The subjugation of the Canary Islands provide a colonial model for “the discovery, invasion, and remaking of the Americas” (31). The local people of the Canary Islands, the Guanche, were essentially eradicated by a combination of disease (brought unwittingly by the Europeans) and enslavement (30). Iberian success on the northwest coast of Africa and the Atlantic islands encouraged “a more intensive mode of colonization: settlement” (29). There was thus a drive to discover new trade routes, particularly by Spain and Portugal, who had recently retaken the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslims in the reconquista (26).Īt the end of the 15th century, new ship technologies were developed (like the caravel) that enabled 14th-century trade to shift into the Atlantic (28). This union disproportionately favored the Europeans, as it provided valuable new imports for Europe while also introducing weeds, pests. When the European colonizers arrived, they brought together the ecological systems of the Old and New Worlds and wrought an environmental revolution (25). They attributed their inferiority to Muslim control of trade routes to the East. Chapter 2 Summary: Colonizers: 1400-1800. provokes us to contemplate the ways in which residents of North America have dealt with diversity.Before their expeditions to the New World, 15th-century Christians felt increasingly restricted by the wealth, power, and technology of their rivals, the Muslims. In a vivid narrative, Taylor draws upon cutting-edge scholarship to create a timely picture of the colonial world characterized by an interplay of freedom and slavery, opportunity and loss. Moving beyond the Atlantic seaboard to examine the entire continent, American Colonies reveals a pivotal period in the global interaction of peoples, cultures, plants, animals, and microbes. Transcending the usual Anglocentric version of our colonial past, he recovers the importance of Native American tribes, African slaves, and the rival empires of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and even Russia in the colonization of North America. In the first volume in the Penguin History of the United States, edited by Eric Foner, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the many cultures that helped make America, from the native inhabitants from milennia past, through the decades of Western colonization and conquest, and across the entire continent, all the way to the Pacific coast. With this volume, Alan Taylor challenges the traditional story of colonial history by examining the. A multicultural, multinational history of colonial America from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Internal Enemy and American Revolutions

American Colonies by Alan Taylor