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In the previous segment we saw that
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Europeans developed the kind of explore
and conquer
mentality, that drove them to explore the
whole world.
And to conquer the whole world.
This unique mentality, is best illustrated
by the development of
a new type of world maps in early modern
Europe.
Many cultures prior to modern Europe also
drew maps
of the whole world.
Obviously, no human culture really knew
the entire globe.
No culture in Africa and Asia, for
example, knew about America.
And no human society in America, knew
about Africa and Asia.
But, this did not prevent them from
imagining
the whole world and drawing eh, maps of
eh, of the entire planet.
Unfamiliar areas were simply left out of
the map.
Or, they were filled with all kinds of
imaginary monsters and, and wonders.
These maps, these were pre-modern world
maps had no empty spaces in them.
They gave you the impression of
familiarity with the entire world.
Such maps were drawn eh, not only by the
Muslims and
Chinese and Japanese and Indians but also
by medieval Europeans.
You can see here before you, a world map
from Europe, from the year of 1459.
You see Europe on top, Africa below
and Asia to the right.
The most interesting thing about
this map is that it is complete.
It is completely full of details.
Even though Europeans in 1459, they didn't
know much about Africa and Asia.
And they didn't know anything about the
existence of America and Australia and
Antarctica.
The map still gives you the impression
that the Europeans were
familiar with everything there is to know
with the whole world.
During the 15th and 16th Century, one of
the first indications
of the scientific revolution and of
European imperialism
was that Europeans began to draw world
maps of
a new type, world maps with lots of empty
spaces.
The empty maps, maps with empty
spaces, were a psychological and
idealogical breakthrough.
They were a clear admission that Europeans
were ignorant of large parts of the world.
The most important change in this respect
occurred of course in 1492.
When Christopher Columbus sailed westward
from Spain seeking a
new trade route to East Asia.
Now according to the calculations of
Columbus which were based on complete
world maps from the Middle Ages,
Japan should be located about 7,000
kilometers west of Spain.
Assumes this is true is what caused
Columbus to set sail.
The truth is of course, that the maps were
wrong.
There are than 20,000 kilometers and an
entire unknown
continent, America, that separated Spain
from Japan.
But Columbus didn't know that.
On the 12th of October, 1492, at about 2
am, in the middle of the night.
The expedition of Columbus collided with
this unknown continent.
A sailor named Juan Rodríguez Bermeo.
Watching from the mast of
the ship Pinta spotted an island in what
we
now, in the island which we now call the
Bahamas,
and shouted land, land and this was the
moment
that the world was basically united and
changed beyond recognition.
But it wasn't realized at first.
When Columbus saw this island in the
Bahamas, he believed he had reached
a small island of the coast of East Asia.
Somewhere in Indonesia or the Philippines
or Japan.
He called, this is why he called the
people which he found on the islands,
Indians.
Because he thought it is reached India's,
the Indi's.
In middle of Europe, East Asia was called
the Indi's.
After, after India.
So when they encountered Native Americans
they thought that these where Indians.
So they called
them Indians.
Now Columbus was wrong of course.
But, what is interesting is that he stuck
to his
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for the rest of his life.
He never admitted.
He never realized that he discovered a new
continent.
The idea that he discovered a completely
unknown continent was
simply inconceivable for Columbus and for
many of his generation.
Because for thousands of years, not only
the greatest thinkers of Europe and
the greatest scholars but also holy
scriptures of Judaism and Christianity.
They knew only about Europe and Africa and
Asia.
Read the bible.
There is no mention of American in the
bible.
And Columbus and his generation they
couldn't get it.
That the Bible could have missed half the
world, it’s impossible.
It’s like,
say in 1969, on the way to the moon,
imagine the Apollo
11, the, the spaceship expedition to the
moon had crashed
into an unknown moon circling the Earth
which nobody previously observed.
This is the what was the kind of thing
that happened to Columbus.
He was sure that the whole world is known
and that he just have to cross the ocean
and
get to Japan.
How can it be that there is an entire
continent that none of
the ancient wise people and not even the
Bible knew, knew that it existed?
In his refusal to admit ignorance,
Columbus
was still a man of the Middle Ages.
