British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore has written a new history of the world, which analyzes the last 10,000 years of global events through the prism of famous (and often infamous) families.
>> Andrew Roberts: Simon Sebag Montefiore is a British historian, TV presenter, and former war correspondent. Amongst his many best selling books are Stalin, Court of the Red Tsar, Jerusalem, The biography, and The Romanovs. In this episode of Secrets of Statecraft, I speak to him about his new book, The World, A Family History.
Simon, why a world history now?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think it's always a good time for a world history, but in terms of turbulence, it gives a wonderful perspective that can be both consoling and terrifyingly alarming as well. But I mean, world history, of course, it seems like a terribly hubristic project, but in fact, I mean, world history has become a terribly fashionable way of approaching history now.
And in fact, one comes out virtually every week in some way taking a different focus or another.
>> Andrew Roberts: What makes yours different?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Mine is told through family history and told through families. And what I was trying to achieve with family history is something that is missing from a lot of world histories.
I mean, world histories traditionally are very good on massive trends, on ideologies, and on economic trends as well, but they miss the sort of intimacy and grit of biography. And what I'm trying to do in this was to try and create a new genre that really kind of combined the span of world history with the intimacy of biography.
>> Andrew Roberts: So how did you decide on what to put in and what to leave out?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, that's the million dollar question. Really, obviously, some of it is just what I think is important, but a lot of it is what I think, what I like to write about and what entertains me.
I mean, I think a great history book has to be both rewarding and entertaining as well as scholarly.
>> Andrew Roberts: You write about nuclear families and power families. How are they different, and is that a worthwhile lens through which to look at this issue?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, nuclear families, the basic family, everyone has a mother and a father of some description, whatever the quality of the parenting, whatever the era in human history.
So nuclear history, nuclear families is something we all have in common. And of course, the book looks at the world through what we now call nuclear families. From the beginning of time right up to today, families are also nuclear families, but they also rule. And in power families, the rules are different.
In power families, fathers and sons often kill each other, and children often kill their grandparents. And one of the parts of the story that I think is interesting and exciting is the terrible struggles for power within power families. But power families are nuclear families, too.
>> Andrew Roberts: But your families are not just politicians, they're also writers, doctors, historians.
How did you select them?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I selected them just through their importance in the story. But also, as I said, the book is filled with things that fascinate me and the book really reflects my taste. It's the sort of book I'd want to read.
>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, it's the sort of book I want to read as well.
It's a fantastic book. It obviously has to cover the superpowers, the present-day superpowers, America, Britain, France, Russia, etc., but this book really is global, isn't it? You cover Cambodia, Hawaii, Haiti, Lithuania, you may name it Albania. What does that tell us about the book?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think what one needs to know is, first of all, I grew up the reason why I wanted to write this, because I grew up reading about all these countries.
I was never just satisfied with reading about british history, though, of course, that's fascinating in itself and important as well. And I was always seeking new histories, new worlds to understand, and world history always appealed to me. So this book is really the culmination of a lifetime of reading and also traveling, and I'm lucky I've been to many of these places.
And, for example, you mentioned Albania. Well, when I went to Albania, Dr. Sali Berisha, the prime minister of Albania, met me in the prime minister's house in the Blloku, which is the sort of central part of Tirana in Albania, where Enver Hoxha lived. And it's the building where Enver Hoxha had his prime minister killed.
So during dinner with the prime minister, I said to him, is there any chance I can see the room where Mehmet Shehu was killed? And by the way, he was killed in the 80s. While we have Mrs. Thatcher, one forgets that, of course, Eastern Europe was a Stalinist dictatorship and Albania remained a place where prime ministers were murdered in their own houses.
And so the prime minister said, okay, well, come upstairs. We all went upstairs at the dinner, and he showed me the room where Shehu had been murdered by Enver Hoxha. And so that's the sort of thing that's in the book and that's the sort of detail that I love and that caught my interest when I was writing this.
>> Andrew Roberts: Well, you were a war correspondent, weren't you, in former Russia in the early 90s.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yes.
>> Andrew Roberts: And you saw the attack on the White House in Moscow, and Georgian coups, and Karabakh, and so on, Chechnya. What do you think that a historian like you can learn from real wars that are helpful in a history book?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I think it's helpful for historians not just to spend their lives writing unintelligible jargon in academic institutions, but generally to write and mix with a wider audience, that's one thing. But to take that further, I think it is invaluable for historians of politics to see how courts work and how leaders function in real life, whether it's prime ministers or kings or whatever.
