What Is Europe

What is Europe

The physical boundaries of Europe as conventionally understood are relatively easy to identify:

like millions of other schoolchildren, I learnt from my geography teacher that Europe is the

landmass lying to the north of the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, the mountains of the

Caucasus and the Caspian, and although the precise location of the disjunction between

Europe and Asia was a little uncertain, this could be resolved by drawing a line from the

Arctic ocean down through the Ural mountains to the Caspian. So that was that: we were now

in a position to draw lines on the map enabled us to mark out Europe quite unambiguously in

spatial terms.

Yet our conceptualisation of Europe involved much more than an ability to mark off and

label the northwestern corner of the much larger Afro-Asiatic landmass. In common, I suspect,

with millions of others, we also took it for granted that the indigenous inhabitants of this area

(a group to which I and my classfellows manifestly