The Transformation of the World (20 page)

In the course of the century, travelers journeyed to various parts of the world for the first time and wrote up their accounts. The main regions of discovery were

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 sub-Saharan Africa beyond long-familiar coastal strips (visited by the South African doctor Andrew Smith, the British-commissioned German geographer Heinrich Barth, and the Scottish missionary David Livingstone);

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 the whole west of the North American continent (to which Thomas Jefferson, then the US president, sent the famous expedition of 1804-6 under Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, but which was only fully mapped later in the century);

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 the interior of Australia (where the Prussian explorer Ludwig Leichardt vanished without trace in 1848, and which long remained completely unmapped); and

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 large parts of Central Asia (about which Chinese geographers had been better informed than Europeans since the eighteenth century, and which after 1860 became a growing field for Russian, British, French, and, in the next century, German travelers and researchers).

Otherwise, people in Europe had had a reasonably good knowledge of world geography since early modern times. This was true not only of Mexico (an old core area of Spanish expansion) and India (about which much had been known even before the colonial period), but also of countries that had never been colonized by Europeans, such as Siam, Iran, or Turkish Asia Minor. Large areas of Asia were so familiar that Carl Ritter, who ranks along with Alexander von Humboldt as the founder of scientific geography, began in 1817 to publish a vast work that eventually ran to twenty-one volumes and 17,000 pages (
Die Erdkunde im Verhältniß zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen
): a summa of several centuries of European reports about the continent. But many of the sources of information were out of date, and Ritter, who was by no means gullible, had great difficulty in extracting the serviceable material. Thus in 1830, European knowledge of China's inland provinces still relied on reports by Jesuits from the seventeenth or eighteenth century; and as for Japan, still tightly sealed from foreigners, not much advance had been made on the classical report of a trip made in the 1690s by the Westphalian doctor Engelbert Kaempfer.
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In all these cases a fresh pair of eyes were necessary. New expeditions were therefore undertaken, many of them inspired by science managers such as Ritter and Humboldt, Joseph Banks or John Barrow (strategically placed at the British Admiralty), and later with the growing support of organizations such as the African Association or the Royal Geographical Society (founded in 1830).
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Alexander von Humboldt himself set the standard with his trip to America from June 1799 to August 1804; over the next quarter of a century, he evaluated the results in a series of works centered on his travel report—a key document of the nineteenth century.
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By 1900, geographical accounts existed for most regions of the world, recognized as standard works representing the best research available at the time.

The geographical exploration of
Europe
paralleled these overseas enterprises; it did not necessarily precede them. In September 1799, a few months after Alexander von Humboldt boarded a ship for Havana, his elder brother Wilhelm set off for Spain. He was breaking new ground there almost as much as Alexander did in the New World. Seen from Berlin or Paris, Spain's Basque provinces were no less exotic than its American empire, and the same was true of other peripheral areas of Europe.
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Throughout the nineteenth century there continued to be individual travelers driven by a lust for adventure and scientific curiosity. The category also includes a number of women, such as the English globetrotter Isabella Bird, who, though no scientific researcher, keenly observed foreign mores and customs.
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Two other important figures representative of the age were the imperial pioneer, whose purpose was to “occupy” territories on behalf of his government, and the colonial geographer, who kept a look out for precious minerals, possible farmland and transport links.

The vision of geographers varies in range. Travelers and land surveyors see their immediate surroundings; only in the scholar's study does the larger picture emerge from the mass of descriptions and measurements. Like Carl Ritter,
the path-breaking eighteenth-century French cartographers of Asia had never set foot on the continent whose form they drew in such accurate detail. The nineteenth century naturally based itself on the ball shape of the earth, for which recent circumnavigations had provided further clear evidence. But it should not be forgotten that before aerial photography, the ball shape could be seen only from the ground—the perspective of traveling or seafaring contemporaries. The bird's-eye view, not to speak of the view of the globe from the cosmos, was the stuff of fiction, for which the ball offered a mere approximation. In the case of a geological oddity such as the Grand Canyon, the techniques of conventional landscape drawing, which could easily cope with Alpine valleys, were stymied; there was no angle from which the drama of the precipitous gorge could be depicted in a naturalist manner. The graphic artist who accompanied the first scientific expedition to the Colorado River in 1857–58 tackled this limitation by means of an
imaginary
aerial view from a point a mile above the earth.
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Names of Continents

Geographers and cartographers have always been the ones who give names to places and localities.
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However a name came about, it entered the public domain as soon as it appeared on a globe or a well-made map with scientific or political authority. If it was just a question of a single topographical feature—a mountain, river, or town—local names had a chance of being adopted by Europeans. Under the surveyors of British India, it was the rule in the nineteenth century that a place requiring an official name should, after consultation with knowledgeable local people, retain the one in customary use. A famous exception was “Peak XV” in the Himalayas, which in 1856 was named after the retired surveyor-general of India, George Everest—overriding his modest objection that Indians found it difficult to pronounce.
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In other parts of the world, the names of European monarchs, statesmen, and discoverers were liberally sprinkled around: Lake Victoria, Albertville, Melbourne, Wellington, Rhodesia, Brazzaville, the Bismarck Archipelago, and the Caprivi Strip (in today's Namibia) are just a few examples from a long list.