>> Andrew Roberts: And you've met a lot of those, haven't you? Because Thatcher and Shimon Peres, Eduard Shevardnadze, Kissinger, these people crop up in your book. I mean, does it help, you think, to have met these characters personally?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think it does. And you probably agree with me, Andrew, you've also known a lot of interesting statesmen in your time.
>> Andrew Roberts: Absolutely, but I'm interviewing you.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Okay, okay.
>> Andrew Roberts: So tell me why.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I'll tell you why, I think it helps. I mean, before we even get onto empires and which is a fascinating subject in the fall of the Soviet empire and the Russian imperialism today, which is a great subject which is treated throughout the book.
But I think it's a fascinating thing, but hard to understand how the courts of powerful people work and how power always influx, always flowing to the most powerful place. I think that just seeing it in action, and obviously the more intimately you can see it, the better, is invaluable for historian writing about power.
So in all those cases, I was very lucky to know these people. I mean, obviously, Kissinger, I knew long after he'd been in power, though he certainly still exuded it powerfully. But the other ones I knew while they were in power, and then I saw Thatcher in 10 Downing Street.
I met Shimon Peres first, I think, when he was prime minister for the second time, and then as president of Israel, which is an honorary position. Shevardnadze I knew when he was president of Georgia, literally the most kind of beleaguered president you can imagine, under attack from every side, barely escaping assassination and death in battle.
And that was one of the most fascinating relationships I had because he came to trust me. And there was no other, there was no other western journalist there at the time. I was just a young war correspondent writing for English newspapers and the New York Times, in fact.
And at various times he said to me, why don't you just come along? One time he said to me, I've got to surrender to Moscow, unless Georgia will be totally destroyed, this is in 1993. And he said, have you got your passport with you? And I said, no.
He said, well, you better stay close to me then, cuz we're flying to Moscow to see Yeltsin and basically to surrender Georgia into the Russian sphere of power. They were hoping to sort of make it into a Western client rather than a Russian client. And that failed then, and of course, it would fail again later.
So these were all amazing relationships, and I've put them in the book. I'm lucky that in the last sort of 50 year period of the book, yes, I knew some of the characters.
>> Andrew Roberts: And these power dynasties that you write about, I mean, we're in the age of the Internet, mass politics and social media and so on.
How can they? Do they continue to exist? And if so, how?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I think there's two questions. I mean, in the West here, in America and Britain and France and so on, we slightly, we rather patronizingly and boastfully like to imagine that we are living in a rational, secular world.
Where family connections or other connections don't really matter. But actually, I think we kid ourselves. And, in fact, camarillas and connections and affinities of power, some of them family based. I mean, you only have to look at the Trump White House or the Bush family or the Kennedy family or the Nehru family in India, for that matter.
I mean, there are many, many examples of these, what I call demo dynasties, where they're elected families, applies all over the world, of course. I mean, Kenyatta's son has just left ruling Kenya, for example. Marcos' son has just been elected president of the Philippines and so on. And so I could go on and on.
I mean, Pakistan is the biggest example.
>> Andrew Roberts: And North Korea, of course.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I'm coming to that, that's a different section. So demo dynasties are ones that are elected. You can get rid of them, but people like are attracted by the reassurance of continuity and the legitimacy, the political legitimacy of someone who's a family.
I mean, look at Trudeau is another example in Canada today. So that's one group of families and another group of political families are those that are really kind of monarchies and really absolute and totally absolute monarchies too. And that, of course, you've got North Korea, Andrew, you correctly mentioned where Kim Jong Un is the third in direct succession of a family.
And that really is a kind of, almost works like a kind of medieval power family in the age of the Internet. I mean, he just had his brother assassinated at Singapore airport recently. And there are many examples of that, too. I mean, in Gabon, the second sort of, they're now the second Bongo president.
Assad in Syria is probably the best known to us in the West. That kind of government in Syria functions exactly like a sort of monarchy.
>> Andrew Roberts: What are the pros and cons of it? There must be some pros, some positive aspects to it as well, especially in the democratic ones.
When you see Kennedys constantly getting elected, there must be something that the american people feel about the Kennedys that they like and which they can take for granted are going to be seen again in coming generations. What's the story there?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, I mean, its interesting, so were talking about democratic sort of dynasties.
