The World: A Family History of Humanity

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Herr Oberoffizial Hiedler. His hobbies were beekeeping, beer drinking and skirt chasing: his love life was chaotic and semi-incestuous, as he fathered children with various women, of whom a daughter Angela survived, before he began an affair when he was already married with a cousin or half-niece hired as a maid called Klara Pölzl, twenty-three years his junior.

Pedro protected them – to public outrage. Pedro aimed to abolish slavery slowly to avoid revolts and an agricultural crash. In 1885, the Sexagenarian Law freed slaves at sixty. Finally, on 13 May 1888, Isabel abolished slavery and freed 700,000 slaves, generating a surge of popularity as Redeemer of the Blacks. While black people supported the monarchy, forming a Black Guard to defend it, many planters became republican.

In November 1889, the old emperor held a ball for the visiting Chilean navy. But when Pedro arrived, he tripped. ‘The monarchy stumbles,’ he joked. ‘But doesn’t fall.’ Marshal Fonseca discouraged republican officers – ‘I want to accompany the emperor’s coffin. He’s old; I respect him’ – but they went ahead anyway. A provincial government declared a republic. At the palace, Pedro waited for the marshal, who was too embarrassed to come. The empress panicked. ‘Nonsense, my lady,’ said Pedro. ‘It’s a tempest in a teapot – I know my fellow Brazilians. Monarchies don’t fall that easily.’ But they do.

When German Jews were attacked in an antisemitic campaign, Fritz and Vicky had supported them by going to a synagogue in Berlin. Bismarck plotted their destruction, focusing his hatred on Vicky – ‘a wild woman…who terrified him by the unrestrained sexuality which speaks through her eyes’. But the chancellor was fortunate: Fritz was already suffering from throat cancer and filial betrayal. His son Willy, long indulged and funded by his grandfather ‘Wilhelm the Great’, despised his weakened father and liberal mother and could not wait to become absolutist kaiser and arbiter of Europe.

he was happiest in the Guards, adoring the male companionship and the fetishistic trappings of Prussian virility, uniforms, high boots, eagle helmets.

I fear he’ll get into trouble,’ thanks to his ‘love of playing the despot and showing off’. She added, ‘It’s indeed a misfortune for us all that W…is imbued with prejudices, false notions and mistaken ideas…so unripe of character and judgement…Power was put into his hands which he so often abuses.’ Vicky had foresight too: ‘The worst of it is that we shall perhaps all have to pay for his ignorance and impudence.’ She meant war.

Willy believed his power was bestowed by God. ‘Forever and forever there’s only one real Emperor in the world,’ he wrote, ‘and that is the German regardless of his person and qualities but by right of a thousand years’ tradition. And his Chancellor has to obey!’

emerging as an eccentric with the maniacal energy that is often the antidote to depression.

After the death of his father, this irrepressible, pugnacious dynamo with round spectacles, rasping voice and ‘castanet-like snapping teeth’ entered ‘the arena’: ‘I intended,’ he said, ‘to be one of the governing class.’

In 1882, Thomas Alva Edison, a half-deaf teachers’ son from Ohio who had started as a telegraphist during the civil war and aged twenty-two registered his first patent, threw a switch in the office of his banker, J. P. Morgan, which started generating electrical power for use in the lighting of fifty-nine homes in Manhattan, launching the utility that became Edison Illuminating Company.

But he neglected his children and was exasperated by his alcoholic huckster sons, whom he refused to employ in his labs.

‘Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.’

Then he worked on the technology to generate and distribute the electricity. He did not get everything right. He insisted that direct current was the safe way to distribute electricity, but he employed a talented young Serb, Nikola Tesla, who left to work for his rival, George Westinghouse, to develop alternating current. Tesla was right. Edison was overtaken by Westinghouse and his bankers merged his businesses with others to create Con Edison and General Electric. But he was also experimenting with recording sounds (the phonograph that launched the music business) and transmitting voices (the carbon telephonic transmitter that became the telephone), the rechargeable battery and the movie camera (the Kinetograph, which created the film industry). He even founded Black Maria, the first movie studio, which made 1,200 silent movies. Later he toyed with a contraption for speaking to the dead. Perhaps he was joking, but it was only a

The refrigerator so improved nutrition that in the next decades the height of the average American increased by 5.1 per cent.

Across the world, at almost the same time, in February 1882, a New Zealander pioneered a refrigerator ship that conveyed frozen lamb from Dunedin to London which w...

All of these became so ever present that their ubiquity was almost invisible; the skills to live without them were lost. Yet without them, modern life would collapse in a second. These improvements in nutrition coincided with advances in healthcare and agricultural productivity...

Edison and Ford – a virulent antisemite and conspiracy theorist – became friends, holding annual motoring expeditions.[*7]

Afterwards soldier Hugh McGinnis recalled that ‘helpless children and women with babies in their arms had been chased as far as two miles from the original scene of encounter and cut down without mercy by the troopers…The soldiers simply went berserk.’ Three hundred Lakota were killed; twenty-five soldiers died too. ‘I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch,’ remembered Black Elk, a Lakota survivor. ‘A people’s dream died there.’

