ABSTRACT

The first global wave, which I call the Columbian Exchange and Age of Colonialism, established water routes between Western Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Americas, and between Western Europe and South and East Asia. It is defined by a variant of commercial capitalism known as mercantilism, the development of increasingly effective central governments in a number of European states, European colonial empires in the western hemisphere or New World, and the enslavement of millions of Africans who were shipped to the Americas as unfree labor.