The Statesman’s Yearbook 2022: The Politics, Cultures, And Economies Of The World, by Palgrave Macmillan

At 1400 pages, this book is an extremely long one to read, and it is unlikely that many people, unless they have an unusually intense interest in the countries of the world, will read this volume. The first part of the book consists of various international organizations, organized by the continent that they work on (with global institutions first and then continental organizations after that). This is then followed by a variety of information about the nations of the world in alphabetical order. Given the authors’ priorities of discussing politics, cultures, and economies, it seems that the first and last are handled better than the second. The book appears to be written from the point of view of the British, with special focus on the United States as well, as each country’s ambassadors with the UK, US, and UN (and vice versa) are included, although in 2022 a surprisingly large number of nations had no US ambassador, which suggests something is quite amiss in American diplomacy in making sure that each nation has appropriate representation within the diplomatic corps. In looking at this book, it is pretty clear what countries are viewed as important, as they are given many pages, full of detailed information about cities, levels of government, and the like, while nations that are not viewed as being all that important are dismissed within only a few pages of pretty superficial coverage. Of particular interest to the compilers of the book is the supposed stability of the nation, as each nation is examined in light of how likely the nation is to collapse, although the specific measurement known for this metric is not exactly clear within the book.

One of the consistent weaknesses of this book is its failure to handle culture and its related difficulties in showing a high degree of expertise in mapping. Each nation has a single not-very-informative map that shows the nation with a few notable cities and towns as well as its capital and its neighborhood, but the book lacks more detailed maps that could help show the distribution of language families, the internal organization of the nation, or religious mapping that would show some of the more vital cultural boundaries within the nation. These weaknesses indicate that the authors of this book are not quite comfortable with showing the culture of the nations of the world as they exist. Even though they talk in many cases about the percentage of different languages that are spoken of within a nation as well as which are taught in public schools, it seems as if this and some brief information about religions is the extent to which culture is considered. Considering that many nations of the world are deeply divided when it comes to culture, the book could have done a better job at showing and talking about these cultural divides as a major aspect of the stability of the nation. The book does a particularly poor job at discussing the divisions within Somalia, demonstrating a high degree of hostility against the Somaliland state. In general, it may be said that this book fails to account for separatist regimes in a fair-minded fashion, which is perhaps unsurprising but it does make this book a bit less effective in showing an accurate view of the world.

There also remains an important question in looking at this book and that is, who is this book for? This particular volume takes probably the entire year to update, and this particular volume was the most recent one that was available for me to check out from a local library. The book is not apparently of wide interest and I was the first person to indicate on Goodreads that I had read the book, which indicates that this book has an extremely small (and likely rather private) reading audience. Aside from diplomats, it is unclear who would be interested in reading a book like this one, and the book appears to be written from a mindset of professional diplomats who are pro-UN and pro-EU and probably pro-globalist in their perspective. The book is not written with a deep understanding or interest in the commonfolk, and spends a lot of time writing about political elites–every single nation’s history is viewed with regards to its history regarding colonialism, and every nation has its head of government given a short biography that is generally laudatory, regardless of how corrupt the regime is that rules over the country. The market for this book is therefore a pretty limited one: people who want to read a lot about other countries but from the point of view of the global elite, largely praising the global elite and the contemporary world order and encouraging stability, even in nations that lack a lot of legitimacy. Something tells me that this isn’t a very large audience, but it has to be enough to justify what must be a huge expense in printing this book, which for all of its flaws is certainly informative.