The Colonial empires were a product of the European Age of Exploration (or Age of Sail) that began with a race of exploration between the then most advanced maritime powers, Portugal and Spain, in the 15th century. The initial impulse behind these dispersed maritime empires and those that followed was trade, driven by the new ideas and the capitalism that grew out of the European Renaissance. Agreements were also done to divide the world up between them in 1479, 1493, and 1494.

Portugal began establishing the first global trade network and empire under the leadership of Henry the Navigator. Portugal would eventually establish colonial domains from Brazil, in South America, to several colonies in Africa (namely Portuguese Guinea, Cape Verde, São Tomé and Príncipe, Angola and Mozambique), in Portuguese India (most importantly Bombay and Goa), in China (Macau), and Oceania (most importantly Timor, namely East Timor), amongst many other smaller or short-lived possessions (see Evolution of the Portuguese Empire).

During its Siglo de Oro, the Spanish Empire had possession of the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Italy, parts of Germany, parts of France, and many colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. With the conquest of inland Mexico, Peru, and the Philippines in the 16th century, Spain established overseas dominions on a scale and world distribution that had never been approached by its predecessors (the Mongol Empire had been larger but was restricted to Eurasia). Possessions in Europe, Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, the Americas, the Pacific Ocean, and the Far East qualified the Spanish Empire as attaining a global presence in this sense.

From 1580 to 1640 the Portuguese Empire and the Spanish Empire were conjoined in a personal union of its Habsburg monarchs, during the period of the Iberian Union, though the empires continued to be administered separately.

Subsequent colonial empires included the French, Dutch, and British empires. The latter, consolidated during the period of British maritime hegemony in the 19th century, became the largest empire in history by virtue of the improved transportation technologies of the time. At its height, the British Empire covered a quarter of the Earth's land area and comprised a quarter of its population. By the 1860s, the Russian Empire — continued as the Soviet Union — became the largest contiguous state in the world, and the latter's main successor, Russia, continues to be so to this day. Despite having "lost" its Soviet periphery, Russia has 12 time zones, stretching slightly over half the world's longitude.

List of colonial empires

• Spanish Empire (1402 to 1975)
  • Spanish Golden Age
  • The empire on which the sun never sets
  • Spanish colonization of the Americas
• Portuguese Empire (1415 to 1999)
  • Evolution of the Portuguese Empire
• Russian empire (1580 to present)
  • Russian conquest of Siberia
• British Empire (1607 to 1997)
  • Evolution of the British Empire
  • British colonization of the Americas
• Danish colonial empire (1620 to 1953)
• Swedish colonial empire (1638 to 1663 and 1785 to 1878)
  • Swedish colonization of the Americas
• Dutch Empire (17th century to present)
• French Empire (1804 to 1960)
  • The First French Empire of Napoleon I (1804–1814 or 1815)
  • The Second French Empire of Napoleon III (1852–1870)
  • The First and Second French Colonial Empire (1605–1962)
• German colonial empire (1883 to 1919)
• Italian empire (1889 to 1943)
• American empire (1812 to present)
  • overseas expansion of the United States
• Belgian colonial empire (1901 to 1962)

See also

• Colonialism
• Western empires
• Islamic empire
• Global empire
• Great divergence
• European miracle

External links

• Visualizing western empires decline