The Edge of the World: A Cultural History of the North Sea and the Transformation of Europe

So history readers … we have to admit that Western history is Mediterranean centric. Greco-Roman history frames nearly all of our understanding. But it's the subtle and rebellious nuance of the North Sea peoples that's not much considered within the whole of Western civilization. The North Sea civilizations populated a larger geographic area than the Mediterranean. The Northmen would write the last chapter of Rome and the Roman Med. Early Greeks and the Roman Army simply did not 'discover' the North Sea peoples ... they encountered them and unlike so many discovered peoples, the Northmen lived on independent. They often won but just as often were defeated. By the fortune of Latin and Greek being widely written, so history was written. The Med-centric world-view did not defeat or possess the Northman.Michael Pye is has an interesting story to tell here. As limited as the documented North Sea history is, Pye pries loose what can be known. The Med-centrics of course funded the writings that survived and we rely upon. The horrid climate of North Sea nations and Baltic simply did not cooperate with preserving organic media. Julius Caesar was the beneficiary of timing by invading the splintered and already defeated Celts/Gauls/Germanics. The tribes were torn apart as a people after coming up on the losing side of some vast, pre-historic, multi-generational era of Northern European total war. The integrity of the Venerable Bede (in the pay of Rome), et. al. are challenged by modern archaeological understanding. The genetic record reports a different story. History as we know it becomes different with the modern efforts of Pye and others.So, the evidence presents peculiar conflicts with written history. The Venerable Bede suggests his Saxons and Celts exterminated the Britons. But an enclave remained to evidence 600,000 Brits directly descended from a 9000-year old Britonic tooth that can beg to differ. Celts, likely from Brittany, are evidenced to have invaded England and the Northern Iberia in the region of the Basques during the Celtic flight west and north from mainland Europe and gaining an English foothold centuries before the Romans and a millennia before the Vikings. The Northmen descended from a highly sophisticated multi-millennial civilization of trade linked by a 4-5 day sea journey and wind.The "Edge of the World" is a study in common market economics. Family, small unit, village, town and port city survival was superordinate in these stormy, sub-zero, seashore footholds. The real story of the cod & slave civilization seems likely consistent to Pye's portrayal within a fraction of a standard deviation.An unknown North Sea 'Lingua Franca' existed; a sort of North Sea pidgin. A common tongue that likely quickly evolved. English is a good candidate to have survived whatever was common tongue. Whatever it was, it changed quickly and served the instant need for commerce. It is remarkable that institutions existed to salvage the relatively small number of non-religious references that exist. Evidences suggest that the most distant trading outposts in the most Northern Scandinavian indeed lost the ability to remain in the civilization as they lost the Lingua Franca. Pye shows how the pidgin generationally evolved very unlike Latin. Iceland is said by the first Vikings to have been home to Irishmen with an ancient pidgin dialect unintelligible at the time … the Irishmen packed up and left. The modern evidence for the pidgin is surely the super-hybrid language of English we inherited.Pye is to be commended for departing from the mostly highborn narrative to consider the everyman part-time fishmonger and sailor and the part-time seasonal warrior. Pye provides some excellent snapshots. Frisians and Britons and Saxons and Vikings transacted in an accepted common currency of modern conceptual 'money' as the storage and transactional exchange of wealth. The 'seashore' is a thoroughly modern image of the place to convene with natures beauty. From 1750, the seashore domains reeked of fish, humans and animals so terribly that it was feared that letters sent from the seashore would stink-up the farmstead or castle when read ... not that anything before 1900 had much of anything that smelled societally good where boats and people transacted. We have an opportunity to share an isolated family unit/tribe and city whose life was chasing a moving sand spit in the modern Netherlands.Pye reveals numerous fascinating archeological sub-lines to confound written history. It was never 'dark' as in ages but always present and directed at surviving the next night. Is it really a surprise to find a prehistoric Irish horse bridle repurposed to a prehistoric Viking broach? It was the great North Sea civilization of the cod & slave. Pye speculates a 'pre-historic' foundation for the amalgam of North Sea centric civilizations. The Hanseatic League first reflected sophistications indicative of thousands of years a highly sophisticated ancient acceptable, trusted into a long developed ‘uniform commercial code’ of North Sea value.5-star entertainment. Grasping the evolution of North Sea civilization is extremely difficult and dynamic with archaeological surprises still abundant.

