The New Atlas Of World History: Global Events At A Glance, by John Haywood

This book is by no means a bad one, and in many ways is a very enjoyable book and a very worthwhile one. Yet it seems wrong to call this book an atlas. Really, this book sits at the boundary of world history and geography, and while its title claims to be an atlas of world history, there are as many chronologies as maps in this book, and the book appears to be slightly skewed towards geographical history rather than historical geography, if only slightly. The fact that this book straddles the line between history and geography marks its striking ambition, in that the work attempts to portray the connectivity of the world as well as certain aspects of what the author considers to be decisive changes in the organization of humanity starting from what the author views as more primitive and loose connections to more advanced ones. There are definitely some questions about this, as it appears that the author, at least from his categorization, considers empires to be a more superior form of organization than that of kingdoms or urbanized societies, which would mean that the world has become less organized in the period since World War II given the breakup of many world empires during that period (a period which really started during the 19th century and accelerated after World War I).

In addition, there is a somewhat arbitrary nature to the author’s categorization of the development level of nations. At the founding of the United States, the United States is labeled as an urbanized society, but the nation was largely a core of cities focused around the Atlantic coast and a large hinterland of small towns and agricultural areas–and long remained mostly rural. Yet the United States could have been considered as an empire from the start given its complex population and form of government and its claiming of control over dependent nations made up of semi-autonomous tribes, which remains to this day. Yet the author considers the United States an empire only from the 1898 conquest of imperial possessions outside of the mainland that were not intended for settlement and statehood. Similarly, the book considers Iran to be no longer an empire after the Safavid period despite the fact that it still held (and holds) imperial rule over a large population of non-Persian peoples like the Azeris, Kurds, some Arabs, Balochi, and some Turkmen, to say nothing of smaller peoples. Nowhere does the author make plain the transitions in his color-coded map scheme, so while early maps show the progress of various tool ages like bronze and iron, and the book as a whole presents nations increasing in development, it seems arbitrary about when nations rise from one category to another. Can it really be said that all of the post-colonial state are equal with each other and on the same level of development and advancement, only separated by their political groupings, simply because they are all eligible to be a part of the United Nations, especially when large parts of the world were considered to be part of complex farming societies and chiefdoms, pastoral nomads, settled farming cultures and peoples, and even hunter-gatherer societies (like the Australian aborigines and Innuits of Canada and Greenland) as late as the 19th century?

In terms of its contents, this book is generally arranged in a chronological order. The book begins with a short table of contents, a longer list of the maps and timelines included, and a discussion of how to use the book. This is followed by a short introduction of world history in overview. After this comes the bulk of the book, which is a series of maps and timelines that begins with the supposed origins of mankind in East Africa in the period between 6M and 100k years ago, and then moves first somewhat speedily through history though the ice age, 6000BC, 4000BC, 200BC, 1300BC, 1000BC, 800BC, 500BC, 323BC, 200BC, and 1BC. After the classical age the book becomes increasingly slow in its period between maps, going no more than a century between maps after late antiquity in 6550, and slows down increasingly in the 19th and 20th centuries, wiht maps in 1783, 1812, 1824, 1848, 1861, 1871, 1900, 1212, 1914, 1917, 1923, 1938, 1942, 1945, 1950, 1962, 1975, 1991, and 2010. Occasionally there are sections without dates that are thematically related to the spread of religions in late antiquity, the patterns of world trade on the eve of European expansion, migrations in the 19th century, and so on. After this the book ends with an A to Z list of peoples included on the maps, suggestions for further reading, sources of data (including the top 5 cities of each time period), acknowledgments, sources of illustrations, reference map, and an index.