Conrad Black’s Extraordinary Magnum Opus

>> Andrew Roberts: Welcome back to Secrets of Statecraft. I'm Andrew Roberts, and my guest today is Conrad Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, the Canadian businessman who's an historian and former media mogul. Conrad, you've written the political and strategic history of the world, volume one. And volume one covers from antiquity to the Caesars, ending in 14 AD with the death of Emperor Augustus.

It really is an extraordinary achievement. It's over a thousand pages long, none of them are boring. It's an extraordinary page turner, especially the Peloponnesian wars, Alexander the Great and Rome. What are you trying to achieve with this gigantic undertaking?

>> Conrad Black: A couple of things on a straight personal level, Andrew.

Well, I feel pretty much the same as I did 30 years ago. I'm getting older and I want a magnum opus, and I thought this was an ambitious objective, but an attainable one. And if it was going to happen, it has to happen now, given my age, because it is, as you know better than almost anybody, a lot of work to write books like this.

Secondly, though, in a broader sense, I felt that it was possible to present the broadly speaking, political history of the world. By which I mean how people have been organized from the most primitive, authenticatable times, if I may use the word, reliable history, as far back as we can get it.

Of how people were organized and how organized groups and jurisdictions communicated with each other and the evolution of that, and in order. And it could be done in manageable length, considerable length. Manageable length, three volumes, big volumes, but not 30 volumes of the kind that are on the shelves behind me here, which is what people would think, the Cambridge and Oxford histories and so on.

And also, I know there's this debate about the great man theory of history and so on, but that's not what this is. But people make history. If there weren't people, there would be no history and nobody could read it or write it. So it is a history of what people do, mediocre people, great people, terrible people, evil people, and so forth, although all of us are all of that different times, I suppose, but in general.

And so the only way to make it interesting was to focus on the personalities who made the history. So that's my plan here, to get it into three big volumes. It's distinct chapters. The chapters have breakers in them. Very good index, and you can get anything you want in the political and strategic history of the world at the end of it, just by looking at the index.

If you want to go further into it, obviously you can do that, but at least I give everyone an entree to it.

>> Andrew Roberts: You certainly do. And the entree from earliest times considers Mesopotamia, the dawn of civilization, Moses, Egypt and the pharaohs, Babylonia, Assyria, India, and China. You go onto the Persian empire and the golden age of Greece.

But the question that I think is going to be asked by readers is, do we have anything to learn from these people of 3000, 2000, 1000 years ago? Considering that they thought so differently from the way that we think, their religious views were obviously completely different. You end this book, of course, just before Christianity sort of emerges onto the scene.

But what have we got to learn from the ancient world, from people who, as I say, have different mindsets from us, or do they?

>> Conrad Black: I don't think human nature changes much, but human experience does make our species more sophisticated in some ways. I think it is not so much what we have to learn in what they did, but in some of their traits that still exist and in the warnings that they gave to avoid certain things.

I think the lesson is that a policy of constant war making is a bad policy unless you can, as the Romans did, devise a pretext to justify aggression. And the Romans at times became rather ingenious and indeed casuistical in doing that. But unless you can do that, and unless once you have actually committed aggression, you do so to your advantage and persuade those who now govern that it was a good thing for them, that you're governing them, you shouldn't do it.

And the Romans were good at that. As you know, they always lowered taxes, they always increased security for everybody, diminished crime and brigandage and so on. And this was a technique emulated by. By the British and to a slight degree, I'm an example of it. They took the more worthy and supportive people in these places that they occupied and elevated them in the Roman structure and put them in the Senate and things.

Like putting Lord Beaverbrook in the House of Lords, that kind of thing. And so you can see these techniques. The other thing I'd mention is that without getting into the subject of religion itself. It should be noted that from the very first and throughout, people always had a preoccupation with what there was that was not visible in the cosmos.

A supernatural intelligence of some sort or some celestial authority that could be propitiated in some way. Now, some of the methods engaged in for this were peculiar and in modern terms, unacceptable. But that area is in the human psychology, and it hasn't been banished. Now, in those days, there was very little outright atheism, unlike the present time, but that instinct to think that there's something more than we see is not going away.

And we have to be careful that it's not occupied by charlatans and particularly evil charlatans, like the pagan festivals of the Nazis and the Stalin communists.

>> Andrew Roberts: You mentioned earlier the concept of the great man theory of history. Although great man and woman theory of history as it's called.

