Seeking recs on colonial imperialism?
TL;DR I'm looking for information on functional differences between the colonization styles of different nations during the Age of Exploration / Age of Imperialism. Any recommendations?
Long version: I'm currently working on a cooperative board game in which the antagonists are, in general, colonizing Europeans.
To boost the difficulty of the game1, players can fight against specific colonizing Europeans2 - eg, a French Agricultural Colony, or Spanish Treasure Seekers.
Ideally, I'd like these antagonists to (at least a little) reflect the strengths / weaknesses / cultures / peculiarities of the historical countries in question. Which means I need to learn how those countries did their colonizing.
One friend pointed me at Civilization: The West and the Rest, which was helpful3, but I'm looking for more. I have not turned up much via internet searching - plenty of compare / contrasts on the home nations themselves, but not their methods / strengths of colonization.
Anyone have any suggestions?
1 Because cooperative games need difficulty boosts to remain challenging - and ideally, they get harder in ways which mix up the gameplay, though that's less common.
2 Or non-European colonizers - but the board-game trope I'm inverting tends to center around Europeans (Puerto Rico, Goa, Navegador, Colonial, Age of Empires, Endeavor, etc.), so I'm going there first.
3 The middle chunk of that book was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for - it did, eg, a compare-contrast of English colonies with the Spanish exploration of South America. Also some info on French and German colonies, esp. in Africa.
Originally posted on Dreamwidth (comments:
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Long version: I'm currently working on a cooperative board game in which the antagonists are, in general, colonizing Europeans.
To boost the difficulty of the game1, players can fight against specific colonizing Europeans2 - eg, a French Agricultural Colony, or Spanish Treasure Seekers.
Ideally, I'd like these antagonists to (at least a little) reflect the strengths / weaknesses / cultures / peculiarities of the historical countries in question. Which means I need to learn how those countries did their colonizing.
One friend pointed me at Civilization: The West and the Rest, which was helpful3, but I'm looking for more. I have not turned up much via internet searching - plenty of compare / contrasts on the home nations themselves, but not their methods / strengths of colonization.
Anyone have any suggestions?
1 Because cooperative games need difficulty boosts to remain challenging - and ideally, they get harder in ways which mix up the gameplay, though that's less common.
2 Or non-European colonizers - but the board-game trope I'm inverting tends to center around Europeans (Puerto Rico, Goa, Navegador, Colonial, Age of Empires, Endeavor, etc.), so I'm going there first.
3 The middle chunk of that book was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for - it did, eg, a compare-contrast of English colonies with the Spanish exploration of South America. Also some info on French and German colonies, esp. in Africa.
Originally posted on Dreamwidth (comments: