The "Age of Exploration" is a traditional term that describes the period from the late 1400s through the end of the 1600s in which European nations were exploring, mapping, and claiming territory around the world. It began when the rise of the Ottoman Empire cut off overland and Mediterranean trade routes to Asia. European rulers, notably at first in Portugal and Spain, financed risky sea journeys to search for new trade routes to countries such as India and China.

These adventures paid off in the discovery of an ocean route to India around the tip of Africa and in the extraordinary discovery of two hitherto unknown continents, North and South America.

The purpose of these explorations was always—despite ancillary desires to convert other peoples to Christianity—primarily mercantile. The Europeans wanted, first, to get the goods such as spices and silk that they were accustomed to obtaining from Asia, and, beyond that, to make what money they could in new ways, such as by finding gold. This was a vastly successful enterprise from a financial point of view, as the resources of the colonized lands, especially in the Americas, became easily available to the technologically-advanced Europeans.

The newer term, "Age of Exploitation," is probably a more accurate description of the underlying reasons for exploration: they were financed primarily to increase the wealth of upper-class Europeans and carried out in ruthless ways that paid next to no attention to the needs or humanity of native peoples. The "Age of Exploitation/Exploration" was the age of the rise of slavery based on European-derived concepts of "race." it was also a period when Native American cultures, particularly in Mexico and South America, were intentionally brutally slaughtered and enslaved; throughout the two continents, diseases were brought in, sometimes intentionally, by Europeans.

Europeans also appropriated land and resources from these new territories with little regard for Native rights. All of this brought a vast amount of wealth flooding into Europe but devastated cultures in other places. Europe saw these new lands as ripe for the picking and exploited them fully.