Facing the Ocean: the Atlantic and Its Peoples 8000 BC-AD 1500 - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2003 by Albert J. Schmidt

By Barry Cunliffe (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. viii plus 600 pp. $45/25 [pounds sterling]).

Although late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century discoveries elevated the Atlantic to unanticipated geopolitical prominence, it has remained for present-day scholars to ponder as well the inter-connectedness of communities interfacing with this broad expanse of water. (1) These settlements extend beyond the European periphery of the north Atlantic: they often comprise Caribbean, Latin American, and African peoples and are not infrequently linked by past traffic in slaves.

Although such an expanded view of the Atlantic is not Barry Cunliffe's book, it does point to the wondrous world that Facing the Ocean reveals to its readers. One would have thought that truly new ideas about presenting ancient and medieval history had played out long ago, but Cunliffe disproves that notion. His is a thesis that coastal peoples Celts, Bretons, and Galicians, to name a few from Iceland to Gibraltar had more in common with one another than they did with their inland kin. Essentially, 10,000 years of ocean exposure fostered this interrelatedness, one of shared beliefs and values.

Cunliffe demonstrates his interdisciplinary skills in introductory chapters on myth, archaeology, geography, and landscape history. In the introductory chapters he examines ancient and modern legends and myths that fashioned an Atlantic mystique in "Between Land and Sea" and draws a matchless portrait in words, maps, and photographs of the ocean facade stretching from Greenland to Africa east of the Canaries. In explaining this great swath through its peninsulas--those of lower Wales and Ireland, Cornwall, Devon, Brittany, and Iberian Galicia and Cape St. Vincent--and by its separate maritime systems-one from Ireland to the Loire and another from the Portuguese Tagus to Morocco--Cunliffe brings clarity to an otherwise unintelligible mass. Another chapter, one on "Ships and Sailors", replete with pictures and diagrams of vessels, details such matters as pilotage and navigation and accounts of sailor adventurers, particularly Phoenicians.

The subsequent nine chapters follow chronologically, from 8000 BC to AD 1500. The first two treat the dramatic environmental and human changes in the 4,000 years after the end of the Ice Age and intriguing religious monuments constructed in various locales in the fourth and third millennia BC. The chapter, "Expanding Networks and the Rise of the Individual: 2700-1200 BC," addresses a third millennian mystery--how emergent European cultures, notably Minoan-Mycenaean in the Aegean, connected with the Atlantic settlements. Cunliffe illumines this dimly lit epoch when he suggests that these hitherto self-contained Atlantic communities made contact with eastern ones by river routes, like the Rhone-Paris Basin-Loire and those leading to the North Sea and Bay of Biscay. That such transmission belts for gold, silver, amber, and faience existed fills gaps in our knowledge of the Mycenaean world of the third and second millennia BC.

Cunliffe continues this commercial saga with two chapters that flesh out the thousand years between 1100-200 BC. In "Sailors on the Two Oceans" he chronicles the seafaring prowess of the Phoenicians who from their ports in the eastern Mediterranean sailed past Gibraltar and by 1100 BC founded strategic Cadiz. In the other covering 1100-200 BC, Cunliffe traces the inland routes travelers followed in their movements from the east. The Garonne, Loire, Seine, and Rhine led them to the northern Atlantic communities in contrast to the Phoenician sea route which led to Iberia. During the course of the first millennium communities had been established in Galicia, Brittany, Britain, and Wales.

The author also details the impact of Rome, 200 BC-AD 200; wanderers and settlers in the early Middle Ages, AD 200-800; the Northmen at the end of the eighth century; and, finally, the period, AD 1000-1500. What had begun at the fringe of classical civilization was by 1500 a point of departure for distant lands and the source for a new epoch in world history. As Cunliffe notes: "The Atlantic, once the end of the world, was now the beginning" [p. 553].

This is a seminal work, an innovative and imaginative treatment of ancient and medieval European history, written in an engaging fashion. Not only is its thesis riveting, the book is beautifully laid out with informative maps, charts, and colored and black and white photographs, good documentation, a very usable index, and even bewitching sea beast iconography adorning the title page of each chapter. That Cunliffe, who "has wanted to write [this book] for a lifetime," did so is a celebration for all privileged to read it.

ENDNOTE

(1.) For example, Harvard University offered an International Seminar on the history of the Atlantic World: Transatlantic Networks, 1500-1825 in the summer of 2003. The North American Conference on British Studies at its annual meeting in November, 2002 scheduled a session on "Rethinking Atlantic Worlds". Texas A & M University has recently advertised for two faculty positions in History of the Atlantic World in 2003. That the idea of Europe has reappeared as a field of study represents an interesting parallel to this Atlantic phenomenon.