Imperialism and the Age of Exploration

The rise of Imperialism and the Age of Exploration was fueled by the quest for plant products. The trade monopoly on spices and sugar from the Far East by the Venetians and the Muslim world was a driving force behind the early explorations by the Portuguese.Prince Henry (Henry the Navigator) of Portugal established one of the first schools of navigation where the early explorers were trained and sent on a quest to bypass the monopolies on these valuable products.

Further explorations, including those that lead to the discovery of the New World, were also motivated by a quest for plants and the products they produced. The rise of slavery in the New World is directly tied to plants. Sugar plantations were established in the tropics of the New World for sugar production to crush the Venetian monopoly on the sugar trade from India and the Far East. With the plantations came the establishment of the slave trade. The importation of an enslaved labor force was the first mass migration of people to the Americas. The sugar plantations opened an ugly chapter in the history of Western civilization.