A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 100 OBJECTS
Neil MacGregor
Penguin
REVIEW: David Eedes
Kenneth Clark’s 1969 Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s 1973 The Ascent of Man were both initially made for television then turned into books.
A History of the World in 100 Objects is a book based, this time, on the much-acclaimed 2010 BBC Radio 4 series. It’s an enticing prospect to imagine adding the third dimension of television to this wonderful project, curated and presented by Neil MacGregor, direct of the British Museum.
Radio 4 listeners to the 15-minute broadcasts would have had the objects described and interpreted by MacGregor and his chosen experts. In the book, each object is presented photographically and described and interpreted via the text.
Having only read the book, the radio series now holds great fascination for me. How it was produced and presented, each object approached and negotiated, and the mystique and visual uniqueness of the chosen item evoked, is intriguing. Was radio also able to successfully convey the broad thematic arc of this unique interpretation of history?
This book is a reminder that written text is a relatively recent and rare development, and only occurred in a few scattered parts of the globe at various times in history. For a large part of the inhabited world, surviving man-made objects are almost the only way of attempting to reconstruct the jigsaw puzzle of the human story.
The British Museum now comprises more than a million items from all parts of the globe. This booty – bought, stolen, traded, pillaged, donated and excavated – was founded on the initial bequest of Dr Hans Sloane in 1753. The task MacGregor has undertaken is to build the story of homo sapiens, from our original nest in Africa to subsequent migrations that led to us inhabiting almost all the land masses on the globe, using only 100 selected pieces from this enormous collection.
Many of the objects chosen come with a provenance coloured by those who followed – invading conquerors, pressured scientists, art historians, palaeontologists, ethnologists, fabulists, collectors. These have left the patina of their – often grubby – fingerprints on each item. That the subsequent interpretations are based on this murky backward glance down the past and then refracted and altered by subsequent historical and political events, only adds to the mystery that shrouds them.
McGregor infuses his personal take on the exhibits with opinions from people who have a particular viewpoint on the object under discussion. He ranges wide in his choice of outside experts – artists, writers, potters, medical scientists, lawyers, political activists, international historians, antiquarians and religious leaders. Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, writers Martin Amis, Susie Orbach and Ben Okri, politicians Kofi Annan, Tony Benn and Boris Johnson, musicians Stephen Sondheim and Evelyn Glennie, Mervyn King, head of the Bank of England and architect Richard Rogers, to name a few. Each one adds wider credentials to cement the selected objects in this view of history.
The possession and display of artefacts from foreign lands by ethnographic institutions such as the British Museum is the subject of a complicated, loaded and ever-fraught debate. As this is not the mandate of the book, MacGregor has managed to tiptoe around it by using these assorted voices. Concentrating his attentions on the objects themselves, while being inclusive of as much of the diversity that currently comprises the human race, he allays racial, political and religious sensitivities, while adding a modern counterpoint to the purely historical.
The book is divided into 20 parts of five objects each, starting with “Making us Human” (2 000 000-9 000BC), to “The World of our Making” (1914-2010AD). Along the way we encounter “Science and Literature”; “Empire Builders”; “World Faiths, Meeting the Gods”; “The Threshold of the Modern World”; “Tolerance and Intolerance”; “Exploration, Exploitation and Enlightenment”; “Mass Production and Mass Persuasion” – to give but a taste.
The oldest object depicted is a tool from the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania from 1.8-2 million years ago. Yet, the first object MacGregor presents (from the comparatively recent age of around 240BC) is a wooden mummy case from Thebes in Egypt. By doing so he boldly places humans at the centre of his story.
His juxtaposition of things of immense beauty alongside objects with back-stories so alien to our modern sensibilities, is gripping. This story of humankind gives us some insight into what has motivated us: ingenuity, artistry, sex, power, greed, beauty and, most importantly, a universal need to rationalise our existence. These are some of the impulses that MacGregor vividly brings into relief here. But to describe individual objects would be to reduce the wonderful surprise on each page.
l Eedes is a Cape Town oncologist with a passion for history and museums.