Frank Welsh

The History of the World An exceptional visual guide to world history from the dawn of civilization to the present day.
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This overly ambitious, Anglo-centric attempt to sum-up all of human existence from early hominids through the modern age is hit and miss. Unfortunately, the hits are buried in tiresome, truncated accounts of context-less world events, with wide swaths of interests ignored or handled dismissively with a few lines or paragraphs--much of Asian culture and achievements, for example, get short shrift.

I suppose I ought to have known better:
Any meaningful, objective breakdown of human history cannot possibly receive justice in 240 pages, unless perhaps published in a font size that demands a magnifying-glass. Which this isn't.

It was penned by a 79-year-old former banker, who misses few opportunities to inject British self-importance and condescension, while disparaging the French whenever possible.

It's not that ex-bankers can't produce scholarly work. It's more that much better, more objectively researched histories abound, reinvigorating old ideas, with fresh theories and discoveries.

Having recently read Charle Mann's superb deep dive into the Americas, "1491," for example, I found Welsh's effort hollow, without humility and generally ignorant of newfound work.

Which is odd, as he does, at some point, acknowledge that histories--and their related, accepted doctrines--do indeed evolve, which is encouraging. Sadly, he hasn't seemingly incorporated them.

On the good side, Welsh packs a hell of a lot into 240 pages. The periodic timelines that overlay significant moments across several world regions are indeed interesting.

But don't expect an evenhanded distribution of said events. Or an accounting of what might currently be seen as a controversial interpretation.

For me, the last straw was a reduction of American colonists and their legitimate grievances --in the run-up to the Revolution--as essentially a bunch of whining whiners who whined just for the sake of whining.

At that point I put the book down. Life's too short to indulge what amounts to an old man's exhaustive and narrow-minded hobby-no matter how ambitious--disguised as serious inquiry.
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JohnCarr
2.0 out of 5 stars Welshing on the Title
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2014
I’ve read a number of histories of the world and they usually have a title like “A (Little/Short) History of the World” or “The Penguin/Times History of the World”. This book is titled with the definite article “The History of the World” as if such a definitive work could be written. This would be a small detail if the author had achieved something noteworthy, but he hasn’t.
In writing a – much less the – history of the world an author must be highly selective. I think the best approach is to try to paint a big picture, illuminated perhaps by a few small fine details.
There are innumerable topics that such a history should and/or could cover – politics and economics, religion and philosophy, science and technology, the arts, demography, climate etc.
This work concentrates very much on international politics and war with other fields getting scant attention. I feel that the Anglophone world gets unduly excessive coverage, even allowing for its disproportionate influence on world history. The epilogue, comparing the (Western) world of 1890 to that of 1820 and discussing the Green Revolution etc is much more in line with how I think such a history should be written.
At times reading it I found myself asking, ‘are we missing something?’ The writer is also the author of an illustrated book titled “The History of the World: From the Earliest Times to the Present Day” and I wonder how related are the two works? On page 306 we’re told that the US “declared war on Mexico, denounced by one young officer as:
‘one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.’”
I recognized the quote and expected that, when it came to the American Civil War, reference would be made back to it and its author identified as U.S. Grant. But no such reference is made and I was left wondering if perhaps we had a cut and paste job from the other work where something got left out.
Spread throughout the book is a series of chronological tables. In the one covering 6000BC to 500AD we’re told that “c1000 BC Viking Voyagers in Labrador”. That indicated that it wasn’t properly proofread.
More telling are the omissions in the final table “Human achievements 6000BC – Present”. In the 1600s Hooke merits two mentions. Galileo, Kepler and Newton don’t get one between them. In the 1800s neither Faraday nor Maxwell, Pasteur nor Mendel, are mentioned.
On page 2, after telling us that Mitochondrial Eve lived about 200,000 years ago – which is likely an upper limit given than the oldest know sapiens remains are put at 195,000 years old plus or minus 5,000 years – we are then told that, “Our last common male ancestor is believed to have existed more recently, perhaps as few as 5,000 years ago when the Sumerian civilization was flourishing…”
Now I suspect that there are some Amazonian Indians, Australian Aborigines and, above all, some Andaman Islanders who have bloodlines far too pure for that to be true. Hitherto I hadn’t read of any suggestion that Y-Chromosome Adam post-dated “Out of Africa”, and I’m not talking about the film.
The pictures are adequate if unexceptional. The four maps are, I believe, poorly chosen. On the plus side what’s written is well written.
If you’re looking to read your first history of the world I suggest you don’t start here.
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Jared Mullane
3.0 out of 5 stars Semi-interesting.
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2014
It took me a while to really sit down and finish this book, being quite a broad topic, it is informative, however lacks depth in some cases. I didn't mind it, however it was good to finally finish reading and pick up something else. Overall, I think there are better detailed books out there. OK.
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GLS MN COLD
1.0 out of 5 stars Yawn................
Reviewed in the United States on December 7, 2013
I wasn't overly impressed with this book, although I may have an earlier version. At least it was a gift that I did not have to spend my money on. My 5th grader could read books in his school library and come up with the same information and photos. It just seems as though this author took random information and ideas out of National Geographic magazines and school history books and threw them together into a book. It would be a refreshing change to find a history writer who could stick with some original ideas and research and write about it instead of just "....drawing on the latest scholarships." I'm not being fair. The book was packed with snippets of information and had nice photos. It was easy to read. The author acknowledged that the view was Eurocentric, etc..., and he didn't dwell on "the big bang theory" or dinosaurs; just human history.
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Abu sulaiman
2.0 out of 5 stars Decent overview, however inherently biased
Reviewed in the United States on November 11, 2013
Decent brief overview of world history
However the author betrays his own prejudices especially when it comes to contemporary issues. For example when introducing post WW1 Palestine he comments
"European Jews had been demonstrating how poor land could be made to flourish. The Arabs perhaps themselves descendants of the ancient Caananites were not impressed seeing this as a different form of colonisation and resenting the implied - and unfortunately justified - settler superiority."

