The World

How can you make a human-scale map of world history without losing its global sweep? In The World, Simon Sebag Montefiore argues that the most reliable compass is the family. Power, faith, wealth and war travel through households: fathers, mothers, lovers, siblings, adopted heirs, eunuchs and in-laws. He contends that if you follow who marries whom, who adopts whom, and who kills whom, you can see how policies, empires and even pandemics are refracted through intimate ties—while technology, faith and markets amplify those private decisions into public outcomes.

Across seven millennia, the book weaves three master threads: the household as the cell of politics; connectivity as a double-edged accelerator; and institutions—religions, bureaucracies, armies, companies—that codify family power into durable systems. You meet Enheduanna, Sargon’s daughter and the first named author, whose hymns fuse trauma and propaganda; Constantine and Helena, who yoke imperial power to Christianity; Kösem and Turhan, Ottoman mothers whose harem maneuvers topple and enthrone sultans; the Medicis, Rothschilds, and Krupps, who turn private capital into statecraft; and revolutionaries from Toussaint to Deng, who recast family and state after cataclysms.

The household: smallest unit, largest consequences

You begin with kin clusters in forager bands and end with first families managing nuclear crises. Enheduanna’s ordeal in Akkad and Hatshepsut’s sacralized lineage show how early dynasties merged temple and kin to legitimate rule. Roman paterfamilias, Achaemenid satrapal marriages, and Chinese adoption practices make succession a domestic art. Fast-forward, and the same grammar persists: Shahjahan’s grief for Mumtaz Mahal becomes the Taj; Aurangzeb’s fratricide remakes the subcontinent; Louis XIV’s Versailles turns etiquette into a security system; Napoleon crowns siblings as kings. The lesson is stark: intimacy decides strategy as surely as spears or cannons.

Connectivity’s paradox: trade, treaties—and plagues

The book insists you treat roads, ships and couriers as political actors. Göbekli Tepe’s pilgrim circuits prefigure states; Uruk’s tablets turn barley into bureaucracies; Darius’ Royal Road stitches satrapies; Mongol yam posts create the first transcontinental market; the VOC/EIC fuse finance with fleets. But the same arteries carry devastation: the Late Bronze Age collapse toppled Hatti’s treaty order; Justinian’s plague wrecked reconquest; the Black Death traveled Genoese galleys from Kaffa to Messina; modern railways and telegraphs sped total war. Today, packets on the internet and drones in the sky remix that old pattern: openness empowers exchange and surveillance at once.

Institutions that remember—and kill

Temples, courts, armies and companies preserve family power beyond any single life. Read cuneiform ledgers or the Bisitun inscription and you see a state’s executive summary; read the Hagia Sophia’s dome and you feel Justinian’s creed turned into stone. The Janissaries’ muskets, the Maxim gun at Omdurman, and Krupp’s howitzers show how firms industrialize sovereignty (and slaughter). IG Farben’s Zyklon‑B and railway timetables reveal how bureaucracy can become a death machine. Yet the same lab bench gives you Pasteur’s vaccines and Haber–Bosch fertilizer (a moral ambivalence Montefiore keeps foregrounding; compare to Jared Diamond’s environmental focus and you’ll see this book leans harder on households and archives).

Arc of the story: from footprints to fiber optics

You move from Happisburgh footprints to Jericho walls, from Sargon’s 5,400 guards to Darius’ satraps, from Pericles’ assembly to Qin legalism, from Constantine’s councils to Muhammad’s ummah, from Tang–Song cosmopolitanism to the Mongol Pax, then crash into the Black Death. Gunpowder empires, Iberian oceanic reach, and sugar slavery globalize brutality and wealth. Versailles perfects court theater; English regicide and Haitian emancipation explode monarchic certainties; Napoleon fuses revolution with dynasty, until logistics and coalitions undo him. The nineteenth century scrambles Africa (Berlin, Congo); East Asia splits between Cixi’s partial reform and Meiji’s full modernization. The twentieth unleashes total war and the Holocaust, then decolonization, Cold War geometry (Cuba, détente), Maoist and Islamist revolutions, the Soviet collapse—and finally an infosphere where ARPANET’s packets power both protest and panopticons.

Through-line

Watch the families; map the networks; audit the ledgers. That triad makes empires legible and collapses predictable.

If you’re reading for application, the method travels: in any crisis today, trace the household (succession, spouses, siblings), the channels (money, media, trade, roads), and the records (laws, budgets, archives). Montefiore’s wager is that the personal is the political at civilizational scale—and that by restoring people and paperwork to the center, you gain a clearer view of how the world was made, unmade and remade.

