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Civilizations
"Civilization" is a tricky term, one that means many things to many people. For some, it denotes great buildings, canals, codes of law; for others, it offers a contrast between one group and another, with the advantage always going to the more "civilized" bunch against the "barbaric," "savage," or "primitive."
All such distinctions, writes Oxford University historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, are arbitrary and laden with subjective value; they speak to unscientific notions of progress, to hidden agendas. What matters, he continues, is the extent to which a culture has developed means to separate itself from nature: "Civilization makes its own habitat. It is civilized in direct proportion to its distance, its difference from the unmodified natural environment." A culture such as the ancient Han Chinese, the medieval highland Maya, or the Renaissance Venetian, then, is highly civilized inasmuch as its members dammed and diverted rivers, drained lakes, stripped forests, and built monumental structures to celebrate their achievements; people content or resigned to "live off the product and inhabit the spaces nature gives them" are markedly less so by virtue of that accommodation.
No culture, Fernández-Armesto writes, is inherently exempt from becoming civilized; nor, he adds, does "civilized" equate to "good." In exploring history as a branch of historical ecology, he sometimes abandons his thesis, intriguing and provocative as it is, to engage in a wide-ranging survey of the world past reminiscent of (but much better-written than) Toynbee and Durant, touching on the ancient Greeks here, the herding peoples of the African savanna and Central Asia there, the Moundbuilders of prehistoric North America and the hunting peoples of the Arctic there. Unlike many standard textbooks, his narrative manages to offer something new wherever he turns. Allusive and learned, his book repays close reading--and should inspire plenty of argument along the way. -- Gregory McNamee
636 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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August 11, 2016
The eloquent historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto has clearly meant this book to be a counter-proposal to the geographic determinism espoused by scholars such as Jared Diamond. And for the most part he does an admirable job of convincing the reader that ‘civilization’, as defined by him, is a truly random and almost inevitable accretion wherever human societies develop. Even though he agrees that geography has always been a vital factor in any civilization’s progress, thus providing ammunition for the “geography is destiny’ cry of the determinists, he also quickly pulls that argument down.
In Armesto’s vision, the geography a civilization finds itself in, or the latitude to be more accurate, is not a determining factor in its history, but a limiting factor in their growth. It is something to be overcome, a basic tenet of the ‘civilizing impulse’ that Armesto believes is a part of all of mankind - the desire to modify the environment as much as possible. To show that geography can be transcended thus, he takes us on a long tour that encompasses all the major geographic niches that the earth has to offer - spanning the frigid snow-lands, the arid deserts, the sultry tropics, the gloomy marshes, the cloudy highlands, the loamy riversides, the stormy coastal areas and the lonely islands - and shows magnificent examples of stunning civilizational attempts that flourished and faded on those vastly different habitats in every latitude of the world. The current predominance of certain civilizations is less than a few centuries old, and could just be a freak of history; after all quite a few civilizations that were less strategically placed geographically have had longer reigns in the past. Armesto makes a compelling case and argues that a lot of things go into the cauldron that spawns civilization and to limit the explanation to any single ingredient is clearly an over simplification.
But then, Armesto too is a historian and like all historians, unfortunately, he cannot avoid trying to construct a story that can explain the present from the past. Why write a history book if it has no thesis to offer on how things got this way? So Armesto proposes his own counter-thesis: Though he struggles throughout the book to avoid any kind of determinism, he goes on to admit in his concluding argument that “geography, in the broadest sense, the palpable realities of the planet, the exigencies of nature, the soils and seeds, the winds and waves has shaped the world presented in these pages.”
He says that even though civilizations might have grown out of their environments of origin, they have been borne by the wind. This forms his principal argument of the book, and it takes shape only at the very end, catching the reader by surprise, after lulling him into the belief that civilizations are a chaotic emergent phenomena of complex human interactions. I would have liked him to stop there and I really don’t buy his causation arguments that make up the last 100 odd pages of the book. But, they are still compelling and thought-provoking and deserves to be presented too.
The crux of Armesto’s final argument then is that instead of the 10,000 BC that Diamond takes to be the point of divergence that led to the current state of the world, Armesto chooses 1490 AD (or the 1490s) as the diverging year that scripted the story of modern colonizations and formed our present. Armesto claims that the unique location of the ‘Western Civilization”, which he prefers to call the “Atlantic Civilization” along with their extremely fine timing to choose their moment for civilizational expansion was what contributed to their world domination - a case of luck and industry going hand in hand. The Europeans, he argues, were always backward in terms of technology, especially sea-faring tech, in comparison to China, India and even the Ottomans,.While they had trade across the Mediterranean (inherited from the Romans), the Atlantic was largely an unexplored territory even while the Indian Ocean had established itself as the preeminent, busiest and most profitable trade route in history. This was due to the fact that the civilizations that rimmed the Indian Ocean enjoyed the Monsoon winds which helped in promoting trade and making travel safe, fast and orderly, with its cyclic nature and seasonal reversal - aiding ships to and fro in their travels.
