The World

The old childish history of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ is back in fashion, albeit with different ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’. Yet as James Baldwin pointed out, ‘An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in the season of drought.’ The best clue is the use of tangled jargon. As Foucault wrote, ideological jargon is a sign of coercive ideology: ‘it tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses’, for the jargon conceals the lack of factual basis, intimidates dissidents and allows collaborators to flaunt their virtuous conventionality. ‘What is at stake,’ asked Foucault, so often on point, ‘in the will to truth, in the will to utter this “true” discourse, if not desire and power?’ Baldwin warned, ‘Nobody’s more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart: for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.’ Ideologies of history rarely survive contact with the messiness, nuance and complexity of real life: ‘The individual which power has constituted,’ noted Foucault, ‘is at the same time its vehicle.’

Of necessity, there is much focus on the dark matter of history – war, crime, violence and oppression – because they are facts of life and they are engines of change. History is ‘the slaughter bench,’ wrote Hegel, ‘on which the happiness of peoples are sacrificed’. War is always an accelerant: ‘The sword tells more truth than books, its edge is parting wisdom from vanity,’ writes Abu Tammam ibn Aws, poet of ninth-century Iraq. ‘Knowledge is found in the sparkle of lances.’ And every army, wrote Trotsky, ‘is a copy of society and suffers from all its diseases, usually at a higher temperature’. Empires – polities of centralized rule, continental mass, geographical span, diverse peoples – are omnipresent in many forms; the steppe empires of nomadic horsemen that menaced sedentary societies for many millennia are very different from the European transoceanic empires that dominated the world between 1500 and 1960. Some were the work of a single conqueror or vision but most were conquered and ruled ad hoc, haphazardly and multifariously. Today’s world contenders are ‘empire nations’ – led by China, America, Russia – which combine the cohesion of nation and the span of empire with awesome, often continental, mass. In Moscow, imperialists, fortified by a new ultra-nationalism, control the world’s largest empire nation – with lethal results. The tournament of geopolitics – what Pope Julius II called ‘the World Game’ – is implacable; success is always temporary, and the human cost is always too high.

Many crimes have been neglected and concealed, and they must be covered in full. In this book, my aim is to write a nuanced history that shows humans and their polities as the complicated, flawed, inspiring entities they really are. The best medicine for the crimes of the past is to cast the brightest light upon them; and, once those crimes are beyond the reach of punishment, this illumination is the truest redemption, the only one that counts. This book aims to cast that light: achievements and crimes are chronicled, whoever the perpetrators were. I try to tell the stories of as many of the innocents killed, enslaved or repressed as I can: everyone counts or no one counts.

Today we are blessed with exciting new scientific methods – carbon-dating, DNA, glottochronology – that allow us to discover more about the past and to chart the damage humans are doing to their earth through global warming and pollution. Yet even with all these new tools, at its essence history is still about people. My last trip before writing this was to Egypt: when I saw the animated faces of the tomb portraits of Fayum, I thought how much these people in the first century looked like us. They and their families do share many characteristics with us today, but the differences are as great. In our own lives, we often scarcely understand people we know well. The first rule of history is to realize how little we know about people in the past, how they thought, how their families worked.

It is a challenge to avoid teleology, writing history as if its outcome was known all along. Historians are bad prophets but good at prophesying the future when they already know what happened. But historians are often not so much chroniclers of the past or seers of the future as simply mirrors of their own present. The only way to understand the past is to shake off the present: our job is to seek what facts we can to chronicle the lives of earlier generations – high and low and as broad as the world – using everything we know.

A world historian, wrote al-Masudi in ninth-century Baghdad, is like ‘a man who, having found pearls of all kinds and colours, gathers them together into a necklace and makes them into an ornament that its possessor guards with great care’. That is the kind of world history I want to write.