A Companion to the Global Early Middle Ages. Edited by Erik Hermans. Arc Humanities Press Companions. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2020. x + 563 pp. €189. ISBN 978 1 942 40175 9.

Abstract

There are at least three reasons why the present review is not typical for Early Medieval Europe: the volume under review has relatively little to say about Europe (one chapter alone is devoted to it), it is not a work of original research but a synthesis, and having been published in 2020 it is not a very recent book. But there are good reasons for it to appear here nevertheless. Although this is a book about global history its contributors frequently place the global in conversation with regional histories. This approach offers helpful methodological lessons for Europeanists asking ‘what can the global do for me’? Likewise, the Europeanist who always wanted to know more about faraway places but was too afraid to ask will benefit from the synthetic orientation of the chapters with their up-to-date bibliographies. These are useful gateways for further research. But the book can be used also as a teaching resource, and the present review will assess it as such, based on two years of trial and error in the classroom (also my only legitimate excuse for the delay in completing the review). I am grateful to the brave students of University College Dublin who took HIS33010 ‘Global History in the First Millennium ad’ and whose feedback informs the observations below.

This multi-authored volume consists of nineteen chapters, fifteen of which concentrate on specific regions: from Africa and Eurasia with their geographical subdivisions (by Mark Horton, Kenneth Hall, John Whitmore, Michael Drompp, Khodadad Rezakhani, George Hatke, Sonja Magnavita, Jennifer Davies), through Oceania (Glenn Summerhayes) and Mesoamerica (Heather McKillop), to regions defined politically or ethnically like China (Tineke D'Haeseleer), Tibet (Lewis Doney), Japan (Ross Bender), Korea (Richard McBride II), and Byzantium (Michael Decker). Australia as well as South America and North America are excluded. The remaining four chapters are thematic, exploring staple themes of global history: trade (by Richard Smith), migration (Johannes Preiser-Kapeller), climate and disease (Peter Sarris), and intellectual connectivity (Erik Hermans). There is no concluding chapter to provide an overarching perspective or tease out common and comparable threads.

The introduction defines the book's chronological limits as extending roughly from the seventh to the ninth centuries. It acknowledges however that not all places included in the book display the same patterns of political, social, and economic changes, nor were they all interconnected in a way that would uphold a self-evident or an unproblematic periodization. But the book's strength lies neither in establishing a secure rationale for periodization nor in putting forward a compelling case for global connectivity (it admits also weak forms of connectivity and this is fine). Rather, A Companion to the Global Early Middle Ages is at its most engaging on a chapter-by-chapter basis, allowing readers to create their own links across places of their choosing, without necessarily subscribing to the thesis of global (commercial, intellectual, or other) connectivity. Connectivity does however work well per chapter, with most following a similar pattern of balancing an introductory essay on each region with observations on the ways in which that region is known to have been connected with neighbouring or distant places. Helpfully, there are seventeen maps corresponding to sites mentioned.

In the absence of a concluding essay, Johannes Preiser-Kapeller's contribution, titled simply ‘Migration’, functions as a convenient (albeit unintended) recapitulation of major themes rehearsed in other chapters. With subheadings like ‘Elite and imperial mobility’, ‘Religious mobility and migration’, ‘Mercantile mobility and migration’, and ‘Refugees, deportees, and slaves’, it captures important trans-regional political, religious, and economic phenomena whose impact cannot always be adequately appreciated when viewed within the confines of specific regions. Among these are the implantation of new migrant ruling groups at the top of already-settled societies throughout Eurasia, the interconnectedness (sometimes by design, sometimes by accident) of elites who made up the upper strata of government and their corresponding aristocracies, the spread of Buddhism and Christianity, the construction and perception of ethnic identities, and the fortunes of the countless voiceless individuals who were driven from their homelands by war, economic necessity, or enslavement.

Other places and themes which are more dominant by default and recur throughout the book are China, Islamic culture and the Muslim world, knowledge and spread of languages, religious practice, and nomads. Given how important nomadic states were, not only for determining contemporary political realities but also as a defining hallmark of the period (some Chinese travellers westwards wrote about settled farmers as the exception), it would have been desirable to devote an entire chapter to this phenomenon, which does not lend itself to neat regional classification. Currently the principal discussion is in the chapter on Inner Asia by Michael Drompp.

The book is an asset for university lecturers who previously struggled to identify introductory readings for students taking global history modules focused on the first millennium ad. It renders accessible a comprehensive set of themes and places that have hitherto been available only in separate publications with their discrete scholarly priorities and often irreconcilable linguistic conventions. Exhibiting more consistency in relation to these matters, this volume can form the centrepiece (or textbook) of an undergraduate course on global history in this period. For a more comprehensive syllabus it may be complemented by chapters from a number of recent books. These include: Benjamin Zeev Kedar and Merry Wiesner-Hanks (eds), Expanding Webs of Exchange and Conflict, 500 ce–1500 ce, The Cambridge World History 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Nicola Di Cosmo and Michael Maas (eds), Empires and Exchanges in Eurasian Late Antiquity: Rome, China, Iran and the Steppe, ca. 250–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Kenneth Harl, Empires of the Steppes: The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); and William Dalrymple, The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2024). As a package, which may be augmented by more specialized journal articles and a selection of primary sources, this will give the Anglophone student a solid basis to start from in exploring global aspects of a period still dominated by regional perspectives.