Late-medieval European world-views blocked expansion as much as naval technology did.

Evidence

This comment pinpoints the complex factors—economic, political, and spiritual—which motivated Portuguese expansion. Why, then, hadn’t they simply sailed southward before? One answer is that they thought their ships were not sufficiently robust to endure the fierce currents and contrary winds to be encountered around the curve of the North African coastline. Another equally powerful factor was what is called the “Great Barrier of Fear”—evident, for example, in the belief that beyond Cape Bojador lay the mouth of Hell, where the seas boiled and people turned black because of the intense heat. The late-medieval European conception of the world constituted as much of a barrier to expansion as technological and navigational factors. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 543

Categorization

• XREF: Directly anticipates the Orientalist epistemology of ‘imaginative geographies’ — the conceptual map of the world as a barrier to action echoes the discursive production of space that downstream Islamophobia readings will use.