Volume 25, Number 19 · December 7, 1978
Global Vision
By J.H. Elliott
The Times Atlas of World History
edited by Geoffrey Barraclough
Hammond Incorporated, 360 pp., $60.00 after December 31
For the best part of five centuries Western man's vision of the world has been conditioned by the map. It was the advent of the printed map that made it possible for sixteenth-century Europeans to conceptualize global space, allowing them to replace an odd assortment of known details, vague impressions, and wild imaginings with the image of a world that could be grasped and known. In 1566 the son of St. Francis Borgia wrote to thank his father for sending him a map or sphere of the world. 'Before seeing it,' he wrote, 'I was still ignorant of how small the world is.' No sooner mapped, the world began to shrink; and the effect of its shrinking was to enlarge the ambition of Europeans to master and control it.
Review, 2749 words
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