Cover 2002 Free Press edition

(8) FELIPPE FERNANDEZ-ARMESTO –

CIVILIZATIONS: CULTURE, AMBITION & THE TRANSFORMATION OF NATURE (2000)

A book on the suject of human civilization – or rather, civilizations, arranged by environment, consistent with the definition of civilization in the subtitle as the transformation of nature.

The book essentially treats all human societies as civilization, or at least a civilization – eschewing attempts at ‘checklist’ of criteria that define a civilization, given the problems of previous attempts to do so for any that are universally agreed, instead looking at human societies in classic Toynbee terms of challenge and response to their natural environments, at least in origin.

While such an approach may have flaws in its lack of distinction between a ‘civilization’ and other human societies, the book does have much to offer from its thematic history of human civilization from a geographic and environmental perspective.

Firstly, it vividly impresses on you the extent to which human history and societies have been shaped by nature, at least in origin – including the most basic or stark features which one might otherwise overlook from a different thematic perspective.

This is most striking when it looks at those environments it groups together as the wasteland, worlds of ice or sand deserts, which can only support the most minimalist societies – minimalist that is, beyond surviving in them, prompting to mind the lines from the poem “Australia” by A.D. Hope, about men whose boast is not “we live” but “we survive”. There’s a similar quality

Perhaps its most insightful feature – which it states in its introduction – was its comparative history of civilizations, “arranged environment by environment, rather than period by period or society by society”, thus yielding comparisons across time and space that might not otherwise occur to the reader.

The evocative part and chapter headings (or subheadings) illustrate those environmental classifications:

• Part 1: The Wasteland – Ice Worlds & Tundra, Deserts of Sand
• Part 2: Leave of Grass – Prairie & Grassy Savannah, the Eurasian Steppe (the Highway of Civilization)
• Part 3: Under the Rain – Postglacial & Temperate Woodland, Tropical Lowlands
• Part 4: The Shining Fields of Mud (alluvial or river floodplains in the ancient Near East, China and India)
• Part 5: The Mirrors of Sky – the Highland Civilizations of the New World and the Old
• Part 6: The Water Margins (Civilizations Shaped by the Sea) – Small Island Civilizations and Seaboard Civilizations such as the Seaboard Civilizations of Maritime Asia or the Greek and Roman Seaboards
• Part 7: Breaking the Waves (the Domestication of the Oceans) – the Rise of Oceanic Civilizations, the Making of Atlantic Civilization, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific – from the Pacific to the World

I was particularly fascinated by its comparison of grassland societies – prompting to mind, as such things tend to do, whether other grasslands might have produced the horse blitzkriegs that the Eurasian steppes did in other circumstances.

Or its subject of the oceans – how maritime navigation has been shaped by the distinctive currents and wind patterns of each ocean, with the Indian Ocean proving the most ”precocious’ for long distance navigation (indeed from the dawn of human history), the Atlantic being somewhat more tricky, and the Pacific trickier still (Polynesian island-hopping aside).

RATING: 4 STARS****

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