ABSTRACT
The dramatic burst of European overseas expansion that began in the fifteenth century and peaked in the first century of the industrial era generated a profound and lasting Eurocentrism that has dominated historical explanations of the geopolitics and global cross-cultural exchanges of the last half-millennium. Eurocentric perspectives remain pervasive. They underwrite the early modern and modern labels we use for the periodisation of recent centuries in global history. And they have sustained a conceptual framework that encapsulates widely held convictions regarding the exceptional nature of the socioeconomic and political transformations that led to Europe’s rise to unprecedented affluence and global hegemony.1 But research in recent decades has made it clear that Europe was but one of a number of highly dynamic, expansive core regions in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.2 In terms of its population, the extent of its urbanisation, the size of its armies, the productivity of its agriculture and other indices of socioeconomic and political development, Europe lagged well behind societies in China, the Islamic world and Mesoamerica. In short, Europe was an underdeveloped region. And the reports of European merchants, missionaries and other travellers to the Middle East and Asia devoted considerable time and attention to this fact. Their accounts, which by the late fifteenth century had begun to accumulate throughout
Europe, did much to arouse the fears and needs that were among the forces driving early European overseas projects.3
