Contents

World History

• "The No Nonsense Guide To World History"
• "12 Books That Changed The World"
• "Speeches That Changed The World"
• "What If?
• "More What If?"

Second World War

• "Europe At War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory"
• “1943: The Victory That Never Was”

African History

American History

British History

• "The English Civil War""
• "Chartism After 1848"

Chinese History

Czech History

• "A Brief History Of The Czech Lands To 2000"
• "Czechs And Balances: A Nation's Survival Kit"

Hungarian History

Indian History

Latin American History

Middle Eastern History

• "The Middle East"
• "Islam"
• "The Palestine-Israeli Conflict"

"The No Nonsense Guide To World History" by Chris Brazier

Most of us obtain our knowledge of history from school and usually the history we are taught relates overwhelmingly to our country or region and frequently to particular periods or wars. I am a great believer that all knowledge, to be fully appreciated, requires context and connections. So we need an overview of world history that at least touches on all regions and all periods.

But such an overview would be excessively lengthy and exceedingly dull. Right? Well, no. The "New Internationalist" magazine [click here], as part of its "No Nonsense Guide" series, has produced a history of the world in a mere 40,000 words. Obviously this is impressionistic, but Chris Brazier - co-author of the "New Internationalist" magazine since 1984 - has produced a commendable work that is immensely readable and utterly fascinating.

Yet Brazier does more than summarize our history; in many ways, he reinterprets it.

Above all, he breaks away from the Euro-centric narratives and interpretations that dominate Anglo-Saxon teaching of history. So he points out that:

• Humankind emerged in Africa around 5,000 BC.
• The first civilization appeared in Sumer - in what is now Iraq - about 3,500 BC.
• Virtually all the earliest civilisations were in Asia: Sumeria (Mesopotamia), Old Kingdom (Egypt), Harappa (Indus), Hittite (Turkey) and Shang (China) with only the Minoan (Crete) and Mycenae (Greece) in the Mediterranean.
• Most of the great civilisations of 1500 BC to 1500 AD were in what we now call Latin America - Maya, Moche, Nazca, Aztec, and Inca - or Africa - Yoruba and Zimbabwe.
• Islam was the leading civilisation of the western hemisphere for a thousand years after the birth of Muhammad.
• At the height of the T'ang dynasty in the eighth century, China was the most advanced country in the world and the capital Chang by far the largest city anywhere.
• At the end of the 17th century, the most powerful monarchs in the world were not Louis XIV of France or Peter the Great of Russia, but the Chinese emperor K'ang-hsi and the Indian Mughal emperor Aurangzeb.

Also, Brazier attempts to correct the view of history that accords no role to women. Therefore he emphasizes that:

• The dominance of man the hunter is a myth because early people would have eaten much more vegetable than animal matter and it was women who gathered the fruits, nuts and berries that sustained people most of the time.
• In the beginning, God was a woman. For at least 25,000 years, people worshipped the Mother of All Things and the Father God of Judaism, Christianity and Islam has been revered for only a tenth of that time.
• In pre-Islamic Arabia, a woman had the right to have more than one husband and to choose her husbands.
• In 1789, the riots against the French King Louis XVI, which led to the storming of the Bastille, were led by a woman, Theroigne de Mericourt.
• Yet, so often, the struggle for freedom has been about the rights of men, not women. New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893, but other democracies took much longer.

• In 72 BC, there was a revolt of the slaves against the Romans, led by Spartacus and resulting in 6,000 crucifixions.
• Peasant revolts occur frequently throughout the history of China - and with good reason.
• There were the Diggers and the Levellers in 17th century Britain and the Chartists in 19th century Britain.
• There were, of course, the revolutions in Russia and China at the beginning of the 20th century.
• Today there are powerful dissenting movements to the policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

One of the most remarkable features of Brazier's history is the seminal influence of slavery. Over the four centuries of the slave trade (mid 15th - mid 19th centuries), between 10-12M Africans were sold in the Americas and about 2M died along the way.

Brazier argues that: "African slavery fed the European economic growth that spiraled into the Industrial Revolution - as well as providing the United States with a kick-start it could never have hoped for by the sweat of its settlers' brows alone". Conversely he suggests that: "This removed not only those most able to have children but also those most able to work. The ground for development was undermined and Africa is still counting the cost today".

Is it possible to draw any broad lessons from such a history of the world? I believe that it is.

First, most regions of the world have had a period of cultural flowering and even leadership. Therefore, it is condescending and ultimately racist to believe that some peoples or cultures are inherently inferior or unimportant.

Second, all empires fall. Whether it is the Roman Empire of two millennia ago or the Soviet bloc of the 20th century, sooner or later all dominant powers eventually loose their pre-eminence. The current hegemony of the United States will not last forever.

Third, progress is not inevitable. In the last 100 years, some 150 million people have died in war, around 100 million have died in famines, a further 100m died as a result of government repression, and - most unsettling to any notion of 'progress' - there were 14 million victims of genocide.

To create a safer and fairer world we need to understand better our turbulent and multi-cultural history.

“12 Books That Changed The World” by Melvyn Bragg

If you love books as much as me, you will have no problem with the idea of books changing people - but changing the world? Now that is a taller order; yet Bragg has little difficulty establishing that a number of seminal works - or at least the ideas in them - have truly changed our world. What is more controversial is his choice which is bound to be very subjective. Firstly, he has chosen to limit his selection to books by British authors. Secondly, he has adopted a rather elastic definition of what constitutes a book.

