I have a grade 9 american history question?

Question

suggest reasons why countries in eastern europe did not send expeditons to north america? this is around the 1500s where the new world was just being discovered!!!! help please!!

Answer 1

the answer is a combination of obvious geography and not-as-obvious historical reasons.     there are three parts.



you need a boat to get to the new world-look at the coastlines of the eastern European empires.

you need a reason to go to the new world-take a look at the four big colonizers-spain, france, britain,portugal.  these are four countries who have been in fairly constant warfare with each other for hundreds of years-none of the wars have had "significant" outcomes (such as one country completely taking over the other).  these countries want to expand, but they are very limited for expansion oppertunities in europe (especially britain and portugal)

you need money to expand-the big colonizers were the only large, strong, consolidated states in europe (to some extent).  russia wasn't much of an empire, germany (holy roman empire at this time) was rather weak and fragmented, devoting all of its resources to holding its empire together, poland lacked both the resources and the will to expand to the americas, the ottoman empire was falling apart, and the austrian empire already had enough on its plate without worrying about overseas colonies.  also, italy didn't exist at this time.

hopefully this is a helpful resource, though i am not the same as a text book-i'm not a historian, just someone interested in history.  hopefully this isn't going to be copied and pasted into your essay, though i trust you'll make the right decision.

Answer 2

No access to ocean ports? I mean in order to explore north america you would have had to have access to the ocean so unless you were on the ocean like italy(the Med.) Spain, France, Belgium,Germany

England, Holland etc where were you going to launch a ship from?

Answer 3

Because many still thought that the world was flat...