Book Review: A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium by Chris Harman

”I have had many people ask me if there is a book which does for world history what my book A People’s History of the United States does for this country. I always respond that I know of only one book that accomplishes this extremely difficult task, and that is Chris Harman’s A People’s History of the World.”               Howard Zinn

“History is about the sequence of events that led to the lives we lead today. It is the story of how we came to be ourselves.”                Chris Harman

‘Chris Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals. Interacting with the forces of technological change as well as the impact of powerful individuals and revolutionary ideas, these societies have engendered events familiar to every school child – from the empires of antiquity to the world wars of the twentieth century.
In a bravura conclusion, Chris Harman exposes the reductive complacency of contemporary capitalism, and asks, in a world riven as never before by suffering and inequality, why we imagine that it can – or should – survive much longer. Ambitious, provocative and invigorating, A People’s History of the World delivers a vital corrective to traditional history, as well as a powerful sense of the deep currents of humanity which surge beneath the froth of government.’

“The left … has few accounts which convey as well as this book does the broad sweep of human history.”         Robin Blackburn, author of The Making of New World Slavery and Age Shock: How Finance Is Failing Us.

‘Chris Harman is the author of numerous books including The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After and The Last Revolution: Germany 1918-23.’

The book is divided up into the following sections:

• Introduction
• Part one: The rise of class societies
• Part two: The ancient world
• Part three: The ‘Middle Ages’
• Part four: The great transformation
• Part five: The spread of the new order
• Part six: The world turned upside down
• Part seven: The century of hope and horror
• Conclusion: Illusion of the epoch
• Notes
• Glossary
• Further Reading
• Index

Chris Harman died in November 2009 aged 67. I do not know when he started writing this book but I get the impression that it must have been his complete life’s work. To have read so many documents, books, articles etc that are referenced in this mighty tome, he must have started reading and collating at an early age and then finally compiling the book which was first published in 1999. It is an absolute gem of a book that fills in the gaping holes that are present in most people’s knowledge of history. It inspires the reader to read more widely and provides the tools to do this via its extensive Notes and Further Reading sections. I knew very little about the Jacobins before reading this book; whilst reading it I went out and bought “The Black Jacobins” by CLR James.

When thinking about writing a book review for Z-Net, I came across the following review by Richard Seymour published in The New Statesman magazine. It says everything that I felt about the book but in a way that I would not have been able to express in words. I will not attempt to re-invent the wheel…   

Taking apart the west

Richard Seymour
Published 24 July 2008
A People's History of the World Chris Harman

A People's History of the World is the first attempt to provide a single, accessible, grass-roots account of the development of human civilisation. The stories of civilisation that have become popular in the era of the "war on terror" usually come with an arid essentialism. We are told there is a discrete entity called "the west", whose ascent is, as the historian Eric Wolf sardonically put it, a "moral success story" in which the peerless west defeats all-comers by virtue of certain "values" that often prove to be the credenda of neocon servatism. The counterpart to such Spenglerian mysticism is the strident celebration of capitalism and the colonial system through which it spread. Niall Ferguson is an avatar of this tendency. Chris Harman's popular history is a vital antidote to these trends.
From the Neolithic revolution to Y2K, A People's History is a dizzying tale of change "from below", with political, economic and cultural narratives interwoven, and occasional pauses to point out intriguing theoretical vistas. Taking pains to upset received opinion, Harman asserts that class societies are neither natural nor a long-term feature of human history. The first such, he argues, emerged after prolonged struggle, after the agricultural revolution that took place in the Fertile Crescent 10,000 years ago. Describing the rise of the ancient world, Harman resists commonplace Eurocentrism, showing how similar environmental and technological pressures were at work in creating precocious civilisations in India, China, Greece and Rome. If the latter were novel, it was partly because of their unusual dependence on slave labour. He resists the fashionable temptation to exalt Roman civilisation, which he argues was largely parasitic on Greek technology and culture, and whose wealth and power derived from barbaric overland expansion.
Against the view that the feudal period was one of stasis, Harman emphasises its dynamism. On the Reformation, he properly highlights the social interests embodied in it rather than reducing it to a battle of ideas. And the Islamic contribution to Enlightenment thought is duly registered in a way that frustrates attempts to claim the Enlightenment for "the west". With the French Revolution, Harman assails the myths about its bloodthirstiness progenerated by historians such as Simon Schama and François Furet. And, rebutting colonial triumphalism, he notes that African societies were, before the locust years of slavery and colonies, at least on a par with European societies in literacy and social development. Similarly, Indian society was far from the stagnant behemoth supposed when it was colonised by Britain, whose early success owed more to its ability to win over local rulers than to economic or military superiority.
A People's History has an almost telescopic structure, devoting greater space to more recent periods as the pace of change increases. The past 150 years of human life, from Marx to the millennium, take up approximately half of the book, and it is by far the most provocative part. From the hopeful experiments of early working-class socialism to the horrific Götterdämmerung of the Second World War and the chilling nuclear stasis of the Cold War, there is much to subvert conventional expectations. Scathing about the effects of capitalism and colonialism, Harman holds no brief for the Stalinist dictatorship.
He shows that the USSR, far from being concerned with emancipatory politics, adopted a manipulative stance towards left-wing movements, encouraging loyal parties to limit their radicalism and to connive in pro-colonial policies. In fact, his principal diagnosis here is that the twin pincers of Stalinism and fascism crushed the tradition of "socialism from below" mid-century, and that this tradition was partially revived in the "New Left" movements of the 1960s. Thus, if the postwar strength of the USSR did not confirm the socialist case, Harman maintains, its collapse did not disprove it.
There are a number of points where engagement with recent scholarship might have altered Harman's account. On the subject of the First World War, for example, he in part accepts the idea that the German masses greeted the war enthusiastically, a view that has lately been demolished by the historian Jeffrey Verhey. And one could split hairs over some of the formulations. It is surprising to see Harman defend a version of Marx's conception of an "Asiatic Mode of Production". It is also surprising that he does not discuss the controversies over the origins of capitalism. Given the demands of concision, it is an understandable omission. Nevertheless, it might have been useful to give the general reader at least some indication that they exist.
These are minor quibbles, however, about such an ambitious and marvellously readable history. Harman has, with impressive narrative sweep, delivered a sophisticated attack on many prevailing assumptions, not least of which is the complacent faith in capitalism's durability.