Eps 3: European Empires
At its height, the British Empire covered a quarter of the Earth 's land area and comprised a quarter of its population.
The Australia dominion , itself a colony that gradually increased its independence in 1901, 1942 and 1986, was tasked with the government of multiple other British colonies and territories and the mandates of New Guinea and Nauru
Peter I Island claimed in 1929, under Norway sovereignty since 1933.
Host
Ken Chavez
Podcast Content
The Spanish Empire began in 1496 with the Age of Exploration and reached its peak in the 16th century with the discovery of gold, silver, copper, gold and other precious metals. The Atlantic presence was established, and Spain explored and colonized the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, America, Europe, and the Middle East, and the Pacific, in the 14th and 15th centuries.
The Spanish were an undisputed naval power until King Phillip II sent his Spanish Armada to invade England in 1588. The defeat of the English, which was defeated by their crushing defeat against the Spanish, paved the way for English expansion and colonialism.
This decisive victory paved the way for the eventual rule of the Roman Empire over the Mediterranean. The fall of Carthage gave the Romans control over all areas of North Africa, and the height of their influence in the region also ushered in an era of "Roman influence" in the region. This was one of the more dramatic moments shown on the animated "map of Europe" and was the "summit" of the Roman Empire.
At its peak under Trajan, the Roman Empire housed the world's first motorized vehicles, such as horses and horses, as well as motor boats, chariots and even motorcycles.
At its height, the Roman Empire stretched from the wind-swept moors of northern England to the desert deserts of Syria, and on its heights to the Mediterranean, from Africa to Asia Minor.
During the Pax Romana, bureaucracy and politics joined much of today's Europe together. In the 20th century, a European empire emerged that covered almost the entire world and is, at that time, the largest and most powerful in the history of the European Union and the second largest in Europe. This has put a huge strain on relations between the EU and its member states and Europe as a whole.
The First World War began in 1914, a conflict motivated in part by imperial ambitions but also by the rise of a resistance movement. Resistance movements arose that the colonialists had difficulty in getting under control, such as the French Revolution in France and the Spanish Civil War.
The resulting changes in Europe and the world undermined many of the beliefs of imperialism, a trend reinforced by World War II.
The history of the third phase of the European empires was one of gradual decolonisation and independence, with the vast majority of empires no longer existing in the Middle East, North Africa, Asia, Africa or Latin America. The two oldest empires are sometimes considered the Ottoman Empire and the Roman Empire, the two largest empires in Europe at the time. In the early 19th century, they dominated the Middle East and later the Mediterranean and South Asia.
After Napoleon's expedition to Egypt, the country's leaders tried to initiate modernisation and emancipation in Istanbul, but after financial difficulties and under the influence of the British Empire, they came under British rule.
After World War I, the League of Nations gave France and Great Britain a mandate to administer the Middle East. The colonial era began to end when the devastated nations of Western Europe could no longer afford such global influence, and global norms turned against them.
British and French troops are sometimes blamed for the 1956 Suez crisis, in which the US and the Soviet Union pressured them to withdraw after invading Egypt to seize the Suez Canal with Israeli help. European colonialism took a few decades to collapse completely: France fought Algeria in 1962, and Portugal abandoned its African colonies only in 1974.
So the map of the European-dominated world is not as bleak as it may feel to many Americans, but it is still not a perfect representation of the world.
It is no secret that European colonialism was a huge and often disastrous project, which brought almost the entire world under the control of one or other European power for several centuries. To give you an idea of how much control the European Empire had over the world, here is a map showing the countries that were partially or completely under European control during the colonial period, which lasted from around 1500 to the 1960s. As you can see, almost every corner of the world was either directly colonized or dominated by different names, protectorate mandates or both.