One of the theories of European entry to African trade and subsequent colonization was over access to ivory, which was previously acquired through Iceland/Greenland walrus hunting, but which ran out as those settlements were abandoned due to overhunting and climate cooling that forced them out of Greenland.
Other reasons include, improvement in both ships and naval armament, and the 11th c (Seljuk) Turkish invasion of the Middle East and Byzantine Empire. The (largely mythical) era of a united muzzie empire disintegrated.
The rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th c led to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 put the cap into what was left of the flow of trade from the East into Europe via the B.E.
The bubonic plague had (re-)emerged among European populations in the 14th c, and with the rather sudden cooling known as the Little Ice Age during that same century, the old feudal order fell apart, leading to a need for a regularized legal system (increasing the value of literacy), and paid labor / free enterprise.
Everything that exists came into being because of the way things unfolded in the past.