Geography Reference
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now inhabited is much greater than these ancient geographers described it . . .
Hence we must conclude that we must now allow for wider limits, both in
latitude and longitude, to the habitable earth than either Aristotle in his topic
or Strabo in his third topic would give it” (quoted in Brotton 1999:78). In this
sense, colonialism, at least in its opening phases, was as much a process of
time-space
expansion
as compression.
Under Henry the Navigator, Lisbon became the new global center of navi-
gational and cartographic expertise. Henry's headquarters at Sagres pioneered
the European exploration of the Atlantic and West Africa, Portugal's entry
into Asia, and revolutionized cartography. Sailing ships such as the Portuguese
caravel, the only ship capable of sailing anywhere on the planet (Hugill 1993),
and its successor, the galleon, were able to sail into the wind and shallow
waters in all weathers, cut weeks from time at sea and allowed sailors (“men
of the sail”) to return home more easily, initiating a feedback loop in which
geographic knowledge became cumulative and its growth self-reinforcing and
continuous. Bartholomeu Dias returned from rounding southern Africa in
1488, which rendered Columbus's original intentions super
uous and encour-
aged him to think about a westward voyage (Boorstin 1983). Portuguese
expansion replaced the older land-and-sea trade networks with an all-ocean
one, greatly lowering the costs of bringing goods from Asia to Europe and
inducing cost-space convergence (Cipolla 1965; Hugill 1993). Yet it would
wrong, or at least Eurocentric, to conceive of this process as simply one of
reaching out across the surface of the earth; to invoke Massey (2005:4),
“Conceiving of space as in the voyages of discovery, as something to be crossed
and maybe conquered . . . makes space seem like a surface: continuous and
given” rather than as a mutable social production, which is to say, colonial
spatialities were
produced
by colonialism, not pre-existing.
Magellan's famous voyage across the Paci
fl
c in 1520 took three months
and 20 days, and remarkably encountered no storms, thus giving the ocean
its name. Since Magellan died in the Philippines, his Malayan slave Enrique,
captured on an early trip to Asia and who accompanied him back to Spain
and thence across the Atlantic and Paci
fi
first person to circum-
navigate the world (Manchester 1992:269). Magellan's crew's feat was not
only technically signi
fi
c, became the
fi
fi
cant, but the very act of global circumnavigation gave
rise for the
finite world, an
early inkling of the relative spaces yet to come. Indeed, despite the fame of
Columbus, the Portuguese achievements did far more to revise the archaic
but enormously in
fi
first time to the notion that there was a closed,
fi
uential Ptolemaic perspective that lay at the core of the
medieval world view. Global circumvention initiated an incipient planetary
awareness among the elites of Europe, or what Pratt (1992) calls an incipient
planetary consciousness, an understanding of the world as a uni
fl
ed entity in
which localities were always enmeshed and intertwined. As Massey (2005:92)
puts it, “The collapse of near and far has long been a fact for places outside
the West—indeed it is intrinsic to the establishment, through 'discover',
imperialism and colonialism, of modernity itself.” Not coincidentally, shortly
fi
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