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The History of Nepo Babies Is the History of Humanity

By Maya Jasanoff

A medieval family tree with portraits of different people on the branches

Everything has a history, and writers have for thousands of years tried to pull together a universal history of everything. “In earliest times,” the Hellenistic historian Polybius mused, in the second century B.C., “history was a series of unrelated episodes, but from now on history becomes an organic whole. Europe and Africa with Asia, and Asia with Africa and Europe.” For the past hundred years or so, each generation of English-language readers has been treated to a fresh blockbuster trying to synthesize world history. H. G. Wells’s “ The Outline of History ” (1920), written “to be read as much by Hindus or Moslems or Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans,” argued “that men form one universal brotherhood . . . that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last in one common human destiny.” Then came Arnold Toynbee, whose twelve-volume “ Study of History ” (1934-61), abridged into a best-selling two, proposed that human civilizations rose and fell in predictable stages. In time, Jared Diamond swept in with “ Guns, Germs, and Steel ” (1997), delivering an agriculture- and animal-powered explanation for the phases of human development. More recently, the field has belonged to Yuval Noah Harari, whose “ Sapiens ” (2011) describes the ascent of humankind over other species, and offers Silicon Valley-friendly speculations about a post-human future.

The appeal of such chronicles has something to do with the way they schematize history in the service of a master plot, identifying laws or tendencies that explain the course of human events. Western historians have long charted history as the linear, progressive working out of some larger design—courtesy of God, Nature, or Marx. Other historians, most influentially the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun, embraced a sine-wave model of civilizational growth and decline. The cliché that “history repeats itself” promotes a cyclical version of events, reminiscent of the Hindu cosmology that divided time into four ages, each more degenerate than the last.

What if world history more resembles a family tree, its vectors hard to trace through cascading tiers, multiplying branches, and an ever-expanding jumble of names? This is the model, heavier on masters than on plot, suggested by Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “ The World: A Family History of Humanity ” (Knopf), a new synthesis that, as the title suggests, approaches the sweep of world history through the family—or, to be more precise, through families in power. In the course of some thirteen hundred pages, “The World” offers a monumental survey of dynastic rule: how to get it, how to keep it, how to squander it.

“The word family has an air of cosiness and affection, but of course in real life families can be webs of struggle and cruelty too,” Montefiore begins. Dynastic history, as he tells it, was riddled with rivalry, betrayal, and violence from the start. A prime example might be Julius Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, the founder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, who consolidated his rule by entrapping and murdering Caesar’s biological son Caesarion, the last of the Ptolemies. Octavian’s ruthlessness looked anodyne compared with many other ancient successions, like that of the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II, who was opposed by his mother and her favorite son. When the favorite died in battle against Artaxerxes, Montefiore reports, their mother executed one of his killers by scaphism, “in which the victim was enclosed between two boats while force-fed honey and milk until maggots, rats and flies infested their living faecal cocoon, eating them alive.” She also ordered the family of Artaxerxes’ wife to be buried alive, and murdered her daughter-in-law by feeding her poisoned fowl.

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As such episodes suggest, it was one thing to hold power, another to pass it on peacefully. “Succession is the great test of a system; few manage it well,” Montefiore observes. Two distinct models coalesced in the thirteenth century. One was practiced by the Mongol empire and its successor states, which tended to hand power to whichever of a ruler’s sons proved the most able in warfare, politics, or internecine family feuds. The Mongol conquests were accompanied by rampant sexual violence; DNA evidence suggests that Genghis Khan may be “literally the father of Asia,” Montefiore writes. He insists, though, that “women among nomadic peoples enjoyed more freedom and authority than those in sedentary states,” and that the many wives, consorts, and concubines in a royal court could occasionally hold real power. The Tang-dynasty empress Wu worked her way up from concubine of the sixth rank through the roles of empress consort (wife), dowager (widow), and regent (mother), and finally became an empress in her own right. More than a millennium later, another low-ranking concubine who became de-facto ruler, Empress Dowager Cixi, contrasted herself with her peer Queen Victoria: “I don’t think her life was half so interesting and eventful as mine. . . . She had nothing to say about policy. Now look at me. I have 400 million dependent on my judgment.”

The political liability of these heir-splitting methods was that rival claimants might fracture the kingdom. The Ottomans handled this problem by dispatching a brigade of mute executioners, known as the Tongueless, to strangle a sultan’s male relatives, and so limit the shedding of royal blood. This made for intense power games in the harem, as mothers tussled to place their sons at the front of the line for succession. A sultan was supposed to stop visiting a consort once she’d given birth to a son, Montefiore explains, “so that each prince would be supported by one mother.” Suleiman the Magnificent—whose father cleared the way for him by having three brothers, seven nephews, and many of his own sons strangled—broke that rule with a young Ukrainian captive named Hürrem (also known as Roxelana). Suleiman had more than one son with Hürrem, freed her, and married her; he then had his eldest son by another mother strangled. But that left two of his and Hürrem’s surviving adult sons jockeying for the top position. After a failed bid to seize power, the younger escaped to Persia, where he was hunted down by the Tongueless and throttled.

A different model for dynasty-building relied on the apparently more tranquil method of intermarriage. Alexander the Great was an early adopter of exogamy as an accessory to conquest; Montefiore says that he merged “the elites of his new empire, Macedonians and Persians, in a mass multicultural wedding” at Susa in 324 B.C. Many other empire-builders through the centuries took up the tactic, notably the Mughal emperor Akbar, who followed his subjugation of the Rajputs by marrying a princess of Amber, and so, Montefiore notes, kicked off “a fusion of Tamerlanian and Rajput lineages with Sanskritic and Persian cultures” that transformed the arts of north India. But it was in Catholic Europe, with its insistence on monogamy and primogeniture, that royal matchmaking became an essential tool of dynasty-building. (The Catholic Church itself, which imposed celibacy on its own Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, and Sisters, kept power in the family when Popes positioned their nephews— nipote , in Italian—in positions of authority, a practice that, as Montefiore points out, gave us the term “nepotism.”)

The archetypal dynasty of this model was the Habsburgs. The family had been catapulted to prominence in the thirteenth century by the self-styled Count Rudolf, who presented himself as a godson of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Rudolf, recognizing the strategic value of family alliances, cannily married off five of his daughters to German princes, thus helping to cement his position as king of the Germans. His method was violently echoed by the Habsburg-sponsored conquistadores, who, in order to shore up their authority, forced the kinswomen of Motecuhzoma and Atahualpa into marriages. And it was to the Habsburgs that Napoleon Bonaparte turned when he sought a mother for his own hoped-for heir.

The ruthless biology of primogeniture tended to reduce women to the position of breeders—and occasionally men, too. Otto von Bismarck snidely called Saxe-Coburg, the home of Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, the “stud farm of Europe.” This system conduced to inbreeding, and came at a genetic price. By the sixteenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V suffered from a massively protruding jaw, with a mouth agape and a stubby tongue slurring his speech. His son Philip II contended with a congenitally incapable heir, Don Carlos, who, Montefiore summarizes, abused animals, flagellated servant girls, defenestrated a page, and torched a house; he also tried to murder a number of courtiers, stage a coup in the Netherlands, stab his uncle, assassinate his father, and kill himself “by swallowing a diamond.” The Spanish Habsburg line ended a few generations later with “Carlos the Hexed,” whose parents were uncle and niece; he was, in Montefiore’s description, “born with a brain swelling, one kidney, one testicle and a jaw so deformed he could barely chew yet a throat so wide he could swallow chunks of meat,” along with “ambiguous genitalia” that may have contributed to his inability to sire an heir.

By the nineteenth century, European dynasts formed an incestuous thicket of cousins, virtually all of them descended from Charlemagne, and many, more proximately, from Queen Victoria. The First World War was the family feud to end them all. Triggered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Habsburg emperor Franz Josef, the war brought three first cousins into conflict: Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, and King George V. (By then, Franz Josef’s only son had killed himself; his wife—and first cousin—had been stabbed to death; his brother Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had been executed; and another first cousin, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, had been deposed.) The war would, Montefiore observes, ultimately “destroy the dynasties it was designed to save”: the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs, and the Hohenzollerns had all been ousted by 1922.

Archaeologist finding ancient pottery then a skull then a skeleton of another archaeologist finding the pottery.

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With the rise to political power of non-royal families in the twentieth century, Montefiore’s template for dynastic rule switches from monarchs to mafiosi. The Mafia model applies as readily to the Kennedys, whom Montefiore calls “a macho family business” with Mob ties, as to the Yeltsins, Boris and his daughter Tatiana, whose designated famiglia of oligarchs selected Vladimir Putin as their heir. In Montefiore’s view, Donald Trump is a wannabe dynast who installed a “disorganized, corrupt and nepotistic court” in democracy’s most iconic palace.

The Mafia metaphor also captures an important truth: a history of family power is a history of hit jobs, lately including Mohammed bin Salman’s ordering the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi —which has been linked to battles within the House of Saud—and Kim Jong Un’s arranging the murder of his half brother. In the late eighteenth century, the concept of family was taking on another role. Modern republican governments seized on the language of kinship—the Jacobins’ “ fraternité ,” the United States’ “Founding Fathers”—to forge political communities detached from specific dynasties. Versions of the title “Father of the Nation” have been bestowed on leaders from Argentina’s José de San Martín to Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda. Immanuel Kant, among others, believed that democracies would be more peaceful than monarchies, because they would be free from dynastic struggles. But some of the bloodiest conflicts of modern times have instead hinged on who does and doesn’t belong to which national “family.” Mustafa Kemal renamed himself “Father of the Turks” (Atatürk) in the wake of the Armenian genocide. A century later, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Myanmar’s “Father of the Nation,” refused to condemn the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, who have been denied citizenship and so excluded from counting as Burmese.

