Journal Entry History

Introduction World History? Since 1500? History 111 – World History since 1500

Spring 2022

Jorge Minella (jminella@umass.edu)

An Empire’s Map On Exactitude in Science Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, translated by Andrew Hurley.

…In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map

of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the

Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no

longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire

whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point

with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of

Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless,

and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the

Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there

are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the

Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.

—Suarez Miranda,Viajes devarones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658

Art by Tim Brumley - https://www.artstation.com/artwork/ZGPkww

Overview

Historical orientation.

Patterns and trends.

Change and ruptures.

What and how?

World Civilizations

 Triumph of Western Civilization?

 Civilization paradigm.

 Rise and fall.

Crusader Kerak Castle, Jordan.

New Approaches to World History

 Zones of interaction.

 Global processes.

 New understandings of modernity.

Bosphorus Strait, Turkey.

Zones of Interaction

 Seas and oceans.

 Various types of encounters.

 Flows of people, goods, capital, ideas, technology, diseases, plants, animals, etc.

Chinese Map (Kangnido Map), 1402.

Global Processes and Local Realities

 Local

 Global

 Multiple perspectives.

Detroit Industry murals, by Diego Rivera, 1933..

Modernity

 Triumph of the “West”?

 Democracy, freedom, and material prosperity?

 Exploitation.

Cutting the Sugar-Cane, 18th Century Caribbean.

Agency

 Uneven, but not one- sided modernity.

 Agency: to act and shape historical circumstances.

 Historical recognition.

 Complexity of History. Map of Quilombo of São Gonçalo, a maroon community in Minas Gerais, Brazil, 1769. National Library (Brazil).

Afro-Eurasia in Fifteenth Century

 Economic recovery.

 Rise of maritime trade.

 Rise of the Ottomans in the crossroads of Europe and Asia.

Land Silk Roads and Maritime Trade

Constantinople, the crossroads of Eurasia  Changes in the Eastern Mediterranean.

 1453 – Fall of Constantinople (current day Istanbul).

 Taken from the Christian Byzantine Empire by the Islamic Ottoman Empire.

 Military innovation.

 Relatively tolerant religious policy.

 Changes in trade.

 New actors.

 Search for new routes.

Le siège de Constantinople (1453) by Jean Le Tavernier after 1455

Upcoming Lectures

 The Americas before European arrival.

 Colonization of the New World.

 Fall of Constantinople (1453); Contact between Europeans and Native Americans (1492).

 Some of the watershed moments opening the modern era.

 Global consequences.