The unidirectional and turbulent winds of the Atlantic were much harder to decode, especially by sailors anxious about how they would ever make it back if they hitched a ride on these winds that never returned. Armesto claims that the Indian Ocean was so busy and so rewarding that it used up all the available resources (ships) in its own internal trade and the rich nations there had no reason to risk the treacherous voyage to the Atlantic and to Western Europe. The Western Europeans on the other hand, wanted to be in on the high-return trade of the Indian Ocean and was willing to take risks, and over time they decoded the cipher that is the Trade Winds of the Atlantic and eventually learned how to link the two wind systems (trade winds and the monsoon) when Vasco da Gama finally reached Calicut. Armesto says:
That may be the simple reason why Vasco da Gama appeared in Calicut, before an Indian or Arab or Chinese or Indonesian merchant "discovered" Europe by sea, despite the superior equipment and longer tradition enjoyed by the seafarers of the East. It was not because of any superiority on the Europeans part but, on the contrary, because of the urgings of a kind of inferiority: laggards have to catch up. In pursuit of the kind of advice Lazarillo de Tormes got from his mother, “the relatively poor reach out to the relatively rich in the hope that something will rub off”
This along with Columbus linking Europe to the New World set in motion the period in which Atlantic took over as the oceanic center of trade, catapulting all the countries on its rim (Armesto calls them the Rimlands) first into financial security, then trade dominance, then imperial eminence and finally into a common civilizational bowl. This western civilization coalesced into a single gel and then set about trying to remake the rest of the world in its image, borne by the new-found winds, and fueled by missionary zeal; infecting the coastal regions first and gradually encroaching inwards. The consequence was the creation of a single Atlantic civilization which spanned both shores of the ocean. In the seventeenth century, this inchoate civilization came to embrace North as well as Central and South America, and Africa as well as Europe, steadily seeping into the rest of the world as well.
That then is Armesto’s thesis, except for the concluding chapter which sketches a possible future in which the power base shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific, thus altering everything again. This is not as believable since the world we know today is not shaped by marine trade as much as the world of the East India Companies.
This scholarly and poetic work tries to give us the history of civilization by giving us glimpses of the images that were the high-watermarks of each of the great civilizations that has graced this world. It is evocative of the splendor of these ancient wonders, even while being more descriptive than narrative. The sheer ease with which Armesto manages to make us feel that we are traveling with a Marco Polo or an Ibn Batutta of our own, enjoying the rise and fall of Rome, pondering the mysterious disappearances of the central American cultures, navigating the glory of Venice in its prime and shuddering at the all-conquering Ottomans bearing down on us - all these experiences ensures that the laborious and careful reading that a book like this demands is entirely worth the effort.
Armesto’s masterpiece leaves you with a sense that you have witnessed history in all its nebulousness and that there is no history, no single narrative that can ever be told. It can only be glimpsed and appreciated, never understood.
July 13, 2013
Published just after the Millennium as a sort of popular pot boiler, no doubt making excellent use of material derived from editing various Times' historical atlases and his research on his own 'Millennium', the idea behind Fernandez-Armesto's book has some experimental merit.
What the Argentian-born academic tries to do is to limit the chronological bias of history by exploring what civilisation means in terms of human mastery of the environment.
There is a dull introduction for fellow-professionals which the author implies we can freely skip and a speculative final chapter that seems already overtaken by events but the remaining 450 pages of this blockbuster contain a great deal of material that will probably be as new to you as it was to me.
The book has to become much more conventional as he moves towards the story of Greece and Rome and then on to the creation and dominance of what he calls Atlantic civilisation but, even here, there are important insights.
His critique of slavery abolitionism is devastating and depressingly true and he reports back on the 1997 500th anniversary academic investigation into Vasco da Gama in a way that suggests that its findings have partially helped to underpin his book.
What we can learn from history is not so much how to predict the future - this is impossible - but how our modern decisions are often wrong because we have not understood what happened in the past (or, equally likely, are in denial of that past).
Even now, in the slavery case, we have eager beaver idealists in the NGOs and amongst the Christian evangelicals causing similar harms on the 'victims' because of their idealistic commitment to issues of 'principle'.
Overall, I like his conservative but humane approach to history as a complex system where good and bad things arise from each other, mostly beyond the control of anyone, rather than a story of inevitable or automatic progress and individual heroism.
What progress there is is incremental and derived from blind luck and necessity as much as any other factors. The mythologies of inevitability and superiority arising from a 'win' in 'life's race' are suggested throughout to be false.
The judgments of the early modern and modern era are mostly sound if necessarily selective in scope. But a book on civilisations that appears to entirely neglect the globalising inter-ocean power of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and over-emphasises the power of the United States since then has to be considered slightly flawed.
As a result, the British Raj is scarcely alluded to (nor the parallel trek across the world of the French) and Australia arises very late and in passing as part of the putative Pacific World where (I think) the author's predictions are too much of the time of his writing.
But the meat of the book - easily two thirds of the whole - is filled with insights on cultures and civilisation that are usually neglected in Western school rooms, covering almost every conceivable human environment excluding space and deep sea exploration (which have not constructed true civilisations as yet).
Here are just some of the peoples that Fernandez-Arnesto introduced to me and which had me searching for more information on Wikipedia - the biarmians, the orang laut, the kutchi, the garamantes, the dawada and the mapuche as well as, more anciently, the hagarites.
