Review of "After Eden" by John Chasteen
This is an anthropologist’s history of the world, and reads like it. The vast majority of the book is consistently uneven. The discussion of the general behavior of hunter gatherer groups is at least useful. However, there are major omissions in the lack of discussion of the origins of the White race in the 3rd millennium BC, and the discussion of the human use of the horse could have been much better with a reading of Robert Drews’ “Early Riders”.
There is an error on nearly every other page. Unfortunately, the book, contrary to my expectations, did not get better as it went on, but somehow got worse (despite the recent past being well within the author’s memory). The third wave of democratization (1973-2000) is almost entirely denied. The work of “Russian computer hackers” in the 2016 US election is attributed to “skillful disinformation” rather than leaking newsworthy DNC emails and Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs transcripts. The period from c. 1920 on is so bad (with a useful digression on communication and transportation technologies and the rise of Hindutva) that I would have written it entirely differently. The comments on neoliberalism in the last portion of the book are so bad as to be laughable. It is clear the author completed the book in order -for instance, the author correctly refers to “regional variants of vernacular Chinese” and the fact “the classical language… differed as much from vernacular Chinese as classical Latin differed from vernacular Italian” when speaking of Matteo Ricci, but writes a completely misleading explanation of the Chinese writing system when describing the rise of Zhou China; the fall of the Indonesian dictatorship is mentioned, but only after saying “political liberalism withered away in the post-Cold War world”.
Rather interestingly, the discussion of the origins of modern economic growth (which is even more Eurocentric than even I would write) is almost Smithian; the scientific revolution is mentioned, but only briefly, and the most important invention mentioned (the chronometer) is remarked on as thus; “Far from enabling early European maritime success, precision celestial navigation arose out of it.”
This is not the worst history book I’ve read (that would be Hendrik Willem van Loon’s The Story of Mankind), but it’s likely in the top ten, certainly in the top twenty. I cannot recommend it.
Rating: three out of five stars