The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed by Ursula Lamb

Author:Ursula Lamb [Lamb, Ursula]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351888769
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2016-12-05T00:00:00+00:00

9

Generalizations: European Source Regions

D. W. Meinig

Geographically the topic of American beginnings leads to a focus upon southwestern Iberia. Seville and Lisbon were the first great seats of American enterprise, the pivotal points linking American operations to all the wider European world. Although both centers prospered as a result of America, both were as much involved in the cause as in the effect. Each had grown from rich surroundings, the plains of Andalusia and Estremadura, which had been brought to a state of intensive cultivation and high productivity under the Muslims, before being conquered by Christian kingdoms from the north.

Of greatest significance for the outreach to America was the encounter, interaction, and intricate convergence in these two areas—and only in these areas in anything like this magnitude—of two great cultural traditions: imperial conquest and commercial seafaring. The former was brought to these lowlands by the Castilians and the Portuguese from their long continuous history of recovery of lands from the Muslims; the latter was brought by the Genoese, Venetians, Catalans, Jews, and others from the ancient cosmopolitan centers of the Mediterranean. It is not that seafaring and conquering had never been combined before; the Crusades are but one example among many from the history of the Mediterranean littoral to suggest otherwise. But never had such a highly developed set of institutions for the seizure, administration, and resettlement of new territories and their populace, an entire system of conquest, become so fully articulated with such a highly developed set of institutions for the financing, production, shipment, and marketing of goods. Furthermore, these traditions were compatible in numerous ways, reinforcing one another with different techniques and experience applicable to the same purpose. Both were fundamentally aggressive and predatory. Plunder and conquest were as much a part of the intensely competitive commercial world of the Mediterranean as of the landed world of Iberia, as demonstrated by the Catalans in the Balearics, the Genoese in Corsica, and the Venetians in Crete. And both traditions included experience with planting as well as conquest. Mediterranean companies had often undertaken the development of new resources, reclamation of wastelands, and repopulation of devastated districts.

6. The Iberian Culture Hearth.

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