The Pelican History of the World
Roberts (J.M.)
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Cover Affidavits

  1. ‘A brilliant book...the most outstanding history of the world yet written’
    → J. H. Plumb
  2. ‘This is a book I would like to put into the hands of anyone interested in the past’
    → Alan Bullock
  3. ‘This book is a stupendous achievement... the unrivalled World History for our day. It extends over all ages and all continents. It covers the forgotten experiences of ordinary men as well as chronicling the acts of men in power. It is unbelievably accurate in its facts and almost incontestable in its judgements’
    → A.J.P. Taylor in the Observer
  4. ‘Anyone who wants an outline grasp of history, the core of all subjects, can grasp it here’
    → Economist
  5. ‘A work of outstanding breadth of scholarship and penetrating judgements. There is nothing better of its kind’
    → Jonathan Sumption in the Sunday Telegraph
  6. ‘A remarkable achievement, fully justifying the self-confidence that must have inspired it’
    → Ivan Roots in the Daily Telegraph
  7. ‘I hope it will find its way into the library of every secondary school in the land’
    → Tony Howarth in The Times Educational Supplement

Preface to the 1976 edition
  1. For the last half-century or so, professional historians in this country have left world history well alone. There is no reason to reproach them for this. They were right, in the first place, to study things which interested them more; that is the way that good history gets written, by historians doing what they like doing. Secondly, the reservations some of them felt about history at anything like so general a level are also perfectly proper and respectable. The professional standards of British historians are as high as any in the world; the uneasiness many of my colleagues feel in talking about topics in which they have not at least mastered the secondary scholarship and their awareness of the grave dangers of impressionistic judgement once away from primary evidence are rooted in scruples of which we should be proud. They express a concern for intellectual honesty and integrity which is a noble achievement of our culture. I hope, none the less, that my colleagues will agree with me that it is proper for someone to try to write a history of the world for a large lay public, whatever the risks involved. The argument from enjoyment, after all, applies here too. My own interest has always been caught by general themes and this is one reason for the existence of this book, for it would never have been done if I had not enjoyed doing it. Whatever other historians think of the result - and no one can go far without falling into error when he must rely almost entirely on the work of experts whose scholarship he boils down, sometimes to a sentence - I hope they will not deplore the fact that I found my subject-matter as interesting as they found their more specialized studies.
  2. Not that this is the only justification of this book. I also feel that there is a positive value in presenting world history to the general public. Even if we do not know it, the history of the world is part of our mental furniture. As most men and women have some notions, however inadequate, about the way the world came to be what it is, it is all the better if they are made explicit. Keynes’ observation that those who say they do not believe in economic theory are usually in thrall to the ideas of an economist long dead can be applied to ‘commonsense’ views on history, too. Even if the limits of our own historical horizon are not very far away, what we take for granted as the background to our daily lives shows what we think is important in huge areas of the past; striving to make sense of events by getting them ‘in perspective’, we make judgements about world history all the time. All the better, then, to make them as seriously and as consciously as possible, whatever the shortcomings of our attempts to do so.
  3. One way in which I hope to have made this a little easier is by recalling something too often ignored in the last century or so, the importance of historical inertia and the sheer weight of the inherited past. This is not just a matter of what we can see - ruins and beefeaters are interesting, but of minor importance - but of the mental and institutional history lost to sight in the welter of day-to-day events. It is easy to recall that, say, what was called the ‘Cold War’ dominated much of the 1950s and 1960s, but we rarely consider its deep background in forces moulding the outlook of Americans, Russians and Chinese centuries before arguments could take place about capitalism and communism. Even our chronology is soaked in history. There is no good reason in this book to set aside the Christian chronology first adopted in the sixth century AD for, say, the Japanese or the Islamic alternatives. But AD 1941 - to take a year important in both Japanese and European history - is just as conventional a way of putting things as is the year 2061, which is the form once favoured by some Japanese nationalists. Calendars are cultural artifacts: our choice of chronologically significant dates around which to construct them is shaped by history.
  4. Nowadays we are unlikely to overlook another fact which shaped the general argument of this book, mankind’s unique power to produce change. The acceleration of change, its growth in scale and its wider and wider spread are irresistible evidence of an increase in conscious power to master the world of nature (and one reason why people have underrated the weight of the past). Lately, though, this mastery has been understandably clouded by disaster. The enthusiasm once felt for technical and intellectual achievement has fallen into disfavour in some quarters. The Great Depression, Auschwitz and Hiroshima have been followed by pollution, fear of overpopulation and the threat of war with ever more frightful weapons - to name only a handful of twentieth-century evils. Some people rightly distrust Promethean visions of man which were in the past too easily distorted into an optimism which assumed that inevitable success lay ahead. They think such views dated and shallow; they recall that the cheerfulness with which H. G. Wells contemplated the past in 1920 gave way to despair when he looked at the world at the end of his life a quarter-century or so later.
