The U.S. just marked the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which launched 13 British colonies toward nationhood. Yet while the events of 1776 created our enduring political system, the arrival on the continent of Christopher Columbus, nearly 300 years earlier, introduced even more far-ranging developments.

Columbus never set foot in territory that became the continental U.S., but in many ways he, too, launched an American revolution. Present-day politicians love to invoke the nation’s founders as the inspiration for what makes us us. Indeed, the president reiterated the 1776 connection in a Columbus Day statement he issued last week. But he didn’t capture the reason why Columbus and other explorers are really so important. Early colonizers who crossed the Atlantic matter because they initiated a set of norms and policies that became central to the United States—celebrating the extraction of natural resources, disregarding harm to Native and other peoples, and promulgating Christianity as a state project.

Europeans had begun sailing westward long before Columbus set off from Palos, Spain, in 1492. By the year 1000 C.E. Norse sailors, often called Vikings, established settlements in Iceland and, later, in Greenland, where they found valuable walrus ivory. In the early 11th century, they also set up an outpost in Newfoundland, though they likely abandoned it within a century. The Norse settlement in Iceland became permanent, and they remained in Greenland for close to 500 years, leaving only with the advent of the Little Ice Age and the end of the Black Death of the mid-14th century.

By then, explorers and traders had expanded Europeans’ desire for goods produced elsewhere, notably silk from East Asia and health-enhancing spices from the southwest Pacific. Silks did not lose value on the long journey around Africa and South Asia by ship or overland on the eponymous Silk Road. But spices got stale, which made trading them less appealing for profit-conscious merchants.

As European tastes and wants evolved and sailing technologies improved, nations began pushing farther beyond their borders. Beginning in the early 15th century, Portuguese mariners claimed the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores, islands west of Africa they thought would be ideal for growing sugar cane. Europeans had come to crave sweetened food and drink after Crusaders brought the plant back from the Middle East. Sugar profits fed a colonizing race between Iberian powers.

In 1492, the Italian Columbus arrived at the Spanish court with an audacious plan: Europeans could get back and forth to the Spice Islands faster if they sailed west across the Atlantic. Famously, he never made it to the southwest Pacific. Instead, he arrived in the Caribbean—territory that Europeans had never seen. He claimed one island after another for his Spanish sponsors, Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon.

Once in American waters, Columbus began to hatch a plan for conquest and colonization. He focused on three arenas: the abundant natural resources of the islands, the ability to seize local residents for his own purposes, and a fresh field for missionary activity.

In his first report home, written as a letter to his patrons and then published in Barcelona in 1493, Columbus extolled the natural wonders he found. He was particularly enthusiastic about Hispaniola (present-day Haiti and the Dominican Republic), which was “a marvel” in his eyes. “Its sierras and mountains, its lowlands and meadows and its beautiful thick soil, are so apt for planting and sowing, for raising all kinds of cattle and for building towns and villages,” he wrote. Towering trees seemed “to touch the sky.” A thousand kinds of birds filled the air with song. Flowers and fruit were everywhere. There were “many spices and great mines of gold and other metals.” Columbus’s brief book enthralled Europeans eager to extract wealth in distant climes. Over the next decade, American plants like the potato and tomato entered Europeans’ diets; tobacco, which they saw as an invaluable addition to medicine, entranced hundreds of thousands.

Columbus admitted to capturing Taino people, the island’s Native residents “by force,” but claimed he hoped “they might learn our language and give me news of what existed in those parts.” These were the first Americans taken captive by European colonizers. Thousands would follow in the years to come, many of whom were forced into bone-crushing labor to cultivate the land.

Before he sailed for home, Columbus also began the process of expanding Christianity in this territory. He anticipated that all of Christendom would celebrate the conversion of Indigenous people to “our Holy Faith,” a process of cultural change that would bring immortal honor to Isabella and Ferdinand as well as to Columbus himself. After Columbus’s return, Pope Alexander VI announced the Doctrine of Discovery, which held that European explorers could assert a right to territory that was not claimed by a Christian ruler.

The English paid close attention to the material and spiritual gains the Iberians made in the Americas. They routinely promised to convert Indigenous peoples and teach them the ways of European civilization. They also accepted as fact that colonizers should harvest as many natural resources from the continent as they could export. As early as 1616-1617 in Bermuda and 1619 on the mainland, English colonizers acquired and enslaved Africans. They became eager participants in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which eventually brought over 12 million captives to the Western Hemisphere.

Political ideas developed over centuries convinced the rebels of 1776 to break away from Britain. But they lacked the power, or the interest, to undermine the forces that conquest and colonization had unleashed. The founders in Philadelphia referred to Native peoples as “merciless Indian savages,” and refused to eliminate the slave trade. Settlers in the early U.S. were too busy seeking profits to worry about the environmental costs of their actions.

Our world today reflects key developments of these earlier generations. Christianity, routinely connected to nationalistic agendas, justified expansion across the Americas, regardless of the consequences for Indigenous communities. The desire to extract profits from nature has not slowed down despite growing awareness that the unrestrained pursuit of wealth is destroying the planet. Enslavement laid a foundation for economic inequality. In a year marking the achievements of 1776, we should also recall what developed earlier—and what the founders and so many other Americans were unwilling to change.

Peter C. Mancall is distinguished professor at USC and the author of Contested Continent: The Struggle for North America, c. 1000-1680, volume one of the Oxford History of the United States. 

Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard