ASIA 150 - Reading 1 (08/20)
The Architecture of Continents
The Architecture of Continents is the development of a continental scheme used to categorize large landmasses. In contemporary usage, continents are understood as large, continuous, discrete masses of land, ideally separated by expanses of water. The sevenfold continental system used in American elementary school geography did not emerge in final form until the middle decades of the present century. The authors emphasize that this convention is historically unstable and surprisingly unexamined.
Key terms:
continent: fundamentally a metageographical category, not a fixed natural entity.
metageography: the study of the boundaries and implications of the geographic categories we use.
Central claim: The contour of continents has been historically constructed, debated, and revised; the modern seven-continent system is a relatively recent standard rather than a timeless truth.
Classical Precedents
The original continental distinction is traced to ancient Greek mariners, who named Europe and Asia for the lands on either side of a central interior waterway (the complex interior waterway running from the Aegean Sea through the Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara, Bosporus, Black Sea, and Kerch Strait to the Sea of Azov).
This waterway became the core boundary in the earliest Greek conceptions; Asia lay to the east, Europe to the west and north, and Libya (Africa) to the south.
The Aegean Sea sits at the heart of the Greek globe conception. Some Greeks used Europe synonymously with Thracia (northern, non-Greek realm) or included the mainland of Greece but not the islands or Peloponnesus; others, notably Aristotle, excluded the Hellenic race from the continental schema altogether, arguing the Greek character occupied a middle position between Europe and Asia.
Greeks tended to view continents as physical entities with minimal cultural or political content. When discussing inhabitants, they usually contrasted Asians and Europeans; Libya was often considered too small or arid to merit deeper treatment.
Herodotus (5th century BCE) criticized the over-theoretical, geometrical approach of Greek geographers and advocated empirical cartography founded on exploration and travel.
One problematic feature Herodotus criticized: Asia and Africa were actually contiguous with Europe, and the Nile and the Phasis (or Maeotic Tanais, depending on account) had been arbitrarily fixed as boundaries, breaking the obvious unity of Egypt and Asia/Africa.
Herodotus questioned who first marked the boundaries or where the names came from; he highlighted the constructed nature of these categories.
Strabo (1st century BCE) noted ongoing disputes about the continents, with some writers treating them as islands, others as peninsulas. He argued Greeks did not consider the whole habitable earth when naming the three continents, instead focusing on their own country and the land opposite.
In Roman times, Europe and Asia continued to be used in scholarly discourse; in military contexts, europeenses referred to the western zone, and Asia to political subdivisions in western Anatolia.
Medieval and Renaissance Constructions
For almost two millennia after Herodotus, the threefold division guided European scholastic imagination. The continental scheme was reinforced in late antiquity as early Christian writers mapped Noah’s descendants onto the world, producing a sacralized three-part framework: Asia, Africa, Europe.
St. Jerome (d. circa 420 CE) claimed Noah gave his three sons inheritance corresponding to Asia, Africa, and Europe, respectively. This theological framing helped explain Asia’s larger size and infused the tripartite division with religious significance.
Medieval Europe inherited Greek ideas but transformed them into mythologized cosmography. The Nile often remained the boundary between Africa and Asia in medieval maps; the T-O maps (a cross-inscribed in a circle) reflected theological space rather than spatial accuracy.
Notable medieval encyclopedists (Martianus Capella, Orosius, Isidore of Seville) upheld the Europe–Asia–Africa framework. However, during the Carolingian period, Europe began to be used as a cultural emblem or topos rather than a precise scholarly category, reflecting the broader political and religious shifts of Christendom.
The religious sacralization of the continental model persisted into the early modern period. Medieval geographers tended to see space through theological lenses, with the Nile often serving as the boundary between Africa and Asia rather than purely physical geography.
Renaissance revivals of Greek and Roman learning restored some scientific authority to the continental scheme, but its boundaries remained contested. Sebastian Munster (16th century) invoked ancient divisions defined by the Don, the Mediterranean, and the Nile.
The Christian world’s geography expanded to reflect the era’s political changes: Turkish conquests in the southeast, Christian expansion in the northeast, and the rise of humanism that challenged the Catholic world’s cultural unity. The result was a secular self-designation for Europe as a distinct civilization, reinforcing the continental scheme even as Christendom’s boundaries shifted.
Old Worlds, New Continents
After crossing the Atlantic, Europeans realized the threefold system did not adequately model a world with a substantial new landmass (the Americas).