“‘Forgetting history or even getting it wrong is one of the major elements in building a nation,’ Ernest Renan wrote, and he said history was a danger to nationalism; Eric Hobsbawm added: ‘I regard it as the primary duty of modern historians to be such a danger.’”Pye applies this maxim, in fact, he must. Why? His focus is on European history from 700 to 1700 CE. No national state exists in the modern sense anyway for most of that era.“For national history has a way of being radically incomplete. The Irish were and are deeply attached to the notion of an island of saints and scholars, which is not wrong at all, except that it leaves out the raiders, slavers and traders. Some Dutchmen used to have a deep mistrust of anything medieval on the grounds that it was bound to be Catholic and therefore unpatriotic and wrong, but it’s tough to get right a history that has to be a perfect blank before the Protestant sixteenth century; and it can be silly.’’Therefore much of this work will present people, ideas, events and connections that other histories overlook. Makes for interesting reading.What does he highlight?From introduction . . .“This book is about rediscovering that lost world, and what it means to us: the life around the North Sea in times when water was the easiest way to travel, when the sea connected and carried peoples, belief and ideas, as well as pots and wine and coal. This is not the usual story of muddled battles and various kings and the spread of Christianity. It is the story of how the constant exchanges over water, the half-knowledge that things could be done differently, began to change people’s minds profoundly.’’Where? The North Sea . . .“This cold, grey sea in an obscure time made the modern world possible.’’Who?“That created a community of people who did business, strong enough and self-conscious enough to go to war with royal and political powers: our world of tension between money and every other power. Humans changed the landscape and, in the course of learning to manage the damage to the natural world, they also spread the idea of being free and having rights. Travel around the sea made fashion possible, and visible, and desirable; we have not yet escaped.’’Explains the importance of the Dutch voluntary cooperation to recover land from the sea and how this led to new type of political union.Fascinating!What else?“Women’s choices, including celibacy or pregnancy on their own terms or else marriage, changed the economic life of the North Sea in quite unexpected ways. Law changed from the local customs everybody knew to a language and a set of texts that needed lawyers: professions were born, first priests, who had to stay out of the secular world, then lawyers, who made law into a kind of religion, then doctors and all the rest. Without that, we would have no idea of a middle class: people whose power came from being experts.’’As these slices indicate, Pye presents considerable history of different groups and influential thinkers. For example, index shows - Abélard, Alcuin, Albertus Magnus, Alfred the great, Ambrose, Augustine, Aristotle, etc., etc., and that is just under ‘A’! Makes for colorful, educational panorama.Introduction1 The invention of money2. The book trade3. Making enemies4. Settling5. Fashion6. Writing the law7. Overseeing nature8. Science and money9. Dealers rule10. Love and capital11. The plague laws12. The city and the worldOne theme reappears regularly . . .“Above all, the world is ready to be counted and engineered, to put mathematics at the heart of building a fort or a windmill, keeping the records of a business or laying out a town. Antwerp knew that change, but rebellion and a war of religious denominations took out the city’s sense of order. Amsterdam inherited the idea. Both cities shared the same shining, seemingly reasonable faith which we still maintain. That faith has roots very deep in time.’’Mathematics became (still) a key to modernity. He explains how and why surfaced. Well done.Last page . . .“Alongside this need to control went a new appetite for experiment: for finding things out and then testing and proving them. The process that Simon Stevin would develop had already begun out of terror of Mongol hordes and the end of the world. In the new universities mathematical thinking was tangled up still with the idea of money, of moral trading and just prices: the connection that began with the Frisians was still shaping minds. Trading became a power in its own right. The towns of the German Hansa formed an alliance which could make its own treaties, see off kings, blockade a nation into starvation and force surrender. Money went to war with political powers. The modern world is taking its shape: law, professions, the written word; towns, and what they do to the natural world; books and fashion, business and its relationship to power. We are not on the margins of history any more; we are dealing in the essential, the changes of mind that made our world possible.’’What happened?“In Antwerp all this produced a glittering civilization which spawned so many of our attitudes: to art, insurance, shares, genius, power as a great show; to the possibility of engineering the world as we want it. When war broke up Flanders, when the northern provinces broke away, those attitudes came to Amsterdam. They came in glory. They look like something both new and brilliant, but the truth is that they grew out of the light in what we used to casually call the ‘dark ages’ and the central importance of what we used to call ‘the edge of the world’. Around the cold, grey waters of the North Sea, the old, the marginal, the unfashionable made us possible: for much better, and for much, much worse. It is time now to give them all their due.’’Easy reading. Draws clear, even vivid portraits of many. Also, paints understandable panoramas of groups; i.e. medieval monks, Frisian traders, Viking raiders, catholic theologians, Dutch rebels, etc., etc..Closer to a good novel than school textbook. Nevertheless, tremendous scholarship!Provides insights that adds understanding of where present came from.However, his writing could use a good editing. Too much repetition, too many words, too many ideas, too much opinion, too many sentences.I did skip a lot.Two mapsHundreds and hundreds of references (linked). Outstanding!Detailed index (not linked)No photographsNo charts

