Covering the history of Eurasia and North Africa from the Neolithic Revolution to the seventh century ce in just under 150 pages, S.'s volume fits neatly into the genre of the small book on a (very) big topic. But there is nothing else quite like this particular small book on offer: the combination of scope and scale is distinctive. The timing is excellent, too, as interest in the history of premodern Eurasia as a whole, and in comparative approaches to the ancient Mediterranean, is booming. What S. offers in short compass is a concise and reliable survey with a short but up-to-date bibliography. As such, it should appeal to multiple readerships, especially newcomers.
Following a short introduction that makes the case for a ‘global’ ancient history that distinguishes between processes common to most societies and those that arise through interaction and ‘interdependence’ (p. 4), the book follows a mostly chronological organisation, beginning in the Fertile Crescent with the emergence of agriculture c. 10,000 bce and the spread of urbanisation in Mesopotamia c. 5000 bce (Chapter 1) and concluding with the collapse of the Sassanid empire in 651 ce as a transitional moment between antiquity and later periods (Chapter 8). Two thematic chapters – the first on approaches to ancient societies (Chapter 2), and the second exploring the nature of city-states and collective government (Chapter 6) – punctuate this diachronic account. Major developments and key themes are summarised in a short conclusion.
S. is a reliable guide to the material, and the narrative is clear and easy to follow. There is relatively more attention paid to matters of statecraft, institutions and political economy than to social or cultural history – there is no thematic chapter on women or slavery, for example, nor on art or literature –, but decisions about what to include or exclude are always defensible. None of the obvious or mainstream events or features of the period are missing.
The strongest chapters are on method (Chapter 2); the rise of complex societies to 1200 bce (Chapter 3); and empires, from 335 bce to 200 ce (Chapter 7, the longest in the book at 30 pages). S. is particularly good both on the emergence of states – effectively summarising materialist, social-contract and new-institutionalist approaches to the problem (pp. 23–4; the treatment of K. Polanyi's distinction between redistribution, reciprocity and exchange, pp. 24–6, is also excellent) – and on the subsequent processes of state formation (pp. 43–6). His picture of a ‘world of empires’ around the turn of the first millennium, drawing on his fine sketches of the Roman, Parthian, Mauryan, and Qin and Han empires, is a model of clear synthesis (Chapter 7). S. also strikes a nice balance between pessimism – noting, for example, that the rise of the state is ‘not necessarily something to celebrate’ (p. 21, following J. Scott, Against the Grain. A Deep History of the Earliest States [2017]) – and optimism, suggesting plausibly that the ‘world of empires’ was ‘a more peaceful and uniform place to live than when Philip rallied the Greek city-states, the Romans waged war against their neighbors in central Italy, Ashoka unified India and the Qin conquered the warring states of China’ (p. 119).
References throughout are admirably up to date, reflecting, for example, current emphases on system-level understandings of complex historical change, such as the crisis and recovery of the early Iron Age, c. 1200–800 bce (p. 51), and on the deep, structural effect of climate (e.g. pp. 119–20, on the ‘Roman Climate Optimum’ as a condition for the flourishing of empires). Images are black and white and sometimes of low resolution, but they nevertheless liven up the text, even if in a no-frills way. The maps are a little crude in execution, but they are very informative. The sequence of ‘Geopolitical Situation’ maps, covering the different forms of sociopolitical organisation – empires, city-states, nomadic peoples, hunter-gatherers and so on – in 250 bce, 1 ce, 250 ce and 500 ce, respectively, is especially illuminating for grasping the ‘big picture’ of Eurasian organisational development over the long term (pp. 97, 102, 116, 134). If students came away from this book armed only with this knowledge, it would be a not inconsiderable gain.
It goes without saying that no one will agree with everything in a book that covers so much in so little space. The claim that early city-states depended on ‘peaceful trade over great distances’ (p. 31), for example, runs counter to recent work that convincingly posits violent competition over trade routes as the driving force behind the rise of empires in West Asia (e.g. P. Bang, C. Bayly and W. Scheidel [edd.], The Oxford World History of Empire [2021], Volume 2: The History of Empires, Part 1, ‘Bronze to Iron Age’). In the chapter on city-states and empires in the period 800 to 335 bce (Chapter 5) emphasis on the revolutionary effects of citizenship, as a new form of belonging, and on coined money, as a new instrument of exchange, is perhaps insufficient. The collapse of the Roman Republic is attributed to an old chestnut: ‘The system set up to govern a city’, as S. says, ‘had not managed the transition to managing a large empire’ (p. 101). But it is not obvious why this should have been the case, and in a global history like this one readers might expect some attempt to support that proposition either comparatively or theoretically. Finally, in a book ostensibly about the entirety of Eurasia and North Africa there are long stretches that focus on Greece and Rome, especially in the central core of the book (Chapters 5–7).
This short survey nevertheless deserves praise for covering so much material so clearly and so succinctly. It is rare indeed that so much information is packaged so neatly between two covers. The book would serve well as a basic textbook in an introductory survey on ancient Eurasia and will also be useful for scholars of ancient Greece and Rome who are looking for an up-to-date overview that puts the ancient Mediterranean in a wider context, both geographically and chronologically. And S.'s main conclusion – that ‘what we are used to seeing as our history has similarities with and is related to what we have often regarded as the history of others … because many of the challenges that humans have encountered have led to similar responses across time and space’ (p. 146) – is one well worth reflecting upon in our own globalised age.