Although obviously, for obvious reasons, there are many more great men in this. But actually, no, you're very. The Olympia comes out. You call her a careening hellcat and eminently consolable when her husband, Philip of Macedon died, and an orgiastic snake worshipper. She sounds an extraordinary figure from your-

 

>> Conrad Black: She was ultimately stoned to death by her victims.

>> Andrew Roberts: Absolutely, but the mother of Alexander the Great. So it's not just the great men of history, it's also.

>> Conrad Black: Cleopatra is a great star, of course.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, she certainly is, but the concept of great men and women has been under enormous ideological attack, hasn't it?

Well, in a sense from the Whigs, but also certainly from Marxists and all Determinists who like to see what T.S. Eliot called the impersonal forces of history being much more important than the individual. Whereas this is a fabulous, written in the old manner comprehensive rejection of that concept, isn't it?

 

>> Conrad Black: Well, I think so, I mean, it's not for me to attach the flattering adjectives you did, but I think it attempts to be that. Look, in many places, natural phenomena like earthquakes, floods, fires and so on did play a role in history. And obviously the volcanic eruption, Mount Vesuvius and the fire in which Nero was wrongfully accused of fiddling, he was actually quite useful at the time.

These things are there, but I don't think what Eliot described as the impersonal forces existed other than to the extent that people devised them or were swayed by them. So what I'm emphasizing is what people do and where they are influenced by some new perspective or something. I certainly emphasize that we had obviously very different types of thinking in periclean Athens than we had in Persia at that time, and that highly motivated the Athenians.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Including, obviously philosophy, you write of the effect that Aristotle had on Alexander. Could you tell us a bit more about the effect of philosophy on politics in the ancient world? How important, genuinely, was it?

>> Conrad Black: Well, it varied, you had some completely unalloyed scoundrels like Agathocles, even Alcibiades, who was himself, I believe, also a student of Socrates.

And I don't think philosophy counted for anything with them, but it did have an impact, broadly speaking, on Alexander. Julius Caesar who was nominated to the post of Pontifex Maximus at the age of 14 by his uncle, General Gaius Marius. But it wasn't proceeded with, but he did ultimately gain election to that office.

Did have distinct religious views, and they emphasized, I mean, they were convenient views for a roman leader to hold, but they did help inform and made his actions. I mean, I think it varies, you get scoundrels who are just out for the main chance, but you get much more thoughtful people.

And Pericles is, of course, a particularly prominent example of that.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, as I say, the Peloponnesian wars period is a real page turner in the book. You mentioned Judius Caesar, and you equate him along with Napoleon and Genghis Khan, as being a towering and galvanizing historical personality alongside Alexander the Great.

And I'd just like to ask a bit about Alexander the Great, because, as you point out, he never had more than 50,000 men. And yet he managed to march from the Danube to the Indus without a setback, without a serious setback, anyway how did he do it?

>> Conrad Black: He saw, and in this, I think he benefited from the insight of his father.

He saw that the Persian empire was vulnerable. It had no loyalty from the populations that it occupied, so it could be rolled back relatively easily. Secondly, he saw himself with reason as not only a conqueror, but a civilizer, who brought with him the hellenic culture and civilization. Which did attract and impress the elites in the various places he went to, all the way to Bactria, which is now Afghanistan, and then to the gates and through the gates of India.

And he, of course, was extremely successful militarily. So he had the system of scattering the armies in front of him and then working with local officials, but with his own nominees at the head of the local administration, satrapies. But he gave them better government, he gave the elites exposure to Greek culture.

He lowered taxes, made the authority of the state less capricious and oppressive. And all these people who were accustomed to being ruled by the Persians, to whom they owed no loyalty, said, well, look, this fellow is much better, and he's a great leader. I mean, Darius fled, he was a coward.

And this man's a hero, riding at the head of his troops with that very visible helmet he had.

>> Andrew Roberts: And he went and slept with all of Duras daughters and Duras wife. Look, historians are divided about whether Alexander, who you rightly say is a conqueror and a civilizer, but also an explorer, you do point out how much of an explorer he is.

But historians are divided about whether he originally intended to conquer Persia or whether or not it was just something that happened as a result of his victory after victory. Where do you stand on that?

>> Conrad Black: I think he definitely intended to conquer Persia because I believe that was his father's ambition also.

And whether he actually took Persia itself or not, that may have been a matter to be determined. But he thought he could take all the Persian conquests, which is all present day Turkey, for example, for Macedonia. Beyond that, into Egypt and then along to India, I think that he was just seeing how far he could go, and he would have gone further, but his soldiers said, look here, we've been away for ten years we have to go back almost.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Would you agree he became more vicious as he went along? I mean, was there an element of megalomania that sets in there towards the.

