Beyond the Edge of the World

In the 1440s, a small wooden ship slipped its moorings on the Portuguese coast and steered south into an ocean that everyone said could not be sailed. Within a lifetime, European caravels and carracks had rounded Africa, crossed the Atlantic, reached India by sea, and sailed all the way around the earth. This is the complete story of the Age of Exploration — the century and a half when a handful of ships remade the world.

E.B Cohen braids together the voyage epic and its consequences: Prince Henry's captains inching down the African coast, Columbus's fatal miscalculation, Vasco da Gama arriving in Calicut with the wrong gifts, Magellan's men eating the leather off the rigging in the vast emptiness of the Pacific, and the eighteen skeletal survivors who first circled the globe. And it tells the other half of the story — the empires that were not waiting to be discovered but living and doomed, the microbes that did more conquering than any army, the silver mountain that became the heart of the first global economy, and the terrible bargain of the Atlantic slave trade.

This is the story of how the separate histories of humankind were fused, for good and for ill, into a single global history — and how the world we live in now was born at the edge of the map.