Cyril Aydon, author of a biography on Darwin, has now produced An Introduction to 150,000 years of human history. It is a work of synthesis, inevitably; it is questionable how one could even do 'research' on the the subject of 'world history' - where would one start? It is also not an academic work, in the sense that it eschews the usual critical apparatus of footnotes, although it does have a useful index and suggestions for further reading. But it must be said at once the 'non-academic' character of The Story of Man should not be taken as a criticism. Aydon writes in a direct and flowing fashion that ensures the reader wants to keep turning the page, and his aim of introducing the general reading public to an overview of human history is an extremely important one.
In comparison with some other recent works, like those by Peter Watson or Richard Tarnas, he emphasizes ideas less, and things rather more. For all that he has little sympathy with Marxist ideology, it is material culture and socio-economic change - in areas such as agriculture, pathology, trade, and demography - that Aydon sees as the motors of history. And if one takes the long-term, bird's eye view, this must presumably be right. One cannot expect individuals to figure very heavily in such a survey, and politics and even war must appear as epiphenomenal a great deal of the time. Sometimes one feels this is perhaps a little overdone, but on the whole it is salutary for those who have been educated chiefly in modern European history in which the nation-state has played a central role.
Aydon also deserves credit for having written a history which is indeed genuinely global; he may be English, but one would never know it. Insofar as it is both possible and required by the story of human development as it has actually occurred, all continents and nations get equal weight. One feels sympathy, for example, when Australia is periodically revisited and the reader learns for the third or fourth time that nothing had happened in the interim, but in areas of the world like Australia that either lacked a literate culture or whose records were destroyed (as in parts of South America when Europeans arrived), there is simply nothing the historical writer can do. The occasional stylistic repetition, for example the increasingly irritating description of economic opportunities as 'mouth-watering' that a better editor would have removed, can easily be forgiven when one is presented with such a rich digest of material.
Aydon is also as comprehensive as he could reasonably have been; from early human origins (where he is particularly strong - some of the passages read like a modern reworking of Rousseau's Discourse on the Origins of Inequality), to ancient civilizations, through the medieval era (in which the backwardness of Europe relative to other parts of the world is rightly repeatedly emphasized), into the age of European discovery, which lead first to colonial conquest and then later to imperialism and slavery, the great movements of world history are all here.
Even those who have read similar works will benefit from being reminded by the large scale view on offer here that the political, economic, and technological dominance of Western culture over the Chinese and Muslim worlds arrived relatively late and is almost certainly itself just another historical moment. And in matters of detail, some of the facts will almost certainly be new to any reader; I naively imagined railways succeeded the invention of the steam-engine, whereas the first railways were in fact devised to carry horse-drawn loads.
Aydon does not attempt to gloss over the violence and brutality of much of human history, but he also misses no opportunity to draw attention to the lasting achievements of humanity, whether in civilization, science, art, or philosophy. He is commendably free from dogmatism of any kind, ideological or religious, and his concluding chapter on the likely future faced by humanity is somewhat grim but hardly alarmist; the potential for natural disaster, disease, man-made global warming, war, or some combination of all of these to destroy the human race is real, and must be added into any weighing up of the scales. And in the last analysis, the enormity of the potential threats is not allowed to mask the scale of the adventure so far, and to come. The Story of Man deserves to find a wide public, and is particularly suitable for the young; I definitely wish I had read something similar in my teens.