Sublime

By enlarging Old Europe into a new Euro-Atlantic ‘world’, the Occidentals had acquired hinterlands as varied and extensive as those of the Islamic realm or East Asia. There was much less evidence in the later early modern age that this great enlargement in territorial scale would also bring about the internal transformation to which Europe’s subseq

What excited Europeans was the belief that they had both the right and the means to ‘make’ or remake America in Europe’s image, or even as an improved version of the old continent.

Europe was almost always a loose-knit ‘confederation’ of culturally similar states in whose mutual relations economic strength was only one of several important variables. Religious affiliation, dynastic allegiance, ideology and ethnic cohesion interacted unpredictably with economic forces to ensure the survival of some political and cultural units

The Avenida de Liberdade, which ran out of the top of the Rossio climbing gently straight up towards the city park, was the Champs-Élysées of Lisbon.

Europe, as noted earlier, has in a short span of time gone from being the most predictable and stable region—one where history seemed to have truly ended (as suggested in an influential essay published in 1989 by the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama)—to something dramatically different. Democracy, prosperity, and peace all seemed firml

This vast realm of geographical ignorance reduced European activity in the Outer World to an archipelago of settlements, mines and trading depots connected by a skein of pathways kept open only by constant effort.