Is a historian hubristic if he sets out to write the entire history of the world? The task would seem near impossible in terms of the time and knowledge required. And history is unfolding in the events of today, so could the work ever be respectably comprehensive? Above all, because perspective is everything, what lens would be applied?
British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, best known for his biographies of Stalin and Catherine the Great and an authoritative work on Jewish history, Jerusalem: The Biography, has attempted to rise to these challenges in The World: A Family History.
“This is a work of synthesis, the product of a lifetime’s reading,” he writes in the preface. Written in 23 “acts” incorporating roughly 360 chaptered stories, The World spans about 5,000 years, from prehistory — or when humankind began to record events — through ancient times and to the present, including Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine.
Montefiore’s knowledge is incredible. He captures voluminous detail on every page. The intricacy can be mind-boggling, but if the prospect of trawling through a 1,300-page tome is daunting, know that The World can be dipped into without fear of losing any critical narrative thread. Even shuffling between centuries — Marco Polo one day, Marie Antoinette the next, then Mao — doesn’t compromise an appreciation of Montefiore’s storytelling.
Paradoxically, this prompts an obvious criticism from readers who value history organised around a central argument regarding seminal events. In its mammoth scale and ambitious scope, The World suffers from a haphazard framework. This is history in the shape of pop culture, maintaining a constant intrigue, page after page, of revelatory, often bizarre titbits, anecdotes, segues into random issues or bit-part historical figures, and observations on life. For example, he writes: “Many sons have loathed their mothers’ new husbands, but few have stormed their wedding reception” — a reference to Alberic II, who seized power in Rome in 932 by preventing his mother’s remarriage.
This means that what doesn’t gel is the writer’s attempt to incorporate “family” as a theme. His explanation — that family is the core unit of human existence, so it lies at the heart of all we do — is largely irrelevant. His subjects overwhelmingly act without much evidence of the family connotations of homeliness and affection. He could simply have said that an objective of The World was to embrace wide inclusion of the stories of influential women — which fascinates in its own right.
Montefiore’s tales are proof that civilisations, empires and ideologies dominate for what are, contextually, only short periods. Flux is inevitable
Besides, many of history’s heavyweights, such as 19th-century Zulu king Shaka, hated their families. Shaka features fairly prominently, his routine acts of savagery covered in more detail than his military conquests. He probably killed his mother Nandi in 1827, which convinced the kingdom’s powerbroker, his aunt MnKabayi, that he had become a madman and had to be assassinated. “Are you stabbing me, king of the world?” he taunted his killers as they committed the deed.
Montefiore rounds out Shaka’s story by noting that he was buried “with a slice of his buttock in his mouth to suppress the anger of his spirit”.
Except for the author’s oblique observation, referencing MnKabayi, that the Zulu culture admired authoritative women, this has little relation to the idea of family.
Without a convincing and cohering overall narrative, Montefiore relies on encyclopedic detail and frequent shock factors, including periodic references to protagonists’ sexual relations. History buffs may pause occasionally to ponder the veracity of all these stories. Is there an element of imagination from the psychedelic churn of a brilliant mind? As one example among hundreds, could the 15th-century German priest Martin Luther — the instigator of the Reformation and the founder of the Protestant church — really have been “vicious” and “fixated on faeces and sex”?
Evil intentions
The tales are also often littered with the bloodiness of fratricide, matricide, regicide, wholesale slaughter and carefully planned assassinations. There are regular mentions of foes being blinded or castrated — or both, as in the case of the 18th-century Persian courtier Taqi, who fell out of favour with Nader Shah, founder of the Afsharid dynasty.
Nader’s rule is covered in particularly nasty detail. Like all maniacal rulers of what we perceive as a distant, uncivilised past, he revelled in bloodshed. But fast-forward 200 years and the world experienced Adolf Hitler; and just 75 years after him we have Putin.
Montefiore’s approach succeeds in capturing how visceral human factors have influenced history. His tales are proof that civilisations, empires and ideologies dominate for what are, contextually, only short periods. Flux is inevitable, and the interactions of different cultures and migrations, the ties of trade and diplomacy, and the fractures of war are driven by the primal forces of human nature — people’s proclivities, faults, feelings and emotions. Because of this the book’s almost anarchic structure and style are compelling.
As a counterpoint to traditional outlooks rooted in established, Western-slanted histories, it’s refreshing to peer into the past in all corners of the world
As a counterpoint to traditional outlooks rooted in established, Western-slanted histories, it’s refreshing to peer into the past in all corners of the world. We’re exposed to obscure but influential figures such as Ganga Zumba, the King of Palmares, and King Ghezo of Dahomey. Zumba was an enslaved former African royal who escaped and established his own free slave kingdom in Brazil in the late 1600s. About 100 years later, as abolition was gaining momentum, Ghezo formed a crack 6,000-strong unit of girl soldiers who served as his shock troops, royal bodyguards and executioners — and as slave raiders, because, as he insisted to British envoys, the slave trade was “the ruling principle of his people”.
Some of The World’s extraordinary detail avoids guts and gore and is simply fun to read — like the story of the first documented female ruler, Kubaba of Kish in Sumeria in about 2500BC, who brewed beer and owned a tavern but about whom nothing else is known.
The first truly powerful female potentate, possibly the most successful pharaoh, was Hatshepsut in Egypt in about 1500BC. Despite her gender, she earned the title of “king” through “a bewildering display of sexual fluidity that the 21st century should find understandable”, writes Montefiore.
Overall, maybe the book’s real point is that historians take their field of study too seriously. The World is an innovative, perhaps unique, work, structured to mirror history: weird and wonderful, but ruinous and destructive; chaotic and unpredictable except in hindsight.
As if Montefiore could not stop writing — or in an attempt to draw the curtain on his vast cast of characters with a calming closure — the concluding section of the book is followed by a large selection of quotes from philosophers and writers.
This quote — by Russian literary giant Vasily Grossman, who witnessed the horrors of two world wars and then lived the rest of his life under the Soviet system — is particularly apt: “Human history ... is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.”
This is only moderately reassuring. Reading history to better understand the past is also about facing up to current realities. In too many parts of the world, including South Africa, this isn’t happening.
The World: A Family History by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Weidenfeld & Nicolson)
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