EUROPE AND ITS PAST

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33739, 11 January 1975, Page 9

EUROPE AND ITS PAST

The Shape of European History. By William H. McNeill. Oxford University Press. 181 pp. (Reviewed by M.F.)

“The Shape of European History” is one of the most ambitious and important historical works of the last generation. Like Lord Acton’s “Lectures on Modem History” or E. H. Carr’s “What is History?” it is an attempt to formulate a broad historical vision which enables man to grasp the meaning of his past.

To achieve this vision Professor McNeill has discarded most of the scholarly panoply of the professional historian such as footnotes and tables of statistics. He ignores also the conventional division of the past into narrow time periods — usually of centuries — and covers Europe from ancient Greece to the present day in three steps. Much of the stimulus for this work comes from anthropology, a study of primitive man. Anthropologists have worked out a number of concepts which enable them to view all social processes as interconnected. Agriculture, mining, religion, finance and transportation, and politics interact with each other and cause changes in the direction of a culture.

Professor McNeill very boldly adopts a new methodology. "Patterns of culture — repeatable behaviour recognisable in the lives of relatively large numbers of men, often millions or hundreds of millions — are the entities that concern me.” This approach will be an unpleasant revelation to those who regard history as a chronicle of the doings of kings, generals, or prime ministers; such doings, according to Professor McNeill, are minor phenomena.

Most of Professor McNeill’s theories are stimulating and well-illustrated. He is interested in the notion of the “metropolitan centre,” something which occurs when successful innovations in technology or administration tend to cluster in time and space. When this cluster causes a geographical spread, a "cultural slope” arises, the high point of which is centred on the “metropolitan centre.”

Professor McNeill wishes to use this theory to replace the old-fashioned national theories of history, such as a history, of Britain or a history of New Zealand. Histories of cohesive groups such as nations or cities are unimportant, because the main drive wheel of historical change is contact between strangers; such contacts and the reactions to them generated civilisations based on “metropolitan centres.” Shifts in location of centres, or the existence of a new centre, caused changes in direction and velocity of cultural flows — that is, alterations in the alignment of cultural slopes. Such alterations can be taken as defining the major periods or eras of history. For European history Professor McNeill proposes three such eras. The first stops in 900 A.D. because that was the date at which technical improvements in agriculture gave Northern Europe its first advantage over Mediterranean Europe. The second era stops just before 1500, when Northern Europe achieved a nautical superiority over the Mediterranean; shipping together with agriculture had been the basis of southern cultural primacy. It would be misleading to indicate that Professor McNeill is only interested in technology. One of his most interesting propositions deals with cultural influences. He demonstrates that Byzantine, Moorish, and Italian Renaissance cultures all followed the same pattern. That is they attained their maximum spread and influence after their economic and military strength had collapsed. “Hence, for a century or more after Italian cities ceased to exercise economic primacy in Europe (roughly after 1500) Italian cultural influence upon the trans-Alpine hinterland continued and indeed increased its importance.” Professor McNeill does not express himself with the felicity of the great cultural historian, Jacob Burckhardt; he equals him in offering provocative generalisations. Both general reader and specialist historian would profit from reading “The Shape of European History.” No other short work offers such a consistent and interesting picture of Europe’s past.