What I call Epoch 3.2 is Europe’s conquest of Earth. I have called it the second conquest, after humanity’s first, when it came to dominate all inhabitable continents. As with Epoch 3.1, when an energy innovation made civilization feasible by using low-energy transportation lanes to expand the hinterland of civilizations, what made Europe’s conquest of Earth possible was turning Earth’s ocean into a low-energy transportation lane. The oceangoing sailing ship was by far the greatest energy technology in the human journey, to its time, as it generated several hundred horsepower.
The rise of Europe arguably began with Classic Greece and Rome. Rome turned the entire Mediterranean into a low-energy transportation lane, which allowed Rome’s population to reach one million people. Of course, its rise was brutal, even genocidal, and its savageries were legendary. Classic Greek culture laid the intellectual foundation for the West’s rise, with a proto-scientific approach, and a key Greek invention was the waterwheel, which was the first time that non-muscle power was generated on land, and Greeks even invented a rudimentary steam engine. But Greece became a deforested wasteland and an imperial has-been.
After Rome conquered the entire Mediterranean, the stage was set for its eventual collapse, as everything that was easily conquered and exploited had been. Rome scoured the Mediterranean periphery for wood for its baths, which I believe is the only time in the human journey that firewood was seagoing freight. Rome deforested Italy, Spain, and France, and was working on Germany’s forests when it collapsed.
North of the Alps was a very different Europe from the Mediterranean. That region got its precipitation from the North Atlantic, which was far more plentiful and reliable, and its heavy, ice-age soils were far more resilient than the relatively thin soils of the Fertile Crescent and Mediterranean. Northwestern Europe was ideal for the spread of watermills, and there was a “Medieval Industrial Revolution” that featured watermills during the Medieval Warm Period, which was a great period of city-building. Europe invaded the Middle East with its Crusades, even waged them on itself, but was largely spared the Mongol hordes. The 1300s were calamitous, however, with a multi-year famine and then the Black Death a generation later, as Europe cooled toward the Little Ice Age.
When Europeans learned to sail the ocean in the 1400s, the peoples of several continents were easy prey, and Europe’s conquest of Earth was the biggest demographic catastrophe in the human journey. Entire continents of people were wiped out, in Australia and the Americas. Portugal was first out of the gate, followed closely by Spain, but the commercializing Dutch and English eventually overtook them.
During the Medieval Warm Period, northwestern Europe was largely deforested (England was almost completely deforested by 1100), but the forests recovered somewhat in the aftermath of the Black Death. The Romans mined coal in England, the practice was revived in a deforested England, and that led to the next Epoch, which we still live in.