North Sea Google Maps

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE did not write "The Merchant of Antwerp", but if Michael Pye is right, it was a near thing. In his new book he argues that the North Sea rivals the Mediterranean as the cradle of European civilization. The fall of the Roman Empire did not, after all, reduce its northern territories to a howling waste, fit only for rampaging Vikings.

On the contrary, those Vikings, the Frisians before them and the Hanseatic merchants after them invented for themselves the conditions for modernity: international trade, money, credit, mathematics, law, the stock exchange, pensions and much else.

Mr Pye asks his readers to imagine a time before fixed national borders, when identity was not so much a matter of race, but of "where you were and where you last came from". The sea was a thoroughfare, quicker than rutted roads. It made it easy for "Scandinavians to be in York, Frisians in Ipswich, Saxons in London".

Unburdened by territorial ambition or by the feudal and monastic oppressions of inland towns, these people looked outward. They braved the legendary terrors of whirlpools and monsters at the northern edge of the world and sailed as far west as Newfoundland. To the east they plied the rivers of Russia to Novgorod, Kiev, the Black Sea and Byzantium. Trading, settling or moving on, they spread goods, fashions and information wherever they went.

Mr Pye draws on a dizzying array of documentary and archaeological scholarship, which he works together in surprising ways. What links peat-digging in Holland with the famous cleanliness of Dutch cities? How did the marriage customs of northern Europe lead to the spread of windmills? He ranges everywhere, from the bookmaking monks of seventh-century Ireland to the beguines of 14th-century Flanders. The beguines were communities run by and for single women and they form part of a wonderful section on the choices and chances open to women left at home by their traveling menfolk.

Maps of North Frisia in 1651 (left) and 1240 (right). Johannes Mejer/Wikimedia Commons

A central theme of this book is the re-invention of money and its role in the development of abstract, scientific and, eventually, secular thought. As a sea-trading people, the Frisians needed portable cash, not the gold and treasure of chiefs and kings, often hoarded and inert. They began minting silver coins, as a currency, an exchange.

Value became an idea, detached from the intrinsic nature of a thing. It could be calculated for different categories of goods, and more than that, it could be written down, arithmetically juggled, turned into ratios and equations. A new way of thinking was born, transactional and everyday, and yet with momentous philosophical implications.

Mr Pye advances on several fronts at once, following the overlapping currents of customary, religious and empirical ways of thinking. He writes about difficult concepts with vivid details and stories, often jump-cutting from exposition to drama like a film. It's complicated, but fun.

The Edge of the World: How the North Sea Made Us Who We Are. By Michael Pye. Viking; 394 pages. To be published in America by Pegasus Books in April.