World by Therborn Göran;

Author:Therborn, Göran;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-01-06T00:00:00+00:00

Scenography: World Space

The social world stage has a pertinent scenic historical background of planetary geography, of connectors and divides. Plains and rivers are connectors. The early high civilizations developed along major rivers and their surrounding plains, narrow around the Euphrates and Tigris and broader along the Yang-tse and Ganges. The vast Eurasian plain connected the European peninsula with the nomad warriors of Huns and Mongols, as well as with the silk of China. Mountains and deserts are divides. The Himalayas cut Central Asia off from South Asia – although a western detour allowed warriors an access route through Afghanistan and the Khyber Pass – the Andes divided South America, and in the North first the Appalachians, then the Rocky Mountains put up (temporary) barriers to US expansion. The Alps have always divided Europe, if not separated north and south. The Sahara, the Gobi, the Takla Makan and the deserts enclosing the ‘Fertile Crescent’ of the Middle East have divided Africa, Northeast and West Asia. Seas and oceans both divide and connect. The Mediterranean and the South China Sea are ancient connectors, with the latter more clearly a border as well. The Arab/Persian Gulf and the Baltic, later also the Caribbean, are examples of regional maritime connectors-cum-dividers. The Indian Ocean connected pre-modern South and West Asia, and East Africa, while also separating them. It’s annual cycle of monsoon winds governed trade and voyages for long into the era of European imperialism (Chaudhuri 1985; 1990).

The North Atlantic provided the same functions, its main early crossings shaped by the ellipse of winds and currents discovered between Sevilla, the Cape Verde Islands, Havana and the Azores back to Iberia (Benjamin 2009: maps 2.6 and 5.1). The Pacific made the Polynesian peopling of the Easter Island, Hawaii and, with a little help from the Indian Ocean, Madagascar possible, but it was an Asian barrier beyond the Philippines, until the route was opened from the west by Americans. Then the connection soon materialized, in the large Chinatowns of San Francisco and Vancouver, and in the Japanese presence in Lima.

The discontinuous navigability of the great African rivers, like the Congo, the Niger and the Zambezi, has separated parts of Africa, as has the tropical central rain forest and the vast Saharan desert, though traversed by caravans bringing slaves and gold to the north and Islamic culture to the south. The fact that the Siberian rivers, the Lena, the Ob and others, run northwards into nowhere has hampered socioeconomic development.

But while the scenography of the world stage is almost entirely nature-made; the layout of airspace is wholly man-made. And long before that became possible, the ancient Chinese Grand Canal and the more adolescent Suez and Panama Canals connected humankind in new important ways. Currently, with man-made global warming and the accompanying melting of ice-caps, the long dreamt-of Northeastern, north of Russia, and Northwestern, north of Canada, passages are beginning to open up.

The layout of the world as continents, separated and connected by vast expanses of water, oceans and seas, is Eurocentric, in the sense that it is a European invention and discovery.

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