Does Political History Miss the Big Picture?

I have just read A History of the Middle East by Peter Mansfield, as edited by Nicolas Pelham. It is a good read, dealing with a large region in the two centuries since Napoleon. Of course, it is history of the school of "one damn thing after another", or more accurately, "one damn big wig after another". (Of course, any history of West Asia and North Africa that describes itself as a history of the Middle East has a Eurocentric bias.)

I suppose the book illuminates a pattern. If so, that pattern is one not so much of instability as of a limit cycle in which political changes take place within a limited range until a metastable arrangement is stumbled upon, which lasts for a longer period. It seems that one outside power after another succeeds in extending its influence over the region. We do not see a total destruction on the order of Darfur in the region during the two centuries, nor do we see the emergence of modern nation-states comparable to those Western Europe.

I read the book while in Jordan. During my visit, I had the opportunity to visit a number of Jordanian museums. They of course are repositories of the remains of the material culture of the region, labeled with the political epochs from which they descended. I was struck by the continuity of that material culture. Mosaic techniques from Greco-Roman times were clearly the antecedents of Byzantine mosaics, which are the basis of a thriving mosaic craft in the region today. Oil lamps from one epoch are much like those of another. So while the thin upper crust of political authorities changed, perhaps the lives of the majority of the people continued much as before.

I am just beginning to read Sailing from Byzantium: How a Lost Empire Shaped the World by Colin Wells. It focuses on how intangible culture flowed from the Levant into Western Europe, Northern Europe, and the Arab lands having been the recipient of culture from Greece and Rome, which in turn were influenced by the earlier civilizations of the Fertile Crescent. Again, intangible culture seems to have a life of its own separate from political regimes, and a continuity that often defies political change.

The big changes may have been environmental. Certainly Jordan today seems to be a much degraded environment, and I was told by a guide that the region has never recovered from the deforestation from the time of the Ottoman Empire. Has anyone studied the link between the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1870) and the decline of the Islamic civilization?