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In Civilizations, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto
once again proves himself a brilliantly original historian,
capable of large-minded and comprehensive works; here he
redefines the subject that has fascinated historians from
Thucydides to Gibbon to Spengler to Fernand Braudel: the
nature of civilization.
To Fernandez-Armesto, a civilization is
"civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its
difference from the unmodified natural environment"
... by its taming and warping of climate, geography, and
ecology. The same impersonal forces that put an ocean between
Africa and India, a river delta in Mesopotamia, or a 2,000-mile-long
mountain range in South America have created the mold from
which humanity has fashioned its own wildly differing cultures.
In a grand tradition that is certain to evoke comparisons
to the great historical taxonomies, each chapter of Civilizations
connects the world of the ecologist and geographer to a
panorama of cultural history. In Civilizations, the
medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is
not merely a Christian allegory, but a testament to the
thousand-year-long deforestation of the trees that once
covered 90 percent of the European mainland. The Indian
Ocean has served as the world's greatest trading highway
for millennia not merely because of cultural imperatives,
but because the regular monsoon winds blow one way in the
summer and the other in the winter.
In the words of the author, "Unlike
previous attempts to write the comparative history of civilizations,
it is arranged environment by environment, rather than period
by period, or society by society." Thus, seventeen
distinct habitats serve as jumping-off points for a series
of brilliant set-piece comparisons; thus, tundra civilizations
from Ice Age Europe are linked with the Inuit of the Pacific
Northwest; and the Mississippi mound-builders and the deforesters
of eleventh-century Europe are both understood as civilizations
built on woodlands. Here, of course, are the familiar riverine
civilizations of Mesopotamia and China, of the Indus and
the Nile; but also highland civilizations from the Inca
to New Guinea; island cultures from Minoan Crete to Polynesia
to Renaissance Venice; maritime civilizations of the Indian
Ocean and South China Sea ... even the Bushmen of Southern
Africa are seen through a lens provided by the desert civilizations
of Chaco Canyon.
More, here are fascinating stories, brilliantly
told -- of the voyages of Chinese admiral Chen Ho and Portuguese
commodore Vasco da Gama, of the Great Khan and the Great
Zimbabwe. Here are Hesiod's tract on maritime trade in the
early Aegean and the most up-to-date genetics of seed crops.
Erudite, wide-ranging, a work of dazzling scholarship written
with extraordinary flair, Civilizations is a remarkable
achievement ... a tour de force by a brilliant scholar.
Felipe Fernandez-Armesto is a Professorial
Fellow of Queen Mary, University of London, and a member
of the Modern History Faculty at Oxford University. He is
the author of twelve books, including Millennium
and Truth: A History.
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