>> Conrad Black: I think not so much vicious, but starting to drink his own bathwater. But being a god, I mean, demanding that people prostrate themselves completely.

I mean, this is quite unnecessary in their presence, they lie down flat on their faces, on the floor in front of it, until they told them to get up. I believe that was the point at which Aristotle thought he'd taken leave of the census to some degree.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you do point out that there are people in history, and you mentioned.

Caiman and Richelieu and Bismarck, who knew when to stop. Is that an absolutely essential feature of statesmanship, leadership?

>> Conrad Black: I think for a great power, yes. Obviously, for the leader of Paraguay or Liberia, it doesn't become a problem. But when you're the greatest power in the world, or one of them, if you don't know where to stop, you finally get everybody else determined to bring you down.

And that you and I are both admirers of Napoleon. And he's by no means solely to blame for the fact that he was ultimately not successful. But I think he did not have that same instinct where it was dangerous to go further, or at least go further without stopping.

I mean, I think if you do it in increments, we've often, in conversation with ourselves, speculated about Hitler. Instead of always wearing a uniform and attacking the Jews and terrorizing his neighbors, he had masqueraded as a civilized German gentleman and had a few years of peace between doing things.

He could have proceeded farther than he did.

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, especially, obviously, if he had another five years or so, the nuclear bomb might have been in play, and that would have been horrific for obvious reasons. You spend a lot of time in this book using analogies, historical analogies.

You equate Alexander the Great's victory with Napoleon at Ulm, Themistocles, and martial salt at one point, Battle of Granicus with the HMS, the sinking of HMS Hood. You equate Tiberius Gracchus with Warren Hastings, Clive of India. These are really thought provoke Hamilcar at one point you equate to Anwar Sadat.

These are very thought provoking analogies.

>> Conrad Black: The one that has caused the most common is Pericles and Gorbachev.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, I could imagine it. Yes, I imagine it would. But I think, by the way, you're in the way Paul Ra and others and Victor Davis Hanson have been writing recently about Pericles.

I think you're probably in the mainstream there rather than an outlier nowadays. Yeah, but what I wanted to ask was, this is history on the big stage. This is very much the comprehensive style of writing history. It's sadly considered by a lot of people to be old-fashioned because history today, especially the academy, is about siloing.

It's about writing about smaller and smaller things, less and less important things in many ways, but also things that are tight chronologically. And you've just rich, literally just sort of thrown all that away and gone back to the old school of big comprehensive history. And I think you're, of course, to be hugely admired for that.

But have you got a sense of where the next break is going to be? Are you going to take it up to the Renaissance or are you going to go further than that at the end of-

>> Conrad Black: That's a timely question. I am three-quarters of the way through volume two, and I expect it to get to just before the American Revolution.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Really, as late as that, how interesting.

>> Conrad Black: Right now, I just finished with Queen Elizabeth and Henry IV, and I'm about to start on Louis XIII is the king, but his mother's the regent. I'm about to get to Russia.

>> Andrew Roberts: I hope Elizabeth I comes out well, she's-

 

>> Conrad Black: Very well, one of the greatest statesmen in European history.

>> Andrew Roberts: Good, that's a big relief, Conrad.

>> Conrad Black: And I believe those are the words in which I section on her. Britain's greatest monarch and one of the greatest statesmen in the history of Europe- You mentioned that, or at least you say that the litmus test of a constitution is how well it works under uninspiring leadership.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Which constitutions would you hail in that regard?

>> Conrad Black: Well, the American is the most prominent in every respect. And without being gratuitous, the current administration is proving that point. I mean, the country is surviving from day to day, but it is an administration that's not successful in most policy areas.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: They were geniuses, weren't they, the founders?

>> Conrad Black: They were.

>> Andrew Roberts: And-

>> Conrad Black: My theory, by the way, when I get to it, which will be in volume three. Is that the quality of American leadership in the latter stages of World War II was of approximately equal standard with Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz, and General Marshall.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You also say, let's go back to Rome for a moment. Again, I agree with you hugely on American leadership in the Second World War. The statesmanship was truly extraordinary, especially the Germany first policy, of course. You say that Rome had a subtlety of governments that eluded the Persians or the Greeks more permanent than Alexander's brilliant but evanescence vision of Hellenization and Greco-Persian integration.

