Although Europeans were central players in the globalization of Christianity and the emergence of modern science, they were not alone in shaping the cultural transformations of the early modern era. Asian, African, and Native American peoples largely determined how Christianity would be accepted, rejected, or transformed as it entered new cultural environments.

Geography provides a starting point for explaining Europe’s American empires. Countries on the Atlantic rim of Europe (Portugal, Spain, Britain, and France) were simply closer to the Americas than were any potential Asian competitors. Moreover, the enormously rich markets of the Indian Ocean world provided little incentive for its Chinese, Indian, or Muslim participants to venture much beyond their own waters. Europeans, however, were powerfully motivated to do so.

It was dominated by Europeans, to be sure, but was a rather more fluid and culturally blended society than the racially rigid colonies of British North America.

Such multiracial people were divided into dozens of separate groups known as castas (castes), based on their precise racial heritage and skin color.

The Spanish conquest of the Aztec and Inca empires in the early sixteenth century gave Spain access to the most wealthy, urbanized, and densely populated regions of the Western Hemisphere. Within a century and well before the British had even begun their colonizing efforts in North America, the Spanish in Mexico and Peru had established nearly a dozen major cities; several impressive universities; hundreds of cathedrals, churches, and missions; an elaborate administrative bureaucracy; and a network of regulated international commerce.