A Short History Of The World by Christopher Lascelles

Just finished reading A Short History Of The World by Christopher Lascelles. The author intends to cover important events, people and empires from the beginning of this universe, The Big Bang right up-to 1991. The idea behind the book is to not engage or discuss with any historical fact but rather consolidate all history so one can put to context timelines and connect different events with it.??

The book is well written and very easy to read. It is divided into chapters and each chapter covers a different part of history. The chapters of the book are:

1.?????Pre-History

2.?????The ancient World

3.?????Early Middle Ages

4.?????Late Middle Ages

5.?????The Ascent of the West

6.?????The Modern Period

7.?????The 20th Century

In each chapter the author describes different events and civilizations that existed in that era throughout the world.?He starts with the earliest civilization and then goes on to describe the rise and fall of different empires. The author does not only focus on the rise and fall of empires but also describes the culture, religion, society, economy, politics and everything else that existed in that era. He also hints at explaining why certain civilizations rose to power while others fell some places in the book. This is the only part where I may disagree with the author specially his comments on the fall of Islamic Golden Age and the primary reason for it.

The book is very well researched. The author has done a lot of research about each event he describes. The primary sources used in the book, excerpts of which are scattered all over the book are:

·???????A Splendid Exchange by W. Bernstein

·???????Guess, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond

·???????The Rise and Fall of Great Powers by Paul Kennedy

·???????The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David Landes

·???????Why the West Rules for Now by Ian Morris

·???????Worlds at War by Anthony Pagden

·???????Collapse by Jared Diamond

·???????The Fall of the West by Adrian Goldsworthy

·???????The House of Wisdom by Jonathan Lyons

·???????Mao's Great Famine by Frank Dikotter

·???????The Prize - The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power by Daniel Yergin

As the list suggest the book is not another Euro-Centric history compilation but covers China, Arabia, Africa and South America. Though Africa is not discussed in detail and many empires from the continent have been omitted but there is enough for one to get an idea of its history.

The book is very interesting and engaging. The author writes in such a way that one cannot put down the book once they start reading it. I really liked this book because it helped me understand history better than any other history books I have read so far. It also helped me understand how different events are related with each other and how they affect each other's outcomes or results. For those who are tired of reading history in fragmented episodes and suffer from a lack of knowledge and context on how each part of history relates to the other, this is the book you need.

Some quotes I found interesting in the book are as follows:

“The K-T Extinction of 65 million years ago destroyed the dinosaurs that had already roamed our planet for close to 150 million years.?This puts the six or seven thousand years since the appearance of the first proper human civilisations into perspective.”

“western notions of medicine were based largely on superstition and exorcism in contrast to the Arab’s advanced clinical training and understanding of surgery, pharmacology and epidemiology. Westerners had no knowledge of ‘hygiene’ and sanitation’.”

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“As William Bernstein describes in ‘A Splendid Exchange’, ‘The Arabs, invigorated by their conquests, experienced a cultural renaissance that extended to many fields; the era’s greatest literature, art, mathematics, and astronomy was not found in Rome, Constantinople, or Paris, but in Damascus, Baghdad and Cordova.”

“Voltaire, rightly commented that it was ‘neither Holy, nor Roman nor an Empire’.”

“The Protestant reformation gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavour. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”