The Intimacies of Four Continents

Abstract

Reading The Intimacies of Four Continents will change the way we look at global (and national) histories forever. In this groundbreaking book, Lisa Lowe offers a genealogy of European liberalism—often narrated according to “a linear temporal progression”—in a broadly conceived “spatial dynamic” (p. 16). Lowe argues that settler colonialism in the Americas, the African slave trade, and East Indies and China trading were the conditions for modern liberalism. Lowe's “global geography” is a fourfold continental system (Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas) that constituted Europe's imperial discourse rather than a given reality (p. 18). Christopher Columbus's journey west across the Atlantic instead of east around Africa in search of a new trade route to Asia, resulting in the “discovery” of a “new world,” irrevocably altered Europe's three-part planetary imagination. Reading across the four continents, Lowe interprets that a post-Columbus cartography created and perpetuated basic global divisions and enabled “Western liberalism to think the universality of human freedom” (p. 16).