Why Did The Spanish Colonize The New World

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Christopher Columbus accidentally discovered the New World in 1492 while trying to find a new route to the Indies. After this discovery, the Spanish immediately took to exploring what the New World had to offer and soon started to colonize lands. As time passed, England was beginning to be overpopulated and was too in need of land and some wealth, so they too went to the New World and started to colonize there just as the Spanish did. As both were colonizing the New World, they each had their similarities and differences when colonizing it. When exploring the new world, the main objective for the Spanish was to look for gold or silver as it would make them richer, and for the English they were more interested in obtaining more land, an economic opportunity, or religious freedom. When it came to interacting with the natives, the Spanish would first defeat them and then enslave them to work in the silver mines, and the English would try to be …show more content…
Discovering new crops like tobacco and corn in the New World is something that both the Spanish and English had done when colonizing in the New World, and in exchange for the discoveries they had made they introduced the natives to crops from the Old World like wheat and rice. The English and Spanish had also unintentionally introduced diseases from the Old World like measles and smallpox to the natives, which had caused many of natives to die because of a weak immunity to it. Not only were their discoveries very much the same, but so was their way of labor. They had both made their own slavery systems like the Spanish used the Indians that survived from their attacks as slaves, and the English had started their system when a ship had sold about 20 African slaves off the coast of Jamestown and from there they were