History

When I started this project, history felt like a painting of infinite scale and detail that mocked any attempt at being understood. Before I could begin, I wanted to first find a way to make history more accessible and attainable; to light the way ahead.I found no better source of light than Gombrich’s A Little History of the World. In this book, Gombrich attempts to take history’s boundless painting and turn it into a simple child’s drawing able to be understood and appreciated by anyone. 

I have no doubt seasoned historians revile this book for its whimsical jaunt through time. Yet what this book lacks in academic rigour (it doesn’t even have a bibliography, the horror!) it makes up for in delightful prose. Originally aimed to be read by children, Gombrich is compassionate and lively, and his grandfatherly tone can be heard in every word. 

This book does an excellent job of reframing the reader’s sense of history, from one of an endless string of dates and names, to a collection of compelling stories that tell of our collective past. It serves as a canvas in which to place more in-depth explorations.

The big bang is the earliest known beginning, and the obvious starting place for this project. It has the seductive allure of being without a before, and I naively thought that this would make it easier to learn about. It turns out, the big bang is actually pretty complicated, not helped by emerging science around quantum physics and dark matter.

In Origins, Tyson and Goldsmith do not shy away from topics like cosmic background radiation, neutrinos and multi-verses, but it’s not what I was looking for as the first stop in my bibliographic journey.

Thankfully I persisted, and Origins progresses into more tangible territory, discussing the formation of galaxies, stars and planets. It’s here that I got sucked into the grand narrative of the universe, and learned how new elements are made (inside stars) and how they were dispersed across the universe (when those stars explode). The book finishes with a short chapter on the emergence of life on earth and speculates on the prospect of life beyond our planet.

After a rocky beginning, Origins lives up to expectations, and places our world in the context of billions of years of cosmic evolution.

Of all the books I have read so far, none complement each other quite so well as Tyson’s Origins and Fortey’s Life. Fortey gracefully accepts the baton passed down by Tyson and Goldsmith, and masterfully details the various stages of emerging life across the four and a half billion years of Earth’s history.

Life can at times be dense, and you quickly lose track of the various species that come and go as the millenniums pass. However Fortey also appreciates a good story, and isn’t afraid to draw on personal anecdotes to liven up the narrative.

It’s clear the author has an overflowing passion for natural history. Visions of shifting continents and earliest organisms “basking in the shallow seas in the late Pre-cambrian sun” paint an other-worldly portrait of Earth in its youth. It’s sometimes hard to recognise it as the same planet.

While the aforementioned Life featured dinosaurs in its sweeping natural history, I thought it would be remiss to not at least read one dedicated book on the impressive beasts that ruled Earth before us (and continue to rule the imaginations of young children everywhere).

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs gives an excellent, up-to-date account on our current understanding of the dinosaurs. Brusatte is clearly a pioneer in his field, and he successfully incorporates his personal journey to give it the book a human touch.

In saying that, I distinctly remember being overwhelmed by all the this-osaurs and that-osaurs throughout; it was a relief to stumble across a triceratops or a diplodocus.

While I appreciated the detail and rigour that Brusatte delivers in a short 350 pages, I couldn’t help but feel somehow disengaged once the novelty of the subject matter wore off. This is evidenced by not one dog-eared highlight throughout the book. I don’t think this is a reflection of Brusatte’s writing, but perhaps my preference for dinosaurs to remain in the world of my imagination rather than on the archaeologist’s table.

Out of all the books in this series, it’s this one that comes up most often in conversation. I knew I needed something that bridged the gap between the big vision of Earth’s natural history in Fortey’s Life and the nitty gritty of the first emerging human civilisations in the books to follow. Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel served that purpose, and more.

The book begins by asking a simple question: “Why were Europeans, rather than Africans or Native Americans, the ones to end up with guns, the nastiest germs and steel?”. I.e., why did some parts of the world develop faster than others?

Diamond presents a series of well-reasoned and expertly evidenced responses that transformed my understanding of how and why technological progress occurs. A fascinating read that, above any other book on this list, is one everyone should pick up.

I could not have asked for a better guide through the next chapter of history than Susan Wise Bauer in The History of the Ancient World and her subsequent books.

