europe and the atlantic world. a historiographic summary

This article analyzes the importance and meaning of the role played by Europe in its new interactions with Africa and the Americas between the 15th Century and first third of the 19th Century. The interconnection of the Atlantic world strengthened the mercantile economic system, allowing Europe to compete with Asia and giving life to a colonial world that created new rules in the relationship between European metropoli. Multi-ethnic feudal societies developed in Latin America and segmental societies developed in Africa and Anglo-Saxon and French America. The difference between the metropoli and their American colonies led to the Atlantic revolution that provoked the fall of the old regimes in America and Europe between the last third of the 18th Century and the first third of the 19th Century.