Scan barcode
A review by brynhammond
Black Sea by Neal Ascherson
4.0
I skimmed much of the modern content to get at ancient, medieval and early modern. I did catch a few tirades on the scourges of nationalism, which was fine. Quite interesting too with a focus on artificiality and the concoction of pasts that never were, to serve a contemporary agenda.
I liked it on the inception of the Civilization/Barbarian discourse... I say discourse because that's a word he hates even though he uses it himself. He's not too fond of new methods of history that look at how and why it's written instead of the 'contents'. But then he practices enough of this to analyse 'the invention of the barbarian'... that's the title of a book he depends on, by Edith Hall. Innovative book in its day, probably overstated in hindsight. On other questions too he seems to pick one scholarly work to give you a precis of. The upside is that he chooses interesting, if provocative and speculative, scholarly theses to do this with.
Top marks for his discussion of Scythian gender (right after one on Cossack gender, and in contrast). For 1995, I bet this was a fabulous discussion. In general he is very nicely open-minded on steppe people and steppe influence -- culture and institutions.
Skillfully written, a lovely read.
I liked it on the inception of the Civilization/Barbarian discourse... I say discourse because that's a word he hates even though he uses it himself. He's not too fond of new methods of history that look at how and why it's written instead of the 'contents'. But then he practices enough of this to analyse 'the invention of the barbarian'... that's the title of a book he depends on, by Edith Hall. Innovative book in its day, probably overstated in hindsight. On other questions too he seems to pick one scholarly work to give you a precis of. The upside is that he chooses interesting, if provocative and speculative, scholarly theses to do this with.
Top marks for his discussion of Scythian gender (right after one on Cossack gender, and in contrast). For 1995, I bet this was a fabulous discussion. In general he is very nicely open-minded on steppe people and steppe influence -- culture and institutions.
Skillfully written, a lovely read.