“New World” and “Old World” are concepts still widely used to refer to the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, respectively, first adopted in European society after Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas in 1492. Sixteenth-century European cartographers consolidated the terms, influenced by Europe’s assumption of superiority over the indigenous communities it had “discovered.” While the terms were temporally inaccurate, they successfully framed the newly understood global landscape as a contrast between modernity and barbarism, justifying colonization—and its devastating effects—in the eyes of Europeans.
“Discovering” the New World
Christopher Columbus’s voyages between 1492 and 1502 initiated an interchange of stories and imaginaries about people, events, and landscapes between Europe and what is known today as America. However, it was Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci who first recognized the presence of an entire continent completely unknown to Europeans, located between East Asia and Europe. He traveled to South America several times, and in 1503, sent a letter to Lorenzo Pietro di Medici referring to his discoveries using the term Mundus Novus (New World) for the first time. His letters were reproduced and spread across Europe, accompanied by the earliest cartographical representations of the American lands.
These letters completely changed how Europeans perceived and imagined the world. It became widely accepted that these lands should be named after the Italian explorer, especially after German cartographer Martin Waldeemüller used the word “America” in his updated maps featuring the American continent, recognizing Vespucci’s explorations.
Was the New World Really New?
When Columbus arrived in the Americas through the Bahamas, he thought the lands he had stumbled upon were connected with the Eastern part of India, which led him to call the local people Indios. Thereafter, Europeans referred to the newly discovered Caribbean region as the “West Indies.” This misleading perception of the world changed after Vespucci realized these territories were an entirely different land, unknown to Europeans.
Neither Columbus nor Vespucci discovered a pristine land filled with what Europe believed were uncivilized savages—they didn’t “discover” anything at all. Instead, they encountered lands that had been occupied for millennia by great civilizations and various smaller indigenous communities dating back to at least the mid-6th millennium BCE.
To appreciate how not “new” this so-called New World was, it is helpful to consider when the American continent was first populated. The earliest ancestors of indigenous communities in America were called the Paleo-Indians, the first people who entered the continent through a landed path in the Bering Strait between what is now Alaska and Russia during the final glacial period of the Late Pleistocene (12,9000-17,700 BCE). It would be more accurate to credit these Paleo-Indians as the people who discovered the continent for the first time.
Paleo-Indians spread southward over the continent during the Archaic stage (8000-1000 BCE), leading to the development of the first sedentary and agriculture-based societies in Mesoamerica and the Andes. The earliest cradle of civilization in the Americas was found on the coast of Peru and was called the Caral-Supe. This civilization flourished between 3500 and 1800 BCE and was as old as the Egyptians. After their decline, the so-called pre-Columbian civilizations developed in Mesoamerica and the Andean Cordillera. These included, among others, the Inca in Peru, the Muisca and Tairona in Colombia, the Huetar in Costa Rica, the Taínos in the Caribbean, and the Olmecs, Mayas, Toltecs, Mixtecs, and Aztecs in Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize.
Reframing current conceptions of the New World and the Old World is, fundamentally, a matter of temporal perspective. The Olmecs in Mesoamerica developed between 2000-900 BCE and were older than the Ancient Greeks (1200 BCE–600 CE). The city of Teotihuacan (250 CE–650 CE), in what is now Mexico City, was contemporary to Imperial Rome (31 BC–476 CE). Just before the arrival of the Spanish, the Aztec and Inca Empires were contemporary to the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, and the Ottomans.
The “New World” After 1492
Before Columbus’s arrival, the American continent was populated by up to 112 million people. Spanish colonization of the continent brought intense sociocultural and biological pressures that caused this number to drop to less than 5 million by 1650. These pressures include the forced introduction of European social and political structures in favor of colonial expansion, the spread of Catholicism to evangelize and “civilize” the indigenous communities, and, most importantly, the introduction of several viral and bacterial diseases for which native people were not prepared immunologically.
