1492: The Year Our World Began (37 page)

Meanwhile, the world Columbus sought—which, as he said, “Alexander labored to conquer”—eluded him. But another world awaited, of wealth more easily exploited than that of Asia and the Indian Ocean, on
the far side of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, just beyond his reach. As it turned out, the densely populated zone that stretched from East Asia across Europe and North Africa did not stop at the ocean’s edge. There were uncontacted outposts of intense settlement and city life in Mesoamerica and the Andean region, in and around the lands of the peoples we know as the Aztecs and Incas. The route Columbus reported led Europe toward them and their gold and silver and millions of productive people. Beyond them, and in the Caribbean islands along the route, was a vast, underexploited terrain that could be adapted for ranchland and farmland and for a potential plantation economy that would enrich the West.

The incorporation of the Americas—the resources, the opportunities—would turn Europe from a poor and marginal region into a nursery of potential global hegemonies. It might not have happened that way. If Chinese conquerors had bothered with the Americas, we would now think of those areas as part of “the East,” and the international dateline would probably sever the Atlantic.

The World We’re In

H
istory has no course. It thrashes and staggers, swivels and twists, but never heads one way for long. Humans who get caught up in it try to give it destinations. But we all pull in different directions, heading for different targets, and tend to cancel each other’s influence out. When trends last for a short spell, we sometimes ascribe them to “men of destiny” or “history makers,” or to great movements—collectively heroic or myopic—or to immense, impersonal forces or laws of social development or economic change: class struggle, for instance, or “progress” or “development” or some other form of History with a capital
H.
But usually some undetectably random event is responsible for initiating big change. History is a system reminiscent of the weather: the flap of a butterfly’s wings can stir up a storm.

Because history has no course, it has no turning points. Or rather, it has so many that you might as well try to straighten a tornado as attempt to sort them out.

Random mutations, however, sometimes have enduring effects in history, rather as in evolution. Evolution generally makes a bad model for understanding history, but in some ways it offers useful analogies. In evolution, a sudden, uncaused, unpredictable biological mutation intersects with the grindingly slow changes that transform environments. Something works for a while—a big, reptilian body, a prehensile tail, an expanded cranium—and a new species flourishes for a span before it becomes a fossil. Similar changes happen in human communities. Some group or society acquires a distinctive feature, the origins of which we struggle—usually unsuccessfully—to explain. It therefore enjoys a period of conspicuous success, usually ending in disaster, or “decline and fall,” when the society mutates unsustainably or when the environment—cultural or climatic—changes, or when people in some other place benefit from an even more exploitable innovation. We scour the past to spot those moments of mutation, to try to identify those random convulsions that seem briefly to pattern chaos. It’s like looking at a seismograph and seeing the first lurch.

The lines in the current pattern are conspicuous enough. We live in a world of demographic explosion. Western hegemony (which the United States exercises now virtually single-handedly and without much chance of keeping going, at present costs, for much longer) crafts the world, along with global intercommunication and, increasingly, global economic interdependence. Other features we can probably all perceive include cultural pluralism and the tensions it generates; competing religious and secular values—with consequent intellectual uncertainty; culture wars, which threaten to become “clashes of civilizations” rapid technological turnover; information overkill; hectic urbanization; pellmell consumption; growing wealth gaps; expensive but effective medical priorities; and environmental angst. The nearest things we have to universal values—apart, perhaps, from obsessions with health—are varieties of individualism, which favor some widespread trends toward, for instance, representative forms of government, codified human rights, and liberal economics. At the same time, ours is a ditherers’ world, tack
ing without much sense of consistent direction, oscillating between addictions and antidotes. Wars alternate with revulsion from war. Generations alienated from their parents bring their children up to be their friends. Spells of social and economic overplanning are interspersed with madcap deregulation. People satiated with permissiveness go “back to basics.”

This world already looks doomed to extinction. Western power is going the way of previous dinosaurs. The United States—the last sentinel of Western supremacy—is in relative decline, challenged from East and South Asia. Pluralism looks increasingly like a path to showdown instead of a panacea for peace. Population trends on a global level are probably going into reverse. Capitalism seems to have failed and is now stigmatized as greed. A reaction against individual excess is driving the world back to collective values. Fear of terror overrides rights; fear of slumps subverts free markets. Consumption levels and urbanization are simply unsustainable at recent rates in the face of environmental change. The throwaway society is headed for the trash heap. People who sense that “modernity” is ending proclaim a “postmodern age.”

