Civilizations - Felipe Fernando-Armesto (Hardcover)

Civilizations - Felipe Fernando-Armesto Civilizations is a radical cultural history of mankind's relationship with nature, which advances a new understanding of what it means to be civilized. In his new book Felipe Fernández-Armesto adopts a unique approach, using environmental categories to make sense of world history. The result is a series of startling and illuminating juxtapositions the maritime civilizations of the Venetians and the Polynesians; the mountain cultures of Tibet and Papua New Guinea; the lifestyles of the English and the Iroquois. Societies that flourished in the Arctic, the rainforest and the desert are re-evaluated alongside those of the ancient river-valleys of Mesopotamia, Egypt and China, where civilization is conventionally supposed to have started. In this book the search for civilization leads not to Imperial Rome, Enlightenment Paris and Renaissance Florence but rather to the Sahara of the Dawada people, the Alcut Islands of the icy northern Pacific, and the Indian Ocean of the oran laut 'sea people'. Illustrated throughout with historical anecdotes, such as the story of Ibn Battuta, the world's most travelled medieval pilgrim, or a recreation of a timber-buying expedition to the Phoenicians three thousand years ago, Fernández-Armesto enlivens the theoretical. Finally and controversially, he concludes that cultures can be ranked according to how civilized they are, and that on this scale the culture of white westerners comes low. Written with the same flair and imagination as Millennium, Civilizations is a richly layered, hawk's eye image of the world whole societies evoked from minute fragments of evidence. It is an immensely readable and controversial work about the environment and our historical relationship to it, which challenges the notion that nature is weak in the face of the human threat. Gift inscription in front.

Condition: 2 (with gift inscription)