How did European nations compete for global trade and empire in the Americas and Asia?

For almost a century after the fall of the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan, the Spanish and Portuguese dominated European overseas trade and colonization (see Chapter 16). In the early seventeenth century, however, England, France, and the Netherlands challenged Spain’s monopoly. They eventually succeeded in creating overseas empires, consisting of settler colonies in North America, slave plantations in the Caribbean, and scattered trading posts in West Africa and Asia.