The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The grizzled, gruesome de Sousa, who combined Catholic and voodoo faith, was originally so poor that he stole cowrie shells from voodoo temples, but ultimately he thrived as a slave trader, living in sultanic splendour in a family compound, Singbomey in Ouidah, amid a harem of African women with whom he fathered 201 children.

1836, Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, who regarded the enslaving of Africans as a God-given right,

He lost the first campaign but won the second in 1828, which was viciously fought: Jackson was accused of being the cannibal son of a prostitute and a ‘mulatto’, married to a bigamist.

Jackson’s politics like his life was visceral: he regularly swore to kill his rivals;

Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar,[*23] a Georgian cotton planter’s son, poet, lawyer and warrior. Lamar had led the cavalry charge at San Jacinto and now armed the republic’s own paramilitary killers, the Rangers, to destroy the Comanche and Cherokee, whom he called ‘red n——’ and ‘wild cannibals’, demanding their ‘total extinction’.

‘manifest destiny’.

Abraham Lincoln, who attacked Polk’s quest for ‘military glory – that attractive rainbow, that rises in showers of blood’. When Polk became jealous of

On 2 February 1848, in a treaty signed at Guadalupe Hidalgo, America won California and new territories larger than western Europe; Mexico lost 55 per cent of its land.

The settler nation now extended from ocean to ocean,

His rise illustrates that mysterious process of politics, momentous inevitability, by which the preposterously impossible becomes plausible, then – as alternatives are rejected and other routes closed – likely, and finally, imminent.

Ptolemy – hijacking the body. Instead, he launched his second coup attempt, which ended with him sentenced to ‘perpetual imprisonment’ in the Fortress of Ham near the Somme. ‘In France,’ he joked, ‘is anything perpetual?’

The revolutions were a howl of rage directed at the old hierarchy in a new era of seething cities, billowing factories, careening railways, rollercoasting stock markets, multiplying newspapers, bestselling instalment-novels and news-bearing telegraphs.

opéra bouffe:

Eliza James,

In Awadh in summer 1857, British civilians and troops were besieged in Lucknow. In Kanpur, Nana rescued 200 women and children from a massacre. As British forces advanced from Allahabad, sepoys refused to kill them, whereupon five butchers from the bazaar slaughtered the 200 Britons with cleavers, while babies were brained against nearby trees. The bodies were then thrown down a well. Britons were sometimes fired out of cannon. Altogether, in the rebellion, 6,000 were killed.[*19]

British civilians and

western outrage that Elgin and Montauban ordered the looting then burning of the beautiful Summer Palace, built by Qianlong. The troops engaged in ‘indiscriminate plunder and wanton destruction’, wrote a young British officer, as they became ‘seized with a temporary insanity’ fixated on ‘plunder, plunder’. Elgin and Montauban – now comte de Palikoa – looted gold and jade staves for Victoria and Napoleon, while an old courtesan who died during the attack left five Pekinese dogs that were taken back to Britain; the queen was given one, crassly named Lootie, who lived in Windsor for ten years. The peace treaties signed by the emperor’s brother ceded Kowloon to Britain, promised indemnities and granted Russia a section of coast, where an eastern port, Vladivostok, was soon built.

On 24 June 1859, at Solferino in Habsburg Italy, Napoleon, chain-smoking in the saddle, defeated the Austrians under Franz Josef in one of the first battles of modern warfare

and the last commanded by sovereigns.

Sisi gave birth to two daughters. But she was unmoved by the stolid emperor, stifled by the pompous court and harassed by her strident mother-in-law, who commandeered the babies and mocked Sisi as a ‘silly young mother’. When a daughter died of typhus aged two, Sisi sank into depression, refusing to eat. Setting up gyms in her palaces, she exercised, dieted and binged obsessionally.

Tall, slim, beautiful, she prided herself on her waist (16½ inches), strapping herself into tightly laced corsets. She craved freedom, fame and love like a modern woman, riding and hunting manically, making herself Europe’s fastest equestrienne. Growing ever more self-absorbed and self-indulgent, she had little time for Franz Josef and not much for her children: ‘Children are the curse of a woman, for when they come, they drive away Beauty.’ She adored Heinrich Heine’s verses and wrote poems herself, often mocking her enemies; she hated royal life – ‘this drudgery, this torture’, she called it. ‘She espoused the view that freedom was everyone’s right,’ wrote her future daughter-in-law Stephanie. ‘Her picture of life resembled a beautiful fairy-tale drama of a world without sorrow or constraint.’ In 1858, she gave birth to a son, Crown Prince Rudolf, fulfilling her chief duty, after which she travelled the world, pursued pleasure and avoided court, husband and children.

