_ Today we start with a pop quiz: name the time period between 300 C.E. and the Renaissance (approximately 1,300 C.E.). If you, like me, reflexively answered, "The Dark Ages," Stewart Gordon's engaging and compact book arrives in the nick of time to expand our knowledge of world history of that period beyond the boundaries of Western Europe. Europe after the fall of Rome may have sunk into a bleak and brutal morass of ignorance, but the Middle East and Asia were anything but "dark," as Gordon reveals the vibrancy and sophistication seen in the vast territory extending from Morocco to Sumatra.
His inspired choice for examining so much time and space is to discuss eight surviving memoirs (as well as the telling remains of one shipwreck); the first-person accounts provide vivid and distinctive perspectives on each epoch and set of territories without overwhelming us with encyclopedic detail. A chapter on one particular person, in Gordon's hands, becomes a miracle of compression addressing, in turn, such topics as: the importance of courtly behavior, common ceremonies and protocol; the interrelationship between religion and politics in some locales; and the complexities of trading relationships and the diverse populations of the trade centers. Emerging from Gordon's survey is a portrait of the way information and culture spread through the extensive travels of many scholars, pilgrims and traders. The phenomenal growth in trade and travel had the result, Gordon points out, that by the 12th century Asia and the Middle East constituted the first world without borders for educated men, an amazingly "modern" institutional reality.
Gordon also discusses the contribution of Buddhism and Islam to building loyalty beyond ethnicity and language in diverse societies. The sophisticated state of what we would call international relations in the area comes into particularly stark relief with the memoirs of Tome Pires, a Portuguese trader who led the first diplomatic mission to China. Pires may have butted up against a system that he as an outsider could not fathom, but he also discovered that the Chinese did not need much of what the Portuguese offered for trade, except for one thing: cannons. And so, by the end of this short and fascinating survey, we see both the arrival of the force that initiated an arms race across the Asian maritime world and the shadow of the age of colonialism looming on the horizon.--
John McFarland
6 December 2007
His inspired choice for examining so much time and space is to discuss eight surviving memoirs (as well as the telling remains of one shipwreck); the first-person accounts provide vivid and distinctive perspectives on each epoch and set of territories without overwhelming us with encyclopedic detail. A chapter on one particular person, in Gordon's hands, becomes a miracle of compression addressing, in turn, such topics as: the importance of courtly behavior, common ceremonies and protocol; the interrelationship between religion and politics in some locales; and the complexities of trading relationships and the diverse populations of the trade centers. Emerging from Gordon's survey is a portrait of the way information and culture spread through the extensive travels of many scholars, pilgrims and traders. The phenomenal growth in trade and travel had the result, Gordon points out, that by the 12th century Asia and the Middle East constituted the first world without borders for educated men, an amazingly "modern" institutional reality.
Gordon also discusses the contribution of Buddhism and Islam to building loyalty beyond ethnicity and language in diverse societies. The sophisticated state of what we would call international relations in the area comes into particularly stark relief with the memoirs of Tome Pires, a Portuguese trader who led the first diplomatic mission to China. Pires may have butted up against a system that he as an outsider could not fathom, but he also discovered that the Chinese did not need much of what the Portuguese offered for trade, except for one thing: cannons. And so, by the end of this short and fascinating survey, we see both the arrival of the force that initiated an arms race across the Asian maritime world and the shadow of the age of colonialism looming on the horizon.--
John McFarland
6 December 2007