But you also say that Philo Hellenism, I'm assuming you're the thinking about sort of Lord Byron and Gladstone and 19th century Philo Hellenism is Macaulay and so on, is over-romanticized. So what did Rome have that the Persians and the Greeks didn't?

>> Conrad Black: Better justice system opposite the Greeks.

The ability to rise above the city-state. I mean, that was what Rome was. I compare it to Fresno, California, the nearest city to Victor Davis Hanson, your colleague there in California. Pardon me, I'm just getting over the cold, I apologize for my slightly hoarse voice.

>> Andrew Roberts: Okay, well, seen.

 

>> Conrad Black: The Rome expanded carefully. It only took what it could digest. And it pursued that policy steadily for really 400 years, from its founding until the first Punic War. And then that was the first real test of strength outside Italy. But it continued that policy right up to its summit of its influence, sort of the two peaks of Marcus Aurelius and then Constantine.

And even if you want a third peak with Theodosius, but that book, of course, doesn't get to those ones. But unlike Persia, it only took what it could digest, and in stages, over many, many years. And unlike the Greeks, they were able, by a different application of the same method, to exceed the boundaries of the city-state.

I mean, to me, as a reader of the history of ancient Greece, it is frustrating that when Athens finally had the moral authority and the power to be Clearly the leading state in Greece. It turned its confederation into an attempt simply to treat all of the other states in the confederation as colonies.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: You're talking about the Delian League here, turning the Delian league into an Athenian Empire.

>> Conrad Black: Yes.

>> Andrew Roberts: And that was the key mistake as far as you're concerned, because.

>> Conrad Black: They overtaxed them and finally they said, look, we're not getting our monies. I mean, they really did, something like what the Americans finally did and said, look, we're not paying these taxes.

We're not getting value for money.

>> Andrew Roberts: You've mentioned taxes now three or four times, it's obviously an important theme throughout history. The level of taxation, is something that in any political history of the world is, of course, gonna be important. But for you, obviously, it's an absolutely central part of the thesis.

 

>> Conrad Black: I have two answers, I personally find that a somewhat annoying subject, but speaking as a historian.

>> Andrew Roberts: Rather than as a discipline.

>> Conrad Black: Yeah, speaking as a historian, I think it's clear that people do respond negatively to oppressive and confiscatory taxation. I mean, you can do it to individuals and persecute individuals, and of course, that's often been done.

But if you overtax an entire population, eventually it rises up. I mean, I think the case could be made that was probably the greatest single cause of the French Revolution.

>> Andrew Roberts: You state?

>> Conrad Black: Excessively and unfair taxation.

>> Andrew Roberts: You state that military conquest, and you said it earlier in this talk, that military conquest is rarely durable.

I mean, obviously there are very few things that are rarely durable, especially from the ancient world. We've got the pyramids and the Parthenon and the roman forum, but not that much else, apart from, i suppose, in areas of philosophy and so on. Why is military conquest rarely durable?

Is it because it tends to be followed by high taxation? What's the problem with it?

>> Conrad Black: No, I think, because I suppose I should have stated that differently. You've caught me in a way here. I think it's durable when it is responding to military force that is not durable.

So I think the military force of the Western allies in world War two, which no one has chronicled better than you have is durable, because it was a response to an illegitimate use of military force that proved not to be durable. But I think the answer is, and I should have phrased it slightly differently, aggressive military force is not durable because ultimately it is repulsed.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Is there another thing you say that heads of state tend to believe? What they want to, is a problem that goes throughout history, maybe into your volumes two and three that people surround themselves with. Yes men, that part of leadership, part of being a great statesman, is to have the occasional no man who will take issue with you, a kind of Alan Brooke position with churchill and so on od you have.

Is this something you've seen throughout history?

>> Conrad Black: Yeah, I think that there are those, of course, who will not tolerate. Those leaders, will not tolerate any difference with their own opinion, whatever the subject. Then there are those who are prepared to listen to it, but won't pay any attention to it.

And I think at times Napoleon, whom we both admire, was in that category. I mean, general RAPP, for example, who was not a particularly senior person, told him that when Napoleon said, how far is Moscow from Smolensk? He said, too far, meaning don't go there. And he didn't listen to it and then there are those who listen carefully to it.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Beth?

>> Conrad Black: Yeah, Mister Churchill was very good at that. I think he had a lot of advice that he didn't agree with, but he always listened to it. Unless it was nonsense.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, of course, exactly.

>> Andrew Roberts: Pericles versus Caiman, Gladstone versus Disraeli, Pitt versus Charles James Fox, Jefferson versus Hamilton.

