As many of you will know, I am (endlessly it
seems) working on a book about Western Europe around 600 AD. I work on Western Europe partly because it is
what, over the years, I have become most (if far from exclusively) interested
in, and partly because it is the limit of my scholarly competence. I have little time for people who study regions
or periods of history where they can’t read the sources in the original
language (why yes, ‘Latin East’ Crusades studies, I am looking at you, but not
exclusively). I can get by in reading all
of the western European Romance or Germanic languages, to some degree, ranging
from fluent (French) to ‘basically getting the gist if it’s not too complex’ (Norwegian;
Portuguese). But my Greek is pretty
basic; I have a very (very) little Turkish but not enough to call a reading
knowledge (and none at all prior to Ataturk’s reforms of script and grammar); and
I can’t read any Slavic languages, let alone Arabic or Parsi, or Sanskrit, or
Chinese… And that, ladies and gentlemen,
is the main reason why I restrict myself to the West. The other reason is simply to put some sort
of geographical limit on the projects.
Partly, though far from entirely, as a means of
making a virtue of this necessity, I have developed an interest in the
North-South axes of communications and connections in the West, from Scandinavia
to the western Mediterranean, rather than in the East-West axis that has
generally dominated the historiography.
I think that has allowed a slightly different perspective on the ‘Late
Antique Paradigm’ and a slightly different way of seeing the last century or so
of the Western Roman Empire. Clearly, it’s
impossible to study that period without keeping the Eastern Empire in the
picture but I maintain that the disintegration of the Western Empire was chiefly
attributable to entirely western imperial factors.
One of the many things that is interesting
about the period between c.550 and c.650 is that in this period links with the
East, the old East-West Mediterranean axis, let alone more far-flung
connections, began to reduce further, and dramatically. Now, this is not news, and not just because
it’s stuff that happened 1400 years ago.
If Pirenne was right about anything, it was about the ways in which the
North-West, the North Sea World, had become more important in Western Europe,
than the Mediterranean world by Charemagne’s day. That’s not to say that the Mediterranean was
without any importance at all; recent studies have shown that East-West
contacts were much more important than Pirenne, for instance, had thought. But the picture, grosso modo, pertains. In
Pirenne’s narrative, the closing of the Mediterrranean by the Arabs, as he
thought, led to western Europe turning inwards and creating new economic
systems around the North Sea. ‘Without
Mohammed, Charlemagne is inconceivable’, in Pirenne’s famous dictum. Pirenne
was wrong about almost all of the specifics of his model. The North-Western European, North-Sea world was
effectively separated from the Mediterranean at least by the fourth century,
for example.(1) Whether the Arabs are to blame for the end of
the Mediterranean’s domination of the western economy is debatable; the shift
comes a generation or more too early in my view but Simon Loseby, whose
understanding of the Mediterranean economy is far superior to mine, thinks
otherwise (or at least used to).
Nonetheless, that the shape of western European networks, c.650, differed
very importantly from those of c.550 seems incontrovertible to me as does the comparative
applicability of the phrase ‘inward-looking’ to those networks.
In even grander narratives, of European
exceptionalism, of the Rise of the West and so on, that phase becomes yet more
important. Allegedly, it is this ‘inward-looking’
period that saw the creation of the features, and the dynamics, that enabled
Europe to expand outwards, ultimately to dominate the world in the period after
c.1800. There’s a danger, perhaps, of
this study of western Europe in the generations either side of 600, becoming
incorporated in one of those tiresome narratives about Why the West is the Best, worse still in one of those narratives of
modernity. Rather like Simon Critchley,
I don’t really believe in modernity, other than as a narrative construct, and I
reject ‘modernity fundamentalism’.(2)
The concept of the modern world is a rather Eurocentric one.
It has become fashionable recently to discuss
Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in more global terms. In some ways this is excellent; in other ways
it’s a huge conceptual muddle. Of course,
the rest of the world had a history before European colonization and there were
links that connected Europe with most of that world. Traditional Late Antique Medieval History can
be criticized for its Eurocentricity (or Mediterranean-basin-ocentricity) but I
am not sure that foisting European periodization on the rest of the world is any
less Eurocentric; perhaps it is more so.
I recently received a ‘reply-all’ email criticizing a proposed history general
course for being divided into Medieval, Early Modern and Modern on the grounds
that that periodization made no sense outside Europe. That of course begs the question of whether
it makes any sense within
Europe. It is a bit disheartening to see
a history professor mistake traditional, contingent chronological divisions,
which have been endlessly called into question and have never really been based
upon more than convenience, for reflections of concrete, regional historical
actuality. But we are were we are, and
the proposed response, to divide world history into two equal periods, before
and after 1800, is (among many other absurdities) even more Eurocentric.
