French eye on history

Press, 24 September 1988, Page 27

French eye on history

Collins Atlas of World History. Edited by Pierre Vidal-Naquet. Collins, 1988. 340 pp. (Reviewed by Mavis Airey) This beautifully produced book $ a translation of Hachette’s “Le Grand Livre de I’Histoire du Monde”: a more expansive title which perhaps suits it better. Although it is an atlas in the sense that it includes a lot of maps, it is far more than that. The book is divided into 160 double-page spreads, each introducing a different aspect of the human story through essays, chronologies, diagrams, maps, and a feast of colour illustrations. The range is wide — from Neanderthal times to the present day, from the geographic development of entire racial groups to specific events in the leading countries of the time. It looks not only at the frontiers which kept them apart, but the developments

in trade, the arts, and science which brought them together. The division into double-page spreads is eye-catching, even if it means the essays are sometimes frustratingly short. The maps are generally helpful, particularly in showing movements of population and changing boundaries. -Occasionally, they could have done with a better key. A contents page would also have been helpful. Although the introductory essay on cartography is sometimes incomprehensible, the translations are on the whole excellent, and its French origin gives the book a refreshing lack of British bias. In the section on British colonial settlement we are told, for example: “In New Zealand ... agricultural development took the form of confiscation of Maori land ...” (this is about the only mention New Zealand rates). In South Africa, “International opinion regarded the Boers as innocent victims of British imperialism. Two and a half years, 400,000 soldiers and the invention of concentration camps were needed to break their resistance.” France naturally fares well, but among the 70 authors credited with writing the text is a fair sprinkling of Slavic, Arabian,’ Germanic, and Latin names. Anglophiles may find the choice of dates and events highlighted is sometimes arbitrary, but this is a small price to pay for some fascinating insights into the India of the Great Moghals, medieval Africa, the thalassocracies of Indonesia, Iran 2000 years ago, Japan under the Togukawa, China in the Ming dynasty, and the history of independence movements in South America. Perhaps it was expecting too much to hope to find something as well about the great Pacific migrations, the history of the Australian Aboriginals, or the North American Indians before the arrival of Europeans. These are minor criticisms. This really is a lovely book. It does more than any other I have seen to bring history alive.