The author has found items across an amazingly wide range of sources but it's a little like reading history from a supermarket tabloid. His thesis is overstated, it doesn't hang together and he frequently drops a subject in the middle. His discussion of the Hansa seems to focus on the most outrageous items and ends without discussing why the Hansa league collapsed (it couldn't withstand the rise of powerful nation states; the idea that money could withstand political and military power is ludicrous - it didn't). His thesis that modern control of people's lives dates from reactions to the Black Plague doesn't seem reasonable either. He almost totally ignores any contributions from southern Europe (although he notes that that the Hansa failed to keep up with financial innovations from Italy). Several pages on a Catholic propagandist in Antwerp didn't seem to have anything to do with his arguments. For a book much about the rise of modern capitalism he seems to be very unhappy about capitalism. On the other hand his brief discussion of the Frisians was quite new and interesting (although they hardly invented money). Having visited the very lovely Beguinage in Bruges I was happy to learn about the beguines (that chapter starts with a story that could have been a 14th century tabloid article) . It's mostly an interesting and fun read but it won't make much of a contribution to understanding the broad themes of European history.

Hugely informative and not overly long or detailed. Highly recommended.

Interesting vindication of the north Europe history, a good starter to understand the way things are nowadays. This should be an obligated book at r we very history course. I honestly will re-read it as much as I can.

I enjoying reading this booklet. Human development and civilization always depended in water. The earliest cultures were determined by rivers, the River Nile and Euphrat and Tigers in Mesopotamia, then all European cultures arose around the Mediterranean, the Greeks and the Romans, till it shifted further north to the North Sea, later on to the Atlantic Ocean with the discovery of the Americas. Today 40% of all products are made around the Pacific Ocean.Goods and ideas travel much faster and easier across the water. Here is where the North Sea comes in. The invention of money, the impact of the Frisians and Vikings and many more influences that helped shape the Europe of today.The book made me curious to find out even more about the Dark Ages and how crossing the North Sea changed Europe forever.It is well written and informative so I think it is worth five stars.

The book has such a broad view of economics and history and yet it I connect with it personally.

L'assunto di questo saggio si riassume in tre punti: 1) a differenza di come viene solitamente raccontato a scuola, l'arco di tempo tra la caduta dell'impero romano d'Occidente e il Medioevo dei Comuni e delle Crociate non è un lungo periodo vuoto in cui non c'è cultura, nè fermento ma solo distruzione portata da barbari che verranno poi civilizzati dal cristianesimo. 2) il nostro mondo attuale non nasce quando nel Rinascimento "rinascono" le arti e la filosofia, la rinascita culturale si innesta sugli effetti di quello che i popoli "barbari" hanno fatto nell'alto medioevo viaggiando, scoprendo, commerciando e scontrandosi tra loro e con il mondo cristiano 3) Se nello studiare la storia si considerano solo le testimonianze scritte lasciate ordinatamente nei conventi e nelle cancellerie, e si studiano solo i monumenti di marmo e le sepolture comodamente collocate sotto le volte delle chiese, si rischia di perdere parecchi elementi e dare una visione molto parziale e distorta dei fatti, come oggi cominciamo ad ammettere grazie a un approccio che combina la linguistica e una archeologia senza paraocchi per la quale, ad esempio, uno scheletro sepolto con armi, almeno in determinati contesti culturali, non deve per forza essere di un uomo.Sebbene non sempre sia chiarissimo, forse perchè l'autore non è uno storico accademico, è un libro estremamente interessante e ben documentato, sia per chi è interessato alle civiltà del Nord Europa (in particolare la questione della cristianizzazione dei popoli germanici è raccontata rifiutando la canonica identità tra paganesimo e barbarie, e tra cristianesimo e civiltà, che nelle nostre scuole è ancora standard) che, più in genera le, per chi cerca un'ottica diversa e non scontata nel guardare al rapporto tra presente e passato.