Cunliffe’s approach will jar readers accustomed to being informed of the epoch-making quality of every inauguration speech. Not for him “the events and personalities flitting on the surface” of conventional history. Rather, he focuses resolutely on the underlying forces—primarily geography and climate—that influenced societies, and specifically on the ways those forces shaped and constrained the “intricate social networks by means of which commodities were exchanged and ideas and beliefs were disseminated.” Cunliffe is intellectually indebted to Fernand Braudel and the Annales school of French economic and social historians, which emphasized largely static environmental influences and long-term historical continuity and regarded political events as little more than trivia. The Annales approach works better for the millennia Cunliffe examines, in which very, very few individuals can even be identified, than for the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, the periods Braudel assessed.

Geography forms the essential basis of Cunliffe’s history. The waters encircling Europe, the transpeninsular rivers that penetrated it, and its topography, currents, tides, and seasonal wind patterns all determined millennia-old sailing routes, and thus the goods and beliefs transported along them. From Cunliffe’s perspective, even the Roman Empire was just an interlude, and perhaps its main achievement was to institutionalize through its ports, roads, and market centers Europe-wide networks of exchange that had been operating since the Middle Stone Age.

By stressing historical continuity and adroitly employing a wide-ranging archaeological record to highlight mobility and interconnectedness, Cunliffe draws a startling picture. Europe, he demonstrates, was geographically and culturally merely “the western excrescence of the continent of Asia.” His archaeological and topographic analysis shows how for thousands of years the steppe lands linked central Asia to the Great Hungarian Plain, thus providing “easy access” from China to the Atlantic Ocean. Here was a corridor for trade and migration, starting with nomadic groups deep in prehistory and continuing through the preclassical, classical, medieval, and early modern eras with great hordes of Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Huns, Magyars, Bulgars, Moguls, and Tatars. Knowledge of, for example, the chariot seems to have moved from the Russian forest steppe (the earliest known examples date to 2800 B.C.) to the Carpathian basin in Hungary and, by the 16th century B.C., to Mycenaean Greece and Sweden. Sarmatian horsemen, originally from central Asia, served in northern England as mercenaries in the Roman army.

By water and over land, through far-flung webs of trade and tribute, the most disparate cultures reached and changed each other. The beliefs and technologies behind megalithic tombs found along Europe’s Atlantic coast as far north as the Orkneys spread to Minoan Crete by 3000B.C. Identical amber jewelry is found only in southern Britain and Mycenaean Greek sites, strongly suggesting direct contact between the societies of Homeric Greece and prehistoric Britain. Images of the same type of warrior are found in Sardinia, Egypt, and Scandinavia by about 1300 B.C. Archaic Greek building techniques were used in southern Germany in the sixth century B.C. At a Dark Ages trading center in central Sweden, active from the sixth through ninth centuries A.D., archaeologists have excavated coins from the eastern and western Roman empires, a ladle from Egypt, a bishop’s crosier from Ireland, and a bronze statue of Buddha from India. In the Byzantium of the 900s, the Varangian guard was made up wholly of Scandinavian mercenaries. “It may have been a member of the guard,” Cunliffe notes, “who scratched his name, Halfdan, in runes … in the church of Hagia Sophia, leaving a poignant reminder of the confrontation of two very different cultures.”