Page 161 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

46 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

In a borderless world we can go anywhere. If we are not allowed a good life in our
countries, if we are going to be global citizens, then we should migrate North....
Masses of Asians and Africans should inundate Europe and America.

agricultural technologies have in the past ten thousand nents, that is, the doctrine that the world comprises
years diffused more easily across the region than they seven major land divisions, three of them being Africa,
have along the long north-south axes of either Africa or Asia, and Europe. Western and Western-educated schol-
the Americas. The reason is that in Africa and the West- ars fully articulated the idea that the earth is constituted
ern Hemisphere migrating farmers and herders had to of seven primary “land worlds” only during the first half
make repeated adaptations to new climatic conditions. of the twentieth century. As late as 1950, for example,
In Afro-Eurasia’s northwesterly section, several seas geographers were not fully agreed that the Americas
penetrate deep into the land mass, which partially explain constituted two continents, rather than one, or that Aus-
the relatively early intensification of human cultural tralia deserved continental rather than merely large-island
exchange and attending technical innovation and popu- status.
lation buildup in that region. Elsewhere on the land Since the mid-twentieth century, however, the seven-
mass, long rivers and animal transport technologies facil- continent scheme has become dogmatic in school text-
itated contact between coastal and interior peoples. books, scholarly literature, geographical atlases, and the
Moreover, the chain of seas in western Afro-Eurasia (the popular media, despite fundamental inconsistencies in
Baltic Sea, North Sea, eastern coastal Atlantic, Mediter- the very definition of the word continent. If a continent is
ranean and Black Sea, Red Sea, and Persian Gulf) con- by conventional definition a large mass of land sur-
nect to the southern seas (the Arabian Sea, Bay of Bengal, rounded or nearly surrounded by water, why, critics of the
and the China Seas) to make for a transhemispheric chain sevenfold categorization have asked, do both Europe and
of seas that from at least 4000 BCE permitted captains of Asia qualify as primary land masses, when no distinct
sail craft to relay goods, ideas, and people from the far watery division between them exists? Indeed, the con-
east to the far west of Afro-Eurasia. ventional definition applies well to Australia, Antarctica,
North America, South America, and Afro-Eurasia, making
How Many Continents? for five continents rather than seven. From this five-
Owing in large measure to the linguistic turn in social and continent perspective we may perceive the Mediterranean,
literary research, most scholars today accept the proposi- Red, and Black seas as internal seas of Afro-Eurasia, since
tion that human beings socially construct and name geo- they are inconsequential intercontinental partitions com-
graphical spaces. Even mountain ranges and river valleys pared with the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Indeed, geog-
exist in nature only insofar as humans agree on the cri- raphers, travelers, merchants, and soldiers have long
teria for determining their characteristics, unity, and lim- known by experience the irrelevance of these waters as
its.Thus, nation-states, ethnic territories, climatic zones, barriers to human contact. As soon as humans invented
and continents are invariably constructions susceptible to sturdy rafts and sailboats, which in the Red Sea region
social acceptance, rejection, or modification over time. may have occurred as long as 100,000 years ago, people
The idea of Afro-Eurasia is equally constructed as a place began to traverse these seas and transform them into busy
on the world map and as an arena of historical develop- channels of cultural and commercial exchange.
ments. So far, however, this construction has gained little The ancient Greeks, whose world centered on the
attention or credence despite the supercontinent’s ready Aegean Sea, were the first we know of to identify Europe
discernibility on the globe and despite accumulating evi- to the northwest,Asia to the east, and Africa to the south
dence of complex, long-distance intercommunication as distinct regions. But the Greeks also imagined these
among its peoples since very ancient times. three zones as comprising parts of a larger integrated
The greatest impediment to recognition of Afro-Eurasia whole, the orbis terrarum, or “world island.” Considering
as a geographical entity has been what the geographers Greek commercial and colonial enterprise all around the
Martin Lewis and Kären Wigen call the myth of conti- rim of the eastern and central Mediterranean, as well as