Nationalism had replaced religion to provide a sense of belonging and meaning for millions; nation states, run by impersonal bureaucracies, became awesome organizers of resources; civil societies grew ever more complicated – but dynasties could adapt and provide stability and leadership. Nations were like families, monarchs their fathers and mothers.

While at Göttingen University, he was nicknamed Mad Junker for his wild hunting, drinking and duelling (he insulted everyone and sought duels, managing to fight twenty-five in three terms),

He delighted in conflict, yet never served in the Prussian army; he was an evangelical Pietist Christian without an ounce of Christian generosity. A soft-voiced but impressive speaker, he was a beguiling wit and a superb writer.

As minister-president, Bismarck enjoyed shocking Prussian liberals: ‘The great questions of the time will be resolved not by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake of 1848 – but by iron and blood.’

War was risky – Bismarck called it ‘rolling the iron dice’ – but he was a risk-taker: ‘My entire life has been spent gambling for high stakes with other people’s money.’

Alfred was as extraordinary as Bismarck, a spidery, stick-thin, neurotic, pointy-faced, hypochondriacal crank who wore a shabby red toupee and was obsessed with steel, technology and weirdly the smell of horse manure. When his father died in 1826, Alfred, then aged fourteen, brought up ‘with the fear of total ruin’, inherited the works, travelling to Yorkshire to spy on the making of Britain’s finest Sheffield steel. On his return, barely sleeping, constantly ill – ‘I celebrate my birthday in my own way, last year with cough medicine, this one with enemas’ – he single-handedly propelled Krupp: ‘I myself acted as clerk, letter writer, cashier, smith, smelter, coke pounder, nightwatchman at the converting furnace,’

Maximilian withdrew to Santiago de Querétaro, where Juárez besieged him. When he attempted to break out, Maximilian was betrayed. Juárez sentenced him to death. ‘I always wanted to die on a morning like this,’ murmured Maximilian as he was taken out before 3,000 troops. He boldly addressed them: ‘Mexicans! Men of my class and race [he meant the Habsburgs] are created by God to be the happiness of nations or their martyrs. Long live Mexico!’ Refusing a blindfold, he choreographed his martyrdom with two of his generals on either side of him like Christ. Franz Josef said nothing about his brother’s death except that he would be missed at the next shoot, where ‘we may still look forward to some good sport’.

reform is always a dangerous moment.

Finally at Cerro Corá, López, accompanied

Brazilian soldiers found him washing his wounds in a stream and shot him.

‘Is this the civilization you promised?’ They forced her to bury both Lópezes with her bare hands.[*9]

Pedro was an unhurried abolitionist who lacked the constitutional power to overrule his slave-owning elite.[*10] But

Two thousand African-Americans were killed in lynchings

extrajudicial murders of African-Americans, supposedly guilty of crimes, often celebrated by whites as part of ‘southern’ culture.

Murder sprees by the KKK and its allies, the Knights of the White Camellia, escalated, and the racists seized power in some counties.

During his two-term presidency, Grant’s noble work in the south and his decent intentions towards Native Americans were undermined by his personal naivety in high politics, and by his inability to restrain America’s imperial voracity in the west. He backed a Peace Plan, offering the Native Americans ‘civilization, Christianization and citizenship’ when what they wanted was freedom to hunt and raid. The civil war had reinvigorated the Lakota and Cheyenne in Colorado and the Dakotas, while in the south the Comanche had returned to raiding.

‘The more Indians we kill this year, the less we’d have to kill next.’

In early 1870, US cavalry burned alive and hacked to pieces 173 Piegan Blackfeet, mainly women and children, in Montana, exposing the army’s genocidal instincts.

columns converged on Lakota villages. Grant loathed the insubordinate, narcissistic self-publicist Custer, a daredevil with long blond hair and fringed buckskin costumes, who had opposed Reconstruction, had been court-martialled for shooting deserters and had recently murdered more than 100 southern Cheyenne women and children. Grant banned this ‘not very level-headed man’ from the expeditions, but acquiesced when the general in command requested his presence. On 17 June, Crazy Horse defeated a column under General Crook. At Greasy Grass, on 25 June, the overconfident Custer and his men were ambushed by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and several hundred braves and wiped out in thirty minutes, with 267 killed. Custer was found shot in the head, stripped naked, an arrow through his penis.