Alternatively, you might try looking up some very obscure but interesting kingdoms - Funan, Shatrunjaya, Srivijaya, Rozwi, Mwene Mutapa or the Maroon Kingdoms such as Palmares.
Overall, not a bad entertainment and an excellent guide to how sensible history should be written - conversationally, contingently and evidence-based with a critical attitude to the stories we tell ourselves in the dark.
What the Argentian-born academic tries to do is to limit the chronological bias of history by exploring what civilisation means in terms of human mastery of the environment.
There is a dull introduction for fellow-professionals which the author implies we can freely skip and a speculative final chapter that seems already overtaken by events but the remaining 450 pages of this blockbuster contain a great deal of material that will probably be as new to you as it was to me.
The book has to become much more conventional as he moves towards the story of Greece and Rome and then on to the creation and dominance of what he calls Atlantic civilisation but, even here, there are important insights.
His critique of slavery abolitionism is devastating and depressingly true and he reports back on the 1997 500th anniversary academic investigation into Vasco da Gama in a way that suggests that its findings have partially helped to underpin his book.
What we can learn from history is not so much how to predict the future - this is impossible - but how our modern decisions are often wrong because we have not understood what happened in the past (or, equally likely, are in denial of that past).
Even now, in the slavery case, we have eager beaver idealists in the NGOs and amongst the Christian evangelicals causing similar harms on the 'victims' because of their idealistic commitment to issues of 'principle'.
Overall, I like his conservative but humane approach to history as a complex system where good and bad things arise from each other, mostly beyond the control of anyone, rather than a story of inevitable or automatic progress and individual heroism.
What progress there is is incremental and derived from blind luck and necessity as much as any other factors. The mythologies of inevitability and superiority arising from a 'win' in 'life's race' are suggested throughout to be false.
The judgments of the early modern and modern era are mostly sound if necessarily selective in scope. But a book on civilisations that appears to entirely neglect the globalising inter-ocean power of the British Empire in the nineteenth century and over-emphasises the power of the United States since then has to be considered slightly flawed.
As a result, the British Raj is scarcely alluded to (nor the parallel trek across the world of the French) and Australia arises very late and in passing as part of the putative Pacific World where (I think) the author's predictions are too much of the time of his writing.
But the meat of the book - easily two thirds of the whole - is filled with insights on cultures and civilisation that are usually neglected in Western school rooms, covering almost every conceivable human environment excluding space and deep sea exploration (which have not constructed true civilisations as yet).
Here are just some of the peoples that Fernandez-Arnesto introduced to me and which had me searching for more information on Wikipedia - the biarmians, the orang laut, the kutchi, the garamantes, the dawada and the mapuche as well as, more anciently, the hagarites.
Alternatively, you might try looking up some very obscure but interesting kingdoms - Funan, Shatrunjaya, Srivijaya, Rozwi, Mwene Mutapa or the Maroon Kingdoms such as Palmares.
Overall, not a bad entertainment and an excellent guide to how sensible history should be written - conversationally, contingently and evidence-based with a critical attitude to the stories we tell ourselves in the dark.
June 10, 2025
This was a quite good book. I tried to read it as a teenager before and didn’t like it, but I guess I wasn’t mature enough at that age. It reframed how I view history in a key way. It’s a book on how civilizations or cultures are formed against the imperative of taming the geography they are. This is a good book with one key flaw. Let me articulate this book in the two books that are really written inside it:
1)A book on the nature of geography on history. This would be a highly useful book for both the general public and people like myself who study history professionally. This book did an incredible job at articulating this point in many brilliant ways I never would have thought otherwise. This work did a really good job not just talking about environmental pressures like desert, jungle, mountain but also macro regions like the Indian ocean basis or Mediterranean.
2)White people bad. This is probably what got the book to be pushed by the regime and so popular. The author tries to shoe-horn in this postmodernist thesis which kinda makes sense that you have to judge certain civilizations by the environmental context they’re in, not by total accomplishments. Imo that’s fair enough up to a certain point. You can’t expect the Saharan desert to produce a Roman Empire. That being said reality is not fair and crushes those peoples by the stronger. Even by this argument Europe did the best with its geography out of any society. The author then tries to push this point further by saying that Europe broke passed the barrier of geography, which was bad, but it’s the natural endpoint of his own measurement of success. He’s self contradicting.
The author then tries to shoehorn in this thesis that doesn’t make sense that white people/industrial civilization is bad for a series of arbitrary seeming reasons that don’t actually connect with the core thesis. It’s lots of slapdash rationalizations without an argument. Muh industrial civilization mistreats nature, conquers, colonizes so is bad. After you wrote an entire fucking book about how everyone else in history does that too.
TLDR: this is a very good book in which for 15% the author has to rationalize the ruling ideology of his society to get published
1)A book on the nature of geography on history. This would be a highly useful book for both the general public and people like myself who study history professionally. This book did an incredible job at articulating this point in many brilliant ways I never would have thought otherwise. This work did a really good job not just talking about environmental pressures like desert, jungle, mountain but also macro regions like the Indian ocean basis or Mediterranean.
