The formation of the modern world
The Chinese and Roman emperors, Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan, possessed a worldview that went beyond the narrow confines of the collective imagination of their time; they had a sense of space that was anything but provincial, but these were exceptions: the rule was constituted by the dominion of the particular, of the narrow local space within which the entire existence of the peoples unfolded. Those political and cultural elites dreamed of the ends of the world, but those limits remained dark areas. The scientific Renaissance represented a moment of fundamental censorship between local particularism and the ability to measure oneself with the planet as a whole. It opened with the first hints of overcoming the Ptolemaic vision, thanks to the publication of Copernicus' works, and closed with the trial of Galileo Galilei.
Meanwhile, thanks to the cartography and navigation school promoted and financed by the Portuguese king Henry the Navigator, they learned to use astronomical discoveries for navigation purposes. Exploration of the Atlantic and navigation along the African coasts served as a prelude to the major geographical discoveries which took off, decisively, in the mid-fifteenth century, and had a sort of exceptional watershed in the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
Astronomy, cartography and navigation were, at the same time, the effect of human curiosity and the cause of an increasingly rapid progress along the road of knowledge of the planet Copernicus, Tico Brahe, Kepler, Galileo, overcoming the even remarkable scientific season of Ptolemaic geocentrism, freed astronomical and geographical knowledge from subordination to dogmas and laid the foundations for modern scientific investigation based on empirical observation. Similarly, Columbus and the other great navigators were empiricists reluctant to accept the limitations of their time, and their voyages assumed the connotation of concrete scientific experiments that placed men in a different relationship with the world. If Copernicus and Galileo subverted every astronomical idea, Columbus did the same geographically.
Continent was rejected because its existence and that of its inhabitants did not harmonize with the biblical dictation which contemplated only three descendants of Noah who would have populated as many continents, and no more. Once again the facts proved more convincing, at least after the initial resistance, and that geographical discovery set in motion great upheavals. Slowly the center of gravity of the Earth moved from the Mediterranean to the coasts of the Atlantic. The decline of that small closed sea, which many civilizations had overlooked, was accompanied by the rise of the great Western European powers: Portugal, Spain, France, Holland, England.
The physical data had not changed, but historical events, giving them different meanings, changed their values. The geographical position benefited the Iberians.
The Atlantic Ocean was configured as the world's center of gravity, despite the journeys undertaken by Magellan and then by Cook around the coasts of Australia, also including the Pacific Ocean among the commercial routes. Voyages to the East Indies had widened the horizons eastward, so that the Indian Ocean began to be sailed with some frequency by the Portuguese, Dutch, English and French. However, the axis of trade remained in the Atlantic, and this fact determined the more rapid integration of the American regions into the European economies, albeit in the subordinate condition of colonies.
The invention of printing and the consequent first circulation of books were an extremely important vehicle of knowledge of the world. The books spread news, sometimes fanciful, about distant peoples even among those who had never left the borders of their own country.
In the early 19th century, the overland journey from Europe to the Far East involved the same hardships experienced by Marco Polo centuries earlier. The times needed to travel that distance hadn't changed much. But the transport revolution once again upset the view of the world, which became smaller. Julius Verne could fantasize about a circumnavigation around the globe; his were mostly utopias at the time, but the progress of science in the field of transport allowed him to project himself into a not so distant future, imagining traveling to the center of the Earth, up to the Moon or twenty thousand leagues below the seas.
