A review by berenikeasteria
A History of the World by Andrew Marr

4.0

As Marr himself admits, no book, no matter whether it’s titled A History of the World or not, can ever succeed in comprehensively covering the entirety of history. So, as he explains in his introduction, he has chosen to focus on “big man” history: well-known individuals who are often, though not always, rulers. This seems on the face of it a rather traditionalist approach to history, a throwback to decades past where historians only seemed to talk about kings and queens. That kind of history has fallen out of favour in the past 30 years, replaced by an interest in social history, gender history, world theory, and phenomenology; the heretofore “untold” stories. So why is Marr writing about powerful individuals? Marr explains that, like it or not, a small number of people throughout history had greater agency than others, the ability to act to change the circumstances around them. He sees these individuals as important because they drove the great changes of history, and although much of the human past is marked by consistency and continuation, it is the changes that have made the biggest difference in our social evolution.

Marr divides human history into defined eras and then selectively talks about a handful of key “change-makers” in each era. Naturally this type of history leaves out a lot, but the examples Marr chooses are, he feels, demonstrative of the most important changes of their era. By picking out key figures and identifying patterns that emerge in history, Marr is able to bring together the whole and explain the significance of the patterns he draws out. It’s left to the reader to decide whether the conclusions Marr draws are insightful or uninteresting.

In my opinion, some of what Marr presents to us in this book is a little dubious. For example, Marr suggests that humans left Africa around 70,000 BCE, but Stephen Oppenheimer’s (ancient population geneticist) book Out of Eden, presents highly convincing, multiple and independent evidence that it was much earlier, around 100,000 BCE. Marr suggests that humans had not even left Africa by the time of the Sumatra eruption c. 75,000 BCE, but Oppenheimer, who Marr actually refers to in his book, presents evidence outside of Africa both above and below the ash layers that human populations survived and thrived both before and afterwards. Marr also presents the view that homo sapiens was probably responsible for wiping out the Neanderthals and megafauna such as woolly mammoths etc. In fact this is still hotly debated, and many theories are put forwards as explanations for these extinctions, including climate change at the end of the Ice Age, which have interesting points of their own. Not to rubbish A History of the World, but just don’t take everything at face value, and keep in mind that many of these questions are still up for debate. Marr uses Orlando Figes as a source about modern history in Russia at one point – awkward, given Figes’ current state of disgrace after the debacle in which he used a sock puppet account on Amazon to rubbish the works of his rivals.

The above caveat aside, the whole work is smoothly written and very readable, I definitely found it an enjoyable read, and Marr picks out both well known and lesser known figures to discuss, and I found his identification of certain patterns in history very intriguing.

7 out of 10