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| Stuart Gordon, There and Back: Twelve Great Routes of Human History. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiv + 266. Index. $19.99 (cloth). |
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Stuart Gordon groups the "Great Routes of Human History" in four sections: "River Routes" (the Rhine, the Nile, the Mississippi); "Pilgrimage Routes" (the Silk Roads, the pilgrimage route to Santiago de Compostela, the Hajj); "Tribute Routes," which also served military and administrative functions (the Appian Way, the Grand Canal, Inka trunk roads); and Trade Routes (Indian Ocean monsoonal sailing routes, trans-Saharan caravan routes, and the Erie Canal). At first glance, his categories seem arbitrary. Why does he associate the Silk Road with pilgrimage rather than trade? Why is Nile a "river route" rather than a "tribute route" siphoning agricultural surpluses and seasonal labor to Pharaonic projects? To ask such questions is Gordon's point: cognitive and physical geography defined each route. A Buddhist monk journeying from China or Central Asia to Buddhist centers in India understood his itinerary very differently from a merchant buying horses in Samarkand to sell in India. Though the Nile was as much a "tribute route" as China's Grand Canal, as a river it shared certain physical constraints with the Rhine and Mississippi – particularly seasonal rhythms of trade (the Nile flooded annually; the upper Rhine and Mississippi both froze) and the differential between upriver and downriver costs. Cognitive and physical geography layered these routes with multiple meanings for intersecting but distinct networks of merchants, pilgrims, officials, soldiers, farmers, herders and townspeople. Gordon begins each chapter with a traveler's own testimony. We join the Horace as he journeys down the Appian Way in the 1st c. BCE. Along the way, Gordon explores the Appian Way's origins in Rome's 4th c. BCE Samite wars and its later extension towards the Adriatic coast as Rome began importing agricultural and luxury goods, first from the eastern Mediterranean and later from the Indian Ocean. Gordon joins 15th c. Korean official Cho'e Pu (a.k.a. Choe Bu), shipwrecked along the central Chinese coast, captured, and sent for examination to Beijing via the Grand Canal. The Confucian-trained Ming administrators who gently interrogated Cho'e Pu ultimately welcomed him as a peer within the broader Sinosphere, an episode that speaks volumes for Chinese worldviews while illuminating the administrative structure embedded along the Grand Canal's thousand-mile length. Similar chapters follow 19th century traveler Lucy Duff Gordon down the Nile, trace Ibn Battuta's slow journey across the 14th c. Sahara, and join the Spivak brothers, Alfred and Charles, vacationing on a Mississippi steamboat with their families in 1910. By organizing his material thematically, Gordon highlights the obduracy of premodern exchange, constrained as it was by weather, geography, pre-industrial technology, imperial political structure, religious faith and commercial interchange. Though he does find outliers (the Inka Empire's apparent prohibition on independent trade, for instance), Gordon more frequently reaches for cross-cultural and trans-millennial comparisons. For instance, Gordon frequently emphasizes just how much we have upended the relationship between distance and time. If money is no object, we are no more than two days from most anywhere on the planet. Should we ever want to return, the Moon requires just a three-day trip. And yet, for the thousands of years before the steam engine, any appreciable distance was measured in weeks, months or years—and such travel posed considerable risk of an early death. Though the story Gordon tells emphasizes continuity, he also addresses three patterns of significant change. The first was political: regime change altered travel. The corrosion and ultimate collapse of the western Roman Empire signaled a significant change in trade patterns, particularly after Islamic polities took control of most Mediterranean trade, rendering the Roman imperial road system obsolete. A thousand years later and eight thousand miles west, Pizzaro shattered the Inka empire and Spanish policies dictated routes closer to the Pacific coast. Lima rose at Cuzco's expense, and the Inka road system fell into neglect. A century later, in Europe, the wars of the Reformation dramatically reduced the number of pilgrims visiting Santiago de Compostela from northern Europe, altering economic and social arrangements far from the Protestant heartland. Environmental change could also disrupt existing networks. All routes carried disease as well as goods, and the most severe plagues (Justinian's Plague in the 6th c., the Black Plague of the 14th) disrupted exchange networks of all kinds. In China, successive dynasties struggled mightily to maintain the Grand Canal against the flooding of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. As silt accumulated on both sides of the