The History of the World

by J.M. Roberts

One volume survey of world history, beginning with paleolithic era up through 9/11 and war on terror.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World History, Audiobook, Classics

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

John Morris Roberts, CBE, was a British historian, with significant published works. From 1979-1985 he was Vice Chancellor of the University of Southampton, and from 1985-1994, Warden of Merton College, Oxford. He was also well known as the author and presenter of the BBC TV series The Triumph of the West (1985).

Reviews

[AiK · Rating 4 out of 5]

Понравилось, что в данном научном труде есть история скифов и древних тюрков. Написать историю, которая бы устроила всех достаточно трудно.

[Libba Ti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Because of its enormous scope and relatively modest length, this book suffers from some appalling omissions, but read in conjunction with the Times Atlas of the World, 'Europe' by Norman D Davies and my other books of similar scope, it gives a fascinating picture of mankind's evolution from prehistory to the present day.

[Stacy]

My grandmother died last week, and this was one of her books that I was allowed to have. Even if it sucks it gets 5 stars.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

Putting together a history of the world that is inclusive, that has central threads that advance an argument without excluding all other arguments, and that is reasonably idiosyncratic, peppy, and readable would be quite a challenge. Mr. Roberts here did a pretty good job! This is a good refresher for every history class you ever took.

[Vincent Archer · Rating 5 out of 5]

A book that simultaneously frustrate you and keeps you reading.

The problem with an history of the world is that it will be very, very fast paced. There's a lot of history to cover, and so, you don't have much space to devote for any specific thing. Sooner or later, you'll get to disagree with author on the importance placed on specific topics. My main pet peeve is shoving the entire Mongol empire into a chapter dedicated to the Middle East (like "wtf?"). Or having a chapter that does simultaneously India and China pre-european expansion into Asia.

But at the same time, you do keep reading, because there's always a bit here and there that, if you're not a major history fan with dozens of books on different eras, you'll have missed. I almost put only 4 stars, but as I said above: if you're frustrated, but keep on reading anyway, it's a good book.

[Brigette]

May, 2014. Read the first chapter, fascinating, and want to continue...but this is a whopper at around 1200 pgs. Need to make it a project.
I wish all books were printed on nice, smooth pages like this one.

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent survey of world history. This helped me to discover which specific histories I would like to read about more.

[Annie Yotova · Rating 5 out of 5]

How do you cover the history of the world in 1100 pages or so? By being very careful in what you cover of course.

The previous editions of J. M. Roberts's book had been around since 1976 (for the first edition) and had long be considered one of the better one volume histories out there. For the 6th edition Odd Arne Westad rewrites the first and last parts of the book (prehistory had changed a lot in the last decades and adding the collapse of USSR and its aftermath could not have been done earlier) and revised the rest. The result is an uptodate book (or mostly uptodate - things keep changing with new discoveries).

You will not find a list of battles here or a list of all the rulers of a country or an empire. You won't find the list of political entries in certain territories listed anywhere. The book starts with an introduction which is important - it tells you how the authors built the book and explain what you are about to read. It is all about influence - an empire existing for 300 years and leaving no traces in the history or culture of the area (or outside of it); a ruler who was there for 10 years and conquered everyone will get more space than that empire.

The book is not a political history or a cultural history; neither it is the history of the English speaking world. If one believes their country to be considered the best in the world, they will get disappointed - while some countries have outsized influence, they are not the only ones covered and they are not just praised (looking at the British) and Americans may be a bit disappointed that until the very last section, USA is pretty much ignored - and even there, it is its foreign influence that matters so it is not that prominent.

It sounds almost disjointed in parts, it feels like it omits too much and covers weird things in detail but it all adds up to a narrative history that works. It has a lot of maps but I wish that there were a lot more (and even an Atlas to accompany it - with maps of the different areas in different times). It also can make you laugh in places - for example when the Portuguese and the Spanish split the known world between each other, the Pope agreed, all was going well and then a Portuguese ship swings too wide on the way back from Asia to work around some winds and hits land - and Brazil's history is changed forever. The way it is written is almost like an old joke - with a pun line and all. The serious and the curious coexist and the analysis added allows for connections to be seen where they are almost hidden.

It is not easy to summarize a history that usually takes 200 pages in a page (or less). Things need to be missed, priorities need to be set. And somehow it works here. It made me read more about a lot of times and places (and people and cultures) but it is a great overview. And thinking on what it covered, all the places and battles and people it actually covered, you wonder how exactly that happened on this number of pages. It is a dense text, it requires attention and the more you know about the history of the places and times you are reading about, the more you will see in these sections. I suspect I will be returning to this book over and over.