The Gilded Age was coal-fuelled and steam-powered, but an angular and meticulous young man was investing in another carbon fuel that seemed useful only for illumination. In fact it would change the world. On 10 January 1870, the thirty-one-year-old John D. Rockefeller founded an oil refinery in Cleveland, Ohio, that he called Standard Oil. At the end of the civil war, he had started to buy out other oil refiners. Rockefeller’s ascetic nature, manifested in an obsession with order and tidiness, was a reaction against a father who was an itinerant huckster, bigamist and snake-oil salesman. Houses had long been lit by whale oil, extracted by whalers, but in 1857 oil was discovered seeping out of the ground in Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, starting a switch to Rockefeller’s chief product, kerosene, now used to light private houses and the streets of the growing cities. Rockefeller played what he called his ‘great game’, an aggressive integration of the oil business into one ‘trust’ that controlled everything from the gushing oil via ships and refineries to the customers who bought their kerosene tins from the local store. The by-products of refining oil were useful for making lubricants for machinery, skin products and something called gasoline, but it was not lucrative. There seemed no use for it.

Some 6,500 black people (and 1,300 whites, usually immigrants) were lynched between 1865 and 1950.

‘I’m too poor to buy myself such a thing,’ grumbled Wilhelm. ‘Folks like us can’t rise to this; only a Rothschild can achieve it.’

Bismarck, appointed chancellor and raised to prince, feared the death of his octogenarian kaiser Wilhelm: his heir, Fritz, who had distinguished himself in the war, was a liberal, influenced by his English wife Vicky. Bismarck hated both as obstacles to his plans. The strain of managing his incoherent invention was compulsive but draining even for the cynical, ingenious chancellor. Into his seventies, he could dictate memoranda for five hours while micromanaging his own multiple conspiracies. Yet the stress led to a spiralling psychosis of paranoia, gluttony and insomnia that almost killed him – only saved by a doctor who lovingly placed him on a diet, relaxed him by wrapping him in blankets and held his hand until he finally slept.

But in November 1884 he invited all the African contenders to Berlin for the dissection of a continent, as Leopold waited in Brussels. Europe, particularly in the Balkans, was so tense that the powers, accustomed to fierce competition, pivoted their rivalries on to Africa: British and French ‘explorers’ – usually imperial soldiers – raced to claim slices of the ‘cake’ if only to deny it to the other. Ideology and religion always reflect political contingency: Christian mission and mission civilisatrice, justified by theories of racist superiority and eugenics, dovetailed perfectly with imperial ambition and commercial avarice.[*10]

In 1888, John Dunlop, an Irish vet, invented the rubber tyre, used on bicycles and soon on motor cars. Leopold’s thugs, wielding rifles, chicotes – hippo-hide whips – and machetes, hunted down any opposition and executed workers who failed to deliver their rubber quotas. ‘As soon as it was a question of rubber,’ recalled a Leopoldine official, Charles Lemaire, ‘I wrote to the government: “To gather rubber, one must cut off hands, noses, ears.” ’ The

Force Publique enforced cheap rubber collection and cheap labour with violence, killing those who refused to work or punishing those who resisted by cutting off limbs for minor infringements: its units even had a Keeper of Hands since some soldiers were paid bonuses for hands collected (and bullets saved); others collected them as trophies. Leopoldine officers sometimes shot Africans for fun, killed their mistresses if they slept with other men, raped women and traded chained ‘volunteers’, effectively slaves. Though the number of deaths is now impossible to calculate, millions died. But this was not enough.

Bismarck accepted lesser prizes, ranging from Cameroon to South West Africa[*11] – while Peters, broad-hipped, soft-skinned and pasty, sporting self-designed military gear and bearing an array of guns, tried to seize Uganda from the kabaka of Buganda, and Tanganyika from the sultan of Zanzibar. He was successful in Tanganyika, where as Reichskommissar, known as Mkono wa Damu – Bloodsmeared Man – he ruled murderously. When his favourite concubine slept with his manservant, he hanged both and liquidated their villages, shocking even the Germans, who recalled Hangman Peters and sent troops to crush the resulting rebellion.[*12]

Napoleons. The era of popular nationalism that doomed pure monarchy and aristocracy fostered both bourgeois values and increasingly representative government at home, but security, profit, and prestige demanded empire abroad.

While killing many thousands in an endless war to subjugate Algeria, the French military were spearheaded by their cosmopolitan vanguard, the Foreign Legion, with its cut-throat cult of victory. ‘You, legionnaires, became soldiers to die,’ their general Oscar de Négrier told them as they seized more of Vietnam, ‘and I’m sending you to do just that!’