"Despite the recent surge of interest in geographical concepts and ideas, most social, cultural, and political studies are riddled with unexamined spatial assumptions. The Myth of Continents initiates a much-needed consideration of this state of affairs. Through a wide-ranging analysis of such metageographical constructs as East, West, Europe, and Asia, Lewis and Wigen provide provocative insights into the nature and significance of the ways we usually divide up the world. Moreover, they do so in an engaging and highly readable style. Readers of The Myth of Continents will never again see the world regions in quite the same way." Alexander B. Murphy, author of The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium

"An exciting, thoughtful, engaging, innovative book that demonstrates the need to reexamine commonly held assumptions about the world's division into continents, East/West, First/Second/Third World, etc. Readers will be drawn to its 'big-think' quality of shattering commonly held assumptions and to its up-to-the-minute contemporary feel." Benjamin Orlove, coeditor of State, Capital, and Rural Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Political Economy in Mexico and the Andes

"An important and long overdue housecleaning of old geographical concepts, based upon an impressively wide reading of regional literatures." Edmund Burke III, editor of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East

"Despite the recent surge of interest in geographical concepts and ideas, most social, cultural, and political studies are riddled with unexamined spatial assumptions. The Myth of Continents initiates a much-needed consideration of this state of affairs. Through a wide-ranging analysis of such metageographical constructs as East, West, Europe, and Asia, Lewis and Wigen provide provocative insights into the nature and significance of the ways we usually divide up the world. Moreover, they do so in an engaging and highly readable style. Readers of The Myth of Continents will never again see the world regions in quite the same way."—Alexander B. Murphy, author of The Regional Dynamics of Language Differentiation in Belgium

"An exciting, thoughtful, engaging, innovative book that demonstrates the need to reexamine commonly held assumptions about the world's division into continents, East/West, First/Second/Third World, etc. Readers will be drawn to its 'big-think' quality of shattering commonly held assumptions and to its up-to-the-minute contemporary feel."—Benjamin Orlove, coeditor of State, Capital, and Rural Society: Anthropological Perspectives on Political Economy in Mexico and the Andes

"An important and long overdue housecleaning of old geographical concepts, based upon an impressively wide reading of regional literatures."—Edmund Burke III, editor of Struggle and Survival in the Modern Middle East

Martin W. Lewis is Associate Research Professor of Geography, Duke University, and author of Wagering the Land: Ritual, Capital, and Environmental Degradation in the Cordillera of Northern Luzon, 1900-1986 (California, 1992) and Green Delusions: An Environmentalist Critique of Radical Environmentalism (1994). Kären E. Wigen is Associate Professor of History, Duke University, and author of The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (California, 1995).

The Myth of Continents

By Martin W. Lewis

University of California Press

Copyright © 1997 Martin W. Lewis
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780520207431

CHAPTER ONE

The Architecture of Continents

The Development of the Continental Scheme

In contemporary usage, continents are understood to be large, continuous, discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water. Although of ancient origin, this convention is both historically unstable and surprisingly unexamined; the required size and the requisite degree of physical separation have never been defined. As we shall see, the sevenfold continental system of American elementary school geography did not emerge in final form until the middle decades of the present century.

CLASSICAL PRECEDENTS

According to Arnold Toynbee, the original continental distinction was devised by ancient Greek mariners, who gave the names Europe and Asia to the lands on either side of the complex interior waterway running from the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara, the Bosporus, the Black Sea, and the Kerch Strait before reaching the Sea of Azov. This water passage became the core of a continental system when the earliest Greek philosophers, the Ionians of Miletus, designated it as the boundary between the two great landmasses of their world. Somewhat later, Libya (or Africa) was added to form a three-continent scheme. Not surprisingly, the Aegean Sea lay at the heart of the Greek conception of the globe; Asia essentially denoted those lands to its east, Europe those lands to its west and north, and Libya those lands to the south.