It is a narrative history - it flows as one story, parts relies on what you already read about before. While different sections can be read on their own, you will miss a lot if you do not keep what was already said in mind. The important comparisons and connections are spelled out but the details are not.

If you are looking for a one volume history of the world and you can read dense texts, this is a marvelous choice - although it requires a lot of patience and focus.

[Dan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"...all history is a selection; it is, in the strictest sense, what any one age finds remarkable in an earlier period, and expectation, legitimate or illegitimate, is only a part of it."

A dense doorstopper covering major human history from the Paleolithic era to about 2013 in a single volume. The stumbling growth and advancement of humanity is incredible. Westad in this edition is editing Robert's manuscript, and my major criticism is that since it is following the influential ideas, themes, and technological developments that led to modernity it has a notable European/Western focus. The book goes to significant lengths establishing Chinese and Indian civilization, then coasts through the centuries until the Europeans arrive. African and early American history is briefly touched upon. Japan gets a couple mentions until the Meiji restoration. My favorites chapters were Ideas Old and New and Revolutions in Science and Perceptions as they ran through the evolution of philosophy and science.

[Usama Albastaki · Rating 5 out of 5]

The entire history of the World in one textbook!. I think that Roberts has succeeded to include all as a story, not as separate ideas or just an outline. It took me a year and a half to read it. There were some interesting topics, but there were some boring points, possibly the pit of history that does not concern me or my region of the World. The story of the planet with the raising of civilizations included and what made them special: conflicts either those goes to military coalition or cold wars, trends in each stage of history from rasing of industries and arts to the end with the concern of pollution.
I read it so I can have an idea about what I am seeing when I am visiting historical museums such as the British Museum, and I believe that it serves its cause.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book kept my interest very well throughout. Due to the scope, it cannot spend too long on any one part of history. I kind of felt like they should have devoted twice the amount of time to the 20th century, WWI and WWII, but the author gave equal measure of attention to each area of history.

[Pierre · Rating 5 out of 5]

A seemingly exhaustive annotated table of contents in which to pin everything else you learn. Or perhaps more like a navigational grid that will be useful when exploring things in more detail.

[Héber Leal · Rating 5 out of 5]

De

[Arash Ahsani · Rating 2 out of 5]

A piece of propaganda

[Beauregard Bottomley · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author makes history come alive and the next minute of listening is as exciting as the previous. If I had one wish, it would be to be able to memorize this book. The book is overwhelming for it does cover over 2 million years of human history in one volume.

The author writes with snark which only adds to the story telling ("the coliseum represents the greatest display of violence until the Hollywood spectacles came along").

The book has a British slant and the narrator's British accent adds to the listening pleasure.

Listening to the book today (2012) adds to the experience because you can pick up on the 1989 perspective the author writes into the modern history part. Somethings that were important in 1989 are not as important as we thought they were and so on. It just shows that even good histories are a product of their times.

The beginning of the book until the 1800s is incredibly exciting and the author's snark is hilarious and adds an attitude to the story telling. The obvious biases of the time the book was written add to the listeners understanding of the real arc of history. There's probably not a better volume on world history than this book.

[Jeff Urbanek · Rating 3 out of 5]

I may have to revisit the revised version. The version I read in the early 90's was eurocentric at best -- although I read the whole book to get a framework and perspective of world history, he lost me when he said he wasn't covering African history, because world history was what contributed to the current European hegemony (I am paraphrasing from memory).

[Jason Kumpf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great historical overview of the world. Some type of historical overview of this, with the narration of what the events in history meant to the future, should be mandatory reading for everyone. Enjoy it again and again on audio. Its a bit Euro/Brit focused, so that lens is on, but I haven't come across another organized, well researched book as this so far.
Best Regards,
Jason Kumpf

[Gustavo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing unparalleled encyclopedia of human history. Worth reading and having around

[Michael Kubat · Rating 5 out of 5]

Weighty volume, well written.

[Clare]

on netgalley, but over 1000 pages...

[Ilknurerdogan]

this is amazing!

[Jayne · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading the 1993 version not the updated one listed here.
922 Pages

[Jesse Field · Rating 5 out of 5]

Roberts’ lifetime project is sure to be one of the most deeply affecting books of my life, giving shape and outline to the historical processes at work through thousands of years of recorded human history. “Distant history still clutters our lives,” writes Roberts in the preface to his fourth edition, “and perhaps even some of what happened in prehistory is still at work in them, too.”

