A People’s History of the World

by Chris Harman

  The conquest of the world by capitalism has speeded up the historical process enormously. There was more change to the lives of the great majority of the world’s population in the twentieth century than in the whole preceding 5,000 years. Such sheer speed of change meant that again and again people were trying to cope with new situations using ideas that reflected recent experience of very different ones. They had decades to undergo a transformation in their ideas comparable to that which took the bourgeoisie in Europe 600 years. The fact that at the end of the century the process was not complete cannot be interpreted as proving it was not still under way. The history of the twentieth century was the history of successive generations of people, ever larger in number, resisting the logic of subjection to the world of competitive capital accumulation. Once, in Russia, they were briefly successful. Sometimes – as in Germany in 1918–19, in France in 1936 or in Poland in the 1980s – they settled for half-success, only then to be defeated. Sometimes they were defeated terribly, as in Germany in January 1933, without even joining the battle. But none of this provides the slightest excuse for claiming the class struggle is over. The sort of struggles carried out by a small working class in the nineteenth century, a bigger one in the first half of the twentieth century, and a much larger one in the last quarter of the century will be repeated by sections of the billions-strong working class of the new millennium.

  Out of these struggles will emerge new attempts to remould society around the values of solidarity, mutual support, egalitarianism, collective cooperation and a democratically planned use of resources. The ruling classes of the world, like their predecessors for 5,000 years, will do their utmost to thwart these attempts and will, if necessary, unleash endless barbarities so as to hang on to what they regard as their sacred right to power and property. They will defend the existing capitalist order to the end – even if it is the end of organised human life.

  There is no way to tell in advance what the outcome of such great conflicts will be. That depends not only on the clash of objective class forces – of the growth of classes in themselves – but also on the extent to which there emerges within the expanded ‘universal’ working class a core of people who understand how to fight and know how to win their fellows to this understanding. There will be no shortage of groups and movements in bitter opposition to one or other aspect of the system. Its very barbarity and irrationality will ensure this in the future, as in the past. But the history of the twentieth century shows that these elements can only be truly effective when they crystallise into revolutionary organisations dedicated to challenging the system in all its aspects. The bourgeoisie needed such a crystallisation with the New Model Army in the seventeenth century and the Jacobin Club in the eighteenth century. The Russian working class needed it with the Bolshevik Party in 1917. The massively expanded world working class is going to need it again and again in the twenty-first century if humanity as a whole is not going to face destruction. The need can only be met if there are people who apply themselves to the task. The Irish revolutionary socialist James Connolly once pointed out, ‘The only true prophets are those who carve out the future’.

  Understanding the past helps. That is why I wrote this book.

  Notes

  Part one: The rise of class societies

  1 In fact, such arguments certainly cannot be drawn from the genuinely scientific study of genetics. See, for example, S Rose, Lifelines (London, 1997); R Hubbard, The Politics of Women’s Biology (New Jersey, 1990); R Lewontin, The Doctrine of DNA (London, 1993).

  2 D Morris, The Naked Ape (London, 1967).

  3 R Ardrey, African Genesis (London, 1969).

  4 R Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford, 1976).

  5 R Lee, ‘Reflections on Primitive Communism’, in T Ingold, D Riches and J Woodburn (eds), Hunters and Gatherers , vol 1 (Oxford, 1988).

  6 The ability to use language is, according to the generally accepted theory of Noam Chomsky, a genetically determined feature of all modern humans. The connection between language, abstraction and human consciousness is spelt out in the books written by the Russian Marxist Voloshinov during the 1920s, and in part two, Labour , of the Ontology by the Hungarian Marxist Georg Lukács.

  7 I am here giving a very brief precis of very long debates. For fuller details and references, see the earlier parts of my article, ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’, in International Socialism 65 (Winter 1994).

