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Prelude to m’zungu colonisation of Africa

"Veni, Vidi,"

Exploration, trade, and proselytizing often shaded into each other, and were frequently

entangled with the use of military force and the establishment of colonial rule. Traders
carried European technologies of warfare and production as well as goods, while

missionaries often advocated European social organization and education as well as
religious beliefs.

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However, explorers, traders, settlers, soldiers, and government officials often came in
conflict with missionaries over European "vices" and the mistreatment of non-Europeans.

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The 'First' European Imperial Age : The Iberian Powers and their Emulators

European overseas expansion grew out of fifteenth-century Iberian crown-sponsored

expeditions of discovery designed to open ocean trading routes to Africa and the East. In
the "first" age of European expansion, spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,
the Portuguese and Spanish were the pioneers, ...

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Iberian exploration shattered the cultural isolation that characterized past ages by

inaugurating an intercontinental world trading economy.

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...continuing conflict with Islam, expressed from the eleventh century in crusading in the

Holy Land and on other frontiers, when combined with the emergence of popular
mendicant religious orders committed to Christian education and evangelism, most

notably the Franciscans and Dominicans, produced both strong military and moral
stimuli to Christian expansion

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The Portuguese and Spanish crowns, confident in their possession of the true religion,
received papal sanction to establish monopolies in overseas trade and missions, and

promoted ecclesiastical expansion as official state ideology

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Missionary orders--including by the mid-1500s the newly founded Jesuits, who operated

as specialists in expansion as part of a larger commitment to oppose the "heresies" of
northern European Protestantism, offered overseas challenges to the piously devoted.

The 'Second' European Imperial Age : The Northern European Powers and their Emulators

In the eighteenth century Europe slowly entered the era of its "second" empires,

dominated at first by the English and French, joined later in the nineteenth century most