Books Reviewed
Many will have in their libraries some of the vast, multi-decker histories from the 19th century: John Lothrop Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic (1855); Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England (1848); James Anthony Froude’s lives of the Tudors; Thomas Carlyle’s Frederick the Great (1858-65); and perhaps the mother of them all, George Grote’s vast History of Greece (1846-56). These days, as most contemporary historians know, even mooting a multi-volume work is enough to have publishers reaching for a sedative: attention spans are shorter, and alternative sources of entertainment more numerous, than they used to be. Such obstacles are nothing to Conrad Black, however. The former newspaper publisher and amateur (in the best sense) historian, whose previous books include Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion of Freedom (2003), Richard M. Nixon: A Life in Full (2007), and a history of his native Canada, Rise to Greatness (2014), makes the scale of his literary ambition clear from the very title of his latest work: The Political and Strategic History of the World. And this is merely Volume I: From Antiquity (not Thucydides, whom many of us considered the first historian, but the Old Testament) to the Caesars, taking the story up to A.D. 14.
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I say “merely,” but there is nothing mere about this tome: 1,152 pages including its index, with type so small (and this is my main criticism of the book) that anyone over the age of 45 is likely to need a magnifying glass during a long sitting. I was glad the editors of this publication gave me plenty of time to compile a review, because after 20 or 30 pages headache set in—which had nothing to do with the quality of the contents. If sometimes eccentric (as, for example, in the case of the history Black draws from Biblical texts) it was always highly engaging.
The reader will need a sense of humor. The author (understanding the demands he makes on his audience) certainly demonstrates one throughout. His introduction “is for thorough readers,” an implied rebuke to those who might intend to skim, or dip, or merely consult the accounts of certain eras. At the end of his first chapter, on the Jews from antiquity to the 5th century B.C. (Moses, David, and Solomon), Black adds an appendix entitled “An Outline of the Intricate History of Non-Jewish Ancient Mesopotamia,” and then, in parentheses: “Only for the most persevering reader.”
Black writes that the book’s purpose is to describe “the development of techniques of government and the evolution of political society,” tracing their origins back to “the cradles of recorded history in the Middle East and South and East Asia.” There is something of Carlyle in Black, because he promises to focus on the “decisive personalities” who made and changed the course of history. As the Sage of Chelsea said, “the history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Black believes he can tell the story of global politics and government in three “unherniating” volumes. Time will tell.
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Apart from the typeface, the main thing that will irritate scholars is the relative paucity of footnotes. Black excuses himself from this, saying many of the references he might give would simply be “recondite.” But then, much historical research is. If he is aiming his work more at the general reader than at the historical specialist, then the scarcity of footnotes hardly matters, but it will be interesting to see how many general readers, even those with the greatest ambitions for self-improvement, will really embark on a work of this huge scope and density. Black argues at the start that he has made this history of this aspect of global affairs far more accessible than any existing work, and that may well be true. He admits to a heavy reliance on the Cambridge Ancient History (1970–2005), some of whose tales he retells with his customary verve and occasional cynicism. The book is light on primary sources.
Volume I is divided into 30 chapters and six parts. Black deals with 3,000 years and more of ancient Egyptian history in just 35 pages, and here as elsewhere he is never short on judgments. “Pepi II Neferkere was the seminal king of the VIth Dynasty,” he writes, “as he probably ruled longer than anyone in history, ascending the throne at the age of six and occupying it for ninety-four years.” This was not an unbridled joy for his subjects: his reign was “a protracted disaster, as he squandered the treasury, allowed the quality of ministers and governors and prophets and priests to decline and tolerated an increasing rot of official corruption and incompetence.” Four thousand seven hundred years later, little has changed in the nature of governance.
Babylonia is examined at similar length down to the time of Nebuchadnezzar, along with Assyria (whose natives are “another crude and fierce people”). The author freely admits that the last part of the chapter “is a simple recitation of a series of polysyllabically named rapacious warlords reenacting a well-practiced sequence of conquest and eventual subsidence.” While this is predominantly narrative and not analytical history, the style is highly adjectival. And the eternal lessons keep coming: of the Assyrian ruler Sargon, Black notes that “as rulers of such obscure provenance are apt to do, Sargon rewrote history somewhat.” Nebuchadnezzar builds the hanging gardens of Babylon and then dies; there follows another detailed appendix on Assyria’s later warlords, which is “only for readers interested in repetitive wars of little lasting importance.” Rather like Carlyle when he was writing Frederick, Black is determined to be a completist even if it kills him.
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He proceeds to explore the unifications of India and China, by way of departures into Buddhism and Confucianism, giving him occasion to comment that “Ch’in authority, almost prefiguring the totalitarianism of the People’s Republic of China more than twenty-two hundred years later, was asserted by the proscription and destruction in 213 B.C. of all writings considered to be subversive, leading to the Great Burning of Books, which engulfed The Odes, The Book of History, most works of history, and most existing literature.” The idea of canceling the past is not peculiar only to Maoist and post-Maoist China: eradicating or at least discrediting recent history has become standard practice even in some Western democracies today.
