The Worlds of Christopher Columbus [Paperback]

The voyages of Christopher Columbus opened a period of European exploration and empire building that breached the boundaries of isolated worlds and changed the course of human history. This book describes his life and times in the context of European and world history.The voyages of Christopher Columbus opened a period of European exploration and empire building that breached the boundaries of isolated worlds and changed the course of human history. This book describes his life and times in the context of European and world history.When Columbus was born in the mid-fifteenth century, Europe was isolated in many ways from the rest of the Old World and Europeans did not even know that the world of the Western Hemisphere existed. The voyages of Christopher Columbus opened a period of European exploration and empire building that breached the boundaries of those isolated worlds and changed the course of human history. This book describes the life and times of Christopher Columbus. The story is not just of one man's rise and fall. Seen in its broader context, his life becomes a prism reflecting the broad range of human experience for the past five hundred years.Acknowledgements; A note on names; 1. The worlds of Christopher Columbus; 2. Old worlds in isolation; 3. The quest for trade and Christians; 4. Tools of expansion; 5. Columbus's early years in Genoa and Portugal; 6. Columbus in Spain; 7. The first voyage; 8. Columbus and the New World; 9. Conquest and colonisation: Spain in the Caribbean; 10. Coercion and commerce: the birth of Empire; 11. The post-Columbian world; Bibliography; Index. William D. Phillips, Jr., and Carla Rahn Phillips have expertly set this biography of Christopher Columbus within the context of the fourteenth and fifteenth-century 'worlds' that Columbus drew together into the single world of modern times by crossing the Atlantic to the West Indies in 1492...I judge this volume to be one of the best efforts so far to set forth Columbus's life, thlSÒ