Somewhere in my
childhood memories there is a strange book The
Story of Mankind written and strangely illustrated by Hendrik van Loon. It
didn’t fit with what I understood to be History: the Kings and Queens of
England; the wars in which We had beaten Them; and – a bit later - the heroes
of the agricultural and industrial revolutions.
Now that we have
Globalisation, the study of World History makes a lot more sense, and probably even
to children. Yuval Noah Hariri’s Sapiens:
A Brief History of Mankind is a splendid, fascinating contribution to world
history. I even indulged myself with the thought that it could be the basis of
a primary school curriculum, but then I remembered that I live in Ruritania
where schools hang out bunting for Harry and Meghan but would never do so for a
Climate Change agreement.
All the way through
this readable 500 page book, Harari springs surprises, getting us to see things
- with which we may be half familiar - in a new light. His most striking achievement is
to incorporate other animals into his narrative, both elaborating on how other
animals have shaped Homo Sapiens and how
Sapiens has shaped them. He doesn’t
say it, but in effect he makes a very strong case for veganism.
He makes a strong case
for a lot of things, and one of the interesting features of this book is the
way in which he is not afraid to venture challenging opinions even though they
are couched in modest prose. Especially in the early chapters, I felt that I
was having all kinds of preconceptions challenged, as when he develops a line
of argument to suggest that early hunter-gatherers (foragers) were (much)
better off than the peasants who toiled in the fields after the first
Agricultural Revolution – the one which took place long before Christ. He also
made me laugh with some very well aimed Ouch!
lines.
A world history has to
be extraordinarily selective, but I felt that Russia was unreasonably
overlooked in the account of Imperialism. Russia is interesting because over a
few hundred years it created an Empire by constantly expanding its land borders.
The Romanov dynasty entered the First World War with plans to extend those land
borders still farther – into Austrian Galicia and across Turkey to
Constantinople. Only in the case of Alaska and California did it create a
colonial presence which required that a sea be crossed. It also had its eyes on Hawaii, but fairly quickly gave up on all of them, despite the availability of some very good explorers, ships, and sailors.
The book is translated
from the Hebrew original, partly by Harari himself. I noticed only one occasion
when the translation is unsatisfactory: at page 287, we are told that “Darwin
almost became an Anglican pastor”. “Clergyman” would be the right word.
