2025 read #9: The Middle Kingdoms by Martyn Rady.

The Middle Kingdoms: A New History of Central Europe by Martyn Rady

520 pages

Published 2023

Read from January 4 to January 27

Rating: 3 out of 5

I’ve become more cautious, and more skeptical, of history books over the years. You never can tell when some (usually white, usually male) author will cherry-pick or outright misrepresent historical context in order to push some right wing bullshit. (Looking at you, Simon Winchester and Dan Jones.) I hesitate to take a chance on any author I haven’t encountered before.

But I want to read more history, both for personal interest as well as inspiration for future writing and worldbuilding. My library has woefully few books written by and about peoples of the global majority, so for now, I’m settling for a history of a part of Europe I don’t know much about.

Right from the start, Rady betrays a weakness for limited, almost Victorian interpretations of history. He still employs the suspect term “civilization” in place of culture (as in, “the vulnerability of [Central Europe’s] civilization” to invaders from the steppe). He has a passion for big men and their battles, and treats “peoples” as if they were solid game pieces being moved around a map by the big men, and not as complex social units with complex interactions. I don’t get the sense that Rady means anything nefarious or RETVRN-like with it, just that he’s an older scholar and perhaps hasn’t deconstructed a lot of the bad old assumptions from the bad old days. Plus, simplistic big man history is much easier to write at this vast scale.

Still, a historian who opines “[S]erfdom was not all bad” has earned a healthy dose of skepticism, a sense not fully dispelled until his relatively even-handed treatment of post-Soviet neoliberalism and its failures.

The scope of The Middle Kingdoms — covering a considerable portion of a continent, from the time of Ovid to the present — is both central to its appeal and its main stumbling block. I always love the sound of a history of a vast region, over an extensive span of time, but inevitably, it ends up superficial, breezing through decades in a paragraph.

However simplistic its big man approach to history may be, Middle Kingdoms was an interesting introduction to a region of the world that doesn’t get a lot of attention in the anglophone press.