History

This is a simple person's simple understanding.

The american lack of immunity to european communicable diseases was probably the decisive factor in their domination. Once introduced, the diseases moved much faster than europeans via the extensive american trade and communications networks. Eventually, european "explorers" they were walking into regions where the population was already severely stressed if not devastated by diseases. The vulnerability of americans to diseases was an advantage exacerbated and exploited by every means, no matter how brutal or devious.

So, a few kingdoms in europe began to accumulate wealth in a way previously impossible. They were motivated to engage in the whole project because their ruling classes envied the luxury goods available elsewhere in eurasia. But they had nothing to trade. All the cabbage in europe couldn't buy single bolt of silk. To say nothing of spices, tea, and other goodies. I don't know how the trafficking of african people first got started, but the benefits of bringing people who were completely disoriented, stripped of social context, and also a bit more resistant to those diseases became evident. But without the depopulation enabled by epidemics, it wouldn't have made sense to bring in a whole new population, much less two new populations (africans and europeans to keep it simple). And no matter their depraved aspirations, europeans would never have been able to defeat the many american nations on a more equal military footing, without the immunological advantage.

One other thing about agriculture, is that the american landscapes were intensively managed for thousands of years to produce what humans needed. Europeans were often oblivious to the sophisticated agricultural technology, as it did not resemble the "farming" they were accustomed to. So they didn't recognize the extent of the interventions which had produced to the "garden of eden" they conquered. While things eventually unraveled due to the maintainers being murdered, displaced, or otherwise prevented from keeping things up, the europeans often wandered into environments which "nature" had provisioned with a bounty of goods, there for the picking.

England was an island

The Moroccans destroyed the Songhai Empire

Spanish diseases wiped out 90% of the population of the Americas

Did the wealth sucked out of the Americas allow the Europeans to do something that would've been previously impossible (or at least not worth the effort)?

Yes, but this has to be paired with the super profits of the Atlantic Slave trade, equivalent of $1 investment resulting in $1700 of profit, nothing in economic history has come close to it

Why did colonialism begin:

The crusades were a shared experience for Europe of going on a foreign land and taking over (also proto racism)

Crusades reintroduced the silk road to western Europe The black death created the conditions for ending feudalism and start proto capitalism

The growing bourgeoisie did not want to pay the ottomans and other Muslim nations in order to trade with China/India so they began looking for other routes

Portugal tarted by attempting to circumnavigate Africa (surprisingly difficult)

An Italian(?) dumbass (Columbus) messed up the diameter of the earth and tried a straight shot across the Atlantic

Turns out Mexico has literal gold, the Caribbean and Brazil have powder gold (sugar)

Why did Europe begin to dominate:

America's were devastated by disease

Incan/Aztec empires lacked the same knowledge of metalworking

The wealth (silver mostly) from the Americas let Europe gain favorable trade deals in India & China

Notably this trade was primarily initiated by Europe China/India are blessed in natural resources and only really needed money

Because the interactions are one way Europeans and in position to take advantage of weakened nations in a way they were immune to

Why Africa happened late:

Malaria, just like how European diseases ravaged the Americas, malaria ravaged any attempt of European colonization. Trade deals with locals was much more economical.

My perception of this might be turbo fucked by Paradox game exposure but a large part of why Africa wasn't heavily exploited prior to America's colonization is because of malaria, which kind of kills a shitload of people and makes getting euro crackers to want to move there to work much more difficult and also makes it harder to have a stable workforce of natives to exploit since they still get sick too

Colonizing America first though resulted in Europeans acquiring the cinchona plant, which allowed for some primitive treatments in the 1600s, but quinine wasn't isolated until 1820

After that, though, according to google ai bullshit it was up to 95% effective at curing malaria, at least before any resistance developed

Before that, well, I've heard people estimate deaths as high as "half of all humans ever born to this day" from malaria, which is kind of a big number ngl

I had a similar question so I looked up stuff about the Spanish and how it worked around Columbus (even though the concept predates him). In short, yes, they gained experience through a long history of infighting and conquering each other. The Spanish had some expeditions into Africa in the late 14th century which were quite profitable for them. They captures slaves and created sugar plantations on the Canary Islands. Plus there was all the stuff with the Reconquista which was the model for their colonialism. The same behaviors and policies from that period become the Encomienda System for colonies. The conquering of neighbors and forcing them to pay tribute had worked out really well for Spain. Encomienda did that but for colonies. The crown also made it legal for nobles to fund their own expeditions in return for a grant of the profits. If you squint really hard you can see capitalism taking shape.

Colonialism was fairly rational for the monarchy and investors. It had proven to make people very rich. For the monarchy, it was a cheap way to get huge returns. Columbus' first voyage only cost about 1% of the annual revenues for the Kingdom. The crown paid about 90% of the cost of the voyage, leaving the rest up to solo investors. Columbus debt financed the rest through Italian banks.

It's culmination of everything that came before, driven in the direction of chasing profits. Culturally, cruelty was a virtue and that helped justify the violence in pursuit of wealth.

