A Short History of the World Read Free Page B

are, to a degree, his Kampf , but, with his English perspective, they were much shorter, much cleaner, and much funnier. Speaking as an historian andprofessional, I admire them very greatly. His books combine admirable skill in the compression of material, and extraction of what matters, with a sense of moral purpose and are evidence of the creative genius of Wells.
    The first thing that strikes you about Wells's Short History is its zest. The reader wants to know what happens next, and though the book can be read on a four-hour train journey, quite a lot of it will stick in the memory. He takes the reader in easy stages from the origins of Earth to the outcome of the First World War – a task that would have daunted anyone with ten times as many pages at his disposal as Wells – and in lesser hands, this little book would have read like an inadequate encyclopedia article, or worse. But Wells had two outstanding talents to bring to a book of this kind. Firstly he had journalistic training: the ability to see the sense of something complicated, and to turn it into something readable. More importantly, he had his point of view which, when he first wrote the book, in 1922, counted as exciting and heretical. For Wells believed in the alliance of Science and the Common People. The hero-country in this book is the United States: classless, technological, pacific.
    The young Wells emerged in a world that was heavily dominated by class, empire, religion; he gathered with like-minded people, mainly radical liberals, and promoted what became, in government parlance, ‘the New Efficiency’. England was to become more like Germany – technical schools, better education, proper hygiene, more science at all levels. In a way, H. G. Wells's Short History , though not composed until 1922, is an artefact of the Edwardian progressives' world.
    In that world, before mass secondary education, there was a widespread movement for Workers' Education, or, in France, universités populaires . Night-schools and libraries flourished, and there was a large market for popularizing, which produced some remarkably good books. Authors could simplify without ‘talking down’, and could be sure that their readers would understand clear prose. Quite possibly, literacy in anything more than a mechanical sense is of a lower standard nowadaysin England than it was before the First World War. My Penguin edition of this book (1938) has, on the back, a list of outstanding, easily accessible works of serious popularization – Woolley on archaeology, Jeans on science, Bell on civilization, Fry on art, Cole on economics, Halévy on the English People. Wells belongs in this exalted category.
    The Short History is of course a period-piece, but it is remarkably free, just the same, from the certainties of opinion held in Edwardian England. It is not Euro-centric. In 344 pages, you do not reach Columbus until page 235 or the French Revolution until page 272. This author knows that empires rise and fall, and that the domination of the world by Europe will not be any more lasting than the Western world's one-time domination by Rome. Again, there is no assertion of the superiority of the ‘Aryan’, or ‘Indo-Germanic’ race, a stock-in-trade of pot-boilers of this time. The science of ‘race-improvement’, eugenics, caught on quite widely after 1900, as people, including commentators of the Left, thought that lower classes and lesser breeds would have to be racially improved. There were experiments along these lines in the Soviet Union; the Rockefeller Foundation in the United States paid for the research work of Dr Josef Mengele (though only up to 1941); in several states of the United States, there were provisions for the castration of men not fit to reproduce. Wells will have none of this: on the contrary, he writes respectfully of all races, particularly of Jews, notes with great approval the rise of Japan in the