ABSTRACT
The history of European overseas expansion seems to be familiar enough. Most surveys date the process back to the first exploratory voyages of the fourteenth century towards the Northern Coast of Africa, Canary Islands, and Madeira. Accounts of overseas European expansion are framed by a traditional storyline which invokes the role of Christopher Columbus in ‘discovering’ the ‘New World’, of central European colonial powers, empire building, the beginning of consumption, and the slave trade. Drawing on ancient and medieval cartographers, Columbus misconceived longitude and latitude as well as time and space, and eventually reached the islands of the Bahamas. Most studies of ‘global microhistory’ in the early modern period focus on the movement of people, i.e. the spatial expansion of social interaction. On early modern maps of Europe, shifting boundaries reflect dynamics such as dynastic conflicts, wars of succession, state formation and personal unions.
