Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity
Rosamond McKitterick
460 pages including index
published in 2008
I knew Rosamond McKitterick from the volume in the Short Oxford History of Europe series she edited, which is why I picked up Charlemagne: the Formation of a European Identity from the library. Charlemagne himself has only relatively recently picked my interest, mostly through having read Emperor of the West a few years back. Interest in Charlemagne in general has rather picked up in the past decade, as the search for a common pan-European identity has taken on obvious political significance, what with the EU and all.
Which is where this comes in, as Rosamond McKitterick attempts to get back to contemporary sources to re-evaluate Charlemagne and his reign, without the interpretations later historians have given them. Her goal is to in this way provide a new critical understanding of what these sources tell us about the development of the Carolingian empire, its political identity and how these changed during Charlemagne’s reign. It makes Charlemagne a heavily text orientated history, as McKitterick examines the narrative representations of Charlemagne produced during his lifetime and shortly after. To be honest, at times this made it heavy going, especially when I read most of it during the morning and afternoon commute.
Seventeenth-century Burma and the Dutch East India Company 1634-1680
Wil O. Dijk
348 pages including index
published in 2006
I got this book out of the library soley on the strength of the author’s own story. Wil O. Dijk was born in Kobe, Japan in 1934, the daughter of a Dutch businessman and a Montenegrin-Burmese (!) mother. As a child she lived in Japan and Burma, with her brother got sent to Singapore when war broke out in 1941, became a prisoner of the Japanese there, like so many other children, while her mother fled to India and her father joined the British 14th army. They all survived war and after being reunited with their parents she and her brother spent some years at boarding school in Holland, before they returned east to Karachi when the Korean War broke out. There she stayed, met her husband, a Dutch foreign service employee, travelled with him from posting to posting all over the world, raising three daughters in the process, then came to stay in Holland permanently in the 1980ties. Wanting to reconnect with her Asian roots, she enrolled as a mature student at Leiden first to study Japanology, then to specialise in Burmese history, the end result of which is this book, written when she was well in her seventies!
Even without the author’s lifestory I would’ve gotten this book though. The focus in Dutch colonial history has understandably always been with Indonesia as well as with the colonies in the Americas, Surinam and the Dutch West Indies, as these were the most enduring, important and longest lived Dutch colonial ventures. With some exceptions (Nieuw Amsterdam obviously, South Africa), the rest of Dutch colonial history is mainly a concern for specialists. Which as Wil O. Dijk makes clear in her introduction, goes double for Dutch involvement with Burma, largely neglected even by specialists, yet no less important and interesting for it.
So it turns out that at least one US marine unit in Afghanistan has been using the lightning runes of the Waffen SS on their flag. Intentional or not, trust Americans not to learn anything from history, but they at least should’ve paid attention to what Mitchell and Webb were trying to tell them:
Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa
Alan Moorehead
642 pages including index
published in 1941, 1943,1943, compilation 1945
If journalism is history as first draft, then these three books, Mediterranean Front, A Year of Battle, The End in Africa; published in one volume as African Trilogy are history as second draft. Written while the Second World War was still ongoing, each of these books tell the story of one year of war in the desert, as seen by one of the preeminent war correspondents of the era. Written largely without the benefit of hindsight, from the notes that Moorehead took at the time, these three books together not only provide an interesting look at an important period in World War II, which England largely had to fight on its own, but also at how people at the time thought about the war, when the outcome was by no means certain yet.
If you’ve heard of Alan Moorehead, it’s probably for his post-war books on the exploration of the Nile, The White Nile (1960) and The Blue Nile (1962). During the Second World War he was a correspondent for the Daily Express, following the war in North Africa, the invasion of Sicily and the war in Italy. As becomes clear from reading these three volumes, Moorehead wasn’t one of those journalists content to stay at headquarters, but went chasing down the front whenever he could. Some of the incidents here certainly read like Boy’s Own Adventures stuff, several times barely escaping running into the enemy at several moments. Moorehead is a born raconteur, aimable, slightly understated, though with some of the attitudes and language use of the time that might seem strange to modern readers.
Ivan’s War
Catherine Merridale
396 pages including index
published in 2005
Though things have improved a lot since the end of the Cold War, the Eastern Front is still underrepresented in western histories of World War II. Quite naturally British and American historians have focused mostly on their own countries’ experiences in the war but even so the Russian experience is still under-represented. And often when the Eastern Front is looked at, it is from a German rather than a Russian perspective. German historians, generals and others were quite quick in putting forward their experiences in order to put the record straight in their favour, German sources were much more available to western historians than Russian sources, stuck behind the Iron Curtain as they were. So we got plenty of Konsalik novels talking about poor, intelligent middle class German officers stuck in the hell of the Ostfront facing the Slavic hordes, not so much about the poor Russian soldiers trying to liberate their homelands. What’s more, Cold War ideology, which presented an outnumbered NATO alliance trying to defend itself against the vast communist tank armies poised to overrun Western Europe at any moment, quite easily identified itself with the German experience and was fed by the same German generals that had been defeated by the Russians on how best to fight the bolshevik menace.
So it’s good to see a book like Ivan’s War be published. It’s the first book I’ve read about the Eastern Front that looks at the war there not just through a Russian perspective, but looks at the ordinary soldier’s experiences, somewhat comparable to e.g. Stud Terkel’s “The Good War” about American experiences of WWII. Catherine Merridale went to Russia not just to look at archives long inaccessible to western scholars, but also to talk to the veterans themselves and get their stories. What’s more, she didn’t just show the stories of the common soldiers, but also those of their officers and political commissars too and does so without editorialising. It’s important to hear those stories, to get an idea of what the Great Patriotic War was really like for those who fought it, without seeing it filtered through American or Western European, let alone German eyes for a change.
War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559
Steven Gunn, David Grummitt & Hans Cools
395 pages including index
published in 2007
Everything the authors tried to achieve with this book is in the title, but whether they succeeded is another question. Based on a massive research project that was carried out between 1999 and 2002, what the book was intended to be was a comparative study of two roughly similar countries in a period critical to Early Modern European history, to determine the impact of war both on society and the (semi-modern) state. As the authors argue, both England and the Netherlands (meaning what we would now call the Low Countries) were sort of outliers in Europe, neither quite fitting in “conventional narratives of the growth of state power”, not as centralised as other countries and with a greater level of democracy. For English historians, an added advantage of this comparison is that it puts England back into an European context by showing the simularities and differences between the two countries’ experiences.
War, State and Society in England and the Netherlands, 1477-1559 is impressive and interesting but what it lacks is that comparative aspect that the title and introduction promises. It’s more a parallel than a comparative history, with developments in the two countries looked at side by side. So you’d have a section on the defence of towns looking first at how English towns dealt with fortifications, then at how Dutch towns did the same, but nothing much on how they differed or why they did. This lack of analysis wasn’t that big a problem for me personally because I found the subject interesting enough already.
