I paid more attention to the main title of this book, and to the cover art, which shows the intricate geometric design of the Dome of Imam mosque in Iran, than I did to the subtitle (which is displayed in smaller type on the cover). But in fact, this is a new history of the world, and my mental picture of camels and sparkling fountains and mysterious palaces long buried in the sand were dealt with summarily in the first 50 pages. What Peter Frankopan has given us is a four-thousand-year overview of old-world history from an economic perspective. That is, he explains everything in terms of trade, commodities, and politics. You can go pretty far with that key, and I cannot fault his analysis: the book is a complete success on its own terms and was a pleasure to read. There is none of the sloppiness or overgeneralizing you tend to expect in a “new history of the world.”
Along the way, I was surprised to learn how consistently Persia/Iran (the latter name only having been adopted in 1935) has been at the center of world affairs. I enjoyed reading about the conquests of Alexander the Great, and about the Islamic golden age in the eighth and ninth centuries, when Baghdad was founded and became the richest city in the world. Frankopan notes that as empires rise they begin to draw in resources from everywhere; throughout most of world history, one of the key resources to be acquired was human—that is, slaves. During Baghdad’s heyday, a great many slaves were imported from the eastern parts of Europe, delivered by the people we know as Vikings. In fact, the words ‘slav’ and ‘slave’ are related.
After the discovery of the Americas and the reorientation of trade routes and the tapping of the great mineral wealth of the Incas, the power center of the world shifted to Europe, which then in its turn began to exploit human beings as property, not primarily in Europe itself but in the colonies and possessions its nations began to acquire.
Frankopan shows us how events in one part of the world could have surprising effects in another part. For example, would the Taj Mahal have been built if it weren’t for Spanish conquests in the Americas? Frankopan thinks not:
Shah Jahan’s lavish expression of sorrow at his wife’s death finds a neat parallel with that articulated on the other side of the globe not long before. The Mayan Empire had also been flourishing before the arrival of the Europeans. “Then there was no sickness; they had then no aching bones; they had then no high fever; they had then no smallpox; they had then no burning chest; they had then no consumption. At that time the course of humanity was orderly. The foreigners made it otherwise when they arrived here. They brought shameful things when they came,” was how one author writing not long afterwards put it. Gold and silver taken from the Americas found its way to Asia; it was this redistribution of wealth that enabled the Taj Mahal to be built. Not without irony, one of the glories of India was the result of the suffering of “Indians” on the other side of the world.
Histories of the world can often lose momentum as they begin dealing with more modern times. That is not the case here: Frankopan has fascinating things to say about how central the lands east of the Mediterranean were to world conflict. In the case of World War I, Great Britain was determined at all costs to hold onto its empire, particularly India. To this end, worried that Russia might sweep up Afghanistan and Persia as it continued to expand into south central Asia, England bought off the Tsar’s government by forging an alliance and supporting Russia’s claims to warm water access to the world’s seas from the Black Sea through the Bosporus and the Sea of Marmara in Turkey. Germany aligned itself with Turkey, which had different notions about who should control this channel. Add in the value of the recently discovered oilfields in what was then still Persia, and the stage was set for the peculiar chain of events, the belligerent raising and re-reraising of stakes, that ended with slaughter and stalemate. Having won the war, England and France divided up the Middle East between them, with England take the southern part (Iraq and Iran) and France taking the northern part (Syria and Lebanon). The greed and duplicity of the Brits in their dealing with Iran, and their sheer contempt for the people in this part of the world, were extreme and shocking. They owned the oilfields and refused to share more than a pittance with the people who lived above them. Their final intervention was the removal of the Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mossedegh, in 1953, this time with a big assist from the USA, which has since taken over the role of leading player in the “great game” of manipulating countries and governments for profit and strategic advantage. The fact that such efforts have so often failed in recent decades is relatively less distressing in light of the long perspective that Frankopan provides.
This is far from the only “new history of the world” that I’ve read in recent years. Some, such as Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, I’ve enjoyed immensely. Others, such as Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens; A Brief History of Humankind, less so. Silk Roads is an impeccable work that was a pleasure to read and very successful in describing the world from a particular perspective. You can’t deny that commerce and economics have played a dominant role in shaping world history.
But I think I’m going to avoid reading any additional “new histories of the world” for a while. Reviewing humanity’s progress at a rate 1000 years every 50 pages is a bit like flying over a country at 35,000 feet. It’s not that the information available at this scale isn’t interesting, it’s that it doesn’t really fire my imagination. I’d much prefer to be put down at a particular time and place: Francis Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America is my favorite example of this kind of history. For days at a time I could almost imagine being a part of the French colony in Quebec, with trading and missionary expeditions going deep into the North American continent, and the ferocious Iroquois Confederation just to the south in what is now New York State.
French is still spoken in one part of North America, but by any standard the French failed as imperialists. Certainly there were economic reasons for this, and Parkman probably did not fail to address this aspect of their history. But that’s not what stayed with me.
