In the decisive point, Jules Verne's schedule perfectly mirrors the original adventure of terrestrial globalization: it unmistakably shows the considerable predominance of sea voyages over those on land. Here we still find, in a time when the circumnavigation of the earth had long become an elite sport (‘globetrotting’, which is to say trampling on everything), the trace of Magellan's radical revision of world pictures, in whose wake the notion of a largely terran earth was replaced with that of the oceanic planet. When Columbus was proposing his project to the Catholic majesties of Spain, he was able to state that the earth was ‘small’ and mostly dry, with the damp element constituting only a seventh of it. The sailors of the late Middle Ages likewise declared the predominance of the terran space – for understandable reasons, as the sea is an element not usually loved by those closely familiar with it (the romanticization of the sea, like that of mountains, is an invention of modern urban sentimentality). It was not without deep-seated reasons, based on experience, that the hatred of coast-dwellers for the open water was translated into the vision in the Apocalypse of Saint John (Revelation 21:1) that the world would no longer exist after the coming of the Messiah – a statement very fittingly quoted by the ship's vicar in James Cameron's Titanic while the ship's stern assumes a vertical position before sinking.
All of a sudden, the Europeans of the early sixteenth century were expected to understand that in the face of the predominance of water, the planet earth had been named rather inappropriately. What they called the earth was revealed as a waterworld; three quarters of its surface belonged to the damp element. This was the fundamental globographical insight of the Modern Age, and it never became entirely clear whether it was an evangelic or a dysangelic one.
It was no easy matter for humans to abandon their immemorial terran prejudices. The oldest surviving post-Columbian globe that hints at the existence of the American continents and the West Indian island world, the small metal Lenox Globe of around 1510, depicts – like many later maps and globes – the legendary island of Zipangu, or Japan, as being very close to the western coast of North America. This mirrors the continued dramatic underestimation of the waters west of the New World, as if Columbus's cardinal error – the hope of a short western route into supposedly proximate Asia – were now to be repeated with America as the base. A little over a decade later, on the Brixen Globe of 1523 or 1524, a caravel placed in the ‘peaceful sea’, the Mar del sur, pointed to Magellan's circumnavigation of the earth; pamphlets disseminated as far as Eastern Europe had reported the return of the Victoria as late as the autumn of 1522, and yet the creator of this first post-Magellan globe was unable to participate in the oceanic ‘revolution’. This was not an expression of any reprehensible narrow-mindedness; no European at the time could assess the implications of what the Basque captain Juan Sebastian del Cano and the Italian author of Magellan's logbook, Antonio Pigafetta, had to say when they reported that after sailing from the south-western coast of America, they had sailed ‘for three months and twenty days’ – from 28 November 1520 to 16 March 1521, with consistently favourable winds – on a north-westerly course through an immeasurable, unknown sea that they named mare pacifico, ‘for during that time we did not suffer any storm’.1 This short note holds the oceanographic reversal that would bring geographical antiquity, the Ptolemaic belief in the predominance of landmasses, to a sensational end.
The extent to which the pre-Magellan, Ptolemaic conception of the world was terracentrically oriented is revealed by the most artful among the late medieval descriptions of the earth, dating from barely a generation before Columbus's voyage: the monumental world disc of the Venetian Camaldolese monk Fra Mauro, made in 1459. In its time, it was considered not only the most extensive, but also the most detailed representation of the earth. Naturally it still presents the medieval-Old European earth, which lies contained in the immunizing circle, and on which the damp element literally plays a marginal role. Aside from the patches of the Mediterranean shifted slightly away from the centre and the rivers, the water is only granted the outermost edges. In Fra Mauro's map, the empirical and the fantastic present themselves in a wondrous compromise, and, despite the knowledgeable and dense reproduction of terran conditions, which is in keeping with the research of the time, the picture as a whole obediently submits to the Old European dream command: to imagine a world with as few aquatic areas as possible.
