Recent reading

[chickenfeet]

Civilizations by Felipe Fernández-Armesto is a tour de force. It is still something of a rarity for academic historians (let alone others) to dare to escape their specialisms and attempt broad, sweeping works of this kind. Having seen the academic knives come out for a few foolhardy souls who dared to enter territory that the academic establishment had not licensed them for my admiration for this author is considerable. Civilizations is a thematic treatment of how human societies have arisen, flourished and decayed in different environments such as the high Arctic, grasslands, flood plains and so on. For each such environment Fernández-Armesto does a 'compare and contrast' across time and geography. For example, his analysis of coastal societies ranges from the Peruvian desert to the Vikings and that of highlands from New Guinea to Guatemala by way of Tibet. It is an interesting and stimulating approach but as might be expected from a conservative who openly disavows the idea of progress there are many questions and very few answers.

Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky is a more ambitious follow up to his very successful Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World. Ranging far wider than its predecessor it provides a wealth of information on salt manufacturing through the ages and around the world. Kurlansky also describes a number of historical situations where access to salt or the lack of it has had a major influence on politics, diplomacy and war. At times he seems almost to slip into what might be called a 'salic determinist' model of history.