This highly enjoyable read sheds light on an ancient culture that was evidently among the greatest nautical explorers. Their genetics, language, and history are fascinating. Devouring the book.

3.5 Star.

An objective, comprehensive yet simplified history of Basque from its beginning to the end of the 20th century. I enjoy the easy, conversational narrative style the author writes in. Furthermore, I feel like the author doesn’t try to gloss over or make up excuses for some of the horrific acts perpetrated by the militant ETA, who attempted to gain a Basque independence through violence, despite indicating his strong sympathy toward the ultimate goals of the Basque people.

However, I also feel like it’s a rather superficial overview of the Basque history. Perhaps, it’s the difficulty of trying to write a comprehensive yet concise overview of any subject. In this book, I feel like despite the numerous interesting historical figures who played significant roles in the history of the conflicts between the Basques and the Spanish, I don’t think I remember any of the crucial player (or, perhaps that’s just my weak memory). I just feel like the author doesn’t spend sufficient time to focus on those important figures. Furthermore, the author also likes to jump to a different year and scenes before redoubling back to the initial subject or figure. As a result, sometimes the book feels confusing and disorganized. Also, I wish there were an updated version, considering that it’s first published over 20 years ago. I’m sure there have been a few interesting and significant changes.

By the way, my interest in this subject is not particularly deep. I first heard the term “Basque” from Athletic Bilbao in the game Football Manager. All I knew was that the club exclusively recruited (still do?) Basque players. I’d also heard of the separatist movements, trying to gain independence for Basque as a nation.

Overall, this is a pretty good book to start with if you’re interested in this particular subject and if you didn’t know anything at all, just like I was.

The most important word in Euskera is gure. It means “our”— our people, our home, our village. Cookbooks talk of our soups, our sauces. “Reptiles are not typically included in our meals,” wrote the great Guipúzcoan chef José María Busca Isusi. That four-letter word, gure, is at the center of Basqueness, the feeling of belonging inalienably to a group. It is what the Basques mean by a nation, why they have remained a nation without a country, even stripped of their laws.”

3.5 out of 5. The Basque History of the World is an interesting look at one of the strangest and oldest peoples of Europe. Lacking a geographical country for most of its history, the Basques have outlived countless other contemporary civilizations. Mark Kurlansky dives head first into much of the culture’s language, culinary practices, stereotypes, religion, politics, and warrior spirit. Kulansky was clearly passionate about the subject. Unfortunately, the book is also marred by a disjointed style and the author’s occasionally irritating sense of humor. As the reviewer Jennifer pointed out, the book is lacking in descriptions of the lives of girls and women in Basque culture. Still, this makes for mostly lively and interesting reading.

Some quotes:
Chapter 1: The Basque Myth

The Basques seem to be a mythical people, almost an imagined people. Their ancient culture is filled with undated legends and customs. Their land itself, a world of red-roofed, whitewashed towns, tough green mountains, rocky crests, a cobalt sea that turns charcoal in stormy weather, a strange language, and big berets, exists on no maps except their own…As with most everything pertaining to Basques, the provinces are defined by language. There are seven dialects of the Basque language, though there are sub-dialects within some of the provinces.
In the Basque language, which is called Euskera, there is no word for Basque. The only word to identify a member of their group is Euskaldun—Euskera speaker. Their land is called Euskal Herria—the land of Euskera speakers. It is language that defines a Basque.

Chapter 2: The Basque Problem

By this time the Basques were the veterans of centuries of war and were valued as mercenaries throughout the Mediterranean. They had fought in Greece in the fourth century B.C. In 240 B.C., a conflict first over Sicily and then over Iberia led to a series of bitter wars between Carthage and Rome. Basque mercenaries fought for Carthage, the losing side, and are thought to have been part of Hannibal’s legendary invasion of Italy in 216 B.C. The Basques knew Carthage when it was the greatest commercial center in the world, a city of imposing wooden houses on a hillside facing a prosperous harbor. And they saw Carthage after Rome destroyed it in 146 B.C., when the city was nothing but the blackened stone foundations of burned buildings, the once green hillside sowed with salt to kill agriculture. This taught the Basques to underestimate neither the power nor the ruthlessness of Rome.

Chapter 3: The Basque Whale

If the Basques had been in America for decades, possibly centuries before Columbus, why would there be no record of it? Some say, as is always said about the Basques, that they keep secrets. But the real answer might lie not in the nature of Basques but in the nature of fishermen. When fishermen find an unknown ground that yields good catches, they go to great lengths to keep their secret. In most fishing communities, there are boats with notably better catches, and the crews are silent about the location of their grounds. The cod and whale grounds off the coast of North America was a secret worth keeping, the richest grounds ever recorded by European fishermen.

