Author(s): Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

History

1492: The Year Our World Began by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto traces modernity to its roots in the year 1492. It focuses on specific events of 1492 (including the Renaissance and voyages of Columbus) which Fernandez-Armesto views as crucial to the development of modern ways of thinking and the physical state of the world today. Exploring how the creation of the earliest surviving globe showed a world shrinking with advances in cartography as a result of exploration, Fernandez-Armesto shows how people, separated by millions of years of geographical change and evolution in terms culture and ecology, began to set out to chart the places they visited, shifting the balance of global power west and establishing a global trade which prefigured that of today, while China marked time. While civilizations were rediscovering one another, however, further divisions emerged as Granada, the last Muslim-ruled state in Western Europe, fell to Spanish Christians confining Islam to the southern shore of the Mediterranean and the Sahara. Meanwhile, Jews expelled from Spain were making their way to destinations around the Mediterranean and Russia was expanding North. With confessional, sovereign states on the rise and challenging the pluralistic empires of the past, ideological differences were more than ever becoming a pretext for war. Power and economic concerns were at the forefront in Florence and Rome, and science and secular clashed with the supernatural. 1492: The Year Our World Began explores a crucial, yet largely neglected point in history and demonstrates how events during this year and the surrounding period began the globalisation and hegemony of the West and the shaping of power relations which we see today.