The fact that British influence – measured by the standards … of ancient Greece or China – is a relatively recent … phenomenon only adds to its interest. It is part of … the history of western Europe's Atlantic-side peoples … the land we inhabit is the sump into which Eurasian history has drained … the spread of farming and metallurgy and Indo-European languages; the colonizations of Phoenicians and Greeks … the migrations of Jews in antiquity, and the coming of Christianity … the arrival of oriental mathematics, science and technology; the invasions of Germanic, Slavic and steppeland peoples; Ottoman imperialism … Many of these movements created their refuse … who ended up on the Atlantic shore … unable to get any further west, as if pinioned by the winds. The great problem of their history is not why they took to the sea and spread over the world, but why they took so long about it.