History has always fascinated me because it offered ways through which I could begin to make sense of the present. History is about how and why things change over time, above all about the causal dynamics underlying how societies, economies, and cultures work and transform. The history of Byzantium is a perfect example, offering many challenges of understanding and interpretation of its own, yet at the same time opening up a whole world of medieval societies and cultures around it, helping to illuminate not just the history of the immediate regions concerned – the eastern Mediterranean and Balkans – but of the world beyond.
I wrote
The Empire That Would Not Die: The Paradox of Eastern Roman Survival, 640-740
This book offers a magisterial survey of the last 10,000 years and puts human history firmly in its full environmental context. There are many different ways of writing about the past, but historical writing is above all about how and why things change over time, about the causal dynamics underlying how societies, economies, and cultures work and transform. But in order to achieve this historians have first of all to establish a narrative – their own particular narrative – and it is their critical analysis of the ways in which this narrative can be constructed that helps us understand the past and that can help inform our understanding of the present. This book succeeds wonderfully in this fundamental task.
The Holocene provides students, researchers and lay-readers with the remarkable story of how the natural world has been transformed since the end of the last Ice Age around 15,000 years ago. This period has witnessed a shift from environmental changes determined by natural forces to those dominated by human actions, including those of climate and greenhouse gases. Understanding the environmental changes - both natural and anthropogenic - that have occurred during the Holocene is of crucial importance if we are to achieve a sustainable environmental future. Revised and updated to take full account of the most recent advances, the third…
“Collapse” is a term frequently bandied about in the press and popular as well as academic historical writing. Middleton’s book, well-informed by the palaeoenvironmental, archaeological, and documentary evidence shines a powerful light on some of the pervasive myths about supposed historical collapses, many of which were not at all what the term might suggest. He challenges us to think carefully and critically about what we really know about a past civilisation before we rush into easy judgements. His book made me rethink many of my own assumptions on the subject and undoubtedly influenced my own work.
Understanding Collapse explores the collapse of ancient civilisations, such as the Roman Empire, the Maya, and Easter Island. In this lively survey, Guy D. Middleton critically examines our ideas about collapse - how we explain it and how we have constructed potentially misleading myths around collapses - showing how and why collapse of societies was a much more complex phenomenon than is often admitted. Rather than positing a single explanatory model of collapse - economic, social, or environmental - Middleton gives full consideration to the overlooked resilience in communities of ancient peoples and the choices that they made. He offers…
This is a wonderful illustration of how to do integrated, holistic history that takes into account every aspect of the way a society works and evolves. Combining archaeology with landscape history, social, political, and economic history, Izdebski’s book is also a handbook on how to do environmental history, with detailed and informative methodological considerations on the problems that come with it. It is quite technical in places, but really sets out very clearly how historians who want to incorporate palaeoscientific data into their discussion should be doing it.
A Rural Economy in Transition deals with one of the most important periods in the history of Europe and the Middle East - the transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. In his monograph, Adam Izdebski focuses on the economic history of Anatolia between the fifth and ninth centuries AD, a period which has traditionally posed great challenges to the historian. Because there are very few written sources from which a detailed economic and rural history of the period might be constructed, A. Izdebski has made extensive use of archaeological material in his study; however, he has also been able…
This really is a “great read”, an exemplary and multi-faceted discussion by one of the leading historians of the early medieval world in western Eurasia. Integrating archaeological with documentary research and a vast range of sources of many different kinds, it offers a coherent, consistent and plausible account of the beginnings and early development of the post-Roman world in Europe, N. Africa, and the Middle East, covering also the origins of Islam and its impacts as well as the rise of the Carolingian empire and the origins and foundation of modern European politics and nations. Technically refined, clearly, coherently and entirely persuasively argued, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the end of the ancient and the beginnings of the medieval world in Europe and the surrounding lands.
"The breath of reading is astounding, the knowledge displayed is awe-inspiring and the attention quietly given to critical theory and the postmodern questioning of evidence is both careful and sincere."--The Daily Telegraph (UK)
"A superlative work of historical scholarship."--Literary Review (UK)
A unique and enlightening look at Europe's so-called Dark Ages; the second volume in the Penguin History of Europe
Defying the conventional Dark Ages view of European history between A.D. 400 and 1000, award-winning historian Chris Wickham presents The Inheritance of Rome, a work of remarkable scope and rigorous yet accessible scholarship. Drawing on a wealth of new material…
This book by Oliver Rackham, the doyen of British landscape history, offers the reader a detailed and more chronologically specific discussion to accompany and in many respects to illustrate the argument in Neil Roberts’s The Holocene. If you want to understand the long process of landscape evolution, the amazing continuities, and deep structures of the British landscape, this is the perfect book. Through detailed discussion of the sources, written, archaeological and environmental, the author presents a topic-by-topic study of every aspect of the British countryside and its deep history, from the Neolithic to the present. I thought I understood something of all this until I read Rackham’s revealing, instructive, and deeply impressive book. Well-written and scholarly yet entirely accessible, this is one of my favourite, and still most useful, books.
From its earliest origins to the present day, this award-winning, beautifully written book describes the endlessly changing character of Britain's countryside.
'A classic' Richard Mabey
Exploring the natural and man-made features of the land - fields, highways, hedgerows, fens, marshes, rivers, heaths, coasts, woods and wood pastures - he shows conclusively and unforgettably how they have developed over the centuries. In doing so, he covers a wealth of related subjects to provide a fascinating account of the sometimes subtle and sometimes radical ways in which people, fauna, flora, climate, soils and other physical conditions have played their part in the…
From being the most powerful state in western Eurasia in 600, by 700 the eastern Roman empire was on the point of collapse. Yet it did not die.
This holistic analysis elucidates the factors that allowed it to survive against all odds, integrating the history of the landscape and cities, the environment and changes in climate, the history of beliefs and ideas, the institutions of the state and the church, secular politics, and the international scene. State, elite, and church together embodied a sacralized empire that held the emperor, not the patriarch, as Christendom’s symbolic head. The empire suffered no serious political rupture and what remained became the heartland of the medieval Roman state that we call the Byzantine empire.
I come by my interest in history and the years before, during, and after the Second World War honestly. For one thing, both my father and my father-in-law served as pilots in the war, my father a P-38 pilot in North Africa and my father-in-law a B-17 bomber pilot in England. Their histories connect me with a period I think we can still almost reach with our fingertips and one that has had a momentous impact on our lives today. I have taken that interest and passion to discover and write true life stories of the war—focusing on the untold and unheard stories often of the “Average Joe.”
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on any other single day of the war.
The narrative of No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident while focusing its attention on ordinary individuals—clerks, radio operators, cooks, sailors, machinist mates, riflemen, and pilots and their air crews. All were men who chose to serve their country and soon found themselves in a terrifying and otherworldly place.
No Average Day reveals the vastness of the war as it reaches past the beaches in…
October 24, 1944, is not a day of national remembrance. Yet, more Americans serving in World War II perished on that day than on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, or on June 6, 1944, when the Allies stormed the beaches of Normandy, or on any other single day of the war. In its telling of the events of October 24, No Average Day proceeds hour by hour and incident by incident. The book begins with Army Private First-Class Paul Miller's pre-dawn demise in the Sendai #6B Japanese prisoner of war camp. It concludes with the death…