He was convinced that he knew the whole
world.
And even when he encountered
America, it wasn't enough to change his
views.
The first modern man was Amerigo Vespucci.
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian sailor who
took part in several
of the first expeditions to America around
the year 1500.
Between 1502 and 1504, two texts
which describes the expedition to America
were published in Europe, and
they were attributed to this man, this
sailor, Amerigo Vespucci.
Now these texts, they argued something
revolutionary.
They argued that the new land that
Columbus discovered, were
not islands off the coast of China, or
Japan or Indonesia.
But, that this was an entire continent
unknown to
classical geographers and unknown to the
Bible and to contemporary Europeans.
Five years later, in 1507, a very famous
German map maker called Martin Valdez
Muller, he was convinced by this argument,
and he published a new world map,
which was the first world map in Europe to
show that
the new lands discovered by Columbus were,
was actually a new continent.
A separate continent which has nothing to
do with Asia.
It's not it's East, East Asia.
It's a new continent.
Now Waldseemuller when he drew this new
map and
this new continent he had to give it a
name.
He mistakenly
believed that Amerigo Vespucci, the person
who wrote these texts,
had been the first person to discover
America and not Columbus.
So, Waldseemuller named the new continent
in
honor of Amerigo Vespucci who discovered
it.
He called it America, because of the name
Amerigo.
The Waldseemuller map became very popular
and many other cartographers and
map makers copied his map along with the
name that he gave to the new continent.
And there is some poetic justice.
In the fact that about a quarter of
the world, two continents out of seven
continents,
South and North America, are named after a
little known Italian whose only claim to
fame is
that he was the first person who had the
courage to say, we
don't know, there is here an entire
continent which we simply know nothing
about.
And this was the foundational event of the
scientific
revolution, the discovery of America is
what really began the
scientific revolution because it taught
Europeans to favor present
observations over past traditions and
sacred texts.
And the desire to conquer and control
America obliged the
European conquerors to start searching for
new knowledge very, very quickly.
If the conquerors, if the Spaniards, the
Portuguese,
and later the English, and Dutch, and
French.
If they really wanted
to control the vast new territories that
they found
in America, they had to gather enormous
amounts of
new data about the geography, the
climates, the animals,
the people, the languages, the cultures of
this new continent.
All other previous knowledge in the Bible,
in Christian scriptures, in all geography
book.
All the ancient traditions,
were of little help to you, if you wanted
to find your way in the new
world of America.
To understand the depth of this
revolution, let's now take a look at
another world map drawn in
Italy in 1525, about 30 years after
Columbus.
Whereas the previous map we saw, the one
from
1459, is full of continents and
islands and very detailed explanations of
all the places in the world.
The 1525 map, what characterizes it, is
that it is mostly empty.
The eye wanders.
Look at the pho, at, at the area which is,
which contains America.
You can see here the coast, the western
coast of America, and you can follow the
coast south
and south until, suddenly, it disappears
into empty
space.
Anyone looking at this world map who
has even minimal curiosity is immediately
tempted to ask what's
beyond this point what's, what is there in
all the huge blank
empty spaces on the map And the map does
not give you any answers.
The map admits that we don't know what's
out there, and the map invites you, the
observer, to set sail and find out for
yourself what's out there in the blank
spaces.
From that point onwards, not only European
geographers, but European
scholars in almost all other fields of
knowledge
and science began to draw maps with blank
spaces.
They begin to admit that their theories
about physics
or biology or economics or whatever, are
not perfect.
There are important things which we simply
don't know.
In the following centuries, the Europeans
were drawn
to these blank spaces on the maps, as if
they were, they were magnets.
During the 15th and 16th and 17th
centuries, European expeditions,
circumnavigated Africa, explored America,
crossed the Pacific and the Indian
Oceans and created a network of bases and
colonies all over the world.
They established the first,
truly global empires and united the entire
globe into a single trade network.
The European
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expeditions transformed the history of the
world from the
history, from many histories of isolated
peoples and cultures
into a single history of a single
integrated human
society.
These explore and conquer expeditions of
the Europeans are so familiar to us that
we tend to overlook just
how unique and extraordinary they were.
Nothing like it had ever happened before
in history.
