Status
Available
Pages
vii; 729
Collection
Publication
London : Verso, 2008.
Description
Chris Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals. Interacting with the forces of technological change as well as the impact of powerful individuals and revolutionary ideas, these societies have engendered events familiar to every schoolchild-from the empires of antiquity to the world wars of the twentieth century. In a bravura conclusion, Chris Harman exposes the reductive complacency of contemporary capitalism, and asks, in a world riven as never before by suffering and inequality, why we imagine that it can-or should-survive much longer. Ambitious, provocative and invigorating, A People's History of the World delivers a vital corrective to traditional history, as well as a powerful sense of the deep currents of humanity which surge beneath the froth of government.… (more)
Media reviews
Chris Harman's A People's History of the World is a very welcome and largely successful attempt to produce a popular history of the human species, bringing out the interconnection between the development of modes of production on the one hand and class struggle on the other. The book is closer in
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spirit to The Communist Manifesto than to Capital, because of this interweaving of story and structure while taking into account a further century and a half of history and historiography. It is 729 pages long, with the last 150 years taking up just over half the space. But to put this another way, Harman still devotes 300 pages to events and developments prior to the industrial revolution. Early chapters cover the farming revolution, the urban revolution, and the rise of the early states and empires, drawing on the work of Jared Diamond as well as Gordon Childe's classic materialist studies in pre-history, updating Childe's account with the later findings of such scholars as Colin Renfrew and Charles Maizels. Show Less
User reviews
LibraryThing member MeditationesMartini
The basic argument - technical innovation leads to establishment of a means of production and corresponding relations of production that persist until the avarice of the ruling class absorbs all the available surplus and squeezes the working classes too hard, leading either to revolution and change
Energy of course flags a bit at moments in a book this size, and Harman has the orthodox Marxist's bias for focus on Europe at the expense of Asia even in the pre-modern era, but you can't fault him for that when it vivifies the moments of revolutionary change - your French and Russian Revolutions, in particular - so powerfully. Sometimes he falls into the bad kind of partiality (as opposed to the good kind, which is basically rooting for the common people in all circumstances) and overjustifies e.g. the Jacobin terror - God knows it's enough, and appreciated, to remind us of the numbers that were beign killed by monarchist reactionaries at the same time, and the disconnect between that and our popular images of crazy Robespierre and the guillotine.
The only substantial criticism I have to make is that Harman keeps moving the goalposts when he discusses the failure of worker's movements at potentially revolutionary moments. Usually that failure comes in the form of "they weren't radical enough, didn't rise to the moment, tried to compromise with the cuddlier sections of the bourgeoisie" and fair enough, that certainly fits the revolution-or-collapse model. sometimes, though, it's all of a sudden "they should have made common cause against the facists with the social democrats" or whatever, and you're all "I thought you just said - " and sure, he can argue that obviously they should have done the thing they didn't do because of how it all didn't work out so good with what they did do, but providing a specific plan of action is a hard thing, let alone retroactively setting out a plausible way they could have come to it at the time. Every disfferent situation requires a new response, and we sure as hell don't know what they are, and Harman sort of implicitly admits as much when he says look at how long it took bourgeois consciousness to mature, and we're expecting a proletarian consciousness strong enough to build a social system on how fast? But you understand. He gets frustrated. We all do.
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in means/relations of production, or mutual collapse - is of course partial, but illuminates big-picture human history better than any other partial argument I can think of. And it's always wonderful to take a journey at this level - you're like, "All these things happened. Every sentence in this book contains a world."Energy of course flags a bit at moments in a book this size, and Harman has the orthodox Marxist's bias for focus on Europe at the expense of Asia even in the pre-modern era, but you can't fault him for that when it vivifies the moments of revolutionary change - your French and Russian Revolutions, in particular - so powerfully. Sometimes he falls into the bad kind of partiality (as opposed to the good kind, which is basically rooting for the common people in all circumstances) and overjustifies e.g. the Jacobin terror - God knows it's enough, and appreciated, to remind us of the numbers that were beign killed by monarchist reactionaries at the same time, and the disconnect between that and our popular images of crazy Robespierre and the guillotine.
The only substantial criticism I have to make is that Harman keeps moving the goalposts when he discusses the failure of worker's movements at potentially revolutionary moments. Usually that failure comes in the form of "they weren't radical enough, didn't rise to the moment, tried to compromise with the cuddlier sections of the bourgeoisie" and fair enough, that certainly fits the revolution-or-collapse model. sometimes, though, it's all of a sudden "they should have made common cause against the facists with the social democrats" or whatever, and you're all "I thought you just said - " and sure, he can argue that obviously they should have done the thing they didn't do because of how it all didn't work out so good with what they did do, but providing a specific plan of action is a hard thing, let alone retroactively setting out a plausible way they could have come to it at the time. Every disfferent situation requires a new response, and we sure as hell don't know what they are, and Harman sort of implicitly admits as much when he says look at how long it took bourgeois consciousness to mature, and we're expecting a proletarian consciousness strong enough to build a social system on how fast? But you understand. He gets frustrated. We all do.
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LibraryThing member woollymammoth
A readable Maxist History of the world. I liked it. From my Socialist Phase.
LibraryThing member mykl-s
OK, I sorta want to read this book, but it is long and hard to get into. The past is less interesting than the future. A refreshing point of view.
LibraryThing member robnbrwn
Really poorly written; far too many leaps of assumption and unsupported conclusions.
LibraryThing member TJ_Petrowski
A brilliant (if you excuse the author's obvious Trotskyist leanings) history of the class struggle from mankind's earliest origins to the present day!
LibraryThing member Paul_S
I found this book offensive. There is really no other way to put it. It's blatantly one sided, with pointless character assassinations on one side and whitewashing on the other. The author uses a really insulting tactic of quoting other sources as if they were factual on disputed matters giving no
At the same time though, I found it interesting and I useful to see what the world looks like through the eyes of communism's number one fan. Funny how there are no fans of communism in countries that suffered through it.
Another problem with this book and pretty much any communist is they always compare capitalism in practice with communism in theory which is a pointless comparison. Want to debate which one is better in theory? Fine, but don't use examples from the real world to show how capitalism is broken because then we have to use examples from the real world for communism and that debate you have lost about 50 times over and still losing by such a wide margin it's embarrassing.
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background or differing sources or even any disclaimers. A lot of it is childish point scoring and "look how nasty capitalism is".At the same time though, I found it interesting and I useful to see what the world looks like through the eyes of communism's number one fan. Funny how there are no fans of communism in countries that suffered through it.
Another problem with this book and pretty much any communist is they always compare capitalism in practice with communism in theory which is a pointless comparison. Want to debate which one is better in theory? Fine, but don't use examples from the real world to show how capitalism is broken because then we have to use examples from the real world for communism and that debate you have lost about 50 times over and still losing by such a wide margin it's embarrassing.
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Subjects
Language
Physical description
vii, 729 p.; 22 cm
ISBN
9781844672387