The World

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.

There have been many histories of the world, but this one adopts a new approach, using the stories of families across time to provide a different, fresh perspective. It is one that appeals to me because it offers a way of connecting great events with individual human drama, from the first hominins to today, from the sharpened stone to the iPhone and the drone. World history is an elixir for troubled times: its advantage is that it offers a sense of perspective; its drawback is that it involves too much distance. World history often has themes, not people; biography has people, not themes.

The family remains the essential unit of human existence – even in the age of AI and galactical warfare. I have woven history together telling the stories of multiple families in every continent and epoch, using them to tether the onward rush of the human story. It is a biography of many people instead of one person. Even if the span of these families is global, their dramas are intimate – birth, death, marriage, love, hate; they rise; they fall; rise again; they migrate; they return. In every family drama, there are many acts. That is what Samuel Johnson meant when he said every kingdom is a family and every family a little kingdom.

Unlike many of the histories that I grew up with, this is a genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe but rather giving Asia, Africa and the Americas the attention they deserve. The focus on family also makes it possible to pay more attention to the lives of women and children, both of whom were slighted in the books I read as a schoolboy. Their roles – like the shape of family itself – change through the arc of time. My aim is to show how the fontanelles of history grew together.

The word family has an air of cosiness and affection, but of course in real life families can be webs of struggle and cruelty too. Many of the families that I follow are power families in which the intimacy and warmth of nurture and love are at once infused and distorted by the peculiar and implacable dynamics of politics. In power families, danger comes from intimacy. ‘Calamity,’ as Han Fei Tzu warned his monarch in second-century BC China, ‘will come to you from those you love.’

‘History is something very few people were doing,’ writes Yuval Noah Harari, ‘when everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.’ Many of the families I choose are ones that exercise power, but others encompass enslaved persons, doctors, painters, novelists, executioners, generals, historians, priests, charlatans, scientists, tycoons, criminals – and lovers. Even a few gods.

Some will be familiar, many will not: here we follow the dynasties of Mali, Ming, Medici and Mutapa, Dahomey, Oman, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Brazil and Iran, Haiti, Hawaii and Habsburg; we chronicle Genghis Khan, Sundiata Keita, Empress Wu, Ewuare the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Kim Jong-un, Itzcoatl, Andrew Jackson, King Henry of Haiti, Ganga Zumba, Kaiser Wilhelm, Indira Gandhi, Sobhuza, Pachacuti Inca and Hitler alongside Kenyattas, Castros, Assads and Trumps, Cleopatra, de Gaulle, Khomeini, Gorbachev, Marie Antoinette, Jefferson, Nader, Mao, Obama; Mozart, Balzac and Michelangelo; Caesars, Mughals, Saudis, Roosevelts, Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Ottomans.

The lurid coexists with the cosy. There are many loving fathers and mothers but also ‘Fatso’ Ptolemy IV dismembers his son and sends the parts to the child’s mother; Nader Shah and Empress Iris blind their sons; Queen Isabella tortures her daughter; Charlemagne possibly sleeps with his; Ottoman power mother Kösem orders the strangling of her son and in turn is strangled on the orders of her grandson; Valois potentate Catherine de’ Medici orchestrates a massacre at the wedding of her daughter whose rape by her sons she seems to have condoned; Nero sleeps with his mother, then murders her. Shaka kills his mother, then uses it as a pretext to launch a massacre. Saddam Hussein unleashes his sons against his sons-in-law. The killing of brothers is endemic – even now: Kim Jong-un has recently murdered his brother in a very modern way using a reality-show stunt as cover, a nerve agent as poison.

We follow the tragedies too of teenaged daughters, dispatched by cold parents to marry strangers in faraway lands where they then die in childbirth: sometimes their marriages facilitated affinities between states; more often, their sufferings achieved little since family connections were totally trumped by interests of state. We also follow enslaved women who rise to rule empires; here is Sally Hemings, enslaved half-sister of Thomas Jefferson’s late wife, secretly bearing the president’s children; here is Razia of the Delhi sultanate who seizes power as sovereign but is destroyed by her relationship with an African general; in al-Andalus, a caliph’s daughter, Wallada, becomes poetess and libertine. Following our chosen families through pandemics, wars, floods and booms, we chart the lives of women from the village to the throne to the factory and the premiership, from catastrophic maternal mortality and legal impotence to the rights to vote, to abortion and contraception; and the trajectory of children from devastating child mortality to industrialized labour and the modern cult of childhood.

This is a history that focuses on individuals, families and coteries. There are many other ways of approaching history with this span. But I am a historian of power and geopolitics is the engine of world history. I have spent most of my career writing about Russian leaders, and this is the sort of history I have always enjoyed reading – it encompasses passions and furies, the realm of the imagination and senses, and the grit of ordinary life in a way missing from pure economics and political science. The centrality of this human connection is a way of telling the global story that shows the impact of political, economic and technical changes while revealing how families too have evolved. This is another bout in the long struggle between structure and agency, impersonal forces and human character. But these are not necessarily exclusive. ‘Men make their own history,’ wrote Marx, ‘but they don’t make it as they please; they don’t make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.’ So often history is presented as a staccato series of events, revolutions and paradigms, experienced by neatly categorized, narrowly identified people. Yet the lives of real families reveal something different – idiosyncratic, singular people living, laughing, loving over decades and centuries in a layered, hybrid, liminal, kaleidoscopic world that defies the categories and identities of later times.

The families and characters I follow here tend to be exceptional – but they also reveal much about their era and place. It is a way of looking at how kingdoms and states evolved, at how the interconnectivity of peoples developed, and at how different societies absorbed outsiders and merged with others. In this multifaceted drama, I hope that the simultaneous, blended yet single narrative catches something of the messy unpredictability and contingency of real life in real time, the feeling that much is happening in different places and orbits, the mayhem and the confusion of a dizzying, spasmodic, bare-knuckle cavalry charge, often as absurd as it is cruel, always filled with vertiginous surprises, strange incidents and incredible personalities that no one could foresee. That’s why the most successful leaders are visionaries, transcendent strategists but also improvisers, opportunists, creatures of bungle and luck. ‘Even the shrewdest of the shrewd,’ admitted Bismark ‘goes like a child into the dark.’ History is made by the interplay of ideas, institutions and geopolitics. When they come together in felicitous conjunction, great changes happen. But even then, it is personalities who roll the dice …

A book of this scale has many themes: one is the shaping of nations by migration. We follow stable families and we follow families in movement or formed by movement: the great mass movements of families – migrations and conquests – that created every race and nation.

We follow both inner families and wider power families, often expanded to clans and tribes. The inner family is a reality for all of us in terms of biology, and for many of us in terms of parental care, however flawed; wider dynasties are constructs that use trust and lineage as a glue to preserve power, protect wealth and share perils. Yet all of us instinctively understand both of these: in many ways we are all members of dynasties, and this family history is a chronicle of all of us. It is just that the means of ruling families and what is at stake for them are more lethal.

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.

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.

The familial footsteps on Happisburgh beach were rapidly destroyed by the tides – but it would be several hundreds of thousands of years before the beginning of what we call history.