Montefiore starts before kings, where family cooperation—long childhoods, shared food, ritual—preconditions everything that follows. You see overlapping strategies, not a single ‘Neolithic Revolution’: seasonal gatherings yield temples like Göbekli Tepe (9500–8000 BC), then agriculture thickens into villages (Jericho, Çatalhöyük) and cities (Uruk). Families adapt: fertility rises, mortality bites, and property rules privilege clear descent—often patrilineal in Eurasia—so inheritance and marriage become politics.

Temples, tablets, and the first authors

Uruk’s elites start marking tokens; cuneiform on clay follows. The earliest named ‘executive’? Kushim, the barley accountant. Writing is not a literary hobby; it’s a control system. Enheduanna—Sargon’s daughter, high priestess at Ur—issues orders, names hairdressers (Ilum Palilis) and scribes (Sagadu), and when a usurper seizes and likely rapes her, she answers with hymns that blend trauma, ritual and dynastic propaganda. Imhotep in Egypt moves from architect to deified sage, proof that administrative genius can turn into theology.

Chariots, treaties, and Bronze Age diplomacy

Horse bits and wheels become weapons: chariots turn elites into mobile missile platforms. Hatti and Egypt clash at Kadesh (1274 BC), but what endures is the treaty—co‑signed by Hattusili III and his queen Puduhepa—codifying spheres of influence, prisoner exchanges, and marriage alliances. Royal women like Puduhepa and China’s Fu Hao wield power via temples, diplomacy and command. You learn to read reliefs and letters as deal memos.

Systems break: climate, revolt and Sea Peoples

Around 1200–1150 BC, interdependence magnifies shocks: climate stress, famines, internal risings and migrating ‘Sea Peoples’ tear networks apart. Hattusa is abandoned; trade routes blink off. The moral applies far beyond antiquity: the tighter the supply web, the more synchronized the failure (compare to modern global shocks). New mixes—Aryan polities in India, Philistines in Canaan—repopulate the stage.

Reading rule in the record

Temples’ receipts and kings’ inscriptions are executive summaries of power. Audit them to see who eats, who pays, and who prays.

For you, the practical habit is simple: when a city appears, ask what family bargains (marriages, adoptions), what ritual centers (temples, ziggurats), and what ledgers (grain, labor) sustain it. From Jericho’s walls to Uruk’s tablets, that triangulation lets you see past marble busts to the machinery underneath.

Empires congeal when kin, creed and bureaucracy align. The Achaemenids perfect the format: Cyrus takes Babylon but keeps local cults; Darius standardizes satrapies, coins (the daric), the Royal Road and a postal spy network (King’s Ears/Eyes). At Bisitun, he nails down legitimacy—genealogy fused to divine favor. In parallel, Greek poleis experiment with councils and assemblies; Pericles turns the Delian League’s tribute into marble and drama. Two models emerge: centralized tolerance with paperwork versus fractious city-states with citizen debates.

Assyria’s terror and ledgers

Tiglath‑Pileser III and Ashurbanipal build a standing army, deport populations and run couriers like a proto‑intelligence service. Palace reliefs show flayings even as Nineveh’s library preserves 32,000 tablets. Montefiore’s point: empire can be archivist and torturer at once. When Assyria implodes (612 BC), rivals like Nabopolassar and Cyaxares carve the carcass—a recurring cycle when terror outpaces legitimacy.

Macedonian shock and Hellenistic fusion

While Athens and Sparta tire, Philip arms Macedonia with sarissas; Alexander then marries Roxane, dons Persian dress and binds satraps into a hybrid court. His sudden death is the family faultline in action: heirs murdered, paladins divide the spoils. The Hellenistic age becomes a lesson in cultural diffusion powered by fragile succession.

Qin’s coercion, Han’s consolidation

Ying Zheng (Qin Shi Huang) standardizes weights, scripts, roads and conscription; he builds walls and a terracotta army—and burns out in a generation. Liu Bang’s Han moderates: family grants, Confucian legitimacy, civil service, paper (Cai Lun) and Silk Road diplomacy (Zhang Qian). Eunuchs and dowager empresses become gatekeepers; purges and witch‑hunts show how access politics can unmake order.

• Administrative glue: roads, records, coinage, and ritual.
• Family calculus: marriages, adoptions, concubines, eunuchs.
• Culture as claim: inscriptions, law codes, public works.

