Around the world in many ways
Nothing irritates Joyce Chaplin more than business catchphrases like “unprecedented global services” and “now we are a global society.” “There’s a much longer history of people thinking globally than simply the last 20 years,” she said. “These people never had the planetary experience of Magellan’s 35 survivors” back in 1521. Chaplin, the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History, is working on a definitive history of circumnavigation, and knows exactly how much precedent these “global services” have, and how long there has been a global society. “I’ve never written anything with such a long history,” she mused of the project, which began, like the journeys of old, by setting out to sea. “I was out on a ship in the Gulf Stream working on my last book about Ben Franklin. I was starting to work on Franklin’s French correspondence, and was stuck out there at sea, so I needed something to...