The Read: J.M. Roberts and Odd Arne Westad, The Penguin History of the World
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
I’m teaching a course on world history/universal history as a genre this fall, so I wanted to read the latest edition of this book, first published in 1976.
Is it what I thought it was?
Yes: it’s a mainstream attempt by two historians to recount the entire history of the world. So it doesn’t have the strong theoretical or conceptual drive that most “universal histories” do but it also demonstrates the kinds of pressures that trying to recount human history from its beginnings to the present places upon scholarly history.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I’ll likely use a small part of the book in the course, I think near the end.
I don’t think I’d use it as a work of reference for specific regions or eras of world history that I’m not expert in.
Quotes
(See below: I’m going to do something a bit different here.)
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
I’m not that far into the book (the main text is almost 1200 pages of small print), but I’ve been taking a lot of notes so far, and this column is really about the way I process a particular reading rather than being a conventionally composed review.
John Morris Roberts died in 2003; Westad was brought in to help revise and update the book for a 6th Edition. I think it’s fairly easy to see where Westad has added new scholarship or revised Roberts’ interpretations, but a good deal of Roberts’ perspective and prose styling remains—on the whole it still reads like a work rooted in the 1970s and 1980s.
What has struck me so far in reading is that the book is a great companion for Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which I reviewed formally recently. One of the common critiques of Graeber and Wengrow from some specialists is that they exaggerate how novel their own interpretations are or misstate what the current consensus interpretations in a particular field of study actually are. In many cases, I don’t have the specialized knowledge to contest such critiques, but I was struck in reading Roberts and Westad’s 6th Edition of the Penguin History that it nicely represents the sort of orthodoxy that Graeber and Wengrow set out to challenge. I understand that one riposte that could be made to this point is that this book is also out-of-date or misrepresents the state of play in a specialized field, but to some extent that is a response that specialists will always have to world histories, since no one is actually doing original research on the entirety of world history. World history is by its nature a synthesizing project and it will always seem to have less fidelity to the details of a given field or subject than specialized work offers.
But looking at this book in relationship to The Dawn of Everything does underscore that there is still some need for the corrective analysis that Graeber and Wengrow are pursuing. So what I thought I would do here is offer a close reading of the first three chapters, which Westad indicates he revised substantially to take note of new archaeological and anthropological research since the previous edition. These chapters are a pretty strong example of the perspectives that Graeber and Wengrow set out to challenge. (Though there are also some interesting alignments between them and Roberts & Westad at points.)
If you ever wanted a compact example of how “Eurocentrism” infiltrates modern historical knowledge even when it is ostensibly not about Europe as such, the first paragraph of his world history could provide it. “The roots of history lie in the pre-human past and it is hard (but important) to grasp just how long ago that was. If we think of a century on our calendar as a minute on some great clock recording the passage of time, then Europeans began to settle in the Americas only about five minutes ago. Slightly less than fifteen minutes before that, Christianity appeared. Rather than more than an hour ago people settled in southern Mesopotamia who were soon to evolve the oldest civilization known to us. This is already well beyond the furthest margin of written records; according to our clock, people began writing down the past much less than an hour ago, too. Some six or seven hours further back on our scale, and much more remote, we can discern the first recognizable human beings of a modern physiological type already established in western Europe”. This is the start of a world history, but look at the benchmarks: Europeans settling in the Americas, Christianity appearing, the familiar Mesopotamians, Homo sapiens arriving in Europe. But Europe isn’t the first place Homo sapiens migrating out of East Africa went, Neolithic agricultural settlements appear in many places early in human history and proto-cities in multiple locations. They’re not even trying to be global in some more expansive sense. (Later on, in what I presume to be Westad’s revisions, there’s some effort to acknowledge that common periodizations of human prehistory are Eurocentric in this sense but the book doesn’t really try to talk about contradictory or diverging evidence from elsewhere—a point Graeber and Wengrow develop at length.)
Compared to some of the more scientifically-inclined “big history” scholars like David Christian, Roberts and Westad’s general summary of mammalian evolution leading to the appearance of hominims up to the earliest appearances of Homo sapiens still has a strong touch of the “evolution has a direction, and its direction is humanity” embedded inside of it, with a lot of the tropes involved—of classifications of animals “dominating” the world or “winning out”, of particular species “deciding” to adapt to a particular environment. It’s one place where using passive tense might be more appropriate: not “a family of successful hominims increased its brain size” but “the brain size of one family of hominims increased over time”. I grant that it’s hard to recount evolution in a narrative without falling into some of these patterns but it can be done, and in this case it’s important if human history is going to be situated within a broader evolutionary context.
