Simon Sebag Montefiore – ‘The World: A Family History’
The enormously popular and prolific historian returns with another audacious volume. ‘The World: A Family History’ is a lengthy doorstop of a tome, totalling over 1,200 pages. It spans the entirety of human history in twenty-three acts from around 5,400 BC to the modern era. Under the sub-title of each act, the author gives the world population at the time. It is a startling reminder of how few people there have been throughout most of human history, until very recently. Necessarily, ‘The World: A Family History’ is not a detailed study of any particular period, but rather it attempts to unite world events, pairing, for example, the Roman Empire with contemporaneous events during the Chinese Han dynasty. Its broad sweep encompasses the reigns of Alexander the Great and Donald Trump, with references to many world events in between. There is some focus on modern history, since the last quarter of the book deals with the Twentieth Century onwards. But those with an interest in other eras of human history will find chapters to satisfy. However, the author’s intention is to offer a relatively concise, grand unifying narrative of the major world events that have shaped human history, and in that, he succeeds. Whether writing on Stalin, Jerusalem or the Romanovs, subjects that have previously occupied his attention, Simon Sebag Montefiore is always a compelling author, bringing out the human story in his narrative.
As a classicist, I was especially captivated by the chapters on antiquity which occupy most of the first sixth of the book, from the Ancient Athenian wars against the Persians and the emergence of Alexander the Great through to the Roman Republic and, later, Empire. The story of Tiberius’ reign is interrupted by the execution in remote outpost Judea of Jesus, a Jewish prophet, whose teachings would later become the foundation of Western civilisation. Understandably, Montefiore concentrates on the rulers and emperors who were the most interesting, either the good emperors, who impressed through their achievements, or the bad emperors such as Caligula, Nero and Commodus, whose psychotic personalities and misdeeds became the stuff of legend. Buy Simon Sebag Montefiore’s ‘The World: A Family History‘.
