Why Europeans Colonized America Before Africa

Pueyo answers a counter-intuitive puzzle: Europe is geographically far closer to Africa than to the Americas, yet large-scale European colonisation of the Americas began in the late 1400s while sub-Saharan Africa was not seriously colonised until the 1870s. Using two maps and a deep-historical sweep, he attributes the gap mostly to geography and biology: Africa's deserts, dense rainforests, tsetse fly, and malaria repelled European settlers, while in the Americas the catastrophic collapse of indigenous populations under smallpox effectively opened the continent to European agriculture and settlement.