The Globe : How the Earth Became Round

Author: Hannam, James

General & world history

Published on 1 July 2023 by REAKTION BOOKS in the United Kingdom.

Hardback | 320 pages, 47 illustrations, 9 in colour; 47 illustrations, 9 in colour
145 x 224 x 37 | 604g

The Globe tells the story of humanity's quest to discover the form of the world. Philosophers in ancient Greece deduced the true shape of the Earth in the fourth century BCE; the Romans passed the knowledge to India, and from there it spread to Baghdad and Central Asia. In early medieval Europe, Christians debated the matter but long before the time of Columbus, the Catholic Church had accepted that the Earth is round and not flat. However, it wasn't until the seventeenth century that Jesuit missionaries finally convinced the Chinese that their traditional square-earth cosmology was mistaken. An accessible challenge to long-established beliefs about the history of ideas, The Globe shows how the realization that our planet is a sphere deserves to be considered the first great scientific achievement.