Felipe Fernández-Armesto has a grand idea. After the formation of separate continents about 150 million years ago, the world’s ‘cultures’ became progressively more ‘sundered’ and its ecosystems more divergent. Then, ‘with extraordinary suddenness’, in 1492 this long-standing pattern ‘went into reverse’: divergence ceased and ‘a new convergent era of the history of the planet began’.
Historians in the West have found it useful to break up the past into rough-and-ready segments — pre-history, followed by ancient, medieval and modern history — without jettisoning the understanding that history is seamless, a story of change and continuity whose events have both distant and immediate causes and effects. And there has long been a consensus that ‘modernity’ has its roots in the Renaissance, of which one vital element was overseas exploration and the discovery of new worlds symbolised by Columbus’ first voyage to America in 1492.
Fernández-Armesto wants to have his cake and eat it, too. He acknowledges the necessity of being ‘flexible about dates, ranging back and forth from what we now think of as 1492 into adjoining years, decades, and ages’, and he points out that ‘most of the transforming initiatives that helped to produce modernity’ came much earlier out of China — printing and paper money, gunpowder, the blast furnace, shipbuilding and navigational aids.
Nevertheless, ‘events in 1492 would make a decisive contribution towards transforming the planet — not just the human sphere but the entire environment in which human life is embedded — more profoundly and more enduringly than those of any previous single year.’
The assertion is more than bold. It is preposterous. To what comparative insignificance, for instance, does it consign the extinction of the dinosaurs 165 million years ago? Fernández-Armesto is not a biologist and he makes no attempt to substantiate his claim that 1492 was decisive for the world’s ecosystem. But he might have taken note of the evidence adduced by Gavin Menzies, in his 1421: The Year China Discovered the World (2002), that before the European ‘discovery’ of America cross-continental propagation of flora and fauna had taken place.
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