Contrast of Two Travelers
Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, two traveller writers of the ancient age, with diametrically styles and views on regions they visited. The former, a Genoese Christian; the latter a Muslim. But the reason for the difference in their attitudes didn’t lie in their religion per se : rather, it lay in who was in power back then, writes William Bernstein in his book on trade, A Splendid Exchange . With the rise of Islam, the trade routes from India and China to the West fell entirely under Muslim control. The Europeans were literally locked out. Ibn Battuta, being a Muslim and thus a part of the power of the age, thus behaved like a “surly Western package tourist”: he complained about the food, the quality of hotels and the fact that the locals cheated him during his visit to China. So unhappy was Battuta in China that he didn’t even appreciate the Chinese invention of paper money. Like the “archetypal American”, he was instead exasperated by the “funny money” of China: why don’t they ...