  8 There has been a century-long scientific debate on the exact relation between the Neanderthals and modern humans – over, for instance, whether they could have interbred. I cannot go into the debate here. Suffice to say, the displacement of the Neanderthals did not necessitate their butchery by modern humans, as some ‘born in blood’ accounts of our origins, like those of Ardrey, would have us believe. See my article, ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’, for an amplification of this point.

  9 ‘Hunting and gathering’ is a somewhat misleading term, since gathering of vegetable food usually played a bigger part in providing people with a diet than hunting animals.

  10 Hence the old use of the word ‘savagery’ to describe such societies – a term used even by those like Lewis Morgan, Frederick Engels and V Gordon Childe who attempted to provide a scientific account of their development.

  11 The phrase is from the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but it sums up the ‘common sense’ attitude which pervaded most accounts of these societies until the 1960s and which is still to be found in popular books like R Ardrey, African Genesis .

  12 M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics (London, 1974).

  13 C Turnbull, The Forest People (New York, 1962), pp107, 110, 124–125.

  14 E Friedl, Women and Men: the Anthropologist’s View (New York, 1975), p28.

  15 E Leacock, Myths of Male Dominance (New York, 1981), pp139–140.

  16 R Lee, The !Kung San (Cambridge, 1979), p118.

  17 The ! at the beginning of !Kung denotes a ‘click’ sound which does not exist in Indo-European languages.

  18 R Lee, The !Kung San , p244.

  19 P LeJeune (1635), quoted in M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics , p14.

  20 E Friedl, Women and Men: The Anthropologist’s View , pp15, 28.

  21 All the quotes are from R Ardrey, African Genesis , pp300, 399.

  22 R Lee, Reflections on Primitive Communism .

  23 Quoted in E Gellner, Plough, Sword and Book (London, 1991).

  24 Engels was right in insisting that there was no systematic domination of women in these societies. However, he was wrong in one important detail – he vastly overestimated the role played by lineages in most hunting-gathering societies. For the full argument on this, see my ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’.

  25 Palestine, Syria, Lebanon, southern Turkey and Iraq.

  26 For full accounts of what happened along the lines presented here, see D O Henry, From Foraging to Agriculture (Philadelphia, 1989); J V S Megaw (ed), Hunters, Gatherers and the First Farmers Beyond Europe (Leicester, 1977); the essays by P M Dolukhanov and G W W Barker in C Renfrew (ed), Explaining Cultural Change (London, 1973); C K Maisels, The Emergence of Civilisation (London, 1993), chs 3 and 4.

  27 J Harlan, ‘A Wild Wheat Harvest in Turkey’, Archaeology 20 (1967), pp197–201, quoted in C K Maisels, The Emergence of Civilisation , pp68–69.

  28 Gordon Childe’s term.

  29 Various estimates and calculations in C K Maisels, The Emergence of Civilisation , p125.

  30 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society (London, 1966), p96.

  31 Although others have argued that the statuettes are connected to fertility rites, and no more imply a high status for women than does the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary.

  32 A point strongly stressed by the Western anthropologists who carried out pioneering studies of them in the 1920s and 1930s. See, for instance, R Benedicts, Patterns of Culture (London, 1935).

  33 J-F Lafitan, quoted in R Lee, Reflections on Pr
imitive Communism , p252.

  34 E Evans-Pritchard, quoted in R Lee, Reflections on Primitive Communism , p252.

  35 This is one of the key arguments in M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics .

  36 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society , p96.

  37 See J V S Megaw (ed), Hunters, Gatherers and the First Farmers Beyond Europe , and the essays by P M Dolukhanov, G W W Barker, C M Nelson, D R Harris and M Tosi in C Renfrew (ed), Explaining Cultural Change .

  38 F Katz, Ancient American Civilisations (London, 1989); W M Bray, F H Swanson and I S Farrington, The Ancient Americas (Oxford, 1989), p14.

  39 As the biologist Jared Diamond has pointed out, no one has yet succeeded in domesticating animals or plants in these regions properly. See J Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (London, 1997), pp163–175.