2)White people bad. This is probably what got the book to be pushed by the regime and so popular. The author tries to shoe-horn in this postmodernist thesis which kinda makes sense that you have to judge certain civilizations by the environmental context they’re in, not by total accomplishments. Imo that’s fair enough up to a certain point. You can’t expect the Saharan desert to produce a Roman Empire. That being said reality is not fair and crushes those peoples by the stronger. Even by this argument Europe did the best with its geography out of any society. The author then tries to push this point further by saying that Europe broke passed the barrier of geography, which was bad, but it’s the natural endpoint of his own measurement of success. He’s self contradicting.
The author then tries to shoehorn in this thesis that doesn’t make sense that white people/industrial civilization is bad for a series of arbitrary seeming reasons that don’t actually connect with the core thesis. It’s lots of slapdash rationalizations without an argument. Muh industrial civilization mistreats nature, conquers, colonizes so is bad. After you wrote an entire fucking book about how everyone else in history does that too.
TLDR: this is a very good book in which for 15% the author has to rationalize the ruling ideology of his society to get published
February 10, 2013
A superb and enlightening book. The author contrasts and compares different cultures and civilisations, not by their time period, religion or other more conventional groupings, but rather by the type of environment that they inhabited - e.g. plateau, tropical rainforest etc. The book was a real eye-opener for me in terms of learning about societies that I hadn't heard of before and in changing the way that I think about how societies develop and succeed. The book is broadly of the same genre as Guns, Germs and Steel, but much better in my view.
April 19, 2011
The subtitle for Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's amazing book references culture, ambition and nature. These ideas are all central to his history of civilizations, but as he states near the end of the book it is a "book of places". That is an overriding theme that is underscored by the many diverse civilizations that he discusses. Thus the book is a history of civilizations, not one civilization; and it is also about the power and ambition of mankind that he uses to tame geography, ecology, climate and other animals to form cities. Although, the author argues in his introduction that cities are not a necessary condition of civilization no matter how frequently they have been associated with the rise of civilization in history. Like all history the book presents an empirical argument with examples of civilizations from grasslands and forests, arid and rain-filled climates, highlands and ocean-based areas. It is a tribute to the intelligence and adaptability of man that civilizations can be found in places as disparate as the Andes and the Aegean; the Euphrates and post-glacial European forests; the Indus, Yellow, and Yangtze rivers of Asia; and other places. The result of Civilizations wide-ranging, through time and geography, ruminations and revelations is a book that is informative and thoughtful. Undoubtedly controversial at times, it is an exciting read for anyone interested in the ability of man to create and mold the world into civilizations.
September 7, 2010
Masterful work by the brilliant British historian that groups various civilizations not by time period or continent by the type of environment in which they formed. Not quite "geography is destiny," but close. F-A regards "civilization" precisely as humanity's attempts to control the environment, and he's very much a "two cheers for civilization" sort: obviously in love with culture and in awe of achievements like transoceanic sailing passages, but pretty clear-eyed about the destruction humanity causes. Heavy stuff, but F-A is a witty, almost Wildean sort of writer, and this is highly enjoyable reading as well as magisterial history.
October 1, 2015
This guy is one of those writers who says such stupid things that the few good things he has to say can't make up for it. While he shows some respect for indigenous cultures and doesn't necessarily consider "more civilized" to be the same as "better" societies, and says that things like happiness and health are better gauges for a society's success, he still says things like this:
"The world is a place of experiment-- an expendable speck in a vast cosmos. It is too durable to perish because of us. But it will perish anyway. Our own occupancy of it is a short-term tenancy: time enough, Norbert Elias hoped, for humans to "muddle their way out of several blind alleys and to learn to make their life together more pleasant, more meaningful and worthwhile." We ought to make the most of it while we have it. This may be more satisfactorily achieved by a sort of cosmic binge-- a daring self-indulgence of the urge to civilize-- than by a prudent and conservative desire to protract our own history. Just as I would rather live strenuously and die soon than fester indefinitely in inert contentment, so I should rather belong to a civilization which changes the world, at risk of self-immolation, than to a modestly "sustainable" society. Just as I would rather join a war or a movement of "protest" than submit to superior force, so I want to be part of a society keen to challenge nature, rather than submissively to remain "at one" with her in static equilibrium. Dazzling ambition is better than modest achievement. If you listen too hard for cosmic harmonies, you never hear the music sent up to god by the lover and the bard."
He then goes on to use cultural diversity as an excuse not to condemn ecocidal empires, as if anyone who appreciates diversity is a hypocrite if they ever complain about violent neighbors threatening their existence. It's also pretty incredible considering that civilizations generally destroy more cultures than they create, making this about as illogical as an idea can ever be, frankly. As for the previous statement about going on a "cosmic binge", it's one thing to say that shit happens every few thousand years, like asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions, and therefore if our societies last that long they're about as sustainable as it realistically matters (although even that would be kind of pushing it in my opinion) but glorifying the most insanely wasteful and unjust lifestyles and mocking those who are happy to live simply is completely nuts. And it gets worse. He also says that environmentalists worrying about humans destroying the planet has more to do with our arrogance about the power of our species than scientific analysis and that "most extinctions happen despite us, not because of us." And this one pretty much sums it up: "We are more likely to be surprised by a new ice age imposed out of the blue than frizzled by global warming through our own fault." What an asshole.
