A Very Short History of the World by Geoffrey Blainey

(Book Review)

Why I Read This Book

          I’m curious, does anyone actually enjoy these short history of the world books?  People who like history, people like me, tend to hate these books because we want to read about all the juicy interesting details that a book like this must inevitably leave out.  And as for people who don’t like history….well, they would hate this book by definition, wouldn’t they?

            But most of us eventually read a book like this because we feel like we should.  And indeed, although they’re not always fun to read, books like this do perform a useful function.  There’s simply too much history for all of us to become experts in everything, and at a certain point we have to resort to summary books like this to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.  (In my own case, for example, I know very little of the history of Europe in the period directly after the fall of the Roman Empire, and I know virtually nothing about the history of India, China and really all of Asia before the 19th Century.)

            So a book like this is useful for filling in the gaps in my knowledge.  Even if it doesn’t go into any details, it still would (hopefully) give me a rough idea of what was happening.

           

            But the real reason I picked this book up was because it was available on audio book. A real book requires some time commitment to sit down and read it, but an audio book can just be casually put on while I’m exercising or cleaning or doing some sort of other mindless task, and therefore I tend to listen to a lot of books on audio that I might never - have - read - in - print.

Background Information

          Although I’m just getting around to it now, this was an audio book I discovered 4 years ago when I was living in Australia.  The University library had a number of audio books on CD available for loan.  I copied several of them onto my computer, with the intention of getting around to them later.

            Some of these audio books I listened to and reviewed, like Turn Right at Istanbul by Tony Wright, and The Butterfly in Amber by Kate Forsyth , were, I believe, titles and authors not widely known outside of Australia.

            So it is with this one.  People on the Internet describe the author, Geoffrey Blainey, as the most famous historian inside of Australia, but to the best of my knowledge he’s not widely known outside the country.

            The frequent references to Australia and comparisons to Australian geography in this book, indicate that it’s intended for an Australian audience.  (Although, I don’t know, possibly there’s an international version which reads slightly different?)

            The book was originally published as A Short History of the World in 2000.  It was abridged as A Very Short History of the World in 2007.  The audio book that I listened to is yet a further abridgement—so it’s an abridged version of the abridged version of a book specifically calling itself a Short History of the world.  With a pedigree like that, I suppose I shouldn’t complain that the book seldom goes into details.

The Review

          Perhaps I would be harder on this book if I had read the print version, but there’s very little to complain of in an audio book.  I learned very little from it, and the author spent most of his time talking in generalities (some of them very questionable), but so what?  The book was mildly entertaining, and it kept my brain occupied for several hours while I caught up on various chores.  I’d say the book performed its function.

            It is, of course, almost impossible to write a truly engaging short history of the world.  There’s no time to get into the details and personalities that make history interesting, and a summary history, the impersonal story of faceless empires just rising and falling, is bound to be boring.

            To his credit, Geoffrey Blainey tries to alleviate this problem somewhat by occasionally slowing the pace down somewhat and lingering a little bit over the biographical portraits of some of the important historical figures.  But the majority of his book still has to be broad sweeping statements.

            History textbooks of previous generations were famous for trying to overload children with the names of too many kings and battles and dates.  Since then, the trend has been to focus more on how people in each age of history actually lived—what the common people ate, and what sort of clothes they wore, and what they did to earn a living.

            Geoffrey Blainey follows this trend, and this history is mostly a social history of the common man. 

            But as a history nerd, I almost go in more for the stories of kings and battles than I do for the descriptions of what people ate 300 years ago.  By the time I was finished with this book, I was sick of hearing about how people’s diet had changed yet again with the opening of new trade or the discovery of a new technology.  I think I would almost have preferred to have been overloaded with names and dates and battles in the old-school history textbook style.

            But that’s just my personal preference.  Doubtless some people will find Geoffrey Blainey’s approach preferable.

            The other big emphasis in the book is religion.  (In his introduction, Geoffrey Blainey highlighted how important he views religion is given how much impact it has had, and continues to have, on human lives).  Of the few times when Geoffrey Blainey breaks away from his broad view and goes into a biographical portrait, almost all of them are about religious figures: Jesus, Mohammed, Confucius*, Buddha, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  (If memory serves, Hinduism gets a bit overlooked, probably because there’s no one biographical story associated with it.)  Near the end of the book, Geoffrey Blainey notes how human society has moved from an intensely religious outlook to a post-religious outlook, and tries to suggest the reasons for this.  (This is perhaps another area where the book shows its Australian outlook.  Although Australia, England and much of Europe has entered a post-religious age, this is not true of all areas of the world, and certainly not true of the United States.)

            Another re-occuring theme throughout the book is globalization.  (It’s a theme that gets perhaps hit a few times too often, as Geoffrey Blainey keeps needing to tell the reader how each historical age was more globally interconnected than the one before it.)  The book ends with musings on how interconnected human society now is, and suggests that now for the first time in history, a world government may be possible.

            Reading this book in 2014, the ending seems to miss the mark somewhat.  As we are on the brink of an ecological catastrophe, the big question for the future now seems to be whether human society can adopt to the rising temperatures and mass extinctions.  But when the first edition of this book was published back in 2000, global warming and overpopulation were not as much in the news as they are now.

Nitpicks

          I caught a few factual mistakes in this book.  Some of them, to be fair, quite minor.  For example. James became the head of the Christian Church after Jesus died, not Peter as Geoffrey Blainey claims.  And Angkor Wat was originally built as a Hindu temple, not Buddhist.

            There are also all sorts of nitpicks you could make about interpretations of historical documents.  Geoffrey Blainey at times takes ancient documents too literally, not seeming to realize that ancient Greek and Roman historians often inflated their numbers.  Also he at times takes ancient religious documents too literally, reporting on the Exodus from Egypt as if it were an historical event.  (In fact modern archeology has cast significant doubt on the story of the Exodus and the conquest of Canaan)  The myth of Buddha is also reported as if it were real history.  Some of this may be because a short book like this doesn’t have time to get into questioning the established narrative. 

            Then there were any number of value statements or interpretive statements I disagreed with.  (Geoffrey Blainey says that the United States did much to spread democracy in the 20th century, but in fact the record is a bit mixed.  Although the United States encouraged democracy in some parts of the world, it overthrew democratic governments in other parts.)

            I’ve only listed a few example above, but there was a lot more that I disagreed with in this book.  I was constantly listening to this book and thinking to myself, “No, that’s not quite right.” 

            In the past, I’ve tried to make exhaustive lists of everything I’ve disagreed with in certain - books, but I’m not going to do that here.  Partly because details are bound to get fudged and oversimplified in a short history of the world, and partly because this was an audio book, and all of the words were just floating in the air and difficult for me to quote and reference them exactly.

            I’ll just say that I disagreed with much of the interpretations in this book, and leave it at that.

Footnotes

* (I know Confucius isn’t technically a religious figure, but his philosophy has inspired a religious-like devotion in many parts of the world, which I imagine is why Geoffrey Blainey includes him on this list.)

Link of the Day 

Noam Chomsky at United Nations: It Would Be Nice if the United States Lived up to International Law