Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
and North America; thus its peoples were able to take full advantage of trade patterns as
they burgeoned in the course of centuries of technological advancements in navigation and
Ocean, which allowed for the outer edges of Eurasia to become a focus of the world's sea
lanes under European dominance. But in McNeill's narrative, it is not only the material ad-
vancement of Europe, under a challenging physical environment, that leads to the rise of
the West, but the closing, as he puts it, of the “barbarian” spaces.
20
McNeill talks of the “inexorable, if not entirely uninterrupted, encroachment of civiliza-
tions upon barbarism”:
It was this encroachment which built up the mass and internal variety of the sep-
arate civilizations of the world and increased the frequency of contact among
them, preparing the way for the spectacular unification of the globe which has
occurred during the past three or four centuries.
21
This civilizational closure of the earth's relatively empty spaces, mainly in the temperate
zone, began in a fundamental way with the voyages of discovery: those of da Gama,
Columbus, Magellan, and others. And it continued through the well-known stages of re-
volutions in industry, transport, and communications to the globalization we experience
today. In between came the final collapse of the steppe peoples, with Russia, China, and
the Habsburg Empire partitioning the relatively empty central Eurasian plains and table-
lands. There was, too, the collapse of indigenous populations with the violent securing of
the western frontier of the North American continent, and the European colonial encroach-
der a largely Western, increasingly urbanized culture. Remember that communism, while
an extension of the totalitarian tendencies within Eastern Orthodox Christianity, and, there-
fore, an affront to liberalism, was still an ideology of the industrialized West. Nazism, too,
emerged as a pathology of an inflation-wracked, rapidly modernizing West. McNeill is not
talking about political unity, but of broad cultural, geographic, and demographic tenden-
cies.
While a central theme of
The Rise of the West
is the closing up of empty spaces on the
map, obviously this is true in a relative sense only. The fact that two rail lines coming from
opposite directions meet and touch each other does not mean that there still aren't many
empty or sparsely inhabited spaces in between. Frontiers may be closed in a formal sense,
but the density of human population and electronic interaction keep increasing at a steep
rate. And it is this rate of increase that helps to form the political drama of the world we
inhabit today. McNeill could consider as united a world where no part of the civilized earth