The Origins of the Modern World talks about how, come the 19th century, the steam engine was more or less the big advantage Europe had over other powers. The basic mechanism was known for a while, but it was so inefficient that its only practical application was for use in coal mines where it had an effectively infinite fuel supply sitting right there. This led to refinements to the design that improved the efficiency enough to make it practical for other purposes, in particular steamships, which had speed and maneuverability no sail ship could match. With that advantage, Europe could more or less go anywhere and take anything it wanted (as long as it had reasonable sea/river access).

It's not a coincidence that capitalism and colonialism co-developed. They are two parts of the same thing, and have continued to be as colonialism has diversified and been relabelled (imperialism/neocolonialism). Fascism is also part of the continuum of this socio-politico-economic development.

The material developments of proto-capitalism enabled proto-colonialism. Shipbuilding advancements led to Europeans building transportation networks to new places, including the Americas, where it would've otherwise of course been impossible for them to colonize. When Euros first arrived, they didn't really have plans to colonize. As you mention, Columbus the Dumbass was planning on finding passage to Asia, not run into Hispañola. But they were incredibly violent almost immediately, and were already supremely chauvinist. They set to work on "conquering" immediately, beginning with the Spaniards. Columbus returns from his first voyage in 1493. Tenochtitlan falls in 1521. 30 years, basically a single generation, between merely knowing the region exists and defeating its strongest military power. That's not just an outcome of disease or having good technology, it is a decisive and swift adversarial posturing and dedication of resources.

Anyways, getting back on track: as others mentioned, Europe was already primed psychologically and politically for these ventures. Others mention the crusades. The crusades center the church and economic boon through conquering. They have an ideological apparatus that justifies and promotes violence against their enemies along racial and religious lines. The Euros invading the Americas are using that same ideology of casual chauvinist violence and expectations of gains. The system itself sends people to do exactly that sort of thing. And the Spanish famously invest everything in just replicating that process as infinitum, making more ships, trying to conquer more and more places, bringing back more and more gold and resources. Other Euro kingdoms do their best to follow suit, often with the same blessings of the church, beginning a colonial race and contest similar to inter-imperialist conflicts today. Euros constantly fought with each other, kingdoms fell or merged or split, religious factions emerge and wars are fought using them as proxies.

Completing the loop is technology and proto-capitalism. The process of colonizing creates a form of inflation. Gold doesn't have any intrinsic value, you just use it to buy more stuff from other people that expect it to retain value. The church flails trying to regulate this, but the impact is still there. The inflation means you either need to focus on other ways to colonize or you need to get even more gold even faster. Spaniards and a few others try both, and too much of the latter. Others focus on other modes of colonization focused on resources, uneven trade deals, and developing what we now call capitalism. The engine of capitalism drives technological advantage and a feedback loop that makes them militarily dominant, with the ability to make more and more powerful fleets because they have more stuff and better production and more production. This is closer to the style of Anglo settlers as well as the dutch and French, with the former eventually becoming dominant, again with tons of inter-Euro fighting. During the period the Anglos are also colonizing the British Isles as well, for example. It is during this period that the Anglo core industrializes off the deindustrialization of its colonies, a core force developing and being developed by capitalism.

It really is essentially how Marx lays it out, which is as a confluence and dialog between the material base and wider society, with technological development changing economic and social relations, which then respond, and in this case it is the development of capitalism that is the qualitative change produced by the accumulation of these things. And colonialism was an accelerator of this process through inter-colonisr war, technological competition for that war and colonization, and then, eventually, a mode of colonial extraction that favored industrialization of the core at the expense of the periphery. Part of it is historical contingency, like the proximity of the crusades to Euros being able to reach the Americas. Part of it is clear material development, like the fact they could reach the Americas at all requiring technological development and social will. And the two interrelate, as the reason to develop and send those long-range ships emerges from trade questions raised by the crusades.

i recommend discourse on colonialism which can give you some insights on thingification, the process at the core of colonialism.

Gonna break a limb and say that big part of the reason is geography. Europe has an extremely varied geography compared to India or China, both of the latter being large landmasses without much interruption by mountains. In contrast, Europe has a very weird shape and mountains separating various peninsulae from the comparable Great European Plain (Pyrenees - Iberian Peninsula, Alps - Italic Peninsula, Carpathians/Alps - Balkan peninsula), + British Isles. Since the Roman Empire, Europe hasn't really been unified by any single political entity (other than the overarching catholic church), and even the Romans couldn't control the vast extense of the Great European Plain running from western France to the Urals, and even then relied for food on the bread basket of the great floodplains of the Nile in Egypt.

China and India, with their vast floodplains, could both feed an astounding amount of people and remain more or less unified in a single political entity for extended periods of time (reason why the Chinese consider themselves the oldest continuous civilization).

I cannot pinpoint any particular characteristic of these differences in geography and its consequences uniquely determining the history of colonialism by Europe (particularly western Europe), but for example, Germany's expansionist plans historically have had to do with conquering neighboring lands of Poland, France and even the vast fertile lands of Ukraine and Southern Russia, and less with overseas colonies the way we understand them. The same can be said of the Russian Empire, with its territorial desires reaching all of the east, part of China, west towards Poland, and south only as far as Constantinople/Byzantium/Istanbul. I guess maybe contiguous territory conquests are historically less prone to colonialism and more people to expansionism and assimilation, and overseas are more prone to colonialism?

Y'all read Black Marxism?

The Crusades changed how Europeans thought about empire.