Long distance campaigns of conquest are
not a
natural undertaking for people, not even
for big empires.
Throughout history, most human societies,
even most kingdoms
and empires, they were so busy in local
conflicts with their neighbors that they
never considered exploring
and conquering unfamiliar distant lands.
Most
of the great empires of history extended
their control
only over familiar lands around them.
They reached very
far places simply because, as they kept
growing and growing,
they came in contact with more and more
lands and, and conquered them, too.
For example, the Romans at first
controlled only the
city of Rome in the center of Italy, but
then in order to defend Rome against
invasion from
the North, they conquered Etruria, what is
today Tuscany.
Then, in order to defend Etruria they
conquered the Po Valley and subsequently
they conquered Province in what is today
Southern France to defend
the Po Valley, the conquered Gull, in
order to defend Province.
And finally, they conquered Britain in
order to defend Gull, again it's invasion.
It took the Romans about 400 years to get
like this, step by step.
Form Rome to Britain.
But in the beginning of the process, signs
of 4th century BC.
No Roman would have imagined to simply
sail
directly to Britain, explore it and
conquer it.
It did happen from time to time, that an
ambitious ruler or an adventurer
would embark on some very long range
campaign of conquest, but such campaigns
of conquest, even then, usually tried to
conquer
an existing and familiar empire, not
completely unknown lands.
For example, the campaigns of Alexander
the Great
did not result in the discovery of new
lands and the establishment of a new
empire,
rather, they were simply an attempt, a
successful attempt,
to conquer, to take over an existing
empire, the empire of the
Persians.
The closest precedence to
the voyages of discovery of the modern
Europeans were the voyages
of discovery the Chinese empire sent in
the early 15th
century.
Between 1405 and 1433, a Chinese
admiral, Zheng He, led seven huge fleets,
seven huge armadas, from China, to explore
the Indian
ocean.
The largest of these seven expeditions,
contained almost 300 ships, and carried
close to
three to 30,000 people.
Sailors, soliders, officals and
so forth.
Zheng He visited and explored to some
extent Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, the
Persian Gulf, the Red sea and East Africa.
In the early 15th century, Chinese ships
reached Malinde on
the shore, of what is today, the Kenya, in
East Africa.
compared to the fleet of Zheng He, the
fleet
of Christopher Columbus in 1492, which
consisted
of only three small ships and 120 sailors
was
like a mosquito.
I mean, what is three ships and 120
sailors that, that Columbus had compared
to Zheng He with 300 ships and
30,000 eh,eh people.
Yet, even though the Zheng He
expeditions were very eh, formidable,
there was
a crucial difference between Zheng He and
Columbus.
Zheng He, yes he explored the ocean and he
assisted the pro-Chinese rulers in
southern Asia, but he did not try
to conquer or colonize the countries he
visited.
And more importantly these expeditions of
Zheng He,
they were not deeply rooted in Chinese
politics and culture.
They were the result of some chance
policy of one particular ruling faction in
Beijing.
When the ruling faction of the Chinese
empire changed in the middle of the 15th
century, the overland, the eh, oversea
expeditions were completely eh,
stopped, they were terminated.
The great fleet, that Zheng He built was
dismantled, the technical, the
geographical knowledge was lost.
And no explorer of such eh, ambition or
statute, ever set sail again from a
Chinese port.
The Chinese rulers in the following
centuries
like most Chinese rulers in previous
centuries, they restricted their interests
and ambitions
only to East Asia, and never again tried
to explore and conquer Southern Asia.
The Zheng He expeditions are nevertheless
very important, because they prove that
Europe did not enjoy any outstanding
technological or economic advantage
over the Chinese or over, over other
people.
What made Europeans exceptional was their
ambition,
unparalleled ambition to explore and
conquer the world.
And the fact that other people, other
empires like the Chinese or the Muslims or
the Indians, they did not send expeditions
to explore and conquer distant and
unfamiliar lands.
This should not surprise us and this was
not due to lack of abillity.
It was simply due to
lack of interests.
The Roman never had any interest in
conquering Scandinavia or India, the
Persians never
attempted to conquer Madagascar or Spain,
and the Chinese never
attempted to conquer Indonesia or Africa.