The process of recognizing the Americas as a continent was gradual and occurred over nearly a century due to cosmographic shock and resistance to reordering existing geographies.
By 1555, La Division du monde (a French geography text) still listed Asia, Europe, and Africa, with no mention of the Americas.
The Castilian notion of the Indies persisted for longer; the term America began to be used by independentist intellectuals only toward the end of the 18th century.
Duarte Pacheco and Martin Waldseemüller mapped the Americas as a continent by the early 16th century. By the 17th century, most global geographies acknowledged the Americas as one of the world’s four quarters.
The new landmass forced a fundamental restructuring of European cosmography. Edmundo O’Gorman highlighted concepts such as Orbis Terrarum (the world island) and Orbis Alterius (the other world island) to explain how “old” cosmographies could be challenged by the Americas.
Americans appeared to be of the same order as other humans, suggesting a fourth part of the human world, not an entirely separate alter-world.
Ortelius (1570) divided the world into four parts, though his maps did not emphasize divisional lines; some regional maps spanned continental divisions.
Over time, the concept of a unitary human terrain dissolved: the Greeks’ single world island became multiple continents, and the relative isolation of each landmass became its defining feature.
The discovery and mapping of the Americas catalyzed a rethinking of global divisions and undermined the old unity of the Orbis Terrarum. The idea of a single, interconnected world island fell apart, replaced by a recognition of distinct continents with increasing separation.
New Divisions
As cartographic knowledge grew, and as Greek authority waned, boundaries such as the Don or Nile ceased to be meaningful delineators between Europe and Africa/Asia.
Early attempts to separate Europe from Asia used the Don, Volga, Kama, and Ob rivers. These were imperfect boundaries; the Ural Mountains eventually emerged as the most significant barrier to Europe–Asia division, supported by Russian Westernizers like Vasilii Nikitich Tatishchev.
Von Strahlenberg argued that the Urals formed the clearest barrier; his view gained traction in Russia and across Europe, particularly with Malte-Brun’s endorsement in the 19th century.
Because the Urals do not extend far enough south or west to clearly separate all of Europe from Asia, 18th–19th century atlases often combined old and new divisions, showing Europe separated from Asia by the Don, Volga, and Ural, with complex delineations around the Caspian region.
The late 19th century saw a more contorted boundary that often included parts of the Caucasus or even extended further south by some maps to accommodate cultural geography (e.g., including Kalmyks within Europe or placing the boundary near the Sahara).
The 1958 Russian geographers’ proposal framed Europe and Asia with an eastern Urals slope and extra boundaries that reclassify the Caucasus region; the Britannica’s 1963 edition even listed a region like Swat in northern Pakistan as bordering Europe and Asia. Some theorists, like Halford Mackinder, pushed a racial boundary to the Sahara as Europe’s southern limit, further illustrating the political utility of boundary choices.
The overarching point: boundary choices are influenced as much by ideology and political aims as by physical geography.
The current widely accepted boundary (late 19th–20th centuries) uses a compact line running southward through the Urals, across the Caspian region, and up around the Caucasus—though this still remains contested in various geographies and political discourses.
The modern view often treats Europe–Asia boundaries as naturalized or trivial, while acknowledging that earlier maps manipulated boundaries for cultural and political purposes.
The Continuing Career of the Continental Scheme
The term continent appeared with more casual usage historically. In early modern English, a continent could refer to any reasonably large landmass or even an island group; by 1599, Hakluyt referred to the West Indies as a continent; Emanuel Bowen (1752) defined a continent as a large block of dry land comprising many joined countries, without water separation. This underscores the fluid semantics behind “continent.”
The old two-continent division (Europe–Asia as one, Africa as another) was criticized even in the 17th century. Prominent 19th-century geographers like Humboldt and Peschel treated Europe as an extension of Asia; some Russian Slavophiles concurred.
The idea that continents are natural, discoverable entities solidified in the 19th century, with E. H. Bunbury labeling Homer a “primitive geographer” for not recognizing a tripartite division, and for criticizing Herodotus’s east–west axis arguments.
Karl Ritter and Arnold Guyot argued for teleological, race-linked interpretations of continents (Europe as white, Africa as black, Asia as yellow, America as red), linking continental boundaries to racialized anthropologies. This perspective helped naturalize the continent framework in the public imagination, albeit in problematic ways.
The 19th century saw continental thinking become a standard framework, reinforced by educational efforts (e.g., Guyot’s American teaching and writing) that presented continents as purposeful, universal structures in human history and geography.