canal, the levees rose higher. In 1851, a catastrophic flood, one of several in the mid-19th century, destroyed a vital stretch of the waterway, effectively ending the canal's utility as an interior waterway. Whether prompted by environmental or political factors, large-scale transformation of existing routes could refashion existing regions and create new ones. The rise of Indian Ocean trade ultimately fostered a distinct African coastal culture and language, built around the interchange of Arabic and Bantu-speaking trade networks. This Swahili coast, extending from Mogadishu south to Kilwa, relied in large part on the Indian Ocean slave trade, a "predatory relationship" that sowed "hostility, distrust and suspicion between peoples of the interior and the coast…still characteristic of the modern countries of east Africa" (201). More recently, Gordon takes note of the Rhine River Commission, a regional organization created in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars to facilitate riverine navigation. And in North America, the Erie Canal transformed the Iroquois Trail's extractive hinterland into a volatile industrial heartland whose rural-to-urban migrants contributed revivalist heat to what 19th century observers dubbed the "Burned-Over District." The third source of consequential change was, strictly speaking, technological, but reflected synergies among 19th and 20th c. industrialization, globalization, empire, and innovation. Waterways were bypassed by rail- and truck-borne freight, relegating the Rhine, Erie Canal and Mississippi to barge traffic and tourism. The Indian Ocean's ancient monsoon trade, plied by lateen-rigged dhows, persisted for certain kinds of low-value goods, but largely gave way to steam and diesel. New financial instruments and credit arrangements overturned the old networks of kinship, cultural affinity, and religious fellowship essential for commercial trust-building before the modern era. Gordon's work has several flaws. First, the travelers themselves seem at times like ornaments, humanizing a paragraph or two but then getting lost in the chronologic sweep. This was true, for instance, of Lucy Duff Gordon, a 19th century British traveler on whose observations hang a 4,000 year sweep of history (32+). Gordon recruits Ibn Battuta for two of his chapters; he might have chosen another Hajji. Second, though Gordon treats cognitive geography as a conceptual game-changer, it comes as no great surprise to discover that travelers with different agendas think differently about place and distance: tourist and truckers do not "see" an interstate highway the same way even when they're both in the same lane. Gordon might have made his point more powerfully had he compared the perspectives of two or three travelers on each of his twelve routes, each with a distinct motivation and, therefore, a distinct mental map. Finally, for a book so dependent upon reader-friendly maps, there are far too many mistakes. A map of the "trans-Sahara" puts Gao and Timbuktu about five hundred miles north of the Niger (Gao is on the Niger and Timbuktu is about a dozen miles north, a proximity vital to the merchants arriving via trans-Saharan caravans. The Silk Road map, depicting Eurasia and the Indian Ocean – omits Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan and Sulawesi. Another map, of the Indian Ocean, covers nearly the same area. This second map does include the Pacific's eastern archipelagos, but does not identify the places mentioned in the chapter. Gordon himself falls into cartographic error, at one point counting Zimbabwe as a "West African" state (212). It is to correct such howlers that even the most skilled writer prays for an uncompromising and vigilant editor. It is disappointing to see Oxford University Press serve Stuart Gordon so poorly. College and high school instructors will find this collection a useful starting point for building curriculum. A teacher can, for instance, divide the chapters among student groups, arranging a jigsaw discussion to provoke comparisons.1 Students might also research routes that Gordon does not describe. How might Gordon's schema account for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the precolonial Congo River, the Oregon Trail, or the roads connecting Mayan cities? Given what students learn from Gordan, what might they predict for the seasonal opening of trans-Arctic shipping routes, a consequence of climate change? In short, for students and instructors, There and Back can offer a useful survey rich with curricular possibilities. Tom Laichas (tlaichas@gmail.com) recently retired after more than thirty years at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. He also served, first as co-editor and then as senior editor, at World History Connected. A collection of poetry, Empire of Eden, is forthcoming in 2020 from High Window Press (UK). |
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Notes 1 For more on jigsaw discussion techniques, see Elliot Aronson's site The Jigsaw Classroom (https://www.jigsaw.org/) |