11, 2001, reinforce this archetype of a threatening Islam. College students
today are therefore astonished to learn that Turks and Moors allowed Jews and
Christians freedom of worship at a time when European Christians tortured or
expelled Jews and Muslims. Not a single textbook tells that the Portuguese
fleet in 1507 blocked the Red Sea and Persian Gulf to stop trade along the old
route, because Portugal controlled the new route, around Africa.^7
Most textbooks note the increase in international trade and commerce, and
some relate the rise of nation-states under monarchies. Otherwise, they do a
poor job of describing the changes in Europe that led to the Age of
Exploration. Some textbooks even invoke the Protestant Reformation, although
it didn’t begin until twenty-five years after 1492.
What is going on here? We must pay attention to what the textbooks are
telling us and what they are not telling us. The changes in Europe not only
prompted Columbus’s voyages and the probable contemporaneous trips to
America by Portuguese, Basque, and Bristol fishermen, but they also paved the
way for Europe’s domination of the world for the next five hundred years.
Except for the invention of agriculture, this was probably the most
consequential development in human history. Our history books ought to
discuss seriously what happened and why, instead of supplying vague, nearly
circular pronouncements such as this from The American Tradition: “Interest
in practical matters and the world outside Europe led to advances in
shipbuilding and navigation.”
Perhaps foremost among the significant factors the textbooks leave out are
advances in military technology. Around 1400, European rulers began to
commission ever bigger guns and learned to mount them on ships. Europe’s
incessant wars gave rise to this arms race, which also ushered in refinements
in archery, drill, and siege warfare. Eventually China, the Ottoman Empire, and
other nations in Asia and Africa would fall prey to European arms. In 1493,
the Americas began to succumb.^8
We live with this arms race still. But the West’s advantage in military
technology over the rest of the world, jealously maintained from the 1400s on,
remains very much contested. Just as the thirteen British colonies tried to
outlaw the sale of guns to Native Americans,^9 the United States now tries to
outlaw the sale of nuclear technology to Third World countries. A key point of
George W. Bush’s foreign policy has been to deny nuclear weapons and other