>> Andrew Roberts: Yes, yeah, the pros and cons of Mr. Clinton being president and then Mrs. Clinton running for president.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, well, it doesn't always work, of course, that's the great thing about democracies. But the attraction is continuity, reassurance, and a sort of legitimacy that comes from familiarity. There's that word, familiarity is a very reassuring feature.
And of course it comes from family, so there we are. And I think that people, all these systems are really about trying to, in fact, all political life much of the time is to achieve stability. And of course, family, people that we know well, that we're familiar with, offer that and offer continuity.
So I mean, you do see examples of where a leader after a long period of family rule in a democracy, you see someone who comes to power offering exactly the opposite. And Modi in India was that classic example. I mean, he boasted that he'd sold tea at the station as a boy.
In other words, he was not one of the Nehru family who'd provided really, really ruled India and dominated India since independence. So he was the sort of anti-family candidate.
>> Andrew Roberts: The 50% of people in any family are women. And your book is sort of very important in this regard, it strikes me, because you have many more women in this book than in traditional world histories.
How do women feature in a world history by family? And who were the greatest of the women rulers, would you say?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, well, that's a good question. I mean, again, I mean, this book, in some ways is the most diverse world history written so far because it really does, as you mentioned, have all these kind of small countries and other countries across the world.
And it really treats Asia and Africa and South America, for example, in the same way that it treats families in Europe and North America. But another way it works well, I think the family approach is through gender. And, yeah, women are very powerful in families, as we know.
And one of the questions that people always ask is, are women better rulers than men? Are they kinder and gentler? Are they kinder, are they gentler? Are the less wars, are they more politically skilled? Do they have more empathy? And sitting as we are in London. So, I mean, so Liz Truss, the premiership of Liz Truss is in itself proof that female rulers aren't necessarily showing more empathy and more political skill than male rulers.
And in fact, that's a feature of the book, is that one always presumed. There have been many arguments recently that if only women were ruling all these countries, there would be less wars.
>> Andrew Roberts: Well, you wrote a biography of Catherine the Great, which slightly undermines that thesis, doesn't it?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I mean, Catherine the Great is a big character in this book, of course. And she was an incredibly effective ruler. She certainly had amazing empathy. The fact is, people of the same gender have nothing in common with each other in terms of their political skills and much of their character.
Women are no kinder or gentler or less warlike than men. It's just there've have been more male rulers because of patriarchal nature of society, most societies. Though, in Africa, matriarch There are many matriarchal societies, matriarchal kingdoms, which we talk about.
>> Andrew Roberts: And do they do better, do they go to war less?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Not in the slightest. And Catherine the Great is a very good example because she wasn't cruel and she didn't sort of kill people or torture people unnecessarily. But if anyone threatened her throne, male or female, she was entirely ruthless.
>> Andrew Roberts: I was about to say, didn't 50,000 people get executed after the Pugachev Uprising?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, the Pugachev Uprising was a brutal uprising that threatened the throne, but also was kind of slaughtering thousands of people as well. So I think in that the sort of, the scales of justice are kind of even I was more thinking of, like, for example, there was a woman who called herself Prince Elizabeth, who claimed to be the daughter of the previous empress, Elizavetta.
And Catherine had her kidnapped, tricked, brought to Petersburg, and imprisoned in a dungeon sort of below the waterline, pretty much in Petersburg, where she died of either flooding or disease. But you didn't want to cross Catherine the great in terms of her actual throne otherwise. And of course, she overthrew her own husband, and though she didn't organize or order his death, I mean, she knew he was going to be murdered.
And he was actually murdered in a kind of drunken frenzy by her lover and his brothers, the Orlov brothers. So power is pretty dangerous, even in a female crown.
>> Andrew Roberts: You've written about the Romanovs, of course, famously. Are they your favorite dynasty?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: No, I think I enjoy a lot of the dynasties, I enjoy a lot of them.
I mean, there are such a variety here, but of course, there are all the familiar European ones, the Romanovs, the Habsburgs, Saxe Coburgs, of course. By the way, when Catherine the Great murdered her husband, Peter III, the official statement declared that he died of hemorrhoids. And when d'Alembert was invited by Catherine the Great to go to Russia and meet Catherine the Great, he said, I don't think I can go because I have hemorrhoids.
They can be a fatal disease in Russia.
