Customer Reviews

The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Pacific (Hist Atlas)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is the seventh in McEvedy's series of comprehensive historical atlases. Having covered Europe and the Middle East in a group of four (ancient, medieval, modern and recent), Africa, and North America, he has now produced the largest of all -- a 120-page work dealing with Asia and the Pacific. To my mind this is not quite as good as the others.

It has some of their strength -- principally a tremendous amount of information and research, which is very enlightening on some important themes -- i.e. population growth, European voyages of discovery, and the expansion of the Malays and Polynesians into Indonesia and the Pacific Islands. Also McEvedy's graceful and humorous style. For example, finding that anthropologists seem to have reached the anomalous conclusion that the native Tasmanians were more closely related to the Melanesians north of Australia than to their immediate neighbors the Australian aborigines, he quotes a Victorian on evolution: "let us hope that it is not true, and if it is, that it not become generally known."

However I note several weaknesses in comparison to the others.

First, the atlas seems to tell too many stories. It covers at least five major areas -- China & Northeast Asia; Southeast Asia; Central Asia & Tibet; the Pacific; and North America. Even though the atlas is physically larger than its predecessors, this reduces detail so much that events become hard to follow at times, particularly in Southeast Asia, Central Asia and the Tibetan plateau. This is true even of some of the Atlas's major focuses -- i.e. colonial expansion and the Second World War. If North America were dropped some information might be lost but the whole atlas would become much clearer.

Second, it covers the whole span of history. This makes coverage spotty up till around 1000 AD, and some important events (Warring States period and Three Kingdoms/disunity eras in China; Tai migration into Southeast Asia; Muslim conversion of Central Asia) are lost altogether.

Probably three and a half stars is a better choice than four. Nonetheless it has a lot of information, is well written, and has the special virtue of being the only book of its kind I have ever seen & reasonably priced as well.

Following from the excellent, entertaining and informative series of Penguin maps on Europe (Ancient, Middle ages, Modern, Recent Histories) this book attempts to show 10000 years of history in the Pacific in 100 pages using the same geographical map (of the entire Pacific rim), showing the rise and fall of cultures, civilisations and other relevant events in the history of the region.

Unfortunately, in this case it does not work so well with reading of the book a little disjointed and less absorbing that others in the series. There are two reasons why I think this is so :
1) The time frame is just too large - too much happens in 10,000 years to be described in enough detail in a book like this, and we end up with lots of details for some events (e.g. America vs. Japan in WWII, European exploration of Pacific 16th->18th centuries) and not so much on others (e.g. mass migration of Chinese to SE Asia in 19th century).
2) The geographical area covered (all the pacific rim) is just too big and in some parts just too plain empty. Further, some of the most interesting events are just outside this map and so are just shown on the periphery or get missed out, e.g. the rise and fall of various Chinese dynasties and the Russian conquest on Siberia all appear on the very periphery of the maps but the Galapagos and Easter islands are all that really exist in the SE Pacific and don't really have a lot of history but still are shown on every page.

Maybe these are just limitations of the rules of these books (i.e. to use the same map) but maybe a map of Asian history would be a good complement to it.

Despite this though, it still is a good read. Mr Mcevendy has a clever ability to describe a whole era of history in a single paragraph. And finally, as with his other books, within the text there is often some very funny lines which will keep readers amused, e.g. on the extinction of native species with the arrival of man "... the moa's problem was having had to too easy over the subsequent 150 million years : no enemies, no sense of danger, no moa".

For many years, Dr. McEvedy has been producing succinct analyses of mankind's achievements, combining wit and devastating attacks on the post-modern academic establishment.
But for some time, he left himself open to one major criticism: why deal with the Middle East, Europe, the Americas and even Africa, while relegating East Asia by implication to a historical backwater? In this book, he has convincingly rebutted his critcs.
Naturally, there will be partisans who find McEvedy's Euro-centric view of the world distasteful. To quote from an earlier work, "Asia is [rightly} considered only as a stage on which the European struts... this... needs no justification".
But here he has shown he is no mindless neo-con or jingo: he is simply not prepared to whitewash inconvenient facts, such as the smug and self-defeating attitude of the Ming and Ching rulers of China, or the fact that Japan only acquired real historical significance with the Meiji Restoration.
This is a book which will withstand the tests of time. It is brightened by the author's usual lively wit and extraordinary gift for relating maps to prose.

This atlas covers what is now the United States, Canada, East Asia, and the entire Pacific The focus of the text is very heavily on Europe and the United States. I would have liked much more focus on China, which had a huge impact on the region. It starts in 28 million years ago and finishes in 1998. The interval between maps gradually shrinks as we get into the modern era, so relatively little is pre-AD. In all, it has over 50 maps.

While I don't think this book is as good as the rest, this entire series is superb and is absolutely essential for any lover of historical atlases. I have been an owner of virtually all of them for at ten years and I can honestly say that they are most read books of all that I own.

The reason is their unique portability and scope. Most historical atlas are huge, heavy and expensive. They are difficult to read unless you are sitting at a table and very difficult to carry. This limits their utility (even though I still love them). Most history books have lots of dense detail about one nation or one period. Virtually none cover the broad sweep of an entire region over centuries.