It was partly to counter the genocidal implications of nationalism that, in 1955, MoMA ’s photography curator Edward Steichen launched “The Family of Man,” a major exhibition designed to showcase “the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” The trouble is that even the most intimately connected human family can divide against itself. In the final days of the Soviet Union, Montefiore recounts, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker discussed the possibility of war in Ukraine with a member of the Politburo. The Soviet official observed that Ukraine had twelve million Russians and many were in mixed marriages, “so what kind of war would that be?” Baker told him, “A normal war.”

“The World” has the heft and character of a dictionary; it’s divided into twenty-three “acts,” each labelled by world-population figures and subdivided into sections headed by family names. Montefiore energetically fulfills his promise to write a “genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe.” In zesty sentences and lively vignettes, he captures the widening global circuits of people, commerce, and culture. Here’s the Roman emperor Claudius parading down the streets of what is now Colchester on an elephant; there’s Manikongo Garcia holding court in what is today Angola “amid Flemish tapestries, wearing Indian linens, eating with cutlery of American silver.” Here are the Anglo-Saxon Mercian kings using Arabic dirhams as local currency; there’s the Khmer ruler Jayavarman VII converting the Hindu site of Angkor for Buddhist worship.

It’s largely up to the reader, though, to make meaning out of these portraits, especially when it comes to the conceit at the book’s center. For one thing, a “family history” is not the same as a “history of the family,” of the sort pioneered by social historians such as Philippe Ariès, Louise A. Tilly, and Lawrence Stone. Montefiore alludes only in passing to shifts such as the consolidation of the nuclear family in Europe after the Black Death, and to the effects on the family of the Industrial Revolution and modern contraception. He offers no sustained analysis of the implications that different family structures had for who could hold power and why.

To the extent that “The World” does have a plot, it concerns the resilience of dynastic power in the face of political transformation. Even today, more than forty nations have a monarch as the head of state, fifteen of them in the British Commonwealth. Yet in democracies, too, holding political power is very often a matter of family connections. “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family,” Teddy Roosevelt remarked at the marriage of his niece Eleanor to her cousin. Americans balk at how many U.S. Presidential nominees in the past generation have been family members of former senators (George H. W. Bush, Al Gore), governors (Mitt Romney), and Presidents (George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton). That’s nothing compared with postwar Japan, where virtually every Prime Minister has come from a political family and some thirty per cent of parliamentary representatives are second generation. In Asia more generally, the path to power for women, especially, has often run through male relatives: of the eleven women who have led Asian democracies, nine have been the daughter, sister, or widow of a male leader. This isn’t how democracy was supposed to work.

Why is hereditary power so hard to shake? Montefiore argues that “dynastic reversion seems both natural and pragmatic when weak states are not trusted to deliver justice or protection and loyalties remain to kin not to institutions”—and new states, many of them hobbled by colonial rule, are rarely strong states. Then, people in power can bend the rules in ways that help them and their successors keep it. It’s not just monarchies that go autocratic: republics can get there all on their own .

A fuller answer, though, rests on the material reality of inheritance, which has systematically enriched some families and dispossessed others. This is most starkly illustrated by the history of slavery, which, as Montefiore frequently points out, has always been twinned with the history of family. Transatlantic slavery, in particular, was “an anti-familial institution” that captured families and ripped them apart, while creating conditions of sexual bondage that produced furtive parallel families. Sally Hemings was the daughter of her first owner, John Wayles; the half sister of her next owner, Martha Wayles; and the mistress of another, Martha’s husband, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson’s children by Wayles and Hemings were simultaneously half siblings and cousins—one set enslaved, the other free. Even without such intimate ties, European family privilege was magnified in the distorting mirror of American slavery. In Guyana in 1823, for example, an enslaved man and his son Jack Gladstone led a rebellion against their British owner, John Gladstone. Jack Gladstone, for his role in the uprising, was exiled to St. Lucia. John Gladstone, for his ownership of more than two thousand enslaved workers, received the largest payout that the British government made to a slaveholder when slavery was abolished. John’s son William Gladstone, the future Liberal Prime Minister, gave his maiden speech in Parliament defending John’s treatment of his chattel labor.

The inheritance of money and status goes a long way toward explaining the prevalence of dynastic patterns in other sectors. Thomas Paine maintained that “a hereditary monarch is as absurd a position as a hereditary doctor,” and yet in many societies being a doctor often was hereditary. The same went for artists, bankers, soldiers, and more; the Paris executioner who lopped off Louis XVI’s head was preceded in his line of work by three generations of family members. Montefiore’s own family, Britain’s most prominent Sephardic dynasty, puts in the occasional appearance in these pages, alongside the Rothschilds (with whom the Montefiores intermarried); both were banking families, and their prominence endures in part because of the generational accumulation of wealth. A recent study of occupations in the United States shows that children are disproportionately likely to do the same job as one of their parents. The children of doctors are twenty times as likely as others to go into medicine; the children of textile-machine operators are hundreds of times more likely to operate textile machines. Children of academics—like me—are five times as likely to go into academia as others. It’s nepo babies all the way down.

There’s an obvious tension between the ideal of democracy, in which citizens enjoy equal standing regardless of family status, and the reality that the family persists as a prime mediator of social, cultural, and financial opportunities. That doesn’t mean that democracy is bound to be dynastic, any more than it means that families have to be superseded by the state. It does mean that dynasties play as persistent and paradoxical a role in many democracies as families do for many citizens of those democracies—can’t live with them, can’t live without them. ♦

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What the Origins of Humanity Can and Can’t Tell Us

By Jennifer Wilson

The British Museum’s Blockbuster Scandals

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In brief: Illuminations; The World: A Family History; From Manchester With Love – reviews

Alan Moore’s short stories enchant, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s dynastic history illuminates and Paul Morley’s biography of Tony Wilson is a moving portrait of Manchester

Illuminations

Alan Moore Bloomsbury, £20, pp464

Alan Moore’s first short story collection covers 35 years of what The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen ’s author calls his “ludicrous imaginings”. Across these nine stories, some of which can barely be called short, there’s a wonderful commitment to fantastical events in mundane towns. His old comic fans might enjoy What We Can Know About Thunderman the most, a spectacular tirade against a superhero industry corrupted from such lofty, inventive beginnings.

The World: A Family History

Simon Sebag Montefiore Orion, £35, pp1,392

To tell a history of the world through its most influential families is a clever way to marshal thousands of years of humanity into some kind of sense and order. It’s also an incredible undertaking to treat the Nubian pharaohs or the Cromwells, the Bonapartes or the Trumps just the same, teasing out human tales amid the naked power and politics. Montefiore finds enduring resonances and offers new perspectives in these door-stopping 1,392 pages. Because these are family stories, he adeptly eschews traditionally male histories to find greater texture and diversity. A remarkable achievement.

From Manchester With Love

Paul Morley Faber, £12.99, pp624 (paperback)

There’s probably no better person to write a biography of “TV talking head, pop culture conceptualist, entrepreneur and bullshitter” Tony Wilson than Paul Morley, a man who formed an esoteric writing career in his Manchester orbit. Still, Morley immediately understands the pitfalls of this enterprise: he calls Wilson “beautiful, foolish, dogmatic, charming. Impossible.” This moving portrait of Manchester from the late 1970s onwards is richer, more complicated and thoughtful than mere biography; a history, of sorts, of a city long since passed into memory.

To order Illuminations , The World: A Family History or From Manchester With Love go to guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply

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The World: A Family History of Humanity

By simon sebag montefiore.

The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore is a doorstopper of a book but a fabulous way to read about world history on a truly global scale across thousands of millennia. What holds it together is a focus on families, starting with the first footprints of a family ever found right the way through to the Trump family. As Sebag Montefiore explains at the beginning, this a work of synthesis, based on his reading and travels over the decades, written up during the Covid lockdowns. It’s a really remarkable work of popular history, and a lot of fun to read.

Other books by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Catherine the great and potemkin: the imperial love affair by simon sebag montefiore, young stalin by simon sebag montefiore, jerusalem: the biography by simon sebag montefiore, sashenka by simon sebag montefiore, voices of history: speeches that changed the world by simon sebag montefiore, our most recommended books, moscow x by david mccloskey, the last murder at the end of the world by stuart turton, kennedy 35 by charles cumming, the tainted cup by robert jackson bennett, beirut station by paul vidich, fall of civilizations: stories of greatness and decline by paul cooper.

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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the world: a family history of humanity.

About the Book

A magisterial world history unlike any other that tells the story of humanity through the one thing we all have in common: families.

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.

A dazzling achievement as spellbinding as fiction, THE WORLD captures the whole human story in a single, masterful narrative.

The World: A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Publication Date: May 16, 2023
Genres: History , Nonfiction
Hardcover: 1344 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN-10: 0525659536
ISBN-13: 9780525659532

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The past isn’t dead, it isn’t even past

The World: A Family History, by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Luke Pepera

An expansive, enlightening, and entertaining history of some of humanity’s most interesting characters.