>> Andrew Roberts: Now, another part of families, of course, is children, which very often, actually, people miss out in histories, don't they? They're rarely key figures, but they do appear in yours, don't they? Tell us about the importance of children.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I mean, you're right, children are missed out in bogus, as women often have been.
And so children appear in this book. And one of the interesting things is parents have always adored their children, but because so many children died during the early years of their life, children were kind of left out of many stories. Perhaps because the parents just couldn't bear the thought that they may lose them, and therefore did not invest so much love in them until they were a little older.
And so it's really recently since infant mortality dropped that there's been a sort of cult of childhood. In fact, in many families, children have really taken over, dominate the families now, which, of course, never took place in the past. So that's one of the sort of themes. One of the themes of the book is childhood.
But while you go back to those female rulers, I just wanted to say a couple of things about them cuz it's so interesting.
>> Andrew Roberts: Are they, by the way, kinder to their own children than fathers are?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Not at all, not at all. Often fathers are much kinder, but in all cases, power almost always trumps family love.
And even quite modern mothers like Maria Theresa, from the 18th century, for example, was absolutely ruthless about marrying her children, even to sort of syphilitic brutes in order to serve the Habsburg family dynasty. And by the way, she's one of the fascinating women who we look at closely in the book, and she is an amazing person.
She really was a brilliant politician. No one expected anything of her. Everyone regarded her succession as a complete disaster for the Habsburgs, but she held it together and showed amazing resolve and acumen in running that empire for 40 years.
>> Andrew Roberts: And also in the 18th century, you interweave characters and families, like Sally Heming and Thomas Jefferson, Toussaint Louverture, and so on.
Tell us about how you did that.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I mean, what I've done in this book is it's a single narrative since caveman, right up to the invasion of Ukraine by Putin.
>> Andrew Roberts: Did you have to end it there because you had to end it somewhere because you had a publishing deadline?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yes, originally, no. I mean, I was dying to end it somewhere as soon as possible, in fact. But I wanted it to be modern because I'd always wanted to write modern life as history. And as we talked about earlier, I've been lucky that I've seen some of these things in real life.
And so I've put them in the book, which is both fun but also gives an immediacy to the story. I originally was gonna end it when the first person died of COVID in Wuhan, and it ended there. But when the invasion happened in February, I immediately realized it had to be that had to be it because it changed the whole world.
>> Andrew Roberts: And also Russia and Ukraine do crop up a lot in your story, don't they?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: They're in it all the way through, and Ukraine really appears from 800 onwards. And in fact, Darius the Great, the king of kings of the Persian empire, the Achaemenid dynasty, invades Ukraine and barely makes it out, in fact.
>> Andrew Roberts: And famously, of course, in July 21, Putin wrote that 6500 word essay on the historical unity of the Ukrainians and the Russians, which gave him, at least for himself, an intellectual justification. Did it stack up at all, that essay? It struck me as being very strange and wildly written and mentions Lithuania no fewer than 17 times, which must be very off putting and worrying for any Lithuanian.
What's your sense about that and about his worldview?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I mean, obviously his worldview is very ideological and it's really just based on. It's based on the view that the Russian Empire is the superior civilization. He calls it the Russian world, and it really comes from 19th century Slavophiles.
I mean, he is a Slavophile directly from that ideology in the 19th century. He regards Ukrainians as little Russians, which is what they used to be called by the Romanov and Russians within Moscow and Petersburg. And the Belarusians are simply white Russians. And the Southern Ukrainian cities like Kherson, Odessa, are new Russians.
So it's all Russians, and Russians are just one people. And so, since he came to power, he's always believed that. And I know that because when I wrote my first book, Catherine the Great, in Potemkin, it was read by him, and he discussed it with George W Bush when they visited, when the Bush-
>> Andrew Roberts: If he didn't take your book as a template, Simon, that wouldn't be very good news.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I think he did take it as a template. It's fascinating because you might sort of say, like, why on earth would a Russian president rule, read some book by. Or be interested by a book by a westerner when he has his perfectly good histories in his own?
But that's one of the strange things about Soviet culture. The Soviets didn't study Catherine the Great at all. And when I went to the archives, there were no, virtually no, nobody had taken out those archives for 100 years or 70 years since 1917. Because Catherine the Great and Potemkin were very decadent, aristocratic and, of course, female friendly characters.
They really studied Ivan the terrible, Peter the Great, Nicholas I, in other words, sort of male macho, male reforming tsars who were like Stalin and Lenin. And therefore, they knew very little about Potemkin and Catherine the Great, so bizarrely, they read that book, and that was in 2000.
