The chapters cover quite long periods of time so that broad

themes can be developed without excessive repetition. The

present geography is seen as the outcome of a desperate search
by new nations in the marchlands of Europe to organise their
defences and accelerate the processes of modernisation. And in
turn the belated manoeuvrings of the inter-war years must be
rationalised through the tight grip maintained through the
nineteenth and eighteenth centuries by Habsburg, Ottoman and
Russian imperialism. But failure to modernise is not only the
consequence of centre-periphery antagonisms within the empires
but more fundamentally of inability to match the progress of
Western Europe with unhindered access to the oceans. The
study is continued in a companion volume on The making of
Eastern Europe: from the earliest times to 1815, explaining the
change in relations with the west as the overland trade routes
were eclipsed by the seaways. Furthermore, the Medieval states
are seen as the outcome of Dark Age migrations and the prior
transfer of technology from the Middle East. In view of this
stripping off of overlays there might be some justification for the
organisation of chapters in a regressive sequence, working back
from the present deeper and deeper into the past. Some work of
this kind has been done in France but in Britain there is a strong
consensus against such practice.25 J.L.M.Gulley found it
appropriate to take his readers backwards through time to trace
the origins of the various elements making up the Wealden
landscape of southeast England.26 But given the long timespan
of most of the periods adopted in this book it seems that the
mental leaps required by the reader, to connect the end of one
period with the beginning of the previous period, would be too
daunting to countenance. And the function of the book as an
historical study of Europes shatterbelt also justifies a convential
sequence of chapters.