Everything has a history, and writers have for thousands of years tried to pull together a universal history of everything. “In earliest times,” the Hellenistic historian Polybius mused, in the second century B.C., “history was a series of unrelated episodes, but from now on history becomes an organic whole. Europe and Africa with Asia, and Asia with Africa and Europe.” For the past hundred years or so, each generation of English-language readers has been treated to a fresh blockbuster trying to synthesize world history. H. G. Wells’s “The Outline of History” (1920), written “to be read as much by Hindus or Moslems or Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans,” argued “that men form one universal brotherhood . . . that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last in one common human destiny.” Then came Arnold Toynbee, whose twelve-volume “Study of History” (1934-61), abridged into a best-selling two, proposed that human civilizations rose and fell in predictable stages. In time, Jared Diamond swept in with “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (1997), delivering an agriculture- and animal-powered explanation for the phases of human development. More recently, the field has belonged to Yuval Noah Harari, whose “Sapiens” (2011) describes the ascent of humankind over other species, and offers Silicon Valley-friendly speculations about a post-human future.
The appeal of such chronicles has something to do with the way they schematize history in the service of a master plot, identifying laws or tendencies that explain the course of human events. Western historians have long charted history as the linear, progressive working out of some larger design—courtesy of God, Nature, or Marx. Other historians, most influentially the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun, embraced a sine-wave model of civilizational growth and decline. The cliché that “history repeats itself” promotes a cyclical version of events, reminiscent of the Hindu cosmology that divided time into four ages, each more degenerate than the last.
What if world history more resembles a family tree, its vectors hard to trace through cascading tiers, multiplying branches, and an ever-expanding jumble of names? This is the model, heavier on masters than on plot, suggested by Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “The World: A Family History of Humanity” (Knopf), a new synthesis that, as the title suggests, approaches the sweep of world history through the family—or, to be more precise, through families in power. In the course of some thirteen hundred pages, “The World” offers a monumental survey of dynastic rule: how to get it, how to keep it, how to squander it.
“The word family has an air of cosiness and affection, but of course in real life families can be webs of struggle and cruelty too,” Montefiore begins. Dynastic history, as he tells it, was riddled with rivalry, betrayal, and violence from the start. A prime example might be Julius Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, the founder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, who consolidated his rule by entrapping and murdering Caesar’s biological son Caesarion, the last of the Ptolemies. Octavian’s ruthlessness looked anodyne compared with many other ancient successions, like that of the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II, who was opposed by his mother and her favorite son. When the favorite died in battle against Artaxerxes, Montefiore reports, their mother executed one of his killers by scaphism, “in which the victim was enclosed between two boats while force-fed honey and milk until maggots, rats and flies infested their living faecal cocoon, eating them alive.” She also ordered the family of Artaxerxes’ wife to be buried alive, and murdered her daughter-in-law by feeding her poisoned fowl.
As such episodes suggest, it was one thing to hold power, another to pass it on peacefully. “Succession is the great test of a system; few manage it well,” Montefiore observes. Two distinct models coalesced in the thirteenth century. One was practiced by the Mongol empire and its successor states, which tended to hand power to whichever of a ruler’s sons proved the most able in warfare, politics, or internecine family feuds. The Mongol conquests were accompanied by rampant sexual violence; DNA evidence suggests that Genghis Khan may be “literally the father of Asia,” Montefiore writes. He insists, though, that “women among nomadic peoples enjoyed more freedom and authority than those in sedentary states,” and that the many wives, consorts, and concubines in a royal court could occasionally hold real power. The Tang-dynasty empress Wu worked her way up from concubine of the sixth rank through the roles of empress consort (wife), dowager (widow), and regent (mother), and finally became an empress in her own right. More than a millennium later, another low-ranking concubine who became de-facto ruler, Empress Dowager Cixi, contrasted herself with her peer Queen Victoria: “I don’t think her life was half so interesting and eventful as mine. . . . She had nothing to say about policy. Now look at me. I have 400 million dependent on my judgment.”
The political liability of these heir-splitting methods was that rival claimants might fracture the kingdom. The Ottomans handled this problem by dispatching a brigade of mute executioners, known as the Tongueless, to strangle a sultan’s male relatives, and so limit the shedding of royal blood. This made for intense power games in the harem, as mothers tussled to place their sons at the front of the line for succession. A sultan was supposed to stop visiting a consort once she’d given birth to a son, Montefiore explains, “so that each prince would be supported by one mother.” Suleiman the Magnificent—whose father cleared the way for him by having three brothers, seven nephews, and many of his own sons strangled—broke that rule with a young Ukrainian captive named Hürrem (also known as Roxelana). Suleiman had more than one son with Hürrem, freed her, and married her; he then had his eldest son by another mother strangled. But that left two of his and Hürrem’s surviving adult sons jockeying for the top position. After a failed bid to seize power, the younger escaped to Persia, where he was hunted down by the Tongueless and throttled.
A different model for dynasty-building relied on the apparently more tranquil method of intermarriage. Alexander the Great was an early adopter of exogamy as an accessory to conquest; Montefiore says that he merged “the elites of his new empire, Macedonians and Persians, in a mass multicultural wedding” at Susa in 324 B.C. Many other empire-builders through the centuries took up the tactic, notably the Mughal emperor Akbar, who followed his subjugation of the Rajputs by marrying a princess of Amber, and so, Montefiore notes, kicked off “a fusion of Tamerlanian and Rajput lineages with Sanskritic and Persian cultures” that transformed the arts of north India. But it was in Catholic Europe, with its insistence on monogamy and primogeniture, that royal matchmaking became an essential tool of dynasty-building. (The Catholic Church itself, which imposed celibacy on its own Fathers, Mothers, Brothers, and Sisters, kept power in the family when Popes positioned their nephews—nipote, in Italian—in positions of authority, a practice that, as Montefiore points out, gave us the term “nepotism.”)
