ABSTRACT
Western empires in Asia are far more difficult to deal with than are those in the Americas or Africa. It is hard to decide even from when to date them. In Central and South America, the Spanish empire was established extremely rapidly: in less than two decades, from Cortes’ arrival in Mexico in 1519 to Pizzaro’s overthrow of the Inca state in Peru in 1535, the conquest of the continent had been substantially consolidated. In Africa, the process was somewhat more prolonged, but it also was mostly concentrated into two decades, the 1880s and 1890s. Although there was a continuous Western presence in Asia from Vasco da Gama’s voyage in 1498 onward, the West did not control any substantial portion of the Asian mainland until nearly three centuries later, nor would European empires truly dominate Asia as a whole until almost four centuries had passed.