So they were already fascinated by how Katherine and Potemkin took the, annexed the Crimea in 1783 and most of southern Ukraine in 1791 and how they founded all those cities. But to give Catherine the great her due, she was not a putinist, they were children of the enlightenment, and their attitude was much more cosmopolitan and less nationalistic.
I mean, they believed in a Russian empire, but a slightly different Russian empire, a cosmopolitan empire. And when they built those new cities which we all reading about in the news now, like Mariapol, they filled them with Greeks, with Jews, with Poles, with Ukrainians and with Russians and with French people.
So they were very, very international sort of frontier towns filled with settlers, so they were very different from Putin's vision.
>> Andrew Roberts: And I mentioned Sally Heming earlier, and that obviously brings us on to the slave trade and other slave trades. You don't just, you, of course, go into the terrible british involvement in the atlantic slave trade, but you also cover other slave trades as well, which are often neglected, I think, in world history, aren't they?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, that's true. And what I tried to do, you mentioned Sally Heming, fascinating character, which Thomas Jefferson, great US president, responsible for buying half of the north American continent with the Louisiana purchase. Which was sort of decisive, really, in American expansionism, the creation of the American state.
But he also had this secret love affair with his wife's enslaved African-American half sister, Sally Heming, who was 30 years younger than him. Very beautiful, by contemporary accounts, there are very little descriptions of her. And he started in an affair with her in Paris, where Jefferson was ambassador, and we know very little of the details of the relationship.
Of course, all relationships between a slave master and the enslaved encompass some coercion. It's not an equal power relationship, we simply don't know how it worked between them, but they had several children together. And what I wanted to do in this is to treat the Heming family exactly as I treat the Jefferson family, all the family of Toussaint Louverture.
Who was the great liberator of the slaves of Saint Domingue, the french colony that became Haiti. And by the way, he was betrayed to Napoleon, he died in a freezing Pyrenean kind of thing.
>> Andrew Roberts: I've actually been there in that, and yes, and it is freezing, and the rather large fireplace there was underused cuz they never gave him enough fuel.
So it was a proper attempt up in the Jura mountains there to kill him, I think.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah and they did, and they succeeded. He was a very, very sympathetic character, he was portrayed by his own comrades and, of course, one of the interesting things this book covers is the three monarchies of Haiti.
Haiti was not always a Republic, and this is underreported and under narrated in history, but it talks about his successor, Emperor Jacques, Jacques Dessalines. And then King Henri of Haiti, who's an absolutely fascinating character, reforming autocrat of Haiti. So those are just some of the sort of perhaps lesser known characters that you just, you encounter in here.
>> Andrew Roberts: Well, exactly, this is one of the great pleasures of the book, is the extraordinary heterodoxy of the book. You've also created a soundtrack to the world history, what are the great history songs? You say at one point that sympathy for the devil is the greatest history song, what are the great history songs, and is pop music useful for teaching history?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, we're just sort of, we're just doing that, putting together that soundtrack to the world now as we're meeting here in London, because yesterday I sort of launched it on Twitter. And thousands of people, including some great, many great historians from Simon Sharma and Annette Gordon Reed and other people, have all written in their favorite songs, which are included in the list.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: And I do think, I mean, there's a serious side of this, which is the great thing about family history, a family world history is. As I mentioned at the beginning that, you know, we wanted to get the intimacy of real life, and that this is often missing in histories where you just get battles, downfall of civilizations.
And what I want to get in all my history books is the feeling that, what people ate, what people. How people dressed, how they made love, how they talked to each other and the music that they enjoyed and the books they read. So this playlist is a sort of part of that, though, of course, most of them are commentaries on history.
But you're right, I think the stones sympathy of devil, I've put number one because. Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste.
>> Andrew Roberts: No, absolutely it's a great history song, but better than the great Billy Joel song, where he goes through everything that happens in every single decade.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: We didn't like the fire.
>> Andrew Roberts: We didn't like the far, 1953 to probably to about 1985.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think that's one of the candidates, I also think, you know, Bony M's Rasputin is one of the guys, and a brilliant analysis of Russian power politics at the early part of the 20th century.
>> Andrew Roberts: I hope you don't have Abba's Waterloo, owing to the fact that Napoleon didn't surrender.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: He didn't.