In this book Bauer makes it clear that classical societies like the Egyptians, Romans or Greeks didn’t just *pop* into existence. Civilisation, as it turns out, is rife with growing pains. 

Across 800 expertly detailed pages, readers witness the unstable evolution of human society, exploding into life one minute (often through the will of a ruthless dictator) only to disintegrate the next. It’s a dizzying cycle of birth, decay, death and rebirth.

It would have been easy to get lost in the monotony of dictators, wars and political takeovers. Yet the author also gives time to levity, taking a moment here and there to indulge in a humorous anecdote. One of my favourites is regarding one of Hammurabi’s laws which stated “if a man goes to fight a fire at his neighbour’s house and pinches any of his neighbour’s goods under cover of smoke, he ‘shall be thrown into the fire’”.

However don’t let that fool you into thinking this is not a serious work of scholarly history. The 300+ cited works listed at the end should be evidence enough of Bauer’s dedication to accuracy and thoroughness. Her achievement here is remarkable.

Bauer in these books doesn’t offer much interpretation, choosing to piece together the what and allowing the reader to make sense of the why. While some may find the endless stream of royalty and relatives, generals and usurpers tiring, it offers, in my view, a more accurate depiction of history. In The History of the Medieval World, Bauer allows us to judge the deeds of Constantine, El Cid and Charlemagne in the context of their time, before being mythified in our collective imagination.

Susan Wise Bauer complete’s her History of the World with this book, an account of events that occurred between 1100 and 1453 where “new currencies are forged, new weapons invented, and world changing catastrophes alter the landscape”.

Bauer’s trilogy numbers over 2000 pages, and one would be forgiven for thinking that such a trek through such a large swathe of history would be exhausting. Thankfully, the short, sharp chapters (similar in style to Gombrich’s A Little History) helps keep the narrative accessible and enjoyable.

Part of me was sad when I reached the end of The History of the Renaissance World and the series as a whole. Bauer’s unflinching record of the first 5000 years of human society has facilitated what would have been an otherwise daunting task, and the temptation is to want her to continue to modern day. Nonetheless, as the world becomes more diverse, typified by the discovery of a whole new continent in 1492, it was clear global histories could only take me so far.

By the ninth book, I had my fill of vast, global histories and wanted to make a step change. I desired to be inside the heads and hearts of some of the real people experiencing history on the ground. Crowley’s Conquerors does just that.

Documenting Portugal’s miraculous rise as a global empire through the discovery of a sea route to India, there is nothing more titillating to the human spirit than a wildly ambitious adventure into unknown seas.

Even though it was Vasco de Gama who first laid Portuguese eyes on Indian shores in 1498, it is in fact Alfonso de Albuquerque, captain the fifth voyage to the east, who is brought to life in these pages. Crowley credits Albequerque with a series of extraordinary events that “shook and shaped” the world. After reading the book, you can understand why.

Alfonso is given a near impossible task: to build a profitable trade network with a foreign people in a hostile environment thousands of miles from home and with no secure territory beyond the worm-eaten decks of his ships.

Albuquerque is a polarising figure. At times you hate him: for his treatment of the local population, his destructive single-minded obsessions, and disregard for human life. At other times Albuquerque demonstrates supreme leadership in the face of overpowering hardship. You cannot help but start rooting for the guy.

In the end, Conquerors portrays this long-forgotten commander as “incorruptible and loyal” to a fault, shouldering the impossible expectations of an empire and miraculously succeeding. Alfonso de Albuquerque vaulted a small, marginalised country onto the global stage, and connected the hemispheres of east and west irrevocably.

There are moments in history when the future rests on the actions of a small number of people in a select period of time. Where the fate of the world pivots on its axis like a weather vane in a gale. In Hernan Cortez’s case, the wind was not blowing in his favour.

Indeed, Conquest documents one of the most remarkable and unlikely series of events ever to be committed to history. It is also remembered as one of humanity’s greatest tragedies. In it, Hugh Thomas tells of the voyage of ~500 Spanish soldiers led by Hernan Cotrez as they journeyed into the heart of South America’s dominating native empire: the Mexica (remembered today as the Aztecs).