The first thing worth mentioning about Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s The World is that it wholly delivers on the promise of its title and its synopsis. If you are by nature a little sceptical, and might hesitate in purchasing the work because you feared that the stories of peoples from even entire parts of certain continents might be missing from its pages, I’m here to tell you that you would not be disappointed. Asia, Africa, Europe, the Americas, Oceania, and Australia – all of them are covered.

What’s more, Sebag-Montefiore has an enviable knack for finding not just the most interesting people who lived in these different places in different eras, but also the long-forgotten, intriguing, revealing, demonstrably human, and often downright disturbing of their lives’ details – for instance, the slightly sketchy soft-spot that the towering, war-mongering empire-builder Charlemagne had for his daughters, or how, at banquets, Augustus Caesar frequently took, right in front of them, the wives of his henchmen present into another room, slept with them, and led them back into the banqueting hall, ‘with their ears red, hair tousled,’ as Sebag-Montefiore wryly puts it.

Indeed, as it is such a significant part of life – is, in fact, how life comes about – sexual relations (and, also, a fair bit of violence) feature quite heavily in The World . Yet, when reading it, you never get the sense that Sebag-Montefiore includes details of it either for their salaciousness, or to shock. Rather, the message that comes across is that, no matter who we are, where we are, or when we are, we, as human beings always, want, and do, the same things, sex being often one of these.

Through his characters whose lives Sebag-Montefiore explores in his book, ranging from the bona fide big dogs of history – Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Napoleon – to the still important, yet lesser-known, figures, like the first-century AD Queen Amanirenas of Kush (modern-day Sudan), who prevented the Roman’s conquering of her kingdom, Harun al-Rashid, the eighth-century Baghdad caliph immortalised alongside his vizier Ja’far in The Arabian Nights , and Murasaki Shikibu, who wrote the first novel, The Tale of Genji , Sebag-Montefiore reminds us of the fears and desires we all share, and that define our humanity. That he also with a clear, lively, humorous, narrative-focused, and introspective writing style indubitably brings these characters to life, and succeeds in getting you often to see parts of yourself in them, makes The World an engrossing and eminently worthwhile read.

Luke Pepera is a writer and historian, and the author of Motherland: 500,000 Years of African History, Cultures & Identity .

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The World. A Family History: Around the globe in 1,300-plus crazed dynasties

Simon sebag montefiore misses the mark with this book, which is marred by undisciplined history.

For Simon Sebag Montefiore 'not even the young die good. He revels in extracting from his sources all past libels and defamations of character.'

The young Wittgenstein instructed us that “the world is all that is the case”. So, the world is quite big.

One implication is that no author, of fiction or nonfiction, can successfully write about “all that is the case”, certainly not without questions that promise interesting answers.

Differently put, if history is what the evidence obliges us to believe, then there is far too much of it for anyone to master or mistress in 10,000 lifetimes — let alone during the mercifully brief period of the global pandemic when Simon Sebag Montefiore (SSM) drafted this book.

Composition must be disciplined by one or more principles of coherent selection, organising concepts, and puzzles or hypotheses to be tackled. That does not happen here.

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Admittedly A Family History, the subtitle of The World, promises a more modest focus on a smaller bite of the universe, but again, it doesn’t happen.

A History of the (Human) Family might suggest an enterprising initiative in global history, and that is maybe why I was invited to review this book. The literary editor of The Irish Times once heard me complain of the underrepresentation of social science in the review pages of newspapers in Ireland and Great Britain. Knowing a political scientist is some kind of social scientist, he may have thought that a treatment of stable or changing family structure since the Stone Age(s) would be a good subject for me.

Before I received the proofs of The World, I thought I would be reading an exposé of the myth of the permanent nuclear family—or the converse, a restatement of its endurance despite appearances. Perhaps a re-examination of whether “childhood” and “adolescence” were recent “inventions” or “constructions” would be on the menu?

Maybe also a full comparative account of personal law, including divorce and inheritance practices — a dark catalogue of primordial, perennial, and promiscuous male mistreatment of women and children, especially of orphans, adoptees, and infants? I also anticipated evidence-based engagements with the current rages and counter-rages over matters of sex and gender, including the government of the public latrine, which preoccupies the suitably named Governor de Santis of Florida.

Once I received this book, however, disappointment haunted my reading.

The human family is not examined anthropologically, let alone through sociology or economics. There is a nod to demography. Each so-called Act in the book is preceded by a guesstimate of the number of humans in the relevant period. But the human family — in its unity and diversity — is not systematically compared, using biology or sociobiology, for good or ill, or mere instruction, with that of the other primates, or with the social insects, let alone the sharks and their cousins, or the pigs and their in-laws.

Dynasty as Destiny

Montefiore’s subtitle misdescribes his book. Around the World: in 1300-plus Crazed Dynasties would have been a more appropriate title.

Pretending to study the family, he trots through a potted history of polities, states, and empires with an intermittent focus on the pathologies of VIPs and VIBs. Totalitarians, tin pots, and timocrats are preferred, but he is inclusive, as befits a restructured modern man. The named men, women, and the transgendered strut, kill, torture, scheme, and abuse. They are from all races, and from all continents — excluding the polar ice caps.

Many of these past leaders are indeed suitable for admission to the Fletcher Memorial Home for Incurable Tyrants and Kings of which Pink Floyd sang. But the author has a special voyeuristic interest in the immediate families of narcissistic autocrats, and their courtiers. Throughout the unspeakable is spoken, and the unprintable is printed — at length.

The book resembles Succession, that acerbic drama based on the Australian sea warriors, the Murdochs, who were presented in the guise of the Roys — a Joycean pun on the French word for a king. The Murdochs don’t make it into SSM’s World , however, and it is not clear why.

What readers will consume, whether they wade or surf through this spectacle of the unedifying wing of the elite of humanity, is a post-paleolithic relay race around the planet, starting with Sargon’s family and ending with the Trumps, the Assads, and the Kims. It is not inspirational. In the beginning, the palaces fill with treacherous and thuggish bastards and bitches, and, judging by SSM’s reportage, at the end of the world that will still be the case.

The pace is frenetic, punctured by frequent awkward segues between locations and time zones, but rather similar “conduct unbecoming” is repeate … passim and ad nauseam . It’s as if we swivel to meso-American despots eating human hearts as their medieval European and Asian counterparts are engaged in foul deeds — sometimes with fowls, and sometimes without. Think “Meanwhile in …” in grim B-movies.

Yes, there is some thematic emphasis here on the abuse of power, but what makes our author salivate is gossip about abuse per se, of all kinds and tastes — especially the poor taste varieties.

Imagine that after a nuclear holocaust the surviving documentary record of politics was confined to the archived digital records of The Daily Mail , People Magazine , Procopius’s Secret History (of what we call Byzantium), the Secret History of the Mongols , the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom , and fragments of The Decameron . And that the sole surviving author who can read and represent this material resembles the scriptwriter of Confessions of a Window Cleaner .

The religiously inclined will have much to savour: an abundance of forgotten corruptions and mortal sins are paraded among those ungodly upper classes who have never sought the kingdom of heaven. Secular readers, by contrast, will have a thousand and one tales of what contemporary American human resources managers call “inappropriate behaviour.”

Plots and losing the plot

If history is partly about storytelling, it is of a special kind, in which respect for the evidence, and its limits, should supersede what might make a better film script, cartoon, or advisory warning.

“Emplotment” must be handled carefully. Some definite puzzles should be identified and thought given to how they might be best resolved or approached. But if this book had an original plot, it is lost well before we get to the Borgias after page 422.

Tolstoy told us that “all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Social scientific readers of SSM may, if generously inclined, think that the author is accumulating evidence to refute the second part of Tolstoy’s hypothesis.

If one were to judge “representative” what I hesitate to call this “sample” of horrors, then the truly successful, the bad hyperpowerful families in the record, resemble one another most in their grossest appetites — for power, sex, food, and monuments — and in their appalling conduct toward their immediate “friends” and relations. Unconscionable doesn’t come close, and SSM seems to think that they’ve generally been happy in imposing unhappiness on others.

For Montefiore, not even the young die good. He revels in extracting from his sources all past libels and defamations of character, while sometimes observing that vicious gossip and slander may be just that — especially when it’s about powerful women. The World is like receiving in sequence all the censored passages from obituaries and speeches at funerals.

There are more than 100 references to monarchy, and over two hundred to dynasties, but no detailed analysis is provided of what the materials say of the pathologies of monarchies, and their courts — and why humanity needs to organise without them. “Sacred” and “mixed” monarchies are mentioned but we are not told what they are.

Monarchies are highly unstable even when the succession principle is known, because the next in line may be the malevolent, the incompetent, or children — and those who are all three. Where the succession principle is unclear, then like Alexander “the Great” and many an Ottoman prince, the son, or bastard son, will succeed after carefully murdering his brothers, and half-brothers — fratricide, the first crime recorded in the Book of Genesis , after apple-eating and incest. We learned from Game of Thrones that there is no English word for killing cousins, but had the expression been available this dragon-free fest of reportage would have employed it extensively.

Conclusion?

An unconvincing terse conclusion brings the exhausting mini-narratives to a halt. It opens defensively, “There is such a thing as too much history.” Many readers will have been fully persuaded several acts before.