In Kyiv, Warsaw and Odessa, and around 200 other places, Jews were attacked by Russian crowds, probably hundreds raped and killed in pogroms (from the Russian pogromit – to destroy). Alexander

‘For two years,’ recalled Riis, ‘we were brothers in [Mafia-ridden] Mulberry Street.’ Thousands of immigrants were pouring into New York, first the Irish, then Italians, Germans, Jews. By 1901, New York was the biggest port on earth, but the hardscrabble fostered another quintessential American culture that is usually left out of world history: crime.

He murdered reformers, using a secret police based on his Russian neighbours’, and was an adept player of ethnic politics.

secret police reported his meetings with his relatives, describing him as a ‘wilful recalcitrant person whose views on the rare occasions he consented to express them revealed a dangerous capacity for original thinking’.

‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world,’ as he wrote in his will, ‘and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.’

Ice-cold, solitary and obsessional, Kitchener, six foot two, blond, with pewter eyes (and a cast in one of them) and a face like a mask, was a self-made Anglo-Irish officer, a celibate, probably a repressed homosexual, who combined steely acumen, vindictive ambition and porcelain collecting. Now this meticulous operation would win him the nickname the Sudan Machine. When the British Lancers charged, Churchill rode with them.

He joined the Social Democratic Party, drawn to one of its leaders, Vladimir Ulyanov, who called himself Lenin, a cultured, well-off nobleman ferociously dedicated to revolution, who adapted Marx to fit Russia, creating a tiny vanguard to exercise a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ backed by terror. Djugashvili hero-worshipped Lenin: ‘my mountain eagle’. Later he adopted the name Stalin.

Roosevelt turned on the overmighty trusts, the first president to believe that the state had to limit the power of monopolies. ‘Of all forms of tyranny,’ said Teddy, ‘the least attractive and most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth.’

He rightly believed that it was the state’s duty to limit the plutocracy. ‘Like all Americans I like big things,’ he said, ‘big prairies…wheatfields, railways, factories, steamboats. But…no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their morals.’ The president, assisted by his attorney-general Charlie Bonaparte,[*21] struck at Rockefeller, forcing the break-up of Standard Oil, along with banks, railways and tobacco trusts.

For decades, thousands of children had died after being poisoned by ‘swill milk’, produced by cows which had been fed the waste created by distilling grain to make whisky. Poisonous milk went on killing until Nathan Straus, Jewish owner of Macy’s department stores, started to pasteurize milk and sell it cheaply to the poor.

He followed that up with the idea that character, governed by the libido and the death drive, was formed by psychosexual experiences in childhood. In particular, he identified the Oedipus complex of paternal hatred and maternal attraction, along with castration anxiety for boys, penis envy for girls.

the Three Pashas – who embraced a toxic mix of Turkish ultra-nationalism, social Darwinism, including eugenics and a hierarchy of racial superiority taught them by their German military instructors, and militaristic warmongering, to save race and empire.

and made a key decision: he converted the navy from coal to oil, purchasing 51 per cent of a company, Anglo-Persian Oil, that had struck oil four years earlier.

On 16 November 1917, France, beset by mutinies and close to collapse, turned to a ferocious critic of its leadership and former premier, Georges ‘Le Tigre’ Clemenceau, aged seventy-seven,[*10]

Wearing his golden eagle helmet and field marshal’s uniform, the kaiser addressed the workers from a slagheap and ranted against ‘traitors’, exhorting, ‘Be as strong as steel!’, unwisely adding, ‘Each worker has his duty, you at your lathe, me on my throne.’ After a long silence the workers shouted, ‘Hunger!’ and ‘Peace!’ Willy was shaken.

A virus subtype H1N1 – the flu – the name itself deriving from an Italian outbreak in 1743 supposedly caused by the influentia of the stars.

But the new cult of the superman-dictator was a transcendent rejection of petty routine and projection of the extraordinary in which the mass could share. Hitler believed he could do the same: he planned to seize power.

‘Do you know,’ said Meiling Song, ‘I’ve noticed the most successful men are usually not the ones with great powers as geniuses but the ones who had such ultimate faith in their own selves that invariably they hypnotize others as well as themselves.’

‘When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible…like a hurricane from a gorge, a sex maniac on heat, prowling for a lover.’ The excitement of conflict and of power over life and death has never been better expressed. ‘Revolutionary war is an anti-toxin which not only eliminates the enemy’s poison,’ he argued, ‘but also purges us of our filth.’

Impulsive and unscrupulous, a supreme manipulator of personalities with a fine turn of phrase, a relentless reader and history buff, with a superb memory, he possessed an unyielding will to dominate. Influenced like so many by social Darwinism, which dovetailed with Marxist class struggle, Mao believed that ‘Long-lasting peace is unendurable to humans’; rather ‘We love sailing on a sea of upheavals.’ China had to be ‘destroyed and reformed’ to rise again.

While Zhou organized clandestine work in Shanghai, Mao held public executions of landlords at Party rallies, declaring, ‘Revolution’s not a dinner party, nor an essay, nor a painting, nor embroidery,’ but ‘an act of violence by which one class overthrows another’. Stalin noticed that Mao was ‘insubordinate but successful’ and started to back him.

