Origins
The European Age of Exploration began in the small Portuguese kingdom in the early 15th century. Portugal had completed the Reconquista of its territory by 1249 and had developed by the early 1400s a sophisticated shipbuilding tradition, a substantial Atlantic fishing fleet, and the political institutional capacity for sustained maritime exploration. The capture of the Moroccan port of Ceuta in 1415 by Portuguese forces under Prince Henry — later called Henry the Navigator — is the conventional starting date of the European exploration of West Africa.
Henry the Navigator sponsored systematic Portuguese coastal exploration south along West Africa through the mid-15th century. The Portuguese reached the Cape Verde Islands (1456), the Gulf of Guinea (1471), the mouth of the Congo (1483), and the Cape of Good Hope (rounded by Bartolomeu Dias in 1488). The exploration was driven by several converging motivations: the Portuguese-papal political conflict with Islamic Morocco (which suggested possible Christian allies in the African interior, including the imagined Christian kingdom of Prester John); the search for direct access to the trans-Saharan gold trade; the search for a sea route to East Asia that would bypass the Ottoman and Venetian intermediaries who controlled the eastern Mediterranean spice trade; and the technological pull of progressively improving Portuguese navigation, cartography, and ship design.
The Iberian breakthroughs
The decisive Portuguese achievement was Vasco da Gama’s 1497–1499 voyage from Lisbon around the Cape of Good Hope to Calicut (in modern Kerala, India) and back. The voyage opened the direct sea route to East Asia and broke the Venetian-Ottoman commercial monopoly on the spice trade.
The Spanish achievement was Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage, which reached the Caribbean while sailing west on the (incorrect) calculation that India was approximately 5,000 kilometres west of Iberia. Columbus made four voyages between 1492 and 1504, mapping substantial portions of the Caribbean and the South American coast without recognizing — or accepting — that he had reached a previously unknown continent.
The Treaty of Tordesillas (7 June 1494), negotiated under papal sponsorship, divided the non-European world between Portuguese and Spanish spheres along a meridian approximately 1,200 nautical miles west of the Cape Verde Islands. Portugal received the eastern hemisphere (including Brazil, discovered by Cabral in 1500 because the meridian passed through it); Spain received the western hemisphere. The treaty had no standing with other European powers but governed Iberian colonial expansion for the following century.
The first circumnavigation of the globe — by the expedition of Ferdinand Magellan (1519–1522) — confirmed the spherical Earth as a navigational fact rather than a theoretical position. Magellan himself died in a skirmish with Mactan islanders in the Philippines on 27 April 1521; his Basque deputy Juan Sebastián Elcano brought the surviving ship Victoria (and 17 of the original 270 crew) back to Spain in September 1522.
Northern European entry
The 16th-century Iberian monopoly on overseas exploration was broken in the late 16th and early 17th centuries by Protestant northern European powers. The Netherlands (the Dutch East India Company, founded 1602) established a major presence in the Indian Ocean and Indonesian archipelago, founded Batavia (modern Jakarta) in 1619, and dominated the global spice trade through the mid-17th century. England (the East India Company, founded 1600, and the early colonial ventures in Virginia from 1607 and Massachusetts from 1620) established maritime and territorial positions in North America, the Caribbean, and India. France entered the colonial competition in Canada (Quebec 1608), the Caribbean, and India.
The northern European entry produced approximately a century and a half of intermittent inter-European maritime warfare (the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the Anglo-French colonial conflicts, the Spanish-Dutch wars) that shaped global colonial geography until the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763).
Consequences
The Age of Exploration produced four major historical transformations:
The global circulation of biological material — the Columbian Exchange — moved Old World crops (wheat, sugarcane, rice, citrus) and animals (horses, cattle, pigs) to the Americas, and New World crops (maize, potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, cacao) to Africa and Eurasia. Both directions of the exchange were demographically transformative; the potato in particular substantially raised European population-carrying capacity over the following two centuries.
The catastrophic depopulation of the Americas by the introduction of Old World diseases against which indigenous populations had no immunity. Recent demographic estimates put the indigenous population of the Americas before 1492 at 50–60 million; by 1600 it had fallen by approximately 80–90%. The dead were overwhelmingly killed by smallpox, measles, influenza, and other pathogens that preceded the European arrivals into the interior by years or decades. The depopulation produced the demographic vacuum into which European settler colonization expanded.
The Atlantic slave trade, which from approximately 1525 to 1867 transported approximately 12.5 million Africans to the Americas (of whom approximately 10.7 million survived the Middle Passage), with substantial knock-on effects on West and Central African political-economic structures and the demographic foundation of slavery-based plantation economies in the Caribbean, Brazil, and the American South.
The development of the first global commercial-financial system. The 16th-century Antwerp, late-16th- and 17th-century Amsterdam, and 18th-century London financial centres progressively developed the international banking, joint-stock company, marine insurance, and commodity-exchange institutions that would constitute the foundation of modern global capitalism.
The Age of Exploration ended approximately at the mid-17th century, when the major coastal outlines of the world’s continents had been mapped (the major exceptions — interior Africa, Australia, Antarctica, and large portions of the Pacific — would be filled in over the following two centuries).