Why Did the Age of Exploration Come to an End?

The Age of Exploration came to a close between 1580 and 1650 because the work of exploration was largely done, the joint-stock company replaced royal patronage as the institutional model for overseas expansion, and the Atlantic plantation complex replaced the conquest frontier as the economic engine of the Atlantic system. The transition is sometimes called the end of the Age of Discovery and the beginning of the Age of Empire. The labels are useful, but the underlying continuity is more important than the discontinuity: the chartered companies of the 17th century were the institutional heirs of the Iberian royal programs, and the slave trade that powered the 18th-century Atlantic economy had been launched in the 1440s under Portuguese auspices.

This page gives the focused answer; the cluster page The Decline and End of the Age of Exploration gives the longer treatment.

The Work Was Done

By 1600 the major outlines of the modern world map had been established. The Atlantic coastlines of Africa and the Americas were charted, the sea route to Asia was open, the Pacific had been crossed, and the southern oceans had been reached. The cartographic revolution of the 16th century, from the Waldseemüller map of 1507 to the Mercator projection of 1569 to the Blaeu and Ortelius atlases of the early 17th century, had fixed the global outline. What remained was exploitation of what had been discovered.

The Chartered Company Replaced Royal Patronage

The Dutch and English East India Companies, founded in 1602 and 1600, were the first joint-stock companies with the legal right to wage war, sign treaties, coin money, and govern territory outside Europe. The Dutch West India Company (founded 1621), the Royal African Company (1660), the French East India Company (1664), the Hudson’s Bay Company (1670), and the French Mississippi Company (1717) followed. These corporations were financed by tradable shares, accountable to boards of directors, and capable of fielding fleets and armies. C.R. Boxer’s The Dutch Seaborne Empire, 1600–1800 (1965) and James Tracy’s The Rise of Merchant Empires (1990) are the standard accounts. The chartered-company model would shape European overseas expansion for the next 250 years.

The Demographic Catastrophe Reshaped the Economy

The deeper cause of the transition was demographic. The indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere fell by 80 to 95 percent in the worst-affected regions within a century of contact, primarily from Old World pathogens against which the indigenous populations had no acquired immunity. William Denevan’s The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (1976, revised 1992) and Noble David Cook’s Born to Die (1998) are the demographic starting points. The collapse made conquest-based economies — the encomienda and repartimiento systems — unworkable, and pushed the European colonial economies toward the importation of African labor. The Atlantic slave trade, which had begun with the Portuguese in the 1440s, became, by the 18th century, the largest commodity flow in the Atlantic economy by tonnage. David Eltis’s The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (2000) and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Eltis and Richardson, 2008) are the standard references. The plantation complex replaced the conquest frontier as the economic engine of the Atlantic system by 1650, and the era of exploration was over for that reason more than any other.

The Northern European Challenge

The Iberian monopoly, never as tight as Tordesillas suggested, began to break in the 1560s. The Iberian Union of 1580–1640, in which the Portuguese and Spanish crowns were held by the same Habsburg king, weakened Portuguese independent action. John Hawkins’s slave-trading voyages of the 1560s and Francis Drake’s circumnavigation of 1577–1580 were the first major English challenges. The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 was the political turning point; it ended Iberian naval dominance and made English and Dutch overseas expansion possible. By 1620 the Dutch had broken the Portuguese monopoly in the East Indies, and the English were establishing the first permanent North American colonies.

The Shift to Scientific Exploration

By the late 17th century, exploration had been absorbed by the bureaucratic state. The French Academy of Sciences (founded 1666), the Royal Society of London (chartered 1662), and the British Admiralty took over the planning and financing of voyages. The new style was exemplified by the Pacific voyages of James Cook (1768–1779), which were state-funded, scientifically planned, and instructed to claim territory for the crown. The Pacific voyages of the 18th century, like those of Cook and Bougainville, completed the European outline of the globe.

The Most Important Cause

Of the several reasons for the transition, the most important is the demographic catastrophe of the Americas. The plantation complex replaced the conquest frontier because the conquest frontier had been depopulated. The slave trade replaced indigenous labor because indigenous labor had died. The chartered companies replaced royal patronage because the capital required for sustained Atlantic operations exceeded what any single crown could finance. The cartographic revolution had filled in the world map. What was left was the harder and less romantic work of running it.