What were the forces that impelled this leap forward by pioneers on the edge of the Iberian Peninsula? With the hindsight of the 21st century, it is presumptuously Eurocentric to talk about the discovery of the world that got under way in the late 15th century.
The Portuguese were in many respects the true pathfinders in the development of globalisation. Yet the historian Arnold Toynbee pointed out that it might more justly be labelled the Era of Vasco da Gama. If historians can trace the roots of globalisation back to archaic times, it is conventional now to see the early modern age as the critical accelerator in the creation of an interconnected world – the moment when European navigators linked the oceans together and inaugurated what we in the West have come to call the Age of Discoveries, or the Era of Columbus.
