There are few historians who engage with themes of global history as innovatively as Felipe Fernández-Armesto, and perhaps none who does so more prolifically. In recent years, he has written histories of the millennium (1995), civilizations (2000), food (2001), ideas (2003), the Americas (2003), and the concept of humankind (2004), as well as a major new textbook for world history courses (2006). These works are noted for their appeal beyond the academic world and respected for their audacity and intelligence. At the same time, Fernández-Armesto has continued to publish in edited volumes and academic journals on various aspects of Iberian history and European overseas expansion. In his latest book, Pathfinders: A global history of exploration, these intellectual trajectories converge. It constructs a grand narrative of exploration, from the spread of homo sapiens to the twentieth century, in nine chronologically arranged chapters, with headings such as ‘Stirring’, ‘Vaulting’, or ‘Girdling’ invoking the cumulative progress of human exploration. Underlying this structure is a notion of history as the twin stories of divergence–how humanity parted and developed differences–and convergence–how societies ‘got back in touch, exchanged culture, copied each other's lives, and became more like each other again’ (p. 1). Both stories, the author contends, are stories of exploration.

To describe the process of divergence that has characterized most of human history, Fernández-Armesto weaves together evidence from primatology, paleoanthropology, and archaeology. He suggests that the Stone Age was the most ‘globalized’ era in human history. When the changes in global climate after the last Ice Age induced humans to seek out new resources, cultural divergence accelerated as groups adapted to new environments. In this scheme, convergence is almost as old a phenomenon as divergence since ‘we can be fairly confident that as soon as societies became separated they began to reach out toward one another’ (p. 15). Sedentary farming and urbanization promoted specialization, which became marketable to others. Moreover, the very practices of agriculture and sedentary life were transferable forms of culture, transmitted by early explorers. In the absence of direct evidence for the dissemination of such knowledge, Fernández-Armesto emphasizes exchange. Although the process of crop dissemination spanned many millennia, ‘human pathfinders must still have spearheaded it’ (p. 18). Archaeological finds of products from different ecosystems in the settlements of prehistoric farming communities mean that ‘pathfinders can be presumed to have been at work’ (p. 17), even though it remains impossible to reconstruct the routes and nature of such commerce. Better evidence for the establishment of long-range contacts is available from the second millennium BCE onwards for the civilizations of Eurasia and Africa. To this period belongs the first specialized explorer known by name, the Egyptian Harkhuf, who led expeditions along the Nile. In the Axial Age, trans-Eurasian trade routes brought societies within mutual knowledge, albeit not direct contact, and exposed the disparities of wealth between the East and the West.

Fernández-Armesto argues that sea routes were more important than land routes in global history because they carried goods faster and more economically and presented greater scope for exploration. He repeatedly stresses the significance of the discovery and use of wind systems and currents. As all the big oceans are dominated by fixed wind systems, the main challenge of exploration was to ‘crack–like codes–the patterns’ (p. 41) of the oceanic environment. ‘By comparison, culture, ideas, individual genius or charisma, economic forces, and all the other motors of history meant little. In most of our explanations of what happened in history, there is too much hot air and not enough wind’ (p. 149). The author offers the counterintuitive insight that ‘overwhelmingly, the history of maritime exploration has been made into the wind’ (p. 35): seaborne pathfinders preferred to sail against the elements and actually avoided following winds to stay within a secure range of return. It was only in a few instances, such as the ‘true heroism’ (p. 52) of Norse navigators or the Waqwaq, that sailors entrusted themselves to following winds without the insurance of a homebound wind.

In this light, it is not surprising that the Indian Ocean with its predictable system of seasonally opposing monsoon winds emerged as a cradle of long-range navigation. At the same time, this environment also acted as a check on exploration beyond its bounds: ‘the Indian Ocean is hard to get out of’ (p. 116). To the north and east it is checked by the landmasses of Asia and Africa, south of ten degrees is a belt of storms that deters shipping, and in the east lie the typhoon-racked seas of Japan and the vastness of the Pacific. Moreover, the intense commercial activity within the Indian Ocean and the wealth of societies along its littoral provided little incentive for long and dangerous voyages of discovery. Indeed, its maritime trade was for the most part characterized by a shortage of available shipping in relation to commercial demand. This, Fernández-Armesto suggests, was why the peoples of the Indian Ocean initially welcomed European interlopers, who were ‘truculent, demanding, barbaric, and often violent, but who added to the shipping stock of the ocean and, therefore, contributed to the general increase of wealth’ (p. 117).

