The first two lectures in David Barnes' Peopling of the Atlantic series were on "The Rise and Fall of Spain in the New World" and "The Atlantic Slave Trade". The first described the events that propelled a poor, defensive, inward-looking and xenophobic Spanish nation from provincial obscurity to imperial power status in the century following Columbus' historic voyage in 1492. Obsessed with racial and religious purity, the Spanish only discovered America with the aid of assimilated Muslim science and were finally dislodged by the twin forces of Protestantism (in the guise of English pirates) and free-thinking Democracy (as unleashed by the French Revolution).
The second lecture considered one aspect of what historians have come to describe as the Columbian Exchange, the movement of flora and fauna between the Old and New Worlds in the centuries after Columbus. One aspect of the exchange of fauna was the migration of people, a traffic that was almost entirely one way, from east to west. The result is that we now have two Europes and two Africas on each side of the Ocean. The number of people of African descent in the Americas today is about one quarter of the present population of Africa. It's a situation unique in the history of our world and its origin was the transportation of thousands upon thousands of black slaves across these mid Atlantic waters, the notorious Middle Passage.
Globalization is a fashionable topic these days but it is not as recent a phenomenon as some people suppose. There could be no better place than a transatlantic crossing to reflect on its deeper origins.
