Is it really possible to tell the history of the world – warfare and empire; trade and diplomacy; religion and mythology; discovery and invention; food, entertainment and sex – through just one hundred artefacts collected from the disparate galleries and shelves of the British Museum in Bloomsbury, London? The key word is the. This is not The History of the World, if such a definitive account could ever exist. As Neil MacGregor, acknowledges himself at the very end of this incredible and beguiling book, “Other objects would have yielded different stories and taken us along different paths”. He goes as far as to suggest “The possibilities are infinite”. If you had asked me whether I agreed with that before I started reading this book, I wouldn’t have been so sure. Now, my answer would be a wholehearted ‘yes!’
Unlike most conventional histories of the world, this book does not take the Mediterranean to be its focal point and centre of gravity, with the rich and diverse cultures of the Pacific Ocean, the Americas and Africa only exploding into being upon contact with European settlers, colonisers and overlords. The final chapter alone takes us from St Petersburg to Mozambique, from the United Arab Emirates to Shenzhen. Nor does it flatter history’s pantheon of noted heroes and villains – there are no William Shakespeares and Isaac Newtons; kings and queens such as Henry VIII and Elizabeth I appear as little more than timestamps. Surprisingly, even Lenin and Hitler are not mentioned by name. This is also not a book to focus on the big, noisy events of history – there are no objects taken from either of the world wars, the French Revolution or the Moon Landings.
To begin with – like, I suspect, many readers – this felt somewhat disorientating. However, I soon found myself fascinated by this unique way of telling history, and it soon started to make a lot of sense to me. After all, when you’re dealing with two million years of human experience, even the events which dominate our twenty-first century way of thinking about the past shrink. Rather, Neil MacGregor is trying to use objects to weave a narrative about everyday life and the broad changes which have occurred since humans first started using tools. Five objects in each of twenty sections provide a snapshot of life across the world, not at a specific instant in time, but in a distinct age (“The First Cities and States”, “The World in the Age of Confucius”).
One of the most rewarding things about this history of the world based on objects is that it gives a voice to people of whose civilization very little has survived. For example, the Moche civilization which flourished in Peru between 200 BC and AD 650, constructing “the first real city in South America, with streets, canals, plazas and industrial areas that any contemporary Roman town would have been proud of” left us no writing; what we know about them comes largely through stylised pots in the shapes of warriors, sea-lions and owls. A sculpture from the Huasetc culture of northern Mexico, depicting a woman with an elaborate headdress and made from geometric shapes, becomes incredibly poignant when you learn that almost all we know about the Huastecs has been refracted and distorted through the lens of the Aztecs who conquered them around 1400; in turn by the Aztecs’ conquerors, the Spanish.
A History of the World in 100 Objects opens your mind to the fact that the idea of globalisation – which we associate with the internet and smartphones – has in fact been around for a very long time. The famous Vale of York Hoard, a collection of objects found near Harrogate by a father-and-son metal detecting duo, and buried by a Viking over 1000 years ago, reveal that the Vikings were transcontinental traders as well as raiders. Some of the coins present were minted in Afghanistan and Baghdad; as Neil MacGregor makes clear: “Like York, Kiev was a great Viking city”. Crucially, such trade and complexity was not limited to Europe; Kilwa, today a small town in Tanzania, once a prosperous port, is where fragments of pottery have been found from Iraq and Syria, as well as Chinese porcelain.
Like the best history, A History of the World in 100 Objects reminds us that the key to deciphering the present is to understand the past. So the 2011 partition of Sudan into Sudan and South Sudan, and the ongoing sectarian violence between Christians and Muslims in the latter country, are partly a legacy of the way the British ruled Sudan “as an Anglo-Egyptian territory from 1899 until independence in 1956 ... British policy was to divide the country into two essentially separate regions – the Islamic, Arabized north and the increasingly Christian African south”. Neil Macgregor’s lucid prose and clear explanation make the fact that this book was published in 2010 seem shocking – how can what is happening in Sudan today possibly have been a surprise?
Even more pertinently for somebody reading this in 2015 – at least from the perspective of a country like Britain – is a chapter on the world’s first Islamic empire, with Damascus as its capital, ruling Egypt and Syria, Iran and Iraq. According to the social anthropologist Professor Madawi al-Rasheed, in the twenty-first century the “ideal of the caliphate” (i.e. an ‘Islamic State’) has returned and become “the embodiment of the Muslim community” for some people, due to “new communication technology that allows Muslims from different backgrounds to imagine some kind of relationship with other Muslims, regardless of their culture, language or ethnic group”; this idea can be felt, in, for example, some “second-generation Muslims in Britain”.
One of the things I like most about this book is that Neil MacGregor is able to both admire the objects within its pages in themselves as exquisite works of art, craftsmanship or technology, and to extrapolate from them something about the world at the time they were made, and even the human condition itself. A 13,000 year old sculpture of two swimming reindeer is “a beautifully realistic representation” of nature; this tells us that the sculptor knew his subject intimately – reindeer provided food, clothes, tools and weapons; Neil MacGregor then wonders why human toolmakers always soon after become artists.
Not only do the objects make this a truly global history; the fact that the author has invited artists, writers and all manner of experts from around the world avoids them being seen only through the eyes of a white, British male, enabling us to understand why shadow puppetry is still important in Indonesia or how a beautiful, almost ethereal sculpture from Nigeria can help modern-day Nigerians craft a sense of cultural pride and heritage.
The only thing I would question about this book is to what extent the objects it describes actually represent the life of most people throughout history. An overwhelming number belong to, were commissioned by or depict rulers – whether priests or pharaohs, emperors or Commissars. Sometimes I felt as though the book veered between the abstract, timeless question “What does it mean to be human?” and the temporal, specific questions about a particular dynasty or civilization, but asking in practice how the wealthy and powerful lived then, while avoiding the ordinary lives of millions of people. Neil MacGregor admits as far in as Chapter 95 that a suffragette-defaced penny is one of the first objects explicitly about the story of women.
On the other hand, it is not an archaeologist or curator’s fault in determining which objects have survived to be studied. Equally, A History of the World in 100 Objects could be seen as a victim of its own success; by shining a spotlight of aspects of humanity which are often neglected in history – at least until the modern era – such as homosexuality, it forces you to ask why other parts of the human experience have been left out. Why do two objects depict two gay men, and yet there are no references to lesbians or transgender people? Where is the history of disabled people?
Despite this there is probably enough to think about in this book to last a lifetime – it seems to me a book which could survive for a thousand years and still have meaning, in a sense be as fresh and radical in the future as it is today.
It certainly offers a very different way of thinking about history than is nearly always presented in the classroom or even through the media – for that reason, I would argue it is almost compulsory reading for anyone with a burning passion for history.
• Read about this book at the British Museum and explore some of the objects in their gallery.
