An Interview with Felipe Fernández-Armesto

July/August 2007 Historically Speaking 9 An Interview with Felipe Fernândez-Armesto Conducted by Donald A. Yerxa FEUPE FERNÂNDEZ-ARMESTO IS ONE OF THE MOST creative andambitious contemporary historians, so much so thathe has been likenedto such luminaries as Gibbon, Montesquieu, Arnold Tqynbee, Fernand Braudel, and A.J.P. Taylor. HeisPrince ofAsturiasProfessorof History atTufts Universityand also holdsan appointmentasprofessorofglobalenvironmentalhistory atQueenMary, University of London. Fernández-Armesto is the authorof nineteen books, including Millennium: A History of the LastThousand Years (Scribner, 1995);Truth: A History and a Guide for the Perplexed (ThomasDunneBooks, 1999);Civilizations (Macmilkn, 2000); Food: A History (Macmillan, 2001); and The Americas: A Hemispheric History (ModernLibrary, 2003). HisPathfinders: A Global History of Exploration waspublished by Norton in 2006. It is a sweeping examination of those who initiated routes of contact thatputpreviously divergent societies of the world back in touch with each other. Historically Speaking editorDonald Yerxa sat down with Fernández-Armesto on March 27, 2007 to discuss Pathfinders and othertopics. Donald Yerxa: Would you provide our readers with a brief summary of your argument in Pathfinders? Felipe Fernández-Armesto: Pathfinders is about what I call laying the infrastructure of global history . It focuses on the people who found the routes that connected previously sundered cultures. How have these come to establish so much mutual contact? It has been by human vectors, and it has been done along routes of contact. So the questions I ask are: Who discovered those routes? How did they do it? Mine is a narrative with the implicit argument that cultural exchange has made the world what it is. Yerxa: Do you believe that crosscultural encounters provide the spine and organizing principle of world history? Map of the Caribbean in Theodor de Bry, OccidentaleAmericae partis, vel eanim Regionum quas Christophe-rus Columbus ... (1594). Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Fernández-Armesto: The big problems of our past are: What makes human culture distinctive? Why do we have history at all? Why are our societies so volatile compared to those of other cultural creatures? Obviously, cultural exchange is fundamental to trying to answer such questions. But that is not all that global history is about. In addition to how human societies interact with each other, there is also the theme of how they interact with the rest of nature. Yerxa: You have written several books on largescale topics. What is gained and lost when you investigate history on a global scale? Fernández-Armesto: Obviously, what is lost at a research level are the thrills you get from writing monographs, staring a living worm in the face in the archive. But the way I try to do global history, you do not lose that entirely. I do not see global history as a different discipline from history, and the world is composed of a mass of details. In my global historical books there are lots of individual lives and experiences, and I try always to maintain close contact with the sources. I do not start with generalizations but with detail, and I build outward from there. What is gained is that you get a far better sense of comparisons and connections. Sometimes when you are working in a very traditional monographic rut, you miss those entirely. There are some great books out there that are deficient because their authors have been unable to locate their subjects in the contexts of the other periods, other cultures, and other disciplines. In everyday life we always learn from analogy, and as scholars we can learn from comparisons. Another thing you gain is the drive to be interdisciplinary. I liken it to ascending to a tremendously exciting imaginary perspective. I believe that the truth is out there and that there is an objective reality to be grasped. I just don't think we can grasp it all at once. It is a slow process, and every time you switch perspective you get another bit of detail. You see the truth from another angle. If you climb to the cosmic crow's nest and try to see the world whole, you see it differendy. You see more of it. I think the...