Chapter 5: The Basque Billy Goat

What stronger denunciation of an agrarian society than the charge of bestiality? Even in modern times, when Basque peasants engage in the duel by insults known as xikito, the accusation of bestiality remains a classic attack. And though to most people, sex with a goat would seem sufficiently perverted, it was not even conceded that they had conventional goat sex. It was group sex, and the goat sometimes used an artificial phallus, with the intercourse sometimes vaginal and sometimes anal. According to some accounts, the goat would lift his tail so the women could kiss his posterior while he broke wind.

Chapter 7: The Basque Beret
“Revolutions are always easier to admire from across the border.”

Chapter 9: Gernika
“There is a dreamlike quality to the 1936 Basque government, the fulfillment of a historic longing that was to be crushed only nine months later in carnage the scale of which had never before been seen on earth.”

Chapter 15: Surviving Democracy

Having grown up before television, no one spoke anything but Euskera in Landart’s home. But the language was forbidden in school. Some teachers let children speak Euskera during recess, but others were more strict. One teacher would force the student, caught in the act of speaking Euskera, to stand by the door holding a broom until he could catch someone else speaking it. The newly betrayed Euskaldun would then be given the broom until he caught someone else. The one holding the broom at the end of the class had to write fifty times, “I will not speak Basque.”
Landart said, “This created an atmosphere of denunciation and fear among us. The one who was denounced remained angry at the denouncer for life. It divided us.”

Chapter 16: The Nation

The most important word in Euskera is gure. It means “our”— our people, our home, our village. Cookbooks talk of our soups, our sauces. “Reptiles are not typically included in our meals,” wrote the great Guipúzcoan chef José María Busca Isusi. That four-letter word, gure, is at the center of Basqueness, the feeling of belonging inalienably to a group. It is what the Basques mean by a nation, why they have remained a nation without a country, even stripped of their laws.

Postscript: The Death of a Basque Pig

An ancient belief of Hebrews and some other cultures that an animal that dies an agonizing death is less edible has been upheld by modern science, and so commercial slaughterhouses avoid this kind of killing. In industrial pig slaughter, the animal is stunned and then the unconscious animal is bled. But these [Basque] farmers insisted that the industrial way of killing was “not as beautiful.” They explained that the blood was darker and not as good. This blood was brilliant red.

Title: The Basque History of the World: The Story of a Nation
Author: Mark Kurlansky
Year: 1999
Genre: Nonfiction - History, sociology, & linguistics
Page count: 400 pages
Date(s) read: 7/12/23-7/18/23
Reading journal entry #136 in 2023

Both a rural backwater and an industrial heartland, the Basque country is the Scotland of Spain, stubborn, different, never quite absorbed and still with hopes for independence.

The Basques ambushed Charlemagne's rearguard at Roncesvalles; discovered America before Columbus (maybe); invented salt cod; were traders, capitalists, iron miners and shipbuilders when the rest of the Iberian peninsula was feudal; created the 700 year Kingdom of Navarre; formed a dynastic union with Spain in the 16th century, yet paid no Spanish tax and served in no Spanish army for 300 years; were the backbone of the ill-fated Armada invasion of England and produced Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits.

How greedy we have all been about the maintenance our respective cultures and traditional practices when with fat fingers grasping and reddening chuffed up faces we Europeans demanded the artificial fabrication of our respective nation states. Borders artificially drawn along vaguely linguistic and geographical lines were then supposed to, yes, bring about the social reality of the all concerning progressive state, but ideally provide the lining wherein communitarian communities could communalize their cultural commons. Truly ideally liberal constitutionally but alas what has happened instead? A completely homogenous consumer capitalist pseudo-liberal sociocultural landscape with the occasional EU sticker of 'local produce' plastered over a Romanian grape, or austerity weary theatre performers putting on a modern interpretation of some originally nationalist bardic odyssey. All things merely symbolic of some hypothesized identity, and all things merely reminiscent of decaying wooden seawalls sinking into a vast cultural quicksand as the tide sweeps in. This, after a 2 month sojourn in the area this summer, I can confirm also to have taken place even in the Eastern/Balkan states who despite their social conservatism were truthfully even more radically exposed to the systematic shock therapy and consequent soothing narcotic of the neoliberal crisis and consolidation. All this, and worse. However, from my now month of personal experience in the Basque city of Bilbao supplemented by Kurlansky's historiography... not so for the formally nationless Basques. This ancient land is alive with history and shot through with some strange pride.