"The world is a place of experiment-- an expendable speck in a vast cosmos. It is too durable to perish because of us. But it will perish anyway. Our own occupancy of it is a short-term tenancy: time enough, Norbert Elias hoped, for humans to "muddle their way out of several blind alleys and to learn to make their life together more pleasant, more meaningful and worthwhile." We ought to make the most of it while we have it. This may be more satisfactorily achieved by a sort of cosmic binge-- a daring self-indulgence of the urge to civilize-- than by a prudent and conservative desire to protract our own history. Just as I would rather live strenuously and die soon than fester indefinitely in inert contentment, so I should rather belong to a civilization which changes the world, at risk of self-immolation, than to a modestly "sustainable" society. Just as I would rather join a war or a movement of "protest" than submit to superior force, so I want to be part of a society keen to challenge nature, rather than submissively to remain "at one" with her in static equilibrium. Dazzling ambition is better than modest achievement. If you listen too hard for cosmic harmonies, you never hear the music sent up to god by the lover and the bard."
He then goes on to use cultural diversity as an excuse not to condemn ecocidal empires, as if anyone who appreciates diversity is a hypocrite if they ever complain about violent neighbors threatening their existence. It's also pretty incredible considering that civilizations generally destroy more cultures than they create, making this about as illogical as an idea can ever be, frankly. As for the previous statement about going on a "cosmic binge", it's one thing to say that shit happens every few thousand years, like asteroid strikes or volcanic eruptions, and therefore if our societies last that long they're about as sustainable as it realistically matters (although even that would be kind of pushing it in my opinion) but glorifying the most insanely wasteful and unjust lifestyles and mocking those who are happy to live simply is completely nuts. And it gets worse. He also says that environmentalists worrying about humans destroying the planet has more to do with our arrogance about the power of our species than scientific analysis and that "most extinctions happen despite us, not because of us." And this one pretty much sums it up: "We are more likely to be surprised by a new ice age imposed out of the blue than frizzled by global warming through our own fault." What an asshole.
May 18, 2012
I found this book both captivating and difficult -- the author is a skilled writer and wonderfully evocative with his description, emotional language, and sense of placing everything in it's context. However, one wonders if some of his assertions are perhaps solely his own rather than verfiable as "fact." The overall premise of the book is fascinating in my opinion -- that is that civilization is a continuum measuring man's relative bending of nature to his needs (or conversely bending himself to limits imposed by nature). At times I must confess myself somewhat lost -- I am not the expert I wish I was in all regions or all epochs of history. I was particularly intrigued by his scheme for classification and comparison -- selecting civilizations by environment type. Hope others enjoy this book!
June 24, 2007
An historian's look at the dialectic of environment and civilization. Also a good antidote to Jared Diamond's environmental determinism. Fernandez-Armesto is an excellent writer, and though this is a dense, long book, his style makes reading a joy. It is rich in information and detail that exposes new ideas and new ways of looking at world history. Most of his other books (most recently "Pathfinders") are excellent as well. If you want to know who you are and the where and why you came to be, this is a book for you.
September 3, 2023
A massive time of delight, don’t pretend to skim through this with speed of light but the knowledge contained is worth the pacing! Not a five star simply because of the age of the book, many new discoveries happened since and wonder if an update is due…
abandoned
June 19, 2012This book is interesting and fun, but it very assiduously avoids making any points explicitly - the author frames it as a fun intellectual adventure he undertook without any real agenda, and this is felt throughout. So while there are takeaway points - history is complex and much of what you know about it is burdened with value judgments that impair deduction from it; the term civilization should be defined on a spectrum, revealing many examples with broadly diverse histories; environment shapes civilizations and is shaped by them, but variation between societies in similar environments belies any determinism that is insufficiently caveated and nuanced.
It just didn't keep my attention - it's 500 pages long and gets repetitive. It doesn't make any points, and it doesn't go into much detail, and each section only includes, it seems, aspects of the society that the author found interesting or romantic. That's great, and it gave the book a really nicely romantic and foreign feel while thoroughly avoiding Orientalist notions. This was a nicely walked line. But it just got boring, and other things took my attention away. I've tried twice now, and maybe I'll finish one day, but it seems unlikely.
Incidentally, this is the only book I've read lately that gave me the chance to keep a list of words to look up. "Pinguid" is a nice one, as is "gyneaceum."
It just didn't keep my attention - it's 500 pages long and gets repetitive. It doesn't make any points, and it doesn't go into much detail, and each section only includes, it seems, aspects of the society that the author found interesting or romantic. That's great, and it gave the book a really nicely romantic and foreign feel while thoroughly avoiding Orientalist notions. This was a nicely walked line. But it just got boring, and other things took my attention away. I've tried twice now, and maybe I'll finish one day, but it seems unlikely.
Incidentally, this is the only book I've read lately that gave me the chance to keep a list of words to look up. "Pinguid" is a nice one, as is "gyneaceum."
