Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise And Fall Of States And Nations, by Norman Davies

This book operates a bit under a bait and switch principle, in that the chapter headings pick deliberately unfamiliar names (at least to Anglophone audiences) for kingdoms and states that many readers will be at least slightly familiar with. That said, even though the author could have labeled the chapters of the book in a familiar way, once he gets on to writing about how it is that kingdoms and nations seem to last forever until they fall, there is a real sense of melancholy in how the author thinks that some of the current regimes of the world will find their own way to fade away. This is a book that looks at the melancholy of the life and afterlife of nations that are not currently in existence, or nations whose existence is imperiled for one reason or another, or areas that have a glorious history that has often been forgotten. In our own lifetimes, we have seen numerous nations perish, including nations which seemed to have a long history and a great deal of power, like Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union (both of whom are included under other names in this book), and have seen nations rise from the dead that seemed doomed forever, including such nations as Estonia, Lithuania, and Montenegro (all of which are likewise in this book).

There is a melancholy mood of decline and death and autopsy that hangs over this book. Whether the author is talking about the Visigoths, the Rusyn people of Transcarpathia, the Poles of Galicia, the kingdom of Prussia, Aragon, Burgundy, or even contemporary Great Britain, the author dwells on the inevitable signs of decline that show a state is reaching a dangerous place where its survival is at risk. The author dwells on states that have existed for centuries and which had long slow declines to their destruction, like the Romans of Constantinople. He dwells on those states like the Rusyn which were stillborn, having been doomed from the start by rapacious neighbors (one thinks, for example, of the first Republic of Somaliland, the five-day republic, here). The British royal family gets hit two times, one with a melancholy reflection on Ireland as the beginning of what has been a steady imperial retreat even from the home islands with the threat of Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish separation, and the other with a discussion of the lands of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha that were all too often unwanted and unloved in the desire of the British royal family to appear more British than they actually were. It is interesting to note here that even though monarchies bear the brunt of the author’s discussion, that the Soviet Union gets called in here for its own talking down as the author examines how it is that a state that seemed so strong was surprisingly fragile because it had so little consent from the governed and so much need for force and fraud to hold everything together by coercion. When the will to hold it all together failed at the top, the end came all too quickly, a lesson that can apply to quite a few contemporary states, it must be admitted.

In terms of its contents, this book is more than 700 pages long and after beginning with a list of illustrations, a list of figures, a list of maps, and a surprisingly short introduction, it is divided into fifteen chapters. The first chapter looks at the comparatively brief period of Visigoth rule over Aquitaine between 418 and 507 (they ruled longer over Spain but had a melancholy end there with the invasion of the Arabs and Berbers). This is followed by a discussion of the North Briton kingdom of Dunbarton that is perhaps best known as Strathclyde, and its lengthy and obscure history (2). The author then tackles a well-known but also confusing kingdom, namely that of Burgundy, in the period between 411 AD and 1795 (3), along with an equally melancholy history of Aragon (4). A discussion of Belarus and its sad existence leads the author to reflect on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania (5). There is a short chapter on the Eastern Roman Empire and its end in 1453 (6) before the author spends more time talking about the complications of the identity of the Kingdom of Prussia and its relationship to Poland and Brandenburg, and its eponymous extinct Baltic people (7). The author’s tour of European kingdoms continues with a look at Savoy (8) and its comparative neglect by monarchs more focused on Italian rulership that ended up being all too brief. Galicia (9) makes a strange appearance as a long-lived but deeply troubled kingdom of the naked and starving Poles and others, before the author returns to Italy to discuss the doomed Grand Duchy of Etruria (10) during Napoleonic times. At this point, the author finds himself reflecting on the fate of cast-off royals, continuing with a discussion of the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha (11) and then continuing to the abandonment of Montenegro to rapacious Serbian domination after World War I (12). The author turns his attention to the stillborn Republic of the Rusyn (13) before ending his book with a discussion of the dissolution of British rule over Ireland (14) as well as the fall of the Soviet Union (15). The book ends with a discussion of how states die, along with notes, acknowledgements, and an index.