Peter Furtado

The idea behind this book is a good one - to get professional historians in a number of countries to tell their national stories in such a way that it would help readers in other nations to understand them better. Unfortunately the result is rather disappointing, not bad, just disappointing.

In part this is down to the difficulty of telling a national story in ten or twelve pages without the story being a dry narrative of sequential events that you could get from Wikipedia. In part it is a show more matter of maintaining quality whilst herding 28 academic cats into a common project.

As a result, the contributions are highly variable and only intermittently insightful although it is true that there are insights to be had - some contributions are very good, many others less so and one or two an utter waste of reading time.

What makes the book problematic lies in the editing. This required a directive rigour that asked for as objective as possible an account of how the mass of nationals of a country (accounting for divisions amongst those nationals) interpreted their story.

Jeremy Black on Great Britain (aka the United Kingdom) is rather good even if the justification for placing our history at 1707, functionally true, does not really hold water if you take seriously how most people in England think of their past sans Celts, 'intellectuals' and migrants.

MIhir Bose is honest about India, a nation invented in part by the British and the British-educated nationalists . Colin Schindler plays it straight about Israel: you can sense an authentic expression of the Israeli mind-set in a clear, simple and uncontentious narrative.

However, too many of the narratives seem to offer us the interpretative or identity hobby horses of not so much historians as 'intellectuals' expressing their own opinions of the past. We end up getting what we always get from pop books - the ruminations of tormented liberal intellectuals.

This tends to be a particular fault of the central and east Europeans where a degree of intellectual discomfort about their own national reality tells us more about the cosmopolitan liberal mind-set (the book was published long before the events of 2016) than about local realities.

The problem is probably that any serious historiography quickly strips away the reality of any national myth but misses the point that such 'dirty' and flexible myths do not need to be true to be useful: they just need to be emotionally coherent.

This offends the intellectual deeply and often the solution lies in trying to construct a new 'clean' ab initio myth such as liberal internationalism or the European Project that can be made to be true because its history is being written now by members of that class.

Strong and cohesive new national identities and versions of history have been emerging in the decade since the book was published in a dialectic with the 'clean' myths. We can guess that the intellectual classes are not going to be enormously happy with the outcome.

The book is a hodge-podge (we get in one non-European case a romantic nationalist rant) of insightful description, thematic suggestions that can only give us a personal and sometimes fashionable view of a culture, intellectual torment and a working out of local political concerns.

Some of the 'thematic' (single issue) contributions will provide useful insights - Willhem Frijhoff on the Dutch and water for example or the account of the Ottomanisation of Turkey in recent years - but others do not.

This is not to be too negative. The account of Finland by Pirjo Markkola represents what every contribution should have been - an exploration of a continuing national historiographical debate set against historical reality with an insight into why things are seen as they are.

The coverage of the 28 nations is also represented by a choice of nations that excludes Africa almost completely (only Ghana and Egypt get a slot) while Asia is only represented by India, China and Japan. The choices are euro-centric and anglo-centric with Israel thrown in for good measure.

The Muslim world is covered by Egypt, Iran and Turkey but not Indonesia or Saudi Arabia. Latin America is covered by Brazil, Mexico and Argentina which is reasonable but South Africa, Nigeria and Ethiopia are excluded while Ireland, the Czech Republic and Finland are included.

The general impression is of a pot boiler concocted for the mass popular history market which, at that level, might have a function as educational for people looking for sufficient knowledge to help get them through a reading of the Economist or when watching broadcast news.

It will certainly educate to a degree, which is good, but I suspect that it will also confirm many in-built prejudices amongst the liberal graduate urban middle class centred on 'the West' and Europe, offering history as the stories people culturally like themselves tell themselves in foreign parts.

The point here is that Erdogan, Putin, Bolsonaro and Johnson as well as national populism itself need explaining as forces that are popular and that have particular visions of history very different from the bleatings of urban intellectuals.

In 2012, few of the contributors seem to have dug far beyond the resources of their own class to analyse the minds of their compatriots. The nation is not confined to the scribbling classes. It extends into the masses and deeply so and that is the history we need to understand. show less

It's a big tome, which covers a lot of events in history with half to one page. That format brings with it a lot of constraints. Given those constraints, I thought it did remarkably well. There are parts of history that I felt I knew quite well and I thought the coverage of those was good. The beauty of the book is that having read it there were many other parts of history that I had no, or just the most fleeting, knowledge of - and now I have at least an awareness of them. The authors are show more British, and whilst the coverage does strive to be international, and the coverage of European history seems to be quite broad, there were a few selections that left me wondering "did that really shape the world?". Definitely not a cover-to-cover read, but a nice book to dip into. show less

It was ok I guess. Several of the entries were more concerned about how that particular country saw its own past rather than a straightforward telling of that history and each one was written by a different author so you get a real mixed bag. After reading twenty-eight in such short order you come away with a vague depressing feeling of how unstable the world is and how you reap what you sow.

Book contents: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Egypt, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey and United States of America.
Each History varying in length from 8 to 14 pages & therefore necessarily limited detail & almost no perspective; plus 202 illustrations across the 303 pages: There's also a very helpful Further Reading List & an show more Index. show less