the expanding European powers in the Early Modern  period. Drawn to the Asian silk and spice trade,  

their colonization efforts were initially  directed to harness the continent's economic  

power. Eventually, the European states started  to use more and more force, and by the start  

of the 20th Century, the Eastern world would be  almost entirely in the hands of Colonial Empires.  

Welcome to our quick rundown on the European  expansion in Asia and the Pacific. This is a  

prelude video to our series on the Pacific  War - we'll release weekly episodes with  

events that started 80 years prior, don't  forget to subscribe to never miss them!

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In 1492, the European discovery of the New  World ushered a new age of maritime exploration.  

For the last century, Portuguese explorers  had been already trying to bypass Muslim  

territories to trade directly with West Africa  while also attempting to reach the Indies and  

its lucrative spice trade. The Portuguese  sent an expedition into African waters,  

at last discovering that the Indian Ocean was  accessible through the Cape of Good Hope. On  

May 20, 1498, an expedition led by Vasco da  Gama finally managed to reach India by sea.  

Thus, the Portuguese Colonial Empire was born.  Soon, they established entrepôts in Kochi,  

Calicut, and Goa, later expanding  their Estado da Índia across the region  

with the crucial acquisitions of Diu,  Darman, Pulicat, Colombo, and Chittagong,  

among others. In Southeast Asia, the Portuguese  captured Malacca and established settlements in  

the spice islands of Solor, Ternate, and Ambon,  as well as on East Timor and Makassar, but they  

also disrupted and diverted trade in the region  and spread Christianity in eastern Indonesia.  

Commercial contact was established with  mainland realms in Southeast Asia as well;  

and in Burma, Portuguese mercenaries became  essential for the expansion of the Toungoo Empire.  

In China, after a long period of conflict, the  Portuguese would be allowed to establish an  

entrepôt in Macau; while in Japan, they benefited  from the state of civil war - the Sengoku Jidai,  

and the Chinese embargo to monopolize  trade between Japan and Europe. 

The Portuguese also managed to  spread Christianity in Japan,  

successfully converting one of the daimyos to  Catholicism, who granted them the small fishing  

village of Nagasaki to act as a center of trade in  the region. Although direct control of the village  

ended just a couple of years later, Nagasaki  would nevertheless remain the main port of  

call for the Portuguese ships thanks to  its predominantly Christian population. 

Meanwhile, thanks to the  Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation,  

the Crown of Spain managed to discover and  gradually colonize the Philippine archipelago.  

The Spaniards also established themselves in  the spice island of Tidore, sparking a decade of  

conflicts with neighboring Portuguese Ternate that  would be concluded with the Treaty of Zaragoza  

in 1529, granting the Philippines to Spain and the  Moluccas to Portugal. From their center in Manila,  

Spanish colonists would go on to settle Guam  and the Mariana, Caroline, and Palau Islands. 

In 1580, the establishment of the Iberian Union  led to the decline of the Portuguese Empire in the  

East, as England, France, and the Dutch Republic  began to create their own overseas empires.  

The Dutch would be the main culprits  for the downfall of the Portuguese,  

successfully attacking their possessions in  Asia and eventually taking control of Malacca,  

Ceylon, the Moluccas, the southern Malabar  Coast, and regions of Coromandel and Surat. 

The initial course of action taken by the Dutch  East Indies would be to found a chartered company,  

the VOC, and to establish a colonial center in  the city of Jakarta, which the Dutch renamed to  

Batavia. From there, the Dutch would continue  to assault the commercial interests of the  

Portuguese, slowly expanding their control  over Southeast Asia, leaving only East Timor  

and Macau in the hands of the Portuguese. They  would also colonize the southern tip of the  

island of Formosa - modern-day Taiwan to use as  headquarters for attacks against the Philippines.  

In response, the Spaniards established  their own colony in the north of the island,  

although it was soon overtaken by the Dutch. The  fate of Formosa would be finally decided when  

the Chinese warlord Koxinga invaded in 1661,  managing to take full control of the island.  

Meanwhile in Japan, the Tokugawa Shogunate started  to show animosity towards the religious intentions  

of the Portuguese, leading to their expulsion  in 1639 and the establishment of the Sakoku  

isolationist policy in Japan. Yet again, the Dutch  benefitted from this to establish a monopoly over  

Japanese trade, being the only European power  to operate in Japan from the port of Deshima  

in Nagasaki. With the fall of the Portuguese  hegemony over the East, the British and French  

Empires would also start establishing their  own chartered companies in the 17th Century. 

Whereas the French arrived late and only  established a few colonies in India,  

the British East India Company quickly set out to  found trading posts in Sumatra, Bengal, and India.  

From there, they expanded their control over  Bengal, established their first colony in  

Malaysia with the acquisition of Penang Island,  and managed to expel the Dutch from Ceylon.  

Once the British had gained a foothold over this  island, they soon warred against the Kingdom of  

Kandy and established a protectorate over the  entirety of Ceylon and the neighboring Maldives.  

Following a series of conflicts with the French  and Dutch Empires, the British would manage to  

take most of their possessions in India, becoming  the dominant European power in the region.  

Within a century, most of the Indian subcontinent  gradually fell under the rule of the British  

East India Company, which prompted the  establishment of the British Raj in 1858  

to assume direct control over India. In Burma,  relations with the British East India Company  

had been always tense after the Burmese  annexation of Arakan, leading to a war in 1824.  

