The World

Khmer/Cambodia: Ashley Thompson, Professor in Southeast Asian Art, SOAS.

Portugal/Portuguese empire: Malyn Newitt, Charles Boxer Professor of History, King’s College London; Zoltán Biedermann, Professor of Early Modern History, SELCS, University College London.

Spain/Spanish Empire: Dr Fernando Cervantes, University of Bristol.

Seventeenth-century England: Ronald Hutton, Professor of History, University of Bristol.

Brazil: Lilia Schwarcz.

Hawaii: Nicholas Thomas, Professor of Social Anthropology, Cambridge.

France: Robert Gildea, Professor of Modern History, Worcester College, Oxford.

Saint-Domingue/Haiti: Dr Sudhir Hazareesingh, Balliol College, Oxford; John D. Garrigus, Professor of History at the University of Texas at Arlington.

Netherlands/Dutch Empire: David Onnekink, Assistant Professor of History at Utrecht University.

Germany: Katja Hoyer.

Cold War: Sergey Radchenko, Distinguished Professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Dr N. Zaki translated Arabic texts. Keith Goldsmith read US sections. Jago Cooper, Kate Jarvis and Olly Boles helped in the early sections. Jonathan Foreman spent many hours discussing world history.

Lives are made by great teachers and inspirational mentors: thank you to the late majestic Professor Isabel de Madariaga who taught me how to write history in my first book Catherine the Great & Potemkin; Jeremy Lemmon, the late Stuart Parsonson, Howard Shaw, Hugh Thompson.

Thanks to the team who have sustained me: Dr Marcus Harbord for health; Rino Eramo of Café Rino and Ted ‘Longshot’ Longden at The Yard for blood-pumping cortados; Carl van Heerden and Dominique Felix for Spartan fitness sessions; Akshaya Wadhwani for high-tech. Thanks to dear friends Samantha Heyworth, Robert Hardman; Aliai Forte; Tamara Magaram; Marie-Claude Bourrely and Eloise Goldstein for their help on Côte d’Ivoire.

Thanks to my publishers at Hachette, David Shelley, Maddy Price, Elizabeth Allen; the heroic Jo Whitford; and to the brilliant Peter James, the king of editors; my former editor Bea Hemming; in the USA, the late Sonny Mehta, to Reagan Arthur and Edward Kastenmeier at Knopf; and to my superlative agents Georgina Capel, Rachel Conway, Irene Baldoni, Simon Shaps.

I dedicate this to my late parents Stephen and April. I thank my wife Santa, daughter Lilochka and son Sasha for tolerating three years of hermetic focus with laughter, love and tolerance: ‘One for all and all for one.’

Simon Sebag Montefiore

London

NOTE

This is a work of synthesis, the product of a lifetime’s reading, using primary sources wherever possible. Each subject here has a vast historiography, so to save space I list in the Bibliography the main works used in each section.

Names matter: ‘things in actual fact’, suggested Confucius, ‘should be made to accord with the implications attached to them by names’. The traditional academic style is to Hellenize eastern dynasties, e.g. Genghis Khan’s Genghizids. Unless they are actually Greek (Seleucids), I try to use their own names for themselves: I call Persian Achaemenids, Haxamanishiya; the Abbasids, Abbasiya. I try to avoid neologisms – mostly using Romaioi instead of Byzantines, Hattian instead of Hittite. I try to avoid anglicizing everything: French kings are François, Spanish kings Enrique. But if they are well known, I use the familiar: Cyrus, not Kouresh, Pompey, not Pompeius. In Ottoman times, I generally use Turkish rather than Arabic: Mehmed Ali instead of Muhammad Ali, even though this will displease Egyptians. I use Türkiye instead of Turkey: if ever there was an example of Eurocentric misspelling, it is that. For Chinese rulers, I use either their given name (Liu Che) or their posthumous title (Emperor Wu or Wudi); for the Ming and Qing, I use era names (the Kangxi Emperor, thereafter Kangxi).

For geographical context, I cite modern states, but this can be confusing: the Kingdom of Dahomey was in today’s Republic of Benin (not the Republic of Dahomey); the Kingdom of Benin was in Nigeria (not the Republic of Benin).

The chrononyms of world history are world-sized – Stone, Dark and Axial Ages, Great Opening and Renaissance, and a lot of revolutions; many now seem reductionist, old-fashioned and clichéd. But it is the historian’s job to classify and some of these are clichés because they are largely true.

Apologies for all inconsistencies.

INTRODUCTION

As the tide fell, the footsteps emerge. The footsteps of a family walking on the beach of what is now a small village in eastern England, Happisburgh. Five sets of footprints. Probably a male and four children, dating from between 950,000 and 850,000 years before the present. These, discovered in 2013, are the oldest family footprints ever found. They are not the first: even older footprints have been found in Africa, where the human story started. But these are the oldest traces of a family. And they are the inspiration for this history of the world.