But I have no objection to this book’s length: my complaints focus on the absence of emplotment, or the marshalling of evidence for some analytical purpose. There is too much “undisciplined” history here — undisciplined by any natural science, social science, or the protocols of puzzle-solving professional historians. The good, the decent, and the net improvers of humanity are dramatically underrepresented — for no clear reason. Marcus Aurelius, one of the better Roman emperors, only gets mentioned as a statue.

SSM blots the end of his copybook with a wiseacre assessment, driven perhaps by the latest Russian despot to invade his neighbours. He writes: “Nuclear war on some scale is not just plausible but likely.” Given his extended treatment of militaristic politicians, warlords, and kings the reader will appreciate why SSM believes that. But then he adds in parenthesis “and it is worth reflecting that, at the time of writing, no nuclear power has ever lost a war”.

That reflection, however, is worthless. In fact, the only nuclear powers that have not yet lost wars or military interventions may be the North Koreans and the Iranians, a correction that may not warm many hearts chilled by this saga of the notorious.

Four Good Guides to World History

Among the thousands available, these books have clear structures, arguments, and plain style.

I gave Ernest Gombrich’s illustrated A Little History of the World, to my American twin-daughters when they were 10, to warm appreciation. First written in German in 1935, and then revised and translated by the author at the end of his life, it’s light on Africa, Latin America, and the Pacific, and soft on the world religions, but it has many virtues. Gombrich hoped Napoleon would be “the last conqueror”. Another book, first written in German, suitable for adults of all ages, is Nathan Schur’s The Relevant History of Mankind (1997). He opens with “What is Relevant?” The answer is not names and dates.

Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989, 2003) is by Patricia Crone, late Professor of Islamic History at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton. The Dane self-deprecatingly described it as a bluffer’s guide to the nature of pre-industrial societies of the complex type (excluding foragers and what she unhesitatingly called primitive societies). China, India, the Islamic world, and pre-Columban America are wonderfully sketched, as is “the oddity” of Europe.

Powers and Liberties: The Causes and Consequences of the Rise of the West (1986, new ed. forthcoming) by John A Hall, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at McGill University, is a short, comparative account of the distinctiveness of the Occident. It captures the political economy, governments, cultures, and status orientations of the major world civilisations of the last four millennia while addressing the controversial question of European historical uniqueness. A second edition will engage fully the “post-colonialists” and survey the remarkable work of the last 30 years on European and Eurasian empires.

Brendan O’Leary is Lauder Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent books include Making Sense of a United Ireland and A Treatise on Northern Ireland

IN THIS SECTION

Peace comes dropping slow by denis bradley: a no-frills account of the troubles and its legacy, claire keegan wins prestigious german award, openings by lucy caldwell: enlightening and enriching collection of stories that closes a loose triptych, oisín mckenna on his intoxicating debut novel: ‘i thought of it as writing in a big key, the way a pop song might be’, ukrainian author tanja maljartschuk: ‘our national memory is a mass grave ... no one was ever punished for all these crimes’, son of rapper sean ‘diddy’ combs accused by irish woman of sexual assault on yacht, ‘a stranger entered our family and turned them all against us’, ‘a tragedy of the worst kind’: families in mourning as 18-month-old boy is killed in clare road incident, asylum seekers transferred out of citywest and crooksling ahead of expected grand canal clearance, man shot dead in drimnagh gang-related violence was facing cocaine-dealing charges, latest stories, many people do not understand the link between eating and climate change, esri finds, ‘a risk to human health and the environment’: almost half of septic tanks inspected by local authorities last year failed, may is a festive month and a highlight is national biodiversity week, comeback kings real madrid stun bayern to reach champions league final, ireland moving forward with plans to recognise palestinian state in coming weeks, says tánaiste.

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The World: A Family History of Humanity

By Simon Sebag Montefiore
Reviewed by Jennifer Bort Yacovissi
June 5, 2023

A staggering work of scholarship that also delights in the naughty bits.

Simon Sebag Montefiore knows how to keep our attention. Perhaps understanding that facing down 1,300 pages of human history might cause even the most committed reader to quail, he makes certain to pepper The World with enough inventive gore, twisted villainy, and seriously kinky sex to keep those pages turning. This book may be huge, but the author ensures it is thoroughly accessible.

Broken into “acts,” then chapters, then subheads that frequently highlight the lurid elements within (“Star Wars, Pierced Penises, Sex Slaves and Steam Baths” is just one example among hundreds — though the salacious details diminish significantly as we approach the modern era), Montefiore’s history rolls rollickingly along from one ruling dynasty to the next. Along the way, he illustrates that no Bond villain could ever outdo early leaders in their inventive ways of killing their enemies, who often were blood relations.

It would be hard to overstate the scholarship this undertaking must have required, to cover epochs and minutiae (the author describes it as an “intimate, human history”) starting from the first recorded ruling dynasty in 2200 BC, led by “Sargon, king of the Four Quarters of the World,” and flowing continuously through to the opening salvo in Vladimir Putin’s wildly misguided war against Ukraine, now in its 16th month. The narrative ends in an ellipsis, because, of course, history continues to unfold.

For Montefiore’s purposes, “History started when war, food, and writing coalesced to allow a potentate…to harness power and promote his or her children in order to keep it.”

The details are always striking. Take the very beginning of the book, and the author’s assessment of Enheduanna, Sargon’s favorite daughter, “the first woman whose words we can hear, the first named author, male or female, the first victim of sexual abuse who wrote about her experiences, and a female member of the first dynasty whom we can know as individuals.”

The conceit of starting each act by noting world population at that point tells its own story. Given the extent of the mass human die-offs via epidemic, famine, and slaughter, one can only wonder at what any given population might otherwise be. It’s interesting to note that in the tiny amount of time covered by Act Thirteen — one of the book’s shortest, encompassing 1786-1793 — the global population plummets by 200 million. Even more mind-boggling, that population eventually leaps from 4.4 billion to 8 billion in just over 30 years’ time (from the late 1980s to the present).

The more I read, the more I wanted to understand how Montefiore managed to write this history in less than a lifetime. He describes working through the covid lockdown, which, although feeling endless in the moment, was hardly long enough to capture all this detail. As a reader (of a certain age), it’s hard enough for me to keep the names and exploits straight from one subhead to the next; how he was able to synthesize this much data into a coherent tale is beyond my comprehension.

I’d also be interested to hear assessments from experts on the various slices of this history about the extent to which Montefiore got the story “right” as he selected what to include and what to leave behind.

Choosing the “what to leave behind” seems to have been especially difficult, in fact, given the breadth of the author’s footnotes, which can summarize entire epochs, contain an in-passing reference to a world-altering event, or offer the tiniest details of an historical backwater or brutality — too intriguing for Montefiore to drop altogether, apparently, and too intriguing for a reader to skip over. (Certainly, we all needed to know the fate of Valentinian’s enemy-eating bear, Innocence, who was returned to the wild for his good service. What happened to his ursine partner, Goldflake, is lost to antiquity.)

Speaking of skipping over: While it’s possible to jump to a section of particular interest, a reader will undoubtedly then find herself in the middle of a discussion that demands flipping back to understand the historical elements that led into this next era. And so backward again and again until it becomes clear — as though any reminding is necessary — that everything is connected to everything that came before.

Indeed, there is a sense of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once throughout, given the often small hinges on which humankind’s path swings. One battle between Octavian and Antony decided that a good chunk of the world would speak Latinate languages; one wife’s jealousy engendered a permanent schism within Islam; and a mere tiny shift would’ve established Manichaeism, not Christianity, as the world’s dominant religion. Also, there’s a reason we hear so much about Charlemagne; “virtually every monarch in Europe down to 1918 was descended from him.”

Delights abound here, from being reminded of things you may (or should) have learned in high-school world history to — every writer’s favorite — discussing the origins of words. Refreshingly non-Eurocentric, nor biased toward the big civilizations, the author embraces all the locales where family dynasties were taking root at any given point along the human timeline.

More than anything, though, as I read, I wanted maps. Surely, this would’ve added considerable bulk — as well as time and cost — to an already outsized undertaking, but maps would’ve added immeasurably to the context of each epoch, allowing readers insight into how the people at that time and in that location understood their world, and possibly increasing the staying power of the narrative being related.

Nonetheless, Montefiore’s accomplishment here is nothing short of breathtaking. It is no mean feat to create a comprehensive timeline of human history that is deeply researched, illuminating, addictively compelling, and — quite simply — a rowdy good time.

Jennifer Bort Yacovissi’s debut novel, Up the Hill to Home , tells the story of four generations of a family in Washington, DC, from the Civil War to the Great Depression. Her short fiction has appeared in Gargoyle and Pen-in-Hand. Jenny reviews regularly for the Independent and serves on its board of directors as president. She has served as chair or program director of the Washington Writers Conference since 2017, and for several recent years was president of the Annapolis chapter of the Maryland Writers’ Association. Stop by Jenny’s website for a collection of her reviews and columns, and follow her on Twitter at @jbyacovissi.

Support the Independent by purchasing this title via our affliate links: Amazon.com Or through Bookshop.org

Book Review in Non-Fiction More

And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

By richard engel.

"An unexpected, suspenseful page-turner."

Non-Fiction ,

The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy

By anand giridharadas.

Can Americans agree on anything at this point?

