"Age-old exposure to the Bible and the classics left Mediterranean observers poorly prepared to interpret the societies they encountered from the fourteenth to the early sixteenth centuries in the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Abulafia painstakingly recreates the spiral of violence that overwhelmed and destroyed ''stone-age'' societies that had developed largely in isolation. Abulafia also offers a learned account of the emergence of new European anthropologies that sought to transform radically alien others into familiarly pliant Christian laborers."-Jorge Canizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin
"David Abulafia''s masterful study reorients our understanding of the age of Columbus. His meticulous research takes us to the Canary Islands, the Caribbean, and Brazil and puts the European ''discovery'' of the Americas into an Atlantic context where it belongs. With extraordinary erudition and sophistication he shows us how the encounter with the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere shaped early modern European culture."-Peter Mancall, University of Southern California
"From its eye-catching title to its masterful conclusion, this erudite exploration of responses by Iberians and Italians to the peoples they found at the end of the fifteenth century is both unabashedly old-school and engagingly new. Abulafia''s vast essay is as illuminating as it is readable."-Matthew Restall, Penn State University, author of Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
"With equal skills as scholar and story-teller, David Abulafia gets to the heart of a subject that matters to today''s world: how our understanding of human nature began to emerge in the late medieval Atlantic, where each new encounter between previously unfamiliar peoples and cultures challenged and transformed existing notions. No other book covers the subject so thoroughly or approaches it with such brilliance."-Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Tufts University