Ethnocentrism: In Greek bàrbaros means foreigner and the word was commonly used to designate those who did not belong to the Greek ethnic stock and culture. The etymology is onomatopoeic in nature: the duplication of "bar" was intended to imitate the stammering of the foreigner who finds it hard to understand and make himself understood; over time the term took on a somewhat derogatory connotation, so much so that it was usually used as a synonym for "rough" and "uncultured",but also of "wild" and "primitive" and even of "cruel". Therefore barbarian was equivalent to inhuman, separated from Greek humanity and subsequently from that of the peoples in whose lexicon the word in question entered. But who were these peoples? Mythologies tell us: almost everyone; no matter what corner of the globe they happened to live in. Thus, for example, the Inca emperors considered the Cario barbarians, one of the Guarani populations then settled between the coasts of present-day Brazil and the inhospitable lands of the Chaco in Paraguay. The Carios, like the other tribes settled on the edge of the Inca domain, had fairly frequent and regular contacts with those united under the sovereignty of the rulers of Cuzco, yet they were considered by the latter "barbarians".
The proposed considerations allow us to illustrate a fundamental concept for understanding worldviews. Ethnic consciousness and the resulting social ties, feeling united by the same linguistic heritage and identical roots do not develop in the abstract, but spring from a life lived socially in a well-defined territory.
A profound commonality is established between places and men united by tribal ties from which strangers are excluded, relegated to uncertain, little-known and therefore treacherous places, evocative of ancestral fears.
What you don't know is scary and the great ignorance of what was beyond one's borders was an almost universal condition. Those borders were synonymous with the unknown and crossing them was often thought of as an act of pride, of non-acceptance of human limitations, almost a challenge to the forces of infinity, an outrage to the divinities.
We also find this feeling in Dante, when in hell he made Ulysses say, addressing his fellow adventurers:"you weren't made to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge". The mythical lord of Ithaca did not accept the limit and took it badly, at least according to a man of the fourteenth century, such as the Florentine poet. Sentence from the Pillars of Hercule: "from the new land a turbo was born, and the first song struck from the wood. Three times it swirled with all the waters: at the fourth time, lift the stern up and the prow down, as it pleased others finally that the sea was closed over us".
About four millennia separate Alighieri from the times to which the most ancient geographical maps found so far date back and which were made in Mesopotamia. Throughout that time the relationships between the dimensions of the individual lands were distorted by the unconscious need to highlight the observer's point of view, i.e. the space of the community or people to which the cartographer belonged, by placing it in the center and enlarging it.
Faraway peoples and places merged and identified with fantastic depictions, mythical and deformed images; in common parlance they became synonyms of extraneousness, antagonism, perhaps of terror, sometimes of inferiority. Thus, therefore, each people has identified and described what is different from itself. It is a universal and easily explainable anthropological element, since one's cultural identity could be built by accentuating the specificities and differences from neighbors and even more from distant peoples.
A certain ethnocentrism was therefore a necessary condition for each group to be able to affirm itself and the originality of its own culture. These processes have also manifested themselves in that peculiar representation of space which is cartography. In drawing the world every people, in every age, has done nothing but abstractly depict a concrete reality - the world - which for millennia escaped, in its entirety, the effective knowledge of men. Here then were the first rudimentary maps, whose edges faded into uncertain boundaries of the planet, not by chance conceived as large indefinite spaces covered by the waters of the seas on which some taboo often weighed down.
As we have seen, the ethnocentrism that underpinned such a way of proceeding had its own original raison d'etre, which in any case should have dissolved as the more intense contacts between peoples favored mutual knowledge, especially after it was the tumultuous phase of geographical discoveries ended.
In the mid-sixteenth century, after the circumnavigation journey made by Magellan between 1519 and 1522, the geographical maps, although still imprecise, by now depicted the Earth in such a way as to constitute a clear break with the past. The brand new continent was still missing and the suspicion of the existence of Antarctica was barely intuitable. And yet the crassest ingenuities disappeared from the papers, but above all in Europe the mental habit remained and indeed consolidated, the habit of placing one's own land at the centre. Starting from the Renaissance, a new need took over, dictated by the expansionist aims of the nation states that had recently established themselves and aspired to consolidate their hegemony inside and outside the continent.
Even cartography was functional to colonial rule and behind the way in which Europeans designed the world was hidden, in a not so veiled way, a vision of the world that placed them at the centre, striving for economic, political, cultural and economic conquest and submission.
