A Short History of the World is the most ambitious thing this series contains: a single condensed history of the entire human race, "from the era of primitive society right up to the present day," compressed by the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR into two modest volumes. This is the first of them, and it carries the whole story from the first stone tools to the overthrow of the Russian monarchy in 1917 — Egypt and Sumer, Greece and Rome, medieval Europe and China and the Arab lands, the discovery of America, the French Revolution, the Paris Commune. It is the work not of one author but of a committee of genuine specialists, and it should be said at once that they were good ones. The list of contributors names Academician Milica Nechkina, the leading Soviet authority on the Decembrists and the Russian revolutionary movement; Academician Sergei Skazkin, a distinguished medievalist; the orientalist Academician Alexander Guber; Sergei Utchenko, a serious historian of the Roman Republic; and, as the volume's presiding editor, Albert Manfred, the outstanding Soviet historian of France, of the Revolution and of Napoleon. When the book reaches the French Revolution it is very good indeed, and that is not an accident: it is Manfred's own subject, written by the man who knew it best. This is not a pamphlet. It is a serious book by serious people, and the interesting question it raises is what such people did when the material of world history would not fit the shape they were required to give it.
Begin, as this series always does, by dating the text rather than the spine. The English translation is dated 1974 and was made by Katharine Judelson from a Russian original — Kratkaya vsemirnaya istoriya, literally a short world history — of the previous decade. Because this is a pre-1917 volume, its own contents cannot date it closely: a survey that stops at the First World War carries no glasnost, no Brezhnev, no Sino-Soviet split on its face. What dates it is its intellectual furniture, and that is unmistakable. The framework is the confident, settled historical materialism of the post-Stalin Soviet academy, the doctrine as it stood before any of the loosening of the later 1980s: the five socio-economic formations as the fixed skeleton of all human history, the October Revolution as the hinge of the world, and the whole treated not as an interpretation to be argued but as a body of established law. The preface states the programme without embarrassment. What the reader is about to receive, it explains, rests on "the Marxist-Leninist theory on the laws governing the development of human society"; and among the questions the book sets out to answer is this one: "Why is the final victory of communism inevitable[?]" That is the register throughout. History has laws, the laws are known, and the outcome is settled in advance. The task of the historian is to display the working.
It helps to ask what a book like this was for. A one-volume world history, translated into the language of international circulation and issued by the export house of Soviet ideological production, was not a research monograph and did not pretend to be one; its preface hopes the work will prove "accessible and of interest to the reader at large," and it is pitched at the educated general reader at home and abroad rather than at the specialist. Its purpose is orientation — to hand that reader a single, coherent map of the whole human past, with the meaning already marked on it. That is why the teleology is not incidental but structural. The reader is not merely told what happened; he is told that it was going somewhere, that "the final victory of communism" is the destination the whole million-year journey has been approaching, and that the state publishing the book is the place where that journey arrives. A world history that ends, in its second volume, with the society issuing the history is a powerful instrument of legitimation, and the confidence of the doctrine is part of the message: the past is closed, its laws are known, and the future is not in doubt. The cost of that confidence is paid wherever the evidence is more interesting than the map allows, and the largest such place is the one the book opens with.
The law in question is the doctrine of the five formations. In the scheme codified in Stalin's 1938 Dialectical and Historical Materialism and taught unchanged for half a century afterward, every human society climbs the same staircase in the same order — primitive-communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist, and at last socialist — each stage generated by the maturing of productive forces inside the one below, each an advance on the last, the sequence universal and obligatory. This volume is that staircase turned into narrative. Its very table of contents is the ladder laid on its side: Part One "The Ancient World" is the slave-owning epoch, Part Two "The Middle Ages" is the feudal epoch, Part Three "The Modern Period" is the rise of capitalism, and the second volume, we are told, will bring "the revolutionary replacement of capitalism, the last type of society based on exploitation, by communism." The engine that drives the whole is class struggle, announced as the single key to everything: "Underlying all the manifold political events — during the era of slave-owning society and that of feudal and, in particular, capitalist society — is the class struggle, the struggle of the oppressed masses of working people against their exploiters." As a statement of method this is not contemptible; a great deal of good history has been written on less. The difficulty is not that the book looks for modes of production and class relations. It is that it knows what it will find before it looks, and there is one place in world history where what it was required to find and what its authors could actually see come apart in the reader's hands.
