the making of global world

[aayush]

explain what we mean when we say the world shrank in 1500 AD

[vehelpfulguy]

A quick search on "1500 events" may give you the answer.

If found the following for 1500 which may give you some clues:

1500 Jan 26, Spanish explorer Vicente Yanez Pinzon reached the northeastern coast of Brazil during a voyage under his command.

1500 Mar 9, Pedro Cabral (1460-1520), Portuguese navigator, departed to India. He left Lisbon with 13 ships headed for India and was blown off course.

1500 Apr 22, Pedro Alvares Cabral (c1460-c1526), Portuguese explorer, discovered Brazil and claimed it for Portugal. He continued on to India.

1500 Aug 10, Diego Diaz discovered Madagascar.

[jake-the-peg]

I would say the world grew substantially

Columbus thought that he'd reached India in 1492 and suddenly people realised that the world was actually a lot bigger

[vehelpfulguy]

>I would say the world grew substantially

I suppose it is the way you look at it, grew in one way, shrank in another.

At one time if you lived in Europe then other parts of the world (the Americas, India, the East such as China etc), seemed a long way away, almost too far for the "ordinairy" person to ever get to.

Then explorers discoverd various routes and all of a sudden those place did not seem so remote and distant, and ordinairy people could get a boat there, so it that sense the world shrunk.

It is a bit like today, when we can hop on a plane and get almost anywhere in the world in less than 24 hours, people say the world has shrunk when of course it hasn't.

[jake-the-peg]

Only there wasn't a sudden technology change that suddenly made long distance travel possible or more affordable in the way that there was when steam trains or jet aircraft became commonplace.

Perhaps what this question is getting at is that people's "known world" suddenly shrank relative to the known world.

In 1300 you lived in a village in England which was part of Europe and you had a vague Idea of Africa and China a long way away.

Then suddenly the world got a lot larger and your village seemed a lot smaller in contrast.

In the same way in 1900 there was the solar system and the stars and some galaxies

50 years later those galaxies were found to be light years away and some were found to be thousands and millions of light years away and that there were billions upon billions of other stars

And so our planet shrunk in comparisom to the known Universe

[Lil O'lady]

Don't agree that european colonisers and explorers were different to any others. Barbary slavers, indonesian pirates, arab traders all seem to have shown their share of greed and murder. My main argument is with the eurocentric perspective of the question which leads the student down a blind alley that ignores events not initiated in europe.