SE Academic Review 2023

44 ST EDWARD’S, OXFORD

meant to not be at the centre rather than define the distinctive characteristics of what it meant to be at the edges of the region (Bartlett, 2007). More recently, however, attempts have been made by medieval historians to define what it meant for people of the Middle Ages to be part of globalized communities, which is explored in more detail below (Shepard, 2018). Finally, the confines of ‘Europeanization’ as a framework of hegemony in The Making of Europe leaves the work open to criticisms of Eurocentrism. Such studies have become the antithesis of global approaches in history, so it is possible to argue that the global approach in Bartlett’s work could be more useful to historians of medieval Europe if its decentred analysis of shared periphery experiences were considered within a broader framework of global history. This exploration could instead fix Europe as part of a greater whole rather than as the whole itself. This opportunity was developed by Robert Moore when he considered these issues within a Eurasian context, arguing that meaningful global history can be achieved when historians avoid representing the making of Europe on a regional level, but instead regard it ‘as an aspect of complex civilization in Eurasia after the decline of its ancient empires’ (Moore, 1997, p. 600). Victor Lieberman has suggested similar conclusions by arguing that seemingly unconnected societies on the fringes of Europe and Asia experienced political and cultural trajectories that were broadly comparable (Lieberman, 2009, p. xxii). Therefore, situating Europeanization within a global context would preserve Bartlett’s achievement of showing that medieval Europe had shared cultural features whilst acknowledging that this was not unique to Europe but was characteristic of the medieval globe. This idea has been developed more confidently recently by Robert Moore (2016), who has characterised the Middle Ages as a period of ‘Global Intensification’. In recent decades, more historians of the period have sought to investigate Europe in the Middle Ages within a larger, global context.

is Bartlett’s portrayal of ‘Europeanization’ as the process of conquest and colonization that created an increasingly homogeneous society within Europe. Bartlett shows that colonization was present in medieval Europe and existed as a form of internal expansion before the more commonly understood process of external global European colonization from c.1500 onwards. This powerfully reminds global historians of other periods that representations of Europe’s colonial past must be constructed against a backdrop of cultural, legal and political colonization by an empire centred on Rome across Europe in the Middle Ages. However, the subsequent development of the field of global history shows that Bartlett’s exposition is best considered as a starting point in illustrating the global methodology for the Middle Ages, rather than a complete picture of the approach in action. The Making of Europe misses an opportunity in its analysis of the peripheries to give agency to subaltern voices and its narrow focus on Europeanization fails to present the period within a larger perspective. By the early 1990s the postcolonial movement had gathered considerable momentum, culminating in the production of eight volumes of the journal Subaltern Studies by Indian historians by 1992. The influence of the journal’s ambition, to reinterpret colonial history to show that it was shaped by its subjugated participants, was far reaching and influenced Western scholars to explain the history of empire as one that could only be understood by researching colonizers and colonized (Cooper & Stoler, 1997). The postcolonial approach has been a feature of global scholarship and could have been adopted to produce a richer explanation of life on the frontiers of Latin Christendom in The Making of Europe . In doing so, it would illuminate what Celtic, Slavic and Baltic people understood about living on the peripheries and whether they identified with a sense of Europeanized homogeneity. Bartlett has broached this subject in later research, but in his examination of what sense of core and periphery was held by people of Medieval Europe, he only accounted for what it

“ ...Bartlett’s exposition is best considered as a starting point in illustrating the global methodology for the Middle Ages... ”