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
