The Opening-up of New Routes

In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Portuguese and the Spanish have opened up direct routes from Europe to the East without passing through the Mediterranean and new routes across the Atlantic to the Americas.

The opening-up of the new routes has been favorable to the growth of the capitalist economy, beginning the “age of expansion” of capitalism. After the discovery of the new routes, the trading and business scope of European merchants expanded rapidly and unprecedentedly, and the world market began to take shape. Europeans began to exploit and plunder the economies of North America, Asia and Africa, to manipulate and control their politics, to infiltrate their religion and culture. The economy, politics, culture and mode of life in the colonial regions gradually saw great changes; moreover, the relatively isolated and closed state among continents was gradually broken. The world increasingly become an interrelated and closely integrated whole. The opening-up of new routes and the beginning of the Western colonial era have changed the world situation and the course of historical development.

The term “Opening-up of New Routes” reflects the then Western Europe-centered notion of geography.