Page 162 - Berkshire Encyclopedia Of World History Vol I - Abraham to Coal

afro-eurasia 47

If there is any strength that we have, it is in the numbers. Three-fourth of the world is either black,
brown, yellow or some combination of all these.We will make all nations in the world rainbow
nations . . . • Dato Seri Mahathir bin Mohamad (b. 1925)

in the Black Sea region, such a holistic conception is intellectuals struggled for several centuries to agree on
hardly surprising. Roman scholars, by contrast, despite the location of their continent’s eastern, sealess border.
the empire’s intercontinental span, tended to emphasize Various rivers flowing north-south across Russia com-
the threefold division. Medieval Christians drew maps of manded followings, but in the nineteenth century, schol-
a world revolving around Jerusalem, a point technically ars reached general consensus that the Ural Mountains
in “Asia,” but in their worldview the lands northwest of should be the marker. An obscure Swedish military offi-
the Holy City, that is, Europe, possessed sharp cultural cer first put forth this idea in the previous century, and
and historical definition, whereas most of Asia and pro-Westernizing Russians found it attractive because it
Africa, lands of heathen darkness, did not. emphasized “the European nature of the historical Russ-
ian core while consigning Siberia to the position of an
Making of the Continents alien Asian realm suitable for colonial rule and exploita-
of Europe and Asia tion” (Lewis and Wigen 1997, 27). In the twentieth cen-
Almost all societies that share language and cultural tra- tury, the Ural partition became dogmatic in Western
ditions also possess a foundational myth that situates academic and school geography. It largely remains so
themselves at the center of creation.Their territory is the today despite the flood of historical evidence showing
place where the primordial creator made the first land that those round-topped hills, whose highest peak
mass and the ancestral human beings. From that “conti- reaches only 1,894 meters, have never thwarted human
nent,” as it were, humans went forth to populate the rest communication. Thus, the social construction of the
of the world.The Chinese self-perception as the people of “Continent of Europe” has well served the fundamentally
the earth’s “middle kingdom,” the Hebrew story of the flawed notion that the lands north of the Mediterranean
Garden of Eden, and the Muslim idea of the Dar al-Islam and Black seas possess geographical singularity compa-
(land of surrender to God) versus the Dar al-Harb (land rable to both Asia and Africa and that this European
of war) have all served such mystiques of cultural and his- entity generated unique cultural ingredients and mecha-
torical primacy. nisms that set it intrinsically apart from those two places,
The idea that Europe is one of the earth’s primary as well as from all other continents.
land masses had its origins in Greek thought, took root The eastern land frontier between Europe and Asia has
in the Middle Ages, and became canonical in modern not been the only continental demarcation subject to
times, even as Western geographical knowledge accu- debate and revision. Medieval European geographers, for
mulated to reveal the absence of any significant water- example, took it for granted that the Nile separated
way or other physical partition separating the eastern Africa from Asia, the Red Sea coming into its own as the
side of Europe from what came to be known as Asia. conventional dividing line only in recent centuries. Con-
Thus, Europe’s status as a continent had to rest on excep- tending for a racial definition of continents, a few schol-
tional criteria, specifically its possessing a population that ars have asserted that the Sahara Desert, not the Mediter-
exhibited distinct cultural characteristics—the shared ranean, properly splits Europe from Africa because the
heritage of Western Christendom. Whatever linguistic, desert separates “white” populations from “black” ones.
cultural, and political differences divided Europeans from In the late nineteenth century, scholars introduced the
one another, they all shared, according to the theory, a concept of Eurasia, though with a variety of definitions.
piece of the world distinctive for not being Asia or Eurasia, characterized simply as Asia and Europe as a sin-
Africa, lands inhabited by Muslims and other unfath- gle land mass, though distinguished from Africa, relegates
omable strangers. However, because of the absence of Europe to the status of subcontinent, that is, a large penin-
any compelling physical border separating Europe from sula of Eurasia comparable to South Asia, Indochina, or
Asia north of the Aegean and Black seas, European Arabia. As the world historian Marshall Hodgson has