Overseas colonization and colonized people's agency and resistance had dramatic effects on European societies. Contacts with the world beyond Europe not only reproduced imperialist patterns of aggression, subordination, and exploitation but introduced Europeans to new and disturbing ideas and practices. The encounter with the Americas helped to destabilize the hegemony and credibility of the Christian church, indeed of the European worldview, speeding secularization by introducing knowledge unforeseen in biblical or classical texts. The European way of life was transformed and its burgeoning population simultaneously sustained and menaced by the introduction of new foods such as maize, tomatoes, squashes, tapioca, peanuts, and especially cacao and potatoes; new crops such as tobacco and rubber; new animals such as llamas, buffalo, jaguars, and other beasts real and mythical; and new diseases such as syphilis.

The inflow of New World bullion produced the massive European inflation and resultant economic and social dislocations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Europe's commercial bourgeoisie gained wealth and power at the expense of the aristocracy, and a stronger bargaining position globally: Mexican silver offered European merchants something the Chinese would accept in exchange for their coveted silks and porcelain. Indigo, annatto, and fustic supplied the textile industries until the development of aniline dyes in the late nineteenth century, and sisal supplied the maritime industries sustaining northwest Europe's global power. The related evolution of a global capitalist system with Europe at its financial and geographical core had profound effects on Europe as well as on the non-European world.

By the eighteenth century, colonial products such as furs and sugar warmed the backs and graced the tables of the well-to-do, becoming symbols of privilege and social distance. Ginger, allspice, nutmeg, mace, coffee, chocolate, sugar, rum, arrowroot, and sago became staples of the middle-class larder. Elite women's participation in shaping demand for colonial products such as Indian cotton, coffee and tea from Asia and South America, Caribbean sugar, Chinese and Japanese porcelain and lacquer goods, and objects made from exotic woods implicated them in projects of empire and of slavery.

European identities themselves were forged in the process of overseas colonization: Scottish merchants, for example, came in the colonial context to recognize the profit to be derived from being British. The Enlightened superiority of eighteenth-century Europe was constructed not only in relation to the imputed barbarism of the Middle Ages but also to the innocence of the Amerindian ''noble savage'' and the alleged brutishness of the African. . .

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