During the 18th century, Europeans explored and colonized much of the world. French explorer Antoine de Bougainville led an expedition around the globe in 1766. Britain's victory in exploring the Pacific under Captain Cook expanded both scientific knowledge and British national pride. However, European empires relied on force and economic interests rather than internal unity. Napoleon later assumed a similar imperial role in Europe to the previous Holy Roman Empire. By the late 18th century, European maritime power extended around the globe through settlements in Australia, New Zealand, and growing influence over China.

1. Peoples and EmpiresAnthony pagden Chapters 9, 10, and 11 Michael Warnick- History 140

2. The Final Frontier During the middle years of the eighteenth century as Britain was losing one empire and obtaining a new one, the fight against slavery began. Also at this time all of the Earth’s surface had been explored, charted, and some cases colonized by Europeans. In 1766 a French nobleman, mathematician, and explorer named Antoine de Bougainville left Nantes on the frigate La Boudeuse with instructions to observe the transit of Venus[a means of measuring the distance of the earth from the sun] a somewhat ironic commission in the circumstances. If possible, to complete a circumnavigation of the globe. 1756, before the loss of Canada , the influential polymath Charles de Brosses had set out a project for a new kind of settlement in the Pacific that would, he hoped, compensate for what the Europeans had done to the Americas. After the creation of the French Republic in 1792, the new revolutionary government turned its back on any future colonizing ventures –untill, that is, the creation of the Napoleonic Empire.

3. Empire, Race, And Nation Cook’s triumph, as his panegyrists made plain, had been not only the triumph of science, but also the triumph of the British nation. The use of force and economic interest might have temporarily “glued together” the world’s empires into “fragile machines of ste,” but underneath this apparatus, they were all, he insisted, “destitute of internal unification and sympathy of parts.” Europeans empires proved to be far more adaptable than Herder had allowed for. Similar uses of the images of empire and the greatness it evoked were made by later generations of Europeans. When on December 12, 1804, Napoleon had himself crowned by Pope Pius VII , he formally assumed the role that the Holy Roman Empire had once held. The Greek Amphictyonic Council, which had previously inspired both James Madison’s image of the future United States in the 1770s and Immanuel Kant’s vision of a global cosmopolitan order in the 1790s, had been a loose federation of city-states dedicated to the protection of the temple of Demeter at Anthela near Thermopylae.

4. Ending The rapid exploration of the Pacific and the settlement by the British in Australia and New Zealand had by the end of the eighteenth century extended the cordon of European influence and European maritime power around the entire globe. China, although it was regarded as a valued and powerful trading partner, was already beginning to look vulnerable to rapacious English eyes when Lord George Macartney made his celebrated visit on behalf of the East India Company and George III in 1793. Within a few years the Europeans, the British, and the French in particular were making increasingly intemperate demands that the Chinese open their doors to “foreign devils,” demands that culminated in the So-called Opium Wars of 1839-42. The new European empires of the twentieth century, the would-be empires of Hitler and Mussolini, rose and fell in the space of a very few years. Imperial powers had provided indigenous elites with as much education as they saw fit in order to run the lower reaches of their empires for them.