The Mexica were not a primitive people. In fact their capital city of Tenochtitlan, located in present-day Mexico City, was bigger in population than almost any European city of the time. The Mexica boasted a fully functioning mercantile economy, universal education, an organised military, system of law, yearly schedule of religious festivals, art and poetry. Upon entering the city for the first time, Cortez’s men were in “awe”.

This vision of a long-lost civilisation developed in complete isolation from the known world helps underscore the calamitous events that follow. Conquest is a true tale that still remains stranger than fiction.

The books so far have done well to highlight some of humanity’s worst traits: violence, hedonism, and desire for power. This book is a celebration of some of its better ones: appreciation for art and commitment to craft.

Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling is small in scope, covering the four years it took Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel between 1508 and 1512. This break away from burning and pillaging was a tranquil reprieve, although this does not reflect the mental state of Michelangelo himself, who spends the majority of the book in near constant torture.

Not just the physical torture of painting on a ceiling for months on end, but the mental torture that comes with attempting one of the most ambitious artistic endeavours of all time, on one of the world’s most important canvases, with little prior experience in the creative techniques involved.

Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling also offers indirect insight into the beating heart of the Renaissance era. I was surprised to learn Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael and many of the other ‘greatest hits’ co-existed together in the same place, at the same time. In fact one of the more dramatic scenes in the book tells of the painting competition between Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, in which both were commissioned to paint opposing chapel walls in order to determine who was the better artist. While the project didn’t get past initial sketches, it is a clear example of a period that often drifts into the realm of fan fiction.

This book was a wonderful hiatus, and served as a reminder that not all history is war and conquest.

As I was progressing through my history reading project, there was one topic that loomed bigger than any other: the reformation. I knew it was an important event that couldn’t be avoided, but I was also intimidated by its scale, complexity, and relation to ideas of religion and belief.

In his book, Nick Page cuts through this theological academia with an approachable humour and sarcasm that makes understanding the reformation’s impact not just easy, but fun! For example, throughout the book each reformer is treated to their own ‘Top Reformers’ card, in which they are rated by Influence and Theological Importance, as well as Facial Hair and Hat Quality.

But jokes aside, Nick Page is a master storyteller. His carefully placed humour is not just used to entertain, but also captures the imperceptible change of culture in a way only satire can.

The echos of the reformation are clearly heard in the books that follow, and A Nearly Infallible History of the Reformation does a wonderful job of detailing why it was one of the most significant shifts in human society ever.

Before they were trawling Silicon Valley for the next Uber, angel investors were mingling with the British aristocracy spying the next transatlantic voyage most likely to return a rich bounty from the new world. At least, that’s the mid-sixteenth century Britain depicted in New World Inc.

In this book, Butman and Targett detail the host of voyages that set off from British shores in search for profits, often to return with nothing, if they returned at all.

Rather than focussing on the voyages themselves, New World Inc. looks at the mechanisms that enabled their embarkment. This includes the founding of some of Britain’s first companies, including one you may have heard of: the East India Company. It’s within these sprouting organisations that the machine of business gets its start, featuring early versions of joint-stocks, dividend payments and hostile takeovers.

The book runs up to the landing of the first American pilgrims in the Mayflower, and is a prelude to the more glamourised events that follow. In that sense, New World Inc. feels less consequential than the other books on this list. Nonetheless, it provides context to the founding of America, a topic I hope to explore more deeply soon.

Authors of popular history often concern themselves with the main events: discoveries and dictatorships, the Henry VIIIs and Alexander the Greats. As readers we enjoy watching the drama unfold on the global theatre. But what about life beyond the spotlight? 

In the murky darkness exists an ever-present silent majority. We learn about the monarch, but we rarely get to know their subjects. What was it like to be a Roman or Victorian? Not just how they washed their clothes or what they learned at school, but more importantly, what was their view of the world and their place in it?

Trying to reconstruct the beliefs of a long-gone society is a daunting task, and it’s no wonder why writers often choose to elevate themselves above the humdrum of daily life with dramatic tales of heroes and villains.

By comparison, Keith Thomas is not afraid to roll around in the muddy peasantry. In Religion and the Decline of Magic, Thomas attempts to construct the changing belief systems of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It’s a thankless task. And frankly reading his book is a little thankless too.