November 28, 2009
A fascinating book based on a simple thesis: "civilization" should be seen as a cultural (including technological) adaptation to a society's natural environment. This definition broadens the term considerably, allowing Fernandez-Armesto to explore a much wider range of societies than the "high cultures" normally found in these kinds of general histories. It makes it all the more exciting when he presents the more familiar civilizations in this context, as it simultaneously drives home the sophistication of their adaptations and reminds us that their celebrated strategies were just one possible approach to their natural constraints.
"Civilizations" is also a great companion piece to the kind of "biological" or "environmental" history associated with people like Jared Diamond, which have been accused of being too determinative and mechanistic. Fernandez-Armesto manages to illustrate the power of ecology over society while also recognizing the enormous cultural diversity in dealing with that power.
"Civilizations" is also a great companion piece to the kind of "biological" or "environmental" history associated with people like Jared Diamond, which have been accused of being too determinative and mechanistic. Fernandez-Armesto manages to illustrate the power of ecology over society while also recognizing the enormous cultural diversity in dealing with that power.
December 22, 2022
An interesting idea ruined by the author's arrogance. The main premise is that people and the environment they find themselves in adapt each other, sometimes one more than the other. To which we all say - duh. My 12 year old could have told you that. One expects the author to make some point or develop a thesis from it. He does not. This is not so much a book as a long collection of factoids that do nothing to illuminate. The arrogance of "writing in a frenzy" (as the author puts it) without bothering to form a point shows.
Also, the author tiresomely engages in the sophomoric pandering to his Marxist pals about how western civilization is bad and success is bad - all while living in the west and enjoying its fruits. This kind of whining would be much more convincing if ever one of these sorts ever went and actually lived differently.
Also, the author tiresomely engages in the sophomoric pandering to his Marxist pals about how western civilization is bad and success is bad - all while living in the west and enjoying its fruits. This kind of whining would be much more convincing if ever one of these sorts ever went and actually lived differently.
March 8, 2017
This book was very interesting, and different, all for the way the author categorizes civilizations- not necc. by their contiguous geography nor chronology (although he does work through eras as well) but they are organized by ecological similarity- Ice & snow, desert, alluvial valleys,, highlands, oceanic, etc. And it works really well. I took my time reading it, each chapter is well compressed so that you can read it, as I did, in little chunks throughout the day, without becoming too bogged down. Good stuff.
June 10, 2009
I really enjoyed Fernandez-Armesto's fresh look at "civilizations" as an antidote to the eurocentric view that is still taught in school. (Full disclosure: I've taught it! That's one reason I was interested in this book in the first place.)
The only disappointment was the ending, in that the book was published in 2001, so describes the future of civilizations in a pre-9-11 world.
The only disappointment was the ending, in that the book was published in 2001, so describes the future of civilizations in a pre-9-11 world.
July 16, 2011
A fun read. Looking at civilizations from the point of view of the environments in which they exist is a pleasantly different perspective from the usual chronological and hierarchical progression. And the fact that the book is made up of a series of anecdotes makes it very pleasant to read.
October 11, 2008
It is a good book to know well the phase of human civilization in the world history.
Want to read
September 7, 2016
October 1, 2015
Izvrstan presjek i prikaz načina na koji ljudi uspiju razviti kulturu, i, da, i civilizaciju i u najnevjerojatnijim uvjetima.
September 6, 2010
A good book. I enjoyed and was informed a great deal by this text.
October 2, 2020
Is an elegantly written defence of the proposition that "civilisation" is the extent to which cultures shape their environments rather than being shaped by them. Despite the eloquence--and length--of Professor Fernandez-Armesto's exposition, I found myself unconvinced. Like Kenneth Clark, I'm at a loss to define "civilisation," but I think I know it when I see it--and I'm more persuaded by what I see, the end result, than I am by how much jungle or impenetrable forest was cleared before the result was obtained. Like, to some extent, Toynbee, Fernandez-Armesto seems to be offering an apology for the different degrees of what most think of as characteristics of "civilisation" achieved by different human cultures--as Clark points out, there's little obvious similarity between Charlemagne's reliquary and a crudely carved wooden mask, both asserted by some to be evidence of "civilisation."
May 9, 2024
I read this book for a class and probably would not have otherwise finished it (or even picked it up) but I'm glad I did. He presents a really unique perspective on civilization; his writing, organization, and set up of arguments is engaging. I'm not a big reader and don't know a lot about history so I feel like I've intellectually gained a lot from reading this book, but if you're already experienced in those areas I might recommend it less.
As for what I didn't like, sometimes his arguments felt just semantical or contrarian, not something worth discussing for chapters on end. Additionally, I felt like he contradicted himself a lot in his arguments. I have a lot of the same complaints of the book as expressed in J.R. McNeill's review in the NYT and Steven Poole's in the Guardian.
If nothing else, the convolution of his arguments adequately reflects the complexity of history and civilization, so for an amateur in history like myself the book is still enlightening.
As for what I didn't like, sometimes his arguments felt just semantical or contrarian, not something worth discussing for chapters on end. Additionally, I felt like he contradicted himself a lot in his arguments. I have a lot of the same complaints of the book as expressed in J.R. McNeill's review in the NYT and Steven Poole's in the Guardian.
