The Burdens of Empire

I

Adam Smith – echoing the Abbyé Guillaume Raynal – famously described the voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama as the “greatest and most important” events in the history of mankind. The origin of this conceit, although neither man mentions it, was the Spanish historian Francisco López de Gómara, and some version of it was still being repeated, albeit in a modified form, in the mid-nineteenth century by the Hegelian geographer Ernst Kapp and in the twentieth by Carl Schmitt. But whereas Gómara had seen the discovery of America (he makes no mention of Vasco de Gama) as an event in the history of the spread of Christianity, and Kapp was to see it, together, in his case with the circumnavigation of the globe, as marking the final stage of evolution of human civilization, what both Smith and Raynal understood by their claim was that the discovery of America and of a sea route to India marked the creation of the modern commercial system, of which Raynal's best-selling Philosophical and Political History of the Two Indies was both a history and a celebration. Columbus and Gama had, furthermore, not merely transformed geography and hugely increased the amount of transactionable merchandise in the world; they had united mankind, by linking together the four (major) continents of which the world had hitherto been divided.

The story of what the “discovery”, and in this context it truly was a discovery not an “encounter”, by Europeans of the worlds beyond Europe – first Africa, America, and India, and finally the Pacific – have meant for the European perception of their own environments is a narrative (or rather a series of narratives) whose origins are to be found in the ancient geographical vision of the world. In antiquity this world, the cosmos or mundus or orbis terrarum had traditionally been conceived as an island surrounded by the Ocean – Okeanos – an encircling river which constituted the final periodos and peirata, the boundaries and the limits which enclosed all humanity.