Clearly too much to cover in one volume, so Fernadez-Armesto provides much local colour. around the corner are the Mughals and the Saffavid Dynasty in Persia. It was also the era of the Aztec, Maya and Inca empires, the Ming Dynasty, the rise of Russia under Ivan the Great, the Ottoman Empire, the Songhay Empire in Africa, and Mamluk Egypt. We are encouraged in the West to have a firmly Eurocentric view of 1492 - the year of the conquest of Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, as well as Columbus sailing the ocean blue - but this expanded my horizons usefully. That kind of distance would not be possible again. Columbus set sail with a letter of introduction to the Great Khan of China, the last of whom had actually been unseated over a century earlier, in 1368. 1492 was 'the year the world began', argues the author, because at that point the human race, which had developed divergently on separate continents, became convergent with the meeting of Europe and the Americas, followed by the establishment of modern globalisation.
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