  5. I can respect such misgivings, but do not share the pessimism which is often drawn from them. I doubt whether a knowledge of historical facts has much to do with most people’s optimism or pessimism; such feelings seem to me to be usually a matter of temperament. But even if this impression is wrong, it does not seem to me that many safe predictions can follow from such facts as history provides. We can only make judgements, not necessary inductions. They do not force us to conclude either that we are now facing problems specially recalcitrant, or, on the other hand, that we are not. The resourcefulness and ingenuity so far displayed by mankind in asserting its conscious control of environment is not now invalidated because huge new needs and problems have arisen from human achievement itself. Such problems need not be insoluble in principle, though the cost may be some major discontinuities. The odds seem to me to be that the world organized as we know it certainly cannot last much longer, but that ordered and civilized life will go on in most places where it already exists. We have no reason to suppose that the outcome will be any more intolerable than, say, the results of changes forced on traditional Asia and Africa within the last century by the coming of Western technology. (Many people, of course, may reasonably argue that this would be intolerable enough.)
  6. My ideas on such topics emerged or at least were clarified by writing this book, but they were not my starting-point. At the outset, I was not sure of much except that I wanted, so far as possible, to tell a unified story and not to compile a new collection of accounts of traditionally important themes. My first body of raw material was constituted by miscellaneous reading and thinking over many years and it became a little easier to grapple with the jumble it presented when, a few years ago, an American publisher invited me to write a textbook of world history for American colleges. Such books are specialized tools, meant to do a particular job. I deferred to the views of my publisher’s technical advisers in writing it and the outcome was, I hope, good in its way, but not a book which said quite what I wished to say to the general public. Yet by forcing me to a first ordering of my ideas it was a big step towards that goal. When I began to write it, I had already decided that this book, too, would be written, so that work on the two versions could not for some time be distinguished.
  7. They were both shaped by a desire to avoid the encyclopaedic detail which often passes for general history. My aim has been to set out the major effective historical processes and their comparative scale and relations, not to provide continuous histories of ail major countries or fields of human activity. Those who look for them will not find in this book the names of every American president, nor those of all notable Italian Renaissance painters, nor the dates on which each African state emerged from colonial rule - or their names, either, for that matter. The place for such facts is an encyclopaedia. It is also true that I have neglected many areas which interest scholars and some others which possess a certain glamour because of the spectacle of what they have left behind. We still gape in amazement at the ruins of Yucatan and Zimbabwe and wonder over the statues of Easter Island. Yet intrinsically desirable though knowledge of the societies which produced these things is, they remain peripheral to world history; I have therefore only briefly sketched the early centuries of black Africa or the story of pre-Columbian America. What Europeans later brought back from and did to such societies is a different matter; that has shaped our lives, even if only in small degree. But nothing in black African or American history between very remote times and the coming of the Europeans moulded the great cultural traditions in which the legacies of the Buddha, the Hebrew prophets, Plato, and Confucius were for centuries (and are still today) living and shaping influences.
  8. I hope I have also avoided the seduction which the historian must feel when material is plentiful. What matters is that a topic is important, not that we may be lucky enough to have a lot of information about it. The wars and diplomacy of Louis XIV for instance, though crucial for France and even Europe, seem to me easier to pass over briefly than, say, the Chinese Revolution. In the most recent period of history it is more than ever important to distinguish the wood from the trees and not to mention something simply because it turns up every day in the newspapers or on television.
  9. Finally, though I use the Christian calendar throughout, I have striven not to be trapped by a ‘Eurocentric’ viewpoint. I have tried to recognize the impulses of my own historical inheritance, which must lie behind the choice of themes, organization and chronological arrangement. I cannot believe (to quote an ideal of historical objectivity set out by Lord Acton three-quarters of a century ago) that ‘nothing shall reveal the country, the religion, or the party’ to which I belong, nor that I could provide (as he hoped) an account of Waterloo to satisfy French, English, German and Dutch alike (even if there were time or space here to spend on such a theme). But I hope that an awareness of my assumptions and their limitations may nevertheless have made it possible to provide what he termed a history ‘which is distinct from the combined history of all countries’, and which nevertheless recognizes the variety of the great cultural traditions which give it much of its structure.
  10. Judgement whether this aim has been or has not been achieved rests with the reader. He should blame no one but the author for what he finds inadequate or erroneous, nor, indeed, for anything else in this book. Yet many other people have made important contributions to it which demand my grateful acknowledgement. …