If nothing else, the convolution of his arguments adequately reflects the complexity of history and civilization, so for an amateur in history like myself the book is still enlightening.
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June 14, 2025The book has lots of interesting examples of considering humanity's relationship with different geographic areas. I learned a lot about different areas peoples that many world histories tend to ignore, of that I'm grateful. The big problem I had with this book is who long winded the writing style is. The author, in the introduction, states that the book is long, about 468 pages, which is not the longest book I've read, maybe if the font spacing was wider like most books, it would be longer. This is not the problem though. To me, if you know your book is long and you have a lot of material to cover, it seems rude or at least overly indulgent to write in such a drawn out and flowery way. Sorry this is all there is to my review, but it was a bit grueling getting through the whole thing.
March 21, 2021
A whirlwind tour of many of the world's civilizations, this is an ambitious, enjoyable tome. The author defines civilization more inclusively than what most of us would have learned in school. In essence, it is a group of people that do not just survive in an environment, but have learned to thrive and perhaps shape it, forming a distinct way of life, and sometimes even imposing that way of life on other groups of people.
This book is very comprehensive and makes me curious to read about some groups and times in history that I have not read about previously. He writes clearly, with some wit and humor here and there.
This book is very comprehensive and makes me curious to read about some groups and times in history that I have not read about previously. He writes clearly, with some wit and humor here and there.
August 9, 2014
The introductory chapter of the book blew my mind. The author eloquently relates the history of 20th century "civilization thinking" and then, theory by theory, cuts them all down. All prior ideas have glaring shortcomings, they are: self-aggrandizing, teleological, short-cited, and rely on dubious definitions of what exactly a civilization makes. This author proposes that what really drives civilizations is an impulse to separate from the environment. So far, so good, but then the book begins.
The book is ordered by environmental settings: ice, desert, swamp, highland, coast, etc. About two hundred pages in I grew very weary of the book. There was nothing to tie any of these sections together or the societies offered as examples. The selection seems so arbitrary that I could be reading about any place. I kept on thinking that this would make a great PBS documentary entitled "Unconsidered Civilizations" or something such. While I thought all of these societies were interesting the intervention of the book, at this point, seemed less constructive than illustrative: there are many civilizations to talk about besides the ones you always read about: here are a bunch of them. OK, I get this, but then the author seems to undercut his own writing by suggesting that some adaptions to nature perhaps don't quite qualify as civilization. This comes across in the authors tones and descriptions, and his continued comparison of one civilization to another and implications that civilizations can improve or decline. A term he claims to abhor in the discussion of civilizations. On the Arctic: "In certain environments, it seems, civilization is an irrational strategy and it is better to defer to nature than to try and warp her to men's ways." (pg. 55). Though this quote appears directed at European colonists aborted or energy-intensive settlements in the Arctic, it implies that the first examples of civilization in this book: the indigenous people perhaps don't really qualify as civilization. If the defining mark of a civilization is simply working with or against nature, in some presumably peculiar way, to hammer out a toehold for humanity, how can a civilization dim? "Tibet emerged as a vassal state of the Chinese empire….The dynamic days of Tibetan civilization were over." (pg. 270) "When it was cut off from access to the Red Sea, … Ethiopian civilization dimmed." (pg. 260). There seems to be more at foot in the author's civilization then he implies in the opening and closing arguments.
At other times the author seems unclear as to his own arguments. He argues against the concept of "Indo-European" language only in order to continue to use it to categorize civilizations. He implies that Ethiopia was isolated by its religion, but then goes on to emphasize shifting trade networks. Although these two factors could be reasonably related, the history of Mediterranean and Eurasian trade is defined by religions cooperating, often while or between periods of feuding, in order to sustain the profits generated by trade.
Some civilizations, such as Great Zimbabwe, seem included mostly because of their monumental building, which partway through the the book it becomes clear is one of the author's secret criteria, along with written language. While at times this links to environmental management, such as in large irrigation works, at other times in seems Fernández-Armesto is simply privy to the same big building, big territory, big art criteria that often defines the models he so detests. Or take this quote on Papuans: "They had no access to metals they could use for tools, so their civilization was stuck in the Stone Age." (pg. 248). On the one hand, the author is simply stating a fact: a society is only out of the Stone Age when they have Bronze, Iron, or some other qualifying metal to use as tools. On the other hand, after lambasting the stiff chronologies of progression that are part and parcel of conventional civilization writing, Fernández-Armesto does not hesitate to state that a civilization is "stuck" in the Stone Age. If stones are enough to make a civilization, why lament when a culture only has stone tools?
Yet it is hard to avoid such traps when writing such a world history. Perhaps, then, the author should stick to what he knows best rather than attempt such a grand narrative. My favorite part of the book were undoubtedly chapters fifteen and sixteen. The author's knowledge of sea travel in the era concerned was strong, convincing, and avoided the muddiness that consumes the author's other historical explanations. Winds and ocean daring had a very strong causation in affecting how and when the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans were crossed. The comparison between highland civilizations in the Americas was also strong. Based on his other books, both the sea travel and Americas aspects are greater concerns of Fernández-Armesto, so I am not surprised that they were the best elements of this history.
