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

By Chris Harman

Building on A People’s History of the United States, this radical world history captures the broad sweep of human history from the perspective of struggling classes.

An “indispensable volume” on class and capitalism throughout the ages—for readers reckoning with the history they were taught and history as it truly was (Howard Zinn)

From the earliest human societies to the Holy Roman Empire, from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment, from the Industrial Revolution to the end of the twentieth century, Chris Harman provides a brilliant and comprehensive history of the human race. Eschewing the standard accounts of “Great Men,” of dates and kings, Harman offers a groundbreaking counter-history, a breathtaking sweep across the centuries in the tradition of “history from below.”

In a fiery narrative, he shows how ordinary men and women were involved in creating and changing society and how conflict between classes was often at the core of these developments. While many scholars see the victory of capitalism as now safely secured, Harman explains the rise and fall of societies and civilizations throughout the ages and demonstrates that history moves ever onward in every age.

A vital corrective to traditional history, A People's History of the World is essential reading for anyone interested in how society has changed and developed and the possibilities for further radical progress.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 17, 2008
• ISBN: 9781844674688

Reviews for A People's History of the World

[robnbrwn · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Really poorly written; far too many leaps of assumption and unsupported conclusions.

[mykl8s · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

OK, I sorta want to read this book, but it is long and hard to get into. The past is less interesting than the future. A refreshing point of view.

[h_d_3 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This was a fantastic book. I think it would be unwise to ignore this book purely on the basis of not sharing its Marxist leanings, because it does provide quite a thorough look at the way the world has been shaped throughout history (mainly by greed), and history is what it is, even if you look at it through a Marxist lense. It doesn't explain away all the ills of humanity as created by capitalism, but it does effectively illustrate how the accumulation of wealth and power could be quite the motivator when stealing, thieving and bastarding your way across the globe.

It's a rather brutal depressing history of the world, in some cases quite upsetting, but by the end I felt informed and a bit more enlightened about certain historical events. It's also a big book with a lot of information, some of which has probably already flown the brain box, but there were certain chapters that will definitely stick in my mind, (especially the one on slavery and racism - harrowing as it was, it was quite an eye-opener).

Reading this book was time well spent.

[meditationesmartini · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The basic argument - technical innovation leads to establishment of a means of production and corresponding relations of production that persist until the avarice of the ruling class absorbs all the available surplus and squeezes the working classes too hard, leading either to revolution and change in means/relations of production, or mutual collapse - is of course partial, but illuminates big-picture human history better than any other partial argument I can think of. And it's always wonderful to take a journey at this level - you're like, "All these things happened. Every sentence in this book contains a world."Energy of course flags a bit at moments in a book this size, and Harman has the orthodox Marxist's bias for focus on Europe at the expense of Asia even in the pre-modern era, but you can't fault him for that when it vivifies the moments of revolutionary change - your French and Russian Revolutions, in particular - so powerfully. Sometimes he falls into the bad kind of partiality (as opposed to the good kind, which is basically rooting for the common people in all circumstances) and overjustifies e.g. the Jacobin terror - God knows it's enough, and appreciated, to remind us of the numbers that were beign killed by monarchist reactionaries at the same time, and the disconnect between that and our popular images of crazy Robespierre and the guillotine.The only substantial criticism I have to make is that Harman keeps moving the goalposts when he discusses the failure of worker's movements at potentially revolutionary moments. Usually that failure comes in the form of "they weren't radical enough, didn't rise to the moment, tried to compromise with the cuddlier sections of the bourgeoisie" and fair enough, that certainly fits the revolution-or-collapse model. sometimes, though, it's all of a sudden "they should have made common cause against the facists with the social democrats" or whatever, and you're all "I thought you just said - " and sure, he can argue that obviously they should have done the thing they didn't do because of how it all didn't work out so good with what they did do, but providing a specific plan of action is a hard thing, let alone retroactively setting out a plausible way they could have come to it at the time. Every disfferent situation requires a new response, and we sure as hell don't know what they are, and Harman sort of implicitly admits as much when he says look at how long it took bourgeois consciousness to mature, and we're expecting a proletarian consciousness strong enough to build a social system on how fast? But you understand. He gets frustrated. We all do.

[woollymammoth_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A readable Maxist History of the world. I liked it. From my Socialist Phase.

[paul_s-289480 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I found this book offensive. There is really no other way to put it. It's blatantly one sided, with pointless character assassinations on one side and whitewashing on the other. The author uses a really insulting tactic of quoting other sources as if they were factual on disputed matters giving no background or differing sources or even any disclaimers. A lot of it is childish point scoring and "look how nasty capitalism is".

At the same time though, I found it interesting and I useful to see what the world looks like through the eyes of communism's number one fan. Funny how there are no fans of communism in countries that suffered through it.

Another problem with this book and pretty much any communist is they always compare capitalism in practice with communism in theory which is a pointless comparison. Want to debate which one is better in theory? Fine, but don't use examples from the real world to show how capitalism is broken because then we have to use examples from the real world for communism and that debate you have lost about 50 times over and still losing by such a wide margin it's embarrassing.

[tj_petrowski · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A brilliant (if you excuse the author's obvious Trotskyist leanings) history of the class struggle from mankind's earliest origins to the present day!