Synopses & Reviews
This enormous project is based on the premise that civilizations are the product of their environment.
With that, Fernandez-Arnesto looks at cultures of the desert, the tundra and ice, then to the more obvious civilizations of alluvial flood plains, the highlands, maritime civilizations and finally civilizations of travel, migration and expansion. This is a work of massive cross referencing juxtaposing the maritime civilizations of Japan and Northern Africa or the mountain civilizations of New Guinea and Tibet. The effect is to suggest that civilization can happen anywhere - that no one environment is uniquely conducive, or that no one race or people are more productive than another.
Synopsis
Written with the same flair and imagination as Millennium, Civilizations is a richly layered, hawk's eye image of the world whole societies evoked from minute fragments of evidence. It is an immensely readable and controversial work about the environment and our historical relationship to it, which challenged the notion that nature is weak in the face of the human threat.
About the Author
Felipe Fernández-Armesto is the author of ten books, including Millennium: A History of Our Last Thousand Years, Truth: History, and Columbus. He has been a member of the Faculty of Modern History at Oxford University since 1983, was a fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in 1999/2000 and is currently Union Pacific Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota. Honours won for his work on maritime and colonial history include the Caird Medal of the National Maritime Museum in 1997 and the John Carter Brown Medal in 1999.