Political Science ,

The World: A Family History of Humanity (Unabridged‪)‬

٣٫٦ • ٧ من التقييمات

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • 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 author of The Romanovs A Best Book of the Year: The New Yorker, Smithsonian “ 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.

مراجعات العملاء

Almost great.

The fourth book by the author I have either listened to or read. Leaving aside the narrations, I found the overall content very well researched (per usual) and presented well. However, I have to draw the line with the hero worshipping of President Obama and othering of his opponents. Until that point the author had done a fairly good job of presenting historical facts with great neutrality, again per usual. As a result I skipped through the last chapters, which seemed like they were sourced directly from the NYT.

Needs editing.

This audiobook needs editing. Too many mispronunciations. Hard to train ear to different readers. Listening is mental gymnastics with all the foreign names and no hard copy to accompany.

قام المستمعون أيضًا بشراء

'Inaccuracies and pure fantasy': Amazon readers unimpressed by Kristi Noem's dead dog tale

S outh Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem's controversial memoir "No Going Back " — in which the MAGA darling details shooting the family dog in a gravel pit — was released to the public Tuesday and immediately subjected to their reviews.

Readers had mixed feelings about Noem's book, in which she notoriously describes killing her 14-month-old wire-haired pointer Cricket and a "nasty and mean" billy goat, as well as the claim she faced down North Korea's Supreme Leader Kim Jung Un.

“I remember when I met with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un," according to the book snippet . "I’m sure he underestimated me, having no clue about my experience staring down little tyrants (I’d been a children’s pastor, after all). Dealing with foreign leaders takes resolve, preparation, and determination.”

Want more breaking political news? Click for the latest headlines at Raw Story.

Already, before the book has formally been released, the handful of Amazon reviews that leaned negative. But there were a couple that praised her work as an author.

ALSO READ: Trump vs. history: Former presidents typically implode on their comeback tours

Amazon reviewer Susan gave "No Going Back" five stars, and wrote: "Honest strong woman... She relates stories from her past and from the heart in a honest fashion. It refreshing to read something that is honest and true and heartfelt."

But that sentiment was the exception.

Momcat gave Noem's book one star out of five.

"Lies, inaccuracies, and pure fantasy," the review reads. "Writes in the book that she took her puppy Cricket to a gravel pit and shot him in the face, then continued on to brutally shoot and eventually kill (after two tries) her un-neutered male goat because 'it smelled bad and butted my kids.'"

Another one star offering came from Jason Fulmer, writing "Political grift for VP at its best," his post reads. "Gross! Save a tree don’t buy this book."

A reviewer with the handle "RitaNYC" also gave one star and the review was poo emojis. This post was found to be "helpful" by nearly 300 people.

A FAMILY HISTORY OF HUMANITY

by Simon Sebag Montefiore ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 2023

A vibrant, masterful rendering of human history.

How family dynamics have shaped the world.

Award-winning historian Montefiore draws on 30 years of research, reading, and travel to create a panoramic, abundantly populated, richly detailed history of the world through the stories of families across place and time. History, he asserts, started when “war, food and writing coalesced to allow a potentate” to harness power and promote his or her children to keep it. That lust for power often involved violence, and promoting a child sometimes meant doing away with another. A family’s aspirations frequently tested loyalty. Arranged chronologically into 23 Acts, beginning in prehistory, the blood-soaked narrative abounds with murder and incest, war and torture, enslavement and oppression. The author identifies the Mesopotamian leader Sargon as head of “the first power family.” As his domain thrived, it proved fragile, an example, Montefiore claims, of “the paradox of empire”—the richer it became, the more its borders had to be defended against rivalrous incursions and “the greater was the incentive for destructive family feuds.” In 2193 B.C.E., Sargon lost his empire. Roughly 1,000 years later, in China, the warrior king Wuding tried to shore up his own empire by placing each of his 64 wives in control of his conquered fiefdoms. Marriages—even between siblings or other close relations—proved helpful, and if alliances frayed, there was always exile, imprisonment, and murder. Pregnancies also were helpful, even if they resulted from rape. Some families that Montefiore examines are familiar to most readers—Medici, Bonaparte, Romanov, Habsburg, and Rockefeller—but Montefiore’s view is capacious, as he recounts the histories of Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hawaiian, and African dynasties as well as the more recent Bushes, Kennedys, Castros, and Kims. The history of humanity, the author ably demonstrates, displays “cruelty upon cruelty, folly upon folly, eruptions, massacres, famines, pandemics, and pollutions”—yet throughout, he adds, an enduring capacity to create and love.

Pub Date: May 16, 2023

ISBN: 9780525659532

Page Count: 1344

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 2, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023

HISTORY | FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS | ANCIENT | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY

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by Santa Montefiore & Simon Sebag Montefiore ; illustrated by Kate Hindley

by Simon Sebag Montefiore with John Bew Martyn Frampton Dan Jones & Claudia Renton

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These World Histories Take Unexpected Routes

PERSPECTIVES

THE EARP BROTHERS, DOC HOLLIDAY, AND THE VENDETTA RIDE FROM HELL

by Tom Clavin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 21, 2020

Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.

Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.

The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad , the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.

Pub Date: April 21, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020

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by Tom Clavin & Bob Drury

by Tom Clavin

ALL THE PRESIDENT'S MEN

by Bob Woodward & Carl Bernstein ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 18, 1974

Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."

Pub Date: June 18, 1974

ISBN: 0671894412

Page Count: 372

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974

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Books | Book review: Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘An Encyclopedia…

Things To Do

Books | book review: jamaica kincaid’s ‘an encyclopedia of gardening for colored children’, a contrarian, sharp, layered look at history and botany, with illustrator kara walker..

With its mordantly anachronistic title and schoolroom-green cover, the book also serves as a reminder that the segregationist term “colored” drew lines almost as stark, limiting opportunities for many Black children to experience gardening as an activity of pure enjoyment. Jamaica Kincaid, now as well known for gardening writing as for fiction, once put it this way (about her garden in Vermont): “I have joined the conquering class: Who else could afford this garden — a garden in which I grow things that it would be much cheaper to buy at the store?”

The cover of Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker's new book.

With the fiercely imaginative artist Kara Walker, Kincaid has transposed this mode of thinking into an amalgam of erudition, discourse, storytelling and picture book art. A simple child’s garden of ABCs their “encyclopedia” is not.

Kincaid’s adult base, too, will gravitate toward it, and occasionally want to elucidate aspects to younger readers — the Bounty sailing in jauntily under “B Is for Breadfruit”; the oblique treatment of Thomas Jefferson; the classification of Carl “L Is for” Linnaeus, the proud papa of taxonomy, as “notorious.” Art collectors will savor the book’s rich contribution to the continuum of Walker’s work.

Playfulness, in its world, never comes without a price. Walker’s opening illustration, a lacy ball of greenery and graphics, is a declaration of intent, spelling out the subtitle. As an “Alphabetary of the Colonized World,” the book sets about peeling back botany to display the history behind it — to reveal conquest as arrogant and destructive, economics as exploitation, the brutal privileges of slaveholding, the propagation of racial injustice. Plants are pawns of trade routes and encounters that don’t end well for Indigenous peoples.

The book names names, including species’ Latin nomenclatures, because Kincaid believes that the rigors and profuse bounty of language have much to teach.

In illustrating her fancifully wonky entries, Walker takes down a notch the natural-world metaphors of the monumental cut-paper silhouettes that brought her to prominence — ocean waves charting the Middle Passage; pastoral landscapes blooming with violence and violation; moonlit trees that are lynching posts.

Cunning and often anthropomorphic, the imagery interpolates child-driven versions of her acidly sardonic shadow art with soft-edged, watercolor vignettes that play hide-and-seek with the letters they’re called on to represent. Sometimes she lets subjects simply speak for themselves.

You can feel the nostalgic tug of precedents on the book. It places itself within the tradition of the pre-Raphaelites reanimating fairy tales and mythology for the Kelmscott Press, Salvador Dalí tackling “Alice in Wonderland,” Alexander Calder taking on Aesop.

To Kincaid, the elements of the past we miss or regret form a paradise we’ve been cast out of, by force or unforeseen circumstances — an Edenic ideal that impels gardeners high and low to make their mark.

After all, as she reminds us, the luxury of a just-because garden “feeds and nourishes our souls and inspires us to think about ‘things’: the little doubts we harbor deep inside ourselves, our hatreds of others, our love of others, the many ways in which we can destroy and create the world and live with the consequences.”

Some of her book’s redundancies and quirks — which are akin to her garden’s — might have benefited from pruning, and clarifying sunlight. As a collaboration, though, the book is charming and instructive. The ground Kincaid and Walker cover together is the better for it. They spin the world differently and make it matter in new ways.

About the book

“AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF GARDENING FOR COLORED CHILDREN: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World”

Jamaica Kincaid. Illustrated by Kara Walker.

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 96 pp. $27.

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We Were the Lucky Ones : The Biggest Differences Between the Novel and Hulu Series Starring Joey King

The book and the series are based off of Hunter’s family’s experiences during World War II

Vlad Cioplea/Hulu

Note: This post contains major spoilers for the novel and show We Were the Lucky Ones.

