Irish Roots: Hiding from Big History

We genealogists spend our time hiding from "big history", convinced in our hearts that small, personal experiences are the real core of the historical experience. As it is good therapy to stretch unused muscles, I have spent the past six months reading Brendan Simms's tome Europe: The Struggle for Supremacy, 1453 to the Present (Allen Lane, 2013).

It has taken six months because it is impossible to absorb more than a dozen pages at a time. The level of detail and breadth of overview are jaw-dropping. But it is a very particular overview. This is a history of statecraft, the way Louis XIV understood his world, with the interlocking endless consequences of diplomacy, treaties and wars. Simms masters it all as if it were a single, endlessly fascinating Rubik’s Cube.

Two big ideas shape the book. First, states' foreign policy decisions have deep unacknowledged impacts on what appear to be purely internal events: the American Revolution is analysed as a byproduct of European big-power manoeuvring, for instance. Second, it's all about Germany. Every significant event since 1453 has revolved around German power, whether as the Holy Roman Empire, the "German Lands" or the modern German state.

At times, the evidence is stretched a bit thin to fit these theses, but it’s still an extraordinary achievement.

So what does Simms, an Irishman, have to say about Ireland?

Not much. Like it or not, in his telling, we are well removed from almost every world historical event, an island off an island off the mainland. All the great upheavals of European history have ended as gentle ripples on our shores: the last incident of world significance to happen here was in 1690, when the Dutch beat the French at the Battle of the Boyne.

Patrick Kavanagh knew this when he wrote Epic, his lyric paean to parochialism, in which we "make our own importance". Because if we don't, nobody else will.irishroots@irishtimes.comirishtimes.com/ancestor