The World

In Europe and the USA, we tend to think of family as a small unit that is no longer of political importance in the age of individualism, mass politics, industrialization and high-tech – and that we no longer need families as much as we used to. There is truth in that, and in the later centuries, family takes on a different aspect, particularly in the west. When there are not prominent families, I continue to use character and connection to tether a complex narrative, but it turns out that, in our individualistic, supposedly rational world, dynasties have evolved but not vanished. Far from it.

During the American revolution, Tom Paine insisted that ‘A hereditary monarch is as absurd a position as a hereditary doctor,’ but doctors, like many other professions, were then often hereditary. One cannot write about dynasty without religion: rulers and dynasties governed as sacred monarchies, agents and sometimes personifications of divine will, a conviction that dovetailed with family to make hereditary succession seem natural, a reflection of the natural organization of society through lineage. After 1789, sacred dynasty evolved to fit new national and popular paradigms and after 1848, mass politics. Traditional religion – bells and smells – is less predominant today, yet our so-called secular societies are just as religious as those of our forefathers and our orthodoxies are just as rigid and absurd as the old religions. An overarching theme then is the human need for religiosity and soteriology, providing every individual, family, nation with a righteous mission that gives meaning and shape to existence. ‘He who has a why to live for,’ says Nietzsche, ‘can tolerate any how.’

In today’s liberal democracies, we pride ourselves on pure, rational politics without clan, kin and connection. Certainly, family matters much less. But most politics remains as much about personality and patronage as about policy. Modern states, even liberal democracies in north America and western Europe, are more complex and less rational than we like to pretend: formal institutions are often bypassed by informal networks and personal courts that include family: in democracies or semi-democracies, one only has to think of Kennedys and Bushes, Kenyattas and Khamas, Nehrus, Bhuttos and Sharifs, Lees and Marcoses, demo-dynasties who represent reassurance and continuity but have to be elected (and can be unelected too). Research in today’s USA, India and Japan reveals that national dynasties are replicated locally among congressional and state lineages. And then there is the growing number of hereditary rulers in Asia and Africa who – behind the cosplay of republican institutions – are in effect monarchs.

‘Kinship and family remain a force to be reckoned with,’ writes Jeroen Duindam, the doyen of dynastic historians. ‘Personalised and enduring forms of leadership in politics and in business tend to acquire semi-dynastic traits even in the contemporary world.’

While family has had different shapes at different times and power is always in flux, there is an opposite phenomenon to which it is linked and to which this book pays much attention: slavery. In the form of household slaves, slavery was an ever-present feature of family from the start, but this was the family not of the enslaved but of the slave master. Slavery shattered families; it was an anti-family institution. The enslaved families that did exist – in Roman households or Islamic harems or those like Sally Hemings and Jefferson in slave-owning America – encompassed coercion without choice, and often outright rape. One theme of this history: family for many can be a privilege.

This book is written at a time of exciting and long-overdue developments in history writing that are reflected here: an emphasis on peoples in Asia and Africa; the interconnectedness of polities, languages, cultures; a focus on the role of women and racial diversity. But history has become a sparkwheel, its moral power instantly igniting torches of knowledge and dumpster-fires of ignorance. One has only to glance at the hellscapes of Twitter and Facebook, hear their borborygmi of prejudices and conspiracies, to see that history is ever more fissile thanks to digital distortion. Part-science, part-literature, part-mysticism, part-ethics, History has always been important because the past, whether gold-speckled splendour or heroic suffering, however imagined, possesses a legitimacy and an authenticity, even a sanctity, that is built into us – and often expressed through the stories of families and nations. It can move multitudes, create nations, justify slaughter and heroism, tyranny and freedom, with the silent power of a thousand armies. That is why at its best, its pursuit of truth is essential. Every ideology, religion and empire has sought to control the hallowed past to legitimize whatever they are doing in the present. There are plenty of attempts today in east and west to force history into an ideology.