The World: A Family History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

Yet in the British Museum’s reading room Marx was devising an all-embracing ideology in a masterwork, Das Kapital: capitalism was doomed by its own internal contradictions because history was ruled by dialectical materialism, a progression towards, first, the rule of the proletariat and, then, a stateless, classless communism of total equality.

Keen to exploit the French presence in east Asia, he grabbed a naval base in China, then sent a flotilla to attack Annam (Vietnam) where Catholic missionaries had provoked a backlash, with the emperor Tu Duc trying to reject Catholic infiltration by executing two Spanish priests. In September 1857, French troops seized Da Nang and Saigon; both were repelled by the Vietnamese, but Napoleon dispatched reinforcements that in June 1862 retook Saigon. Thus was established the French colony of Cochinchina.

The Conservative chancellor, Disraeli, denounced the ‘Stygian pool, reeking with ineffable and intolerable horrors’, and launched the construction of London’s magnificent sewers by a visionary engineer, Joseph Bazalgette, who created 82 miles of brick-lined sewers and 1,100 miles of street sewers with pumping stations as splendid as palaces. It took twenty years but it ended the stink and reduced cholera too.

By 1865, a message from London to Bombay took thirty-five minutes. The smaller world made news more urgent: after Charles-Louis Havas, a Jewish writer from Rouen, had founded the first press agency, one of his employees, Israel Josaphat, a rabbi’s son from Kassel, defected to start his own agency, first using pigeons, then paying steamships to throw canisters with American news off ships at the first Irish port and finally, after moving to London and changing his name to Reuter, his new company used telegraphy to become a global news agency.

Disraeli, son of a bookish Jewish immigrant from Morocco, was the first outsider to rule Britain since the Romans, a rise achieved with brazen intrigue and brilliant wit but without money, land or connections. ‘Mr. Disraeli is Prime Minister!’ Queen Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky. ‘A proud thing for a man “risen from the people”.’ He celebrated: ‘I’ve climbed to the top of the greasy pole.’

Twain was himself one of the ornaments of the Gilded Age, a self-invented boy named Samuel Clemens from Hannibal, Missouri, who had worked the steamboats of the Mississippi, toiled in silver mines and then in 1876 published his Adventures of Tom Sawyer, based on his exploits and taking his nom de plume from the cry ‘mark twain’ of the leadsmen who measured the depth of the river.

Disraeli is the wittiest of British leaders: ‘There are three types of lies,’ he said. ‘Lies, damn lies and statistics.’

Empire is always a charade of power, a confidence trick, pulled off with the mystique of hegemony that can only be sustained by the threat of swift force.

Vienna, the most exciting city, a laboratory for the ideas of race, revolution and art that made the twentieth century.

The Austrian official’s son Adolf Hitler wanted to study art at the Vienna Academy of Arts but, twice failing to win a place, he moved to the city in 1907 aged eighteen, living in a bed-and-breakfast, reading in bed – ‘books were his whole world’ – about Frederick the Great and Germanic mythology, and attending Wagner operas.

The native Viennese were almost overwhelmed by a deluge of immigrant Czechs, Jews and Poles. Between 1880 and 1910, the city’s population doubled; a fifth of the inhabitants were Czech, while 8.7 per cent were Jewish, higher than in any other European city.

Winston Churchill, aged thirty-seven, newly appointed first lord of the Admiralty, ordered four more battleships ‘to prepare for an attack by Germany as if it might come the next day’, 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. Iran, ruled by the Qajar shahs, recently weakened by a revolution, became vital to British power, as the possession of oil now became essential to great powers. ‘Mastery itself,’ declared Churchill, ‘was the prize.’

A Vietnamese socialist in Paris wrote to the three powers to demand independence for Vietnam from France, signing his appeal Nguyen Ai Quoc (Patriot Nguyen). Aged twenty-eight, Nguyen Sinh Cung was the son of a rural teacher and magistrate who loathed French rule, though he had attended a French school. He had applied to study at the French Colonial Administrative School and travelled to France, but his application was turned down – one of the biggest mistakes in French imperial history, even if he was probably already a socialist. Instead he worked as a waiter and dishwasher, maybe even as a pâtissier, writing articles and studying, travelling on to study in Bolshevik Russia. Later he adopted the name Ho Chi Minh.

Roosevelt reassured Americans that ‘The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.’

Penicillin had been discovered sixteen years earlier by a British scientist, Alexander Fleming. Keeping a messy laboratory, Fleming had returned to find his experiments overgrown with a fungus which had destroyed bacteria; using the fungus and the tears and snot of his assistants, he developed penicillin, the first natural antibiotic. ‘One sometimes finds what one isn’t looking for,’ he said, yet it was not really an accident as he was an enthusiastic innovator: ‘I play with microbes.’

To celebrate the tricentenary of Hetman Khmelnytsky’s treaty of allegiance to the Romanov Tsar Alexei in April 1654, Stalin decided to grant Crimea to Ukraine. The new leaders made the transfer the next year. This meant that when in 1991, the Soviet Union broke up, Crimea remained part of Ukraine.

America and Russia lavished military aid on the Iraqi dictator. ‘It’s a pity,’ said Kissinger, ‘both sides can’t lose.’ The war would last ten years and kill a million young men – a forgotten catastrophe that encouraged Khomeini to consolidate his theocracy and Saddam to take more risks, funded by the Saudis.

‘You can’t retake islands I’m afraid without loss of life,’ she told a schoolboy interviewer (this author) in Downing Street soon afterwards.

In 1837, the poet Lord Byron’s daughter, Ada, countess of Lovelace, and her friend Charles Babbage, partly inspired by the article of an Italian military engineer Luigi Menabrea, later premier of united Italy, had devised a programme for what they called an Analytical Engine. In 1843, Lovelace wrote instructions that she called algorithms, inspired by al-Khwarizmi of 820s Baghdad, but she also foresaw the perils of ‘autocrats of information’. Babbage designed their Engine. Yet it was a century before such technology was invented by a German scientist Konrad Zuse who in 1941 built the first computer, Z3, in Berlin and devised the first programming language, Plankalkül. His Z3 was destroyed by an Allied air raid, but after the war Zuse founded the first tech company – and sold his patent to the American company IBM, which had also worked on tabulating vast quantities of personal data for the US government in Nazi Germany and the USA.

There is such a thing as too much history. This

History matters: we long to know how we came to be who we are. ‘Life can only be understood backwards,’ writes Søren Kierkegaard, ‘but it must be lived forwards.’

‘The real problem of humanity,’ said Edward O. Wilson, ‘is we have palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.’