The World: A Family History of Humanity
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Average rating3.3
A magisterial world history unlike any other that tells the story of humanity through the one thing we all have in common: families • From the New York Times best-selling author of The Romanovs “Succession meets Game of Thrones.” —The Spectator • “The author brings his cast of dynastic titans, rogues and psychopaths to life...An epic that both entertains and informs.” —The Economist, Best Books of the Year Around 950,000 years ago, a family of five walked along the beach and left behind the oldest family footprints ever discovered. For award-winning historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, these poignant, familiar fossils serve as an inspiration for a new kind of world history, one that is genuinely global, spans all eras and all continents, and focuses on the family ties that connect every one of us. In this epic, ever-surprising book, Montefiore chronicles the world’s great dynasties across human history through palace intrigues, love affairs, and family lives, linking grand themes of war, migration, plague, religion, and technology to the people at the heart of the human drama. It features a cast of extraordinary diversity: in addition to rulers and conquerors, there are priests, charlatans, artists, scientists, tycoons, gangsters, lovers, husbands, wives, and children. There is Hongwu, the beggar who founded the Ming dynasty; Ewuare, the Leopard-King of Benin; Henry Christophe, King of Haiti; Kamehameha, the conqueror of Hawaii; Zenobia, the Arab empress who defied Rome; Lady Murasaki, the first female novelist; Sayyida al-Hurra, the Moroccan pirate-queen. Here too are moderns such as Indira Gandhi, Margaret Thatcher, Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, and Volodymyr Zelensky. Here are the Caesars, Medicis and Incas, Ottomans and Mughals, Bonapartes, Habsburgs and Zulus, Rothschilds, Rockefellers and Krupps, Churchills, Kennedys, Castros, Nehrus, Pahlavis and Kenyattas, Saudis, Kims and Assads. These powerful families represent the breadth of human endeavor, with bloody succession battles, treacherous conspiracies, and shocking megalomania alongside flourishing culture, moving romances, and enlightened benevolence. A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, The World captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative.
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Although described as a family history of humanity, this is primarily a history of political leaders, plus a few other notables. In this very long book there are so many of them—from all over the world—that each one has to be covered in a hurry. We get quick summaries of their personal histories, appearances, temperaments, sexual activities, and in particular the often horrible ways in which they killed each other and other people. Surprisingly often, they killed members of their own families, being rivals or potential rivals for power.
Thus, it's a tale of sex and violence; rather like reading a long historical novel with far too many characters, no coherent plot, and no neat beginning or end. Of course, it starts more or less at the beginning of recorded history, and finishes at the present.
I wouldn't have persevered with it but for the fact that this is all history, it really happened, which makes it sufficiently interesting that I managed to read it from cover to cover, though in fairly small doses, so it took me almost two months to finish it.
It's written quite readably, it's not hard to read, but I can't say that I really enjoyed it as I might enjoy a good novel. I rather generously award three stars in recognition of the author's achievement in covering the vast span of world history, and covering people and events on every continent. I rather doubt that I'll ever reread the whole thing, but I may sometimes use it for reference and dip into it.
I might prefer a more analytical world history that put less emphasis on individuals and more on developments in science, technology, society, political systems, the migrations of whole peoples, and so on. And I'd like dates to be more visible. Although this book is written more or less in chronological order, actual dates are mentioned only occasionally, in passing, and the book is divided up into eras not by date but by an estimate of world population in each era.
It's an impressive achievement in its way, and I don't think I regret buying it, but I find that it's not my preferred kind of world history.