Without the translation of the new Magellanic truth into the maps of the next globe generations and the generation after those, no European would have had an adequate notion of the ‘revolutionary’ inflation of the watery areas. This inflation was the basis of the shift from mainland thought to oceanic thought – a process whose consequences would be as unforeseeable as the Columbian-Magellanic transition from the ancient three-continent conception (which appears on maps as orbis tripartitus) to the modern four-continent scheme augmented by the two Americas. As for the fifth continent, the mythical terra australis, of which the sixteenth century began to dream as the largest and richest of all earthly spaces, the history of its discovery – by the standards of the initial hopes – was a long history of disappointment and shrinking. It would take centuries for European seafarers and globographers to reduce their Australian phantasms to a natural scale. The Britons acted on this when they turned the failing southern realm into their penal colony; now the ‘irredeemable, unwanted excess population of felons’ amply produced by England could be more or less permanently ‘transported’ to a place an optimal distance away from the motherland.2
To anyone familiar with the history of concepts, it seems especially bizarre, yet also revealing, that the contiguous landmasses of the earth's surface would soon bear only the name of the encompassing – continens – that had, into the time of Copernicus, referred to the cosmic shell or firmament of the world's final boundary. If the watery planet doggedly continues to call itself Terra, and if the landmasses on it adorn themselves to this day with the absurd title ‘continent’, this only shows how the Europeans of the Modern Age responded to the damp revolution: after the shock of circumnavigation, they withdrew to misnomers that feigned the long-familiar in the unaccustomed new. For just as the circumnavigated planet does not deserve to be named after the little mainland that protrudes from its oceans, the ‘continents’ have no rightful claim to their name, as they are precisely not the encompassing, but rather the – aquatically – encompassed. It is not only in lexical and semantic terms, however, that the history of the Modern Age was a drawn-out process of manoeuvring and evasion on the part of the terran conception of space and substance in the face of the sea and the flow of goods that passed over it. The hesitance to accept the oceanic truths informed the terran-conservative wing of the entire Modern Age.
The offensive sting of early globalization knowledge lay in the Magellanic views of the true extension of the oceans and their acknowledgement as the true world media. That the oceans are the carriers of global affairs, and thus the natural media of unrestricted capital flow, is the message of all messages in the period between Columbus, the hero of the maritime medium, and Lindberg, the pioneer of the age of the air medium – a message the grounded Europeans fought for centuries with their will to provincialism. It seemed as if the old earth would sink anew in diluvian floods – this time, however, floods that would not fall from the sky, but rather rush in from unheard-of logbooks. In the nineteenth century, Melville, the greatest writer of the maritime world, could let one of his figures exclaim: ‘Yea, foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided.’3 Both the unity and the division of the planet earth had become subject to the maritime element, and European seafaring – in its civil, military and corsair manifestations – had to prove itself as the effective agent of globalization until the rise of aeronautics. It was via the oceans that the European world powers wanted to build their ‘seaborne empires’. During that time, anyone who claimed to understand the world had to think hydrographically. Even the sardonic itinerary in the Morning Chronicle acknowledged this truth by featuring a total of sixty-eight days at sea alongside a mere twelve by rail to travel around the earth. Only the sea offered a foundation for universal thoughts; the ocean alone could bestow the doctorate caps of the true Modern Age. Melville rightly let the same protagonist declare: ‘a whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard’.4
One of the first to draw practical conclusions from the insights of Magellan and del Cano was the young monarch Charles V, king of Spain from 1516 and ruler of the Holy Roman empire from May 1519. In the autumn of 1522, Pigafetta presented his ship's log to him at Valladolid as the most secret document of the new international situation.5 Charles quite rightly took the information about the Pacific and the superhuman efforts involved in the circumnavigation of the earth on the western route as news that was both wondrous and frightening. After only a few failed attempts to repeat Magellan's voyage, he considered it advisable to abandon the idea of new trips to the Maluku Islands. Thus, in the Treaty of Zaragoza of 1529, he sold the asserted Spanish claims to the islands to the Portuguese crown for 350,000 ducats – which transpired as an excellent deal after improved longitude measurements on the other side of the globe a few years later showed that since the division of land agreed on in 1494 in the Treaty of Tordesillas, the sought-after Spice Islands had belonged to the Portuguese hemisphere anyway.
This inter-dynastic change of ownership of distant lands, where clearly neither the buyer nor the seller even knew their exact location, mirrors more accurately than almost any other act from that time the speculative nature of the original globalization. It is somewhat ridiculous when today's journalists presume to identify the most recent movements of speculative capital as the real cause of the world-form shock known as globalization. From the first moment on, the world system of capitalism established under the interwoven auspices of the globe and speculation.6 Likewise, the knowledge that merchant capital has a tendency to emancipate itself from ties to a particular country is as old as the modern economic system itself. In 1776, Adam Smith was able to note down the following words as if uttering a self-evident truth:
A merchant […] is not necessarily the citizen of any particular country. It is in a great measure indifferent to him from what place he carries on his trade; and a very trifling disgust will make him remove his capital, and together with it all the industry which it supports, from one country to another.7
The overseas empire of Charles V had been financed with loans from Flemish and Augsburg banks, and later Genoese ones, whose owners set globes in rotation in order to gain an idea of the outward journeys of their credit and the return journeys of their interest.
From the start, the oceanic adventure entangled its actors in a race for hidden chances to access opaque distant markets. Cecil Rhodes's notorious statement already applied to them: ‘Expansion is everything.’8 What economists after Marx called original accumulation was often – as the aforementioned example suggests – more an accumulation of ownership titles, options and claims to usage than a management of production plants on the basis of invested capital. For the princely and civil clients of overseas navigation, the discovery and formal appropriation of distant territories established an expectation of future income, whether in the form of loot, tribute or regular trading transactions, where it was never forbidden to dream of fabulous profit margins.
