Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Central to this process were the oceans. The new European relationship
to the seas was forged through the navigational revolution of the
fifteenth
century, which allowed open ocean sailing rather than coastal voyages. The
ensuing voyages of exploration and conquest brought the world's maritime
regions within the expanding circuits of European capital circulation and
accumulation. Colonialism transformed the oceans from barriers into a
means of accessing lands beyond, even if those were unknown or only dimly
perceived. Often this process was borne of dire necessity: Portuguese and
Spanish entries into the Atlantic Ocean were in many respects an attempt to
circumvent the Turkish domination of the Middle East (including the seizure
of Constantinople in 1453), a force that motivated Europeans to
fi
nd new
ways to the lucrative Asian trade. The eventual result was a series of colonial
empires that bound together vast regions separated by enormous maritime
spaces, constructing geographies that were “porous, discontinuous and relent-
lessly speculative” (Brotton 1999:88). Because they did not allow penetration
of continental interiors, ship-based empires were con
fi
ned to coasts, littorals,
archipelagos, and islands. Oceanic discoveries and conquests also propelled
a gradual restructuring of European spatiality, with a decline in the Italian
city-states and the Hanseatic League and a rise of the Atlantic sea powers,
shifting the primary locus of trade and balance of power from the Mediter-
ranean and Baltic to the Atlantic, in which not one but several empires
operated simultaneously.
The emerging colonial world system was heavily conditioned by the pre-
existing European discursive and imaginative geographies. For example, the
writings of Marco Polo, precapitalist history's most famous adventurer, had
a signi
fi
uence in the emerging Western conception of the Orient.
Henry the Navigator of Portugal carefully read Polo's account,
The Descrip-
tion of the World
, as did Columbus and Magellan. Colonial voyages simul-
taneously put to rest ancient conceptions of the earth, particularly those of
Ptolemy, and opened the way for newer, more pragmatic accounts of how the
earth worked. Vasco de Gama's circumnavigation of Africa in 1498 ushered
in profound changes in Europe's view of the world, making accessible the
Indies in ways that directly contradicted classical geographical imaginations.
Indeed, prior to 1492 numerous European scholars believed that the shortest
route to India lay across the Atlantic. In 1474, Florentine scholar Paolo
Toscanelli, drawing on Ptolemy and Strabo, advised King Alfonso V of
Portugal “Do not be surprised that I describe the areas from which the spices
are brought as lying to the west, whereas they are usually thought of as lying
to the east. But they may also be reached by sailing west” (quoted in Klemp
1976:9).
The voyages of navigation, exploration, and conquest initially revealed to
Europeans how large the world truly was and how small Europe was in com-
parison. European scholars were acutely aware that the maritime voyages were
radically expanding their known world. For example, in 1512, Nuremberg
scholar Johannes Cochlaeus noted that “truly the dimension of the earth as
fi
cant in
fl
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