The real heart of the book lies in its discussion of the causes and processes of European overseas expansion–or, as the author prefers, Europe's Atlantic-side expansion. He stresses that European seaborne imperialism was specifically located on the Atlantic coasts of western Europe, the very periphery of Eurasia. The region's subsequent ‘singular and terrible role in world history’ (p. 120) is all the more perplexing because Europe's west had historically been at the receiving end of the transmission of culture; in this view, ‘Westerners are the dregs of Eurasian history, and the salient they inhabit is the sump into which Eurasian history has drained’ (p. 121). Pathfinders offers some familiar explanations for the Iberian outward drive, such as the poverty of its marginal kingdoms, the chivalry-steeped ‘world of shabby swagger’ (p. 130) of the lower nobility that promoted the quest for fame and riches, and the desire to circumvent the Maghribis’ hold on the trans-Saharan gold trade. It puts particular emphasis on the discovery and occupation of Atlantic islands by Castile and Portugal as ‘epoch-making accidents’ (p. 128), providing bases athwart the Atlantic trade winds that facilitated the exploration of the ocean routes. The profitable exploitation of these islands, especially through sugar production, also gave investors the resources and confidence to underwrite further Atlantic voyages. Of equal significance was the ‘privatization’ of the right to exploration that proved the dynamic force behind the navigation around West Africa. Interestingly, Fernández-Armesto seems to downplay the significance of the ideology and institutions of the Iberian Reconquista but does not elaborate on his reasons for this. Similarly, he does not discuss any parallels to the ideology of Muscovy's landward expansion of the same period.

The scene thus set, a familiar cast of characters enter: Cabot, Columbus, da Gama, Cabral. They are discussed with great gusto and knowledge. The discussion of Columbus’ voyages is particularly delightful in its deflation of persistent legends. Columbus revised the (remarkably accurate) calculations of the ancient Greeks, underestimating the size of the earth by 20% to argue that Asia could be reached ‘in a few days’ (cited on p. 163). He navigated more by prophetic vision than nautical skill, wielding his quadrant ‘like a magic wand–not for practical use but for specious effect’ (p. 246). And, although the year 1492 ‘gets all the hullabaloo’ (p. 160), his second voyage of 1493 was of much greater significance because it established a viable route for future exploration. Pathfinders also discusses less well-known explorers, such as the Spaniard Andrés de Urdaneta, whom the author considers ‘a figure of primordial importance in the history of the world’ (p. 202) for his discovery of the Acapulco–Manila route. Like the Atlantic pathfinders, his achievement had been made possible by daring to sail with the wind, with no certainty of return. As a result of their achievements, ‘the rest of the world became an offshore resource for Europe–exploitably reachable’ (p. 242).

The final chapters survey such diverse feats of discovery as the territorial exploration of the Americas, the crossing of Siberia, and the quest for the mythical Terra Australis. Most of interior Africa remained a white space on the map well into the nineteenth century, when spirited adventurers hoping to publish bestselling travelogues supplanted merchants and missionaries at the spearhead of discovery. Another strand of the narrative is the role and development of scientific knowledge: cartography promoted the codification of navigational expertise, chronometers helped to overcome ‘longitude blindness’, and methodical experimentation yielded ways to ward off scurvy. Inevitably in a work of this scope, specialists will identify points of disagreement. This reviewer, for instance, would suggest that contrary to the author's assertion Indian Ocean rulers did at times project political power in the Indian Ocean and took titles to reflect this. Similarly, the discussion of the Ottomans’ failure to establish a seaborne empire might be qualified in light of recent work. Some disagreements may well result from Fernández-Armesto's penchant for a provocative phrase. This, however, is integral to the author's characteristic style and makes Pathfinders such a thought-provoking read. The reader is compensated for the inexplicable lack of a consolidated bibliography by the book's fine illustrations, especially the exquisite hand-drawn maps.

On a conceptual level, the proposition that history can be understood as the dual dynamics of divergence and convergence is stimulating. It is similar to a model independently proposed by David Northrup, although it does not share its periodization. The obvious problem with Fernández-Armesto's model is its loose definition of what constitutes divergence and convergence. For the most part he seems to refer to cultural practices, although the initial process of divergence was marked by biological as well as cultural adaptations to new environments to which human groups had been led by early pathfinders. Also, convergence has not been a universal process. For example, littoral societies shared many traits with similar groups across the seas, even without being in contact, while remaining culturally distant to inland dwellers with whom they traded directly. In many parts of the world, a common reaction to the European presence was a crystallization of differences. While the current wave of globalization has its antecedents, it is not an inevitable result of ‘being in touch’. As the author rightly notes, divergence and convergence can occur ‘simultaneously at different levels and in different ways’ (p. 15).

These reflections should only add to the reader's interest in this book. Pathfinders brings a truly new scope and perspective to the history of exploration and the technological, social, economic, and psychological forces that drove it. Its central achievement is in describing the periphery explorers generally occupied–both geographically and socially–and in demonstrating that, for all its ascribed glories, exploration has for the most part been ‘a march of folly, in which almost every step forward has been the failed outcome of an attempted leap ahead’ (p. 399).