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The discovery of mankind: Atlantic encounters in the age of Columbus

An immense amount of impressive research went into the making of David Abulafia’s The discovery of mankind: Atlantic encounters in the age of Columbus. It is based on extensive reading of primary documents in several languages, as well as the relevant archaeological literature. Yet, for all of this work, Abulafia runs into difficulties when he seeks to summarize his book’s major accomplishments. In addition, he handles the identification of the parties to early modern Atlantic encounters in a manner that, while seemingly straightforward, ensnares his text in a host of difficulties. In Abulafia’s own account of his book’s most important contributions, he presents established approaches and conclusions as distinctive, even novel. In the first paragraph of his preface, for example, Abulafia tell us that his book departs from the received ‘literature on the early discoveries’ by replacing a focus on ‘geographical and navigational questions’ with a focus on ‘first encounters between Europeans and peoples previously unknown to them’ (p. xv). Contrary to what this suggests, however, historians of ‘the age of discovery’ abandoned a focus on ‘geographical and navigational questions’ several decades ago and have, in the last three or so decades, built up a rich literature on ‘first encounters’, as evidenced by the work of Todorov, Seed, Sahlins, Pagden, Greenblatt, and Boon – to name just a few of the most obvious suspects. Similarly, it seems anticlimactic for Abulafia to state, as he does in the book’s final pages, that a major lesson of the age of discovery is that what ‘Europeans’ discovered in the ‘age of Columbus’ was not just lands but a humanity more diverse than they had previously known – except, alas, that theirs was ‘an incomplete discovery’, since ‘not all [European] observers accepted that the newly discovered peoples were fully human’ (pp. 312–13). In short, in his efforts to sum up his own work, Abulafia appears as someone who has completed a journey both arduous and fascinating – but without quite knowing what to make of it all. On my reading, what most deserves recognition in Abulafia’s text is that it brings together, in a single narrative, accounts of encounters on islands in the eastern Atlantic in the fourteenth century and on islands in the Caribbean in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This narrative framing, in combination with the specifics offered about the different encounters, makes Abulafia’s book a useful contribution to the collective scholarly project of mapping out the continuities and discontinuities between these two historical moments. Nevertheless, one prominent aspect of the way in which Abulafia links the encounters of these different times and places warrants scrutiny, if not scepticism. In his text, Caribbean and Canary islanders alike are coded in social evolutionary terms (as ‘primitive’, ‘Stone Age’, or ‘Neolithic’), while the seafarers who ‘discovered’ these various islanders are coded in continental terms (as ‘European’). Thus, each encounter becomes a case of a more general type: the first contact between ‘Europeans’ and ‘primitive’ Others. But what, we should ask, justifies the use of these terms of identification? We should note that they are not historically motivated. Indeed, the two codes from which Abulafia draws did not emerge until several centuries after the encounters he is depicting, and the terms that he takes from these codes differ in their meanings, in non-trivial