The Story of Mankind

In this narrative history, Hendrik Willem van Loon traces the development of Western civilization from the formation of the Earth through the aftermath of World War I.

Van Loon opens with a childhood memory of climbing the tower of Old Saint Lawrence in Rotterdam, where his uncle and a watchman pointed out landmarks tied to Dutch history. He compares history itself to this tower: a structure built by time that rewards the effort of climbing, and offers the book as the key to its door.

The narrative begins with geological and biological prehistory. Van Loon describes the Earth cooling from a ball of flaming matter, the emergence of the first living cell, and the branching of life through plants, fish, amphibians, reptiles, and mammals. One mammal learned to walk upright, use its forepaws as hands, and develop grunts into language, becoming humanity's first ancestor. Four glacial periods nearly extinguished the species but forced rapid adaptation: Survivors learned to master fire, cook meat, and sharpen stones into tools. Van Loon calls the glacial era humanity's "greatest teacher."

He then turns to the ancient Near East. Egypt, nourished by the Nile's annual flooding, developed farming, temples, a calendar, and most importantly writing, which Van Loon considers the greatest of all inventions. Egyptian hieroglyphics evolved from pictures into a phonetic system, later deciphered through the Rosetta Stone discovered during Napoleon's 1798 campaign. Egyptian belief in the afterlife produced mummification and the pyramids, culminating in King Khufu's Great Pyramid. Egypt's political history spanned millennia and ended when Queen Cleopatra, Egypt's last ruler, died by suicide in 30 B.C. rather than submit to Rome. Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" Euphrates and Tigris, was a second cradle of civilization marked by successive conquering peoples. The Hebrews, a small Semitic shepherd tribe, wandered from Mesopotamia to Egypt, endured centuries of slavery, and were led to freedom by Moses, the Hebrew lawgiver, who received the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai and established the first nation to worship a single God. The Phoenicians contributed an alphabet of 22 letters that became the basis of modern Western writing.

Van Loon shifts to the Greek world. Indo-European Hellenes migrated into the Greek peninsula, conquered the earlier Aegean civilization, and developed the city-state, a community small enough that every citizen knew every other. Greek ideals of moderation and self-government produced unmatched achievements in art, philosophy, and literature. The Persian Wars, in which Athens defeated invasions at Marathon (490 B.C.) and Salamis (480 B.C.), preserved Greek independence. But rivalry between Athens and militaristic Sparta produced the disastrous Peloponnesian War, ending with Athens's surrender in 404 B.C. Philip of Macedon unified Greece by force, and his son Alexander the Great conquered the known world before dying of fever in Babylon in 323 B.C.

Rome began as a trading post on the Tiber and grew by offering generous partnership to neighboring tribes. The Punic Wars against Carthage, the great Phoenician trading city in North Africa, lasted over a century. Hannibal, Carthage's general, invaded Italy in 218 B.C. and nearly destroyed Rome, but the loyalty of Rome's allies held firm, and Hannibal was defeated at Zama in 202 B.C. Carthage was ultimately destroyed. Internal class struggles and civil wars transformed the Republic into an Empire under Julius Caesar, the Roman general and statesman. Caesar's assassination on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., gave way to the rule of his grand-nephew Octavian, who as Augustus established decades of peace while Rome's foundations decayed from slave labor, ruined farmers, and urban poverty.

Van Loon tells the story of Jesus through two fictional letters between a Roman physician and his soldier nephew. The nephew reports that Jesus taught universal brotherhood, that the Roman governor Pontius Pilatus found nothing seditious in his teachings, and that Jesus was crucified under pressure from religious authorities. The author contrasts Augustus in his palace with Mary tending her child in a stable, predicting the stable would triumph.

Rome's fall was gradual. Barbarian invasions, economic decay, and the replacement of citizen armies with foreign mercenaries left the western empire defenseless; the last emperor was deposed in 475. The Christian Church survived by converting the barbarians and preserving fragments of civilization. Pope Gregory, who led the church from 590 to 604, established the papacy as the spiritual head of western Europe.

Mohammed, a camel-driver from Mecca, founded Islam in the seventh century on principles of faith, charity, and submission to Allah. After his death in 632, Arab armies conquered Egypt, Persia, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, and eventually Spain. Charles Martel, the Frankish military leader, stopped their advance into Europe at Tours in 732. Charlemagne, the Frankish king, revived the western Roman Empire when Pope Leo III crowned him on Christmas Day 800, but after Charlemagne's death the realm split into what became France and Germany.

The Middle Ages produced feudalism, chivalry, and the Crusades, which failed militarily but transformed Europe by exposing the West to Eastern culture and stimulating trade. Medieval cities emerged as engines of progress, as merchants wrested civic liberties from feudal lords. Representative government developed in England through the Magna Carta (1215) and Parliament (1265), with similar assemblies appearing across the continent.

The Renaissance began as a rediscovery of classical civilization and the joy of living. Petrarch, an Italian poet and humanist, became its first celebrity. Gutenberg's movable type democratized knowledge. Portuguese explorers mapped the African coast, Columbus reached the Americas in 1492, and Magellan's expedition circumnavigated the globe. The Reformation followed when Martin Luther, a Saxon monk and professor, posted 95 theses against indulgences, or church pardons sold for money, in 1517. The resulting religious wars, including the devastating Thirty Years War (1618-1648), exhausted Europe without settling the underlying conflicts.

Van Loon also surveys the great teachers of the East: Siddhartha, a prince who renounced luxury to teach compassion, and Confucius, who preached self-possession and filial piety. Van Loon notes that European Christians encountered these older religions with hostility, attacking their traditions when they interfered with trade.

In England, the execution of Charles I in 1649 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688 established parliamentary government and the principle that kings rule by contract with their people. In France, Louis XIV's 72-year reign exemplified enlightened despotism, or absolute rule presented as rational governance, and provoked the development of the balance of power principle: the idea that no single state should dominate Europe. Russia emerged under Peter the Great, the tsar who forcibly westernized his country, and Prussia rose under Frederick the Great, whose military discipline transformed Germany.

The American Revolution produced the Declaration of Independence (1776) and the first written constitution. The French Revolution proclaimed liberty, equality, and fraternity but degenerated into the Terror before producing Napoleon Bonaparte, the French general who became emperor. Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo (1815) led to the Congress of Vienna, where Metternich, the Austrian statesman; Talleyrand, the French diplomat; and Tsar Alexander I attempted to restore the old order through the Holy Alliance, a pact among monarchs to suppress revolutionary movements. This repressive system provoked the Monroe Doctrine, through which the United States opposed European intervention in the Americas, and was progressively undone by independence movements across South America, Greece, Belgium, Italy, and Germany. German unification was the work of Bismarck, the Prussian chancellor, who used three wars to forge an empire under Prussian leadership.

The Industrial Revolution transformed material life but created new miseries, including dangerous working conditions and the destruction of the artisan class. The abolition of slavery, the growth of labor unions, and Karl Marx's socialist movement represented different responses. The Age of Science, overcoming centuries of religious persecution, established empirical investigation as the foundation of modern knowledge.

Van Loon concludes by arguing that late 19th-century colonial competition, combined with unresolved Balkan questions left by the Congress of Berlin, the 1878 diplomatic settlement of southeastern European territory, led to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, and the catastrophe of World War I. He contends that the fundamental cause was the gap between technological modernity and political antiquity, and closes by insisting that humanity stands at the very beginning of civilization, desperately needing leaders with the courage to learn an entirely new system of navigation for the modern age.