The.Route to China: Northern Europe’s Arctic. Delusions
In spite of the mounting Western interest in history, ancient travellers ’ tales, and historical.cartography- brought home to us by the number, quality, and popularity of recent works-the arctic regions seem to be peculiarly absent from the main-stream of contemporary historical research. These regi...
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| Language: | English |
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| Online Access: | http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.547.7716 http://pubs.aina.ucalgary.ca/arctic/Arctic37-4-446.pdf |
| Summary: | In spite of the mounting Western interest in history, ancient travellers ’ tales, and historical.cartography- brought home to us by the number, quality, and popularity of recent works-the arctic regions seem to be peculiarly absent from the main-stream of contemporary historical research. These regions also appear to resist, oddly enough, any attempt’at synthesis, as if they can only be understood through a fragmentation of time and space or through the scissions resulting from the disillu-sionments of a recent‘past and the stakes placed on future ex-ploitation, over which many different interests are.already in confrontation. GLOBAL AND NATIONAL HISTORY I think that this hiatus is not a matter of chance, that it does not spring from the historian’s oversight but more from economic, political, ideological, and scientific developments that have taken place. in the Christianized West since the Renaissance. These developments have gradually pushed back the unreal in the Western person’s mind to make way for “logical thought ” and “efficiency”, thus.creating in the realm of knowledge vast patches of shadow beside those areas of.bright illumination. These developments have also led to a historical science whose objecfivity has given way to a creed that too often hides the fact that “revolutions ”- the ap-pearance of new independent states and the specialization of knowledge- have brought with them a divergence in points of view and a. breaking up of geographical representation, notably in the arctic-regions. * This should not surprise us if we consider that the.protagonists of today’s science are the an-tagonists of yesterday in the Arctic, among them the Anglo-Saxons, French, Dutch,.Danes, and Russians, who- vied with each other each from their own economic, political, and religious standpoints. By an easily. understood and perhaps even unconscious reflex, the states that t day control the.real “arctic empires” |
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