Background

Until the end of World War II, anyone looking at the political and economic condition in which the world's peoples found themselves had to note that Europeans were dominant nearly everywhere. In fact, global history in the following generation was largely the story of how native inhabitants of areas that had long been part of the colonial empire of one or another of the European powers finally regained control over their own destinies. Prior to such recent developments, European hegemony had been an established fact of world history for so long that for several centuries many observers simply took it for granted as a sign of divine will or European racial superiority, or both. But, in fact, Europeans had not always been masters; their global dominance was the result of activities that took place as recently as the nineteenth, and no earlier than the sixteenth, century. Before then, Europeans were anything but dominant, not only in a global context but even in parts of Europe itself.

When Europeans began to consider the possibilities of overseas ventures, the existence of North and South America was not known by Europeans nor any culture familiar to Europeans.