  40 This point is made very well in J Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel , p139.

  41 R Lee, Reflections on Primitive Communism , p262.

  42 C Levi-Strauss, quoted in M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics , p132.

  43 H I Hogbin, quoted in M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics , p135.

  44 Before him the pioneer nineteenth-century anthropologist Morgan wrote of a transition from ‘barbarism’ (meaning a purely agricultural way of life) to ‘civilisation’ (one centred on cities). The terms were used by Frederick Engels, but have fallen out of use as it has become increasingly clear that ‘civilised’ societies in Morgan’s sense can be much more barbaric than early agricultural ones.

  45 See the example given by M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics .

  46 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History (Harmondsworth, 1948), pp59–62.

  47 See, for example, F Katz, Ancient American Civilisations , pp78–79, 81, 102, 113, 128.

  48 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History , pp80–81.

  49 C K Maisels, The Emergence of Civilisation: From Hunting and Gathering to Agriculture, Cities and the State in the Near East (London, 1993), p297.

  50 C K Maisels, The Emergence of Civilisation , p297.

  51 According to F Katz, Ancient American Civilisations , p29.

  52 V Gordon Childe, Social Evolution (London, 1963), pp155–156.

  53 For a discussion on these pre-urban stone constructions, see C Renfrew, Before Civilisation (Harmondsworth, 1976).

  54 Thus it is certain that developments in the Aegean were encouraged by what had happened on the Asian mainland to the south east and the African mainland to the south. It is likely that some of the developments in Egypt (the sorts of grains which were sown, some of the artefacts) were influenced, to a limited degree, by contacts with the earlier developing Mesopotamian civilisation, and it is just possible that the Latin American civilisations had had some contact with those of east and south east Asia.

  55 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society , pp95–96.

  56 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society , p98.

  57 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society , p103.

  58 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society , p104.

  59 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History , p88.

  60 T B Jones, quoted in C K Maisels, The Emergence of Civilisation , p184.

  61 C J Gadd, ‘Cities in Babylon’, in I E S Edwards, C J Gadd and N G L Hammond (eds), Cambridge Ancient History , vol 1, part 2 (Cambridge, 1971).

  62 F Katz, Ancient American Civilisations , p38.

  63 G R Willey and D B Shimkin, ‘The Maya Collapse: A Summary View’, in T P Culbert (ed), The Classic Maya Collapse (Albuquerque, 1973), p459.

  64 As Michael Mann puts it in his own sociological jargon, they were not willing ‘to increase their collective powers because of the distributive powers involved’, M Mann, The Sources of Social Power , vol 1 (Cambridge, 1986), p39.

  65 For one account of such changes, see D R Harris, ‘The Prehistory of Tropical Agriculture’, in C Renfrew (ed), Explaining Cultural Change , pp398–399.

  66 M Sahlins, Stone Age Economics , p140.

  67 See Christine Ward Gailey’s account of the attempts between AD 1100 and 1400 by the highest-ranking chiefly groups in Tonga to cut themselves off from their obligations to lower-ranking people to attempt to form themselves into a ruling class, in C W Gailey, Kinship to Kingship (Texas, 1987).

  68 V Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself (London, 1956), p155.

  69 See, for example, R Tharper, Ancient Indian Social History (Hyderabad, 1984).

  70 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society (London, 1966), p114.

  71 See the account of the Incas in A J Pla, Modo de Produccion Asiatico y las Formaciones Economico Sociales Inca y Azteca (Mexico City, 1982), p151.

  72 R M Adams, The Evolution of Urban Society , p90.

  73 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History , p72.

  74 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History , p72.

  75 This is the argument in K Sachs, Sisters and Wives (London, 1979), pp117, 121.

  76 For a much fuller development of my argument on the way women’s oppression arose, see my ‘Engels and the Origins of Human Society’, pp129–142.

  77 I M Diakhanov, ‘The Structure of Near Eastern Society Before the Middle of the 2nd Millennium BC’, Oikumene 3:1 (Budapest, 1982).

