A skewed (if laudable) take on world history (The No Nonsense Guide to World History - Chris Brazier)

Member Name: Burning_Darkness

Product:	The No Nonsense Guide to World History - Chris Brazier
Date:	14/06/09 (36 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: well researched and presented, easy to read

Disadvantages: Author's self opinionated style can become tiresome.

Chris Brazier's "No Nonsense to World History" is a useful little book which strives, in under 150 small pages, to chronicle the ascent of man from a sparse distribution of hunter gatherers to the omnipresent, 6-billion strong, technologically advanced species of today.

The book is well set out and easy to read, being organised into short, generally chronologically ordered chapters. After a very brief chapter on the dawn of man, his migration from Africa, and the dawn of agriculture, the book provides a look at the first civilizations across the world, from the Sumerians and the Egyptians onwards, complete with a hugely useful civilisation timeline and associated world map.

From here the book chronicles man's history in a steady-paced and engaging way, simultaneously depicting the rise of empires and the conflict between city states and nomadic peoples, the transition from earlier pagan religions to new belief systems such as Buddhism and Monotheism, the development of new systems of governance from feudalism to democracy, and the evolution of philosophy and the fine arts.

The book is hugely successful in tying together disparate strands of world history into a larger whole, demonstrating through an easy to follow narrative how , through the rise and fall of different empires, ideologies and peoples throughout the ages, mankind has arrived at the culturally diverse and in many ways volatile world that we inhabit today.

From the spread of the Indo-European or "Aryan" peoples, (which, as the book points out is an innocuous phrase that, much like the swastika, was hijacked by the Nazis), to the rise and fall of the Persian and Assyrian empires, to the steady growth and slow, bloody unification of China to the fall of the Roman Empire and the spread of Islam and Christianity and splitting of Western and Eastern Europe, Brazier's book provides a hugely informative and coherent narrative.

The roles of played by Christianity in shaping Western thinking and foreign policy are explored, from the Crusades to the colonisation of the Americas and beyond, as is the role of Islam in the shaping the near East and the creation of the Ottoman Empire, along with the causes of the long-standing continuing conflict between the two sides. Chapters are also given over to, amongst others, the rise of China and Russia in the East, the genesis of civilisation in the Americas, and the Kingdoms of Africa, the significance of which, Brazier argues, have largely been whitewashed from history as a product of Western Imperialist concerns.

On then through the dark ages, renaissance and enlightenment to the the French revolution, the discovery and colonisation of the New World, the explosion in African slavery, the global influence of widespread Western Imperialism, the industrial revolution, the emergence of capitalism in the West and communism in the East and the re-emergence of Fascism, and finally the emergence of industrialised total war on a global scale in the 20th century. This is then followed by a chapter on the radicalist events of the 20th century, in which established, centuries old, triumphalist notions of historical "progress" are challenged by modern ideals of individualism and social and political freedom. There is also a graph showing the increase in world population throughout history up to the present day, which is ominous to say the least!

Brazier's book is well researched, engaging and concise, and, as it can be read within a few days, is worth reading multiple times to soak up any details not fully observed the first time round. So why only three stars?

Although his book is well put together, Brazier insists on expressing his own moral take on the conduct of different societies throughout history. Whilst these are perfectly innocuous left-liberal views, I would argue that it is folly of the highest order for any historian to try and judge the peoples of the past by the standards of today. I don't mean to say that I would like to see women returned to the status of baby-making-machines, or see the reintroduction of slavery and human sacrifice, but Brazier's smug conceit that the peoples of the past- amongst them the Sumerians, Greeks and Romans, peoples who, respectively, invented writing and western philosophy and brought unification to the world through a mixture of technological brilliance and shrewd Empire-building, were in some way inferior to us smacks of arrogance in the extreme.

The modern, western liberal views to which Brazier adheres are noble ones, and I would not want to claim that they are not worth fighting and dying for, but to imply, as the book frequently does, that they are "better" than the outlook of the Romans or Sumerians or Aztecs in some abstract absolute sense strikes me as a naive thing for a historian claim, and Brazier appears oblivious to the fact that his own thinking is largely influenced by Christian ideology. Brazier frequently allows his own moral judgments to get in the way, and his historical analysis suffers for it. He appears to be of the view that morality is a concrete entity, to which humanity has been slowly edging closer, when in fact morality is essentially a set of arbitrary values which exist to support the society to which they belong as much as the society exists to support them. The moral values of our current society have taken many centuries of struggle to acheive, and I would certainly argue that they are worthy of our umost protection, but I feel that the notion that our possessing them makes our society indisputably and unequivocally "better" than the societies that preceded us to be a rather myopic one.

Again, dont get me wrong: There is not a single moral point he makes that I dont agree with, but then as the product of a left wing and largely liberal modern day society I am likely to say that. That said though, I feel that the reader should be allowed to arrive at his own conclusions, rather than be led by the hand through the book as Brazier points out the goodies and baddies of the piece for our benefit.

Summary: A worthy book but would do well to allow its readers to draw their own conclusions.