The concept of the world island (Orbis Terrarum) was replaced by a more continentalist approach as the map of the world diversified and the idea of a single, all-encompassing landmass dissolved.
Into the Twentieth Century
The 18th century raised challenges in categorizing Southeast Asia, Australia, and Pacific islands. By the 19th century, Australia was often depicted as a distinct part of the world, sometimes linked with the Pacific islands. The notion of Oceania as a fifth or sixth division grew in the early 20th century as insular Southeast Asia was isolated from Asia and attached to the island world.
Early 20th-century geography textbooks in Britain and the United States typically used the continental system, dedicating chapters to each natural unit, with slight deviations (e.g., International Geography placing Central/South America in a single chapter; A Regional Geography of the World partitioning Britain in its own chapter).
Some textbooks introduced Eurocentrism or Britanocentrism, such as featuring the British Isles as a separate chapter or region.
Not all geographers accepted fixed continental divisions in the early 20th century. The Van Loon Geography of 1937, for example, humorously acknowledged the arbitrariness of the scheme and still described five continents (Asia, America, Africa, Europe, Australia).
By the 1950s, most American geographers supported separate designations for North America and South America, added Antarctica, and framed Oceania as Australia plus associated islands. The seven-continent system gained widespread acceptance.
The 1960s brought the quantitative revolution in geography, with researchers attempting to calculate the exact number of continents through mathematical methods. The result approximately aligned with the conventional seven continents: North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Oceania (Australia plus New Zealand), Africa, and Antarctica.
Japan adopted a European-derived fourfold system by the 18th–19th centuries, with Asia typically ranked first; the Islamic world had adopted the ancient threefold division earlier, while South Asians used cosmographical rather than purely physical criteria.
With the global dominance of European imperialism, the contemporary European view of the world’s divisions became near-universal, even though some countries still debate the exact number (e.g., fivefold vs sevenfold in parts of Europe).
Paradoxically, once the seven-continent system became dominant, many professional geographers began to abandon it for regionalist approaches in education and scholarship. American university-level global geography texts often shifted toward world regions by the mid-20th century, though popular and general-audience materials continued to use the older continental framework.
The popular press and education still reflect the old system (e.g., “Don't Know Much about Geography” and other child-oriented materials). The notion of the world island remains largely invisible in popular culture, even as formal geographers moved away from it.
By the Numbers, Boundaries, and Formations
Major numerical points:
The seven-continent system is the current standard in many contexts, but global geography has historic precedents with 4-, 5-, and 6-continent schemes as well. The shift to seven continents became widely accepted by the mid-20th century. continents is the standard often cited today.
Several boundary lines have been proposed or used over time, notably: the Don, Volga, Kama, and Ob rivers; the Ural Mountains as the major barrier; later refinements include lines that pass through the Caspian region and the Caucasus.
In some geopolitical discussions, the Sahara has been proposed as a southern boundary for Europe (per Halford Mackinder’s line of argument).
Key terms and concepts worth memorizing:
Orbis Terrarum vs Orbis Alterius: the traditional world island concept vs the idea of a separate alter-world in the Americas.
The Nile as boundary vs the Red Sea boundary: shift from river-based boundaries to sea-based or isthmus boundaries.
The T-O map: medieval cosmological map emphasizing theological space and using a cross (T) to divide Europe, Asia, and Africa within a circle.
Important names and figures to connect to boundary concepts:
Greek: Herodotus, Strabo, Aristotle, Ionians of Miletus.
Roman: europeenses, Asia subdivisions.
Medieval: Martianus Capella, Orosius, Isidore of Seville; St. Jerome.
Renaissance/Enlightenment: Sebastian Munster, Malte-Brun, Ritter, Guyot, Bunbury, O’Gorman (historical analysis rather than a boundary maker).
19th–20th centuries: Humboldt, Peschel, Ritter, Guyot, Ottonian thinkers, von Strahlenberg, Tatishchev, Mignolo, Oriol (as referenced in the text), Mackinder.
The Continuing Career of the Continental Scheme (Summary of Key Points)
Despite critiques, the continental scheme retained a persistent presence in both scholarly and popular geography through the 19th and 20th centuries, with the seven-continent model eventually becoming dominant in much of the world.
The map of the world as a set of discrete continents was often linked to cultural and political ideologies (e.g., European imperialism, racialized typologies) and thus became a vehicle for broader social narratives, not just geographical classification.
The shift toward world regions in education and geography reflected a move away from rigid continental boundaries toward a more regionalized, possibly relativized, view of global geography.
