The Global Opportunity, and: The European Opportunity, and: The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed (review)

These volumes are the first three to appear in Variorum's major new series, "An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450-1800." The series is an ambitious undertaking that will eventually include more than thirty specialized volumes of reprinted scholarly articles in categories such as technology and science, society and culture, government and empire, and exploitation. The initial three all fall into the category of expansion, interaction, and encounters. The aim of the series, according to its general editor John Russell-Wood, is to get beyond narrowly focused themes and present "the multicontinental, multi-oceanic and multinational dimension of the European activities." The approach emphasizes "the cross-cultural con-text of European activities and...how collaboration and cooperation between peoples transcended real or perceived boundaries" of various sorts (p. ix).

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, a specialist in European expansion, edited the first two volumes. In The Global Opportunity he has selected articles to show that the pre-Columbian world was filled with expanding societies, that every continent had groups that were expanding at the expense of their neighbors or had potential to do so, and that for various reasons "most of them failed to develop [the potential] or abandoned the initiative to the Europeans" (p. xii). Thus we have discussions of Chinese maritime expansion by Joseph Needham, Robert Finlay, Pin-Tsun Chang, and Kuei-Sheng Chang. (Throughout the three volumes, assertions of the vast size of late medieval Chinese ships mainly go unchallenged.) Also included are articles by Charles Issawi on the decline of Middle Eastern trade, by Andrew Hess on Ottoman maritime expansion, by Yves-Pierre Manguin on Southeast Asian ships, and by Kenneth R. Hall on trade in Malasia. All these deal mainly with oceanic concerns, but Michael Tymowski's article on the role of the Niger River within the western Sudan describes an inland trading area. Hall's article on Javanese maritime influence gives support to Fernández-Armesto's assertion that an extraplanetary ob-server in the fourteenth century might well have bet on Java as the first world power. Two large-scale comparative essays, very different from one another, add particular interest to the expressed aim of the series, addressing comparative questions. One is by A.P.Usher on comparative demography and territorial expansion in Eurasia. Dating from 1930, it is the oldest article in the three volumes, but as the editor states, its comparative concerns anticipate more recent scholarly trends. The other is Chris Wickham's effort to find a common mode of socioeconomic analysis for Eurasian polities, in order to overcome particularistic claims that are constantly maintained for individual regions.

If many groups before the 1490s had the potential to develop into global or at least multicontinental explorers and empire builders, it was the Europeans who seized the initiative thereafter. This is the focus of Fernández-Armesto's second volume, The European Opportunity, which is divided into three sections on means, motives, and momentum, following the classic formulation of J.H.Parry. In the first part are articles on geographical thought (Thomas Goldstein), methods of navigation (Paul Adam), Portuguese shipbuilding (Richard Unger), international capital (Jacques Heers), and Italian influence in Portugal and Castile (Charles Verlinden). The section on motives includes two articles dealing with Henry the Navigator (P.E.Russell and Guy Beaujouan), one on religious motivations (C.F.Beckingham and Pauline Moffit Watts), and one on the search for gold (Andrew Watson). The "momentum" section is less sharply focused and includes articles dealing with the medieval background of European oceanic expansion and empire building. Charles Verlinden treats the...