I picked up this book, as well as my first words in Euskara (their language so ancient that it has no linguistic precedent in the world (read: Neolithic)) at the first book store I entered. I had recently arrived to live and labour in the Basque country for a year. Working for the EU I represented part of the civil apparatus of a supranational union that Kurlanksy rightly points out is moving in directions of 19th c. nation state itself; both I and my employer holding a broad appreciation of cultural expression but unable to claim anything of equal value as our own (read: antecedently individuated vacuous universalists). I hoped this would be no matter as the skill of easily accommodating identity and cultural mannerism proves a both a necessity and easily commodified virtue in both gentrified burrows and globalizing bureaucracies. This however proved false, despite having moved many times in my life: abroad and afar, a move to the Basque country proved the first real culture shock in the best of ways.

I suppose that if I had not read this book I would have remained blind, blind to the often outright paradoxical and thus utterly unique tendencies and tensions that belie the brusque but friendly people, the seemingly untouched but scarred landscape, and the intuitively leftist but actively conservative politics. Such blindness would have worsened the culture shock already not being helped by my understudied Spanish, this itself not being helped by my Basque postpunk band friends (who had randomly come upon me disoriented on my first night at a proto-pagan folk festival) insisting on the fact that it was not enough to learn only Spanish, that this in fact would be an offense: I must and would learn Basque. Kindly enough they also immediately offered to be the ones who would help me do so. Over the course of that night, and many since over this past month, I found myself caught in conversations that veered constantly between public lecture (not mine don't worry) and debate, on the history, culture, but most importantly: rights, of the Basques. Most gravitated around the heavier topics of ETA/GAL, the illiberalism of the social democrats post-Franco and missed opportunities during the reconstitution of Spanish democracy, each plea for autonomy somewhat vague in its precise demand (note: even the BNP (Basque nationalist party remains tactically obscure about its real positioning on further political autonomy) but none lacking in the excited conviction of my interlocutor. And although I can sympathize with my non-Basque Spanish friends that this attitude is more exclusionary than it is revolutionary, that the ancient laws (Fueros) defended and fought for with tooth and nail since proto-European history now largely serve to allow the Basques fiscal independence and thus no obligation to the welfare of less prosperous and rapidly degenerating areas of Spain, that claims of 'national' independence are made to demonstrate identity instead of express genuine desire (to which I liberally add that any nationalistic fervour is not only non-genuine but instead expresses false consciousness), I cannot deny the role of this element of general sentiment in creating what can genuinely be described as a community. In this sense Bilbao feels at once a village and a city. No excessive cultural funding and youth engagement programmes are required to motivate the young (and increasingly the once silenced under authoritarian structures elderly) to gather in the creation of their own festivals, their own cooperatives and social ventures. To celebrate and invest themselves in a language (and by extension its prose in literature/song). This Basque band I mentioned is, throughout the Summer and thankfully into the early Fall, invited to play at these local youth organised festivals 'txosnas' and will for 3 hours straight (often from 1-4AM) sing solely Basque songs.

There are many other examples I have of such, in the spirit of my thesis, 'extra-market communitarian ethics', but this is no journal entry nor philosophical case study (or is it) but a book review. Kurlanksy is both curious, sympathetic, and clearly a life-enjoyer. Besides his authorial talent, I believe these features make him an ideal ethnographer and thus author for this book. For as he recognised and clarified at the start of the book, this could be no simple historical survey, it would be lacking something non-reducible. Whilst historical narrative is usually situated within 'the world', Basque history is a history of a world unto itself. I discussed this with a Basque colleague at work: the minimal export of commodified Basque culture abroad and in turn the naturally endowed immunity of Basques towards Americanization and regression at home. We agreed (with my source being this not all too long historical survey, and hers being an entire lifetime richly filled with experience - but a la) that Basque culture proved too complex and contextually situated to be taken up popularly. No reference need be made here to a certain 'je ne sais qua' only to the epistemic privilege of a person exposed to the pre-indo-europea-lingual and politically paradoxical state of affairs folded between mist filled valleys circa the bay of Biscay.

