{"id":6394,"date":"2016-11-02T15:02:57","date_gmt":"2016-11-02T15:02:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/?post_type=chapter&p=6394"},"modified":"2017-12-15T23:16:56","modified_gmt":"2017-12-15T23:16:56","slug":"3-2-beginnings-of-globalism","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/opentextbc.ca\/preconfederation\/chapter\/3-2-beginnings-of-globalism\/","title":{"raw":"3.2 Beginnings of\u00a0Globalism","rendered":"3.2 Beginnings of\u00a0Globalism"},"content":{"raw":"In Chapter 2<\/a> we considered the very deep history of human occupation in the Americas. Here, we\u00a0do the same for the Europeans.\r\n

Northwestern Europe to 1491<\/h2>\r\nThe earliest human-made or\u00a0anthropogenic\u00a0tools discovered in France have been dated to more than 1.5 million BPE, but that does not mean that there has been continuous human occupation of the region. The area's multiple climate zones and various entry points made it a crossroads for human traffic over millennia. Neanderthal populations appear around\u00a0300,000 BPE but are thought to have gone extinct around 30,000 BPE. Modern humans (in this case,\u00a0Cro-Magnons) became the dominant hominid species. They enjoyed a long run, but glaciation scoured\u00a0humans and other fauna from\u00a0much of northwestern Europe\u00a0until about 15,000 years ago. It was only then -- about the same time humans were appearing in the Americas, if not some years later -- that humans returned to northern France and the British Isles.\r\n\r\nThe emergence of agricultural societies in the\u00a0Neolithic, about 4,000-6,000 BPE, occurs\u00a0at about the same time teosinte cultivation emerged in Mesoamerica. At about 2800 BCE, people in what is now France began working in bronze; evidence suggests that it was\u00a0about 2150 BCE before Britons began to do the same. The so-called Iron Age, however, did\u00a0not arrive for another 1,000 to\u00a01,200 years.\r\n\r\nThe experience of the British Isles in the pre-contact period illustrates processes at work across Europe. What leaps out is\u00a0the succession of cultures that arrived in Britain and established dominance. Indigenous British populations were subjected to repeated influxes of newcomers from the mainland of Europe, the most consequential\u00a0waves beginning\u00a0with the Romans about 2,000 years ago.\u00a0British culture was strongly influenced by successive invasions, including the Germanic arrivals of the fifth\u00a0century CE and repeated incursions and immigrations from Viking homelands from the eighth century through to the 10th century (one arm of which would carry on across the Atlantic). And while the British Isles would sustain many localized seagoing, fishing economies, the core economic activity was agriculture. This was true in France as well, and the number of hunter-gatherers in both\u00a0territories was insignificant.\r\n\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_2439\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"300\"]\"A<\/a> Figure 3.2 Pre-contact Europeans developed striking visual records of their history, like the Bayeux Tapestry.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nThe indigenous Celtic cultures of northwestern Europe and the British Isles continued to be pushed to the margins in the late pre-contact period. In England and Wales that process accelerated with the arrival of the Normans (in large measure the descendants of Viking immigrants to France) in the 11th century. The society that emerged in England -- and that was in place in 1492 -- was thus a hybridized one dominated by an aristocracy of continental origin and a landscape of often fractious princelings\/chieftains with a warrior class and clergy dominating a large agricultural peasantry. The \"commoners\" were themselves a mix, but in many districts in Britain throughout this period they were essentially ethnically different from their feudal masters. (Everyday artifacts of this relationship are\u00a0the words\u00a0used to describe meats: English peasants raised pigs, chickens, and cows, which were transmogrified in the market and on the banquet-hall table into pork (porc), <\/em>poultry (poulet), <\/em>and beef (boeuf), <\/em>words derived from their conquerors' native Norman French.)\r\n\r\nWhile England's boundaries were still undefined\u00a0in this period and Wales resisted\u00a0English domination, Scotland and Ireland were utterly distinct and their\u00a0political units were mostly organized around chieftainships. What can be said of these northwestern European peoples in this period is that their political and economic conditions were very unsettled, that they had developed important technologies, and that their identities were necessarily fluid and somewhat tribal.[footnote]For a survey of the repeated and overlapping population tides that washed across Britain, see David Miles, The Tribes of Britain<\/em> (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005).[\/footnote]\r\n

