Search Results for: contact
3.6 France in the Americas
The Spanish literally struck gold in the Caribbean and in the Aztec Empire. The torrent of gold and silver plunder flowing into western Europe changed the continent overnight. Until the 16th century, Iceland, the British Isles, and northwestern France were perceived by the commercial and political leaders of the great Eurasian capitals as the farthest reaches of Read more »
3.4 England and France in the Age of Discovery
In the period before contact with the Americas, the countries of England and France, as they appear on the map today, had not yet taken shape. For much of the Middle Ages, both regions faced invasions by Germanic and Scandinavian tribes from northern and central Europe and almost continuous internal instability. It was the principal goal Read more »
3.3 The Seafaring World of the 15th and 16th Centuries
A map of the world in 1400 reveals a patchwork of small countries and kingdoms, most of them heavily centralized, but few of them truly expansive. There are exceptions, such as the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (and its successor state, the Poland-Lithuanian Alliance), which extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea, and the Ottoman Read more »
3.1 Introduction
The 1400s witnessed the start of increasingly ambitious sea expeditions in the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans, which continued for several centuries. Countries in Eurasia and Africa developed a growing interest in exotic goods and the wider world. The western European voyages of fishermen, whalers, and licensed explorers opened up an era in which the growth of commerce, Read more »
3.2 Beginnings of Globalism
In Chapter 2 we considered the very deep history of human occupation in the Americas. Here, we do the same for the Europeans. Northwestern Europe to 1491 The earliest human-made or anthropogenic tools discovered in France have been dated to more than 1.5 million BPE, but that does not mean that there has been continuous human occupation of Read more »
2.5 Languages, Cultures, Economies
These brief histories of the Aboriginal Americas reveal that categorization is complicated. Take language, for example, which is often used as a key element of nationality (e.g., French people speak French and live in France and almost everyone in France speaks French). For Aboriginal peoples, there are no political units that encapsulate the whole of the largest Read more »
2.6 Summary
Pre-contact North America was home to a numerous and diverse array of peoples, languages, religions, and cultures. Scientific origin theories such as the Bering land bridge and coastal migration suggest that the ancestors of these groups arrived in the Western Hemisphere at least 14,000 years ago. The origin stories of most of the groups provide another, Read more »
2.3 The Aboriginal Americas
The telling of Aboriginal history in Canada often begins with a discussion of human migration routes into the Americas, which reflects the long-standing misperception that was held by Europeans that Aboriginal societies were primitive, usually migratory, and unlikely to have been in the Americas for very long before the 15th century. This misperception, of course, served Read more »
2.2 History without Archives
The idea that the Americas have no history before the arrival of Europeans derives mainly from the apparent absence of a written record. European, Middle Eastern, and Asian civilizations evolved highly bureaucratic and centralized administrative functions based on the ability to write things down. The influential Canadian economic historian, Harold Innis, described the impact of writing on the Read more »
2.1 Introduction
When does the history of Canada begin? If we think of Canada as a political entity, then we will offer up one kind of answer (although, in all likelihood, we won’t agree at the outset on the answer). If we think of Canada as a space roughly defined by our current borders and as a stage Read more »