Sebag Montefiore (and me) on the history of the world

Googling myself yesterday (hey, I was hoping an online link would take me quickly to something I wrote), I came across a very nice review by an American librarian and critic, Betsy Bird, of my 2011 history of the world, From Then to Now. Her review is also from 2011, but I'd never come across it before.  It strikes me as very thoughtful and very complimentary too, which is lovely.

Oddly, it turns up just as I have been indulging myself in another world history --  one that is a good thousand pages longer than mine.  It's The World: A Family History of Humanity by the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.  I was impressed some time ago by his Court of the Red Tsar, which combines vividly personal, almost gossipy, detail about the circles of people about Stalin's Kremlin with a very clearheaded account of the fantastically murderous sociopathy that underpinned the dictator's government as well as his personal life.  And I've heard his Jerusalem highly praised too.

I was hoping for a similar mix of personal stories and larger historical sweep in The World, but Montefiore declares "I am a historian of power and geopolitics is the engine of world history," His knowledge base is immense and the big book rattles on a tremendous pace, but he delivers a very military/political vision of the past. There are lots of trumpets-and-drums accounts of the way that a zillion states and dynasties rose and fell across the world and across the millennia. These are juxtaposed against lurid stories of the bad behaviour of kings and the women and children around them (that's the family part). 

But surely there should be more to the history of humanity. It begins to feels as if Montefiore's gossipy side has triumphed. 

I began to think, indeed, that in my own world history -- it's a kid's book, remember, just 188 pages -- I covered a lot of big topics far beyond Montefiore's scope  -- the nature of religions, the meaning of legal structures, the shaping of agriculture and trade -- without being entirely boring about it. So I discovered Betsy Bird's viewpoint just at the right time:  

As you read, you realize that Moore’s focus is vast. It contains multitudes. He’ll mention the gardeners of the Middle East then segue casually into the island of New Guinea, the river valleys of China, Central American valleys, and other parts of Africa. Reading this, kids get the sense of worldwide connections. One culture comes up with this technique and it is found over here in this other culture as well. Moore’s focus is wide at the start of the book. He’ll give the Greeks and Romans their time in the sun but not before he’s discussed “The Golden Empires” of 5000 BCE – 1000 CE and cultures that cultivated laws and gods from the same time period. Europe get a chapter of its own, but its title is “A Peninsula West of Asia” which is a nice change for folks who’ve heard Asia referred to as “the far east” all these years.

Damn right, Betsy. And thanks! (The praise for illustrator Andrej Krystoforski is dead-on too.)