When you compare Darius to Pericles, or Qin to Han, you’re watching the same puzzle solved differently: how to extend rule beyond one person’s lifespan. (Note: where Mary Beard centers Roman civic forms, Montefiore leans harder into the backstage family economy of power.)

Religion repeatedly sacralizes dynasty and law. Constantine fuses empire and Christianity: basilicas rise, councils codify orthodoxy (Nicaea), Sunday becomes policy, and a new Rome—Constantinople—re‑maps the sacred. Muhammad founds a polity where scripture, law and warfare entwine: the hijra births the ummah, Medina drafts covenants, and caliphates mint coins and build domes (Abd al‑Malik’s Dome of the Rock). Sacred authority becomes constitutional architecture.

Justinian’s ambition versus a microbe

Justinian codifies law (Corpus Juris Civilis), reconquers provinces under Belisarius, and crowns it with Hagia Sophia—until plague (Yersinia pestis) kills perhaps a third of Constantinople and drains the treasury. Procopius’ stench‑soaked pages remind you: ecology can veto empire. The plague’s fallout weakens both Byzantium and Sasanids, easing later Arab conquests.

Tang–Song openings and women’s power

Tang cosmopolitanism (Taizong) welcomes Turkic cavalry; Empress Wu Zetian rules as sovereign, building Buddhist institutions and secret police. The Song then spark a commercial‑tech revolution: movable type, gunpowder weapons, compasses, paper money, and million‑strong cities like Kaifeng. Li Qingzhao’s elegies and Shen Gua’s notebooks show culture and science blooming together.

Mongol linkage: markets and microbes

Genghis’ yam system and merit promotions (Jebe, Subotai) create a Eurasian highway; Kublai’s Yuan courts host Polos; Hulagu sacks Baghdad; Sorqaqtani and imperial daughters govern appanages. But the same roads likely accelerate the Black Death. In the fourteenth century, plague fells a third or more in many regions; Mansa Musa’s gold parades and Marco Polo’s marvels ride the same vectors that later carry catastrophe.

Operating rule

Faith legitimizes families; families staff faith. Crises—plague, famine—reveal whether the bond is ritual veneer or institutional backbone.

For you, the actionable lens is to read churches, mosques and monasteries as ministries, and pandemics as stress tests that separate architectural grandeur from fiscal capacity.

From the fifteenth century, oceans become highways for prestige and profit. The Ming show an alternative to European conquest: Yongle’s eunuch admiral Zheng He sails treasure fleets to Hormuz, Calicut and Kilwa, projecting suzerainty, moving giraffes and artisans—not settlers. After Yongle, Confucian bureaucrats scuttle the fleets; China turns inward (a choice often contrasted with later Belt‑and‑Road ambitions).

Iberian leap and the sugar engine

Portuguese caravels round Africa; Henry the Navigator’s ventures seed islands (Madeira, São Tomé) where sugar plantations cry out for labor. Captives arrive in Lagos (1444); the Atlantic slave trade scales as Brazil’s mills expand. In the Americas, disease erases indigenous labor; planters pivot to African chattel slavery, rationalized by an emerging racial ideology. Columbus’ voyages, papal bulls and royal licenses make conquest and enslavement legal policy.

Company‑states and commodity worlds

The Dutch VOC and English EIC institutionalize force‑backed commerce: Jan Pieterszoon Coen massacres Banda for nutmeg; the VOC builds a global lattice (Java to the Cape to New Amsterdam). Silver from Potosí sluices into China’s Ming markets; European banking houses (Fuggers, later Rothschilds) finance wars and rails. New Amsterdam becomes a mixed port of Moors, Jews, Africans and Dutch burghers, while Cape farms turn a refreshment stop into settler frontier.

Gunpowder empires and Renaissance finance

Ottomans storm Constantinople with cannon; Selim crushes Safavid horse archers at Çaldıran with muskets; Babur wins Panipat using Ottoman artillery templates. Meanwhile the Medicis convert cloth into cathedrals: Brunelleschi’s dome and Ghiberti’s doors sanctify banking. Printing empowers Luther and multiplies dissent; patronage stabilizes and destabilizes in the same breath.

Trade’s rule

When a commodity (sugar, spice, silver) meets ships and credit, you get empires by ledger as much as by lance.

To analyze any early modern node—Elmina fort, Malacca, Amsterdam’s bourse—ask which company flag flies, which family bank underwrites, and which coerced bodies turn a profit. The answer explains who rules the sea lanes and who pays the human price.

