Colonial expansion depended on practical advances across many sciences

Evidence

These accounts chart how the voyages of discovery produced exactly the information about nature’s order needed for Europeans successfully to establish global trade routes and settlements in the Americas and, eventually, Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and elsewhere around the globe. The success of such expansionist projects required advances in navigation, cartography, oceanography, climatology, botany, agricultural sciences, geology, medicine, pharmacology, weaponry, and other scientific fields that could provide information enabling Europeans to travel far beyond the boundaries of Europe, and to survive encounters with heretofore unfamiliar lands, climates, flora, fauna, and peoples. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 1588

Categorization

• XREF: The specific list — navigation, cartography, botany, pharmacology — connects to Alfred Crosby’s ‘Columbian Exchange’ and the role of botanical knowledge (cinchona, rubber) in colonial extraction.