What are these historical processes? Roberts finds a 6,000-year old tradition of increasing belief that humans can alter the environment to meet their needs. This belief seems strained in today’s world, but not broken. “Historians should never prophesy.”

‘Globalization’ is another historical process that has brought ‘clashes’ with Islamic societies for centuries. Students of history must realize that what seem to some like a new and unprecedented world of conflict is in fact the product of many shifts. (For example, if it was the inadequacies of modernity as envisioned by Islamic leaders like Ataturk that helped pave the way for today’s radicalization of some Islamic societies, then what we should consider is how that radicalization itself is a stage in the larger game.

Another such process is the increased presence of the state in our lives. Speaking to radical forces opposing states, including “ecology, feminism, and a generalized anti-nuclear and ‘peace’ movement,” Roberts avers that

[T]hey have only been successful when they have been able to influence and shape state policy, bringing changes in the law and the setting up of new institutions. The idea that major amelioration can be achieved by altogether bypassing so dominant an institution still seems as unreaslitic as it was in the days of the anarchistic and utopian movements of the nineteenth century.

These words of wisdom apply as much to Stephen Bannon as to Greenpeace!

Political democratization also seems a persistent force, though it drives forward helter-skelter, in fits and starts. In a section on statecraft in the UK during the early Victorian age, Roberts frames a narrative that says that with the electorate expanding, it was necessary for English parliamentary leaders to catch the ear of new sections of society, most notably the new wealthy industrialists who were inadequately represented by ‘rotten boroughs’ and so forth. Robert Peel’s greatest act as a Tory PM was to prefer the arguments of the industrialists with his repeal of the Corn Laws, a slap in the face of landed gentry hoping to keep food prices high and their way of life stable. A watershed moment of democratization was thus ushered to pass by a conservative, and one of the earliest and most paradigmatic of conservatives. (Roberts leaves aside that Peel took only small, miserly steps to actually get cheaper, subsidized food to the famine-stricken lands of Ireland. Expansion of the electorate also brought dogmatic trust in the laissez-faire principle of free trade.)

To write a history of the world is to summarize, and place keystone figures and events so as to highlight the perceived patterns of change and continuity. This is no doubt where the controversies of synthetic history writing mostly lie. A section on Freud, for example, contains this clever opener: “…Sigmend Freud…thought he had a place in the history of culture beside Copernicus or Darwin, for he changed the way educated men thought of themselves.” I couldn’t help but think of the recent essay “Freud: What’s Left?” by Frederick C. Crews, which argues that Freud was an incompetent, unoriginal, and likely a pervert and a coke-head. If Crews’ acidly revisionist view stands, Roberts’ portrait in History of the World will likely also stand, and remain the cooler, more reasonable approach. “He introduced several new ideas into ordinary discourse: the special meanings we now give to the words ‘complex’ and ‘obsession’, and the appearance of the familiar terms ‘Freudian slip’ and ‘libido’ are monuments to the power of his teaching.” That just seems true, and the formulation reflects on introductions from ‘teaching’ without touching on the veracity or originality of the thought.

Occasionally, of course, significant details may be omitted. In a discussion on US-Indonesia relations during the early Cold War, Roberts elides the Eisenhower administration’s distaste for Sukarno’s neutralism: “…he [Sukarno] leaned more and more on Soviet support…Yet the United States, fearing that he might turn to China for help, continued to stand by him.” (1051) A *major* footnote to this proposition is the campaign of covert operations against Sukarno, inspired in part by the desire within the nascent intelligence community to flex its new muscles against perceived “monsters,” or so says chapter 8 of The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles & Their Secret World War, by Stephen Kinzer. Perhaps Kinzer overplays the rapid increase of intelligence-based, covert warfare in rabidly anti-Communist 1950s America, but recent events such as the widespread adoption of covert operations by other countries of the world mean that Roberts’ omission is at best a missed opportunity. (On this subject, see also Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War by Fred Kaplan.) At worst, the statement on p. 1051 that the US “continued to stand by” Sukarno is simply wrong, giving us pause about other propositions scattered throughout the book.

Which brings us to the question of how to use the book. I hope to refer back to Roberts often as I continue to read history. Roberts is likely wrong, eliding, or just provides an interpretation I don’t agree with on many, many occasions, but those disputes are crucial to historical education.

[Belle Meade School]

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