Monarchy survives by choreography. Louis XIV learns from the Fronde that magnificence is security; Versailles scripts access—lever, coucher, ballets—and converts nobles into clients. Fouquet’s ostentation earns arrest; the Affair of the Poisons shows scandal’s danger. Yet spectacle without solvency breaks: by Louis XVI, debts, pamphlets and the diamond‑necklace gossip corrode legitimacy; the Estates‑General opens the revolutionary trapdoor.

When procedure fails: regicide and protectorates

In England, Charles I storms the Commons, raises his standard and loses to the New Model Army. Cromwell’s Ironsides win at Marston Moor and Naseby; a court convicts a king; a republic and Protectorate stumble toward restoration. You learn that when parliaments, armies and pulpits fuse, constitutional orders can invert overnight.

Harem politics: mothers as ministers

Ottoman succession makes the valide sultan (Kösem, then Turhan) the empire’s pivot. Murad IV’s violent pageantry and Ibrahim’s grotesqueries force maternal coups; fatwas sanction stranglings; concubines and Janissaries arbitrate sovereignty. The palace is a cabinet, the harem a war room.

Mughal love and fratricide

Shahjahan translates grief into the Taj; Mumtaz once wielded the seal of state. Their sons—Dara Shikoh the syncretist, Aurangzeb the austere strategist—fight for empire. Aurangzeb’s siege of Agra, beheading of Dara, Deccan expansions and jizya reveal politics as piety and logistics. The cost is overreach and regional revolt (Marathas, Sikhs).

Haiti and Napoleon: emancipation and empire

In Saint‑Domingue, the Bois Caïman oath sparks insurrection; Toussaint bargains with Spain, then Republican France after 1794 abolition; he governs with military discipline. Napoleon crowns himself, spreads a family monarchy (Joseph, Louis, Jérôme), and marries for alliances—but Trafalgar, the Continental System’s leakiness, and the Russian winter crush him. Leclerc’s attempt to re‑enslave Haiti fails under yellow fever and Dessalines’ war; Haiti’s independence remaps the Atlantic and pushes Napoleon to sell Louisiana (Jefferson doubles the U.S., then sends Lewis and Clark; Astor monetizes it with fur and China sandalwood).

Read courts as systems of risk management—and revolutions as failures of that system. Where etiquette, marriage and money no longer mediate rivals, heads roll and new theaters (plebiscitary empires, black monarchies, protectorates) appear.

Modern states fight with money and molecules. The Rothschilds perfect family finance: Mayer Amschel stations sons across Europe; Nathan moves bullion to pay Wellington; code and couriers outrun cabinets. Myths of a Waterloo market coup aside, their enduring power is logistics of credit, not gambler’s luck—funding coalitions, rails and restorations while drawing antisemitic bile.

Guns, germs and ledgers 2.0

Maxim guns mow down Matabele at Shangani and Mahdists at Omdurman; Krupp furnaces cast Big Berthas and later panzers. Chemistry births aspirin (Hoffmann) and antibiotics (Ehrlich) even as Haber–Bosch feeds billions and fills shells. Pasteur and Koch make germ theory; Nathan Straus’ pasteurized milk saves city children. The same bench invents cure and poison.

Sugar, slavery and financial ecosystems

Plantation ledgers calculate human lifespans as inputs; Middle Passage mortality (6–20%) is a grim line item. Dutch and English company charters license sovereign violence in pursuit of commodity profits. In this world, an invoice can be deadlier than a sword because it scales brutality efficiently.

Moral arithmetic

Ask of any breakthrough: who funds it, who benefits, who bleeds? The answer predicts whether discovery becomes vaccine, fertilizer—or gas.

For your toolkit: treat banks, labs and factories as strategic ministries. They extend or erode sovereignty depending on whether ledgers answer to parliaments—or to private dynasts without guardrails.

The twentieth century binds industrial capacity to annihilation. A Balkan murder—Princip shooting Franz Ferdinand—triggers alliance machinery and the Schlieffen timetables; once mobilizations begin, diplomacy dies. Trenches from Ypres to the Somme grind men into mud under machine‑gun and shellfire; gas drifts; tanks rumble. On other fronts, movement persists but death keeps pace; empires wobble and fall.

From pogroms to a system of murder

Nazi rule scales localized violence into bureaucracy. In the USSR invasion’s wake, Einsatzgruppen execute mass shootings (Babi Yar). By January 1942, Wannsee bureaucrats align ministries for a ‘Final Solution’: ghettos, deportations, selections, Zyklon‑B gas chambers, crematoria. Rail timetables and requisitions coordinate the killing; Auschwitz‑Birkenau becomes a factory of death.

