Customer Reviews

A Brief History of the Human Race

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I thoroughly enjoyed Michael Cook's "A Brief History of the Human Race." Although Cook does not address the details of world history, his book is a well-written exploration of broad themes and interesting questions.

Much of what Cook has to say seems simple but is nonetheless thought provoking. For example, Cook poses the intriguing question of whether human history as we know it was, broadly speaking, the only kind of history that humans could have made. Specifically, was there anything inevitable about the development of farming and civilization, or might we have somehow "chosen" to remain nomads or hunter/gatherers or pastoralists? Having posed this question, Cook skillfuly compares the development of civilizations in both the new world and the old world, concluding that, given enough time and population, agriculture and a civilization of some sort are inevitable outcomes of human history.

Cook's work explores a number of other interesting questions, such as why human history as we understand it appeared when it did (it has to do with the warm period that began about 10,000 years ago at the end of the last Ice Age) and why writing appeared first in civilized societies rather than earlier among hunter-gatherers. Whether you agree with Cook or not, his answers to the broad questions of history are quite interesting, and his writing style is clear and enjoyable.

Keep in mind that Cook's focus is on the forest, not the trees. Although he discusses a few important historical events in order to make his points, "A Brief History of the Human Race" is a book about broad themes rather than a chronology of events. If you want to learn the basics of world history, you would probably do better to start with a book like J.M. Roberts' "A History of the World" (or his somewhat less weighty "Concise History of the World). But if you already know something about world history and you want to explore some big ideas that make sense of some of those facts and dates, Cook's "A Brief History of the Human Race" is a great place to start.

True to his book's title, historian Cook takes on a daunting project and manages to chart a flow of global human history over the last 10,000 years, since the start of our present era of benign climate, the Holocene, and the consequent advent of farming. Only with farming can people begin to put down roots, feed larger numbers, accumulate pottery, build cities, and construct - or steal- a system of writing to leave an account of themselves for posterity.

Farming began in the Near East - Mesopotamia (present day Iraq) - the birthplace of civilization, as every schoolchild learns. Interestingly, and logically, as Cook shows, the last place civilization caught on in the Old World was Western Europe - its best soils being too heavy for the available plow. When a heavier plow was developed halfway through the first millennium, cities sprouted and armies reaped the benefits.

In broad strokes (with accompanying broad maps) Cook credits geography, climate and natural resources for driving early advances. Cultural flow is more problematic - why did Greek culture spread while Egyptian did not? Or why did Buddhism wander to China while Hinduism stayed put in India? Cook raises many such tantalizing questions and explores what evidence there is, offering cogent theories of his own. And he shows how technological advances shaped larger movements - expensive bronze favoring elite rule, while cheap iron empowered the masses, for instance.

But if farming made civilization possible, monotheism began to shape the world as we know it. Christianity made its way through the scattered Jewish diaspora of the Roman Empire and was, as a political expedient, finally adopted as the state religion by Constantine. It then became attractive to frontier peoples as a trapping of civilization. Islam (Cook's specialty) solved a political difficulty by uniting two Arab tribes in Arabia to form a state, which then had the power to coordinate a wave of conquest, which resulted in the largest empire ever.

Cook organizes his book in four parts. He begins with an overview of prehistory and inevitable development and concludes with a question, "Toward One World?" which embraces the Islamic expansion, the European expansion and the modern world. Three-part chapters within each of these sections focus on broad geographical masses and the cultural developments within, then draw it all together by homing in on particular features: the complicated marriageability rules among the Australian Aranda, Chinese ancestor worship, caste and sexuality in Hinduism, Greek pottery and more.

Much is left out; much is simplified. Naturally. And the most interesting bits are the story-like chapter conclusions. But Cook uses these to illustrate his broader points and to show the individual peculiarities of human cultures. His writing is lucid, often witty, and seldom dry. And he gives an extensive "further reading" list for each chapter. A fine, thought-provoking, well-organized and succinct history of the last 10,000 years.

