Colonial Period
Further information: History of colonialism and Greater EuropeThe discovery of the Americas stimulated a steady stream of voluntary migration from Europe. It happened during the colonization of the Americas, starting in the 15th century. About 200,000 Spaniards settled in their American colonies prior to 1600, a small settlement compared to the 3 to 4 million Amerindians who lived in Spanish territory in the Americas. In Brazil, the European emigration remained very small in the first two centuries of colonization: between 1500 and 1700, only 100,000 Portuguese settled there. However, the development of the mining economy in the 18th century raised the wages and employment opportunities in the Portuguese colony and the emigration grew: in the 18th century alone, about 400,000 Portuguese settled in Brazil, a mass emigration given that Portugal had a population of only 2 million people. In North America the immigration was dominated by British, Irish and other Northern Europeans.
Read more about this topic: Emigration From Europe
Famous quotes containing the words colonial and/or period:
“In colonial America, the father was the primary parent. . . . Over the past two hundred years, each generation of fathers has had less authority than the last. . . . Masculinity ceased to be defined in terms of domestic involvement, skills at fathering and husbanding, but began to be defined in terms of making money. Men had to leave home to work. They stopped doing all the things they used to do.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)