An interesting historical formula is allowed to develop here the outcomes of which can be traced to the twin conditions of geography and existential political strife (or in its modern guise: international relations). Concerning the first, the Basques cannot be rid out of their valleys - many have tried - but an initial retreat into the mountains is only followed for the occupying force by years of economic attrition through sabotage from above. This has been the experience of the Celts, Carthaginians, and overly idealistic Napoleonic cavaliers that thought to pass across the border easily. Most recently of course the experience of advancing Francoist forces that took months, despite heralding the most advanced war-machine thus far created (the Italian and German horrors that darkened the 20th c. imaginary), to advance mere kilometres. This of course to the frustration of ample a fascist. Co-existence with an occupying force on the other hand is possible, though with many concessions on matters of legal and cultural authority and a promise of economic freedom. This has only been successfully achieved by the Romans and now the Spaniards (Then Castillians and Aragonese). But complete assimilation? The forgetting or gradual dilution of identity? No. What is possible is the reverse: the introduction of a foreigner into the privileged sphere of existence, it is why Kurlansky talks of the internationalist pride of the Basques - their flexibility in incorporating and instrumentally accommodating new trends/ markets upon a solid base of linguistic /cultural identity. This fact, and my practical experience of the excitement that is generated when a genuine interest is expressed, explains why Kurlansky as a curious life-enjoyer was able to write this book in the first place, and why in having read it and sharing his predisposition I might be able to at some point call this place 'etxe' (house and houses).

Perfect read for a Basque country holiday. In the first chapters, Kurlansky skillfully channels the history of the start of the modern world through the story of the Basques, a people whose origin and language remain ever mysterious. The author is an obvious sympathizer of the Basques and the way they maintained their foothold over what is now south western France and a part of the North of Spain. As a result, he writes about these outward-looking-explorers-cum-ancient-culture preservers with great gusto.

Kurlansky displays what seems like a deep knowledge of his subject and world history at large (though his absurd claim that Spains population was the only one not consulted about European Economic Community membership does dent his authority as a former Europe correspondent).

It all gets somewhat less spirited towards the end but it remains a fascinating read. Also: gotta love the way he blends Basque recipes (writing about Spanish regional identies = writing about food?) into this romantic history of a tough and tiny nation.

Utterly fascinating, the Basques have left such a mark on our world culturally, economically, and dietarily and I had to go to San Sebastian to discover this obfuscated history. The Romans wrote about encountering the basques and their strange language (a mystery that has still not been fully unraveled) and would eventually leave them to semi-independent self-rule. Throughout history the basques have continued to live, and prosper, semi-autonomously within larger, warring, nations, not succumbing to the rigid doctrine of borders being lines on maps. For them, their lingual, cultural, and legal distinctions set them apart. They have been some of the leading innovators on the seas, in factories, and in the kitchen (the food is indeed amazing). Finding out more about this unique vein of history has only whetted my appetite for Basque history and history in general, and getting to experience some of it firsthand, was unforgettable. I can't wait to go back to Basqueland.

Overall, it was very poorly written. Some interesting history but did not flow well chronologically. Additionally, the information has a lot to do with locations and they were not described well at all. It was difficult to know where the narrative was taking place as the author jumped from one location to another and did not give enough dialog to this important aspect. There were not enough clear inclusive maps. Author described the food (including recipes) better than the all important locations and very confusing political/fighting alliances.

2021 reads, #75. DID NOT FINISH. This book suffers from the same problem as that history of George Handel in London volume I recently marked as DNF and turned back into the library as well; that after thinking, "Hmm, that looks interesting" when first stumbling across it at Wowbrary, once I got it home I realized that I'm not actually interested enough in the subject to get through a 400-page book about it, and so it ended up sitting in my room for an entire four months without me ever getting past the 50-page mark. That's a shame, because this is actually very well-written, done in the kind of witty, highly literary style of fellow "geographical biographies" like Bettany Hughes' Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities and Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography. If you have the patience for it, I actually recommend it, despite me not getting even close to finishing it myself.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone with an interest in Spain particularly if, like me, you don't know much about Basqueland and its history and culture. I certainly learnt a lot even about a period shortly before I lived in Spain/Catalunya. But to be honest I don't think it's especially well written, it jumps around in what seems to me a fairly illogical way. The author also presents some information as though it is clear and obvious but it often isn't supported with evidence. It's certainly not an academic look at Basqueland but I'm not sure the author knows exactly what it is. There are recipes, and Basque food rightly is highly thought of but I'm not sure these are 'nice additions' or just pointless space fillers. To be honest some of them seem to be 'catch fish, kill it, add salt to it and cook it for 20 mins' . I bet it tastes great but not sure the recipe is needed. The author makes some interesting political points about post Franco Spain and the 'transition' but overall this part is light on information. So a book that was both pleasing - I learnt a lot about Basqueland but irritating - I didn't really appreciate the author's 'style'. Others clearly do and you may too.

I found this book interesting, particularly as prior to reading it, I hadn’t ever heard to the Basques. Perhaps, due to the fact a lot of the information was new to me, I found it difficult to get into. I would read a few pages and then need to stop and absorb the information. I would recommend the book, however advise people to keep in mind that it’s quite dense.

Fascinating read!