This book, subtitled "A Global History," surveys the world as it was in one single year, 1688.
We learn of the Chinese Emperor Kangxi's (
John E. Wills, who is Professor of History at the University of Southern California, is a specialist in the history of relations between China and the West. As a result, Asian affairs are generously covered. There are 60 pages on China and Japan alone, with more on Thailand (then Siam), India, the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia) and the Spanish-controlled Philippines.
But why 1688? To historians of England, this is a crucial year in constitutional history. It was then that a new king, William III, was invited from Holland and placed on the throne, but strictly on parliament's terms. The year has therefore been seen as marking the beginning of rule by the people, or at least some of the people, with the monarchy henceforth commanding only limited power. It was achieved almost without bloodshed, and this led to the peaceful change being dubbed the "Glorious Revolution."
Wills states that he initially tried to avoid 1688 precisely because of what he calls the "complexities" attendant on the date in England. He tried out 1687 and 1689 for size, but events elsewhere in the world made 1688, he says, unavoidable. The other events turn out to have been the murder of Constantine Phaulkon, the Greek adventurer who had attained enormous influence over affairs of state in Thailand, and the emissaries sent from China to Madras in India by Shi Lang (
The question that inevitably arises is "Will this book set a fashion? Are there going to be many more books, each looking an another single year?" There's no reason why not. What about 44 BC (the assassination of Julius Caesar), 1776 (the American Declaration of Independence), 1912 (the establishment of the ROC), or even 1963 (the Beatles' first LP)? There are enough possibilities to keep historians scribbling away until the end of time.
They'd better not choose a year too close to 1688, however. In many of the places Wills is obliged to describe, nothing especially momentous occurred. In Japan, for example, he is only able to find edicts for the protection of animals issued by the dog-loving shogun Tokugawa Tsunayoshi. Nevertheless, the year was marked by important developments in the lives of two celebrated Japanese writers, Ihara Saikaku and Matsuo Toshichiro, or Basho ("banana tree") as he liked to sign himself.
But what the author usually resorts to is describing the surrounding period in general, and the overall state of the society he is looking at -- the perennial problem of the control of the course of the Yellow River in China, for instance. Any sequel coming close to Will's chosen year, and adopting his method, would therefore be obliged to cover much of this material all over again.
There does, however, appear to be an element of chance in the approaches Wills takes. He describes Japanese society in comprehensive, if brief, manner, but when he reaches North America he contents himself with accounts of the 1688 visit to London of the Boston puritan Increase Mather, and of the Quaker aristocrat William Penn's career, which culminated in the granting to him of a vast area of land that was to become Pennsylvania. But if you look for any account, however general, of life in what is now the US at this time, you will look in vain. This seems a strange omission in a work of this kind.
This book, then, is no masterpiece. Rather, the author has hit on a good idea and carried it through with efficiency. It's actually not a difficult project for a professional historian. There's no room to deal with events in any one country in any detail, so all that's required is to summarize some of the spade-work previously done by specialists. The result is inevitably more a work of popularization than of original history.
All in all, this book will please someone wanting to know at a glance what the more populous parts of the planet were like at a point shortly before industrialization began to get under way, but when international trade had already made considerable progress. It was a world where the great centers of power were Europe and China, but when neither knew very much about the other. The Spanish were scurrying everywhere, notably extracting gold and silver from South America, and the slave trade between West Africa and North America was already in operation.
Australia was still virgin territory, and some of Wills' most interesting pages describe the landing there of the compulsive traveler William Dampier, in the company of pirates, and his observation of the Aborigines. But all Wills really has to do is quote passages from Dampier's diary, which is absorbingly interesting in its own right. As is the case with much of the rest of the book, the story then more or less tells itself.
What would have held such a book together more compellingly would have been a particularly strong, even eccentric, personality in the narrator. Wills doesn't have this. Even so, the book has its merits. The great Jonathan Spence, who has been persuaded to supply a few advance words of praise, has homed in on the main one by describing the book as being "full of startling juxtapositions." This is right. The placing of otherwise unremarkable events side by side does create the book's chief attraction.
Publication Notes:
By John E. Wills
Hardback, 330 pages
Granta Books
The canonical shot of an East Asian city is a night skyline studded with towering apartment and office buildings, bright with neon and plastic signage, a landscape of energy and modernity. Another classic image is the same city seen from above, in which identical apartment towers march across the city, spilling out over nearby geography, like stylized soldiers colonizing new territory in a board game. Densely populated dynamic conurbations of money, technological innovation and convenience, it is hard to see the cities of East Asia as what they truly are: necropolises. Why is this? The East Asian development model, with
June 16 to June 22 The following flyer appeared on the streets of Hsinchu on June 12, 1895: “Taipei has already fallen to the Japanese barbarians, who have brought great misery to our land and people. We heard that the Japanese occupiers will tax our gardens, our houses, our bodies, and even our chickens, dogs, cows and pigs. They wear their hair wild, carve their teeth, tattoo their foreheads, wear strange clothes and speak a strange language. How can we be ruled by such people?” Posted by civilian militia leader Wu Tang-hsing (吳湯興), it was a call to arms to retake
This is a deeply unsettling period in Taiwan. Uncertainties are everywhere while everyone waits for a small army of other shoes to drop on nearly every front. During challenging times, interesting political changes can happen, yet all three major political parties are beset with scandals, strife and self-inflicted wounds. As the ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is held accountable for not only the challenges to the party, but also the nation. Taiwan is geopolitically and economically under threat. Domestically, the administration is under siege by the opposition-controlled legislature and growing discontent with what opponents characterize as arrogant, autocratic
Desperate dads meet in car parks to exchange packets; exhausted parents slip it into their kids’ drinks; families wait months for prescriptions buy it “off label.” But is it worth the risk? “The first time I gave him a gummy, I thought, ‘Oh my God, have I killed him?’ He just passed out in front of the TV. That never happens.” Jen remembers giving her son, David, six, melatonin to help him sleep. She got them from a friend, a pediatrician who gave them to her own child. “It was sort of hilarious. She had half a tub of gummies,
RSS