hist notlari 2: peopling of europe

The human invasion started when they started to come out of Africa, crossed Middle East and went to different directions. It is the pre-mordial colonization of the world when they spread unevenly throughout Europe and Asia. They were hunter and gatherers going after the food. In the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic periods they were using basic tools like sharpened stones. Since it is a durable material the change in the technique of making stone tools could be traced.  In the Neolithic period food production has started, humans were experimenting and domesticating plants. This food could be stored, leading to surpluses and enabling population growth. For the Mesolithic period the population density was estimated as 0.1 human per km² it raised to 1.5 per km² in the late Mesolithic period and to 5 – 10 per km² during the Roman Empire. The surplus of food also led to the Bronze and Iron ages, of which the ages can be calculated via the carbon 14 method. 

Jean Auel has not written about people with names, she never uses modern European nations. What she does is to invent names but not the events that occur, since her books are based on serious archeological and anthropological research, which she attends in person. On the contrary the Turkish Thesis of History alleges that the most ancient people are Turks. Taking 7000 BC as the ending point, this thesis propounds the ancient civilization was created by proto-Turks, the white Caucasian race who were advanced in science, cultured and have invented agriculture. Wherever they have immigrated, they enlightened people and pushed them up to become a civilization. Lots of them left central Asia and went to north and south America, while others went to Egypt, Anatolia and Italy became Sumerians, Hittites and Etruscans. The people putting forward this theory were obviously playing with the evidence to tie everything to the Turkish race.   

The British developed the Indo-European languages hypothesis after the colonization of India. The similarities between the two languages were fascinating. The booming of oriental studies and linguistics to comprehend the customs, art and literature revealed the structural and grammatical similarities between the European and Indian languages. After several stages, the inescapable conclusion was that they were one point at time the same language. What they also realized was that the commonality neither depends on the similarity of the sound nor the look of the words. The next question that people came up with was how they might get separated and have spread over time. Scholars came up with the idea that until 4000 BC there was a compact block of tribes living together and speaking a common language with slight variations. Hence, the reconstruction of the lost trunk-language was taking place. Different groups went different ways: some went to the south of the Caspian sea, one branch (Arians) went to the Indus valley and others spread to different directions in Europe.

Two waves from the north arrived at what is called Greece today in 2200-2000 BC and 1100 – 1000 BC. Another huge demographic move occurred also from the north to Italy by the Italic speaking people who settled there as different groups in different areas creating their own small principalities. The evidence for Greek invasion (Acais) comes from Homer’s poets and archeological findings of fire distraction. Archeologists look at several places and try to trace a horizon of fire distraction and find the connection between them. Moreover, the burial customs are also significant indicators as the tombs contain possessions of the buried person. The material and ethnolinguistic evidences are brought together draw a possible map and give the Greek (or Acais) name to the people there. Ancient Greece was taken over by Alexander the Great of Macedonia and stayed so until his death. After that the Macedonian Empire broke down to several kingdoms among which Rome in Italy was one. This was also the beginning of the history of Europe shaped through the Greco-Roman and Christian legacy. Moreover geographers and historians like Hecataeus, Strabo, and Herodotus were successfully describing the gradual filling up of the world through the synthesis of knowledge and copying from each other. Even before them anonymous bureaucrats were keeping records of dynasties, kings’ lists and great deeds of them. Hence, these state archives written by faceless people mentioning the developments inside and outside their borders (through wars) can be considered as the first historical records.