You present them all together as arguing that in order to be a truly great man, you really do need pretty good opponents as well. You're kept on your game, essentially at the top of your game through having people against you who test you. Is that a fair assumption from what this volume says?

 

>> Conrad Black: Absolutely, yes, if you are working in a stable political system. So, for example, in the british system, or even the athenian system, I think that it was necessary. A man like Napoleon, who achieved supreme power in revolutionary circumstances, he wasn't operating in a system that provided a loyal opposition.

What I really, pardon me, meant was a loyal opposition where other people qualified, sensible, accomplished people will say, look here, there's another way to do this, or we shouldn't do this. But they're doing it, no doubt partly in their own interest, but in the overall interest of the jurisdiction in which they serve.

But where you are an autocrat, having achieved power by a coup or revolution, and there is no institutionalized opposition, it becomes more complicated and difficult. Then you have to have the kind of confidence and breadth of vision to have some naysayers in your entourage just to get the other side.

Very few people do that, but some do.

>> Andrew Roberts: This book's very-

>> Conrad Black: You see, the techniques differed, I would take a Mandev like Bismarck. I don't think he listened to opposition much, but he knew he had to please the emperor, although ultimately failed to do it. But that was an emperor.

It was impossible, to please Richelieu spoke to the gray eminence, father and listened very carefully to his advice. I think people simply don't listen to anybody and bash ahead are going to get into real trouble before too long.

>> Andrew Roberts: One of the great things about this book is it's full of what my friends call conradisms.

It's a very funny, there are some very. Of course, because it's a very funny book. There are moments that laugh out loud funny. The execution of Bezos, for example, when you say that his not over grieving widow sent his head to Alexander the Great. Not over grieving widow is a classic what as I say, my friends call a conradism.

And it's got and it's full of that. Did you enjoy writing this book? Was it fun to do?

>> Conrad Black: One in that, category that really found astounding was and I forget who it was but in ancient, I beg your pardon, Andrew. In ancient Mesopotamia somebody impaled an opponent, had him stabbed a number of times, superfluously.

Put in the skin of an ass, a mule, decapitated his head, stuck in a tree, taken down, he publicly urinated on his skull.

>> Andrew Roberts: I remember this bit.

>> Conrad Black: And then put it on display.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, I think they have a phrase for that as well, they do, I seem to remember.

 

>> Conrad Black: This is carrying animosity to astounding extremes.

>> Andrew Roberts: And you end the book with this concept of Christianity, a new religious concept, how unusual was it? How new was it? How different was it from all of the other kind of religions that you write about in this book?

 

>> Conrad Black: Well, it of course had a similarity to Judaism from which it was in large measure derived, as we all know. But as a monotheism it was radically different, and it was radically different. I mean, it's too obvious to say this, Andrew, all your viewers would know it as well as we do.

But where it was alleged and believed that the one God had one son whom he sent to the Earth, who attempted to reason with people and was brutally murdered for his trouble. Let us leave aside for the moment the question of how much one believes of the claims of Christian believers.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Well, you're a believing Roman Catholic, aren't you Conor? So you wouldn't guess that necessarily from this book, but nonetheless, I suspect the next volume.

>> Conrad Black: In the words of the late Cardinal Hume, I believe enough of it to get by and get me to paradise.

>> Conrad Black: But I'm addressing this comment to those who don't, who think it's rubbish, that's not the point.

No serious person disputes that Christ exists, that the apostles wrote what they wrote, and that a great many people believe that he was the son of God. This is an infinitely more powerful message, the son of God crucified by men, than anything that could be conveyed by a religion based on God for every function of nature and that sort of thing.

God of victory, a God of the sun, a God of the moon and all that. I mean, and in ancient Mesopotamia, you could proceed 20 miles to a so called city at the town of 500 with an entirely different set of gods. Civilization took a quantum leap in its religious views.

It's ecclesiastical concept when it moved to one God for everybody.

>> Andrew Roberts: Now, there's a question that I always ask all my guests. What history book or biography are you reading at the moment?

>> Conrad Black: Well, I've just finished Anthony Beaver's Russia, Revolution and Civil War, written with his usual rigor, excellent book.

 

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, it's a very fine book, isn't that?

>> Conrad Black: And I'm just starting a book your viewers would not be familiar with about a late friend of mine, John Turner, the former prime minister of Canada. A friend of mine who married a relative of mine, but he was more prominent as Pierre Trudeau's justice minister and finance minister.

And also written by a friend of mine who's a television news personality in this country. But both excellent books in their way.

