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I have been looking for
a suitable course text book to teach an introductory class to first-year
university history students on world history, specifically the early modern
period 1450–1750. From the title, Aaron Shatzman's The Old World, the New
World and the Creation of the Modern World, 1400–1650: An Interpretative
History sounded ideal, so I quickly obtained a copy. Unfortunately, for a
number of reasons, I will not be adopting this text, although it has some good
points.
This book seems to be
written at the end of a career, much of which was spent in university
administration. The guide to the literature generally recommends worthy, but
rather dated texts, and is far too cursory for university study. The
introductory material is too self-referential and prolix, and dwells
excessively on the author and nostalgia for his academic past, rather than the
kinds of intellectual problems the topic presents and which this book should be
addressing.
Then, it is a book
written for an American audience of a previous
generation that still embraces all the old tropes of American apologetica; for
example, the concept of change is considered not merely as a possibility, but a
positive good, and this, of course, is "America's great gift to the world"
(60). Reeling out Turner's frontier thesis in chapter six amounts to a verbal
fanfare of the Star-Spangled Banner. While I would not like to go as far as
dismissing these features per se, they are of little interest to
students who seek more objective treatment of matters of
conquest, trade, settlement, and the rise and fall of civilizations. This is
not a book about world history, but rather how America was 'discovered,' the
problems in conceiving it, and the tribulations and different histories of
settlement in English, French and Spanish examples. While a letter of Afonso de
Albuquerque divulging plans to seize Malacca in 1511 in the eastern hemisphere
is included, and there are Champlains's descriptions of Iroquois Indian life,
there is no attempt to grapple with other great world civilizations of that
time, primarily China, but also Mughal India and Tokugawa Japan. For these
purposes, Charles Parker's recent Global Interactions in the Early Modern
Age may be more suitable. Nor does this book stand back from the historical
detail sufficiently to enable chapters on hot topics like the 'Ecological
Revolution,' or contemplate 'Global Convergence' (to supplement John Darwin's
'Early Modern Equilibrium'). For this, too, readers will have to turn
elsewhere.
The omphalic tendencies in this book are reinforced by
spelling mistakes when foreign languages are approached: the Italian Carlo
Cipolla becomes 'Cippola', Brazilian engenhos are written 'engenhios',
and most glaringly, the captains donatory, or capitães, become
'captians'. The caravel does not need to be italicised as it has entered
sufficiently the English idiom. There are some confusions in the use of
apostrophes, and in the accusative form of 'who'. A section on Portugal begins
– at a rhetorical level one might expect from a 16-year old schoolchild
essay –'King John I sat on the throne in 1415'. Actually, the King had
just acquired the throne in climactic circumstances, amidst massive social
upheaval, and inaugurated an ambitious new dynasty. All of this needs to have
been pointed out, however briefly.
It is nice to see
source materials reproduced in full, and which, as the author himself suggests,
constitute as much as one-third of the whole text, and the publisher has gone
to some lengths to present illustrative material in an appealing fashion.
However, some of the works like the St. Vincent Altarpiece (Figure 1.3) need to
be decoded for the reader in order to fully understand what they are saying.
The author might like to know that there is plenty of available historiography
to turn to here such as David Abulafia, "The Jew on the Altar: the Image of the
Jew in the Veneration of St. Vincent Attributed to Nuno Gonçalves', Mediterranean
Studies (vol. 10, 2002). Sections like 'the emergence of Spanish
American culture' need more than two pages if they are going to be able to say
anything meaningful; indeed one gets the feeling of indirectly learning much
more from source extracts like Philip II's Royal Ordinances Concerning the
Laying Out of New Towns, 1573 (pp. 66–69) than from the author's
interventions. That said, chapters four (on the French challenge in
America) and five (the English settlements) were greatly enjoyable, with
their combination of letters, reports and journal entries, succinct analysis,
and portraits of the protagonists. Thus, in a crowded historiographical arena
full of other contending texts, while short of recommending this book, one can
still find sections worthy of recollection, or of value for use in the classroom.
Stefan Halikowski
Smith teaches world history of
the 1500–1800 period at Swansea University in Wales. He has published Creolization
and Diaspora in the Portuguese Indies:The Social World of Ayutthaya (Brill,
2011) and is completing a second monograph entitled Between Illusions and
Reality: Two Late Seventeenth-Century Unpublished Missionary Tales from
Southeast Asia later this year. He can be reached at s.halikowski-smith@swansea.ac.uk. |
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