Even more arbitrary and ideological than these local instances, however, was the choosing of names for large areas. Some have spoken of “metageography” to refer to this spatial schematization of the world, which everyone carries around in their head, usually without being aware of what is involved.
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Metageographical categories are among the large variety of “mental maps” those that divide the globe into continents and other “world regions.” In the nineteenth century the main geographical categories were still in flux, and one needs to beware of anachronism when employing names from a later time. Even the term “Latin America” is less straightforward than it sounds. To the present day, there is still disagreement as to whether the “West Indies” or Caribbean (where English or French, or Creole, is spoken) should be included in it. Alexander von Humboldt, and those who followed in his tracks, did not know the term “Latin America”;
his America was the “midnight” or tropical regions of the Spanish empire in the New World, which evidently included Cuba. Simón Bolívar's generation spoke of “southern America.” The name “Latin America” was coined in 1861, amid the “pan-Latinism” of the French Saint-Simonians, and soon afterward taken up by politicians. At the time, Napoleon III was seeking to build a French empire in the region—an ambition that came to a shabby end in 1867 with the expulsion of French troops from Mexico and the execution of Maximilian, the Frenchbacked Habsburg emperor of the country. The strategic attraction of the “Latin” tag was that it promised to construct “natural” bonds between the Romance-speaking peoples of France and the Americas.
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“Latin America,” though, is a comparatively old regional concept. Many other “world regions” are much younger. “Southeast Asia,” for instance, came into being in Japan during the First World War, and its wider adoption was due to the fact that in 1943, in the middle of the Pacific War, it became politically necessary to define the position of Lord Mountbatten, at the head of a “South East Asia Command” distinct from the American-dominated military theater.
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Until then the West had lacked a generic name for this topographically and culturally most heterogeneous region. When Europeans had not referred indiscriminately to the “East Indies,” their terminology at a level higher than individual kingdoms and colonial domains had distinguished between a mainland “Further India” (today's Burma, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) and the “Malay Archipelago.” Until a few decades ago, “Southeast Asians” felt little or no common identity, and the first history of the region as a whole appeared no earlier than 1955.
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The picture was similar farther to the north. Early modern maps featured a seldom clearly defined area in the middle of the Asian land mass: “Tartary.” This corresponded vaguely to the terms “Inner Asia” and “Central Asia,” which even today have not achieved conceptual stability. Russian authors employ them only for the mainly Muslim-populated areas of the former Russian Turkestan, whereas some other usages include Mongolia, Tibet, and the present-day Mongol regions of the People's Republic of China (“Inner Mongolia.”) Tibet is often excluded—in which case it does not belong anywhere, since it is also not part of “South Asia.” Southern Siberia and Manchuria—which in the eighteenth century were still mostly placed in “Tartary”—have disappeared from any concept of Central Asia. The boundaries between Central Asia and “East Asia” and the “Middle East” have long been controversial, and some authors have proposed a neologism such as “Central Eurasia.”
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An alternative approach to a region of such uncertain shape is a functionalist one that sees it as a pulsating network of exchange, expanding and contracting over the centuries. “Central Asia” is then coterminous with the scope of trade and conquest conducted by peoples of the steppe.
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While “Tartary” and “Central Asia” conjured up the mysterious wonderland, scarcely accessible to the ordinary traveler, which Halford Mackinder portrayed in his oft-quoted lecture of 1904 “The Geographical Pivot of History,”
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the territorial referents of the “Orient” were even less developed.
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It was essentially
a culturally defined term for the lands—including the Ottoman Balkans—inhabited by Arab, Turkish, and Iranian Muslims that European commentators had covered over the centuries with various layers of meaning. It was never clear whether more distant Muslim regions such as the Mogul empire, Malaya, or Java were part of it; and in the nineteenth century, “Orientals” was often used for Indians and Chinese. Nevertheless, this was the only collective term available to Western observers at the time. The expression “Near East” (German
Vorderer Orient
, Russian
Blizkii Vostok
, French
Proche-Orient
) entered diplomatic usage toward the end of the century, when it designated the Ottoman Empire and areas of North Africa (such as Egypt and Algeria) that had once been, but were effectively no longer, part of it. “Fertile Crescent,” coined in 1916, was a favorite among archaeologists and had a ring of pre-Islamic antiquity. “Middle East,” on the other hand, though of older origin, was popularized around the turn of the twentieth century by the British journalist Valenine Chirol and the American naval officer and military theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan, had no cultural and few historical connotations; it referred to a zone of perceived political instability caused by the weakness of the erstwhile hegemon, the Ottoman Empire. In spatial terns, it designated the zone north of the Persian Gulf, then seen as a major theater in the conflict between Britain and the Tsarist Empire, but some geopolitical commentators included Asia Minor, Afghanistan, or even Nepal and Tibet (which others allocated to “Central Asia”). From a British point of view, the main focus was the strategically vulnerable borderlands of India. Geographical terms that specialists and laypeople alike now use as a matter of course, and which have in many cases been taken over by indigenous elites with varying degrees of enthusiasm, often rooted in geopolitical perceptions during the age of high imperialism.

“Far East”/“East Asia”

The metamorphoses of European spatial semantics are best illustrated by the region known as East Asia. The term is more common in geography and sociological “area studies” than among philologists, since there is no obvious linguistic case for bracketing China, Japan, and Korea together; the three languages are constructed quite differently. Sinology, Japanology, and Korean studies are still separate disciplines, often jealously protective of their independence. But since their origins in the nineteenth century, they themselves have had no difficulty in employing the common term East (or Eastern) Asia. In fact, as a vague, mainly topographical, designation, it first appeared in English, French, and German in the late eighteenth century. But it only became universally accepted in the 1930s, after the rise of the United States as a Pacific power made it seem absurd to continue using the Eurocentric “Far East”; logically, only the term “Russian Far East” (meaning Siberia) would have been plausible. Since then, more outside the region than in the countries directly concerned, attempts have been made to agree on a term such as “Sinosphere” or “Sino-Japanese cultural realm”: a historical
construct that mainly draws on the virtue of a shared “Confucian” link, though a conceptualization in terms of interaction offers an alternative vision.
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