John E. Wills (1936–2017)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2890995.html

This is an interesting concept - looking at a single year and the political events of the entire world that happened in that year, casting the net as widely as possible to capture every continent. Of course in the home archipelago this is the year of the so-called Glorious Revolution, in which the Catholic James II of England and VII of Scotland was overthrown by a suspicious Protestant elite; in the eastern Mediterranean, the Venetians and show more Austrians were fighting the Ottomans; up north near St Petersburg, 1500 Old Believers burned to death rather than submit to Russian rule.

However, I confess I'm writing this up some months after I read it, and I remember very little about it. The best bit is an exploration of Japanese poetry and sexual customs of the period. There are also good bits about Australia, science and the Dutch East India Company. But it doesn't hang together as one might have wished.

The problem with taking a snapshot like this is that you necessarily get a static rather than dynamic picture. Stories in history depend on capturing long-term trends to illustrate why particular moments are so important. If you have picked your moments for chronology rather than story, you throw away your advantage. show less

Reading history often feels disjointed --we focus on one event, or one culture, without considering the wider, global view of which it is part. Wills' book is extremely fresh in that it attempts the opposite: it's a historical snapshot of 1688, with stories from all over the world, and the result is almost fantastic: Pirates, samurais, Sor Juana, Newton, Louis XIV, the Dutch East India Company, they're all here, and they were all there, living through the same days and years.

The book loses show more strength near the end, and it's too forgiving of religiousness, considering the number of wars and deaths it caused even in just that one year. Still a good read. show less

Truly cosmopolitan account of the very earliest dawn in what might (with good will) seem a global if timid Early Enlightenment. In addition to unfamiliar vignettes from, say, the Chinese, Japanese, or Russian empires, the book features interesting portraits of early "public intellectuals" such as Aphra Behn & Pierre Bayle.

I loved the idea of this book: it reminded me of something I once heard Jonathan Spence describe in a lecture, that there is a moment between 1575 and 1700 where the entire world is linked in a new way, but that for the most part, Western Europe is not really dominant over this new world-system. Exploring that moment through the prism of a single year seems like a fantastic idea. I'm also very partial to a more microhistorical, cultural-history take on world history. For all of that, show more however, this book just doesn't quite gel together as well as I expected it to. I'm not sure why. It may be that Wills just doesn't give it enough structure, or that the writing is less engaging that it needs to be, or that his selection of narratives from 1688 ends up feeling like one damn thing after another as opposed to some golden thread of connections. show less