I think it's much more useful to think of a net with connections, with different levels of "zoom out".

For example, you could look at 0CE Rome, and get a good understanding of how the city ran. Zoom out to Italy, and have a good understanding of the 'Centre' of their empire. Zoom out to the entire empire, noticing a second clustering towards Egypt, and how trade flowed to the Parthian empire, into Germania and how there was even a trickle through the Sahara.

Then zoom out again to get an idea of how these all interacted with the other great empires in India and China. And how these were disconnected from the American empires at the time.

The book is also very focused on trade, not just war. And the brilliant goods of the East were the source of great trade.

True, but very informative, as China's borders have grown and shrunk and grown again quite a bit over the centuries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=zdHkY3XYHKA

I need to fact-check that, though. If Fuller is right, it really is a huge twist on the story of early global trade.

History is full of stuff like that. The key difference is that these regions didn’t keep written track and have left only archeology, but in Europe most of that didn’t keep because other people lived on it after wards.

The earliest written accounts about Northern Europe are Christian accounts that were written almost 400 years after the Vikings discovered America. While it’s not incorrect to theorize that there is nothing because there was nothing, it’s important to keep in mind that we still don’t know how Stonehenge was build.

> While it’s not incorrect to theorize that there is nothing because there was nothing, ...

There likely was something. Linguistic evidence from proto-indo-european homeland theories aside, could mean ongoing exchange and exploitation from far away, so no permanent civilization but excursions and outposts.

And if there was something, it is still possible that was removed by conquering religions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_Game

Honestly i can't shake the idea that said game has continued to the present day, only with various players tag teaming in and out over the years.

Ah, yes, an unintersting backwater ...that created objects like this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism

Also: Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Thales of Melitus, Archimedes, Democritus, Ptolemy, Aristotle of course, etc etc.

It's true that the Orient and also Mesoamerica were also civlisational centers, a fact that is not acknowledged in Western history books. But to go from that ommission, to saying that the West (in fact, the entire Old World since it's impossible to separate Greek and Roman history from say Egyptian or Babylonian history) was a "backwater" before Columbus, is simply unhistorical.

It's difficult to know. The OP mentions the "Eeastern Mediterranean basin" as part of the Orient:

>> the Orient (particularly the Eastern Mediterranean basin over to present-day India), not Europe, is the historic center of civilization.

I can't see how that doesn't include Greece, especially Ionia. On the other hand, I can't see how "Europe" excludes Greece, either. The same goes for the Roman Empire, that covered much of both Europe and the Eastern Mediterrannean for a long period.

I think the OP, or perhaps their source, is just confused about what is what, the Orient, Europe, the West etc.

The straight-line cultural connection from northern Europe to classical Greece is mostly a myth, established to sell a sense of importance to the Johnny-come-lately imperialists of Britain, Holland, and Germany. "Europe" is a more modern concept.

Geographically, certainly. Culturally, not at all. The Persian wars (and even Alexander's campaign) were already portrayed as a clash of civilisation by their contemporaries. The difference between one big, monolithic empire vs many agile city-states (a few of them even democratic, to different degrees) was not easy to miss and it becamse a main theme of the interpretations of the Persians' failed campaigns that persists to this day (e.g. - how the Greeks overwhelmed the Persian navy with their smaller, faster, more manoeuverable ships in Salamis etc).

>> "Europe" is a more modern concept.

A lot of this "myth" of continuity comes from the fact that the people who were originally subjugated by Rome ended up seeing themselves as Roman, and proclaimed their proto-nation states to be the legitimate heirs of Rome. Most prominent among them, the Holy Roman Empire (i.e. the origins of modern Germany) and even more so Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire, in other words- the Greeks.

Is there a straight-line connection between Rome and modern Greece that goes through Byzantium? A word for "Greek" in the Greek language is, even today, "Romios", which means - Roman. The Turks even called us "Rum".

Is there a straight-line connection between ancient and modern Greece? We call ourselves "Greek" (I'm one obviously) but we speak a significantly changed language, identify with a single nation-state and recognise a montheistic religion as the official state religion.

And yet, who has more of a claim to being "greek" than modern-day Greeks? Turks, maybe, who live in what used to be Ionia? Southern Italians, who live in Magna Grecia and often speak Greek dialects?

How about a connection with Rome? Who can claim to be a descendant of the Romans any more than the speakers of Romance languages? What about the inhabitants of the "land of the Romans" (Romania)?

What I'm trying to say is- modern nation-states are invariably based on a particular reading of ancient history, which, since we're talking about the Old World, is the history of Rome (and to a lesser extent, Greece). The influence of Rome on the identity and culture of the people of Europe, through those "myths" is of such undeniable magnitude that it really ends up constituting a straight-line cultural connection, even when the culture has changed significantly since ancient times (as of course it would). See "What did the Romans do for us".

"Europe" is a modern concept, sure- but it would not have taken off the ground if it hadn't been for the unifying influence of the Roman Empire.

Instead current Romania was named as such just based on the endonym (the name they gave to themselves) of the locals: Romanians. The name of the locals does imply a connection to the Romans, as their descendants, but that's it.

What I'm trying to say is a bit subtle, but basically Romania is a name which acknowledges a fact (the Romanians are descendants of the Romans/Latin speaking populations; not even our greatest enemy, Hungary denies this), not a claim to greatness. So the name is a logical extension of this fact, just like you'd call the land of the Greeks, Greece (or the land of the Albanians, Albania) :)

An Anglo-French alliance was not inevitable; as late as 1894 it was possible to publish a novel in which England, invaded by France and Russia, was rescued by Germany [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Great_War_in_England_in_18...

"In the European Union, treating World War I as the product of abstract forces like arms races or nationalism is doubtlessly useful in minimizing national animosities.

But unlike the chattering classes, most historians, ever since Fritz Fischer published Germany’s Aims in the First World War (1961), have tended to agree that the major cause of World War I was Imperial Germany’s determination to become a “world power” or superpower by crippling Russia and France in what it hoped would be a brief and decisive war, like the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Following the Archduke’s assassination, Berlin deliberately used the crisis in relations between its satellite Austria-Hungary and Russia’s satellite Serbia as an excuse for a general war that would establish German hegemony from Belgium to Baghdad. World War I started in 1914 for the same reason that World War II started in 1939—a government in Berlin wanted a war, though not the war it ultimately got."

Additionally, Austrian historians claim that Austrian military strategists also surely didn't want the big war but just to attack Serbia which they estimated was already weak enough to be an easy target. Both Germans and Austrians simply (stupidly?) expected much less response from other countries.