The Hulu limited series We Were the Lucky Ones sees its series finale Thursday, May 2. Both the show and its source material — the 2017 novel of the same name by Georgia Hunter — follow the Kurc family, who are Polish and Jewish, throughout World War II. Once the war began, the family was scattered across the globe, in places like a ship on the Mediterranean to a Siberian labor camp, and went years without knowing where some members were. The story is based upon the the author’s family’s experiences and stories of survival. Hunter wrote and researched the sprawling novel for nearly a decade, spending time in her family’s Radom hometown and in museums, as well as interviewing her relatives and their descendants. “I went into this particular project as a family historian, not really as an author,” Hunter told PEOPLE of the novel. “I had never written a book before, so I set out in 2008 to unearth and record the family story.”

The Hulu series stars Logan Lerman as Addy Kurc and Joey King as Halina Kurc. The cast also features Henry Lloyd-Hughes as Genek Kurc, Hadas Yaron as Mila Kurc, Amit Rahav as Jakob Kurc, Robin Weigert as Nechuma Kurc, Lior Ashkenazi as Sol Kurc, Sam Woolf as Adam, Michael Aloni as Selim, Eva Feiler as Bella and Moran Rosenblatt as Herta. Though the series stays close to its source material — Hunter also served as an executive producer on the show — there are some slight changes. Here are some of the biggest differences between Hunter’s novel and the Hulu series.

The series and the novel begin differently

In the novel, readers are first introduced to Addy, who, in 1939, is living in Paris and is unable to go back home to Poland for Passover. He has just received a letter from his mother, who warns him that it’s too dangerous to travel across German borders at the start of the war. The series starts out differently, and utilizes a nonlinear timeline. The show opens with the Kurc's youngest child, Halina, at a Red Cross office in Poland in 1945. Halina receives word that her brother, Genek, sister-in-law Herta and brother-in-law, Selim, are alive. The show then cuts to 1938, when Addy returns to Poland from Paris, and the family celebrates their last Passover together before the war.

Bella doesn't travel to Lvov alone

The Kurc family begin to get seperated from one another at the start of the war. Jakob, the Kurc’s youngest son, leaves for Lvov to fight in the military, and his girlfriend, Bella, decides to travel to meet him and to be closer to her sister, Anna.

In the novel, Bella attempts the journey to Lvov alone, traveling by horse and wagon by a man named Tomek. In the show, however, Halina accompanies her. The two are turned back at gunpoint after German officers discover that they are Jewish. Halina and Bella eventually make it to Lvov on their own, where Bella and Jakob get married in a secret ceremony.

A new scene involving Genek is added to the show

A new scene is added to the TV series, taking place when the eldest Kurc child, Genek, and his wife, Herta, are working in a Siberian labor camp after Genek is arrested by soldiers and deemed an enemy of the state. Genek didn’t disclose that he was Jewish and Polish before renting an apartment. At the camp, Genek attempts to get a doctor and time off for Herta, who is pregnant, but his requests are denied. When his food rations are cut after he didn't show up for work (a prison guard who originally gave him permission later denied doing so), Genek loses his temper and tells off the Commandant about the unfair treatment of prisoners in the camp. No such scene happens in the novel, though Herta and Genek’s son, Józef, is still born in the labor camp.

Mila leaves her job as a nanny under slightly different circumstances

During the war, Mila takes a job as a nanny for a German family, but ultimately has to leave. In the novel, she resigns from her job after her boss confronts her about visiting a seamstress, who is helping Mila to hide her daughter, Felicia, in a Włocławek convent under a false name. In the series, Mila is confronted by her boss after she takes her boss’s son, Edgar, to the park. Edgar is playing a game with other children, where they are pretending to be soldiers and Jews, and complains to Mila about having “to be a Jew.” Mila and her boss get into an argument afterward with her boss saying that Edgar “was accused of being a Jew.”

Both versions of the story see Mila’s boss hitting her over the head with a vase, and Mila vowing to never return to work there.

Adam goes with Mila to find Felicia after a bombing in Warsaw

One of the most harrowing moments in the show and novel is when Mila goes to rescue Felicia in the aftermath of bombing in Warsaw. In the novel, Mila arrives at the convent and searches for her daughter with Tymoteusz, the father of another child. In the show, Halina’s partner, Adam, goes with Mila to rescue Felicia. Eventually, Mila and Adam, along with Halina, parents Sol and Nechuma, and Felicia embark on a journey through the Alps to reunite with Selim, Genek and Herta once the family learns that they are alive.

Addy learns of his family’s survival while with different people

A touching scene in both versions of the story sees Addy receiving news that his family is alive, while he’s living in Brazil. In the book, Addy learns of his family’s survival while with his friend Sebastian, a writer from Poland, who also traveled with Addy on the ship Cabo de Hornos .

In the show, Addy receives the good news while he is with Eliska, his ex-fiancée. In the series, Addy and Eliska stayed in touch, even after they called off their engagement, and Addy began a relationship with an American woman named Caroline.

Why we can’t manage to work for less than 40 hours a week

Historian Gary S. Cross explores how leisure gave shape to the way we labor in “Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal.”

For much of the 19th century, ordinary workers labored for 60 hours a week, taking only a single day of rest. But as technology advanced, so too did the understanding of how we might best use our spare time. Soon, progressive organizations were arguing that a shorter workweek need not decrease productivity. Simultaneously, social reformers began to make the case for how citizens could use the resulting leisure, effectively turning time off into a public good.

Where once a 60-hour workweek had been the norm, the 40-hour workweek soon replaced it. Strangely, however, it froze there. The question of why it contracted no further is central to Gary S. Cross’s engaging and richly informative book “ Free Time: The History of an Elusive Ideal .” This invaluable historical study provides an account of the evolution of the working week over the course of the Industrial Age. Alongside that absorbingly told story is a detailed chronicle of consumerism that captures the welter of ever-changing gadgets and machines that define much of our leisure time.

Consumerism, Cross argues, affected the structure of free time in fundamental ways. First, it weakened workers’ desire for further significant reductions in working hours. A shorter day might mean lower earnings, and that would limit access to the consumerist products and experiences that now gripped them. The appeal of consumerism explains why the “genteel” form of leisure — a model focused on the higher ends of improving self and society — never achieved real prominence. Because pleasurable forms of consumption lent themselves to easy enjoyment, they were far easier to fit into the 40-hour week than more genteel activities.

Cross’s book has a few oversights, one of which is his failure to provide convincing evidence for his claim that leisure devoted to consumerism has proved especially dissatisfying. Equally curious is his neglect of the kind of vacation idealized in the image of lounging on a beach. It promises, if anything, a break with time, a rupture with the world of busyness. And it is among the most significant innovations in the use of leisure in the modern age, one that is fully commercialized and consumerist.

The genteel ideal is not, though, what it seems to be: something that, in the name of virtuous self-fulfillment, breaks us out of the cycle of repetition and stress that marks the working day. It does not depart from the norms of work as much, perhaps, as Cross assumes. It seems to me that it is a displaced form of work, albeit one we might like to call our own. Cross connects the task of self-fulfillment, found in genteel leisure, with slowness. But slow leisure needs to take shape within a project (since it is not capricious or momentary), and it aims at enhancing the self through the work demanded by that project. This distinctly modern view of self-making diverges from the idea of workplace labor, but not from work itself. Witness those supposedly enriching vacations spent visiting museums and sites of cultural interest.

And this brings me to the “work” ethic, which also warrants some degree of philosophical skepticism. A work ethic cannot merely mean a desire to work or a willingness to work. Indeed, Cross refers to Max Weber’s original formulation of the idea — an obligation individuals place on themselves in the hope of salvation. Weber’s claim is far from incontestable, but it does at least capture some part of what gives work a value beyond its ability to sustain a life.

It is, however, too easy to mistakenly treat the endless desire for work as if it were a direct consequence of an “ethic.” Indeed, the real cause — both of that desire and of its effect on our ability to enjoy the time we spend not working — is the training that begins in the early years. Children are sent to places of structured and task-oriented learning with set hours, and are rarely encouraged to do just as they like. Education policy aims, in other words, to form that most unnatural of species, the good worker. It leaves its mark, with periods of free time often boring and burdensome. That is to be expected when training succeeds in turning us into beings who are defined by usefulness.

This supposed work ethic — largely a training rather than a value, then — lends itself rather easily to the forms of entertainment that Cross finds across the spectrum of consumerism. There is a holistic connection between consumerism and work in the era of multitasking, in that the forms of experience are parallel, not in tension. Leisure today looks to an older generation like a bewildering array of multiple discreet moments of distraction.

“Free Time,” like all important books, both establishes indispensable new perspectives and invites reflections that go beyond them. The trends that Cross identifies seem to be here to stay, sustained as they are by plain commercialism and a pseudo-democratic dogma that there is no hierarchy of the forms anyone might “choose” when seeking to enjoy their free time. His book helps us recognize the less-than-innocent influences that have captured time that was once painstakingly liberated from work and converted it into little more than consumer activity.

Brian O’Connor is a professor of philosophy at University College Dublin and the author of “ Idleness: A Philosophical Essay .”

The History of an Elusive Ideal

By Gary S. Cross

New York University Press. 337 pp. $35

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Check out our coverage of this year’s Pulitzer winners: Jayne Anne Phillips won the fiction prize for her novel “ Night Watch .” The nonfiction prize went to Nathan Thrall, for “ A Day in the Life of Abed Salama .” Cristina Rivera Garza received the memoir prize for “ Liliana’s Invincible Summer .” And Jonathan Eig received the biography prize for his “ King: A Life .”

