“The Edge of the World” by Michael Pye

Pye details the rise and fall of the three main powers of the medieval North Sea: the Frisians, the Vikings, and the Hanseatic League. It is no surprise that all three made their livings on the sea, as the lands in which they inhabited were so inhospitable for much of the year. Pye makes the case that the harsh conditions of the region led to an independent peoples who led modernizing innovations in seafaring, writing, architecture, governmental institutions, weaponry, gender roles, and the creation of money which were then adopted throughout the rest of Europe.

Pye posits that the North Sea’s development was every bit as essential to the development of Western civilization as its well studied compatriot the Mediterranean. Pye is at his most compelling when making the case for the economic development of the West and, particularly, of international trade. Pye posits that because the land abutting the North Sea was often so inhospitable and under threat, with the water often reclaiming the land along with homes and entire communities, that the people who chose to settle these backwaters were often left alone by the great powers of the day- the Roman Empire and its bastard heir “The Holy Roman Empire.” Within this milieu, inventions were allowed to develop and grow without a central authority- chief among them paper money, printed books and written ledgers for accounting, and seafaring science and technology. 

Chronologically, Pye details the rise and subsequent fall of the three great North Sea cultures the Frisians, the Vikings, and the Hanseatic League of free city-states. Pye, more importantly, details the remnants of those cultures that outlasted the societies themselves, most often through extended and prodigious trade. He does not gloss over the sometimes brutal and warlike nature of the people who inhabited the outskirts of the world, but convincingly refutes the myth that they were mere plunderers and not innovators too. He details law that evolved naturally so that trading strangers could resort to contracts and tort claims through information-disseminating institutions used to shun those who reneged on their word. It is no coincidence that the first stock market in Amsterdam grew from the joint-trading institutions of the Hanseatic League. Pye also makes a powerful case for the polycentric order that developed- where people had recourse to multiple competing and overlapping sources of institutional order from kinship bonds, religious affiliations, commercial relations, and community formations from small villages to larger cities that could unite or divide as the particular situation saw fit. Pye describes the village of Helgo, near modern day Stockholm, that predated even the Viking societies of 800 AD, where in was found buried a bronze ladle from Egypt and a gold Buddha covered with a fine embroidered cloak from Kashmir. These men might have lived on the edge of the world, but by no means were they your typical country bumpkins.