Contents
    List of maps and diagrams → p.9
    Preface to The Pelican History of the World → p.11
    Preface to the 1976 edition → p.13
  1. Book One: Before History - Beginnings
      Introduction → p.19
    1. The foundations → p.21
    2. Homo sapiens → p.36
    3. The possibility of civilization → p.47
  2. Book Two: The First Civilizations
      Introduction → p.55
    1. Early civilized life → p.57
    2. Ancient Mesopotamia → p.64
    3. Ancient Egypt → p.81
    4. Intruders and invaders: The Dark Ages of the ancient Near East → p.101
      A complicating world → p.101
      Early civilized life in the Aegean → p.107
      The Near East in the ages of confusion → p.118
    5. The beginnings of civilization in eastern Asia → p.131
      Ancient India → p.131
      Ancient China → p.143
    6. The other worlds of the ancient past → p.158
    7. The end of the Old World → p.167
  3. Book Three: The Classical Mediterranean
      Introduction → p.173
    1. The roots of one world → p.174
    2. The Greeks → p.178
    3. Greek civilization → p.193
    4. The Hellenistic world → p.215
    5. Rome → p.229
    6. The Roman achievement → p.244
    7. Jewry and the coming of Christianity → p.258
    8. The waning of the classical West → p.272
    9. The elements of a future → p.296
  4. Book Four: The Age of Diverging Traditions
      Introduction → p.309
    1. Islam and the re-making of the Near East → p.311
    2. The Arab empires → p.326
    3. Byzantium and its sphere → p.336
    4. The disputed legacies of the Near East → p.359
    5. The making of Europe → p.378
    6. India → p.402
    7. The Chinese sphere → p.424
      China → p.424
      Japan → p.444
    8. Worlds apart → p.454
    9. Europe: the first revolution → p.467
      The Church → p.468
      Principalities and powers → p.480
      Working and living → p.488
    10. New limits, new horizons → p.499
      Europe looks outward → p.499
      The European mind → p.508
  5. Book Five: The Making of the European Age
      Introduction → p.519
    1. A new kind of society: early modern Europe → p.521
    2. Authority and its challengers → p.542
    3. The new world of great powers → p.571
    4. Europe’s assault on the world → p.600
    5. World history’s new shape → p.622
    6. Ideas old and new → p.637
  6. Book Six: The Great Acceleration
      Introduction → p.657
    1. Long-term change → p.659
    2. Political change in an age of revolution → p.678
    3. Political change: a new Europe → p.702
    4. Political change: the Anglo-Saxon world → p.721
    5. The European world hegemony → p.739
    6. European imperialism and imperial rule → p.761
    7. Asia’s response to a Europeanizing world → p.776
  7. Book Seven: The End of the Europeans’ World
      Introduction → p.803
    1. Strains in the system → p.805
    2. The era of the First World War → p.822
    3. A new Asia in the making → p.850
    4. The Ottoman heritage and the western Islamic lands → p.864
    5. The Second World War → p.877
    6. The shaping of a new world → p.898
  8. Book Eight: The Post-European Age
      Introduction → p.919
    1. A world civilization → p.921
    2. The politics of a new world → p.944
      Cold War → p.944
      Asian revolution → p.950
      The inheritors of empire in Africa and the Middle East → p.965
      Latin America → p.973
      The end of bipolarity? → p.980
    3. In the light of history → p.1003
    Index → p.1021
Book Comment

Penguin Books, 1980 (1981 Reprint)


Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)
  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026
  2. Mauve: Text by correspondent(s) or other author(s); © the author(s)


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