Publisher Description
From one of our most acclaimed historians comes an account of human solidarity throughout the ages, provocatively arguing against the received wisdom that history is best understood as a chronicle of groups in conflict.
Investigating the six most pervasive categories of human difference—religion, nation, class, gender, race, and civilization—Cannadine asks how determinative each of them has really been over the course of history. Without denying their power to motivate populations dramatically at particular moments, he reveals that in the long term none has proven remotely as divisive as the occasional absolutist cries of “us versus them” would suggest, whether Christian versus Muslim during the Crusades (and now), landed gentry versus peasantry during the Bolshevik Revolution, or Jews versus “Aryan race” in Nazi Germany. For most of recorded time, these same “unbridgeable” differences were experienced as just one identity among others; whatever most chroniclers, self-serving mythmakers, and demagogues would have us believe, history needs to be reimagined to include the countless fruitful interactions across these lines, which are usually left out of the picture.
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“Cannadine does not say so, but he may well have
written his book in response to Samuel Huntington’s famous argument about the
clash of civilizations…I can only
hope that The Undivided Past will have all the impact of Huntington’s work,
serving as an important reminder that human beings around the world not only
have much in common but also have improved the conditions of their lives over
time…His optimism is both refreshing and necessary.”—
New York Times Book Review
