienda system and Indigenous slave trade, though reforms came too late for the Taino.
Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire (1519–1521) by exploiting internal Aztec weaknesses, forming alliances with Aztec enemies (especially the Tlaxcalans), and relying on the interpreter/go-between La Malinche (Doña Marina); Tenochtitlan fell in 1521 after Moctezuma's death and the spread of smallpox.
Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire (1532–1536) by exploiting a civil war between rival Inca claimants based in Cuzco and Quito, using a much smaller force than Cortés.
Disease was the single most devastating factor in Indigenous demographic collapse across the Americas (population fell from roughly 45–55 million to 8–9 million between 1500–1650, over 80% decline), but historians now stress that labor exploitation and enslavement compounded the disaster alongside disease — a more balanced view than the older 'Black Legend' that blamed Spanish cruelty alone.
Portuguese contact with Tupi-speaking peoples in Brazil (from 1500, Cabral) followed a similar pattern of go-betweens, alliances, coerced labor (sugar plantations), and devastating disease.
In eastern North America, Indigenous societies (Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan speakers organized as sachemships/chiefdoms) understood trade primarily as a political and diplomatic tool for alliance-building and prestige, not profit — a different worldview from the increasingly market-driven Europeans.
English involvement in Atlantic colonization was shaped by domestic pressures: the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther, 1517; Henry VIII's Church of England, 1534), the 'rehearsal' of colonizing Ireland, and enclosure creating displaced 'masterless men' whom promoters like Richard Hakluyt saw colonization as a solution for.
Timeline
c. 1000 CENorse explorers reach North America (Vinland), making the earliest known European contact with Native North Americans.
1441The first enslaved Africans transported by ship in Atlantic waters arrive in Portugal.
1482Portuguese establish the feitoria (fortified trading post) of Elmina, in present-day Ghana.
1492Sailing for Spain, Christopher Columbus makes landfall in the Bahamas and then on Hispaniola.
1497Sailing for England, John Cabot reaches Newfoundland.
1498Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounds Africa and reaches the Indian Ocean.
1500Portuguese explorer Pedro Álvares Cabral reaches northeastern Brazil.
1503Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci first uses the term 'New World' to describe the Western Hemisphere.
1517Martin Luther publishes his Ninety-Five Theses, sparking the Protestant Reformation.
1519–1521Hernán Cortés leads the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire.
1524In the service of France, Giovanni da Verrazzano sails up the eastern coast of North America.
1528–1536Spanish explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca travels across the Gulf coast of the present-day United States and Mexico.
1532–1536Francisco Pizarro leads the Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire.
1534–1536French navigator Jacques Cartier travels the St. Lawrence River.
1539–1542Hernando de Soto leads the first European expedition through the Native country of the North American southeast and lower Mississippi Valley.
1540–1542Francisco Vázquez de Coronado becomes the first European to explore the southwestern areas of North America.
1558–1603Reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England.
1565Spanish establish St. Augustine on the Florida peninsula, the longest continuously occupied European settlement in North America.
1577–1580English privateer Francis Drake becomes the second man to circumnavigate the globe.
1585–1586English privateer Francis Drake's 'Great Expedition' raids Spanish America.
1585–1590English efforts to settle Roanoke Island off present-day North Carolina fail.