And again, this shouldn't surprise
us, because why should the Romans try to
conquer far away India?
Or why should the Chinese try to conquer
Indonesia or Africa?
What sense does it make?
The really strange thing is that early
modern Europeans caught some kind of
madness that
drove them to sail to distant and
completely unknown lands
full of alien cultures, take one small
step on the beach
and immediately declare, I claim all this
land for my country, for my king.
This is very, very strange.
Even after the Europeans began to send
these expeditions of exploring and
conquering the world.
The other main powers in the world like
the
rulers of the Middle East and India, and
China.
They still did not try to compete with
them.
The European these, these expeditions were
so strange that even after
the great empires of Asia saw what was
happening, they didn't try
to compete.
They heard pretty quickly the rulers of
China or the Ottoman Empire about
the discovery of America and about later
about the discovery by
Europeans of new lands, in Africa and
Australia in the Pacific Ocean.
But even then, the rulers of China and
India
and the Middle East displayed very little
interest in
these discoveries.
They continued to believe that the world
revolves around Asia.
And that nothing of importance exists in
America or
Africa and therefore they made no attempt
to compete with
Europeans for control of America, or for
control of the
new ocean trade rules in the Atlantic and
the Pacific.
At the time, even very very small European
kingdoms like
Scotland and Denmark, they too send, try
to send a few
exploring and conquering expeditions to
America, but not
one expedition or, or one exploration or
one conquest
was ever attempted in America by the
Muslims, or
Indians or Chinese.
There was never a case say that the
Ottoman sultan sent an
army, say in 1600, to try and conquer and
explore Mexico, Australia.
The first time that a non-European power
tried to send a military
expedition to America was only in the
Second World War when Japan,
in 1942, sent an expedition towards Alaska
that managed
to conquer two small islands near the
Alaskan coast, Kiska and Attu.
Capturing in the process, ten US soldiers
and one dog.
This was the closest that any non European
power
ever came to waging an invasion of the new
world
of America.
It cannot be argued that they didn't have
the means to do it.
The Ottomans and the Chinese, they had the
technology and they were close enough.
There were not much more distance from
America than the Europeans.
They had the technological, the economics,
the military abilities to reach America
and to try to compete with Euoropeans for
control of the new world.
The resources that were enough to send
Zheng He with 30,000 people
from China to East Africa in the 1420s
should have been more than enough
to reach America but the Chinese were just
not interested because they didn't think
that there was anything imp, important
which they don’t already know about.
That some
place in the new world there can be
something that is important for
China.
The first world map in China that actually
showed America as part of the world was
published only in 1602.
More than a hundred years after Columbus.
And even that map was published by
a European missionary, not by a Chinese
geographer.
So, for 300 years after Columbus, the
Europeans enjoyed undisputed
mastery, in America, in the Atlantic
Ocean, in the Pacific Ocean, there
were many struggles for controlling these
new territories, but all the struggles
were between different European powers,
all between the European powers and
the local population.
The big, powerful kingdoms and empires of
Asia and Africa did not try to intervene.
And it was the resources and the wealth,
that the Europeans accumulated
in these new lands and America and the
oceans in Australia,
that eventually gave them enough power to
compete with
the Asian empires in Asia itself and to
defeat them.
When the Ottomans, the Persians, the
Indians
and the Chinese finally understood that
America
was important, that the oceans of the
world were important, it was already too
late.
They were already too far behind the
Europeans.
We see then that
what united modern science and European
imperialism
was the urge to discover and conquer new
things and new lands.
The empire supported scientific
explorations because these
explorations again and again proved
themselves very useful.
this began when the empire supported
geographical expeditions.
The first really important science of the
scientific revolution was geography.
Not physics or chemistry or biology, at
first geography was the most important
science, it received the biggest in
investments,
and it gave back the biggest results.
It gave the Europeans mastery over new
lands and new oceans.
But what began with Geography.
Soon spread to other disciplines, other
areas, such as medicine
and physics and logistics, and economics,
and anthropology and history and so forth.
In the next segment we will continue to
examine how European
imperialism and European science, became
closely connected to
each other.
And how the Empire supported
science, while the scientists
supported and opened the way for empire.
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