ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book begins with the voyages of the Norse, the first Europeans successfully to contend with the rigours of the North Atlantic. Their colonization of Iceland and Greenland marked the commencement of the extension of European power (and eventually civilization) beyond the bounds of the continent itself. Between approximately 800 and 1650 the world known to western Europeans was enlarged in a way unparalleled before or since. In the Americas whole indigenous societies were destroyed and some parts of the continent brought under European rule in campaigns whose audacity, let alone success, still remains a matter for wonder. The book ends in the mid-seventeenth century. By this date the oceanic empires created by the Portuguese and Spaniards—often with the aid of Italian skills and capital—were resisting with varying degrees of success the assaults of other European states.