For all that Roberts and Westad periodically acknowledge how little we actually know about the specifics of hominid and human life up to 10,000 BCE or so (a point Graeber and Wengrow also make), it’s fascinating to see where they give themselves permission to offer quite specific descriptions of hominid or early human life. The consistent subject where they do so is in describing gender roles (here I think they are reflecting the scholarship in physical anthropology) in ways that seem to go way beyond what there is strong evidence to claim. We know that larger brain sizes with Homo species from erectus onward must have dramatically boosted their daily caloric and nutritional needs. We know that larger brain sizes plus the earlier development of an upright gait meant that homo infants needed to be born with less and less in-the-womb development which meant a longer period of childhood development that required adult attention. We can reasonably guess that homo species developed hidden estrus like some other primates, but it’s not even clear that it’s entirely accurate to say that contemporary humans have completely “lost” estrus in the sense of internal hormonal cycles have little to no effect on women’s sexuality. But Roberts and Westad (like many others scholars) quickly leap to arguing homo erectus females were responsible for child care and had to get rid of estrus because it was too disruptive to nurturing children. Or “the new possibilities of individual selection [of mates] pointed ahead to the stable and enduring family unit of father, mother and offspring, an institution unique to mankind”, which seems a very Just-So kind of story that is arguable or just wrong at several points.
Another point where they habitually overstate the specifics is when it comes to talking about technology and tool-use, whether it’s evidence for the early use of fire or for the expansion and refinement of stone tools. This is a point Graeber and Wengrow also make (though they don’t have much to say about gender, by contrast), which is that it’s entirely possible that at a very early date in human evolution, there were refined tools in common usage that will never show up in any kind of archaeological evidence because they aren’t preserved. Roberts and Westad note this point several times as well: “Earlier men or even man-like creatures may have scratched patterns in the mud, daubed their bodies, moved rhythmically in dance or spread flowers in patterns, but of such things we know nothing, because, of them, if they ever happened, nothing has survived.” But this caution doesn’t stop them from offering quite tangible descriptions of developments that we can’t know about except in purely speculative terms. They’ve got homo erectus, a fire-user but not fire-maker, being changed sociologically, psychologically and culturally by its advent. That’s plausible (if speculative) but then we get “fire-bearers and fire specialists appeared, beings of awesome and mysterious importance…They carried and guarded the great liberating tool, and the need to guard it must sometimes have made them masters. Yet the deepest tendency of this new power always ran towards the liberation of mankind”. In terms of what we know (and likely all we will ever know), that’s just purely made up. I could as easily say “fire-keeping was a democratic responsibility shared equally by all members of a group that forged new bonds of equality” or “homo erectus had a pragmatic, matter-of-fact view of fire” and be just as on target with existing evidence. (This is usually the point where some scholars will insist that contemporary hunter-gatherers can be used to infer what earlier homo communities thought or did, or that other primates can provide insight—and then usually cherry-pick the one example that fits their description and ignore all the others, while also just completely overlooking the knowable history of foraging and hunting societies between 1750 and 2022 that should make this kind of claim off-limits, since none of them are “unchanged survivals” of a prehistoric way of life.)
Another example of this: they describe the disappearance of cave art as an “extinction”, an “impoverishment”, a possible result of climatic change, but they also concede that this is once again based on its history in Europe—that there are many possible locations for prehistorical rock art that haven’t been studied or found, but also that perhaps artistic practices simply shifted into media that haven’t survived. (Also that in some parts of the planet, cave art and rock art have been routinely erased by local environmental conditions.) Once again, they note how “fanciful” it is to speculate based on a specifically European set of examples but it doesn’t stop them.
I find it really odd in accounts of human evolution that we routinely use the word “colonize” to describe migrations of homo genus populations into areas that appear to have had no prior homo populations in them before that point.
Interestingly, they do tell a story that aligns with Graeber and Wengrow in one very particular way, which is to suggest that at some point after 25,000 BCE, the major storyline of human history is the variety and diversity of human societies, driven to a significant extent by the conscious choices of human beings but also by complex relationships between neighboring societies. “Mankind increasingly chooses for itself, and even in prehistory the story of change is therefore increasingly one of conscious adaptation. So the story will continue into historical times, more intensively still. This is why the most important part of the human story is the story of consciousness, when, long ago, it broke the genetic slow march, it made everything else possible.”
What reading Roberts and Westad shows me is partially that the need to revise world history is still rather pressing. It’s not that hard to imagine what a book that starts with that clock metaphor but uses genuinely global benchmarks might look like, what a book could be that would open a bigger and more intellectually generous sort of “fanciful” interpretations of times and places that we know less about, what a book that is much more wary about conventional readings of the temporality and meaning of early human settlements, agriculture and urbanization. Graeber and Wengrow are trying to get there on most of these points—and I’m simply not convinced that every other historian has long since arrived at such a revision. Roberts and Westad feel closer to a historiographical consensus version of world history, even though through successive revisions, many signs of parenthetical cautions about that consensus have appeared in the text.