  78 Both on the outskirts of modern Cairo.

  79 B J Kemp, ‘Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom and Second Intermediate Period’, in B G Trigger, B J Kemp, D O’Connor and A B Lloyd, Ancient Egypt: A Social History (Cambridge, 1983), p176.

  80 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History , p117.

  81 V Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself , p227.

  82 V Gordon Childe, The Pre-History of European Society (London, 1958), p7. The central theme of this work is that the ‘barbarians’ were more innovative because they were less held back by an all-powerful despotic state structure. But Childe tends to see the innovative ‘barbarians’ as almost always European, and fails to take into account the way in which those outside the established empires in other continents – in Asia, Africa and the Americas – also made enormous advances (for instance, the whole series of innovations in central Asia in the first millennium AD which were, as we will see later, then adopted in China before spreading to Europe, or the independent development of iron technology in parts of Africa).

  83 B G Trigger, ‘The Rise of Egyptian Civilisation’, in B G Trigger and others, Ancient Egypt , p67.

  84 V Gordon Childe, Man Makes Himself , pp230–231.

  85 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History , pp119–120.

  86 G R Willey and D B Shimkin, ‘The Maya Collapse’, in T P Culbert (ed), The Classic Maya Collapse .

  87 Quoted in M Rich, Egypt’s Making (London, 1991), p226. For a criticism of the view that this text refers to real events, see B J Kemp, in B G Trigger and others (eds), Ancient Egypt , pp74–75, 115.

  88 See, for example, F Katz, Ancient American Civilisations , pp78–79 and introduction to T P Culbert (ed), The Classic Maya Collapse , p19.

  89 See, for example, F Katz, Ancient American Civilisations , p78.

  90 B J Kemp, in B G Trigger and others (eds), Ancient Egypt , p115.

  91 B S Lesko, ‘Rank, Roles and Rights’, in L H Lesko (ed), Pharoah’s Workers (Ithaca, 1994), p15.

  92 B S Lesko, ‘Rank, Roles and Rights’, p39.

  93 B S Lesko, ‘Rank, Roles and Rights’, p38.

  94 K Marx, Preface to the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy , in K Marx and F Engels, Selected Works , vol 1 (London, 1962), pp362–363.

  95 K Marx and F Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, 1996), p3.

  96 V Gordon Childe, What Happened in History , p137.

  97 K W Butzer, Early Hydraulic Civilisation in Egypt (Chicago, 1976), p46.

  Part two: The ancient world

  1 Some historians assume that knowledge of iron making must have been been transmitted into Africa. See, for instance, R Mauny, ‘Trans-Saharan Contacts in the Iron Age’, in J D Gage (ed), Cambridge History of Africa , vol 2, p318. But Jared Diamond argues that
the techniques used in sub-Saharan Africa were rather different to those elsewhere, pointing to independent discovery. See J Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel (London, 1977), p394.

  2 Centred on what is now Bihar.

  3 Quoted in D D Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1996), p190.

  4 R Thapar, History of India , vol 1 (Harmondsworth, 1966), p84.

  5 R S Sharma, Light on Early Indian Society and Economy (Bombay, 1966), p66.

  6 R Thapar, ‘Asoka India and the Gupta Age’, in A L Basham, A Cultural History of India (Oxford, 1975), p44.

  7 R S Sharma, Light , p78. Romila Thapar is critical of D D Kosambi for seeing the later Maurya period as one of economic decline: ‘If anything the picture is one of an expanding economy’, R Thapar, Asoka and the Decline of the Mauryas (Oxford, 1961), pp204–205.

  8 H J J Winer, ‘Science’, in A L Basham, A Cultural History , p154.

  9 H J J Winer, ‘Science’, p154.

  10 R Thapar, ‘Asoka’, p49.

  11 It did not build the wall from scratch, as is sometimes said, but connected up a number of pre-existing walls. The present Great Wall was restored and extended by the Ming Dynasty in the seventeenth century AD.