And a third thought

[chickenfeet]

I'm reading the esteemed (at least by coughingbear and myself) NAM Rodger's naval history of Britain. I'm immediately struck by how different the history of those islands in the 9th to 12th century CE looks when one thinks of 'basins' rather than 'landmasses' as the basic political and strategic unit. It ties in too very nicely with Francis Pryor's longue durée thesis that for mainland Britain, south of the Forth-Clyde gap at least, there are two distinct and persistent cultural patterns; a North Sea facing one and an Atlantic facing one.

There's a sad irony that it's taken until now for anyone to look seriously at how sea power has shaped the history of the islands that were, for a decent chunk of time, the world's pre-eminent maritime power.

Comments

[shezan.livejournal.com]

it's taken until now for anyone to look seriously at how sea power has shaped the history of the islands

That's actually amazing. I would have expected the thing to have a Braudelian-sized biblioghraphy.

What's NAM?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

What's NAM?

Rodger's initials.

This os Braudelian in scope and page count. So far it's taken two hefty tomes to get to 1815. I assume there is a third in the works. The bibliography is vast but still no one had written this history before. Previous work falls broadly into four categories:

General land oriented studies of how an individual polity/society developed
Comparative studies based largely on landmasses
Studies of naval battles and tactics
Histories of the Royal Navy

What I have never seen is a study that looks at issues like how the decline of English seapower under the Normans (to some extent) cut the earls of Pembroke off from the the Anglo-Norman world and pushed them into the Norse-Celtic world of the Irish Sea.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

North of the Forth and Clyde it also holds, but it's a bit more complicated. Glasgow faces not just the Atlantic, and America, but the Irish Sea and Ireland. The West Highlands face Ireland but also, bizarely, Scandinavia - there's a Viking influence at least as far south as Largs. The whole culture of the West Highlands was maritime for around 3 or 4 thousand years, and, given the geography, can still remain that way to a curious extent, even today (I can drive to the cottage from Glasgow in two hours, covering 90 odd miles, or take two ferries and drive about 30. It still takes two hours, though).

I'm unsure on the East coast, but would probably draw the same Scandinavian influence from Edinburgh up.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I think the separate cultural identities of the two halves of Northern Scotland are well known (at least to anyone with any sense of history - the appropriation of a Disneyfied version of Irish/Norse culture by Eastern and Southern Scots is of course Scotland's dirty secret!). It's just that Pryor doesn't deal with them so I could hardly cite him as an authority. Nor is there much evidence that they emerged as early as the two southerly ones (Pryor would argue that the pattern in Southern Britain is set by 3000BCE at the latest!).

FWIW - the eastern lowlands seem to be most deeply influenced by Pictish influences. At least the kingdom of Scotland had its roots in the Pict heartlands north of the Forth. The far North was, until quite late (14th/15th century CE??), very much a part of the Norse-Celtic maritime world.