>> Andrew Roberts: But you've got Elvis, you've got Elton John, you've got Mick Jagger, Sinatra, they all crop up in the book, I mean, music is obviously important then.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think music is important, and especially, I mean, I think it's always been important.
It was, in families, particularly before television, theater and singing in houses was singing at home was, of course, immensely important. And everyone from middle class families learned instruments and could sing and could sing at home, and that was part of family life. But once it came to mass culture, it's easier to chronicle, and of course, people like take Sinatra, for example, I mean, Sinatra is a key figure in American political figure in a way.
He's a sort of fascinating nexus of politics, of popular mass culture, of the commercialization of society and the consumer society, and also the mafia, of course. So Sinatra's just one, and of course, in a book like this, I love characters like that because he brings in the Kennedys.
>> Andrew Roberts: And I suppose there's also a family element in that, it was his mother, wasn't it, who drove him on. And then his son also became a singer.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah.
>> Andrew Roberts: So you've got that aspect to it.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I think one of the themes of the book is that, yes, there are power dynasties.
Yes, there are dynasties of historians and artists as well, but we're all part of dynasties. We're all part of families. And so the sort of approach works just as well with people who hated family, like Hitler or Stalin, as it does with people who were part of massive families, like the Habsburgs, or the ruling house of Benin, or Dahomey.
>> Andrew Roberts: And I suppose Stalin and the way in which the Soviet Communist Party tried to get children to inform on their parents was a classic anti-family aspect phenomenon.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, and another anti-family institution, it was slavery, which you mentioned earlier. Of course, in a Roman family, the familia, that was meant the household, and that included the house slaves, as well as the children and the brothers and sisters and parents and grandparents, of course.
But basically, slavery always deliberately broke up families wherever possible in order to exert control. And so-
>> Andrew Roberts: The first thing that happened, of course, on the ramp at Auschwitz was that the family was broken up.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yes, and of course, an underreported part of World War II is that it was the greatest slave empire in all of history.
I mean, exact figures aren't known, but it's estimated that about 12.5 million people were enslaved during World War II. It's only for four years, of course, but that's more intense than anything else.
>> Andrew Roberts: They didn't know that, of course, had no idea.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: No, they didn't know that and the intensity of it was astonishing.
But of course, we cover the Atlantic slavery, but we also cover other slave trades that were also, if you were a victim of them, were just as gruesome and appalling. And there's an East African slave trade, there's a sort of Mediterranean slave trade in Russia, and the word slave comes from Slav.
>> Andrew Roberts: How interesting. You often cite the risks taken by historians, what do you see as the role of the historian?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: I think there's a great quote by Mandelstam, the Russian, the Soviet poet, who said, in Russia, they so respect poetry, they kill you for it here
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: And history has always been a very dangerous profession because as we see with President Putin, you quoted his kind of dubious and distorted historical essay about Ukraine and Russia.
But history has always been, because of its legitimacy, because of its authenticity, because of its continuity, it has a sort of sacred prestige to justify what's happening in the present. And so historians have an enormous power, and in dynasties and absolutist monarchs throughout history, including today, the manipulation of history, the control of history is seen as essential.
And for example, in Chinese history, historians are regularly killed by emperors for questioning the dynasty, for undermining the dynasty. There's also a great example, Ibn Khaldun, who's one of the great Arab historians, his brother was also a historian, who was assassinated by another historian.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Who was jealous of him, so history is a dangerous profession, Andrew.
>> Andrew Roberts: It is, I remember, though, Tamerlane, when he captured a city and sacked it and killed everybody inside, would not kill the chess masters and the historians. So I've always had a little bit of a soft spot for Tamur the Great.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, Tamerlane is a huge character in the book, and I'll tell you, it's fascinating.
And of course, the historian that he really got on best with was Ibn Khaldun, who was the most famous historian alive at that time. And while he was besieging Damascus, he met Ibn Khaldun, who was the prime minister. In those days, also, historians were always politicians, and who was the prime minister of the Mamluk Sultan.
And they had these kind of long conversations while Tamerlane sort of sacked the city and ordered its bombardment, which was shaking off stage as they discussed history together in a very scholarly way. I mean, Tamerlane was highly intelligent, he also developed chess and was one of the people who was great champions of chess.
But if I can just say, what's interesting about him is that this book is dominated by about two or three families. One is the family of the Prophet Muhammad, because his family ruled through many dynasties, were all descended from him. And the Hashemites of Jordan are the last of those families that still rule today, so it goes right up to 2022.