That place is Asia, and the missing idea has a name. The most important Marxist concept ever devised for the great agrarian civilisations of the East — for Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China, the very societies this volume opens with — is the Asiatic mode of production, and it does not appear in this book. Search the whole of it: the phrase is not there, and "Asiatic" occurs only once, geographically, in a sentence about "the majority of Asiatic states." Yet the concept was Marx's own, and it was specifically about these places. In his 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx listed the great epochs of economic development as "the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and the modern bourgeois modes of production" — four rungs, not the later three-before-capitalism, and the first of them named for Asia. He built the idea in his 1853 articles on British India for the New York Daily Tribune and in his correspondence with Engels that summer: a society of self-sufficient village communities, without private property in land, over which the state stands as universal landlord, tax and rent fused into a single levy, and on that foundation a centralised despotism that Marx thought had held Asian history strangely static. Whatever one now makes of that model — and it has been criticised, from inside Marxism and out, as an Orientalist misreading that mistook colonial disruption for changelessness — it was Marx's, and it was the natural theoretical home for exactly the phenomena these opening chapters describe.
The absence is not an oversight, and it is not these authors' choice. It was a decision taken far above their heads and long before they wrote. In the Soviet theoretical debates of the late 1920s and early 1930s — the Leningrad discussion of 1931 was the decisive moment — the Asiatic mode was condemned and effectively banned. It implied that a large part of humanity had travelled a distinct, non-European and, worst of all, non-progressive road, and that offended both the universal five-stage ladder then being canonised and the political needs of a state that wished to promise the colonial world a future identical to Europe's. After 1938 the historian of Asia had exactly one permitted task: to find slavery and then feudalism where Marx had found something he judged to be neither. This volume performs that task on a planetary scale, and the strain shows in the authors' own sentences.
Watch it operate. For the ancient river valleys the required category is the slave-owning formation, and the verdicts are duly delivered. "Assyria was a state of warlords and slave-owners," we read; "slavery was more developed there than it had been in either Egypt or Babylon." Urartu is disposed of in a single line: "Like other ancient kingdoms of the East, Urartu was a slaveholding society." For India and China the required category is the transition from slavery to feudalism, and it too is supplied by fiat: "Unlike the peoples of India and China who made the transition to feudalism from a relatively developed slave-holding society, the peoples of South-East Asia … did not evolve developed slave-holding civilisations." India's classical states are "the slave-holding society of the Gupta Empire and the slave-holding states in the south of India." The labels are affixed with confidence. But read on, and the evidence the same authors have gathered pulls steadily the other way. Egyptian agriculture, they report, rested not on slave gangs but on the peasant commune: "The land was cultivated by peasant communes and each commune was administrated by its council of elders," which organised the taxes and the labour levies for the state's building works — communal cultivators and a state above them extracting corvée, which is the material of the Asiatic mode, not of Roman latifundia. Indian slavery, they concede, "although fairly widespread in India, was as a rule of a domestic, patriarchal variety" — a marginal, household institution, not a mode of production. And about the Indian village they write a sentence that Marx could have signed: one distinctive feature of ancient India, they observe, was "the unchanging nature of the village communes over many centuries," self-governing, self-sufficient, reproducing the same pattern down the ages. That is Marx's Asiatic village to the letter. The scholarship arrives at the Asiatic mode from every direction and stops one word short of it, because that word was the one word that could not be written.
This is not a peculiarity of one survey. It is a house pattern, and the companion volumes in this same series, prepared in the same institutional world, show the identical operation performed at closer range. The Progress A History of India, Volume One itemises the predominance of state-owned land, the fusion of rent and tax and the absence of serfdom in medieval India — Marx's checklist, feature by feature — and then writes "feudalism" over the top of the list. The Modern History of China edited by Tikhvinsky lets Marx's category vanish from a history of the very country whose hydraulic bureaucracy helped inspire it, and forces China onto the feudal track with a borrowed phrase of Lenin's. Agibalova and Donskoy's school textbook History of the Middle Ages makes the Arab Caliphate "feudal" in a single sentence for children — a state that is the universal landlord, with tax and rent merged and no serfdom — and Feudal Society and Its Culture generalises the same suppression across India, China, Japan and the Iranian and Arab lands together. Four books, four teams of specialists, one banned idea leaving its outline in the shape of its own absence. A Short History of the World is where the operation is carried out on the whole globe at once, at a single stroke, because a one-volume survey has no room to hedge as the monographs do. The awkwardness the longer books register in a paragraph, this one registers in an adjective — "domestic," "patriarchal," "unchanging" — and moves on.