At home, where alcohol was still banned, Americans drank in blind tigers – covert bars or speakeasies – to the sound of jazz, a word that originated in jasm, which among black musicians in New Orleans meant sexual energy. Jazz, a fusion of African-American blues, ragtime and jig piano, was developed there in New Orleans. Its seminal ballad, ‘Strange Fruit’, sung by Billie Holiday, recounts a lynching: most of the musical movements that swept twentieth-century Euro-America would be rooted in the horror and passion of the African-American experience. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young novelist who chronicled the careless wealth and mysterious pasts of the new grandees in his novel The Great Gatsby, called the period the Jazz Age. In Chicago and New York at the same time, vertiginous skyscraping towers were built. Jazz was now embraced by white Americans spending money made in industry, on the stock market or from crime in glamorous clubs controlled by Italian, Irish and Jewish gangsters where Scottish and Canadian whisky was served. Lucky Luciano was recruited as a hitman by the pudgy, epicurean New York padrino Joe Masseria; Meyer and Bugsy often assisted at his killings. Masseria was confronted by challengers and survived (with only two bullet holes in his hat) a gun-blazing assassination attempt, with hitmen firing tommy-guns while riding on the running boards of a motor car. He emerged as capo di tutti capi – boss of bosses – forcing other Mafiosi from Detroit and Buffalo to p...

‘There’s nothing better than educating a young thing,’ he reflected, ‘malleable as wax.’ In September 1931, Geli shot herself with a pistol given to her by Uncle Alf. No one knows why she killed herself, but most likely she found herself suffocated by Hitler’s control. ‘The days are sad right now,’ a poleaxed Hitler told Winifred Wagner, the composer’s daughter-in-law and one of the devoted hostesses who served as surrogate mothers. The suicide made him a vegetarian and confirmed that love and family mattered little to him. ‘I’m the most limited person in the world in this area,’ he said, ‘I am a fully non-familial being.’ Soon afterwards, Hitler, now forty, met the eighteen-year-old Eva Braun, a schoolteacher’s daughter and assistant to his photographer Hoffmann, who fitted Hitler’s ideal of ‘big and blonde and wonderful’. When she too attempted suicide, it won her a permanent place in his life

‘This girl did this out of love for me’ – but her discretion allowed him to declare frequently, ‘I have another bride. I am married: to the German people.’

‘When I’m no longer here…’ He was a reckless gambler whose dreams defied conventional sense: ‘I go the way that providence dictates with the assurance of a sleepwalker.’

All politicians exist twice – as individuals representing just their personal qualities and as phenomena representing something more: the magic lies in the fusion of the two.

Hitler arrived back in Berlin, revelling in the drama: ‘Brown shirt, black tie, dark brown leather coat, high black military boots, everything dark upon dark,’ wrote a witness. ‘Above it all, bareheaded, a chalkwhite, sleepless, unshaven face…from which a pair of extinguished eyes stared through some clotted strands of hair.’

Next morning, Hitler told his secretary, ‘I’ve just had a bath and feel like I’ve been born again.’

backed by a murderous secret police, now called the OGPU, and a network of concentration camps, the GULAG, Stalin mastered the propulsive politics of the Mass Age, mobilizing millions of people, particularly the young, in the Bolshevik project to destroy the old and build a new, more just world in the thrilling drama of revolution. But he also appreciated that modernity was a struggle of geopolitics, driven by mass weapons, mass killing, mass production and mass spectacle.

Stalin had embarked on a radical and colossal gamble to industrialize Russia at breakneck speed, using American advisers and technology to collectivize agriculture in Ukraine and other regions, mercilessly collecting grain to pay for the industrialization. Initially the Bolsheviks had promoted Ukrainian culture, as part of their policy of korenizatsiia (indigenisation), providing Moscow was paramount. But when the peasants in Ukraine resisted, Stalin ‘broke their backs’ by repression and famine. Remembering the Polish invasion and fearing that ‘We may lose Ukraine’, he cracked down on Ukrainian language and culture, arresting, shooting or deporting 4–5 million people.

Four million peasants died of starvation in Ukraine – one in eight people – the atrocity today known as the Holodomor (‘Death by Hunger’) that was, writes Serhii Plokhy, ‘a man-made phenomenon, caused by official policy’, resulting from ‘policies with a clear ethnonational coloration’. Simultaneously, it was part of a wider Soviet famine – 1.2 to 1.4 million Kazakhs starved to death: ‘This,’ writes Stephen Kotkin, ‘was the highest death ratio in the Soviet Union.’ Stalin’s self-made calamity could have destroyed the USSR, but instead the cruel gamble paid off: the USSR emerged with collectivized farms worked by 100 million farmers as oppressed as serfs – and modern industry that could soon outproduce Germany.

If Russia faced a new war against Hitler, Stalin needed to enforce total supremacy. Killing was his way to do it. ‘Our system,’ he told a confidant, ‘is bloodletting,’ later explaining that his method was ‘quicker but requires more blood’.