The American Web thinly connected peoples from the North American Great Lakes to the Andes via water transport and road networks, and a loose web emerged in the Pacific through regular political contacts between Melanesian and Polynesian chiefdoms. The Old World Web was the largest, densest, and most formidable. New advancements in maritime technology thickened and consolidated the Old World Web at its extremities.

Atlantic Europe developed strong, swift, inexpensive, and capacious ships and charted every inhabited coastline by the late 18th century using enhanced navigational knowledge. They incited the first major expansion of the human web into Africa via a permanent Dutch post in South Africa and Portuguese initiation of the transatlantic slave trade in West Africa. Once Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas and the transatlantic slave trade began, the Old World Web and the American Web fused. Atlantic Europeans took over American empires and populations through military conquest, diplomacy, disease, and religious and cultural imposition. Simultaneously, Russians expanded the web into Siberia and the subarctic region of North America through military conquest, fur trading, and cultural imposition, and Europeans decimated Indigenous populations in Australia and Oceania by establishing settler colonies.