The History of the Entire Goddamn World
The World by Simon Sebag Montefiore
I mentioned that I was reading The World, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s narrative of human history from Sumer to Donald Trump. Montefiore is an engaging, funny writer—I was sucked in. Montefiore writes this narrative in chronological order, marking the passage of time with chapter headings enumerating the earth’s population. Just before he relates the rise of Islam, the chapter heading reminds us that there about 300 million people in the world (many of whom are in the Americas and won’t have contact with Africa-Asia-Europe for several hundred years). By the time I got to the 17th century in The World, I couldn’t put it down. I whittled down my expansive “reading now” pile of books to just two, The World and Tracy Daugherty’s biography of Larry McMurtry.
As I was careening towards the end of the book, I was startled by how delighted I was to read about an event in world history that I witnessed. I had to read 1066 pages before I stumbled onto this sudden sense of familiarity. Montefiore writes about how Cuba sent tens of thousands of troops to Angola to fight on the communist side in that country’s long civil war after it won independence from Portugal. And I was, indirectly, an employee of the communists, helping them prospect for oil in the province of Cabinda. When I was there in the mid-80s, the country was an armed camp. Some of our guys were accidentally shot at by government forces (they saw our small boat near the beach and assumed it contained South African commandos. The shots were all warning shots, thankfully.) This conflict politically had two sides—the communist government, aided by Cuban soldiers and Soviet advisors (the airport in Luanda was filled with Aeroflot jetliners and MIG combat jets), and the rebel group Unita, support militarily by South Africa and financially by the USA. But in a way, the communists also had the world-wide oil industry on their side (represented by Chevron operating in Cabinda). I didn’t work there long, but it definitely was the one time I had a front-row seat on world history. This chapter sent a chill down my spine. (By the way, the Angolan communists won the civil war, but Cuba couldn’t have been totally pleased, because the second the Angolan government won, they stopped being communist. UNITA vanished from history pretty much, and South Africa and the USSR really lost as their whole ideological reasons for existing evaporated with a few years.)
Given the task of writing a history of everything, how does Montefiore distinguish his history from all the others that have been written? His subtitle tells you his angle: “A Family History of Humanity. ‘ Part of this is a fascination with dynasties, which at the very beginning, as humanity was inventing writing and bronze-making, was how we arranged our governments. Ancient Egypt lasted so long that it managed to have 26 dynasties before they were conquered by the Persians in 525 BCE. China’s last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, only ended in 1912. (But the emperor, a six-year-old boy named Puyi, was permitted to continue living in the Forbidden City until 1924—the switch from empire to republic was not instantaneous.)
And these family stories are fascinating and, often, terrifying. Imagine you are a hereditary king in the medieval period somewhere in the world. For some reason (legal/religious/cultural/etc.), only one of your sons can become the next king. But you live in a world in which childbirth is very dangerous for both mother and baby. And even if you were confident that your queen could survive the births of your children, she may never give birth to a son. If you live in a country like England, you may end up killing or divorcing your wives until one can produce a son for you (as Henry VIII did). In China or the Ottoman Empire, you have endless concubines whose job it is to fuck the emperor or sultan and produce sons. And one thing you, as monarch, don’t want is for one of your concubines to give birth to another man’s son. So all of their male attendants are eunuchs, which perversely leads to eunuchs becoming a power center in those medieval courts. The world we live in today was partly shaped by the actions of politically-connected eunuchs.
To contemporary humans, eunuchs and concubines sound like a fantasy story. And while eunuchs guarding harems is (I believe) completely a thing of the past, world leaders continue to have mistresses and boy-toys, and Montefiore is happy to tell us their stories, too. And that is the other side of telling the “family history” of humanity—people like to fuck, and throughout history, who they fuck, why they fuck the people they fuck, and how they do the fucking actually makes a difference.
While outside Saudi Arabia, ruling dynasties are a thing of the past, Montefiore shows how even in republics and democracies, families might hold power for generations, and that power won’t necessarily be in one country. Obviously dynastic families like the Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Bourbons, etc., ended up as rulers in many European countries over many centuries. One family that Montefiore follows from imperial power to relatively high executive power in a democracy is the Bonapartes. Napoleon starts off as the scion of minor Corsican nobility. He becomes emperor of France, but was defeated and exiled to a remote island in the south Atlantic. But before this, he had ennobled his siblings. One of his siblings was made king of Holland. and he had a son named Louis Napoleon Bonaparte. Louis Napoleon was elected president of France in 1848, and declared himself emperor (France’s last monarch) in 1852. But he lost a war against what was about to become the German empire in 1870. That would seem to be the end of the Bonapartes as actors on the world stage. But some members of the Bonaparte family immigrated to the USA, and one of them, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, became involved with liberal reform Republican politics in the late 19th century and ended up in Teddy Roosevelt’s cabinet. Obviously Charlie Bonaparte didn’t acquire important political positions through the rules of dynastic succession. But these family connections snake through all of human history. Once Montefiore gets to the 20th century, he weaves in the family stories of the Putins, the Xis, the Obamas and the Trumps, mostly to demonstrate how the relatively insignificant progenitors were entangled in the histories their children and grandchildren would subsequently build on.
There is so much to say about The World, but I want to leave with one idea—one that seems irrelevant in the modern world, but which is one of the main engines of history. This is the ongoing conflict between nomadic people and settled people. Throughout most of history, the big conflicts between nomadic peoples and city folks have been in Asia. About 6000 years ago, some neolithic humans somewhere in what is modern Ukraine or Kazahkstan figured out how to tame and ride horses. Very useful for their pastoralist life, which involved moving herds of sheep or cattle from one feeding ground to another. But they soon realized that if you were on horseback, farmers couldn’t do much if you rode up and took their stuff. This was the basic conflict of early civilization—those nations that existed on horseback would continually raid farmers and towns. These nomads had civilizations, but they weren’t builders or writers. But fortunately for those of us interested in history, the cities and farms they raided had literate people. I remember the first time I read about the Scythians back in the 1980s in Herodotus’s Histories. Herodotus perhaps unintentionally made the Scythians seem like total badasses. Stable, non-nomadic civilizations like Persia, China, Greece, and Rome fought for centuries against such steppe civilizations as the Scythians, the Huns, the Xiongnu, the Sakas, and the baddest of all, the Mongols (who get my vote for being the most destructive civilization in human history.) But it is interesting that this never happened in the Americas until much later. We have a “steppe”—the Great Plains—but prehistoric native peoples had hunted all the horses in the Americas to extinction, so a horseback culture didn’t develop until the Spanish brought some horses over. In a few hundred years after 1492, an indigenous ethnic group, the Comanches, had become the North American equivalent of the Scythians. And farmers. whether Spanish, Anglo, or Apache, were who the Comanches raided. But nomads couldn’t survive in a world of gunpowder weapons. The arquebus, six-shooter and Maxim gun made sure that no nomadic people would ever endanger all of us city-dwellers. (Maybe as civilization collapses in the wake of worldwide climate disaster, the idea of nomadic nations will make a comeback. If so, my advice is to surrender as soon as you see them on the horizon.)
[Please consider supporting this publication by becoming a patron, and you can also support it by patronizing our online store. And one more way to support this work is to buy books through The Great God Pan is Dead’s bookstore. ]