But the other great family is the Genghis Khan and Tamerlane family. The last Genghis family members who actually ruled directly with the Baharans, who were only overthrown in 1920. But Tamerlane's family then went on to rule India, the Mughal dynasty. So he was part of a fascinating family, that one family that dominated sort of eight parts of Asia from about 1200 right up until 1857, when the last Mughal emperor was deposed by the British.
>> Andrew Roberts: And what's the next one down, would you say, after those-
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: After those two, no one really comes close to those two because of their sort of multidimensional nature. I mean, obviously, the Caesars are one of the families.
>> Andrew Roberts: Yeah.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Are one of the most fascinating families in the book.
And there are interesting sort of sidelines that, for example, of that era and the Ptolemies are also massive. And I think that the answer is what I call the Alexandrian dynasties, which I include. The Argeads of Macedonia, which is Alexander's own family, and then the Seleucids and Ptolemies of Egypt, and they dominated for about 300 years.
>> Andrew Roberts: Is this a lockdown book? I mean, how did lockdown affect it with regard to your own family? I think your family are in the book, aren't they, in some way?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: In fact, the Montefiore's are in the book because they appear in various moments. And my ancestors, Sir Moses Montefiore, I always regard him as slightly sort of comically because he's a sort of Zelig-like figure in the 19th century.
He sort of appears everywhere, when Disraeli arrives back from Berlin in 1878, having settled, having put the Russian empire back in its place. Moses Montefiore is there at the station waiting to greet him, as I'm sure you will put in your book.
>> Andrew Roberts: I undoubtedly will.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: But he appears everywhere.
When you're talking about Muhammad Ali, the ruler of Egypt, Moses Montefiore goes and visits him, and we have his record of that meeting. And he was really the inventor of Zionism before Zionism, if you like. So he appears in it, but also, my mother's family, who were just Lithuanian Jews who were escaping from the pogroms, also appear in it in the 20th century.
So I think it's fun to put a little bit of family, but not much.
>> Andrew Roberts: And how about the lockdown, did you find that those many months at home were helpful
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yes, I mean, as we all know, we sign up with publishers to write these books, and we're quite excited by that.
And then when it comes to actually write it, it's quite an awesome project.
>> Andrew Roberts: Well, it's an awesome book, it's how many pages long?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: 1,200 pages. Sort of same as your Churchill almost, I think. And, of course, the Churchills are one of the families in the book.
>> Andrew Roberts: I'd jolly well hope so.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, from Winston Churchill and John Churchill, first Duke of Marlborough, right the way down to Sir Winston, yeah. So, yeah, lockdown was just essential. I mean, without lockdown, I don't think I could have written it at all. Cuz I just literally, it took me two and a half years to write this book.
Normally, a book takes a year, a big history book takes a year to write, basically. But this took two and a half years. And it was a punishing schedule. But I was on my own a lot of the time, the family were in the country, and I was just in this small office filled, piled with heaps of books in order.
One day I came back to find that my cleaner had reordered all the books-
>> Andrew Roberts: In the basis of height.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yeah, in the basis of height and what would look best together. Cuz everything was in subject.
>> Andrew Roberts: That once happened to me years ago, where the very nice housekeeper reordered them on the basis of color, the color of the book jacket.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Yes, well that's what she basically did. I mean, already I was highly stressed by writing this book. And of course, that caused near apocalyptic breakdown.
>> Andrew Roberts: Last question, the conclusion, the book is filled with horrors and massacres and terrible deaths in terrible ways, because that is the nature of world history.
But you end optimistically, this big book, you ended optimistically, despite all the horrors that you've filled the book with. How can you do that? Why do you do that?
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Well, I think, of course, the book covers the dark matter of history, slavery, war, plague, which are, for better or for worse, the engines of change.
But the book's also a great celebration of love, of literature, of human ingenuity. And that's how I end the book, just to say that after all this, we live in a world of many dangers, growing and present dangers, and yet I end up with optimism. Because this book, above all, is a celebration of family love and human ingenuity and creativity.
>> Andrew Roberts: Simon Seabag Montefiore, world historian. Thank you very much.
>> Simon Sebag Montefiore: Thank you. This podcast is a production of the Hoover Institution, where we advance ideas that define a free society and improve the human condition. For more information about our work or to listen to more of our podcast or watch our videos, please visit hoover.org.
