12
~West Comes East
905-1266AH
1500-1850 CEB
ETWEEN 1500 AND 18oo CE, western Europeans sailed pretty much
all over the world and colonized pretty much everything. In some
lands, they simply took possession, entirely supplanting the original in-
habitants: North America and Australia suffered this fate, ending up as vir-
tual extensions of Europe.
In other areas, they left the original inhabitants in place but moved in
above them as a ruling elite in control of all-important resources. Some
portion of the original population ended up as their servants or slaves
while the rest went on living as best they could in constricted circum-
stances. Such was the fate of the people in most of South America and sub-
Saharan Africa.
In some places, however-most notably China and the Islamic heart-
land-Europeans came up against well-organized, wealthy, technologically
advanced societies seemingly quite able to hold their own, and here the in-
teraction between newcomers and natives took a subtler course. The Is-
lamic world presented a particularly complex psychosocial drama, first,
because western Europeans had a tangled history with Muslims already,
and second, because they started trickling into the Muslim world just as
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