The Black Sea: A History - Softcover

Review from previous edition both scholarly and enjoyable. (Lloyd's List)

In this timely book Charles King provides a stretchy timeline for the murky pool (once a lake, now a tideless sea) which has always sat on the edge of everything: Europe, Asia, civilisation, barbarism, us and other... This is an essential book for anyone who feels they ought to know about what used to be called "the eastern question" and worries, secretly, that it is too late to start finding out. (The Guardian)

A solid work by an academic historian, writing for the general educated public. He is particularly good on little known or forgotten episodes - the part played by Westerners in the development of the area. King is well placed to see through the myths of nationalists ... he has a good eye also for the victims of history. King's work has all the virtues of good American scholarship ... vast array of sources, ... a transatlantic detachment, and the recent and very welcome fashion for elegant prose. (Andrew Mango, TLS)

The collapse of the Soviet Union restored two great geostrategic arenas long buried in now-defunct empires or pushed to the margin by Cold War alignments. The first is Inner Asia, an immense hinterland stretching from the Chinese borderlands, across the Siberian south, to the Hindu Kush. The second is the Black Sea, a junction where the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East meet. (Say no more.) To appreciate what this re-embodiment means one needs a special vantage point. King traces the Black Sea's many political incarnations from the Greeks and Scythians to the Romans, the Byzantine Christians, the Ottomans, the Russians, and the tumult of the twentieth century. Even when fractured and populated with weak and troubled states (as now), the region, King argues in this mind-broadening book, coheres-and deserves to be thought about and approached accordingly. (Foreign Affairs)

A masterful account of the ever-changing trade between the peoples and the powers of this crucial waterway. (Orlando Figes)

In this admirable book Professor King gives a cool authoritative and discerning description of the Black Sea...he writes with clarity, humour and perception, enlivens his text with much unfamiliar detail,a nd in a masterly survey covers the entire history of the region from Antiquity to the present day. (Geoffrey Scammell, Pembroke College, Cambridge)

The lands surrounding the Black Sea share a colourful past. Though in recent decades they have experienced ethnic conflict, economic collapse, and interstate rivalry, their common heritage and common interests go deep. Now, as a region at the meeting point of the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East, the Black Sea is more important than ever. In this lively and entertaining book, which is based on extensive research in multiple languages, Charles King investigates the myriad connections that have made the Black Sea more of a bridge than a boundary, linking religious communities, linguistic groups, empires, and later, nations and states.