ABSTRACT
In late seventeenth-century Europe, knowledge of global cultures and early human history was being woven into polemical works of a distinctly nationalist bent that pitted the achievements of modern individuals and states against what were sometimes regarded as relatively primitive ancient and non-Western groups. In his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688-1692), for example, the French author Charles Perrault uses global travel and commerce as evidence of the chasm separating his contemporary world from antiquity. Ancient sailors “hardly dared to abandon the coasts of the Mediterranean,” he claimed, while modern navigators “have established routes across the ocean that are as straight and true as our great roads and provide access to all places on the globe” (Perrault [1692-1697] 1979, 1: xxvii). Ancient ships, designed for the relative calm of the Mediterranean, could not rival the scale or sophistication of modern oceangoing vessels (Perrault [1692-1697] 1979, 4: 95). Recent astronomical techniques applied to the determination of longitude at sites on the Mediterranean coast of France demonstrated the “unbelievable” errors of earlier maps and ancient geographers (Perrault [1692-1697] 1979, 4: 83). Indeed, ancient knowledge of the world was itself largely conned to the Mediterranean basin and adjacent territories, limitations glaring to modern eyes after several centuries of global exploration.
