History in a hurry

More World History in 3 Points

Author: Zac Sangeeth

Publisher: Hachette

Pages: 246

Price: Rs 399

In primary school, we were taught history from a fascinating textbook series called Down The Ages, which took us from the dawn of man to the early great civilisations. This engagingly written and superbly illustrated set of books gave way in big school to spectacularly anodyne tomes that appeared to specialise in discouraging even the most zealous student of history.

It is possible that Zac Sangeeth, who describes himself as the “world’s youngest ‘historian’ [the quote marks are his] and the youngest commissioned non-fiction series author”, may not have had the benefit of well-produced text books in his formative years. All of 10 years old, he has pronounced history “boring” and decided to soup it up by producing this “World History in Three Points” series.

Zac appears to be a precocious kid with an impressive vocabulary at his command. His CV lists him as an international public speaker. When his first book was launched in February this year, he told PTI, “In this age of fleeting attention spans and our addiction to micro-messaging platforms like Twitter and Instagram, history is still that odd subject that makes readers search information haystacks for needles of insight.” The reason for this apparent deficiency in history writing, in his view, is that “history books take a worm’s eye view — delving into minute historical details”. So Zac wants to offer a “broad, to-the-point approach”.

In keeping with this method, the cover of the second of the series offers us three bullet points of information. Point one says: “No more having to read long-winded accounts that make the subject complex and dull! This unique book gives you a quick and thorough overview of each topic by distilling details into three crisp bite-sized capsules. Every paragraph has a key sentence highlighted for recall.” In case you missed the point, the last two sentences are highlighted.

Like the first edition, this one covers a medley of topics. The first is Empires — South Asian, South-East Asian, Persian, Mongol, African and South American. Then it covers Families and Dynasties, mostly European, goes on to Artists and Architects, Poets, Musicians and Authors and then Scientists and Inventions. That’s a vastly impressive range for any historian of any vintage.

The presentation of the topics are unexceptionable enough if you overlook the odd syntax that Zac’s generation tends to employ. Examples:  “The Mauryan kingdom declined after Ashoka due to  multiple reasons…” and “Though the Pandyas sought the help of the Vijayanagar Empire this led their empire to be taken over …”.

Zac deserves kudos for focusing on the empires of south India in the South Asian section, an inexplicably under-studied subject in standard school histories. Ditto for calling attention to some of the pre-colonial African and South American empires that contradict the racist tropes embedded in Western-oriented history syllabuses.

You can see why this book will be popular among school kids, quizzers and executives with little time to read. But as a “historian” Zac may need to think a little harder about this “fast-facts” way of presenting history — especially when these facts can be accessed just as easily from online encyclopaedias.

The premise of this series — that knowledge of key facts, not the details, makes history interesting — is misleading. History, as we are witnessing in the current contestation over Indian textbooks, is not just an agglomeration of past events. It is, as E H Carr famously described it, a dialogue between past and present.

The section on the Mauryas is just one example of why context is important —and can make historical detailing interesting and relevant. Zac dismisses Ashoka in one longish bullet point, describing him as Ashoka the Great and sketching out the broad contours of his life — the Kalinga war that caused him to eschew a life of violence and embrace Buddhism. But there is no explanation of why Ashoka is called “Great”, no mention of his edicts, his unique thinking nor why the government of independent India chose the Ashoka Sthambh as its official logo. There is one strange highlight citing a theory of whether Ashoka’s adoption of non-violence could have had an adverse impact on military morale. Another line of explanation could have cleared that up and added context: The lack of expansionism deprived the military of the spoils of war.

The three points on the Ottoman Empire make no mention of its most illustrious ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent, whose empires stretched to the borders of Central Europe, and whose monumental mosques and buildings under his architect Sinan can be seen all over Istanbul to this day. The end of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of modern Turkey were seminal developments in world history after World War I, the reverberations of which are being felt right up to present times. The revolt of the Young Turks has bequeathed to modern politics a term that is very much in vogue in modern politics. These interesting and important details cannot be distilled into three bullet points and, no surprise, are glossed over.

This is not to denigrate Zac’s efforts from a half-century vantage point. On the contrary, his prodigious fact-collecting has highlighted a huge information gap and should signal to a publisher an opportunity to produce accessible and multilingual (and more detailed) histories for children, offering relief from the mostly poor quality textbooks that we inflict on them today.