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A review by drollgorg
A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor
informative
slow-paced
2.5
As a collection of explorations into the historical context and current interpretations of a variety of interesting archaeological artifacts, you'd have trouble doing better. Taken together as a cohesive history of human history, that's where it slips for me.
If you are trying to explore history through a collection of archaeological artifacts, the British Museum is probably the best possible single source you could have on hand. I've visited several times myself and it is a really amazing museum, a testament to how modern notions of a peoples rights to self-determination and to their own cultural heritage are holding back the advancement of the museum field. Due to its rich history of not being concerned with self-determination and cultural heritage, many of the objects in this book can pull double duty in terms of providing object lessons about history- you get a lot of information about when it was originally created, and then some extra coverage of whenever in the 18th-20th centuries the British got their hands on it.
Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of this as a historiographic work is the fact that it ties itself too much to the British Museum as an institution. It's distracting and a waste of space to frequently find ways to tie in the experience of visiting the museum to the informational content of the book. Another similar weakness, but an even worse and more distracting one is that it overall anchors itself in the British cultural perspective of 2010- because the book began as a BBC podcast project, covering one item for every episode, it contains a lot of the contributions from interviews with various personages who are relevant in the field of whatever the object is. I'm pretty sure that these are just quotes from the podcast that have been trimmed and cleaned up, because they universally read like someone who's just been told about this object for the first time and has been asked a question about how they recognize the beginning of X idea from their own work in it. For a podcast, these are fine answers, but the book is already going in depth on each item and everything known about it, and the guests never have anything very substantive to add or observations that are more insightful than you're already getting from the entry.
Broadly speaking, I can see that they wanted to represent a lot of different cultures and track a majority of the most significant developments in human history across a wide spectrum. Unfortunately, the book is still rooted in and follows a developmental view of history centered on productive capacity and on the path to the rise of the most significant ideological structures that exist today, without much to challenge this procedural view, like the one you'd find in Sapiens, or Guns Germs & Steel (they even brought in Jared Diamond to talk about one of the objects, though I forget which. I don't think Jared Diamond is stupid, or that he describes the past inaccurately, but I think that history presented as progressive evolution is annoying, and they just keep doing that with every guest brought in to tie something to a more complex version of it in the present day.
As you can see, I didn't really rate the book that harshly, and at the end of the day it was definitely an interesting read, with plenty of things I learned from it. It just fails to break new ground as a work of history, apart from the innovation of its particular format, and has enough drawbacks to make it difficult to fully recommend it.
If you are trying to explore history through a collection of archaeological artifacts, the British Museum is probably the best possible single source you could have on hand. I've visited several times myself and it is a really amazing museum, a testament to how modern notions of a peoples rights to self-determination and to their own cultural heritage are holding back the advancement of the museum field. Due to its rich history of not being concerned with self-determination and cultural heritage, many of the objects in this book can pull double duty in terms of providing object lessons about history- you get a lot of information about when it was originally created, and then some extra coverage of whenever in the 18th-20th centuries the British got their hands on it.
Unfortunately, one of the weaknesses of this as a historiographic work is the fact that it ties itself too much to the British Museum as an institution. It's distracting and a waste of space to frequently find ways to tie in the experience of visiting the museum to the informational content of the book. Another similar weakness, but an even worse and more distracting one is that it overall anchors itself in the British cultural perspective of 2010- because the book began as a BBC podcast project, covering one item for every episode, it contains a lot of the contributions from interviews with various personages who are relevant in the field of whatever the object is. I'm pretty sure that these are just quotes from the podcast that have been trimmed and cleaned up, because they universally read like someone who's just been told about this object for the first time and has been asked a question about how they recognize the beginning of X idea from their own work in it. For a podcast, these are fine answers, but the book is already going in depth on each item and everything known about it, and the guests never have anything very substantive to add or observations that are more insightful than you're already getting from the entry.
Broadly speaking, I can see that they wanted to represent a lot of different cultures and track a majority of the most significant developments in human history across a wide spectrum. Unfortunately, the book is still rooted in and follows a developmental view of history centered on productive capacity and on the path to the rise of the most significant ideological structures that exist today, without much to challenge this procedural view, like the one you'd find in Sapiens, or Guns Germs & Steel (they even brought in Jared Diamond to talk about one of the objects, though I forget which. I don't think Jared Diamond is stupid, or that he describes the past inaccurately, but I think that history presented as progressive evolution is annoying, and they just keep doing that with every guest brought in to tie something to a more complex version of it in the present day.
As you can see, I didn't really rate the book that harshly, and at the end of the day it was definitely an interesting read, with plenty of things I learned from it. It just fails to break new ground as a work of history, apart from the innovation of its particular format, and has enough drawbacks to make it difficult to fully recommend it.