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Everything Is Made of History
What I learned from reading over 100 books on world history in a year
Back in school, history was just about my least favourite subject. The past seemed a dreary, black-and-white world populated by buttoned-up Englishmen writing copperplate and boringly discovering stuff. To a large extent, the way history was taught was to blame for this. We seemed to dredge over the same dull facts about Captain Cook and the Endeavour (Australia’s equivalent of the Mayflower) ad nauseam, and an absurd emphasis was placed on the retention of dates, which to me seems rather like studying literature by memorising page numbers.
Some years ago, however, I started trying to fill in the knowledge gaps that my lack of interest in history at school had left me by studying history on my long commutes to work. This soon turned into something of an obsession, and after a year of this, I had read or listened to well over a hundred history books and had filled in a broad picture of the arc of human development over the past three thousand years.
These are some of the lessons I learned.
Human history is an abyss of strife
It is not saying anything novel to observe that human history is largely a story of conflict. History exaggerates this element of our past, of course, because in peace there is less of interest to tell. War and conflict form the joints of history, the places at which the story changes direction or is transformed, since war traces the shifts of power, and power — who had it, what they did with it, and how they lost it — is a crucial lens for understanding the past.
Nonetheless, bloodshed and brutality are so ubiquitous in the story of our species that to read history with empathy, putting oneself in the shoes of those who lived through it, is quite traumatic. I recall one day on the train putting down the book I was reading about the Mongol Invasions and staring out at the world rushing by with a sensation akin to the one you have when waking up in a place that you only saw in the dark the night before: so this is where I am!
It was if day had dawned and I found that I had been blithely sleeping on a ledge above a chasm. I could suddenly see that the island of peace…