In sum, the book is an interesting survey of civilizations (or societies?) and how they adapted to their environments and whether they influenced or were influenced by others. But I was left with little better way to identify a civilization. If the term is worthless, which it very well may be, this book didn't do much to set it to sleep. If we want the term to be broader, perhaps it would hurt to be a little more constructive in model building, but I don't think this author has much of a desire to attempt anything more positivistic.
The book is ordered by environmental settings: ice, desert, swamp, highland, coast, etc. About two hundred pages in I grew very weary of the book. There was nothing to tie any of these sections together or the societies offered as examples. The selection seems so arbitrary that I could be reading about any place. I kept on thinking that this would make a great PBS documentary entitled "Unconsidered Civilizations" or something such. While I thought all of these societies were interesting the intervention of the book, at this point, seemed less constructive than illustrative: there are many civilizations to talk about besides the ones you always read about: here are a bunch of them. OK, I get this, but then the author seems to undercut his own writing by suggesting that some adaptions to nature perhaps don't quite qualify as civilization. This comes across in the authors tones and descriptions, and his continued comparison of one civilization to another and implications that civilizations can improve or decline. A term he claims to abhor in the discussion of civilizations. On the Arctic: "In certain environments, it seems, civilization is an irrational strategy and it is better to defer to nature than to try and warp her to men's ways." (pg. 55). Though this quote appears directed at European colonists aborted or energy-intensive settlements in the Arctic, it implies that the first examples of civilization in this book: the indigenous people perhaps don't really qualify as civilization. If the defining mark of a civilization is simply working with or against nature, in some presumably peculiar way, to hammer out a toehold for humanity, how can a civilization dim? "Tibet emerged as a vassal state of the Chinese empire….The dynamic days of Tibetan civilization were over." (pg. 270) "When it was cut off from access to the Red Sea, … Ethiopian civilization dimmed." (pg. 260). There seems to be more at foot in the author's civilization then he implies in the opening and closing arguments.
At other times the author seems unclear as to his own arguments. He argues against the concept of "Indo-European" language only in order to continue to use it to categorize civilizations. He implies that Ethiopia was isolated by its religion, but then goes on to emphasize shifting trade networks. Although these two factors could be reasonably related, the history of Mediterranean and Eurasian trade is defined by religions cooperating, often while or between periods of feuding, in order to sustain the profits generated by trade.
Some civilizations, such as Great Zimbabwe, seem included mostly because of their monumental building, which partway through the the book it becomes clear is one of the author's secret criteria, along with written language. While at times this links to environmental management, such as in large irrigation works, at other times in seems Fernández-Armesto is simply privy to the same big building, big territory, big art criteria that often defines the models he so detests. Or take this quote on Papuans: "They had no access to metals they could use for tools, so their civilization was stuck in the Stone Age." (pg. 248). On the one hand, the author is simply stating a fact: a society is only out of the Stone Age when they have Bronze, Iron, or some other qualifying metal to use as tools. On the other hand, after lambasting the stiff chronologies of progression that are part and parcel of conventional civilization writing, Fernández-Armesto does not hesitate to state that a civilization is "stuck" in the Stone Age. If stones are enough to make a civilization, why lament when a culture only has stone tools?
Yet it is hard to avoid such traps when writing such a world history. Perhaps, then, the author should stick to what he knows best rather than attempt such a grand narrative. My favorite part of the book were undoubtedly chapters fifteen and sixteen. The author's knowledge of sea travel in the era concerned was strong, convincing, and avoided the muddiness that consumes the author's other historical explanations. Winds and ocean daring had a very strong causation in affecting how and when the Indian, Atlantic, and Pacific Oceans were crossed. The comparison between highland civilizations in the Americas was also strong. Based on his other books, both the sea travel and Americas aspects are greater concerns of Fernández-Armesto, so I am not surprised that they were the best elements of this history.
In sum, the book is an interesting survey of civilizations (or societies?) and how they adapted to their environments and whether they influenced or were influenced by others. But I was left with little better way to identify a civilization. If the term is worthless, which it very well may be, this book didn't do much to set it to sleep. If we want the term to be broader, perhaps it would hurt to be a little more constructive in model building, but I don't think this author has much of a desire to attempt anything more positivistic.
May 17, 2020
One good reason to pick this book is if you've ever wondered about the uniqueness of the history and the traits we were imparted through our civilization and how it differs from other civilizations across the globe with respect to the nature and climate they grew in. The contents as I'm understanding, or rather, using, is that it has been broken into sections of around 30 pages or so for every type of terrain and geographical type and then discusses the way civilizations are in that type of a territory and discussing parallels that exist across them.
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April 4, 2020gaining good knowledge of asian history
December 9, 2021
3.5, leaning towards 3
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March 29, 2023唉，拖了好久才接回來看，就覺得必須暫時擱下了，哪天有機會再重新看好了...
May 10, 2021
This was my World Civ 1 and 2 textbook and it was incredible. It’s not like a textbook. It really helps you understand world civilizations when looking at it through typography.
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