The wider world

In the period after the European discovery of the New World and the sea routes round Africa to Asia, Europeans were suddenly posed with the problem of how to process all the information about the world and its peoples that was rapidly filtering its way back to Europe. There was virtually no aspect of European thought that remained unchallenged by the geographical opening up of the world. For students of the early modern period this sudden influx of new information about the wider world presents an enormous array of sources and approaches that enable us to gain a better understanding of European attitudes to other cultures, some knowledge about those cultures themselves, and an outlook on Europe and its relationship to the wider world in the sixteenth century. Easily the most studied sources by students of the early modern period are those pertaining directly to conquest and colonization (particularly to the Spanish conquest of the New World, and the English settlement of America), but the documentation of conquest is only a small portion of the sources available to students of European conquest, colonization and contact. Everything from religious discussions, to natural history to geographical and cartographical documentation, to technology, to travel, to natural history became fields of study that were affected by the new-found knowledge of the wider world. As knowledge about the wider world grew, more and more sources became available, but this chapter will have a focus on sources written in the aftermath of encounter, with a particular emphasis on sixteenth-century sources, written in the century after the opening up of Europe to knowledge about the wider world. All the sources mentioned in this chapter are textual sources written from a European, or European-influenced, viewpoint. Every society has its own history, however, and while outsiders’ outlooks can provide useful information, for the student of non-European societies the European sources need to be supplemented by indigenous material, both in written documents (where available) and in archaeological and art historical works.