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    A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
    A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
    A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium
    Audiobook29 hours

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

    Written by Chris Harman

    Narrated by Napoleon Ryan

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    About this audiobook

    Chris Harman describes the shape and course of human history as a narrative of ordinary people forming and re-forming complex societies in pursuit of common human goals. Interacting with the forces of technological change as well as the impact of powerful individuals and revolutionary ideas, these societies have engendered events familiar to every schoolchild-from the empires of antiquity to the world wars of the twentieth century.

    In a bravura conclusion, Chris Harman exposes the reductive complacency of contemporary capitalism, and asks, in a world riven as never before by suffering and inequality, why we imagine that it can-or should-survive much longer. Ambitious, provocative and invigorating, A People's History of the World delivers a vital corrective to traditional history, as well as a powerful sense of the deep currents of humanity which surge beneath the froth of government.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 29, 2017
    ISBN9781541475823

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    Reviews for A People's History of the World

    4/5

    91 ratings10 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Excellent interpretation of events in the history and presenting them in a clear and logical perspective

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      As the title suggests, this book looks at world history from a different angle than most people have been taught. I'm not going to lie: this was a challenging, heavy book to get through because its emphasis on the plight of the least empowered members of society doesn't gloss over the brutal details of what the people went through.

      That said, the writing and narration are solid, and I believe a book like this is important as a kind of "reality check" for those interested in politics, history, social science, or economics. I came to this book seeking out different perspectives to the simplistic narrative of "progress" with which I was raised. This book accomplished that goal perfectly, and blasted me with existential questions about my place in society as a young undergraduate student.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      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.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      This is a solid reference book. It’s mostly focused on the history of the West, but those few chapters dedicated to other civilizations are worth the read. I’m not entirely satisfied with how the certain subjects were handled, but from what I can remember not one of them was handled tastlessly. If you are in doubt whether you should read / listen to this book or not, my honest advice would be to give it a try, especially if you are “new” to history.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 2/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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!
    • 1/5
      Really poorly written; far too many leaps of assumption and unsupported conclusions.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 5/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      A readable Maxist History of the world. I liked it. From my Socialist Phase.