Into the Twentieth Century (Detailed Timeline)
Early 20th century: Oceania emerges as a distinct concept; insular Southeast Asia is sometimes separated from Asia and appended to the island world.
1937: Van Loon’s Geography describes five continents with a light, humorous tone, acknowledging the arbitrary basis of the system; North and South America are still sometimes treated as a single continent in some texts.
1950s: A shift toward recognizing North and South America as separate continents; Antarctica is added; Oceania is recast as Australia plus attached islands.
The seven-continent system gains acceptance in the United States and in many other regions during this period.
The 1960s also sees the quantitative revolution, with researchers computing the number of continents; the resulting tally closely matches the conventional seven continents.
International variation: Japan’s adoption of a fourfold system from the 1700s–1800s, where Asia is usually listed first; Islamic geographers had long used a threefold system but did not emphasize continents heavily until the 20th century.
Despite general acceptance of seven continents, some regions still debate the exact count (e.g., fivefold schemes in parts of Europe) and some debates persist about the geographic and cultural contents of each continent.
The trend toward world regions continues to gain traction among geographers, educators, and those interested in regional studies. Yet the older continental terms persist in popular culture and educative materials.
The Takeaway: Why These Debates Matter
The terms Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia, and Antarctica, and the question of how many continents exist, are not merely neutral labels. They reflect power, culture, and history—how people understand the world and their place in it.
The boundary lines are not purely natural phenomena; they encode political decisions, cultural assumptions, and the needs of empires and nation-states.
In studying geography, it is essential to distinguish between descriptive geography (how the world is) and metageography (how we choose to divide and interpret the world); this chapter argues that our continental framework is a constructed, historically contingent system, not a universal necessity.
Study Questions (From Pages 12–17)
Development and definition
1. In contemporary usage, what is a continent?
2. What are the reasons that the definition of continents is both historically unstable and unexamined?
3. In what century did the sevenfold continental system emerge?
Classical Precedents (Map and concepts)
4. On the provided map, locate the complex interior waterway and the continents it connected: Asia, Europe, Libya, Aegean Sea, Dardanelles, Sea of Marmara, Bosporus, Black Sea, Kerch Strait, Sea of Azov.
5. For the Greek conception of the globe, what lay at the center?
6. Identify the three-continent scheme of the Greeks.
7. Anomaly: Explain the anomaly of the intermediate position of the Greek definition of Europe and Asia.
8. Disparage: According to Toynbee, why did the inhabitants of central Greece disparage their Ionian kin?
9. In what way did Aristotle identify the Greek character and lands?
How did Herodotus’ geography differ from the Greek geometric (theoretical) approach? Identify one problematic feature he criticized.
Contiguous: Asia and Africa were actually contiguous, with Europe as well. Besides contiguity, what else puzzled Herodotus?
Did Herodotus ever learn who first marked the boundaries or where the names came from?
Explain what “constructed categories” means in reference to the continents.
According to Strabo, what did the Greeks neglect when naming the three continents?
Although Romans continued the continental scheme, how were the labels Europe and Asia used informally?
Medieval and Renaissance Constructions
For almost how many years did the threefold division guide European imagination?
Explain in your own words what the authors mean by a “sacralized continental model.” Include the St. Jerome influence and the infusion of religious significance into the Greek tripartite division.
Calcified and mythologized: How did medieval European geographical ideas differ from the best Greek geographers?
On the provided map, locate the Red Sea and the Nile River.
Why did the Red Sea make a more appropriate boundary between Asia and Africa than the Nile?
How did Martianus Capella, Orosius, and Isidore of Seville hold similar views?
On the provided map, outline the Carolingian Empire.
Explain how the concept of Europe was used during the Carolingian period (a topos of panegyric and cultural emblem).
What are the approximate years of the Carolingian period? Which course period (1, 2, or 3) does it belong to?
Old Worlds, New Continents (questions continued)
Describe medieval European conceptions of Africa (dismissed as inferior with reasons).
How did scholarly geographical studies transpose the tripartite worldview?
Since spatial accuracy was abandoned, how did medieval maps represent the earth?
How did the theological view of space use Europe, Asia, and Africa?
Why was the older continental scheme revived in the Renaissance?
How did people use the continental scheme after questioning its constructed nature?
Identify the geographical boundaries of Christianity.
Identify the movement challenging Western Christian unity.
As Christendom’s boundaries coincided with Europe’s Europe and humanists sought secular self-designation, what term displaced Christendom?
How did southeastern Europe’s boundary change during this period?