Cartage and Punic wars ensures Rome’s domination in the Western Mediterranean and starts the construction of identity as us versus them. People outside the Greco-Roman settlement are named as barbarians, creating its own identity crystallization. When Augustus died in AD 14, the Roman Empire was roughly a rectangle around the Mediterranean incorporating Greece and Northern Africa as well. On the north frontier lay Danube and Rhine rivers that were protecting the empire from invasions. In addition the system of fortresses and legions behind them were successful against the Slavic and Germanic tribes for a while. In 300 AD mobile army was also held in reserve in step behind the fortresses. The empire switched from an offensive to a defensive characteristic. In 370 AD Visigoths started to burst from Balkans and they were bribed to go west. But the Germanic tribes were already coming from the north and west to Britannia. In 420 Romans had to evacuate it and the age of migrations accelerated with the coming of Ostrogoths, Franks and Slavs in the 700s. The Antiquity ended and the Middle Ages begun with the invasions and migrations of Germans and Slavs. That is also referred as the European history or Dark ages. By the time Western Roman Empire has ended and Byzantium was left. Western Europe was invaded by the Germanic tribes while the east was exposed to the Slavic expansion. Hence the North – South division became the East – West division also through the language split and by the Elbe River. In the 6^th century Justinian sent his generals to re-conquer western Mediterranean against Vandals and Ostrogoths who were semi-tribal in social formation. However, the rule did not last long and a vacuum was created of which the Frankish king took advantage. Merovingians who own their victories against Visigoths, Saxons and Alemanni to their leader Merovech, took control of the Western Europe. Some kingdoms like Saxony, Lombard, and Burgundy were united through the conquests of Clovis and Charlemagne.

After Clovis’ sons and grandsons have conquered the Burgundian kingdom the Frankish control has extended to the Mediterranean. But in hundred years the Merovingian House started to decay due to inner weaknesses. Dividing the kingdom among king’s sons led to bitter civil wars as the kings were also ineffective rulers. The kingdom divided into three and the rulers were mere puppets. With the Merovindian decline, new waves of invasions from Slavic people and Muslims threatened western Europe. Charles Martel ‘the hammer’ won a victory against the Muslim invasion and his son Pepin the Short the first Carolingian king has succeeded in overthrowing the Lombards in Italy. His son Charlemagne seized  a huge territory and sent Arabs back to Spain. But the civil wars burst and the means of government were not enough to control huge territories. Finally, the Treaty of Meerssen in 870 has partitioned the Carolingian Empire that gave the rough shape of France, Germany and Italy. 

hist notlari 1: when does European history begin?

Formations and Constructions: when does European history begin?

When talking about formation, one can mention several layers that are constantly changing and shaping the entity called Europe. This is also a process of inventing Europe through the creation of tradition. With the year 1983, constructivism in the interpretation of history gets a firmer place. Because empiricism and positivism were the dominant methods used before. Although in 1960s there were indicator of the coming change through E.H. Carr’s interpretation of history as the dialogue between the past and the present rather than the collection of facts. In the 1970s the interest into ancient history became the fashion as some other topics were already over-studied. This curiosity to other topics brought also with it new interpretations of the existed literature. For instance, in 1976 Edward Said came up with his theory that, the West has been constructing and forming an ideology while producing knowledge about the Orient. This was also one of the implementations of E.H. Carr to a specific field. After Orientalism, scholars started to question their knowledge about the most basic concepts like nation. Scholars like Renan, asked what a nation is constituted of. Since commonalities are only told to but not experienced by the majority of the people, ideology creates this sense of belongingness and connectedness with others in the community.

History starts when the individual voices of people (today known as historians) were heard. In time it became the first branch of social sciences, redefined and professionalized. But it cannot be perceived as a science, since it is not looking for formulation of laws. It is ideographical rather than nomothetical that is interested with reaching generalizable facts. It is interested with pure, ideology-free objectivity. But this was not always the case, as historians were not interested with other nation states.

Through the Napoleonic Wars, French Revolution and unifications of Italy and Germany nation states were taking shape. This was also the time of rising radical ascendency of Europe on the rest of the world. Before 1500 this was not the case, as civilizations (East Asian, Indian, Medieval Feudal etc.) have minimal contact with and no superiority against each other. At time one would rise above the others first through its economic domination that will reflect to military and political power. The gap opened up in the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution. The jump from agrarian to industrial society altered the existing balance and pushed the disparities to an extreme. Rise of Eurocentrism, the feeling of superiority over the rest coincides with the rise of nation states, nationalism and ideological currents.

