My younger daughter and I just finished a puzzle of this wonderful world map by Dutch geographer Henricus Hondius the Younger, published in 1630. It was great fun. (Wikipedia has a
very big image of this map, a less colorful than the above but clearer.)
Gazing at the complete puzzle I fell into a reverie about the wonder this map represents. Imagine that men in a chilly corner of northwestern Europe boarded little wooden ships and sailed across the entire globe, to Siberia and Patagonia and Sumatra and Madagascar. And not only did they sail to these places, they worked out, by staring at the sun and stars through little brass instruments, where on the globe they were, rendering the whole planet into an image that can be taken in at a glance. They were the first humans to know the shape of our world.
Imagine the voyaging that lay behind this extravagant listing of all the ports in South America.
I believe that this is what birthed the modern world. What made our age different from all that came before was the mapping of the whole globe and the connection of the planet into a single system through which goods and ideas could flow. European expansion was a violent cataclysm accompanied by much death and disaster, but it was also creative in the deepest and most profound sense: it changed the world.
Much was lost: peoples, cultures, dreams of strange worlds over the horizon inhabited by monsters or angels. But without the knowledge that lies behind this map, and the voyages that produced it, we would not be here.
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But without the knowledge that lies behind this map, and the voyages that produced it, we would not be here.
ReplyDeleteThis is effectively a tautology, though, with no greater meaning connected to it.
Without anything, we would not be where we are. The exact circumstances of the present are always the result of all the combined elements of the past.
You might just as well note that without Hitler conducting the Holocaust, we would not be here; or that without the domestication of grapefruit, we would not be here; or that without the formation of the earth, we would not be here.
What made our age different from all that came before was the mapping of the whole globe and the connection of the planet into a single system through which goods and ideas could flow.
A single system? In what way? Because even today, the world is not unified under a single system.
Rough mapping of global coastlines is all well and good, but continental interiors remained unmapped until the 20th century - yet you wouldn't argue the "modern age" only began then, would you?
Blue water sailing expanded the exchange of goods and ideas, but it didn't create "a single system" for such flow. At best, it created many new competing systems - the European colonial powers were constantly vying with each other and seeking to disrupt or destroy the exchange systems of their rivals.
But even then, truly vast exchange systems already existed BEFORE blue water sailing came about. And that's true even when you consider that blue water sailing was ACTUALLY invented in the West Pacific, and that Europeans independently came up with their own version centuries after the fact.
Colonialism also wasn't really "exchange" in the usual sense - goods and ideas both certainly flowed, but each chiefly in one direction. European powers extracted resources from distant lands, but didn't particularly care much about the ideas of the people living in those lands. And the locals often integrated European ideas and ways into their own cultures, but this was largely out of necessity - either because it was expected of them by their colonial overlords, or because they viewed "Westernization" as the only ready defense to avoid BEING colonized.
Granted, you had things like fads of Orientalism here and there, but you certainly didn't see major cultural exchanges of the sort that truly changed European worldviews - not a lot of African of Asian or Indigenous American thought made it's way back to Europe.
And I would argue, none of this is particularly "modern" - much the same kind of unidirectional "exchange" took place in the "pre-modern" period, when Islamic traders spread across Africa and Asia, extracting valuable resources to bring back home, and exporting the Muslim faith and the Arabic language from Benin to Brunei and beyond.
So, no... I really must insist that mapping and Colonialism didn't make the "modern age". If anything, I'd lean toward certain technological advancements and changes in thinking - gunpowder (which changed the nature of warfare and power projection), clockworks (which changed the nature of time keeping and expectations for labor), the printing press (which changed the nature of regular discourse), et cetera...
"European powers extracted resources from distant lands, but didn't particularly care much about the ideas of the people living in those lands."
ReplyDeleteThis is absolutely false. The Europeans showed astonishing curiosity about the ideas of people all over the world, which you would know if you made any study of European intellectual life in the 1500 to 1900 period. They were *intensely* curious about the world. They wrote about Polynesian navigation already in the early 1700s. They debated the merits of Christian monogamy vs. Muslim polygamy, extensively discussed the caste system, wrote dozens of books in English, French, and Dutch about the Iroquois League. They made immense efforts to study foreign languages and create dictionaries and grammars of languages from Nahuatl to Cantonese.
It was global trade that made Europe rich, but it was learning about the world that made Europe so intellectually and artistically creative.