ABSTRACT
The expansion of Europe into the rest of the world, by conquest and settlement, by trade
and administrative empire and by the diffusion of its civilization and its unique
technology, was a major event in the history of mankind. It was a slow and complex
process that took place over many centuries and took many different forms. This chapter
is concerned with European expansion before the radical change of the nineteenth
century. In that century the Europeans created the first international system to span the
whole globe, and established everywhere a universalized version of the rules and
institutions and the basic assumptions of the European society of states. Our present
international society is directly descended from that universalized European system.