Yet this doomed world is still young: 1492 seems, on the face of it, too far back to look for the origins of the world we are in. Population really started to grow worldwide with explosive force only in the eighteenth century. The United States did not even exist until 1776, and only became the unique superpower in the 1990s. The tool kit of ideas we associate with individualism, secularism, and constitutional guarantees of liberty really came together only in the movement we call the Enlightenment in eighteenth-century western Europe and parts of the Americas, and even then they struggled for survival—bloodied by the French Revolution, betrayed by romanticism.

Most of the other features of our world were barely discernible before the nineteenth century, when industrialization empowered Western empires and made a genuinely global economy possible. Much of the intellectual framework familiar in today’s world was new in the early twentieth century—the first era of relativity, quantum mechanics, psy
choanalysis, and cultural relativism. Individualism had to fight wars against collectivism. Democracy, pitted against totalitarianisms, won a solid-looking victory only when the twentieth century was nearly over. Environmentalism has emerged as a powerful worldwide ideology only in the last forty years or so. Some of the science and technology that make the way we think and live and fear distinctive are of more recent origin—nuclear weapons, micro-IT, the genetics of DNA, the currently fashionable techniques of disease control, the food-production methods that now feed the world. These sudden and rapid new departures are reminders that “modernity”—which, allowing for the variety of more or less equivalent terms, is every generation’s self-description—never starts, but is perpetually renewed.

In any case, it is a fallacy to assume that origins are always remote, or that historical events are like big species—with long ancestries—or big plants with long roots. One of the lessons of our time, for those as old as I am or older, is that changes happen suddenly and unpredictably. Long-running pasts crunch into reverse gear. We who are middle-aged—who have not even seen out a normal lifetime—have watched the British Empire collapse, the Cold War melt, the divisions of Europe heal in “ever-closer” union, the Soviet bloc dissolve. Supposedly autochthonous national characters have self-transformed. The English, for instance—my mother’s people—whom my father described after World War II, with their stiff upper lips and umbrellas as tightly rolled as their minds, have turned into people he would no longer recognize: as mawkish and exhibitionist as everybody else. The stiff upper lips have gone wobbly. The Spanish—my father’s people—have changed just as much, in an even shorter time. The values of austerity, sobriety, quixotism, and lividly, vividly dogmatic Catholicism, which I knew as a child, have vanished, conquered by consumerism and embourgeoisement. Spain is no longer—as the tourist slogans used to say—different. Almost every community has undergone similarly radical changes of character.

Structures based on class and sex today are unrecognizable from those of my childhood. Moralities—usually the most stable ingredients
of the societies that adopt them—have metamorphosed. Gays can adopt children—an innovation my parents’ generation could never have imagined. The pope has prayed in a mosque. Almost every morning brings an awakening like Rip van Winkle’s into a transmuted world. I struggle to understand my students’ language: we no longer share the same cultural referents, know the same stories, recognize the same icons. When I search in class for art we all have in common, it seems that we have hardly ever even seen the same movies or learned the same advertising jingles. The most bewilderingly abrupt changes have been environmental: a melting icecap, desiccated seas, diminished rain forests, engorged cities, perforated “ozone,” species extinguished at unprecedented rates. The world we live in seems to have been made in a single lifetime. It is so mutable, so volatile, that to reckon its gestation at half a millennium or so, and date it from 1492, seems almost quaint.

The big change, I think, that has overtaken my own discipline in my lifetime is that we historians have more or less abandoned the search for long-term origins. What we used to call the
longue durée
has collapsed like a tidied-away telescope. When we want to explain the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, we no longer do as Edward Gibbon did in his classic on the subject and go back to the age of the Antonine emperors (who were doing very well in their day), but say that migrations in the late fourth and early fifth centuries provoked a sudden and unmanageable crisis. When we try to explain the English Civil War of the 1640s, we no longer look back as Macaulay did to traditions supposedly traceable to the “Germanic woods,” or even to the supposed “rise of Parliament” or of “the bourgeoisie” in the late Middle Ages and Tudor period, but see English government strained to the breaking point by a war with Scotland that started four years before the breakdown. To explain the French Revolution we no longer do as Tocqueville did in his unsurpassed history and look at the reign of Louis XIV, but see the financial conditions of the 1780s as crucial. To understand the outbreak of the First World War we no longer do as Albertini did and blame the deficiencies of the nineteenth-century diplomatic system—which was actually
rather good at preserving peace—but at the relatively sudden collapse of that system in the years preceding the war, or even at the intractabilities of the railway timetables of 1914, which, according to A. J. P. Taylor’s notoriously seductive theory, made the mobilization of armies irreversible once it was under way.