In the preface the author says that the book isn't meant to me a Grand Unified Theory of history. That it isn't, but I get the feeling that the first draft was meant to be and that the preface was subsequently written to state the obvious failure. The first three chapters are good. The rest is an arbitrariliy arranged collection of occasionally interesting facts mixed with poorly argued conclusions. I'm not an academic, but even I found the last two chapters (especially the one on the modern world) almost laughable in the breadth and shallowness of it's argument.

"No one can know all there is to be known about it, let alone hope to convey even the gist of it in one small volume" - the author in his preface

"The result is that this book is both deliberately selective and involuntarily patchy." - also from preface

The first quote relates the author's ideas on writing about human history, and the second exemplifies his approach to this book. These two quotes convey exactly what you can expect from this book. It is obviously not a comprehensive history of the human race nor does it intend to be, but even as an organized outline of our history, it falls short. It is patchy, and the author often presents his ideas and arguments in rather haphazard sequences.

The main part of Cook's history is separated into chapters based on geographical origins (or absences) of civilization. He takes us from Australia to the Americas then to Africa and so forth, and in the process, he uses familiar discussions of climate and geography to relate the rise of civilization predominantly with farming. The last part of the book is concerned with the interaction of civilizations and how various cultures were affected by the Islamic world, European expansion, etc. All in all, Cook provides very interesting information, and his arguments are fairly good.

However, many of the chapters include interesting discussions of traditions or phenomena that are/were unique to certain civilizations, but the author fails to satisfactorily integrate these with his other discussions. He does not adequately compare and contrast cultural traditions but rather describes them and moves on. Of course, the author may not have able to do that without substantially lengthening the book, but a book titled "A Brief History of the Human Race" should be able to provide a more cohesive picture than the disorganized one that it does.

Another problem I had with this book was that it was sorely lacking in maps and figures. There are a few to be sure, but the author apparently assumes that the average reader has a very good knowledge of geographical and geological history. For example, the author repeatedly refers to Pangaea, Gondwanaland, and Eurasia but never provides a map of the world before the continents took their present shape.

This book is a pretty quick and informative read, but if you're looking for a more comprehensive and organized work, look elsewhere.

November 29, 2003
SHELF LIFE
Briefly, in the Beginning There Was a Farmer
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

s a vantage point for writing the history of the human race," writes Michael Cook with a bit of defiance, "the present has very little to be said for it." )

Unfortunately, as Mr. Cook, a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University, knows, the present always has very little to be said for it when facing such a daunting task. But it is all anybody ever has.

What is intriguing at this particular present is how worthwhile the task has come to seem. So Mr. Cook's "Brief History of the Human Race," a smart, literate survey of human life from Paleolithic times until 9/11, is joining an honorable recent tradition, which came into its own with Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" and is continuously expanding with new compact histories of peoples, religions and cultures.

Such an enterprise is a bit like setting out on an epic expedition with nothing more than a day pack and a hand full of pemmican, feeling confident that sustenance will be easily found. So Mr. Cook does not engage in ponderous Hegelian probings in search of a deeper order underlying apparent chaos. He has, he confesses, no "Grand Unified Theory," and, he adds, with characteristic humility, "If I had such a theory, it would almost certainly be wrong."

That may even be the point. Mr. Cook is a scholar of Islamic history and was co-author, in the 1970's, of a fairly controversial theory about Islam's origins. . That background, along with political events of the last few years, seems to have given him a healthy respect for diversity and a healthy skepticism about received opinion.

Mr. Cook's expertise also allows him to offer up little-known details, like the fact that in the mid-17th century, the Omanis, Muslims of southeastern Arabia, captured European ships, established a navy and colonized the western Indian Ocean "with a zest that put them at least in the same league as the Portuguese." His insights resonate with his discipline: he suggests that one little-recognized reason for the sudden 15th-century interest by Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration was to compete with the "geopolitical dominance of Islam." .