The evidence today shows that, far from being a scarcely populated land, wild and pristine, as it was thought of in Europe, the American continent had been shaped and structured by local indigenous communities and civilizations. However, because of the deadly consequences of colonialism in America, local societies fell and disappeared. According to one scholar, human presence in the Americas was actually less visible in 1750 than in 1492.
The Geopolitical Implications of New vs Old Lands
Over the last centuries, modern sciences have organized the world through dichotomies that have shaped how countries and nations see each other: the North and the South, the West and the East, the First and Third World, the New and the Old. These terms, far from reflecting the world objectively, have strong political implications driven by economic, social, or political interests often exercised by dominant societies over subaltern ones.
The distinction between the “New” and “Old” Worlds was no exception. This concept significantly defined European beliefs regarding the communities living outside the continent as well as their own societies. The assumption of Europe’s ethnic and social superiority was present from the very beginning in Columbus’s letters, where he described Indians as peaceful, naïve tribes, technologically and culturally inferior, and suggested that Spain would need to make them Christians to serve the crown.
Later, during the 18th century, the Age of Enlightenment resulted in many new intellectual, scientific, social, and political ideas that shaped novel Europe’s understanding of the world. In her recent article “The New World Debate and the 18th-Century Images of America that Brought Europe Together,” researcher Catherine Dossin from Purdue University studied how, during this time, Europe experienced an increase in knowledge development while simultaneously dealing with the question of America. She studied how the 18th-century paradigm of Europe was built upon a self-referential confrontation with the newly discovered continent. In simpler terms, Europe defined itself by what it was not in comparison with foreign lands and peoples.
Moreover, Dossin notes that the publication of Comte de Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle (1749-1804) proposed the idea of America’s biological inferiority compared to Europe as a scientific truth. In addition, she highlights some other works that influenced the image of Europe in contrast with America: Rameau’s opera-ballet Les Indes Gallantes (1735), Voltaire’s play Alzire et les Américains, and De Pauw’s pamphlet Recherches philosophiques sur les Américains (1768).
These works helped to spread the assumption that the progress of European civilization was the path these newly “discovered” so-called savage societies should follow, reinforcing the belief that American indigenous communities were barbarians who needed Europe’s guidance and control. These stereotypes were accompanied by processes of othering, symbolic exclusion, fetishization, and reductionism.
Moreover, the earliest representations and narratives of the Americas in Europe served to develop a Eurocentric view of the world through what Dossin calls a “paternalistic, usually benevolent but always contemptuous relation to America,” which would bring cultural and political legitimacy to colonial expansion and colonialism as an “essential, yet uncomfortable, dimensions of Europe’s modern identity.”
Without a doubt, these were core ideas that made colonization legitimate in the eyes of many living in Europe and the reason Catholicism was viewed as one of the best tools to convert what was left of the indigenous population to a new set of moral values that would align with the “civilized” European world. The presumption of American inferiority and the need for control was used to exercise power over not only indigenous people but also their lands, making them available for colonial expansion, intensive looting, and exploitation.
Decolonizing Modern Discourse: Reconsidering New vs Old
The decolonial perspective in current social discourse has long insisted on evaluating how many Eurocentric concepts still exist in the discourses and practices of both academia and everyday life today. Reconsidering the use of terms such as New World and Old World implies that modern humans are conscious of the colonial legacy they reproduce. Discontinuing the use of these terms is another stepping stone in critically reviewing what has long been taught about the world’s geography and history and, most importantly, revealing the hurtful conditions under which Europe’s colonial powers diminished the contributions of the societies that had been existing and developing for millennia in the not new part of the world.
Bibliography:
Denevan, W. M. (Ed.). (1992). The native population of the Americas in 1492. Univ of Wisconsin Press.
Denevan, W. M. (1992). The pristine myth: the landscape of the Americas in 1492. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 82(3), 369-385.
Hall, S., (ed.), (1997), Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. SAGE Publications & Open University, London.
Stanković, A. K. (2021). Visual representations of Native Americans in colonial America. Facta Universitatis, Series: Visual Arts and Music, 075-085.
