Early modern voyages expanded physical but not cultural horizons

Evidence

The new information which the English voyages of the sixteenth century brought to the national culture had to be fitted, as best it could, into a received image of what was important. This means that the facts were not received in quite the same way as they would have been in the nineteenth century. Historians of the last century were much taken with the idea of the Elizabethan imagination liberated by the voyagers. But there is little evidence of this outside the unhistorical supposition, “that’s how I would have reacted.” The voyages certainly did expand the physical horizon, but it is not clear that they expanded the cultural horizon at the same time… . The image of man in his theological, political and social aspects could not be much affected by the discovery of empty or primitive lands. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 517

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader theme that European conquest was ideological before it was physical — foreshadows Edward Said’s orientalism and modern critiques of the ‘Age of Discovery’ narrative.