But the very idea of a brief history of humanity also seems an appropriate response to contemporary crises. For the once-thriving intellectual explanations of the world's past, particularly Marxism and post-colonial theory, have come to seem threadbare. There should be a way to take into account the multiplicity of human cultures and to describe human weaknesses without the application of such highly charged systems, without simply invoking their now-familiar rosters of victims and heroes.

This is just what Mr. Cook does. And by stepping back so far - the last 500 years take up no more than the final 50 pages - another kind of perspective develops. Humanity's written record, Mr. Cook points out, began only 5,000 years ago. Other evidence of human history barely reaches back a few hundred generations. So why has something grown so recently out of nothing and why did it take the shape it did?

First of all, Mr. Cook suggests, the moderate temperatures of the contemporary Holocene era developed only 10,000 years ago. This made it possible to develop farming, which, in Mr. Cook's view, is the foundation of human civilization. Hunter-gatherers, he argues, could neither accumulate goods nor accumulate culture. Their societies had little historical awareness. But farming led to new kinds of social organization, the design of pottery for storage, the domestication of animals and an increasing sense that the world could be shaped to human needs.

Nature even proves the point with experiments of a sort. Australia's climate and soil, Mr. Cook argues, prevented the independent invention of farming; it was also geographically isolated. So until the 18th century the continent remained a land of hunter-gatherers, lacking a written past, let alone pottery. Because of other limitations, farming was also stunted in the New World, which lagged about five millenniums behind the Middle East.

As in Jared Diamond's account, geography and climate are shown here to make indelible imprints on the development of cultures, offering possibilities, foreclosing opportunities, creating strange imbalances of cultural power. And drawing on genetic research that has been done by scientists like Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, and invoking sophisticated linguistic geneologies, Mr. Cook traces the migrations of these cultures in their varied struggles for power or resources.

There is the "maritime passivity of Africa" to account for, the relative lack of influence of ancient Egypt to explain, the cultural and political continuity of Chinese history to examine and, of course, the more recent triumph of the British and the imperial West to scrutinize. Each of these subjects already inspires small libraries of research and speculation, but Mr. Cook, by focusing on material resources and geographical restrictions and examining their effects on social organization and cultural enterprise, ends up accounting for a good deal.

At times the survey becomes merely dutiful, but through it all, Mr. Cook is amused by the human race and its peculiarities, devoting attention to cultural variations in snuff boxes or tracing the marital regulations of an aboriginal tribe.

If anything, Mr. Cook is almost too bemused by such detail, referring to the human capacity for "superfluous cultural innovation" and society's "elaborate and ultimately arbitrary rules." But we know from the work of anthropologists like Lévi-Strauss that few rules are arbitrary or superfluous. They establish elaborate systems of belief and provide, as Mr. Cook seems to acknowledge elsewhere, unusual insight into a culture's workings, its past and its possible future.

In fact, Mr. Cook's biggest weakness is that he too readily overlooks the ways in which human action creates its own kind of geography - how culture, like climate and rock formations, helps shape what is possible and outline what is forbidden. Technological innovation, which appears too rarely in the book's latter pages, can even have volcanic force.

But criticizing a brief history for being too brief is too easy a privilege, And in this case, so much has already been achieved not just by what has been put in but by how much has been left out.

Professor Cook of Princeton wrote this very enjoyable book on the pertinent points of our civilizations. It is one for the common reader, who didn't get enough of such an important education in the high school and college. Cook's attempts to integrate geography to the histories of major events were very helpful. One cannot neglect the effects of mountains and rivers on our society and human psyche, however imperceptible to one's mind. It is uncommon, yet refreshing, to see maps of the world with records of rainfalls in each chapter in such book. But how does all the records of rainfall really help if no demonstration of the effects of weather is described? In his description of Africa, it attempts such an explanation, which I really enjoyed, but it didn't spread to other civilizations too well. I applaud the Professor's efforts, and hope the reader will follow up any interest in the book in his well-presented section of "Further Reading."

