But perhaps the most important act of “rationalization”
Citations (1)
- The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers whole source · open book
What historians refer to as the “Vasco da Gama epoch” and the “Columbian era”—that is, the three or four centuries of European hegemony after 1500—was a very gradual process. Portuguese explorers might have reached the shores of India by the 1490s, but their vessels were still small (often only 300 tons) and not all that well armed—certainly not compared with the powerful Dutch East Indiamen which sailed in those waters a century later. In fact, the Portuguese could not penetrate the Red Sea for a long while, and then only precariously, nor could they gain much of a footing in China; and in the late sixteenth century they lost some of their East African stations to an Arab counteroffensive.27 It would be erroneous, too, to assume that the non-European powers simply collapsed like a pack of cards at the first signs of western expansionism.
chapter: The “European Miracle”