The globalization of the earth by the early seafaring merchants and cosmographers was clearly far removed from submitting to theoretical interests; since its initiation by the Portuguese, it had followed a resolutely anti-contemplative knowledge programme. Whoever sought to gain control over the newly discovered world had to dispense with idealizations and deductions. The experimentum maris provided the criterion for the new understanding of world-experience. Only at sea did it become clear how the Modern Age intended to envisage the interplay of theory and practice. A hundred years before Francis Bacon, the contractees and actors of global circumnavigation knew that knowledge of the earth's surface was power – power in its most concrete and profitable form. The increasingly precise image of the earth directly took on the character of quantitative and access knowledge; new oceanographic insights amounted to arms deliveries for the battle against competitors in the open space. Geographical and hydrographical discoveries were therefore guarded like state secrets or industrial patents; the Portuguese crown forbade – on pain of death – the proliferation of nautical charts that showed the country's discoveries and descriptions of coastlines. That is why hardly any of its famous portolans, which were used like itineraries for sailing along navigable coastlines, have survived.9 A counterpart to calculation with Arabic numerals emerged, one might say, in the form of calculation with European maps. After the introduction of the Indo-Arabic zero in the twelfth century had enabled an elegant arithmetic, the earth globe of the Europeans provided an operable round view of geopolitical and world economic affairs.
In the same way, however, that – as noted by the philosopher Alfred N. Whitehead – no one leaves the house to buy zero fish, no one sails from Portugal to Calicut or Malacca to return with zero cloves in the cargo hold. From this perspective, a group of spice islands in the South Pacific targeted and occupied by European desires is not simply a vague spot on a vague world map, but also a symbol of expected profits. In the hands of those who know how to use it, the globe is the true icon of the newly navigable earth; even more than this, it constitutes an image of monetary sources flowing from the future to the present. One could even consider it an occult clock that showed the hours of profit connected to distant islands and foreign continents. The modern globe made its fortune as an opportunity clock for a society of long-distance entrepreneurs and risk-takers who already saw the wealth of tomorrow on the coasts of other worlds today. This clock, which showed the hours in the never-before-seen, told the quick-witted agents of the new era – the conquistadors, spice merchants, gold hunters and later political realists – how things stood for their enterprises and their countries.
It is clear why the same globographers served both the princes and the civil large-scale entrepreneurs. Before the new, emperors and peddlers are equal, and Fortuna barely discriminates between noble and non-noble minions. Charles V, whose attention was drawn to these extremely useful scholars by his secretary Maximilian Transylvanus, had friendly relations with Gerhard Mercator and Philipp Apian, the outstanding globographers of their time, who simultaneously worked for the entire financial and scientific elite. Raymund Fugger, certainly no mere peddler, had a globe of his own produced by Martin Furtenbach in 1535, which was later exhibited at the Fuggerschloss in Kirchbach; like the slightly earlier Welser globe made by Christoff Schiepp, the Fugger globe was an artfully fashioned unicum. The future, however, belonged to printed globes, which reached the market in larger numbers; they provided globalization with its first mass media foundation. Whether it was a unique specimen or a serial product, however, every globe spoke to its viewers of the pleasure and necessity of gaining advantages in the borderless terrestrial space.
On 22 March 1518, after the nautical hero Magellan had turned his back on ungrateful Portugal, he and a representative of the Spanish crown cast a joint glance at one such promising globe, which located the Spice Islands somewhere near the Antipodes, and made a contract for the discovery of the same (Capitulación sobre el descubrimiento de las Islas de la Especeria) which already stipulated in minute detail the division of the virtual riches that would be generated by these sources. This shows with uncommon explicitness that even the concept of ‘discovery’ – the central epistemological and political word of the Modern Age – referred not to an autonomous theoretical category, but rather to a special case of the investment phenomenon; and investment is in turn a case of risk-taking. Where the schemata of risk-taking spread at a general level – taking up loans, investing, planning, inventing, betting, reinsuring, spreading risks, building up reserves – people emerge who want to create their own fortune and future by playing with opportunities, not simply accepting whatever God's hand grants them. In the new property and money economy, this is a type which has learned that damage makes people wise, but debts make them wiser. The key figure of the new age is the ‘debtor-producer’ – better known as the entrepreneur – who constantly flexibilizes their business methods, their opinions and themselves in order to access by all lawful and unlawful, tried and untried means the profits that enable them to pay off their loans on time. These debtor-producers give the idea of owed debt its radically renewing, modern meaning: a moral fault becomes an economically logical relationship of incentive. Without the positivization of debt, there can be no capitalism. It was the debtor-producers who began to turn the wheel of permanent monetary circulation in the ‘age of the bourgeoisie’.10
The primary fact of the Modern Age was not that the earth goes around the sun, but that money goes around the earth.