This and other such passages which are written in the same arrogance mean that one can only give this a 2/5
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Carlos Alberto Cordeiro
5.0 out of 5 stars Qualidade visual do livro
Reviewed in Brazil on October 15, 2022
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De tudo, desde a história contada bem como as fotos incluídas que bem ajudam a visualizar bem o ocorrido na história, sendo a história contada bem recheada de fatos.
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Oliver J.
4.0 out of 5 stars simply & nice
Reviewed in Germany on February 3, 2014
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For a little "killing of time" and refresh your own memory with some parts of the world history - it's great thing.
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John Quenby
5.0 out of 5 stars What a browser!
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 5, 2013
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This coffee table sized book is first class! Excellent illustrations and illuminating text. Congratulations to Frank on this superb publication! JQ
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Matthew
4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent synthesis
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 16, 2014
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Welsh cuts right through any preconceptions we might have about the importance of our own local and regional histories to put them in their proper historical context. In this way he gives us the big picture of humanity's path so far carefully leading us through our own history.
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Provided you understand what you're getting, this is a solid history of Australia. What are you getting?

i) a book written by a Brit, not an Australian. This is very good, insofar as he doesn't feel obliged to take sides in Australia's extraordinarily vitriolic historiographical polemics. It's bad in that he doesn't necessarily give you an understanding of what it's like to actually grow up in Australia, i.e., he hates Ned Kelly. Bloody poms. This makes the book particularly useless for those looking to understand the country's culture and society.

ii) in other words, it's a political history. That's good, since you get an understanding of the political history; it's bad, because Australia's political history is pretty dull, particularly if you're not taking part in the vitriolic *political* polemics, which are great entertainment.

But I suspect this makes it a good place to start, for Australians or others. If you feel the urge to skim over pre-Menzies political stuff, you won't be losing anything. But beware Welsh's free and loose ways with footnotes and references--he sometimes refers to nonexistent books. Tut tut.… (más)

Welsh takes the history of South Africa from the first recorded European contact (Bartolomeu Dias in 1488) through to the post-Mandela election of 1999 in the space of about 540 pages (plus notes, etc.). Despite this rather wide scope, he manages reasonably detailed coverage throughout (skimping a bit on the parts he expects us to know about already, like the military history of the "Zulu wars" and "Boer war" and the stuff we all saw on the TV news in the 1980s), but the core of his interest is clearly in the hundred years of British administration, where he goes into a lot of detail about how successive generations of British officials on the spot and politicians in Whitehall messed up the running of the Cape Colony and its various unwanted appendages (Natal, the Boer republics and the protectorates that became Lesotho, Swaziland and Botswana).

Whilst he spends plenty of time on puncturing the core myths of Afrikanerdom (and exposes the newness of at least some glorious African tribal "traditions"), this really seems to be a book addressed at British (or English-speaking South African) readers brought up on the idea that it was benign, if somewhat paternalistic, British imperial supervision that protected the black population from the evil Afrikaners until "we" were so ungratefully chucked out. In reality, of course, British imperial policy was all about keeping the voters in the British Isles happy, which, then as now, meant spending as little as possible, protecting trade, and keeping British casualties low. Embarrassing headlines about "natives" being maltreated could be awkward, but they were rarely the top priority. The office of Colonial Secretary was not a popular one (Joseph Chamberlain seems to have been the only minister who ever volunteered for it), it had a high turnover rate, and was rarely given to anyone disqualified by practical knowledge of the world south of the English Channel. Something I hadn't appreciated was that there was always a strong rivalry between the Colonial Office and the separate India Office — to the extent that the India Secretary sometimes intervened to complain about the mistreatment of Indians in Natal, for example.

This mess of good old-fashioned British amateurishness and cynicism goes a long way to explain the real puzzle of South African history, something I never made sense of in school history lessons, that the British fought a long and nasty war against the Afrikaners, defeated them thoroughly, and then only a few years later agreed a constitutional settlement that allowed them to become the dominant parties in the new Union of South Africa, with no real guarantees for non-white people at all. One part of the puzzle is that it was a Tory government that fought the war, and it was fought to safeguard the rights not of the black people, but of the white, non-Afrikaner capitalists and workers in the gold-mining areas of Transvaal. And the other part is that the Tories were ousted by the Liberals soon after the end of the war, and their policy seems to have been to get rid of the South African problem as swiftly as possible, even if it meant letting Jan Smuts pull a fast one on voting rights...

In the discussion of the twentieth century there wasn't so much that was new to me, but it was interesting to see Welsh's — no doubt well-informed — view that it was chiefly economic factors that forced the end of white minority rule in the 1980s. Employers simply couldn't work with the crazy conditions that the apartheid system dictated, and investors were pulling out, leaving Botha and de Klerk little choice but to start dismantling the rickety apparatus their predecessors had convinced themselves they needed. (Other writers usually give most of the credit to the end of the Cold War making South Africa's "bulwark against communism" irrelevant to the US.)

All very interesting, and useful background on how South Africa got to be how it is now.… (más)