How might the old world had evolved if there were no american continents? I can’t help but view history as having a strong divide, arguably the strongest, once the New World was discovered. It was a giant push toward exploration, settlement, and separation that lasted hundreds of years.
I’m mostly going to take a back seat here, since I’m not very well educated in world history and won’t have much to offer. But I do like a good display of the brainpower of those here that do.
I think Europe would have been a much smaller influence on world affairs. If you leave out the Americas, Europe is just a small region off on one edge of the world. It was the discovery of the Americas that made places like Spain, Portugal, England, France, and the Netherlands world powers and spread western culture throughout the world.
I think there’s also an argument to be made that the discovery of the Americas led to the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Industrial and Scientific Revolutions. All societies, including those of Western Europe, had always been very tradition-based. What was good enough for our great-great-grandfathers is good enough for us. Tradition provided all the answers you needed and shouldn’t be questioned. But the Americas weren’t covered under tradition; they were a major indisputable discovery that had been totally unknown. People were suddenly asking that if tradition had missed something that big, what else might it be wrong about? Maybe there were other big things out there waiting to be discovered or invented.
Food would be completely different across the world. The list is endless but potatoes, tomatoes, and corn for instance are indigenous to the New World. Imagine Italian food without tomatoes.
Philip José Farmer wrote a sci-fi — or more properly, fantasy — book using this premise in 1966 (mistitled The Gate of Time, it was republished in 1979 using its proper title, Two Hawks from Earth). The protagonist, Roger Two Hawks, is an Iroquois bomber pilot who is forced to bail out during the raid on Ploiesti. When he lands (and after experiencing an odd sensation), he finds that not only are the people who rescue him not Romanians, but also that they speak a language closely related to Iroquois.
In Farmer’s scenario, the ancients who crossed the Bering land bridge never did so — there was no such thing — but turned westward instead and populated central Europe. This displaced the populations we’re familiar with, so that England is primarily Cretan and Semitic. (IIRC, the Hittites also make an appearance.)
That’s about as far as my memory will take me, and I’m far too lazy to go rummaging through used bookstores to find a copy. Perhaps the scenario isn’t very likely, though Farmer is usually pretty clean with his research; but it seems at least plausible.
Little Nemo, that’s interesting, and it raises another question. Is humanity again growing stale, and will space exploration and eventual colonization provide another “New World” to challenge our modern “traditions”?
Those who argue that the discovery of the Americas supported the Renaissance point to the relative failure of the Ottonian Renaissance a few centures earlier that faded out - the Italian Renaissance could have also been a passing local fad.
I don’t think so. The thing about science is that it works. Once you start using it, it produces results and those results reinforce the willingness to keep using it. The answers were always out there; people just needed to start asking the questions.
It is interesting to look back at the history of science and see that it had so much trouble getting traction until the Americas seem to offer an adequate separation from those institutions that opposed and even oppressed it. It seems the ancient Greeks were really on to something, then it all disappeared. The dark ages fell, and we didn’t seem to come back around until after the discovery of the Americas. Would it be fair to call the Americas a deep breath that the world needed at the last possible moment to maintain our progression as a species into science and technology?
Also, life without tomatoes and potatoes. ::shudder::
The historiography of the Renaissance is pretty interesting. 19th century historians were very keen to point out that that the Renaissance represented a radical change from medieval thinking but more recent scholars have shown that the break isn’t so distinctive. Nor was it necessarily an age were reason began to take hold. The intense witch-hunting of Europe occurred between1450-1750 and saw nearly 90,000 people brought to trial and 45,000 of them executed. In some ways it would appear the middle ages were more enlightened.
The origins of the Renaissance lie before the discovery of the western hemisphere. You had the formation of what we consider to be early modern states in Portugal an Spain (by 1492 and would have happened with or without the Americas), whatever influence the plague of the 14th century might have had in changing European society, and European powers were already well on their way to building the technology necessary to dominate the world.
