American and French Revolutions
... and Mughal Empires because it was an officially Shi'ite empire, and religious differences led to much antagonism between the Safavids and its Sunni neighbours. The Safavid Empire was the shortest-lived of the three, forming in 1501 and suffering its final collapse at the hands of the invading Afghans in 1722. It forever influenced Persian nationalism, however, and out of the remnants of the Safavid Empire grew the present-day country of Iran. The Mughal Empire in India, which formed in 1526, was the third Great Islamic Empire to form, and it struggled for several years after that to consolidate its territory. It benefited from a succession of strong rulers throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, many of whom were able to ensure the Empire's survival by appeasing the majority Hindu population of the Indian subcontinent. Like the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, however, the Mughal Empire's power eventually declined, and it was absorbed by the expansion of the British Empire in India in the mid-19th century The Age of Exploration and Isolation Before the 15th century (the 1400s) Western Europe was still lagging far behind the rest of the world in terms of ship technology and exploration. The main reason for the boom, which started in the 1400s, and continued for the next several centuries, was financial. The Spanish went west across the Atlantic instead of East. Christopher Columbus sailed the first of his voyages in 1492. An Italian himself, he went first to the Portuguese for funding. When they rejected him, he approached the Spanish. His goal was to find a western route to the Orient, since the Portuguese had a lock on the Eastern one. Columbus never did find his route to Asia in the West that he would have to wait for Ferdinand Magellan. But his discovery of the Americas proved much more important in the long run. By the late 15th Century, after Columbus' first trips, Europe's focus began to shift from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. European exploration soon became conquest. The Spanish Empire The conquistadors were young adventurers, generally with greater aspiratio...