Before He Was A Swimming Pool Game

My favorite teacher at American River College was, not surprisingly, in the history department.  We'll call him Professor Cool--so as not to embarrass him.  The first night of a lower division world history class, he began the lecture with the comment, "Before he was a swimming pool game, Marco Polo was an Italian explorer."  With such a quippy beginning, how could I not love Professor Cool?

This weekend, I read Janet Abu-Lughod's Before European Hegemony: the World System A.D. 1250-1350.  Mind you, I am not a world history scholar.  Or even a European history scholar.  In fact, I am barely a U.S. history scholar, being far more focused on my home state of California and its amazingly rich history.  Nevertheless, this semester at CSUS, I am enrolled in a reading seminar that examines the field of world history.  To my surprise, Abu-Lughod's presentation of an economic history demonstrating the interconnectedness of the medieval world was spellbinding.  Surprising to many of us today, Europe played a very small part in the world economy--it was what Immanual Wallerstein would call a "periphery" state.  The main players in the world trading system were states in the Middle East and Asia, with Italians taking on the role of intermediaries and Northern European regions like Champagne and Flanders just beginning to become involved in the wider world. No one region was dominant, and the connections between them meant that decline in one of them could lead to decline in the entire system (as happened, to a great extent, when the plague swept Europe and Asia and decimated the populations of nearly all the trading partners).

Why is this important?  In my twisted mind, reading about this wide medieval world of cultural and economic exchange made me think about my own situation.  I have been walled up here at the Court for over 25 years.  In that time, I have become detached from the outside world.  I no longer think like a member of the private sector; I have become a government drone.  I rarely have the opportunity to interact, in a business sense, with anyone outside the Court (the exception being the amazing people involved in the AB590 Sargent Shriver Grant).  I am medieval Northern Europe, with little to no exchange with the wider world.

But that's all about to change.  The drawbridge is down, and I am free to engage in the outside world.  It is scary--the cultural norms that I am accustomed to here are likely to bear no resemblance to what awaits me.  Yet, it is an exciting challenge.  Like Marco Polo, I am about to explore something new and interesting.  The journey I am about to undertake will undoubtedly have its difficulties, and I am sure there will be times when I am damned scared.  I'm sure Marco was scared as well.  But, scared or not, I am venturing off to learn new things, to discover new lands, and to expand my horizons.  The world awaits....