The archetypal dynasty of this model was the Habsburgs. The family had been catapulted to prominence in the thirteenth century by the self-styled Count Rudolf, who presented himself as a godson of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Rudolf, recognizing the strategic value of family alliances, cannily married off five of his daughters to German princes, thus helping to cement his position as king of the Germans. His method was violently echoed by the Habsburg-sponsored conquistadores, who, in order to shore up their authority, forced the kinswomen of Motecuhzoma and Atahualpa into marriages. And it was to the Habsburgs that Napoleon Bonaparte turned when he sought a mother for his own hoped-for heir.
The ruthless biology of primogeniture tended to reduce women to the position of breeders—and occasionally men, too. Otto von Bismarck snidely called Saxe-Coburg, the home of Queen Victoria’s husband, Albert, the “stud farm of Europe.” This system conduced to inbreeding, and came at a genetic price. By the sixteenth century, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V suffered from a massively protruding jaw, with a mouth agape and a stubby tongue slurring his speech. His son Philip II contended with a congenitally incapable heir, Don Carlos, who, Montefiore summarizes, abused animals, flagellated servant girls, defenestrated a page, and torched a house; he also tried to murder a number of courtiers, stage a coup in the Netherlands, stab his uncle, assassinate his father, and kill himself “by swallowing a diamond.” The Spanish Habsburg line ended a few generations later with “Carlos the Hexed,” whose parents were uncle and niece; he was, in Montefiore’s description, “born with a brain swelling, one kidney, one testicle and a jaw so deformed he could barely chew yet a throat so wide he could swallow chunks of meat,” along with “ambiguous genitalia” that may have contributed to his inability to sire an heir.
By the nineteenth century, European dynasts formed an incestuous thicket of cousins, virtually all of them descended from Charlemagne, and many, more proximately, from Queen Victoria. The First World War was the family feud to end them all. Triggered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir of the Habsburg emperor Franz Josef, the war brought three first cousins into conflict: Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, and King George V. (By then, Franz Josef’s only son had killed himself; his wife—and first cousin—had been stabbed to death; his brother Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had been executed; and another first cousin, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, had been deposed.) The war would, Montefiore observes, ultimately “destroy the dynasties it was designed to save”: the Habsburgs, the Ottomans, the Romanovs, and the Hohenzollerns had all been ousted by 1922.
Cartoon by Edward Steed
With the rise to political power of non-royal families in the twentieth century, Montefiore’s template for dynastic rule switches from monarchs to mafiosi. The Mafia model applies as readily to the Kennedys, whom Montefiore calls “a macho family business” with Mob ties, as to the Yeltsins, Boris and his daughter Tatiana, whose designated famiglia of oligarchs selected Vladimir Putin as their heir. In Montefiore’s view, Donald Trump is a wannabe dynast who installed a “disorganized, corrupt and nepotistic court” in democracy’s most iconic palace.
The Mafia metaphor also captures an important truth: a history of family power is a history of hit jobs, lately including Mohammed bin Salman’s ordering the dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi—which has been linked to battles within the House of Saud—and Kim Jong Un’s arranging the murder of his half brother. In the late eighteenth century, the concept of family was taking on another role. Modern republican governments seized on the language of kinship—the Jacobins’ “fraternité,” the United States’ “Founding Fathers”—to forge political communities detached from specific dynasties. Versions of the title “Father of the Nation” have been bestowed on leaders from Argentina’s José de San Martín to Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda. Immanuel Kant, among others, believed that democracies would be more peaceful than monarchies, because they would be free from dynastic struggles. But some of the bloodiest conflicts of modern times have instead hinged on who does and doesn’t belong to which national “family.” Mustafa Kemal renamed himself “Father of the Turks” (Atatürk) in the wake of the Armenian genocide. A century later, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Myanmar’s “Father of the Nation,” refused to condemn the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, who have been denied citizenship and so excluded from counting as Burmese.
It was partly to counter the genocidal implications of nationalism that, in 1955, MoMA’s photography curator Edward Steichen launched “The Family of Man,” a major exhibition designed to showcase “the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world.” The trouble is that even the most intimately connected human family can divide against itself. In the final days of the Soviet Union, Montefiore recounts, the U.S. Secretary of State James Baker discussed the possibility of war in Ukraine with a member of the Politburo. The Soviet official observed that Ukraine had twelve million Russians and many were in mixed marriages, “so what kind of war would that be?” Baker told him, “A normal war.”
“The World” has the heft and character of a dictionary; it’s divided into twenty-three “acts,” each labelled by world-population figures and subdivided into sections headed by family names. Montefiore energetically fulfills his promise to write a “genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe.” In zesty sentences and lively vignettes, he captures the widening global circuits of people, commerce, and culture. Here’s the Roman emperor Claudius parading down the streets of what is now Colchester on an elephant; there’s Manikongo Garcia holding court in what is today Angola “amid Flemish tapestries, wearing Indian linens, eating with cutlery of American silver.” Here are the Anglo-Saxon Mercian kings using Arabic dirhams as local currency; there’s the Khmer ruler Jayavarman VII converting the Hindu site of Angkor for Buddhist worship.
It’s largely up to the reader, though, to make meaning out of these portraits, especially when it comes to the conceit at the book’s center. For one thing, a “family history” is not the same as a “history of the family,” of the sort pioneered by social historians such as Philippe Ariès, Louise A. Tilly, and Lawrence Stone. Montefiore alludes only in passing to shifts such as the consolidation of the nuclear family in Europe after the Black Death, and to the effects on the family of the Industrial Revolution and modern contraception. He offers no sustained analysis of the implications that different family structures had for who could hold power and why.