This isn’t an insult to Thomas’ work. In fact Religion and the Decline of Magic is a monumental achievement. Some back-of-the-napkin math reveals there are around 2400 citations within its pages. That’s an average of 3 citations per page.

The reason is the author is working with raw data. Testimony from legal proceedings, medical notes by physicians, sermons of priests. Religion and the Decline of Magic attempts to connect a vast collection of tiny data points to build a picture of systemic belief in flux. It’s dense and messy, because humans are messy.

People believed one’s future could be determined by the size of their skull. That the monarch possessed healing powers. That the position of the moon influenced fluid in the brain. That amulets could reveal lost treasure.

It’s easy to look back at these beliefs from the perspective of modern times and assume people were just dumb. However Religion and the Decline of Magic posits that these beliefs didn’t prosper from pure ignorance. They served a social function, helping right the balance between the powerful and powerless.

What was the social function of witches, often depicted as widowed, crippled women? Well when a wealthy family were visited by one they would feel obliged to give money for fear of being cursed otherwise. Why were sorcerers hired to identify a thief through mystical ritual? Because there wasn’t a social system of justice in which to otherwise turn to.

What’s crazy is that it worked. People gave money to the poor and thieves succumbed to the pressure of mystical examination. Even more radically the book suggests magic ‘may have provided as effective a therapy for diseases of the mind as anything available today’.

It’s clear that we need academics like Keith Thomas. It’s fun watching the spectacle happening on centre stage, but every now and then it’s healthy to examine the writhing fabric that underlies it all.

Kant. Nietzsche. Aristotle. Descartes. Hear these words and your otherwise innocent conversation has turned into a pseudo-intellectual contest. Long-dormant phrases like ‘metaphysics’ and ‘teleology’ spring to life, and raging debates comparing the ethics of Hegel versus Hume ensue. All the while you try to recall that one video you watched on utilitarianism, and scold yourself for not having read Plato’s Republic.

In a situation like this, it can feel like there exists a bountiful well of knowledge that one is either too dumb or too lazy to access. I see those who confidently wield the ideas of Rousseau and Spinoza as being almost one step closer to enlightenment, able to engage in heavenly discourse while I watch longingly from the sidelines. I chose to read Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy because I wanted to know what I was missing, and find value among the ideas of history’s greatest thinkers.

This book is as good a place to start as any. Russell takes the reader on a tour of ideas from early Greek to mid-20th Century (the book was originally published in 1946), and covers all the famous names mentioned above and many more.

Russell’s writing strikes a good balance between complexity and accessibility. It is clear the author has strong views of their own, and his interpretation was helpful in digesting the rapid succession of abstract ideas. Those expecting a more detached account will be disappointed however.

History of Western Philosophy divides its chronology into three parts: ancient, catholic, and modern. Peculiarly, it was the ancients that engaged me the most; I found myself getting frustrated by the heady gymnastics employed by the more modern thinkers. It is a book that demands a lot from its reader, and I was fortunate that with some historical context I was able to push through the dense chapters.

With the book finished, what did I learn? Have I emerged from the well of knowledge an enlightened man? No. In fact I’d be hard pressed to recall most of the philosophy held within its pages. The one difference however, is now the words Kant, Nietzsche, Aristotle and Descartes are imbued with a little less power.

When I was 7 I overheard one of the older kids talking about learning this strange thing called ‘times tables’. I remember thinking: ‘Wow, I can’t wait until I get to do some woodworking too.’ To my disappointment I later discovered times tables have nothing to do with actual tables.

Yet we’re taught things like times tables and the law of gravity like they’re self evident. I can still see my jaded secondary maths teacher peering over his rimmed glasses no doubt thinking, it’s a² + b² = c², obviously. However we forget that for most of human history, these ideas were not obvious at all.

In The Clockwork Universe, Dolnick documents the origins of the mathematical ideas we now take for granted. Like how in the late 17th Century Liebniz and Newton both stumbled across the concept of using axes to measure change over time, inventing what we would now recognise as a graph. While trivial today, this was a revolutionary new approach to visualising data that led to some of the most defining discoveries of the decade.