Delanty argued that European idea is ambivalent, as it is not always about unity and inclusion but also exclusion and construction of difference based on norms of exclusion. The idea of Europe has been invented repetitively through the pressure of new collective identities. It is a normative concept on the contrary to belief that the cultural foundation is in Christianity, humanism and liberal democracy. On the same line, Gellner has mentioned that Europeans have taken their recent problems like the rise of authoritarian regimes as universal issues faced by mankind. Hence these turbulences have also shaped the human destiny. However, he also mentions that this assumption has been abandoned and Europe is no longer considered as a model to explain everything else. Mann relates Europe’s ‘superiority’ to the ecological difference with Asia, namely high proportion of coastlines and navigable rivers for transportation. Moreover, competition derived from surplus that is hidden from interference of state and inertial control also led to normative regulations. Another component that differs Europe from Asia is Christianity. The rational restless versus rational acceptance dichotomy is formed through Christianity’s provision of common social identity ensuring recognition of property rights and free exchange, whereas Asiatic belief systems are based on acceptance of social order. Hence these differentiations and interpretations have resulted in the three-balance view of the world.

The inner circle or the peak was perceived as the West, who also considered themselves as ‘historic’ nations with a past of progress and dynamic development. Especially the elites believed that they were the ones who ‘made’ the history since the Middle ages by creating an advanced civilization. Hence, they had the capitalist development, making the separate studying of politics, social relations and economic development possible. When the history department was created in universities, it only studied the European history. They were nationalistic in spirit and focusing on the country of origin. The periodicals of 19^th century reflected this trend and writers have not talked to each other till the end of the Second World War.

The outer circle consisted of the primitives, people without history or the ‘non-white’ communities. Their territories were limited, they have not established a language and believed in a monotheistic religion. Anthropology was studying them by collecting artifacts and facts about their lives. Especially with the colonization era British, French and Americans had much to study from the countries they colonized.  The circle in between is formed by the ‘Oriental’ i.e. Chinese, Japanese, Ottoman, Indian and Ethiopians. They are distinguished from the primitives through the states, complex bureaucracy and military they formed. But these nations are not fully historical nations who can end up being promoted or relegated to the third situation. Oriental studies looked into these civilizations with the help of linguistics that has done a lot of translation. The others’ history has been static and repetitive due to despotism and Asiatic way of economic development, which deprived oriental studies from a place in the departmental structure. The oriental despotism was rooted in the lack of checks and balances system, lawless and subservient on will of one person. Hence, the West and the Orient are binary opposites in which the western side is the stronger. The blockage and absence of development was ended after 1000 years with colonization. The underlying message is that West is the superior, but how and when did that happen?

Scholars like Wallerstein, Gellner and Stears asked the question in the opposite way: why did the East stay backwards? No private property and individual freedom have stood out as the most important reasons from the discussions. The catastrophes of 20^th century led to pessimism and exploration of knowledge on non-European civilizations. All national histories have started to been included in the department, in mean while the Euro-centric optimization was reversed. But this question persisted: how was it that just the European agrarian society developed capitalism? It is interesting to see that people just left behind 99% of their history formed by hunting, gathering and cultivation. Through the industrial revolution, accumulation of wealth and concentration of capital were made possible. The historians were emphasizing the uniqueness of the situation that triggered this revolution, which may be meaningless for the historians living 1000 years from now. But still the explanations focus on timeless and frozen West as the single biggest construction. Diamond and Cook wondered from when on this superiority started, Gellner and Stearns elaborated on the theories of how they became superior. Whereas Delanty looked into every stage of European history and found out that there has always been the ‘other’ for the West, although the name has been changing.