Corporate integration into atrocity

Krupp petitions for Auschwitz slave labor; Berthawerk rises; IG Farben supplies chemicals; the Reichsbahn delivers victims on schedule. The horror isn’t just ideology; it’s process: procurement, payroll, and planning become instruments of genocide. Meanwhile, Ottoman wartime nationalism births the Armenian genocide—proof that state crises can turn minorities into targets of extermination.

Systemic warning

When ideology meets logistics and unaccountable firms, ordinary offices become lethal. Study incentives, not only monsters.

This part of the story arms you with a diagnostic: whenever a regime centralizes rail, registry and rationing under dehumanizing law, you’re looking at potential for mass crime. The fix is institutional—independent courts, free media, corporate liability—because virtue alone cannot stop a machine.

Empire’s twilight arrives with bombs and ballots. The Trinity test and Hiroshima/Nagasaki end one war and start an age where total war means mutual suicide. Exhausted Europeans unwind empires in panic: India’s rushed partition (Nehru, Jinnah, Mountbatten) kills a million and uproots ten million; Palestine’s partition births Israel and the Nakba. New states confront superpowers offering aid with strings: Marshall Plan and NATO in the West; Cominform and Soviet advisors in the East.

Scramble, reform—and divergence in Asia

Africa is carved at Berlin (1884–85); Leopold’s Congo becomes a private hell of rubber quotas and severed hands. Later, decolonization bleeds into proxy wars: Cuba’s Operation Carlota shores up Angola’s MPLA; Mengistu’s Red Terror in Ethiopia rides Soviet and Cuban support. In East Asia, Cixi’s partial reforms can’t stem humiliation; Japan’s Meiji sprint wins wars and Korea (after Queen Min’s assassination) at China’s expense.

Crisis management in a nuclear world

The Cuban Missile Crisis shows bargaining under annihilation: Kennedy trades secret Jupiter withdrawals from Türkiye and a no‑invasion pledge for Khrushchev’s removal of Cuban missiles; a hotline follows. Nixon and Kissinger’s triangular diplomacy opens to China, squeezes SALT from Moscow, and barely rides out the Yom Kippur War and oil shock. These maneuvers prove détente is managed rivalry, not peace.

Revolutions and collapse

Mao’s Cultural Revolution pulverizes a generation; Pol Pot’s Year Zero murders a third of Cambodian men until Vietnam ends the nightmare; Iran swaps the Shah’s modernization for Khomeini’s theocracy. The Soviet story arcs from Brezhnev’s stagnation to Gorbachev’s glasnost/perestroika; 1989 opens walls, 1991’s failed coup ends the USSR; Yeltsin’s wild privatizations mint oligarchs and incubate Putin’s managed autocracy.

If you’re pattern‑spotting: great‑power retreats, local ambitions and ideology collide; the winners are those who master finance, legitimacy and logistics without overreaching into massacre.

The book closes by showing how today’s power rides code and cells as much as cavalry or cannons. Packet‑switching (Baran, Davies) and ARPA birth ARPANET; TCP/IP and Berners‑Lee’s Web make a planetary nervous system. Steve Jobs compresses that web into your palm; smartphones turn attention into terrain and data into fuel for politics and markets.

Surveillance and disinformation at scale

Authoritarian states bolt facial recognition, big data and censorship atop the net; Russia refines hacking and disinformation to tilt elections abroad. Democracies gain reach but inherit fragility: virality outpaces verification; rumor colonizes reality. Montefiore’s family lens still helps: court‑like cliques (advisers, donors, platforms) shape choices behind official podiums.

Remote war and biopolitics

Predators and Reapers evolve from eyes to executioners (Awlaki, Soleimani), extending executive violence across borders. DNA’s double helix and the pill quietly refactor families, fertility and labor; vaccines move from Jefferson’s cowpox evangelism to global eradication drives. Public health remains politics by other means—just as in Justinian’s time, but with PCR and cold chains.

Contemporary rule

Openness empowers innovators and autocrats alike. Guardrails—privacy law, transparency, liability—determine whether networks free or fetter.

To use Montefiore’s method now, trace three paths in any crisis: the family network around the leader, the data pipes carrying narrative and money, and the institutional memory (courts, platforms, archives) that can restrain or enable power. The past’s patterns still pulse through the fiber.