Exploring complex ideas from their inception helps peel away the cult of expectation that can inhibit their understanding. It’s comforting to know that when you next struggle with a basic maths problem, at some point in time a world-class mathematician also struggled with the same thing.

There are few examples of books where the person finishing it is different from the person who started it. This is one such book.

The Dictator’s Handbook addresses questions which have long puzzled me: How do tyrants hold onto power for so long? Why are failed business executives still given enormous bonuses? In general, why is bad behaviour almost always good politics?

In popular culture we focus a lot on the perpetrators of these bad acts, painting the disgraced business owner or cruel dictator as singular crimes against humanity, and despair at how such people come into power. However The Dictator’s Handbook proposes these events aren’t anomalies, but logical outcomes from a system that incentivises their behaviour. We cannot rely on people in power to have good morals. Instead it’s the responsibility of the system to incentivise leaders to lead in a way that that aligns with their desire to hold on to power, and the interests of people they’re leading.

This book does not pull any punches in its pragmatic depiction of politics. But I believe it’s a truthful depiction that offers a new way to understand a complex world that rises above the daily politicking.

If you often find yourself disheartened by unjust exercises of power, this book can offer some justification, even if it taints the rose-tinted glasses.

The political framework offered in The Dictator’s Handbook quickly became useful as I muscled through three separate revolutionary conflicts: the English civil war, American fight for independence, and French Revolution.

Purkiss’ The English Civil War is the first time I noticed the role of media play a significant part in the events that unfold. Indeed, the author places blame on the sensationalist rhetoric of cheap, mass-market pamphlets for fanning the flames of civil war, expertly contrasting the hysteria existing in people’s heads with reality at the beginning of the conflict.

While the protestants fretted over Catholic plots and secret Jesuit armies, there were in fact only 30,000 Catholics in England out of a population of four million, and no brewing invasion. Purkiss summarises: ‘Civil War politics were often about heated reactions to propaganda’. And we thought fake news was a 21st Century notion.

After the first 150 pages, and as the civil war gets underway, the book gets less interesting. Doctor Who has it right. Allude to the notion of a ‘time war’ and avoid getting into the specifics. I find the particulars of war (who fought who when and who won at what cost) dry if detached, and a sombre slog if not.

That being said, The English Civil War does make an effort to humanise the conflict, unveiling personal stories and tragedies in a ‘people’s history’. While these helped prevent the book being a tedious account of one bloody battle after another, I didn’t retain much from it.

This filled the gap in my knowledge about the British civil war, but I’m not keen to return to the topic.

I dread writing a review for a book where I made no highlights while reading. This isn’t strictly a sign of a bad book, and is certainly not so in this case. For me, 1776 suffered from two problems.

The first is 1776, which in hindsight should have been obvious, covers the timespan of just one year. It’s a pivotal year, documenting the America’s separation from Britain and the skirmishes that followed, however it’s missing the context that surrounds the main event. Not being raised in America and having little pre-existing knowledge of American history, this made it hard to appreciate the gravity of the situation and become invested in the military stratagems.

Secondly, I don’t have the patriotic attachment to this ragtag band of Americans defying their rulers and declaring independence. It’s certainly interesting to see the birth of something now so large and powerful, and strange to imagine its existence once rested on a last minute decision by a general or the weather conditions on a fateful morning. But, I’m not jumping to my feet shouting: “Murica!”

When after reading this book you asked me to summarise the French Revolution, I would offer a sigh and say ‘It’s complicated’. Great events in history tend to get distilled into dramatic moments and famous quotes (“Let them eat cake”), making it easy to identify the baddies and goodies. When reading more in-depth, one discovers the swirling mess of history that involves a much wider cast across many more minor moments. It becomes hard to pinpoint when it all goes wrong or who is to blame.

Instead what we see is an avalanche of slight errors that build over time to engulf a nation. All the while jeered by a political press that “held the attention through the sheer relentless ferocity of their ranting and the waves of indignation and panic they could stir”.

Citizens does an excellent job of holding the complex pieces of its story in the reader’s imagination, and bringing them slowly together to form a revolution.