Mastery of the winds brought all oceanic coastlines and their hinterlands between Arctic and Antarctic ice within the European reach, but as history makes clear, not all were within the power of the Europeans to grasp, to occupy in numbers and displace the indigenous populations. Almost all the lands beyond the boundaries of Europe that are Neo-European today are those that most nearly meet the criteria cited at the end of the last chapter: similarity to Europe in such fundamentals as climate, and remoteness from the Old World. These are the Neo-Europes, the most visible residues of the age when Europe exclusively ruled the waves. Their history is the burden of the rest of this book, but first we must deal, if only briefly, with the lands that do not meet these criteria and that today are not Neo-European, though many were European colonies for long periods.

We can be brief about Pacific Asia north of the Tropic of Cancer. In China, Korea, and Japan, the Europeans had to deal with dense populations with traditions of strong central governments, resilient institutions, and cultural self-confidence, as well as with crops, domesticated animals, microlife, and parasites quite like those of Europe. In fact, the East Asians were very much like Europeans in most of the important ways, with a crucial but temporary deficiency in technology. The white imperialists never established colonies of settlement in this part of the world; the European quarters in such ports as Macao, Nagasaki, and Shanghai were only spigots tapped into the flank of Asia to draw off some of its wealth.

Middle Easterners were as well defended as the East Asians vis-à-vis the Europeans in the matters cited earlier, and they were actually expanding the area they controlled while the marinheiros were accomplishing their conquest of the oceans.