Still, it has long been the vocation of historians to thumb back through time, looking for the previously unglimpsed origins of what is conspicuous in every age. With surprising unanimity, the quest for the origins of most of what is distinctive in the modern world has led back to the fifteenth or sixteenth century and to Europe. Most textbooks still make a break—the start of a new volume or part—around 1500. Some of them still call this the beginning of the modern world. Historians—even those who disapprove of traditional periodization—loosely call the few centuries prior to about 1800 the “early modern period.”

The intellectual movements we call the Renaissance and Reformation, for instance, have become associated with claims or assumptions that they made modern social, political, cultural, philosophical, and scientific developments possible. The work of European explorers and conquerors around the globe makes a convincing starting point for the modern history of imperialism and globalization. The date textbooks used to treat as “the beginning of modernity” was 1494, when a French invasion of Italy supposedly unlocked influences from the Renaissance and began to spread them around Europe. A few writers have claimed to trace such supposed constituent features of modern thought as skepticism, secularism, atheism, capitalism, and even ironic humor to medieval Jewish tradition, and have argued that the absorption of these ideas into the European mainstream began with the effectively enforced conversion of Spanish Jews to Christianity.
¹
These claims are untrue but are suggestive in the present context, because the biggest bonanza of conversions almost certainly occurred in the year 1492, when all Jews who refused conversion were expelled from the Spanish kingdoms.

So dating the beginnings of the modern world to a time close to 1500 or thereabouts has a long tradition behind it. I reject the thinking
that underpins the tradition. In the breakers’ yard of history, supposedly cosmic events get pounded into fragments, reduced to a series of local or individual significance. What once seemed world-shattering revolutions are reclassified as transitions. Almost all the claims made for the Renaissance and the Reformation, for instance, have turned out to be wrong. The supposed consequences in our own world—deism, secularism and atheism, individualism and rationalism; the rise of capitalism and the decline of magic; the scientific revolution and the American dream; the origins of civil liberties and shifts in the global balance of power—all appear less convincingly consequential as time goes on. In recent years, revisionist scholarship and critical thinking have loosened the links in these chains of consequence, one by one.

In any case, Renaissance and Reformation were, in global terms, small-scale phenomena. The Renaissance was, in part, a product of cultural cross-fertilization between Islam and the West. It was not a unique “classical revival” but an accentuation of uninterrupted Western self-modeling on ancient Greece and Rome. It edged the West only a little way toward secularism: most art and learning was sacred in inspiration and clerical in control. It was not “scientific”: for every scientist there was a sorcerer. The Reformation was not a revolution: most reformers were social and political conservatives, whose movements were part of a general trend among the godly of Christendom toward the communication of a more acutely felt, actively engaged form of Christianity to previously underevangelized or unevangelized reaches of society and regions of the world. The reformers’ work did not inaugurate capitalism or subvert magic or promote science. Western imperialism, though it started in a conspicuous way in 1492, was not a world-transforming phenomenon until the eighteenth or nineteenth century.

Nevertheless, the world did change in 1492. Events of that year started to change the balance and distribution of power and wealth across the globe, launching communities in western Europe across oceans, empowering a mighty Russian state for the first time, and prefiguring (though not of course producing) the decline of maritime Asia
and of traditional powers around the Indian Ocean and its adjacent seas. Until the 1490s, any well-informed and objective observer would surely have acknowledged these regions as homes to the planet’s most dynamic and best-equipped exploring cultures, with the most impressive records of long-term, long-range achievement. In that fateful decade, rivals from western Europe leapfrogged ahead, while the powers that might have stopped them or outstripped them remained inert.