The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe

by Ayesha Ramachandran

In this beautifully conceived book, Ayesha Ramachandran reconstructs the imaginative struggles of early modern artists, philosophers, and writers to make sense of something that we take for the world, imagined as a whole. Once a new, exciting, and frightening concept, “the world” was transformed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But how could one envision something that no one had ever seen in its totality?
 
The Worldmakers moves beyond histories of globalization to explore how “the world” itself—variously understood as an object of inquiry, a comprehensive category, and a system of order—was self-consciously shaped by human agents. Gathering an international cast of characters, from Dutch cartographers and French philosophers to Portuguese and English poets, Ramachandran describes a history of the first world atlas, the first global epic, the first modern attempt to develop a systematic natural philosophy—all part of an effort by early modern thinkers to capture “the world” on the page.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, Science

312 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2015

Reviews

[Dean Cycon · Rating 5 out of 5]

We usually think of history in stages or periods. Oh, that was the Renaissance, that was those nasty Dark Ages, the Reformation, and on and on. But there are no borders or boundaries in history, nor according to Professor Ramachandran, are there any silos called history, politics, literature, science, religion. The book concentrates on several key figures in the evolution of the concept called "the world" and looks at how the diaphanous veils between different approaches to thought manifest through mapmaking and worldmaking in politics and literature. This is not a breezy read, but it is profoundly important as it challenges the idea that there is any kind of stasis in the way we perceive the world or in fact the way we think. Although Professor Ramachandran focuses on the era around the Age of Exploration (from the European viewpoint, which she takes great pains to share is only the European viewpoint), I kept applying the concepts in the book to modern times and different parts of the world beyond the Eurocentric or American, as our understanding of human interaction is going through a great change yet again.

I love books that broaden and challenge my pre-existing point of view. This is one of them.