by Michael Carberry
What does a prolific author and television presenter of popular histories, biographies, novels and children’s books but who has also worked as a banker, a foreign affairs journalist, and a war correspondent, do during the Covid pandemic? For Simon Sebag Montefiore, the answer was clear – write a history of the entire world. And not just a history in the conventional sense of recorded history but reaching back beyond the earliest civilizations into the realms of prehistory and palaeontology and extending forward up to the immediate present - what might more appropriately be termed current affairs. As a history graduate, one-time history teacher and former British diplomat I confess I was intrigued. Could one really take on such a vast topic and even begin to do it justice? In fact, according to the author’s introduction, it was written over a three-year period, mainly during Covid. SSM (as I will henceforth call him) has never lacked for self-confidence. As a schoolboy at Harrow, where he edited the school magazine, he managed to obtain an interview with the then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher. According to his own account, Thatcher afterwards vowed that she would never do another schoolboy interview because she had found him “too cheeky”. So, taking advantage of a two-week cruise in a rather chilly Baltic Sea where inclement weather kept us off the decks and even out of one port, I ploughed through the 1,262 pages of The World – A Family History. It proved a less difficult read than expected.
Any large-scale historical work tends to be little more than a broad-brush narrative summary, lacking in both essential details and critical analysis. They are of limited value in understanding the past and rather boring. So, I tackled this book with some scepticism. I need not have worried. SSM clearly does not do boring.
SSM says that his book “adopts a new approach, using the stories of families across time to provide a different fresh perspective.” It is not so much a narrative history as an anecdotal account of the past three thousand or so years. It is very much a King Alfred burning the cakes, Robert Bruce and the Spider, George Washington and the apple tree, or King Cnut ordering the waves to go back kind of history. In fact, none of these stories appear in the book, probably because they are already too well known or clearly never happened but also because they are not juicy enough. As an unashamed populariser SSM knows that what titillates the ordinary reader, who might not normally pick up a history book, are colourful stories about the rich and famous particularly if they involve sex and violence. And he gives it to us – in spades.
Powerful potentates with vast wealth, opulent palaces and huge harems are the background to stories of intrigue, sexual debauchery, murder and mayhem and every kind of excess. Wars and battles are recounted in terms of massacres, looting, mass rapes, piles of severed heads and atrocities of all kinds. Justice (or more usually revenge) is meted out with unspeakable tortures and grisly executions. No wonder a review in The Spectator described it “Succession meets Game of Thrones.”
SSM knows that people remember soubriquets like Richard the Lionheart, Ivan the Terrible and Suleiman the Magnificent. So, he gives people nicknames like Spear-thrower Owl, Boy Racer, and King Fatso. He also focuses more on their personal peccadillos or human weaknesses than their political or military successes. Thus, we learn more about Napoleon’s piles than about his victories. The Battle of Waterloo, one of the great turning points in European history is dismissed with the phrase. “Napoleon failed to master the battle and lost 25,000 men” while a half page of notes is devoted to the emperor’s correspondence with his brother Jérôme about the best treatment for his haemorrhoids.
In order to humanise his characters further, their reported sayings are translated into much earthier language than one would normally find in a conventional history. Chapter headings – e.g. Murder by enema or Death by testicular compression – would not be out of place in a tabloid newspaper. Yet SSM, perhaps to emphasise his academic credentials (PhD from Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge and visiting Professor of Humanities at the University of Buckingham), indulges in an overuse of obscure or literary words: epigone, pinguid, bloviating, eschaton, thermobaric, coprophagia are just a few examples from one section of the book. One wonders at whom the book is really targeted
So, is The World – A Family History nothing more than a giant historical Hello! Magazine, a bumper-length Mills and Boon with added violence and scatological detail? Well, sometimes it does feel like that. But there is much more to the book than that. The author himself acknowledges that it is a “work of synthesis”, i.e., cobbled together from a huge range of other historians’ work, as indeed any book on this scale would have to be. There is some original research. He interviewed some of the individuals mentioned in the very last part of the text. But, quite apart from the fact that this research only relates to very recent events – a tiny fraction of the period covered - interviews, like autobiographies, are a notoriously unreliable source of objective historical data. And many of those interviewed, like the ex-King of Bulgaria, are not among the movers and shakers of world history.
But if there is little in the way of original research, or carefully annotated sources, there is nevertheless much erudition. In compiling this work on such a vast topic, SSM has brought together a huge amount of information which even an avid reader of world history like myself found both new and interesting. In particular he consciously tries to move away from the Euro-centric view of world history which has tended to dominate most academic writing to present a more balanced picture, taking in not just the ancient and highly developed civilisations in East and South Asia but also the rich history and cultures of what are conventionally seen as less developed parts of the globe such as Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America or Oceania. In particular he shows how many pre-literate societies were nevertheless often highly sophisticated with surprising levels of organisation and artistic culture. But he also makes the reader take a fresh look at apparently familiar topics such a slavery, highlighting the long history and extent of slavery in Europe and Africa, reaching back well before the first slave ships sailed from the coast of West Africa for the new World and lasting long after the slave trade was abolished in Europe – indeed up to the twentieth century.
As part of this rebalancing SSM frequently switches from one part of the globe to another to reveal events occurring in different areas at the same time. This not only gives a global overview of developments around the world, but also the links between them resulting from trading contacts, military conquest, the spread of religions, the transmission of ideas and technologies or dynastic links. It is in this latter area that SSM’s focus on families comes into its own. Throughout human history, marriage (effectively the trading of women between different family groups) has been used to cement political alliances, win friends and buy off enemies. By focussing on ruling dynasties and highlighting the marital and familial links with similar dynasties elsewhere, SSM highlights the interconnectedness of events which are often treated in isolation in more narrowly-based accounts. It also enables him to highlight the important role of women in global history – not just the handful of women who have achieved a place in the history books - Boudicca, Elizabeth I of England, Catherine the Great of Russia, or Empress Ci Xi of China - but the far greater numbers who exercised power and influence in the background: the women behind the throne or in the heart of the harem, manipulating and sometimes supplanting husbands, sons and brothers, and thus determining the success or failure of dynasties.
Such a vast work will inevitably contain errors of fact or inconsistencies, although there were surprisingly few that I could detect. Partly because much of the more colourful content is, by its very nature, unverifiable. But also, because the work has been read and fact-checked, at least in parts, by an impressive list of distinguished academic historians, politicians and other luminaries. Yet there are no comments, reviews or quotations from these individuals One can imagine the academic historians rolling their eyes as they see SSM’s book coining in the cash while their own carefully researched and annotated works, the fruits of many years diligent research, gather dust on the bookshop shelves.
So how, in the end, can one sum up this extraordinary book? Is it great history – certainly not. Is it well written – I would say not really. Does it contain much new and interesting information – most certainly. However, such a vast amount of information is difficult to take in. It becomes part of an amorphous mass, rather as when one mixes all the vibrant colours on an artist’s pallet and end up with a dull grey sludge. Secondly, the book is inevitably long on information but short on critical analysis which, for me, is the real value of history; not just ‘what happened?’ but, more importantly ‘why?’ However, if you have a general interest in history and are looking for a fun read, the book is vastly entertaining. I have to confess that, for all my misgivings (and they were many), I rather enjoyed it.
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