As a small book, "A Brief History of the Human Race" leaves out more than it puts in about human history, but it's an interesting survey. The author's most profound point in my opinion was his obvious, but not often made, point that the principal characteristics of civilization in the unconnected new world and the old were the same: farming, cities, etc. That's profound when you think about it. Faced with two different environments, cultural, and geographic realities human beings responded in pretty much the same way.

The author leavens this macro approach with a lot of micro points. Especially fascinating was his explanation of the marriage customs of Australian aborigines and his questions as to why they were so complex. He also takes a look at the similarities of snuff use around the world, calendars, Shang-dynasty bronzes, and the rise of Islam. All this combines to make for a potpourri of reading in which the similarities of humankind in broad ways are contrasted with his differences in mostly small, but sometimes large ways. Why, for example, did not sub-Saharan Africans take to the sea? The environmental determinism that this book promotes here and there owes a debt to Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel."

This is a book that even if you're an ignoramus you can read and understand. If you're not an ignoramus, it's still interesting to dip into. There's nothing here that will cause you to jump and shout "Eureka" but it's an informative read with a take on human history that is sometimes provocative or unfamiliar.

Smallchief

Having the word "history" in the title of A Brief History of the Human Race is a bit misleading. Michael Cook's short and brisky-written book is less a history than it is a series of interconnected essays supporting a thesis. There's nothing wrong with this approach, but Cook's essays are often too brief for their own good and his thesis is flawed.

Cook essentially extols the idea of geographical determinism, an idea put forward in Jared Diamond's Pulitzer-winning Guns, Germs and Steel. In essence, the idea is that societies advance or decline based not on any inherent quality of the people--genetically, morally, or otherwise--but on the basis of what natural advantages their environment has randomly blessed them with. It's an intriguing idea, and one worth arguing about (Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture is an eloquent, exciting counterargument to Diamond), but Cook assumes the truth of his thesis and narrates from that point of view, not arguing for the idea so much as describing, vaguely, the origins of man from this point of view.

Cook shows strange priorities in selecting his material. The section on aboriginal Australian marriage ritual--mentioned by several other reviewers--is interesting enough, but beyond making the point that "primitive" societies are sometimes quite complex the section is irrelevant. Compare this lengthy section with the treatment given more traditional subjects of "brief histories"--Alexander the Great is mentioned three times, Julius Caesar only once, Hebrew religion is pawned off as an exclusivist former polytheism, and modern history passes so quickly that it warrants the cliche "blink and you'll miss it."

I think what I most disliked about the book, which was required reading for the students in a Western Civ class in which I was the graduate assistant, was a sort of unconscious chronological snobbery. Stone age peoples advance only as ice ages come and go--as if human beings haven't overcome immense natural obstacles solely to see what's on the other side. Actually, much of the book is built on speculation and rather insignificant anthropological study, reminding me of Mark Twain's famous observation that "There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact."

In short, those looking here for history, brief or not, will be disappointed. If this book has any redeeming trait, it's that Cook is a talented writer--if not a great historian--and the book is rarely dull. That might not save it from being a waste of time, but it will keep it from being miserable.

Not recommended.

I found this book interesting as it goes quite in breadth in terms of the places and cultures it deals with. I feel that putting into perspective what each civilization has provided as a heritage to human kind is very important for understanding who we are and why. Some interpretations are very questionable, that's true, but the author did not pretend to know everything about the topic. As already mentioned by other reviewers, the end of the book lacks in depth, the conclusions are without interest, hence my rating of 4 stars only.

This is a book to be read over a weekend: well written, no footnotes and generic explanations of causes of historic developments. The reader is taken to a tour of the history of the human race as it developed in the continents.The author states that he does not have a Grand Unified Theory of history but does have ideas (some borrowed from others) - and his ideas are really thought provoking! The final chapter on the Modern World is a little bit frustating in (or lack of) explaining the inequalities in the world today.