Europe between the Oceans
Themes and Variations: 9000 bc to ad 1000
Barry Cunliffe
Yale University Press 480pp £30.00 ISBN 978 0 30011 923 7
This handsome book seductively melds the geography of Europe with ten thousand years of history and spins a yarn that owes a great deal to much new archaeological research over the past twenty-five years. With its sumptuous photographs and numerous coloured maps, it feels like a book to accompany a television series. But, as with its earlier companion, Facing the Ocean, Barry Cunliffe has written an academic book that will appeal to a wide range of readership.
This is definitely a Eurocentric book. Its argument is that while Europe is in world terms a relatively minor peninsula attached to the Eurasian land mass, it came to dominate the world during the course of the second millennium AD. ‘China and Japan’, he notes dismissively, ‘worked hard to retain their remoteness.’ The central theme is that Europeans prospered because they were favourably situated facing many seas. The encircling oceans and the great trans-peninsular rivers connecting regions of natural resources encouraged a mobility – ‘an innate restless energy’ – and networks of interaction which formed the platform for the inexorable transformation of Europe from the Last Glacial Maximum around 9000 BC until the formation of the nation states in the wake of the Viking raids around AD 1000.
Beginning with the theme of cognitive geography, Cunliffe reviews the earliest map of Europe by Hecataeus of Miletus as well as Herodotus’s vivid description as illustrations of ways of seeing. Following this, he introduces the reader to the concepts of the French historian, Fernand Braudel about time, distinguishing between la longue durée, the deep rhythm of underlying forces influencing all human society and the faster rhythms respectively of society and of events. It is soon clear that Braudel’s concepts are the basis of this book. Geography (including environment) matters, argues Cunliffe. This determines mobility and interaction. The theme is compellingly developed in arguably the most original chapter dealing with the ‘attributes of the straggling peninsula of Europe’ – its configurations between the oceans. By examining the routeways as well as the seas, their currents and seasonal winds, in a concise, well-illustrated chapter, Cunliffe establishes the canvas on which he paints a picture from the Mesolithic to the Vikings.
Cunliffe enlists archaeological evidence to portray the origins of European society. So, for example, he dwells fleetingly on an individual interred near Stonehenge in the second millennium BC with an array of equipment from the mainland of Europe. This man leads him to reflect upon the spirit of early Europeans who dared to travel: from the inhabitants of Santorini who, according to Herodotus, on suffering a failure of their harvests, went overseas to found a new colony, to 8th-century Irish monks who sailed to Iceland ‘to commune with their god’.
Like Stuart Piggott’s classic, Ancient Europe (1965), geography is melded with the unstoppable march of history. In both cases, the many maps dominated by arrows arching across great sweeps of the European continent suggest a militarized world that, in the light of the discovery of the Neolithic individual from Amesbury, is undoubtedly misleading. Individual agency was possibly as important as the compelling pressure of tribes or formal armies. Indeed, the discourse between environment, society and the individual that Braudel persuasively defined fifty years ago and Cunliffe follows here surely needs reframing given our extraordinary knowledge of Europe from its earliest times. No-one can doubt the significance of the oceans and rivers – and Cunliffe’s achievement in this book is to illustrate this point convincingly – but it is the individuals who challenged the geography and the tenets of tribal society who certainly fashioned European dominance in the second millennium AD. Surely, this argument works for the preceding 10,000 years? Certainly, Cunliffe in his closing chapter considers this thought as he elegiacally recalls encountering an elderly traveller on a road in Sussex who was making for Kent. ‘When I asked why, he said, “We always go there at this time.”’ From this traveller to the Bronze and Iron age tribes sweeping across the maps that illuminate this book, we surely now know that Europeans were always mobile and indeed daring, but we still need to grasp why they were restless.
- Richard Hodges is co-editor of Roman Butrint (Oxbow Books, 2007).