The World

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is a world history that I wrote during the menacing times of Covid lockdown and Russian invasion of Ukraine. There are a million ways to do such a thing; hundreds of historians, starting in ancient times, have done it their way; most universities now have professors of world history and scores of such works are published annually, many of them brilliant, and I have tried to read them all. No book is easy to write, world history harder than most. ‘Words and ideas pour out of my head,’ wrote Ibn Khaldun composing his world history, ‘like cream into a churn.’ There has been much cream and much churning in the writing of this.

I have always wanted to write an intimate, human history like this, in some ways a new approach, in some ways a traditional one, which is the fruit of a lifetime of study and travels. I have been lucky enough to visit many of the places in this history, to witness wars and coups that play a part in it, and to have conversations with a few characters who have played roles on the world stage.

When I was eleven, my father, a thoughtful medical doctor, gave me an abridged version of the now pungently unfashionable Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History. ‘Maybe one day,’ he said, ‘you’ll write something like this,’ and I spent hours reading histories of places and times that were not taught at my English school, where study of the Tudors and Nazis dominated.

This book has given me the greatest satisfaction of my writing life, and presented the most daunting challenge. But I have suffered much less than many other historians. Ibn Khaldun saw both his parents perish of the plague. Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his History of the World while waiting to be executed, a condition that surely fostered the required perspective. But he was beheaded before finishing (an unbearable thought). History has a special, almost mystic power to shape (and, if abused, to distort) the present: that’s what makes history-writing an essential and noble – but dangerous – profession. Sima Qian, the Chinese world historian (born circa 145 BC), was accused of defaming the emperor and given a choice between execution and becoming a palace eunuch. He opted for castration so that he could complete his history: ‘before I had finished my rough manuscript, I met with this calamity … If it may be handed down to men who will appreciate it, and penetrate to the villages and great cities, then though I should suffer a thousand mutilations, what regret should I have?’ Every historian, every writer shares that dream. Sima Qian was in my thoughts as I wrote …

Among living historians, a galaxy of distinguished, brilliant scholars have read, discussed and corrected all or part of this book: thank you to Dominic Lieven, Professor of International History, LSE; Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History, Oxford; Olivette Otele, Professor of the Legacies and Memory of Slavery, SOAS; Thomas Levenson, Professor of Science Writing, MIT; Sir Simon Schama, Professor of History and Art History, Columbia Univeristy; David Abulafia, Professor Emeritus of Mediterranean History, Cambridge University; Abigail Green, Professor of Modern European History, Oxford.

Dr Henry Kissinger, US Secretary of State 1973–7, read his period; I had the honour to talk about the creation of the internet with Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Rosemary Berners-Lee. Thanks to Ben Okri.

Thanks to the following for correcting these specific subjects:

Africa: Luke Pepera.

Americas: (USA) Annette Gordon-Reed, Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History, Harvard Law School; Andrew Preston, Professor of American History, Cambridge University; (Mesoamerica/South America) Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Penn State College of Liberal Arts; (Brazil) Lilia Schwarcz, Professor of Anthropology, University of São Paulo.

China: (early) Michael Nylan, Professor, East Asian Studies, Berkeley University; (Qin onwards) Mark C. Elliott, Mark Schwartz Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History, Harvard University.

Genetics/DNA: Dr Adam Rutherford.

Greeks: Roderick Beaton, Emeritus Koraes Professor of Modern Greek & Byzantine History, King’s College, London.

India/South Asia: Tirthankar Roy, Professor in Economic History, LSE; Dr Tripurdaman Singh, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, School of Advanced Studies, London University; William Dalrymple; Dr Sushma Jansari, Curator, South Asia Collections, British Museum; Dr Imma Ramos, Curator, South Asia Collections, British Museum; Dr Katherine Schofield, Senior Lecturer in South Asian Music and History, King’s College London.

Iran: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor in Ancient History, Cardiff University.

Japan: Dr Christopher Harding, Senior Lecturer, Asian History, Edinburgh University.

Ukraine: Serhii Plokhy, Mykhailo Hrushevsky Professor of Ukrainian History, Harvard University

My thanks to the following for their corrections in subjects presented chronologically:

Prehistory: Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader, Human Evolution, Natural History Museum; (Sumeria/Mesopotamia) Augusta McMahon, Professor of Mesopotamian Archaeology, Cambridge; Dr John MacGinnis, Department of Middle East, British Museum.

Ancient Egypt: Salima Ikhram, Professor of Egyptology, American University in Cairo.

Ancient Rome: Greg Woolf, Ronald J. Mellor Chair of Ancient History at University of California.

Silk Roads: Peter Frankopan.

Byzantium: Jonathan Harris, Professor of the History of Byzantium, Royal Holloway, University of London; Peter Frankopan.

Vikings: Neil Price, Professor of Archaeology, University of Uppsala.

Kyivan Rus/Muscovy: Dr Sergei Bogatyrev, Associate Professor, University College London (author of a forthcoming book on familial memory in Kyivan Rus).

Medieval Europe/Normans: Robert Bartlett, Emeritus Professor, St Andrews University.

Mongols: Timothy May, Professor of Central Eurasian History, University of North Georgia.

Incas and Aztecs: Matthew Restall, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Colonial Latin American History, Penn State College of Liberal Arts.

Ethiopia: Dr Mai Musié, postdoctoral researcher in Race and Ethnicity in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, Oxford University; Dr Verena Krebs, Ruhr-University Bochum; Dr Adam Simmons, Nottingham Trent University; Dr Bar Kribus, Hebrew University, Jerusalem.

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