Book Review: Europe Between the Oceans by Barry Cunliffe

The Scotsman ^ | July 19, 2008 | unattributed

[SunkenCiv]

Cunliffe's thesis is disarmingly straightforward and elegant. In seeking to unpack the history behind the extraordinary expansion of European power and influence all over the world after 1500, he looks closely at how the peoples of the continent communicated and interacted in the 10,000 years before that. It is his central contention that geography was absolutely determinant, and that Europe's long and indented coastline -- the Black Sea, the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the North Sea and the Baltic -- encouraged constant mobility, the rapid exchange of ideas and a ceaseless flow of innovation. To illustrate, Cunliffe's approach is like that of a historical hot-air balloonist. Flying high over Europe, in the quiet, still air, he points out the immense generalities, how the littoral is a series of connected seas and bays navigable in short hops, how the great rivers washed ideas, raw materials and people down to the busy shoreline...

Not only the master of detail, Cunliffe is also abreast of current research in many specialist areas. The huge volume of reading behind a book like this can be underestimated. For example, we are told that at the same time as all that gold was being buried in Bulgaria, the herdsmen of the steppes between the rivers Don and Dnepr were beginning to tame and ride horses. Russian archaeologists found that the teeth of a stallion showed a pattern of wear made by having a solid bit in its mouth, and the cheek pieces of a primitive bridle have been recognised. When horses were later trained to pull carts in place of plodding oxen, the speed of transport improved dramatically from 16 miles a day to between 31 and 37 -- a radical change which altered the flow and reach of early economies.

[SunkenCiv]

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Europe Between the Oceans: 9000 BC-AD 1000 by Barry Cunliffe

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[SunkenCiv]

The Sunday Times review by James Fenton Barry Cunliffe offers a survey of European development from the Last Glacial Maximum (10,000 BC) to the beginning of modern history. A sober assessor of evidence, he is also happy to speculate, as when he discusses the strange fact that certain elements of early jewellery, perforated amber spaces for multistrand necklaces, are found only in Wessex and Mycenae. Was this, he asks, "the result of a single journey -- carried perhaps on a Mycenaean boat that had ventured into the Atlantic, or by an enterprising Wessex warrior exploring the wider world? Or could the carrier have been a Wessex woman wearing her finery as she left home as a gift to a Mycenaean prince?" ...Cunliffe is a fan of Herodotus, whose record of the funeral customs of the Scythians turns out to accord well with the surviving evidence. This involves the strangling of "one concubine, a cook, a groom, an attendant and a messenger" to bury with the deceased king, plus, on the first anniversary of the death, 50 strangled attendants (true-born Scythians, for they keep no slaves), attached by vertical stakes to 50 of the finest strangled horses. The dead king is stuffed with frankincense, parsley and anise. The attendant youths and horses are stuffed with chaff.

[SunkenCiv]

reviewed for The Atlantic by Benjamin Schwarz

[SunkenCiv]

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[vbmoneyspender]

Mountain ranges are important too. The mountainous terrain in ancient Greece enabled the city-states to compete but prevented any particular city-state from becoming absolutely dominant. I would argue that the mountain ranges in Europe (i.e. the Pyrenees and the Alps) along with the English Channel had the same effect on with respect to Western Europe.

[SunkenCiv]

I have to disagree. Sparta became dominant over the Peloponnese, and over a couple of generations crossed a mountain range (which remained nearly roadless until the 20th century) to conquer the Messenians and held them as slaves for a couple of centuries. Only after generations of downward spiral of the elite population, followed by its exhausting war with Athens, was Sparta's dominance finally broken, by the Thebans, who then remained the major power in the Peloponnese until the Macedonians conquered Greece.

The English Channel wouldn't be called that (because there wouldn't be an England) if it had ever posed much of a barrier everyone who came along. :')

Theban victory monument at Leuctra

[vbmoneyspender]

Ancient Greece was much more than the Peloponnese. And Ancient Greece never came under the control of a single Greek city-state (although not for lack of trying on the part of the Athenians). In fact, no single power was able to control Greece until Alexander came along.

[rdl6989]

Adding to my reading list.

[SunkenCiv]

Yeah, I plan to get it out of the library. :')