Reconstructed setting· The columns of time
The world made round
1450 → 1800
An ocean-going ship under sail, and a press with books stacked beside it. In three centuries the coasts of the world were joined, and what was known could be multiplied without being copied out by hand.
What the evidence shows
The first circumnavigation was completed in 1522, and after it any coast could be reached from the east or from the west. Printing with movable type spread through Europe from about 1450, and the two things together define the band: one made the world a single space to move across, the other made it a single space to argue in. The backdrop shows both because neither on its own explains what followed, and because about seventy years separate them.
Bounds and conventions
Everything here is told from the deck of the ship, which is only one of the two places to stand. The same voyages that joined the coasts carried the epidemics that emptied much of the Americas, and a backdrop drawn from the shore would be a different picture entirely.
Sources
- Fernández-Armesto, F. (2006). Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0199295905. Monographie, à valider en relecture.
- Eisenstein, E. L. (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780521219679. Monographie, à valider en relecture.