It’s tough to play “what if” though it’s certainly a lot of fun. Would the European Renaissance have fizzled out like it did in the Ottoman Empire? I don’t know. After all the Europeans weren’t the Ottomans so why would I expect a similar outcome? Even without the Americas the Europeans were still keen on expanding trading routes and influence into the Orient. They were building much more sophisticated ships than most Asians and could out-navigate them as well.
The classical Greeks weren’t really scientists. They’re more aptly called natural philosophers. They made up theories about the kinds of things that science now studies but the important distinction is that they saw no need to ground their theories in facts; they thought the value of a theory was based on how eloquent and/or logical it was, not on how well it explained the experimental evidence. The scientific method, as we now understand it, was developed in the 10th century by Abu Ibn al-Haytham.
^^^ I guess that’s what I mean about how they were “on to something.” I just don’t know how to articulate well sometimes.
If circumstances were different, I think they were very close to a scientific movement, that could have produced the scientific method. This didn’t stop them from producing a lot of valuable scientific advances, knowledge and information. Right?
There are two ways to approach the question, one of them utterly unproductive. That one, is if the Americas weren’t there at all. That would mean no Gulf Stream, no inhabitable Europe, who knows what else.
The interesting one is, What If the Americas had been uninhabited in 1492? Well, for starters, it would likely have remained that way for a while. Columbus and his merry men would have starved to death on the alien shores, and exploitation of the area would have continued as the province of Breton fishermen for a while longer. (By uninhabited, I’m also figuring the Vikings never got around to doing the Vinland thing. Hey, fantasy: in for a dime, in for a dollar.) Eventually, just working with trig and knowing the diameter of the Earth, along with some observations of ocean currents, somebody would have figured out something was there, and had the resources to look into the matter. Western Europeans, Chinese, West Africans, all of them? My crystal ball sees many alternate-history scifi books…
A lot of people don’t understand the real foundation of science. Science is not just a collection of various observed facts being described by plausible jargon - science is when you actually understand why something works not just have the ability to describe how something works.
A person who watchs a lot of rocks being thrown will eventually figure out a bunch of rules for where a rock will land based on how big it is and how hard you throw it. But a person who understands physics will be able to tell you where a thrown rock will land even if he’s never seen one.
There was also another major point that Farmer made in that book (and one relevant to the discussion): No North America, no Gulf Stream, and Europe’s climate is significantly colder. Rome, for instance, is further north than New York – no sunny Italy. London is roughly at the same lattitude as Calgary.
I was going to point out that, IMNSHO, one thing that made the Italian Renaissance so pervasive was that it was happening just as Gutenberg’s printing press was invented, making dissemination of ideas fantastically easier.
The other thing that bothers me about Little Nemo’s first post in this thread was the assertion that without the Americas to energize and magnify the influence of the various European powers they would have languished with only a local influence, is that there were already trading pressures to try to control the trans-Levant, or Indian, trade routes. There still would have been economic pressures and rewards for the nations that could colonize India or China, even without the example of the wealth coming from the New World. I’m not an expert, but my impression is that the direct influence of things from the New World on the establishment of the British Raj in India, or other similar colonial regimes in various Old World empires, is very, very small.
I’ll admit, part of my reaction is emotion, because it sounds like Frontier Theory again, and that’s something I always found annoying in it’s assumptions.
Is it still considered the standard theory that horses evolved in the New World, and crossed the land bridge in the other direction? If that is the case, wouldn’t that have a huge effect on things, too? Without horses (well, steppe ponies) I don’t think that there’d have been the Mongol Empire.
I agree that their would have been European travel and trade to Eastern Asia; the start of that predated the discovery of the Americas and its motives were independent. But actual conquest is a whole different level. Conquering a continent is a major undertaking and requires a lot of resources. The Europeans got lucky; they happened to discover the Americas at the right time, disease killed off most of the Americans, and they picked up a couple of continents for minimal effort. And it was the resources of the Americas that financed the conquest of Asia and Africa. Without those resources, Europe would have been competing with Asia on a much more equal footing. At best, you’d see small European trading posts in Asia and Africa rather than colonial empires. More realistically, you probably would have seen Chinese, Indian, and Arabic trading posts in Europe. There’s no reason that trading voyages around Africa had to start from the west.
