The World

Award-winning historian Montefiore draws on 30 years of research, reading, and travel to create a panoramic, abundantly populated, richly detailed history of the world through the stories of families across place and time. History, he asserts, started when “war, food and writing coalesced to allow a potentate” to harness power and promote his or her children to keep it. That lust for power often involved violence, and promoting a child sometimes meant doing away with another. A family’s aspirations frequently tested loyalty. Arranged chronologically into 23 Acts, beginning in prehistory, the blood-soaked narrative abounds with murder and incest, war and torture, enslavement and oppression. The author identifies the Mesopotamian leader Sargon as head of “the first power family.” As his domain thrived, it proved fragile, an example, Montefiore claims, of “the paradox of empire”—the richer it became, the more its borders had to be defended against rivalrous incursions and “the greater was the incentive for destructive family feuds.” In 2193 B.C.E., Sargon lost his empire. Roughly 1,000 years later, in China, the warrior king Wuding tried to shore up his own empire by placing each of his 64 wives in control of his conquered fiefdoms. Marriages—even between siblings or other close relations—proved helpful, and if alliances frayed, there was always exile, imprisonment, and murder. Pregnancies also were helpful, even if they resulted from rape. Some families that Montefiore examines are familiar to most readers—Medici, Bonaparte, Romanov, Habsburg, and Rockefeller—but Montefiore’s view is capacious, as he recounts the histories of Chinese, Indian, Middle Eastern, Hawaiian, and African dynasties as well as the more recent Bushes, Kennedys, Castros, and Kims. The history of humanity, the author ably demonstrates, displays “cruelty upon cruelty, folly upon folly, eruptions, massacres, famines, pandemics, and pollutions”—yet throughout, he adds, an enduring capacity to create and love. The book is a vibrant and a masterful rendering of human history. The Weekender