35–35 (note: missing item in page excerpt)
Old Worlds, New Continents (continued)
Once Europeans crossed the Atlantic, what happened to the threefold continental scheme?
How was the new world landmass taken into account?
What evidence do the authors give that cosmographic shock lasted more than 50 years in France?
How long did it take the Spanish imperial imagination to accept the Americas as a new world landmass and give up the Castilian Indies?
Which Europeans first accepted the Americas as a continent?
By the 17th century, what was generally acknowledged by virtually all global geographies?
antipodes: Explain the differences between Orbis Terrarum and Orbis Alterius.
Instead of being an entirely different species, what did the Americans turn out to be?
What impact did the discovery of a distant human population have on the concept of a world island?
How did the understanding of the world’s major landmasses change over the centuries?
What happened to the Greek notion of a unitary human terrain? Did improved mapping restore it?
New Divisions
As geographical knowledge increased, how did the Nile and Don rivers’ roles change as boundaries?
On the map provided, locate the Don River.
What geographical feature replaced the Nile as the African–Asian divide?
What geographical feature suggested by Strahlenberg became the Europe–Asia boundary?
How did the Ural divide separate Russia from Siberia?
On the map: locate the Ob, Yenisey, and Don Rivers; Sea of Azov, Black Sea, and Caspian Sea.
What other geographical features were added to the Ural Mountains to form a complete border?
How did extending the southern boundary of Europe to include the Sahara affect cultural geography?
What was the purpose of extending Europe’s southern boundary to the Sahara?
The Continuing Career of the Continental Scheme (Summary)
How did the term continent have a far more casual usage?
Write out how Richard Hakluyt referred to the West Indies.
Write out Emanuel Bowen’s statement about continents.
What happened to clear-headed reasoning that Europe, Asia, and Africa were one continent?
How did Carl Ritter conflate continents with races to create a pernicious notion in the public imagination?
Describe how Arnold Guyot influenced generations of American teachers and writers.
How was the continental system regarded in the nineteenth century?
In what ways did nineteenth-century geographers lose Herodotus’s reason for dividing Europe and Asia?
Why did Herodotus have the better scientific argument for a north–south axis versus an east–west axis?
Into the Twentieth Century
Since the early eighteenth century, what is one of the most problematic issues for global geographers?
To what part of the world did cartographers append insular Southeast Asia?
Explain the purpose of American geopolitical designs in 1937.
In which decade did the seven-continent system gain acceptance in the United States?
Identify both the exact number of the world’s continents and their names.
Describe how the triumph of European imperialism affected geography.
The Paradox of Adoption and Abandonment
Who were the people that first abandoned the seven-part continental system?
What remains invisible in the book Don’t Know Much about Geography?
Connections and Implications
The chapter argues that metageography affects policy, education, and cultural identity by shaping how people think about space, race, and history.
The shift from a universal world island to discrete continents reflects broader political shifts: imperialism, nationalism, and regionalism.
The references to maps and maps’ creators illustrate how knowledge production is embedded in power structures and ideological commitments.
Quick recap of core ideas
Continent boundaries are historical constructions rather than fixed natural divisions.
The seven-continent scheme is a modern convention, not a timeless truth.
The Americas’ recognition as a continent required upheaval of established cosmographies.
Boundary choices between Europe and Asia (Don, Ural, etc.) have frequently served ideological purposes.
The “world region” approach gained traction in the mid-20th century, while popular culture continues to propagate the older continental frame.
Notes for exam preparation
Be able to describe the complex interior waterway and its role in early continental thinking.
Explain Herodotus’s empirical critique and how it contrasted with Greek geometrical models.
Compare the sacralization of the continental model in medieval Europe with its scientific revival in the Renaissance.
Discuss the shift from “Orbis Terrarum” to continental divisions and what this reveals about European worldview and colonial expansion.
Outline the boundary debates between Europe and Asia, including the Don, Volga, Kama, Ob, Ural, and related boundary proposals.
Summarize the rise of the seven-continent system and the reasons for its popularity in the mid-20th century.
Reflect on the ethical and philosophical implications of tying geography to race and civilization, as discussed in Ritter and Guyot.
Glossary (key terms to memorize)
Continent, Contiguity, sacralized continental model, Orbis Terrarum, Orbis Alterius, metageography, cosmography, empirical cartography, teleology, demographic/racial mapping in geography, world regions.
Note: The above notes synthesize the content of the provided pages and the study questions embedded in pages 12–17. For visual tasks (map locations), refer to the maps included with the original transcript.