Best books of 2023: See our picks for the 10 best books of 2023 or dive into the staff picks that Book World writers and editors treasured in 2023. Check out the complete lists of 50 notable works for fiction and the top 50 nonfiction books of last year.

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Drake and Kendrick Lamar’s feud — the biggest beef in recent rap history — explained

Police are investigating a shooting outside rapper Drake’s mansion in Toronto that left a security guard seriously wounded. Authorities did not confirm whether Drake was at home at the time of the shooting, but said his team is cooperating. The shooting happened around 2 a.m. Tuesday in the affluent Bridle Path neighborhood of Toronto. (May 7)

Rapper Kendrick Lamar appears at the MTV Video Music Awards, on Aug. 27, 2017, in Inglewood, Calif., left, and Canadian rapper Drake appears at the premiere of the series “Euphoria,” in Los Angeles on June 4, 2019. (AP Photo)

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In one of the biggest beefs in recent hip-hop history, Drake and Kendrick Lamar are feuding — to the point that police were asked about their feud after a security guard was shot outside Drake’s Toronto mansion on Tuesday. But it wasn’t always this way.

Over a decade ago, the pair collaborated on a few songs: On Drake’s 2011 track “Buried Alive Interlude,” on Lamar’s 2012 release “Poetic Justice,” and on A$AP Rocky’s “(Expletive) ’ Problems” that same year.

That didn’t last very long. In 2013, Pulitzer Prize winner Lamar was featured on Big Sean’s “Control,” in which he called out a slew of contemporary rappers including Drake, J. Cole, Meek Mill, Pusha T, A$AP Rocky, Big K.R.I.T., Wale, Pusha T and even Big Sean among them.

“I got love for you all, but I’m trying to murder you,” he rapped. “Trying to make sure your core fans never heard of you.”

This image released by 20th Century Studios shows Noa, played by Owen Teague, in a scene from "Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes." (20th Century Studios via AP)

Drake responded in a Billboard cover story, saying “I know good and well that Kendrick’s not murdering me, at all, in any platform.” Shortly afterward, at the 2013 BET Hip-Hop Awards , Lamar took another jab at Drake.

Over the next few years, the rappers launched disses at each other with less frequency. Drake had other beefs with other performers, like Meek Mill in 2015, and most infamously Pusha T in 2018, where the latter rapper dropped “The Story of Adidon,” revealing Drake is a father .

In October 2023, J. Cole perhaps accidentally reignited the beef on “First Person Shooter” with Drake. He rapped “Love when they argue the hardest MC / Is it K-Dot? Is it Aubrey? Or me?” referencing Lamar and Drake’s birth name, Aubrey Graham. “We the big three like we started a league / but right now, I feel like Muhammad Ali.”

Which brings us to the current moment. Here’s a timeline of the developments in recent weeks — it should be noted that diss tracks between rappers often include exaggerated truths and unsubstantiated rumors for dramatic effect, and that police have not said the feud led to Tuesday’s shooting.

March 22: Lamar disses Drake on Future and Metro Boomin’s “Like That”

“The big three,” Lamar raps, referencing J. Cole’s boast. “It’s just big me.”

He references Drake’s 2023 album “For All the Dogs,” and also compares himself to Prince and Drake to Michael Jackson: “Prince outlived Mike Jack.”

J. Cole soon releases a response, “7 Minute Drill,” but quickly apologizes for it onstage at his Dreamville Festival in Raleigh, N.C.

April 13: Drake’s “Push Ups” leaks

Drake’s response is leaked and later premiered by DJ Akademiks. “You ain’t in no Big Three, SZA got you wiped down, Travis got you wiped down, Savage got you wiped down,” he raps about Lamar.

It also assumed Drake takes aim at Future, Metro Boomin, Rick Ross and The Weeknd — Ross releases a response track shortly afterward.

April 24: Drake responds with a second, AI-assisted diss track, “Taylor Made Freestyle”

Drake’s second diss track used artificial intelligence technology to include verses from Tupac and Snoop Dogg, two of Lamar’s influences. In his own verse, Drake accuses Lamar of delaying his response track because of the imminent release of Taylor Swift ‘s “The Tortured Poets Department.” (Lamar collaborated with Swift on “Bad Blood.”)

Tupac’s estate threatened to sue Drake in response, so he removed the song from his social channels.

Snoop Dogg responded to the news in a video on Instagram . “They did what? When? How? Are you sure?” he said. “I’m going back to bed. Good night.”

April 30: Lamar hits back with a nearly six-and-a-half-minute track, “Euphoria”

This is where it gets more complicated. Lamar’s “Euphoria” hits like an opus, unleashing a slew of allegations against Drake. He comes after Drake’s skills as a rapper, use of AI, appearance, racial identity, and parenting .

“I got a son to raise, but I can see you know nothin’ ’bout that,” Lamar raps.

The title is a reference to the HBO series “Euphoria,” of which Drake is an executive producer.

Lamar teases that he’ll go “back-to-back” with his tracks.

May 3: Lamar drops a follow-up, “6:16 in LA”

In Lamar’s next diss, titled after a time and location like Drake is wont to do, Lamar targets the company Drizzy keeps. “Have you ever thought that OVO was working for me? / Fake bully, I hate bullies,” he raps, referencing Drake’s record label. “You must be a terrible person / Everyone inside your team is whispering that you deserve it.”

According to Billboard, the song was produced by Sounwave and Jack Antonoff — the latter notably Swift’s longtime producer. It also samples Al Green’s “What a Wonderful Thing Love Is,” on which one of Drake’s relatives played guitar.

May 3: Drake launches “Family Matters”

Drake hits back with a music video and a nearly eight-minute response, in which he alleges abuse and infidelity in Lamar’s relationship with his fiancee.

May 4: Lamar responds with “Meet the Grahams”

Almost immediately afterward, Lamar releases “Meet the Grahams,” which begins with the rapper addressing Drake’s son: “I’m sorry that man is your father.” Lamar also addresses Drake’s parents, and “a baby girl,” alleging that Drake has a secret daughter.

He also labels Drake a “predator,” without elaborating.

May 4: Less than 24 hours later, Lamar drops “Not Like Us”

Hours later, Lamar doubles down, releasing “Not Like Us,” produced by DJ Mustard.

“Say, Drake, I hear you like ’em young / You better not ever go to cell block one,” Lamar raps.

May 5: Drake softens his blows on “The Heart Part 6”

Referencing Lamar’s “The Heart” series, Drake drops “The Heart Part 6” in response. In the song, which samples Aretha Franklin’s “Prove It,” Drake challenges Lamar’s allegations, doubles down on his own against him, and says that he does not have a secret daughter.

He sounds notably lethargic on the song — potentially taking a final bow with verses like, “You know, at least your fans are gettin’ some raps out of you / I’m happy I could motivate you.”

Review: The Opioid High of Empire

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The Opioid High of Empire

Two new books turn a spotlight on how the colonial past lives on in unacknowledged ways..

In 2019, when Britain’s Labour Party pledged to review the country’s legacy of colonialism, Nigel Farage, then the leader of the Brexit Party (now Reform UK), warned Britons against obsessing “about the past.” “It was a different world, a different time,” he said. Months later, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the Atlantic and amid calls for a reevaluation of revered historical figures with records of racism, then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson echoed this view. “We cannot now try to edit or censor our past,” he said. “We cannot pretend to have a different history.” For Johnson and Farage—and they were hardly alone—history was done, fixed, settled.

Smoke and Ashes: Opium’s Hidden Histories , Amitav Ghosh, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 416 pp., $32, February 2024; Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe , Sathnam Sanghera, PublicAffairs, 464 pp., $35, May 2024

Two new books, Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld : How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe and Amitav Ghosh’s Smoke and Ashes : Opium’s Hidden Histories , provide an elegant riposte to this view, turning a spotlight on how the colonial past lives on years after the dismantling of the British imperial state. Together, they also render for a general readership what, contra Farage and Johnson, academic historians have long known: that British imperialism continues to influence our world today in manifold—and often unacknowledged—ways.

Sanghera’s is a follow-up to Empireland , his 2021 bestseller on how imperialism continues to shape Britain, where he was born to Punjabi parents in the 1970s and now works as a journalist. That book, he writes, exposed him to “thousands of abusive tweets and letters” and “hundreds of suggestions that I leave the country if I couldn’t learn to love British history.” The volume and intensity of this racist abuse was so great that it “ingrained itself into my daily existence, becoming as commonplace as my morning bowl of porridge,” he writes.

Fortunately for us, instead of retreating, Sanghera’s response was to widen his canvass, moving beyond his homefront to examine the British Empire’s impact on the wider world and assuming, in Empireworld , the role of a globe-trotting archeologist of imperialism, dusting off faraway colonial footprints. What he finds could fill a whole new British Museum.

Sanghera uncovers the empire’s distinctive stamp on buildings, language, systems of government, even varieties of flora and fauna. He examines the impact of, among other things, slavery, indentured labor, and the opium trade, and his catalog of imperial legacies is dense and damning.

