Tamim Ansary:

As he eloquently states at the beginning, it is intriguing to realize that "the Wall of China going up has something to do with the Roman Empire coming down... the religious practices prescribed by the Prophet Muhammad had something to do with the Europeans acquiring the magnetic compass... the twelfth century conquest of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks had subtle roots going back to crop failures in Scandinavia centuries earlier... the policies of the Ming dynasty in China contributed to the American Revolution" (or, better, as worded later in the book: "the policies of China's Qing government did contribute to the birth of the United States").

The story begins with too-making humans acquiring artistic skills while other tool-making primates didn't. He doesn't find an explanation for this "oddity" and then turns to language and its immense influence on the development of human civilization (again, no explanation for why language happened to Homo Sapiens and not to other primates). He briefly summarizes the great river civilizations (which all histories of prehistory do) but also adds a summary of the nomadic civilizations that are often forgotten. This way de don't leave out of the narrative populations like the Mongols, the Vikings/Rus and the Turks, and the Indo-Europeans themselves. We owe these nomads the invention of the "horse" as a vehicle, and then the chariot and then the composite bow (far more powerful than the previous bows).

Ansary devotes one or two pages to each major civilization of early history. He focuses on Persia (Iran) during the Acheamenid dynasty, the first "super-state" (he places the conquest of Babylonia in 533 BC, whereas most historians use 539 BC). He doesn't quite explain why Persia failed to conquer Greece, which in my opinion is a key moment of antiquity (it may have had to do with technology, which is one of the weak points of this book). Instead he jumps straight to Alexander and that is useful to realize that Alexander basically rebuilt Darius' empire under Greek civilization. In parallel he tells us what was going on in India (the Maurya empire, which got even bigger than the Persian and Macedonian empires) and in China (the Qin empire that unified the Han people) Ansary misses a coincidence: Alexander, Qin Shi and Chandragupta Maurya were all very young.

Ansary spends more time on the Kushans than on ancient Greece, and that's understandable since he is originally from Afghanistan, but it is also welcome because too often history books are limited to the empires that left a lot of written documents, which doesn't mean that they were less influential. Ansary subscribes to the theory that the Roman Empire never fell, simply evolved, and emphasizes the role of Christianity (He uses 395 as the date when the Roman Empire adopted Christianity but i think it should be 380). The chapter on Islam forgets an important invention: Islam was the first major case of religious intolerance. To me, that was its most influential invention. Mecca had been open to all religions before Islam, but after Islam (and to this day!) it was open only to Muslims. (And i'm always annoyed when people refer to the founder of Islam as a "prophet" - that's an opinion, not a fact, and most of us laugh at these superstitions).

It is refreshing to read that "slavery has existed since there were people to enslave", something that most humans are reluctant to admit, pretending that the only case of slavery was the one publicized by Hollywood movies (the Atlantic slave trade of modern times). Just like slave trades were long-distance international trades that impacted multiple economies, Ansary talks about the other great trades in history, from sugar to opium and tea. The trade of tea is the one that indirectly led to the American Revolution and has to do with the fact that tea came from China and the British government had granted the East India Company a monopoly on the tea trade from China.

Inevitably, in a book that summarizes thousands of years of history in a few pages, many statements are left wanting. He writes that the Tang dynasty produced the first prose novels in the world, but we are not told which ones: the (short) prose romances of the Tang dynasty are famous but they are hardly novels, whereas there were famous Greek and Latin prose narratives from the first century BC to the second century AD (Chariton's "Callirhoe", Petronius' "Satyricon" and Apuleius' "The Golden Ass") so it's not clear why the short Tang stories qualify as "first novels" but the Greek ones don't.

Ansary makes a connection between the Ming printing paper money while at the same time ordering taxes to be paid in silver, but the Ming stopped printing paper money in 1450 and mandated the payment in silver in 1465... Incidentally, Ansary uses the Chinese name Huang He for the Yellow River but not the Chinese name for the Yangtze Kiang (Chang Jiang) which looks odd to a Chinese reader. He attributes the invention of the lateen sail to the Malays but i think that the Romans already knew it (just didn't use it as much as the Arab would centuries later).

Ansary summarizes in one line the fact that Pizarro easily conquered the Incas but forgets to mention that the Incas were in the middle of a civil war (and it actually took several years for the Spaniards to conquer the whole Inca empire). Ansary adopts the popular thesis that "germs" killed most of the pre-Columbian American population but, like every other promoter of that theory, doesn't explain why some populations (say, the Navajos) survived the European germs (i am not saying that i don't believe in that theory - i am saying that there's something we don't know about those germs). The idea that pre-Columbian Americans lived in a disease-free environment seems implausible.

Ansary is not fully convincing when he argues that the Atlantic slave trade was driven by the fact that sugar, cotton and tobacco "required intensive back-breaking labor" as if the traditional crops of Europe didn't require an equally "intensive back-breaking labor" and often in much worse climatic conditions. I think the difference was the ready availability of slaves in Africa (provided by the African kingdoms themselves). Europe already had its slaves (the peasants). America needed the equivalent of the European peasant and found them (at competitive prices and in large quantities) in the slave markets of Africa. Perhaps it is politically incorrect to emphasize that most black slaves were captured and sold by black slave traders (Ansary mentions it in passing when he writes "...who were captured farther inland by the coastal Africans...")

Ansary talks of the rotary press as "perfected in 1830". I'd love to know what he is referring to. I don't think rotary presses were used to mass produce newspapers until much later. Instead he implies that the New York Sun of 1833 already used one. See James Moran's "Printing Presses", page 177 and later.

Ansary credits Le Bon Marche' in Paris as the first department store, but maybe it was Harrods in London, three years earlier.

But these are details. Ansary's thesis is that there are "narratives" at work that guide the development of the various regions and peoples of the world. I am not sure i understood what these "narratives" are and he never explain ones in detail. Only at the end of the book, when he mentions Kuhn's book on scientific revolutions, i got the feeling that his "narratives" are what Kuhn called "paradigm shifts". Quote: "A new narrative has the power to draw a clamorous concatenation of people into a single harmonious whole".

The other thesis of the book is that geography influences the rise of a civilization. This has been discussed by historians for centuries. The truth is that Ansary does not explain how Greece's geography helped it become the cradle of Western civilization. His description of the Greek peninsula (at the beginning of the book) makes you realize the opposite: how unlikely it was that a great civilization would originate from that barren land that produced only grapes and olives. Nor does he explain his statement that geography helped England and the Netherlands in the 16th century (page 268): that very short chapter says nothing about their geography that could not be found in many other places. I am sure that location is important but often overrated. You can find many places in the world that have a weather and a location comparable to the San Francisco Bay Area but none of them has a Silicon Valley and most of them are underdeveloped. Historians have tried for centuries to prove that systems of thought, economies, and military conquests are influenced by the natural environment and failed repeatedly: the Alps didn't stop the Romans and the Urals didn't stop the Mongols, whereas the Chinese never reached Siberia. The truth is that no Egyptian of 3,000 years ago would have predicted that Greece would one day be rich and powerful. No European of 2,000 years ago would have predicted the rise of Firenze and Venezia. And no European, Chinese or Indian predicted that the poor English colonies of North America would become the superpower of the 20th century. On the other hand, land blessed with immense natural resources and with a strategic location (from subSaharan Africa to Siberia and to Brazil) have mostly created endemic poverty. But the myth persists.

One thing annoyed me about this book: scholarly books should not use the ancient Roman imperial system of miles and feet but the modern, scientific metric system.