Writers have charted history as a linear progression, a sine wave, a cycle. What if it more closely resembles a family tree?
With the rise to political power of non-royal families in the twentieth century, Montefiore’s template for dynastic rule switches from monarchs to mafiosi. The Mafia model applies as readily to the Kennedys, whom Montefiore calls “a macho family business” with Mob ties, as to the Yeltsins, Boris and his daughter Tatiana, whose designatedas their heir.
“The World” has the heft and character of a dictionary; it’s divided into twenty-three “acts,” each labelled by world-population figures and subdivided into sections headed by family names. Montefiore energetically fulfills his promise to write a “genuine world history, not unbalanced by excessive focus on Britain and Europe.” In zesty sentences and lively vignettes, he captures the widening global circuits of people, commerce, and culture.
To the extent that “The World” does have a plot, it concerns the resilience of dynastic power in the face of political transformation. Even today, more than forty nations have a monarch as the head of state, fifteen of them in the British Commonwealth. Yet in democracies, too, holding political power is very often a matter of family connections. “Well, Franklin, there’s nothing like keeping the name in the family,” Teddy Roosevelt remarked at the marriage of his niece Eleanor to her cousin.
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