Nationalism wasn’t very big in early Europe, but later throughout the centurion the various kingdoms and duchies began to crystallize into empires and nations. I will tackle the colonizers in order, first the Portuguese and Spanish made colonies westward to Asia because the Ottoman Empire had complete control of the spice trade from Asia. The Portuguese went under Africa and the cape of good hope and established colonies in India, Spain sent Columbus to discover another route and he found the Americas, and primal civilizations that had lots of gold, the Spanish began expanding there as soon as possible. This clashes with the interest there of the Portuguese so both of them made a deal to divided the world. Spain would get all of the America’s except for Brazil and Portugal would get all of Africa. Both empires later collapsed, mainly due to Napoleon but their colonies made them super rich but very poor mismanagement is one of the reasons for mass poverty in South America. The Dutch empire is very interesting because it was extremely large for such a small nation. The Dutch empire spanned in the americas, Africa until the British kicked them out of New Amsterdam and South Africa. But their main colony was always Indonesia, they actually went there because of hostility of the Mughal empire, this move opened up trade with Japan and china who actually liked the Dutch because they didn’t push their religion that much like the Spanish did. Also the VOC was like the OG and the British EOC ( East India trading company) was seen as an cheap knockoff at first and the VOC actually laid the foundation and structure for the British to take over India. Speaking of the British they won Canada after beating French, America revolted, They finished the Mughal empire, took over Dutch South Africa and Ottoman Egypt for the suez and earlier got Gibraltar from the Spanish giving them complete control of the Mediterranean. They even got into what’s called the great game with the Russians but all these empires died out in the Cold War.
