Britain and Colonial Maritime War in the Early Eighteenth Century: Silver, Seapower and the Atlantic (original) (raw)

The Modern Origins of the Early Middle Ages. By Ian N. Wood. Oxford University Press. 2013. xiv + 374pp. £65.00. 'Why is early medieval history, or indeed any pre-modern history, important?', asks Ian Wood in the preface of this fascinating book. The problem was raised for him in 2003 when the then education secretary Charles Clarke appeared to dismiss the value of 'medievalists'. Clarke claimed later that he was actually referring to antiquated models of education; nevertheless, the systematic defunding of the Humanities by governments in the UK and elsewhere has left history professors and others very much on the defensive. Wood enters the debate here by proposing, fairly, that medievalists must rely on a better defence than the need to police the facts from careless amateurs. He proceeds by exploring the observation that history is almost always political, and that study of the early Middle Ages has often been part of wider discourses and events in society. The focus of the book is on the ways that different writers from c. 1700 onwards have interpreted the Fall of West Rome and the rise of successor kingdoms in the fifth and sixth centuries. (This is the early Middle Ages in its Late Antique guise, sans Charlemagne.) He starts by outlining early 'Germanist' and 'Romanist' positions-Boulainvilliers representing the first because he saw the Germanic Franks as a force for liberation against the oppressive Roman state, and Abbé du Bos standing for the Romanists because he argued that Frankish influence was limited, especially in Armorica and Provence. In these early exchanges, it seems that some people wrote reflecting the anxiety about the erosion of noble rights under Louis XIV, while others wrote implicitly in defence of monarchy. Rights and class dominated discussion, as one might expect in a world which would soon be reshaped in response to revolutions. Napoleon, we learn, once ordered the Comte de Montlosier to write a new history of France and was disappointed when what he got was anticlerical, supported a hereditary monarchy, and calmly explored the merits of both the Germanist and Romanist arguments. Balanced scholarship and political agendas did not always mix well. And so, as Wood's subject matter races into the nineteenth century, it continued. Much here, unsurprisingly, concerns Germanism and its opponents. It is to Wood's credit that he keeps his account of the foundation of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica relatively brief despite its great reputation, and sets it alongside debates surrounding Jacob Grimm and the then recently rediscovered Beowulf to emphasize the wider growth in philology. He also does well to highlight the importance of Felix Dahn's novel, Ein Kampf um Rom