Rivals on the World Stage

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how Europeans built overseas empires and trade networks through a combination of armed force and negotiation between roughly 1494 and 1648 (LO I; KC-1.3.III).
• Account for the rise of Spain as the dominant European power of the sixteenth century, supported by its colonies in the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Pacific (KC-1.3.III.B).
• Account for the entry of the Atlantic states (France, England, the Netherlands) into overseas commerce in the seventeenth century and explain how they challenged Iberian dominance (KC-1.3.III.C).
• Account for the conflicts and rivalries among European powers produced by competition for trade in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, identifying at least three specific wars (KC-1.3.III.D).
• Use Skill 3.A (Claims and Evidence in Sources) to identify the legal and political claims early modern European treaties and charters made about colonial dominion.

The CED's framing of Topic 1.7 is built on a single key concept parent (KC-1.3.III) and three sub-codes (KC-1.3.III.B, C, D) that elaborate. KC-1.3.III states that Europeans built overseas empires and trade networks through a combination of armed force and negotiation. The two methods worked together: the Iberian voyages of Topic 1.6 produced overseas territorial claims that needed legal authorization (negotiation with Rome and with rival European powers) and forcible defense (armed naval and colonial garrison forces). Topic 1.7 traces this process through three phases: Iberian dominance, Atlantic challenge, and the wars that resulted.

The first phase is sixteenth century Iberian dominance. The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, between Spain and Portugal, divided the non-Christian world along a line 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands. Spain claimed everything west of the line; Portugal everything east. The treaty was a successor to two papal bulls of 1493 (issued by the Spanish-born Alexander VI) and was ratified by Pope Julius II in 1506. It placed most of the Americas in the Spanish sphere but Brazil within the Portuguese sphere; it confirmed Portuguese claims to West Africa and the Indian Ocean. Spain's empire by 1600 included Mexico (after Cortes's conquest of the Aztec capital in 1521), Peru (after Pizarro's conquest of the Inca empire in the 1530s), most of the Caribbean, and the Philippines (acquired through Magellan's 1521 voyage and named for Philip II). The American silver mines, especially Potosi (in present-day Bolivia, opened in 1545), funded the Spanish Habsburg state for the next century and made Spain, in KC-1.3.III.B's framing, the dominant state in Europe in the sixteenth century.

Portugal's empire ran on a different model. Rather than territorial conquest, the Portuguese built a network of fortified factories (trading posts) along the West African coast, in the Persian Gulf, around the Indian Ocean rim, and in the Strait of Malacca. The factories were defended by ship-mounted cannon and small garrisons; they did not require the conquest of large interior populations. The system worked because the Portuguese controlled the chokepoints — the entrances to the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, the strait between Africa and Madagascar, the Strait of Malacca — through which Asian spice trade had to pass. By 1550 Portugal was the dominant European trading power in Asia and West Africa, despite its small home population.

The second phase is the seventeenth century Atlantic challenge. KC-1.3.III.C identifies the principal new actors: France, England, and the Netherlands. The Dutch were the first to challenge effectively. The Dutch Revolt against Spain (1568-1648) produced the United Provinces of the Netherlands, which by the 1590s had built a deep-water merchant marine and was fighting the Portuguese (then under Spanish Habsburg rule) directly in Asia. The Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie or VOC), chartered in March 1602, was granted a twenty-one year monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, sovereign powers including the right to wage war, conclude treaties, mint coins, and establish colonies, and a corporate structure based on shareholder capital. By the 1640s the VOC had displaced the Portuguese in the spice islands of present-day Indonesia, taken over the Cape of Good Hope, and established factories from Nagasaki to Cape Town. The Dutch West India Company, chartered in 1621, ran a parallel Atlantic operation focused on the slave trade and Brazilian sugar.

England and France followed similar patterns at different scales. The English East India Company was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I in December 1600, two years before the VOC; it operated more cautiously across the seventeenth century, focused initially on Indian textiles rather than Indonesian spices, and gradually expanded its territorial control in India after 1700. English Atlantic colonization began with Jamestown in 1607 and the Plymouth Colony in 1620; by 1700 England held a chain of colonies along the eastern North American seaboard, sugar islands in the Caribbean, and a network of trading posts on the West African coast. France's American empire (New France, founded 1608, expanded across the Saint Lawrence and Mississippi watersheds) and its sugar colonies in the Caribbean (Saint-Domingue, Martinique, Guadeloupe) made France a major Atlantic colonial power by the late seventeenth century, supported by Colbert's mercantilist program.

The third phase, KC-1.3.III.D, is the imperial wars that competition for trade produced. The Anglo-Dutch Wars of 1652-1654, 1665-1667, and 1672-1674 fought over commercial dominance of the North Atlantic, with the Navigation Acts of the 1650s and 1660s as their political-economic background. The War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714) ended with the Treaty of Utrecht, which (among many other provisions) granted England the Asiento — the right to supply slaves to Spanish America — and a thirty-year contract for the South Sea Company to send one ship per year to the Spanish colonial market. The War of Jenkins' Ear (1739-1748) and the War of Austrian Succession overlapped in the Caribbean and North America. And the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), known as the French and Indian War in North America, was the first European war fought principally on colonial fronts; it ended with the Treaty of Paris and the dramatic British acquisition of New France, much of French India, and Spanish Florida, setting the stage for the American Revolution and for British global commercial dominance through the long eighteenth century.

The deeper effect of seventeenth century rivalry was the gradual displacement of territorial empire by chartered company commerce as the dominant form of European overseas activity. Spanish silver and Portuguese factory-fortifications had been the sixteenth century model; the Dutch and English chartered joint-stock companies were the seventeenth century model. The companies pooled capital from urban merchant elites, distributed risk across many investors, paid dividends, and functioned as quasi-states with the right to wage war and conclude treaties. The institutional form connects Topic 1.7 forward to Topic 1.10 (the commercial revolution), where the rise of joint-stock companies, banking innovations, and the new economic elite of European cities are the explicit subject. By 1648, when Topic 1.7's narrative arc closes, the European overseas system was no longer Iberian and no longer organized purely around Crown control: it had become a competitive Atlantic system in which states, chartered companies, and merchant capital cooperated and clashed in pursuit of commercial advantage.

Three sources, each documenting a distinct phase of European overseas rivalry: the Iberian-papal division of 1494, the Dutch challenge of 1602, and the eighteenth century English entry into the Spanish colonial market.

1. (Causation) Account for how Spain became the dominant European power of the sixteenth century. What roles did the Treaty of Tordesillas, the conquests of Mexico and Peru, and the silver mines of Potosi play? (KC-1.3.III.B)
2. (Causation) Account for the institutional innovation represented by the Dutch East India Company. What did the chartered joint-stock company offer that the Portuguese factory-fortification system did not? (KC-1.3.III.C)
3. (Causation) Compare the English, French, and Dutch entries into seventeenth century overseas trade. What did the three states share, and what was distinctive about each?
4. (Causation) Account for the role of European wars in producing changes in colonial control. Identify at least two specific wars and the colonial outcomes they produced. (KC-1.3.III.D)
5. (Causation) The Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) rested on papal authority; the Asiento of 1713 rested on military victory. Account for the difference and explain what it tells us about the long-run shift in the basis of European overseas claims between 1500 and 1700.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP European History codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, V.1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.