1688: A Global History [Hardcover]

John E. Wills Jr. (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 2001

A rich, kaleidoscopic history of the world in a year at the dawn of modern times. Told with the verve and color of Robert Darnton's bestseller The Great Cat Massacre, Jack Wills's masterful history ushers us into the worlds of 1688, from the suicidal exaltation of Russian Old Believers to the ravishing voice of the haiku poet Basho. Witness the splendor of the Chinese imperial court as the Kangxi emperor publicly mourns the death of his grandmother and shrewdly consolidates his power. Walk the pungent streets of Amsterdam and enter the Rasp House, where vagrants, beggars, and petty criminals labor to produce powdered brazilwood for the dyeworks. Meet the Dog Shogun who rules Edo Castle, issuing countless edicts forbidding cruelty to dogs. Through these stories, Wills paints a detailed picture of how the global connections of power, money, and belief were beginning to lend the world its modern form. 12 b/w illustrations.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Although he realizes that "the very concept of the world in a single year is an artificial one," USC historian Wills (Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History; etc.) has merged cultural anthropology and history to reflect through the prism of a single year the shape of the world poised on the edge of modernity. This ambitious effort has a number of strengthsAsuch as the quality of its writing and its ability to weave together disparate narrative threads. But for many readers, this account's greatest strength will be what it is notAEurocentric, limited by gender and ethnicity, confined by class. It touches on events in Africa, the New World, China, Japan, Australia and eastern and western Europe. We go from the world of the Kangxi emperor in China to that of an African Muslim slave in the New World. In constructing this multifarious history, Wills draws on sources as diverse as the correspondence of far-flung Jesuit missionaries, the records of the Dutch and English trading companies, contemporary poetry, diaries and even a ketubah (a Jewish marriage contract). Wills thus succeeds in producing a vivid picture of life in 1688Aa picture filled with terrifying violence, frightening diseases and religious and political persecution, but also with comfortingly familiar human kindnesses, familial affections and the scientific and intellectual achievements of Leibniz, Locke and Newton, among others. Wills provides a satisfying, many-faceted tour of the world in 1688 that will appeal to readers with a far-ranging curiosity about the world and its history. Illus. not seen by PW. (Jan.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Wills invites history buffs and armchair adventurers to immerse themselves in the various social, political, and artistic contexts that existed in the year 1688. Offering a refreshing global perspective rather than an overworked Westernized viewpoint, the author has researched and related a wide range of fascinating true stories illustrating the developing links between cultures and nations. Taken individually, these tales from Russia, China, Japan, Africa, Europe, and the Americas provide tantalizing glimpses into a series of unique environments; analyzed collectively, they provide a panoramic view of a world poised on the brink of a major transformation. Stylish, anecdotal history chronicling the infancy of an interdependent global community. Margaret Flanagan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039304744X
• ISBN-13: 978-0393047448
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,316,370 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars White spots and the temptation to read more, August 24, 2001

By 

WFK "alt historian" (Wolfsberg, Austria) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1688: A Global History (Hardcover)

At first this book fascinates: a global view from one year in history. All those spotlight reports from all over the world make the reader realise what is happening at nearly the same moment in time: the establishment of a new dynasty's rule in China, the overthrow of the Stuarts in England, the departure of a Viceroy from Mexico ... Those are fascinating reports from 300 years ago, all with stories about individual people who left records: a nun in New Spain, a poet in Japan, a Jewish widow in Hamburg, a captured Turkish slave in the Balkans ... All those fates, all those stories make the reader want to learn more. Alas, this won't happen in this book. It is just a temptation to read other books, but not good history as such. For that it lacks a coherent structure; there is no theme beside the year 1688. Also there are too many white spots on the globe presented here. So not realy good history, but nevertheless a great book to be recomended!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting and broad coverage, June 20, 2005

By 

Mike Christie (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: 1688: A Global History (Paperback)

John Wills has done a good job of presenting the whole world as it was in 1688. The coverage is necessarily incomplete--if Wills had identified every culture and conflict alive in that year there'd have been only a sentence on each. It's thorough even so, and by 1688 the world was truly a global network: the Spanish mining silver in Bolivia; the Dutch bloodily extracting spices from the Indonesian archipelagoes; the British making their first military probes into India. The Tsar of Russia visited London; there were Armenian traders in Lhasa, English scientists in Australia, and Jesuits almost everywhere.

The coverage is so broad that Wills cannot do any one story real justice. He copes with this by picking specific narratives and telling them in detail, interspersing these stories among the general cultural and historical background. He covers the progress of the great religions, and literature and science as well as the struggles for empire -- this was the age of Locke, Leibniz and Newton, after all. And 1688 is a good choice for other reasons: the English Revolution of that year is the hook on which Wills hangs much material about the religious strife of the seventeenth century, for example.

The writing is clear and transparent. The book's only real weak point is that nothing is described in much detail; nothing gets more than a few pages. The result is that when you've finished you feel more as if you'd been reading newspapers about the year than a history text. You don't feel you know these cultures in depth -- you know them the way a slightly educated contemporary might have known them: by reputation, with a few high points. However, I think that's a fine result for a book like this. It certainly made me want to read half a dozen more books to get more details. I don't think this is a good book to start with, though, if you don't already have some awareness of this period of history; it is not truly introductory for any of the cultures covered. For those interested, though, it is well able to whet your appetite for more.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worldwide history, February 17, 2002

By 

"white-anglo-saxon-muslim" (London, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: 1688: A Global History (Paperback)

Conventional histories discuss events taking place over time. In his brilliant, thought-provoking 1688, Wills turns that notion on its side by concentrating on what was happening worldwide in one particular year. Along with relatively familiar European occurrences, 1688 saw the Chinese emperor mourning a Flemish Jesuit astronomer, the great African trading crossroads of Timbuktu in decline and a French fleet failing to cow Algiers. Wills ingenuously claims that initially he wanted to avoid 1688 for fear that Britain's Glorious Revolution, which saw the deposition of James II and the accession of William III, would dominate, and that, finally, he was forced towards it by other stories he wanted to tell (he could hardly, however, have written about a neighbouring year and ignored the revolution).

The year is early in Peter the Great's career, just after Newton's great publications and towards the end of the life of the Chinese writer Wang Fuzhi. Bemoaning colonisation's later impact on aboriginal tribes, which he asserts were happy with nothing, Wills tends to romanticise the non-western. Without exonerating Arab or African participants, he blames Europeans for the awfulness of the slave trade, yet barely discusses slavery in the Ottoman empire. Descriptions of, say, tolerant Muslim urbanisation need more caveats than they get here, but 1688 challenges western-centric prejudices in horizon- expanding fashion, and its erudite combination of brevity and scope make it an excellent popular history.