‘Old World’ / ‘New World’
This piece appeared on my Patreon account way back in 2022. I thought I’d move it here so that it would be more accessible. I’ve barely edited these Patreon pieces and they were all written fairly quickly; try to forgive the occasionally clunky prose.
I was asked recently why I don’t use the terms ‘New World’ and ‘Old World’ in reference to pre-Columbian America and Afro-Eurasia respectively. It’s a question worth answering in a somewhat longer form than a tweet.
‘New World’ and ‘Old World’ are common terms — and they’re useful too. I tend to say ‘American commodities’ when talking about crops domesticated in the Americas, like peanuts, sunflowers, and so on, but for most people that phrase is naturally more likely to bring to mind high-fructose corn syrup and AR-15-style rifles. ‘New World commodities’ doesn’t have that problem. ‘Old World’ also has the positive implication of a shared ecumene or world across Afro-Eurasia before the Columbian exchange, and I’m keen to emphasise these medieval Afro-Eurasian links in my own work.
However: these terms are imprecise, they’re Eurocentric, and they have unpleasant connotations. I’d prefer not to use ‘Old World’ and ‘New World’ even if it means that I end up clunkily repeating ‘Afro-Eurasian’ and ‘American’ every other paragraph. I’m sure a lot of you will agree with this already, but I’ll explain below anyway (and refer back to this piece in future if I ever feel my writing suffers from the lack of these phrases).
Not Precise!
The terms ‘New World’ and ‘Old World’ are imprecise because they don’t tell us what these two worlds comprised, even approximately. ‘Old World’ often appears to refer exclusively to Europe (as in the hideous phrase ‘old world charm’) and not to greater Afro-Eurasia at large — Africa, Asia, and Europe in addition to their neighbouring islands. If I say ‘Afro-Eurasia’, you know which region of the world we’re talking about, and the same applies to ‘the Americas’.
I see the term ‘Afro-Eurasia’ butchered fairly often, by the way — ‘Afro-Asia’ is a common if baffling variant. I don’t know why the term is so perplexing or seemingly so novel. The Afro-Eurasian mainland is the biggest contiguous landmass on our planet. It’s odd that people aren’t generally aware of that fact. Either way, ‘(greater) Afro-Eurasia’ is a useful and generally accurate term, and the fact that it is so novel for so many people suggests that it is genuinely consciousness-raising to use it the way that I and many other scholars do. The same cannot be said for ‘Old World’.
Eurocentric!
From the perspective of the Mēxihcah, the ‘New World’ was not new and the ‘Old World’ not old. Wheat was new in Central Mexico in the sixteenth century; the Spanish language was new; Christianity was new; and when Mēxihcah went to Europe, Europe was new. To refer to the Americas as the ‘New World’ is obviously Eurocentric — and I probably shouldn’t need to say much more than that.
Of course, the Americas were peopled much later than Afro-Eurasia, with the first humans crossing Beringia something on the order of 25,000 years ago. These people were not preceded by other hominids, and all the people who made their way to the Americas were fully modern humans like us. Afro-Eurasia is the ‘Old World’ and the Americas the ‘New World’ in that restricted sense. Unless we’re talking about events in the Pleistocene, though, I don’t see much use for this Old/New distinction.
White/Christian Supremacy!
The other reason for opposing ‘New World’ discourse is that the very phrase ‘New World’ implicitly endorses white/Christian supremacist narratives of Manifest Destiny and the discovery doctrine. I’d avoid these terms even if they could be salvaged from such links and connotations for the reasons outlined above, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the obvious settler colonial connection here: The notion that the Americas constitute a ‘New World’ is fundamentally a refusal to acknowledge the histories of the people who lived there before Europeans (and other Afro-Eurasians) turned up.
No texts written before the sixteenth century are known from anywhere in South America (assuming khipus, which cannot currently be read, do not constitute ‘texts’), nor from North America north of Mexico. The only truly literate places in pre-Columbian America were in Mesoamerica. This does not mean that the other indigenous peoples of the Americas did not have histories before 1492; history is not simply what is recorded in written texts. I do not want to use phrases that suggest otherwise or terms that justify settler colonialism, implicitly or otherwise.
I suppose this means we’ll all have to get used to reading, writing, and hearing ‘Afro-Eurasia’ and ‘the Americas’ fairly often if we are to make progress in understanding our human past. These are the terms I will continue to use, in any case.
A. J. West — Lisbon, 2022 (posted here 2024).
