With family ties and professional interests on Europe’s peripheries, he has long been privately and publicly critical of the way “European” history has come to mean the history of England, France, Germany, and very occasionally Italy and Spain. His own family is Welsh, his wife’s family is from what is now Ukraine, and he is a British scholar whose two-volume history of Poland, God’s Playground, has become, in translation, the standard text in many Polish schools. Only our geographical prejudices have remained curiously intact-and Norman Davies was precisely the man to dissect them. In recent years, women have been discovered, the history of the illiterate lower classes has been unearthed, the stories of slaves and chambermaids have been published to great acclaim. After all, we live in an era of hyper-historical consciousness, in which the prejudices of our historians have themselves become the subject of learned theses. Powerful though these assumptions and geographical prejudices may be, Professor Davies ridicules their historical basis so thoroughly that it seems surprising no one else has thought to do it before. The Allied Scheme of History-of which more later-produced a number of assumptions, all of which I also distinctly remember being taught: the belief that the “Atlantic Community” is the pinnacle of progress, the demonization of everything German, the generally indulgent view of both the tsarist empire and even the Soviet Union, at least in its wartime role, and the unspoken acceptance of the division of Europe as “natural.” Contemporary events shape our idea of which countries are and are not meant to be “progressive,” and in our era, the event which has most shaped history is the Second World War and its aftermath. During large chunks of history, Byzantium was far more sophisticated, scientifically and politically, than the old Western Roman Empire, for example.īyzantium was far more sophisticated, scientifically and politically, than the old Western Roman Empire.Ĭertainly it isn’t the case that at all times, and in all places, the division of Europe which persisted through the second half of the twentieth century remained the same. Nor did all of the lines divide Europe exactly as one might think. Some of the most permanent-like that which separates Catholic and Orthodox Christianity-have nothing to do with who is and who isn’t now in NATO, or who was or wasn’t in the Holy Roman Empire. Some of the most important-in terms of climate, culture, family structure-divide north from south rather than east from west. After all, he notes, there are many dividing lines which shaped the history of Europe.
It only takes a few swift sentences early on in his monumental Europe: A History for Norman Davies to dispense with that sort of history. The peoples to the east were slower to develop, less democratic, less “European.” The peoples to the west of that line would, therefore, be the object of the next nine months of study. In all cases and at all times, the peoples to the west of the imaginary line had been more sophisticated, more progressive, more advanced. The lecturer explained that the division of Europe was nothing new: it had its origins in deep cultural and political differences, land use patterns, the absence of capitalism in the East, the scientific revolution in the West. To the west of it lay the Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire, the “progressive” Great Powers, and what we learned during the Cold War to call “the West.” To the east lay barbarism, feudal states, Russia and Austria-Hungary, and what was then known as “the Communist bloc.” Empires shifted, he explained, but this line had remained the same. The peninsula of Europe lay stretched out over a blackboard the lecturer drew an imaginary line down the center. My introduction to European history began with a map.