Key points
The term "New World" was coined by Amerigo Vespucci in 1503, but the chapter argues that contact made the world new for Europeans, Africans, and Indigenous peoples alike — not just a European 'discovery' of unknown lands.
Contact between Europeans and West Africans (mid-1400s on) built on prior trans-Saharan trade familiarity and Portuguese advances in Atlantic navigation (the Canary Current, wind/current knowledge from the grain and Atlantic Islands trade).
In West Africa, the Portuguese pursued trade, not conquest, operating from small fortified trading posts (feitorias) like Elmina (founded 1482) at African rulers' forbearance, since African states were militarily formidable.
West Africans had partial immunity to Old World diseases from centuries of trans-Saharan/Red Sea contact, so contact did not cause a demographic disaster in Africa; disease instead hit Europeans hardest (malaria, etc.).
Contact zones produced culturally mixed populations and go-betweens: Atlantic creoles in West Africa, mestizos in the Caribbean and Mexico — people who spoke multiple languages, intermarried, and mediated between cultures.
A new transatlantic slave trade in enslaved Africans grew out of pre-existing African slavery systems; African merchants and rulers were active participants; enslaved Africans were shipped to Iberia and the Atlantic Islands to grow sugar.
Columbus (1492) made contact with the Taino of Hispaniola; he exploited political divisions among Taino states to forge alliances (e.g., with cacique Guacanagari) and built the encomienda system, a tribute/labor system resembling feudalism.
The Caribbean experienced catastrophic depopulation: the Taino population fell from roughly 300,000 to about 60,000 within a decade and to near extinction by 1550, due to a combination of European disease (no prior immunity) and Spanish enslavement, forced labor, and brutality.
Bartolome de Las Casas, a former encomendero turned Dominican priest, became the leading defender of Native rights and helped push reforms restricting the encomienda system and Indigenous slave trade, though reforms came too late for the Taino.
Hernán Cortés conquered the Aztec Empire (1519–1521) by exploiting internal Aztec weaknesses, forming alliances with Aztec enemies (especially the Tlaxcalans), and relying on the interpreter/go-between La Malinche (Doña Marina); Tenochtitlan fell in 1521 after Moctezuma's death and the spread of smallpox.
Francisco Pizarro conquered the Inca Empire (1532–1536) by exploiting a civil war between rival Inca claimants based in Cuzco and Quito, using a much smaller force than Cortés.
Disease was the single most devastating factor in Indigenous demographic collapse across the Americas (population fell from roughly 45–55 million to 8–9 million between 1500–1650, over 80% decline), but historians now stress that labor exploitation and enslavement compounded the disaster alongside disease — a more balanced view than the older 'Black Legend' that blamed Spanish cruelty alone.
Portuguese contact with Tupi-speaking peoples in Brazil (from 1500, Cabral) followed a similar pattern of go-betweens, alliances, coerced labor (sugar plantations), and devastating disease.
In eastern North America, Indigenous societies (Algonquian, Iroquoian, Siouan speakers organized as sachemships/chiefdoms) understood trade primarily as a political and diplomatic tool for alliance-building and prestige, not profit — a different worldview from the increasingly market-driven Europeans.
English involvement in Atlantic colonization was shaped by domestic pressures: the Protestant Reformation (Martin Luther, 1517; Henry VIII's Church of England, 1534), the 'rehearsal' of colonizing Ireland, and enclosure creating displaced 'masterless men' whom promoters like Richard Hakluyt saw colonization as a solution for.