The Birth of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon

Abstract

Although they still differ considerably in their willingness to acknowledge it, specialists in the history of north-western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE are increasingly treating it as that of the emergence of a new civilization in what had previously been a peripheral region of the Mediterranean-based civilization of the classical west, rather than as a continuation or revival of that civilization itself. In this light Europe, or Latin Christendom as it saw itself, offers a number of striking resemblances to the developments which Lieberman discusses. The most dynamic regions of the new Europe—north-western France, Flanders and lowland England, north-eastern Spain, northern Italy, southern Italy and Sicily—were all peripheral, though in various senses, both to the long-defunct classical civilization and its direct successors, the Byzantine and Abbasid Empires, and to the transitional and much more loosely based ninth-and tenth-century empires of the Franks and Saxons (Ottonians). To this one might add that by the end of the twelfth century the remaining rimlands of the Eurasian continent in a purely geographical sense—Scandinavia, including Iceland, and still more the southern coast of the Baltic and the areas dominated by the rivers which drained into it—were developing very rapidly indeed.

Redeeming the universal: Postcolonialism and the inner life of Eurocentrism

“…The present argument lends support to the second approach which arguably provides a deeper theoretical foundation for a non-Eurocentric international historical materialism, one that challenges the idea of the endogenous formation of capitalist social relations in England (e.g. Brenner, 1988), highlighting the constitutiveness of the international both to the emergence and the expansion of capitalism, an approach that is receiving growing empirical support (Abu-Lughod, 1989;Chaudhuri, 1990;Hodgson, 1993;Moore, 1997). This is of course not a denial of the specifically European form of capitalist modernity, but an accentuation of the need for methodological consistency and theoretical coherence in the formulation and deployment of uneven and combined development.…”

Chapter 2. The Middle Period: Islamic Axiality in the Age of Afro-Eurasian Transcultural Hybridity

“…From the 1066 Norman conquest of England by Duke William of Normandy to the Spanish campaigns of the Christian knights, from the expedition of the Scandinavian navigators into the northern seas to the Latinization of Hungarians and eastern Europe, the growth of Europe, especially, in the 12 th century identified an age of intense interconnection between Germanic, Slavic and Latin Mediterranean-based cultures. "The birth of Europe as a Eurasian phenomenon," in this fashion, brought about an integrated Europe made up of northwestern France, Flanders, lowland England, Spain, northern and southern Italy (Moore 1997). While travel provided the new integrated-hybrid civilization of Europe with the incentive of economic adventure, especially, in the 13 th century (Marco Polo), proliferation in European travel writings reflected the increasing importance of movement across homeland as a prelude to further conquest of the new territories.…”

Sri Lanka in the Long Early Modern Period: Its Place in a Comparative Theory of Second Millennium Eurasian History

“… 92 Lieberman 1997 a : 460. For more on war and competition as leading to ethnic consciousness, see Moore 1997: 595 on twelfth-century Europe.…”