A seeming anomaly of this scheme was the intermediate position of the Greeks themselves, whose civilization spanned both the western and the eastern shores of the Aegean. Toynbee argued that the inhabitants of central Greece used the Asia-Europe boundary to disparage their Ionian kin, whose succumbing to "Asian" (Persian) dominion contrasted flatteringly with their own "European" freedom. Yet not all Greek thinkers identified themselves as Europeans. Some evidently employed the term Europe as a synonym for the northern (non-Greek) realm of Thracia. In another formulation, Europe was held to include the mainland of Greece, but not the islands or the Peloponnesus. Still others--notably Aristotle--excluded the Hellenic "race" from the continental schema altogether, arguing that the Greek character, like the Greek lands themselves, occupied a "middle position" between that of Europe and Asia. In any case, these disputes were somewhat technical, since the Greeks tended to view continents as physical entities, with minimal cultural or political content. When they did make generalizations about the inhabitants of different continents, they usually limited their discussion to the contrast between Asians and Europeans; Libya was evidently considered too small and arid to merit more than passing consideration.

Twofold or threefold, the continental system of the Greeks clearly had some utility for those whose geographical horizons did not extend much beyond the Aegean, eastern Mediterranean, and Black Seas. But its arbitrary nature was fully apparent by the fifth century B.C.E. Herodotus, in particular, consistently questioned the conventional three-part system, even while employing it. Criticizing the overly theoretical orientation of Greek geographers, who attempted to apprehend the world through elegant geometrical models, he argued instead for an "empirical cartography founded on exploration and travel." One problematic feature of the geography that Herodotus criticized was its division of Asia and Africa along the Nile, a boundary that sundered the obvious unity of Egypt. After all, as he noted, Asia and Africa were actually contiguous, both with each other and with Europe: "Another thing that puzzles me is why three distinct women's names should have been given to what is really a single landmass; and why, too, the Nile and the Phasis--or, according to some, the Maeotic Tanais and the Cimmerian Strait--should have been fixed upon for the boundaries. Nor have I been able to learn who it was that first marked the boundaries, or where they got their names from."

Similar comments, suggesting a continued awareness that these were constructed categories, echoed throughout the classical period. Strabo, writing in the first century B.C.E., noted that there was "much argument respecting the continents," with some writers viewing them as islands, others as mere peninsulas. Furthermore, he argued, "in giving names to the three continents, the Greeks did not take into consideration the whole habitable earth, but merely their own country, and the land exactly opposite...."

Under the Romans, the continental scheme continued to be employed in scholarly discourse, and the labels Europe and Asia were sometimes used in an informal sense to designate western and eastern portions of the empire. In regard to military matters, the term europeenses was deployed rather more precisely for the western zone. Asia was also used in a more locally specific sense to refer to a political subdivision of the Roman Empire in western Anatolia.

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE CONSTRUCTIONS

For almost two millennia after Herodotus, the threefold division of the earth continued to guide the European scholarly imagination. The continental scheme was reinforced in late antiquity when early Christian writers mapped onto it the story of Noah's successors. According to St. Jerome (who died circa A.D. 420), translator of the Vulgate Bible, "Noah gave each of his three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, one of the three parts of the world for their inheritance, and these were Asia, Africa, and Europe, respectively." This new theological conception had the merit of explaining the larger size of the Asian landmass by reference to Shem's primogeniture. It also infused the Greeks' tripartite division of the world with religious significance. This sacralized continental model would persist with little alteration until the early modern period.

Medieval Europe thus inherited the geographical ideas of the classical world, but in a calcified and increasingly mythologized form. Whereas the best Greek geographers had recognized the conventional nature of the continents--and insisted that the Red Sea made a more appropriate boundary between Asia and Africa than the Nile River--such niceties were often lost on their counterparts in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Martianus Capella, whose compilation of knowledge became a standard medieval text, took it as gospel that the world was divided into Europe, Asia, and Africa, with the Nile separating the latter two landmasses. Other influential encyclopedists of the period, including Orosius and Isidore of Seville, held similar views.

During the Carolingian period, by contrast, the inherited framework of Greek geography began to recede from view. The term Europe (in one form or another) was sometimes used to refer to the emerging civilization in the largely Frankish lands of Latin Christendom, which were occasionally contrasted with an increasingly fabulous Asia to the east. In fact, proponents of both Carolingian and Ottonian (German) imperialism, as well as the papacy, employed the concept of Europe as "a topos of panegyric, [and] a cultural emblem." But until the late Middle Ages, reference to the larger formal continental scheme was largely limited to recondite geographical studies, finding little place in general scholarly discourse. Africa in particular did not figure prominently in the travel...