Like all Penguin Historical Atlases, it is small, light, reasonably priced and incredibly broad in scope. These atlases offer a unique perspective on history than is otherwise impossible to achieve. Their size and weight make them perfect for travelling. Whenever I go on a trip, I take the most relevant ones with me. That way I can brush up on my history of the region.

The format departs a bit from other Penguin Historical Atlases, which I think is a drawback. They departed from the usual map on the right and text on the left.

The four parts of this book's contents gives a good indication of what you will find: Part 1, Setting the Scene [31 of the 120 pages to cover the period from 28 Million Years Ago until AD 1513]; Part 2. The Ocean Defined [by the Spaniards, English, Dutch, etc., of course]; Part 3. From Cook to Perry [need I say more]; and, finally, Modern Times [pp. 79-112, including much detail about WWII].

On the Meiji Restoration of 1868, the author states: ". . .as is often the case in Japan, things were not as they seemed. For instance, the idea that power was being restored to the emperor was simply humbug; the monarchy remained, as it always had been, purely ceremonial. For another, the new government was searching for a consenses and soon found it; top priority,it announced, would go to strengthening the armed forces. In a society that took great pride in its warrior caste, this was not a policy anyone could oppose. . ." And so on.

If the reader is content to understand the history of Japan simply as a series of Mifune films, topped off by "The Last Samurai", this may be the book for you. Otherwise, you will recall that the monarchy was very much in control of the government at least from the days of Prince Shotoku (d. 622) until the Gempei War (1180-85). . . He/she will also recall that the samurai class lost its political and social position from the very beginning of the Meiji Restoration. Was this a "society that took great pride in its warrior caste," or was it a society that was "opened" in 1853 with Commodore Perry's guns trained on the capital, a society quite aware of how Europe (including England) and America were on a rampage to colonize the entire world, that it might bestow upon it the blessings of democracy and Christianity? What would you do if you were a Japanese in 1868?

On the issue of inaccuracy, let me cite at least one, including one of the author's remarks that some might mistakenly consider amusing: "The Japanese script, on the other hand, though it looks similar to Chinese, was, from the start, an instrument for writing Japanese. There are several variants, which were combined with Chinese characters to produce the wildly complicated, often ambiguous hotch-potch that has proved so perfect a match for the Japanese psyche." (p. 23)

Where does one begin to address such a confused -- and bigoted -- statement? The earliest extant document in Japanese, the Kojiki (ca. 712), for the most part used Chinese characters for their PHONETIC value to convey Japanese sounds. The Nihon shoki (720), on the other hand, was written by Japanese IN CHINESE. Eventually, the Japanese developed two parallel syllabaries (kana) -- hiragana and katakana -- to complement the use of Chinese used SEMANTICALLY, for their meaning. . . The chart on p. 23 is also misleading. The Korean column contains standard Chinese characters but should probably display the Hankul script developed by the Koreans; and the "Japanese" column is, at best, some example of specialized writing style that to most Japanese today would be simply unreadable. Ask one.

For a good book on the issues, see Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, "The World's Writing Systems," New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. 922 pages.

Mcevedy's achievement is to take a broad sweep of history spanning several millenia and present it in a form which is clear, scholarly and readily comprehensible to the layman. His prose style is entertaining and the text is amply complemented by the adjoining maps. It is possible to follow the historical narrative and place it in a geographical context which would normally elude the lay reader. I found this to be an excellent and most entertaining book, as good as if not better than his previous work.

When I saw that Colin McEvedy had written another historical atlas, I was very excited because his atlases of Europe, Africa and North America were, for me, invaluably illuminating. However, despite his usual concise brilliance, this book was somewhat disappointing.

For one thing, when I saw the title "Atlas of the Pacific", I didn't really expect it to literally be about the ocean. When one hears "Pacific", one thinks of Eastern Asia- China, Japan, Korea, etc. However, the map template for this book consists of the Pacific Ocean occupying the vast center of the map, with Asia tucked in a little corner in the upper left and North America tucked in the opposite corner. This was simply daft. This book should have focused solely on Asia. Not only was the narrative necessarily unfocused- having to cover North America, Asia, Australia and Oceania- but the maps themselves consequently suffered from a lack of detail.

In addition, it is simply incredible that anyone thought this subject could have been covered in the limited pages it was given. It took McEvedy 4 books to cover the history of Europe; shouldn't the history of Asia have merited the same thorough treatment? He often is forced to have one map cover hundreds of years of history. One map covers a thousand years. In contrast, his medieval atlas of Europe never went more than about 50 years without an updated map.

So, even though McEvedy's scholarship and writing were as impressive as always, the bizarrely broad scope of this work hobbled the effectiveness of this work and lessened my satisfaction.

I am very interested in history and particulary fond of historical atlases. I own several by Colin McEvedy: The Atlases of Ancient History to Recent History, the Historical Atlas of Africa and that of North America. I particularly enjoy his witty incisive view of history. This particular atlas fills in my knowledge gap about the Pacific area. It was particulary fascinating to view the maps and read the history of this area, to find out how the "other half" of the world has been doing.