This was one of the most expensive  operations of the chartered company,  

but in the end, it saw the British takeover  of Manipur, Assam, Arakan, and Tennasserim,  

as well as the birth of British supremacy in Asian  coastal waters. A second war broke out in 1852,  

in which the British annexed the province of Lower  Burma, leaving the Burmese state in shambles. 

In the 19th Century, the British also decided  to take a more expansionist role in Malaysia,  

sponsoring a coup in the Sultanate of Johor and  founding the colony of Singapore. They would  

then negotiate with the Dutch for the cession of  Malacca and the remaining Dutch forts in India  

in exchange for all British possession in Sumatra  and the recognition of Dutch rights to Indonesia.  

British Malaya would continue to grow across  the century, as the Straits Settlements were  

established and the Malay Sultanates were  gradually annexed as protectorates. At the  

same time, the British established a protectorate  over the Raj of Sarawak in northwestern Borneo  

and then established a colony on the Labuan  islands. Meanwhile, the French would take great  

interest in the region of Indochina. After  enjoying very good relations with Vietnam,  

the French Empire would start to continually  intervene in the country in the 19th century,  

culminating with an attack on Tourane and  the founding of the colony of Cochinchina.  

In 1867, all of Southern Vietnam fell under  French control and a protectorate over Cambodia  

was officially established. The French would also  go on to establish protectorates over the islands  

of New Caledonia, Tahiti, Tahuata, and Wallis  and Futuna. Initially, the Tahitians would offer  

strong resistance against the colonists, yet they  would be subdued at last and the French would go  

on to expand across modern-day French Polynesia.  With the British, they would also establish an  

Anglo-French condominium over the New Hebrides;  with one English side, and the other one French. 

Meanwhile in China, there was an increasing demand  for opium that was strongly damaging the Chinese  

population, prompting the Daoguang Emperor  to end the opium trade with the Europeans.  

In response, Britain sent a military expedition in  1839, thus starting the first of the Opium Wars.  

The Chinese would be defeated in a humiliating  way, and as a consequence, they would have to  

open their foreign trade with Europe and to cede  the island of Hong Kong to the British Empire.  

Furthermore, China was left in a state of social  unrest, and it would need the help of French  

and British troops to quell the Taiping and Nian  Rebellions. In 1856, another incident over opium  

would renew war with the British Empire. Joined  by the United States and the French and Russian  

Empires, the British would win again,  further opening commercial areas in China,  

legalizing the opium trade, and acquiring  the Kowloon Peninsula next to Hong Kong. 

The Russian Empire, which over the last centuries  had been expanding across Central Asia and  

Siberia, would also go on to annex the entire  region of Outer Manchuria. In 1884, the French  

Empire would obtain control over northern Vietnam  following their victory over China in another war,  

thus consolidating their colony in Indochina.  But the success of the French also threatened  

the British position in the region, prompting them  to declare war against the Burmese and annex the  

province of Upper Burma. This left the Kingdom  of Siam entirely surrounded by European powers,  

and the Siamese would have to relinquish some  territories on the frontiers to maintain their  

independence. Thus, the British received the  Shan states and some possessions in Malaysia  

while the French enlarged their Indochinese  colony with the addition of modern-day Laos. 

In the 19th Century, the Dutch also started to  gradually expand their East Indies across maritime  

Southeast Asia, and by 1920 they had acquired  the modern-day borders of Indonesia. Meanwhile,  

the British expanded into Brunei and North Borneo  and managed to colonize Fiji, Christmas Island,  

Cocos Islands, the Pitcairn Islands, the Union  Islands, the southern Solomon Islands, and the  

Gilbert and Ellice Islands[30]. By the 20th  Century, Great Britain also colonized the islands  

of Tonga and Niue, the Phoenix Islands, and the  southeastern side of the island of New Guinea.  

Yet, the crown jewel of their Oceanic  Empire would be the colonies of Australia  

and New Zealand, from where the British  controlled all their Pacific possessions. 

At the end of the century, the assassination of  German missionaries in China would spark another  

conflict with European powers, culminating  with a scramble for concessions in 1898  

that awarded the Germans with a lease over  the Jiazhou Bay and Tianjin, that granted  

the British a lease over Weihaiwei and the New  Territories of Hong Kong, and that gave a lease  

over Guangzhouwan to the French. The recently  established German Empire also colonized the  

northeastern part of New Guinea, the Bismarck  Archipelago, the northern Solomon Islands,  

Western Samoa, and Nauru. Finally, the entrance  of the United States into the Pacific, the last  

main foreign player in the region, would coincide  with the downfall of the Spanish Empire. In 1898,  

the same year that the US annexed Hawaii, American  intervention in Cuba led to the ultimate conquest  

of the Philippines and Guam in the Pacific. Weakened from their defeat against the US,  

the Spaniards could no longer protect their  Pacific possessions, including the Mariana,  

Caroline, and Palau islands; so, in 1889,  they sold these territories to the German  

Empire for a significant sum of gold marks,  ending the Spanish presence in the region. 

The start of the next century would also see  an increasing American interest in the Pacific  

with the colonization of Wake Island, the Midway  Atoll, the Johnston Atoll, Eastern Samoa, and the  

Howland and Baker Islands, thus completing the  colonization of Oceania. As you can see, most of  

Southeast Asia and Oceania were left in the hands  of Western powers by the turn of the 20th Century. 

Our prelude series that will soon morph  into the weekly coverage of the Pacific War  

will continue next week as we observe how the  Japanese turned from an isolationist state into  

a regional power in the East, laying the initial  groundwork for the rise of the Japanese Empire, so  

make sure you are subscribed and have pressed the  bell button to see the next video in the series.  

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