No single motive adequately explains the origins of European overseas expansion
Evidence
For some students of the era, the motives for European expansion were material and physical: “What western Europe needed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,” Wallerstein writes, “was food … and fuel.” Braudel, on the other hand, has suggested that western Mediterranean overpopulation was the key to expansion. There are also those who have argued, like Livermore, that the motivation was organizationally systemic, that the militaristic machinery of the Reconquista required new “targets of opportunity” if it were not to be turned inward. Others, as we have noted earlier, with more attention to ideology, have supposed the real issue was the defeat of the Muslims and the revitalization of Christendom. No single such explanation seems entirely correct or sufficiently specific, though all have been persuasively presented. The result is that at the grand level of reconstruction, the analysis of fifteenth-century Portugal and its historical role would appear to have no satisfactory measure for distilling this multiplicity of needs, actors, and historical forces. Still, though their number might be confusing, reconstruction of the actual power relations between these actors may simplify the task of their identification and assessment. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 522
Categorization
- DEFINE: Surveys competing historiographic explanations for Portugal’s expansion — material scarcity, overpopulation, militarism, ideology.
- XREF: connects to: Conversion and conquest alone cannot explain Europe’s genocidal exceptionalism; European expansion episodes were mass migrations driven by population growth — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 565
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Conversion and conquest alone cannot explain Europe’s genocidal exceptionalism; European expansion episodes were mass migrations driven by population growth — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 565
Broader Connections
- European expansion episodes were mass migrations driven by population growth
#complicates(0.78) — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 565