European expansion coincided with the decline of feudalism and rise of centralized monarchies.

Evidence

Broadly speaking, European expansion coincides with the end of what we call “the Middle Ages” and the beginning of the “modern age.” Feudalism was already in decline in western Europe, while trade, commerce, and the market were expanding. The centralized monarchies of France, England, and Spain were emerging. Europe was on the threshold of a long, secular boom in productivity, improving standards of living, rapid population growth, and that explosion in art, learning, science, scholarship, and knowledge known as the Renaissance. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 532

Categorization

• XREF: This situates European expansion within the transition-from-feudalism debate central to Marxist historiography and postcolonial theory; connects to the reader’s scaffolding task of mapping colonial psychology onto material conditions.