>> Andrew Roberts: And what's your favourite what if?

>> Conrad Black: Could I give a positive and a negative what if?

>> Andrew Roberts: Of course.

>> Conrad Black: A nightmare what if? Okay, my nightmare what if is that if Hitler, after the overthrow of the Yugoslav government and the ill starred Italian invasion of Greece, had postponed the invasion of Russia.

And when the Japanese foreign minister, Matsushita, I think his name was, educated in Portland, Oregon, by the way, spoke perfect English, disapproved of antisemitism when he visited Hitler in, I think, March of 1941. If Hitler had laid out a plan whereby the main German military effort would be in North Africa to take the Suez and the oil fields and that then Japan could be supplied oil from that source and not from the United States.

Which was providing 85% of it, in which Roosevelt had cut off, so that Japan should not have anything to do with aggression with America. And had postponed the invasion of Russia for a year and then for Japan to attack in the east so that those forces Stalin had there could not be withdrawn to defend Leningrad and Moscow.

He might have ended up with the Japanese in control of the entire Eurasian landmass, that's my nightmare question.

>> Andrew Roberts: So basically, the Japanese get Siberia and everything up to what?

>> Conrad Black: Manchuria.

>> Andrew Roberts: To the Urals?

>> Conrad Black: A free ticket to take what they want in China.

>> Andrew Roberts: And Hitler gets the Urals-

 

>> Conrad Black: But not bother the Americans.

>> Andrew Roberts: And the Americans don't come into the war, and the Urals to Brest essentially is dominated by Nazi Germany. Yeah, that's a believable and completely nerve wracking what if. What's your happier what if?

>> Conrad Black: My happy what if, is that if man, again, you're his biographer, if George III and his ministers had managed to work things out with the Americans.

So that there was a cooperative arrangement and they'd managed to keep some system going where they worked closely together. By the middle of the 19th century, the Anglo-American empire, if you will, would have been a force of incomparable strength. And at the time of World War I, he would have had a mighty America, all of the British empire, one government, one parliament, one monarch.

I mean, most of the MP's would be Americans, but that's not the point. That we had an English speaking government benignly governing South Asia, Australasia, North America, the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and half of Africa. Even the German emperor would never have challenged such a thing.

>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah, so you wouldn't have had the First World War and therefore not Nazism, communism and the holocaust.

 

>> Conrad Black: Precisely.

>> Andrew Roberts: Can I give you an ancient history one? What if Alexander, instead of dying at the age of 33, had lived to the age of 73 or 63? What could he have done with those extra 30 years of life?

>> Conrad Black: Yes, I think the hellenization plan and the commingling of Persian and Greek government.

I mean, he basically regarded himself as Greek rather than the Macedonian in that he was like the Austria And Hitler being a German, the Corsican Napoleon being a Frenchman, and the Georgian Stalin being a Russian. But sometimes people from neighboring communities know that community better than the people in the community.

Alexander the Hamilton was a West Indian, after all. But I think then you would have had that taking hold. The hellenization would have been much more durable. And you would have had some expansion into India, certainly a better and closer rapport with India. And one assumes that he lived on 40 years.

He would have turned his attention to the west, and there was really nothing to stop him from getting something close to the early roman empire in place. I mean, there was no force on the littoral of the Mediterranean that could stop him. Now, what he would have made once he got to the tenebrous forests of Germany, I think even he would have found that a bit of a challenge.

But it would have been a unification of really probably all the known world and more, except I don't see how he could have got hold of China. I think he might have. I mean, I just think that's too different a culture and too many people. But it would have been a marvelous as long as he was there, very benign empire.

Of course, the horror was dying when he did. What happened was all that period to when he would have been 73 was filled with these horrible wars between his subalterns. Which included the massacre of every member of Alexander's family, not just his mother, his wife, and his infant child.

It was a horrible thing.

>> Andrew Roberts: Conrad Black, author of the political and Strategic History of the world, volume one. Thank you very much indeed for coming on my podcast. You might be Roman Catholic just enough to get you to paradise, but you've already written a book that's going to get you to historians paradise.

 

>> Conrad Black: In that case, I look forward to seeing you there.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thanks, Conrade.

>> Conrad Black: Thank you very much.

>> Andrew Roberts: Thank you, Conrad. Join me on the next secrets of statecraft, where my guest will be Toby Young, journalist and director of the Free Speech Union.

>> Presenter: This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we generate and promote ideas advancing freedom.

For more information about our work, to hear more of our podcasts or view our video content, please visit hoover.org.