In chapter five Black reaches Europe, and with it, Greece. He calls this “the forefront of this narrative” and compares the Greeks with the Jews as “peoples that would be reckoned with.” Part II deals with the rivalry between Greece and Persia from the mid-6th century B.C. to the mid-4th. Events and people from our general knowledge now appear more frequently—Marathon, the Trojan Horse, Homer, Xerxes, Themistocles, Pericles and then the Peloponnesian Wars, the death of Socrates and the fall (followed later by the new rise) of Athens. Black is clear that the intellectual properties of Hellenism as found in philosophy, architecture, literature, and the political process have made it the most enduring of the ancient cultures: the Romans after all learned from it and imitated it. We see the birth of drama, which may be peripheral to Black’s theme, but also the stirrings of democracy, which certainly are not. “By the Eighth Century B.C., in almost every valley of Greece, the hereditary nobles around a heroic king, or a king whose ascendants were heroic within relevant memory or belief, were simultaneously authors of the evolution of the Greek state, which combined noble kingship, influential elders and consultation of the citizenry. This was a revolutionary advance from the brutal and elemental structures of the Jews and Egyptians.” It was also a key evolutionary moment in the development of society.
In the last centuries of the first millennium B.C. new states and powers rise, and new rivalries with them. By the 6th century B.C. the Persians have supplanted the Assyrians as the big beasts in the Middle East; they take on the Greeks at Marathon, but by the 4th century the main players are Sicily and Carthage along with, later, Alexander the Great’s Macedonia. As in the modern era, when one European country after another has endured the loss of empire and with it the loss of international clout, so in the ancient world nothing, manifestly, was forever. After Alexander goes, Black decrees that “perhaps the wiliest and most clear-headed” of all his “professed successors” was Ptolemy, who died in his bed at the age of 85, a tribute to his wiles and to his clear head. More than that, “[h]is dynasty ruled on [in Egypt] for a total of nearly three-hundred years until Cleopatra VII, the last and most renowned of his line, famously committed suicide by exposure to an asp.”
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In part IV of the book Rome rises, having dominated much of central Italy. Its self-appointed role is to take on the Carthaginians, before Rome itself is taken on by Hannibal and some truculent Gauls. Black describes as “tenuous” the typical contention that the foundation of Rome’s republic was “one of the great formative episodes in the rise of the cause of human liberty.” He counters that the republic’s political institutions were “unstable.” However, victory comes in the First Punic War because “the Italians were the best soldiers,” which in turn was because “their own interests and national pride were involved, and the Roman federal government was stronger than that of Carthage for the same reason—it was participatory and based on a common federal interest, not conscription or subornation.” The other consequence of Rome’s intervening to stop the Carthaginians swallowing Sicily is that Rome ends up swallowing it instead.
Black gives extensive accounts of the conflicts between warring powers, and pen-portraits of their leaders—his description of Hannibal, whom he clearly admires, is a case in point. But he is also careful to outline the relations between states in normal times, thus illustrating the birth of diplomacy. In the 3rd and 2nd centuries B.C. Rome looks east, seeking to aggrandize itself by grabbing the former Macedonian Empire. Mussolini parodied this strategy more than 2,000 years later when he strode into pitiful little Albania on Easter in 1939. Black raises another parallel later in the book: he argues that Rome’s intervention in Eastern Europe was motivated by fear of a pact between Philip V of Macedon and Antiochus, which he compares with the effect on the West of the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939.
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In the 2nd and 1st centuries B.C. the book reaches what Black terms “the Crisis of the Roman Republic,” in which Rome becomes ever more militaristic and expansionist as its power spreads throughout southern Europe. That in turn brings civil war as Julius Caesar, Pompey, and their followers slug it out. The pyrotechnic rule of Caesar brings with it all sorts of political convulsions, and tales familiar from Shakespeare begin to emerge: with Caesar warned about the Ides of March, and then murdered, Antony and Cleopatra become the biggest power couple since Adam and Eve. Black then finishes with the Augustan Republic. The Roman dictatorship, and the fates that befell some of those who held it, should have been a warning to those who pursued that method during more modern times. It appears not, although some—one thinks of Salazar, Franco, possibly even Brezhnev—got away with it.
Black’s first volume ends at “the tortured but miraculous dawn of the Christian Era.” His book is not merely a roller-coaster ride but a hurtling one. He has surely done voluminous reading, which makes the lack of footnotes—and, indeed, of a comprehensive bibliography—all the more unfortunate. He has just as surely made ancient history more accessible, even if he does not appear to have much increased the sum of knowledge about it. And in his main task of demonstrating that history is indeed a continuum, so that in political practice as well as in human nature there are serious parallels between our own era and that of the ancients, he appears to have succeeded rather well. The proof of that pudding, though, will be in the next two volumes.