> So the question remains: How did Europe quickly go from inferior to their neighbors in the ~1200s to colonizing the world by the 1700s? Colonization started

> So the question remains: How did Europe quickly go from inferior to their neighbors in the ~1200s to colonizing the world by the 1700s? Colonization started more than 200 years earlier. I'm deeply suspicious of these theories seeking to unify an explanation of the development of centuries, even more so if the ideology used to explain an era is coincidentally the dominating one today. Just to point out two hugely important factors that have nothing to do with free market competition: - Europe is geographically close to the Americas compared to the Middle East and East Asia. - The introduction of New World crops like potato massively increased agricultural yields.