The reply to all this was made by Marxists, and it is worth pointing the reader to it precisely because the objection is not that the book is too Marxist but that it is not Marxist enough — that it has replaced a method of inquiry with a timetable. Marx's own 1859 list, quoted above, already refuses the single European staircase: it puts the Asiatic mode first as a distinct road, not a lower rung of the same one. The sharpest instrument against the staircase, though, is Trotsky's law of uneven and combined development, formulated in exactly these years against exactly this dogma. Backward societies, Trotsky argued, do not obediently re-enact the path of the advanced ones; they fuse archaic and modern forms into combinations without precedent. "To jump over intermediate stages," he wrote in his 1932 lecture In Defence of October, "is the way of backward countries" — and the whole of Russian history was his standing refutation of the idea that the stairs must be climbed one at a time, in order, by everyone. A history of the world built on uneven and combined development would have had no need to pretend that Mauryan India and Han China were secretly passing through the same slave-owning phase as the Mediterranean; it could have said what its own evidence says, that they were something else. The question was alive and being argued in the wider Marxist world throughout the years this book was written — in the West, the Dobb–Sweezy debate of the early 1950s over the transition from feudalism to capitalism turned on precisely the point that "feudalism" covered wildly divergent social orders and that the sequence of forms was a matter for concrete study, not a template known in advance. The file Moscow had closed in 1931 was open everywhere else.
None of this is a reason to throw the book away, and it would be a poor service to the reader to leave the impression that a survey compiled by scholars of this calibre has nothing to teach. It has a great deal. Its first and most durable virtue is that it is genuinely a history of the world and not of Europe with appendices. Whole chapters go to ancient India and China, to the Arab Caliphate and Sassanid Iran, to Japan and South-East Asia, to the Mongol conquests, to America before and after the European invasion — treated as histories in their own right, by specialists who knew the sources, and not as raw material for the European story. In 1974 that global reach was rarer in a general survey than it should have been, and much of the substance still holds. The second virtue is the one the materialist method really does deliver: a steady attention to how people fed and clothed themselves, to tools and techniques and the relations of production, that keeps the book anchored in something more solid than dynasties and battles. Its account of the deep transitions — the move from stone to bronze to iron, the invention of the plough, the rise of irrigation agriculture in the great river valleys, the first appearance of surplus, property and class — is clear, concrete and, in its essentials, sound. A reader will come away understanding why states arose where they did, which is more than most narrative histories trouble to explain.
The third virtue is the most attractive, and it is the honest fruit of the class-struggle emphasis. This is history with the labouring majority kept firmly in view, and it does not flinch from insurrection. It gives real space to the revolts of the exploited across every epoch — the great uprising of Egyptian peasants and slaves in the eighteenth century B.C., when, in the ancient chronicle the book quotes, "the earth whirled round like a potter's wheel" and the poor took the houses of the rich; the slave war of Spartacus; the peasant wars of medieval China and early-modern Russia. Where a conventional survey of the period would give the reader kings and treaties, this one insists on the people who built the pyramids and worked the latifundia and paid the rents, and treats their resistance as central rather than as disorder. Its anti-colonialism, too, has real force: the chapters on the European conquest of America and the plunder of Asia describe the "primary accumulation" of capital through the enslavement and robbery of whole continents with an unblinking directness — the book quotes Marx to the effect that "plunder and violence was the sole aim of the Spanish adventurers" — that much Cold-War Western historiography preferred to soften. On these matters the doctrine and the evidence pull the same way, and the book is the better for it.
So the reader can use this volume, and use it well, provided the ideological skeleton is recognised for what it is. Where A Short History of the World narrates — the plough, the commune, the slave revolt, the French Revolution, the growth of the working-class movement — it is often admirable, the work of people who cared about the past and knew it. Where it classifies — where it announces that Egypt and Assyria were slave-owning societies and India and China feudal ones by the same law that governed Rome and France — it is reciting a catechism fixed in Moscow forty years before, and its own best sentences quietly contradict it. The tell is always the same, and once seen it cannot be unseen: an "unchanging" village here, a "patriarchal" slavery there, a state that is somehow the universal landlord, the diagnostic features of a banned idea surfacing one by one in the prose of scholars who were not permitted to name the thing they had found. Read the narrative for its learning and its reach; read the ladder as an ideological fingerprint pressed into the text — the place where a great state told the whole human race that it had only ever been walking, in step, up a single flight of stairs toward the door that state claimed to hold open. The historians who wrote this book knew the world was more various than that. Sentence by sentence, against their own conclusions, they keep letting the reader see it.