European encounters in the age of expansion

This essay, which is part of the section "Europe and the World" in "EGO-European History Online" (http://www.ieg-ego.eu/), proposes an overall reconstruction of the expanding process of Europe overseas in the early modern age and of the multiple forms of ‘encounter’ with ‘other’ peoples and cultures successively made by the European navigators, explorers, conquerors, colonizers, merchants and missionaries over nearly four centuries in America, East Asia, the Pacific and Africa. Such encounters have always had a double aspect. On the one hand they had practical consequences, as they involved the necessity to work out forms of direct and immediate approach with such peoples ‘on the spot’. In other words, they led, though conquest, colonization or commerce, to the establishment of modes of domination or coexistence and implied several aspects of transcultural relationships. On the other hand, the encounters with ‘otherness’ in the early modern age stimulated in Europe a complex intellectual and cognitive process directed at interpreting the origins and nature of such human and cultural (linguistic, religious and social) diversities. This enriched considerably the European views of world history and of the anthropological and sociological varieties of mankind, spurring in particular a wholly new kind of reflection on ‘savagery’ and ‘barbarism’, and leading to the authentic discovery not only of new geographic realities, but also of cultures, religions and languages totally unknown before. If it is possible to keep logically distinct these two aspects, in fact they remained closely connected, as the pressure of political and economic interests and of religious, cultural and racial prejudices always influenced the European perceptions of the ‘other’ and gave them an increasingly hierarchical turn, reinforced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by scientific paradigms. At the same time, observation of alien societies, cultures and religious opened new perspectives on extremely differentiated forms of human life, producing doubts and a critical attitude towards European Christian civilization. Recommended citation form: Abbattista, Guido : European Encounters in the Age of Expansion, in: Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), hg. vom Institut für Europäische Geschichte (IEG), Mainz European History Online (EGO), published by the Institute of European History (IEG), Mainz Jan 24, 2011. URL: http://www.ieg-ego.eu/abbattistag-2011-en URN: urn:nbn:de:0159-20101025326 [TT.MM.JJJJ].