A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium

A truly fantastic book which tells history from the perspective of the vast majority of those who lived it. If history was taught, as this book does, in a way which shows how the decisions of the elites effected the masses, we would all have a greater understanding of human history, sociology, and psychology. (It is time for schools to stop being useless knowledge factories, and to start teaching an engaging form of history that students can actually relate to: a history of the people.) The book also provides an anthropological study of pre-capitalist humans who lived in democratic societies without knowledge of possession or class, proving that human nature is malleable. We do not have have a desire built into our DNA to oppress those around us. Human greed is a product of our current insidious social environment which twists human nature to reflect societal demands for profit.I applaud you, Christopher Hartman, for taking the time necessary to create an accurate historical account of the forgotten masses who have experienced oppression and privation, for the benefit of the few elites. I find your analysis of historical facts to be spot on. Your book, and the uprisings in Northern Africa, give me hope that humanity will not be forever doomed to the ubiquitous barbarism concomitant to the rise of capitalism.

Harman describes how the Agricultural Revolution enhanced people's adaptive capabilities but at a price. It introduced bureaucracy, a necessary innovation to deal with complexities introduced by the division of labor in society. Tribal connectivity gave way to management and ultimately to elitism. The history of empires, of feudalism in Europe, and finally the development of modern global society reflect the poisonous effects of pragmatism at the expense of community solidarity. Harman shows us how a thin thread, however, growing gradually more substantial since the Middle Ages, and significantly so during the French Revolution, testifies to humans' stumbling drive to reverse this anomaly. He provides, therefore, a useful focus for activism in our age. Less upon accomplishing specific political goals than upon learning how to build complex community, including needed bureaucracy, without sacrificing the core survival attribute of our species: our drive to connect. Elites inevitably seek to disrupt this drive, but so do our own individual tendencies to sacrifice happiness for short term gains. In the Marxist tradition, Harman calls upon his readers consciously to come to terms with our own irrationality, and consciously to reject elitism in order to promote our own survival. What makes us happy is indeed most adaptive.

I liked this book a lot. He handles a huge mass of data quite well. Only one thing bothers me. At times he fails to identify the time frame clearly.He might cite a date early in a section and pages later he's moved ahead several years or even more and you don't know the time has changed. He leaps from topic to topic without always providing clear transitions. And the abbreviations are also hard to identify if one isn't already a well-versed historian. You can decipher them using other sources but not always easily. But all in all this is a great book that overcomes many challenges.

Chris Harman did an excellent job of writing about the broad sweep of human history from the perspective of ordinary people and disadvantaged groups. Written in the tradition of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, it goes well beyond the "great men and their deeds" that has often been how history is taught to explicitly tell the stories of women, the poor, and minorities. I strongly recommend it for anyone interested in a more nuanced picture of how we (humans) got where we are.

I've just begun to read the well written introduction and it's very informative, diving into a history of histories which emphasizes the need for non biased reporting on the various activities of mankind since the dawn of our existence. The book is over seven hundred pages long, and classified as a reference volume. I will be a while reading it and am excited about the undertaking.

The title "History of the World" is no Mel Brooks gag: the author takes us from the earliest days of hunter-gatherers toward the world burning events of the late 20th century. Eschewing a "great man" view of events, Harman instead analyzes human history from a class perspective, and the results are fascinating.Granted, covering all of this material in a single volume can sometimes be overwhelming, and one insurgency/revolt/ascension is in danger of running into another. However, the seminal events: revolutions (especially the Russian), Nazism, nascent industrialization in England, and Marx's views are all covered extensively from a macro view that puts the isolated event into a historical context. Highly recommended for those who want to understand how Marx's views have impacted the world, and can be used to interpret it.