The Creation of the Atlantic World

In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Portugal and Spain developed two economic and political systems in the Atlantic, comparable in many respects with the Mediterranean world which had dominated the culture and economy of Europe, north Africa and the Middle East since the days of the Greek and Persian empires. These Atlantic worlds linked western Africa, the eastern coasts of North and South America and the Atlantic coastline of Europe and north Africa, and included wholly new societies brought into being in the Atlantic islands. The Spanish Atlantic system eventually extended to the Pacific, the Philippines and China, while the Portuguese system was linked to the empire that Portugal created in the Indian Ocean. These systems were built up through constantly expanding and increasingly interdependent economic activity, and by migrations of population and the cultural interplay of religions and ideas from all four continents. One of the first consequences of this interdependence was that diseases that were endemic in one continent, and plant and animal species from hitherto ecologically distinct areas, now spread throughout the Atlantic basin. Moreover, although these imperial systems were based on old and established practices, their novelty and very size demanded new concepts of law and sovereignty.

The northern parts of the Atlantic, including North and Central America and the Caribbean basin, for some time remained a Spanish world, with the Canary Islands as an outlying fragment; the southern part of the ocean, in turn, was almost exclusively Portuguese.