M. E. Rothwell on Substack

In the Americas, the human cost of Europe’s maritime imperialism was largely borne by the indigenous Amerindians and imported slaves. Overland expansion in the Old World faced tougher resistance and a harsher environment. So here the price of the Occidental breakout was a domestic regime of deepening social and political oppression, whose effects w

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Archbishop Isidore of Seville, writing an encyclopedia called the Etymologiae that circulated widely in manuscript—as many as a thousand handwritten copies survive—had drawn the world as a circle surrounded by oceans and divided by seas into three bodies of land, Asia, Europe, and Africa, inhabited by the descendants of the three sons of Noah: Shem

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These aren’t sculptures, they’re maps of water. Navigators from the Marshall Islands made ‘stick charts’ to record wave patterns in the sea, treating the ocean as terrain—the shells indicate islands. Their methods and skills are the most advanced of any known for ‘reading’ water

On ne conçoit pas, à l’époque où Henrique se met au travail, combien les notions géographiques et nautiques de l’Europe sont rudimentaires. Pendant les sombres siècles d’ignorance et d’abrutissement qui suivirent la chute de l’empire romain, le moyen âge a oublié tout ce que les Phéniciens, les Grecs, les Romains savaient en cosmologie. L’expéditio

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