As signs, labels have their signifieds. To talk of the global Middle Ages or the
global Late Antiquity, implicitly confers on extra-European, or extra-Mediterranean,
regions not simply a name but a place in a teleological narrative or a
historiographical problematic. Periods
referred to as a ‘middle’ age in various parts of South or East Asia, for
example, are so called for quite different reasons than those which led European
humanists to designate the period between them and the Roman Empire as the age
that lay ‘in the middle’ between them, and consequently those different Middle
Ages do not map directly onto each other.
Does the history of South Asia benefit from being labelled according to
a periodization devised to address the issues of continuity on either side of
the political events of fifth-century Western Europe and the Mediterranean? I am not sure it does.
That is not, by any means, to argue against the
interest or importance of looking at the links that existed between western
Europe, say, and China or South Asia, via the Steppe, or the sea routes around
the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa.
There has been much recent work done that sees Roman history as a part
of a Eurasian history that connects it with the other great Empires of the
period.(3) I am thinking about a radically revised, second
edition of Barbarian Migrations and
these developments definitely need to be taken into account there. Just the other day, via a quite different
process, I found myself wondering whether the collapse of the Gupta state in
India had some role in kicking off the changes in East-West connections that
can be seen in the period I am studying.
But connections need closer critical
consideration. There are two dangers, as
I see it. One is that the Eurasian
perspective on Late Antiquity runs the risk of reintroducing the idea of the
Huns as the Deus Ex Machina that
ruins the Roman Empire (though of course there are some areas where that idea
has never gone away). It either kicks
the explanatory can back off across the steppes, leaving us not to have to
worry about conflicts, tensions and political dynamics within the Roman Empire itself,
or it leads us on a goose-chase, wild or otherwise, to seek some sort of ultimate
point of causation, the place where change started, where no further external
factor can be adduced: an Ursache
indeed.(4).
This raises the next problem, which is that
connections, like narratives, have to be deconstructed. When we join the dots are we creating a
picture that had no contemporary historical reality? Just as the arrows on ‘migration maps’ have
been correctly critiqued for joining up into what looks like a coherent process
series of separate phenomena, distinct, contingent movements motivated by quite
other intentions than to arrive at the next ‘stage’ on the map or the final ‘goal’,
carried out by fundamentally different groups of people. Do links that join up trading connections or
cultural contacts commit the same fundamental error? Do the people who stood at the beginning and
end points of these arrows even have an awareness of each other? What does this connectivity mean? How does it
compare with other social relations, if at all?
How is each link in the chain seen, enacted and employed by the people
involved? What are the (quite possibly
very different) effects of connectivity, on the various societies connected by
these chains? These questions are not at
all posed to reject placing fourth- to seventh-century Europe and the Mediterranean
in a wider world of connections and contacts.
They are meant to invite a more critical reflection, even if also to challenge
the notion that joining the dots is a blessing in itself.
But what if, as I think is the case, the dots
leading to or from Western Europe between c.550 and c.650 don’t actually go
very far? Is there a less Eurocentric
way of thinking about European history of a period when Europe (if we can even
talk about Europe – let’s call it Europe ‘sous rature’) had little to do
with anywhere else? Is it possible to
recast the period in terms other than those of European exceptionalism: the
time ‘when Europe discovered itself’ and when the foundations of modern
Capitalism were laid? Maybe there isn’t
and it isn’t. One idea that occurred to
me comes out of the placing of Europe sous rature, just now. I once referred to the area I work on as ‘far
western Eurasia’. I did so partly in
jest but perhaps it is worth taking that nomenclature seriously. It has the benefit of decentring the perspective
that led westerners until recently to talk of the ‘near’ and the ‘far’ East. It has the advantage, too, of pointing out,
that in global terms, especially if you eschew the Mercator Projection, the
area I work on lies at the extremity, at the edge, whether of the great
Eurasian landmass, or northwards, across the sea, from the equally great
landmass of Africa. It is interesting to
think not only of Britain, but of all of Eurasia west of the Upper Elbe and the
Adriatic, as peripheral. But that, it
seems to me, if very much the case in the period I am currently looking
at. In many ways it won’t make much
difference to the story I have to tell and the factors I want to adduce, but
words matter and ‘The Isolation of Far Western Eurasia’ has a rather importantly
different signified from ‘The Origins of Europe’.
Notes
[1]
Indeed the preceding period,
between say the Late Roman Republic and the ‘Third-Century Crisis’ when this
may not have been the case, is rather more exceptional.
[3]
See Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael
Maas (ed.), Empires and Exchanges in
Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran, and the Steppe, Ca. 250-750
(Cambridge, 2018). Some of this thinking
makes its way into Michael Kulikowski’s excellent Imperial Triumph. The Roman World from Hadrian to Constantine (London,
2016), which I heartily recommend.
[4]
The German word die Ursache (‘cause’,‘root cause’, ‘reason’) contains the stem ‘Ur’’, which usually
denotes something primordial or original, and die Sache – ‘thing’, ‘matter’: the
ultimate, primary thing. A root cause indeed.
