It looks like England, France, Spain, and Portugal did most of the colonizing during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries as far as North, Central and South America go.
I can see why mostly landlocked European countries might not have the ability or desire to sail half way around the world, but Italy was no slouch during this time.
So why didn’t Italy claim their piece of the new world during these early days… or did they?
Italy was not united during the time. The individual Italian states did not have the infrastructure to support wars of conquest and trade and to protect these colonies once established. I would argue that the Netherlands was itself barely big enough to hold colonies and even that was only because it had a large trade fleet, and it could barely hang on to its colonies as it is. I would argue that the smaller and/or poorer italian states were below this threshhold. (Naples and/or Sicily may not have been larger than the Netherlands, but they were poorer.)
Italian navigators like Christopher Columbus (Cristoforo Colombo) of Genoa, John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) of Venice, and Amerigo Vespucci and Giovanni da Verrazzano of Florence were prominent early explorers, but as has been said their city-states were too small to sponsor major expeditions. Instead they sailed for Spain, England, Portugal, and France respectively. In addition, Italian states were more focused on trade within the Mediterranean. The colonizing powers like Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England all had coasts on the Atlantic and had fleets adapted to oceanic trade.
From what I understand, the most recent evidence says that Columbus was a Spaniard.
Where did you hear that? That he himself was born in Spain, or that his family might have some connection to Spain?
I’ve never seen any strong evidence that he was anything other than Genoese, although there have been all kinds of theories alleging other connections, most of them based on slim evidence.
Columbus almost never wrote in Italian (or I should say Genoese, since there wasn’t really a unified Italian language at that stage). However, he often wrote Spanish with Portuguese spellings, which implies that he was not a native Spanish speaker. It is thought that when he left Genoa he may have been semi-illiterate and only learned to write when he lived in Portugal.
This Wikipedia page seems pretty thorough on his origin.
It does talk about one scholar’s book that claimed Columbus was Catalan, but overall the evidence seems heavily skewed toward an Italian origin.
Thanks. That makes sense. I learned so much about the Italian Renaissance in school that I assumed that the states of Genoa and Venice were just as rich and seafaring as France or Portugal were. Obviously I was wrong.
Bear in mind that the Italians peaked early. By the mid-1500s, the rest of Europe had caught up culturally and technologically, and the Turks, Austrians and French had reversed their earlier military achievements.
By the 16th century the only really substantial independent international trading power in Italy was Venice. Genoa by the mid-16th century had become a virtual protectorate of Spain, which for obvious reasons mitigated against any participation in serious colonial ventures.
Venice on the other hand was to a significant extent the cause of Spanish and Portuguese exploration. It had held a near-monopoly in the Eastern Mediterranean, dominating the final leg of the overland Asian trade through the Muslim states of the Levant. It was they that were the real impediment to the Western Mediterranean powers, not the Muslims who were always interested in making a few dinars themselves.
Located at the wrong end of the Mediterranean and overwhelmingly preoccupied with local issues ( including predatory neighbors like the Habsburgs, the Ottomans and periodically in the 16th century the French during the Italian Wars ), Venice just wasn’t well positioned to involve themselves heavily in the New World, though they made a few investments here and there. Eventually of course the Western powers at least partially short-circuited Venice’s main source of revenue and the state went into a slow and steady decline, not helped by losing the occasional overseas possession to the Ottomans.
The Dutch also had significant new world settlements. Need I mention New Amsterdam? Curacao? Also in what is now Brazil. In fact, there was a Jewish settlement there that was destroyed when Brazil was handed over to the Portuguese. They went to Barbados at least and many to British North America.
I think there were also at least some Swedes. At least there is a town in NJ now called Swedesboro that I assume was settled from Sweden.
I didn’t mention the Netherlands because I couldn’t think of any settlement other than New Amsterdam, which while important, hardly matches the Spanish, French, English and Portuguese colonies in terms of size and stature. But they should still get credit for what they accomplished!
The Dutch were major colonizers in the Old World as well, and largely kicked the Portuguese out of their original colonies there. Their most important colony by far was the Dutch East Indies, which is modern Indonesia. The Dutch took both the Cape Colony at the Cape of Good Hope and Ceylon/Sri Lanka from the Portuguese but were later ousted themselves by the British. They had a short-lived colony on Formosa/Taiwan as well.
Sweden’s colonyon the Delaware River last from 1638 to 1655, when it was taken over by the Dutch.
Denmark also got into the act in a minor way with a colony in the Virgin Islands from 1665 until 1916, when the US purchased it for strategic reasons.
If the Swedes aren’t obscure enough, there was Baltic colonization in the New World and Africa
Don’t forget the poor Scots.
Thanks, I hadn’t been aware of that one!
Another obscure colonial effort was made by Scotland when it was still independent of England. The Company of Scotland attempted to found a colony in Panamain the late 1600s which was a total disaster. The company’s failure virtually bankrupted Scotland and helped prompted the Act of Union with England in 1707.
ETA: Beaten to the punch by An Gadai!
Awww, we could have had the Panama Conjoined Lochs.
These researchers seem to think that his writings prove he was really Spanish. YMMV.
madsircool, that’s the same study Exapno mentioned.
It’s absurd for the researcher to claim that the study constitutes proof that Columbus was from Aragon. Even if the links to Catalan in Columbus’s writings is correct (and this is just one study), that hardly proves that he was actually from there. Castilian Spanish was clearly not Columbus’s native language, and others such as Morrison have linked Columbus’s errors to having first learned Portuguese. But if he picked up his Spanish at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella, that would be reason enough for there to be some Catalan influence on his Castilian, since Ferdinand was Aragonese. (Isabella was from Castile.)
If the fact that he only rarely wrote in Italian is an objection to his being from there (and one wonders why he would ever have written in it if he had no connection to Genoa), the fact that he is never known to have written in Catalan would be an even greater objection to him being from Aragon. The abundant documentation of him being from Genoa, and complete absence of any linking him to Aragon, would also weigh strongly against it.
Researcher, singular.
Every branch of scholarship is collective and consensus-based. A single study, however well done, becomes meaningful only when the rest of the profession adopts it. It might take time for the elders to die off before the opposition goes away, but there always will be a pack of younger researchers who advocate for it if the change is truly meaningful. I see no sign of that here.
