Millennium

by Anthony Coleman

This entirely new book has been especially written to accompany the ten-part television series Millennium, itself inspired by Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's internationally acclaimed book of the same title.

It offers a bold, colourful approach to the last thousand years of world history. Taking a global rather than a European or Anglo-Saxon perspective, it looks at neglected but fascinating corners of mankind's collective experience. It considers vast historical movements, but in vivid and telling detail, on a human scale, through the lives of remarkable individuals, some famous, some unfamiliar except to scholars. It evokes the past through brilliant imagery and through the actual words of witnesses.

Each chapter in the book, like each programme in the television series, is devoted to a single century and examines the key individuals, the technologies, the issues, the catastrophes, both human and natural, that seem to define it: Genghis Khan, terrorizing Europe and Asia and creating a remarkable empire; the Black Death, cutting a swathe through the world's hopes and achievements as well as through much of its population; the compass and the telescope, enlarging mankind's horizons; Charles Darwin, transforming the way we see ourselves; steam technology, powering the West's dominance over the rest of the world; and the technologies of our own century, enabling us to see our planet as a whole and to communicate globally in an instant of time.

Millennium is above all the tremendous story of how the diverse and separate societies of a thousand years ago became the one world we inhabit today, a collective biography of mankind as it enters a new era.

Millennium,the television series, travels back through the last thousand years of history in only ten hours of television. Filmed in twenty-eight countries around the world, it adopts a global perspective, highlighting the cultures of the East, of Asia and Africa, as well as of Europe and the Americas. Commissioned by Ted Turner, produced by Jeremy Isaacs Productions, narrated by Ben Kingsley and broadcast on BBC2 and CNN, Millennium is a unique television documentary which brings history to life.

This book accompanies the ground-breaking television series.

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999