The First Voyageurs: the Vikings and Others<\/h2>\r\n[caption id=\"attachment_1174\" align=\"aligncenter\" width=\"197\"]\"Six<\/a> Figure 3.3 Danes about to invade England. From Miscellany on the Life of St. Edmund<\/em> from the 12th century.[\/caption]\r\n\r\nIn the eighth century, Norsemen, or\u00a0Vikings,\u00a0began settling parts of the Faroe, Shetland, and Orkney Islands in the North Atlantic. For nearly four centuries they went wherever treasure was, trading as far as Byzantium and Kiev in the east. In the west they raided Ireland and England, continuing south to the Italian peninsula. Their gun-and-run approach -- sailing into a port, seizing its gold, and murdering or enslaving its people before fleeing -- belies the fact that they were also settlers. They made homes throughout the British Isles, and they began settling Iceland in approximately 870 CE. One\u00a0Viking, known to us as\u00a0Erik the Red (ca. 950-1003),\u00a0was accused of murder and banished from his native Iceland in about 980. Erik explored to the west and later founded a settlement on a poorly charted, snowy coastline. Knowing that this bleak land would need many people to prosper, Erik returned to Iceland after his exile had passed and coined the word \"Greenland\" as a branding ploy that he hoped would appeal to the overpopulated and treeless settlement. Erik sailed again\u00a0to Greenland in 985 and established two colonies with a population of nearly 5,000.\r\n\r\nLeif Erikson (ca. 970-1020), son of Erik the Red, and other members of his family began exploring\u00a0the North American coast in 986 CE. Leif\u00a0landed in three places, and in the third established\u00a0a small settlement called Vinland<\/strong>. The location of Vinland is uncertain, but an archaeological site on the northern tip of Newfoundland at L'Anse aux Meadows<\/strong>\u00a0has been identified as a good candidate. It was a modest Viking settlement and is the oldest confirmed presence of Europeans in North America. The settlement in Vinland was abandoned in struggles between the Vikings and the native inhabitants, who the newcomers\u00a0called\u00a0Skraelingar<\/strong>. Bickering also broke out among the Norsemen themselves, and the settlement lasted less than two years. The Vikings would make brief excursions to North America for the next 200 years, though further\u00a0attempts at colonization were\u00a0thwarted.\r\n\r\nBy the 13th\u00a0century, Viking civilization was in retreat; Iceland and Greenland entered a period of decline during a little ice age.\u00a0Christianity\u00a0and the emergence of a unified Christian kingdom in Norway caused division\u00a0within the Viking world. As well,\u00a0Europe soon fell prey to\u00a0a series of devastating epidemic diseases, and what knowledge scholars, sailors, and governments had of Viking\u00a0explorations was lost or ignored.\u00a0Apart from the traces left behind at L'Anse aux Meadows and the possibility that some genetic material might have found its way into the Aboriginal communities of the region, the Viking legacy evaporated with their departure. Vinland was a dead end.\r\n\r\nOther\u00a0apocryphal accounts of European encounters with the Americas exist. These include stories of St. Brendan's voyages from Ireland, Prince Madoc's expedition from Wales, and the possibility of fishing fleets sailing out of Bristol, England,\u00a0all the way to Newfoundland. However, none of these stories\u00a0can be substantiated by\u00a0evidence; neither can\u00a0the suggestion that African or Chinese voyages across open seas reached the Americas.\u00a0There are also tales of classical-era Romans and Egyptians, and even Old Testament \"lost tribes of Israel\" crossing the Atlantic. Against these unconfirmed\u00a0tales,\u00a0there is some evidence to suggest that Inuit sea voyagers may have washed ashore in western Europe, but none of these encounters appears to have had any significant consequences to the Aboriginal North Americans or to the Europeans they may have encountered.\r\n\r\nAll of this is\u00a0important\u00a0to consider against\u00a0the many efforts Europeans launched after 1492 to claim all or parts of the Americas. Often these claims were made on the strength of long-term connections that\u00a0simply did not exist in any form other than myth. This is not to say that crossing the Atlantic from east to west was impossible before 1492, although\u00a0prevailing winds and sea currents made it fiendishly difficult and dangerous. Boats sailing out of the north of Spain and the west coast of France and possibly Portugal as well pursued fish and whales into the North Atlantic and may have done so before Columbus. Indeed, the enthusiasm with which Basque, Bristol, and French whaling and fishing fleets patrolled\u00a0the Grand Banks in the era of recorded voyages suggests that they were one step ahead of John Cabot's voyage in 1497 at the very least. Ultimately, European claims\u00a0were principally made against one another, rather than against Aboriginal occupants whose status as non-Europeans and non-Christians was critical to the very idea of\u00a0imperial expansion.\r\n
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Key Points<\/h2>\r\n