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    1492: The Year Our World Began
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    1492: The Year Our World Began
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    1492: The Year Our World Began
    Ebook422 pages7 hours

    1492: The Year Our World Began

    By Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

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    About this ebook

    'Fernández-Armesto's rich vision of the 1490s is unlike any other world historians have given us. He has performed an amazing feat of portraying the world as one place before it had yet become one place ... This is popular history at its best: grounded in research, insightfully critical, and written with grace' Literary Review

    'Filled with marvels and sensations rich in description and replete with anecdote ... A compendium of delights' The Times

    The world would end in 1492 - so the prophets, soothsayers and stargazers said. They were right. Their world did end. But ours began.

    In search of the origins of the modern world, 1492 takes readers on a journey around the globe of the time, in the company of real-life travellers, drawing together the threads that began to bind the planet: from the way power and wealth are distributed around the globe to the way major religions and civilizations divide the world.

    Events that began in 1492 even transformed the whole ecological system of the planet. Wars and witchcraft, plagues and persecutions, poetry and prophecy, science and magic, art and faith - all the glories and follies of the time are in this book.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateFeb 4, 2013
    ISBN9781408842928
    Unavailable
    1492: The Year Our World Began
    Author

    Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

    Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is William P. Reynolds Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Some of his recent publications include 1492: The Year Our World Began (2011), Pathfinders: A Global History of Exploration (2006) and The Conquistadors: A Very Short Introduction (2011).

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    Reviews for 1492

    4/5

    43 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Engaging high-speed overview of the world (well, the civilised bits, anyway) as it was in 1492, just as the Spanish reached the Americas and the Portuguese moved into the Indian Ocean. Very entertaining and informative.
    • 3/5
      Overview of the various exploratory and colonialistic movements happening around the world in the period when Columbus was sailing to the New World (though that was neither his intention nor his assumption). While I learned an awful lot from this book, I found it frankly rather disappointing. Part of it was the author's sytax; the book is peppered with sentences and phrases that often struck me as odd and sometimes incomprehensible.
    • 4/5
      An engrossing, highly readable survey of the state of the world in 1492, when Columbus's (or his overlooked lookout's) discovery of the Americas dramatically changed the global status quo. Fernandez-Armesto, a Professorial Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, writes with clarity and intellectual rigor (not always an easily managed combination), examining the international situation with the enthusiasm of an ideal explorer.At 321 pages, this book is deceptively lightweight, and minimally footnoted, but the author manages to pack an impressive amount of content between its covers. Over the course of ten chapters, subjects covered include, among others, the fortunes of Islam in Africa, the reign of Ivan III and his massive expansion of Russia, and the complex tensions between Confucian mandarins and the Buddhist-sympathizing Ming dynasty. Some of Fernandez-Armesto's most striking observations are only briefly treated in the text, but provide much room for further thought: for example, his speculation that a decline in the fortunes of the great empire of Mali, during the fifteenth century, may have directly influenced the concurrent decline in the status of black people, evinced in contemporary map illustrations, thus strengthening the justifications for the slave trade (itself already well underway) and constituting a dramatic turning-point in the history of race relations.Occasionally, the author's attempts to provide contemporary pop-culture parallels for historic reference points can feel slightly jarring, but this is rarely an issue and in any case is also a reflection of the book's appealing chattiness and immense enthusiasm for and engagement with its subject. Notwithstanding its light touch, however, this study provides a cogent and intensive analysis of why other parts of the world, for one reason or another, did not take over the Americas -- thus giving the lie to the inevitability of the "rise of the West" -- and what this take-over, five hundred odd years ago, means for the world today.