Sanghera recounts how British colonialism was “largely responsible for the environmental destruction of the South Atlantic island of St Helena,” where colonists first felled trees for “cooking, heating and the distillation of booze” and then sealed the island’s environmental fate by importing invasive plants; how it resulted in “present-day New Zealand losing at least 60 per cent of its forests”; and how Britons’ taste for mahogany furniture and doors, “which were fashionable from the eighteenth century to the mid-nineteenth, and that visitors to National Trust houses coo over in the twenty-first century, led to near extinction of the trees in the West Indies.”

No, College Curriculums Aren’t Too Focused on Decolonization

Critics of campus demonstrations are aiming at the wrong target. We need to study more history, not less.

The Indian Anti-Colonial Movement Never Ended

It’s where we actually are in history.

Yet Empireworld is more than a catalog of what happened. Sanghera is an astute observer of the way the imperial past lives on, twisting attitudes in the present. Take Barbados, where Sanghera was surprised to find no mention of slavery during a tour of a colonial mansion on a former plantation. The tour guide explained that one of the bathrooms did not have running water because the owners considered it an “unnecessary expense,” Sanghera writes, but the guide didn’t clarify that this was likely because enslaved people carried water for them.

That was just one of several elisions on the tour. Sanghera writes that it “felt as if the topic was being deliberately sidestepped.” The tourists who visited the plantation—mostly white, mostly British—simply “didn’t care,” the guide told Sanghera, and “are marvelling at the accomplishments of their ancestors.”

Politics shift, rulers change; centuries-old dynamics, reinforced with selective tellings of the past, are harder to displace. As Sanghera muses during one of his research trips: It “would be easier to take the ghee out of the masala omelettes I’ve become addicted to eating for breakfast in India.”

British ships destroy an enemy fleet in Canton curing the First Opium War, circa 1841. Dea Picture Library/via Getty Images

Where Sanghera ranges widely across the former empire, Ghosh, in Smoke and Ashes , focuses on one aspect of it: the opium trade. Ghosh started to research the opium trade two decades ago for his Ibis trilogy, a fictional rendering of the events in the 1830s that led up to the First Opium War between Britain and China. But in its concerns about the reverberations of the colonial past and the sirens they sound about the future, Smoke and Ashes feels more akin to The Nutmeg’s Curse and The Great Derangement , Ghosh’s nonfiction works on the history of the climate crisis and our imaginative failure to reckon with it.

The story, this time, begins with tea. Nineteenth-century Britain, having acquired a taste for the Chinese brew, faced an economic conundrum. It wanted tea, lots of it, but China was largely uninterested in British goods. This resulted in a trade imbalance, with huge amounts of money flowing from Britain to China. Imperial administrators wanted to reverse this tide in the British exchequer’s favor, so they sought to increase the flow of exports to China from Britain’s Indian colonies. Opium was the centerpiece of this economic offensive. The opium trade already existed, but European colonizers expanded it by an “order of magnitude,” Ghosh writes.

A series of drawings from 1882 show scenes from an opium factory in Patna, India: the balling room, the drying room, and the stacking room. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Under the British, opium production in India was transformed into a giant state monopoly, one propped up by what Ghosh calls “self-exculpatory” myths. Although China had banned the addictive drug by the late 1700s, Britain justified the trade by claiming that “non-white people were by nature prone to addiction and depravity,” he writes. British colonizers also claimed that the trade was simply a successor to an earlier opium enterprise under the Mughals—one that, Ghosh writes, doesn’t appear to have existed.

As China sought to crack down on opium imports, the trade led to wars and, ultimately, “to immense profits for the British Empire for well over a hundred years,” Ghosh writes. Britain’s victory in the mid-19th-century Opium Wars brought the empire control of Hong Kong, compensation for destroyed opium, and the forced legalization of the opium trade in China. Profits also flowed across the pond, as American capitalists, cut off from trade with nearby British colonies following their War of Independence, started to import Turkish opium to China.

This trade, as Ghosh shows, had an outsized impact on today’s world, from the global drug trade to modern India’s economy, where some of today’s economic problems can be traced back to the British opium monopoly. The Indian states where opium production was centered were rapaciously exploited by colonial officials, and they remain among the poorest in the nation today. Furthermore, he writes, many “of the cities that are now pillars of the modern globalised economy—Mumbai, Singapore, Hong Kong and Shanghai—were initially sustained by opium.”

An Indian police officer destroys poppy flowers being grown for opium production in Jharkhand, India, on Feb. 6, 2017. Sanjib Dutta/AFP via Getty Images

“Study the historian before you begin to study the facts,” the British scholar E.H. Carr said in a lecture series he gave in the early 1960s on the nature of history. Ghosh and Sanghera are, of course, very different kinds of writers; the former is one of India’s best-known literary figures, the latter a longtime journalist. They differ in approach and in their style of writing. What they share is the perspective of the outsider—outside, that is, of academia. Both rely on the works of professional historians to tell their stories. But as outsiders, they are also unconstrained by the rules of the academy: Both books roam widely, jumping from academic history to memoir to journalism. The results are works that are accessible, in the best sense of the word: complex stories, rivetingly told, that will appeal to a broad swath of readers.

They also do more than chronicle. “Britain cannot hope to have a productive future in the world without acknowledging what it did to the world in the first place,” Sanghera writes. This doesn’t mean grappling with reductive questions of the sort implied by Farage and Johnson. Indeed, asking whether the empire was good or bad, he writes, is “as inane and pointless as asking whether the world’s weather has been good or bad over the last 350 years.” Instead, Sanghera calls for a much more nuanced view of Britain’s imperial history. For him, this entails filling the yawning gap in Westerners’ understanding about the empire and interrogating “some of the common claims and controversies about British imperial influence.”

Ghosh, long concerned about our unfolding climate catastrophe—for which Foreign Policy named him a Global Thinker in 2019—sounds a broader alarm about humanity’s limits in constraining the forces it unleashes. “There is no better example of this than the story of the opium poppy,” he writes. “It is at once a cautionary tale about human hubris, and a lesson about humanity’s limits and frailties.”

Both Ghosh and Sanghera understand, as Carr also argued in the 1960s, that “the past is intelligible to us only in the light of the present; and we can fully understand the present only in the light of the past.” For Carr, the past and present were in constant dialogue, and the function of history was to “enable man to understand the society of the past, and to increase his mastery over the society of the present.” Empireworld and Smoke and Ashes fulfill this function brilliantly, looking back at the colonial past not simply to draw up a balance sheet of what happened but to understand the present and, hopefully, reimagine our shared futures.

Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.

Nikhil Kumar is a New York City-based writer and journalist. His work has appeared in the New York Times , Time , and the Independent , among other publications. Twitter: @nkreports

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Thomas McDow Pens New Book

Thomas F. McDow Associate Professor [email protected]

Thomas McDow and book cover with a vintage map

Congratulations to Professor Thomas McDow on the publication this month of his new book, A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History , (Duke University Press). Written with Edward A. Alphers, the book "is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses. It can also serve those who are training future teachers to prepare their own syllabi, as well as those who want to incorporate Indian Ocean histories into their world history courses."

From the publisher's website: "Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow offer course design principles that will help students navigate topics ranging from empire, geography, slavery, and trade to mobility, disease, and the environment. In addition to exploring non-European sources and diverse historical methodologies, they discuss classroom pedagogy and provide curriculum possibilities that will help instructors at any level enrich and deepen standard approaches to world history. Alpers and McDow draw readers into strategically designing courses that will challenge students to think critically about a vast area with which many of them are almost entirely unfamiliar."

Purchasing Information

“Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow provide a multidimensional map to guide educators in their Indian Ocean World history teaching journey. Thematically organized and pedagogically innovative, the student-centered digital technology assignment ideas are designed to bring the Indian Ocean World to life. These design principles will make Indian Ocean history accessible for educators seeking to go boldly beyond conventional world history or area studies by incorporating or recentering their teaching on this fascinating and cosmopolitan region.”

— Kerry Ward, Associate Professor of History, Rice University

“The importance and prominence of the Indian Ocean World for research and teaching is growing exponentially. The region offers countless opportunities to enhance and challenge students’ normative understanding of subjects such as slavery, empire, and the social and physical geographies of space. With this in mind, Edward A. Alpers and Thomas F. McDow have produced a vital guide that offers innovative teaching strategies with which to engage students.”

— Pedro Machado, author of Ocean of Trade: South Asian Merchants, Africa, and the Indian Ocean, c.1750–1850

COMMENTS

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Maya Jasanoff reviews "The World: A Family History of Humanity," by Simon Sebag Montefiore. From ancient dynasties to modern fortunes, family has long defined our past, present, and future.
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John Lampe's Balkans into Southeastern Europe (2006) and Andrew Wachtel's The Balkans in World History (2008) prefer southeastern Europe as a more appropriate toponym. Hall on the other hand, also acknowledges the nuances of the two terms in the book under review but chooses to use them interchangeably without making a firm stance on the issue.
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Review: Amitav Ghosh's 'Smoke and Ashes' and Sathnam Sanghera's
Two new books, Sathnam Sanghera's Empireworld: How British Imperialism Shaped the Globe and Amitav Ghosh's Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories, provide an elegant riposte to this view ...
Thomas McDow Pens New Book
Congratulations to Professor Thomas McDow on the publication this month of his new book, A Primer for Teaching Indian Ocean World History, (Duke University Press).Written with Edward A. Alphers, the book "is a guide for college and high school educators who are teaching Indian Ocean histories for the first time or who want to reinvigorate their courses.

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