It starts with the Frisians, with a change of climate and the fall of Rome. Pliny the Younger had mentioned that there were people on the edge of the world
who lived cut off from the mainland by marshes. They were sea people, he announced, and all they had in their lives was fish, so they were not …show more content…
It tells some of the history of the North Sea and its peoples. It traces the development of several things that came out of that sea, among them the idea that one could shape the world to one’s needs, that women could make key choices in their lives, that law was power and, by extension, that lawmakers and doctors were powerful. And it challenges the idea that we owe our world to the ancients and the Renaissance. “We are not on the margins of history anymore,” Pye concludes