ABSTRACT
In c. 1500, when Europeans were embarking on the transoceanic maritime explorations and overseas conquests that would transform the world, their maps told them little of its enormous diversity. Beyond Europe was a myriad of regions, each with distinctive forms of agriculture, trade and technology, and many different beliefs and traditions. Vast areas of the planet, especially in the American, African and Australian continents, were still populated by hunters, food gatherers, herders of domesticated animals and hand cultivators who lived in small communities, often under simple forms of government. In other regions, however, societies of great wealth and power projected cultural and political influence over large areas. These shared some basic similarities in that they relied on a base of subsistence agriculture and employed technologies driven by water, wind and animal power. But they had some very distinctive features, too, arising from economies shaped by different environments and social and cultural traditions that had moved along historically separate trajectories. The world in 1500 was, in short, akin to an archipelago, a set of social and cultural islands that sometimes interacted through migrations, trade or the expansion of states and religions, but were also kept apart by both the difficulties of long-distance travel and the mutual incomprehension that arose from deep social and cultural differences. Taking a global perspective, we can identify several salient points on the world’s cultural and political landscape in c. 1500. The greatest concentrations of wealth, power and knowledge were in the Eurasian landmass: the Middle East, India and China were all sites of advanced cultures and powerful states. In the African continent, many different societies had emerged in a wide climatic continuum that stretched
south from the Mediterranean through the deserts, savannahs and forests of the interior: Africa’s cultures ranged from the Islamic urban civilizations of the Maghreb to the nomadic hunters and gatherers of the Kalahari. To the west, in the American continent, was a world that stood completely apart. Stretching from the north to the south pole, with a geographical and climatic range greater than Africa or Eurasia, the Americas were the home of human communities which had for millennia lived without contact with the peoples, flora and fauna of the continents on the other sides of the Atlantic and Pacific (Figure I.3; cf. Map 3 in the Appendix). A brief survey will reveal some of the key features, resemblances and differences of these multiple, discrete societies that lay beyond Europe.