His selection then - in the order in which he examines them - is as follows:

• "Principia Mathematica" (1687) by Isaac Newton
• "Married Love" (1918) by Marie Stopes
• "Magna Carta" (1215) by members of the English ruling classes
• "The Rule Book Of Association Football" (1863) by a group of former English public school men
• "On The Origin Of Species" (1859) by Charles Darwin
• "On The Abolition Of The Slave Trade" (1789) by William Wilberforce
• "A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women" (1792) by Mary Wollstonecraft
• "Experimental Researches In Electricity" (1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday
• "Patent Specification For Arkwright's Spinning Machine" (1769) by Richard Arkwright
• "The King James Bible" (1611) by William Tyndale and 54 scholars appointed by the king
• "An Inquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth Of Nations" (1776) by Adam Smith
• "The First Folio" (1623) by William Shakespeare

“Speeches That Changed The World” with an introduction by Simon Sebag Montefiore

The publishers Quercus have certainly chosen an eclectic collection: a total of 55 speeches from 48 individuals (only seven of them women) starting with Moses and the Ten Commandents and Jesus and the Sermon on the Mount, taking in four early American Presidents (Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Wilson), moving on to no less than 12 speeches around the Second World War, taking in more American Presidents (Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, and George W Bush), not excluding black speakers (Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and Shirley Chisholm) and concluding with the likes of Chaim Herzog, Mikhail Gorbachev and Vaclav Havel.

Each speech is accompanied by an introduction that provides a brief biography of the speaker and an explanation of how the speech came to be made. Whether these really are speeches that actually changed the world must be debatable; more accurately these are speeches that marked special moments in history ranging from the departure of Napoleon to the arrival of radium, from the anger of Adolf Hitler to the indefatigableness of Winston Churchill, from the dropping of the atomic bomb to the destruction of the World Trade Center. Although all the events were momentous, not all the speeches are equally fluent. Notably brilliant for their oratory though are the speeches of Kennedy and King.

“What If?” edited Robert Cowley

Academic historians use the word "counterfactual" for what we lay persons would describe as the "what if?" question of history. In this absolutely fascinating book, a collection of mainly American military historians, edited by Robert Cowley, have considered which battles of the last 3,000 years were so decisive to world history yet simultaneously so susceptible to different outcomes from relatively minor factors. As one of the writers puts it: "The heaviest doors pivot on small hinges". Twenty chapters reassess "what might have been":

• What if, in 701 BC, the Assyrian siege of Jerusalem by the forces of Sennacherib had not been lifted following the death of a large part of the attacking army from a mysterious plague? Then Judaism would have disappeared from the face of the earth and the two daughter religions of Christianity and Islam could not have come into existence.

• What if, in 480 BC, the Greeks commanded by the admiral Themistocles had not defeated the Persians led by their emperor Xerxes in the critical naval encounter at Salamis? Then western civilisation would never have benefited from the enduring values of the Hellenic cultural tradition.

• What if, in 334 BC, at the Battle of the Granicus River, the second axe blow aimed at the head of the man to be known as Alexander the Great had not been blocked by his bodyguard Cleitus and Alexander had died at 22 instead of 32? Then the Greek and Roman empires and traditions would not have dominated the West.

• What if, in AD 9, in the Teutoburg Forest the Germanic chieftain Arminius had not halted the proposed Roman pacification of Germania when he ambushed and annihilated three Roman legions of some 15,000 men led by the unfortunate Publius Quinctilius Varus? Then the notion of Aryan supremacy that led ultimately to two world wars may never have happened.

• What if, in 378, the Romans under Emperor Valens had not been defeated by the Visigoths led by Fritigern at Adrianople, or, in (probably) 732, the Muslims commanded by Abd Al-Rahman had not been beaten by the Frankish army of Charles the Pippinid at Poitiers? Then either imperial Rome or imperial Islam would have prevented the descent of Europe into the so-called Dark Ages of 500-1000 which - even if historians now believe was not quite that 'dark' - was nevertheless an era of physical chaos and cultural poverty.

• What if, in 1242, the utterly ruthless and unstoppable Mongol hordes led by the military genius Sabotai had not turned round before defenceless Vienna because Ogadai - the head of the greatest land empire in history - had died and they had to return to elect a new khan? Then the world would have witnessed the annihilation of Christendom with no Renaissance and no Reformation.

• What if, the summer of 1529 had not been so wet that in the autumn the army of the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent moved so slowly and his heavy artillery had to be abandoned, so that he was unable to take Vienna? Then the Habsburgs would have been challenged internally and Henry VIII of England might have received papal blessing for his divorce from his Habsburg queen with no need to form the Anglican Church.

• What if, in 1519 and 1520, the Spanish adventurer Hernÿn Cortés had failed for any one of half a dozen identifiable and plausible reasons in his audacious campaign to defeat the Aztec society of Montezuma and take its capital city of Tenochtitlán (modern day Mexico City)? Then any re-conquest would have been much delayed, changing the nature of today's Mexico and perhaps the USA itself.

• What if, in 1588, the great Spanish Armada - a formidable naval force of 130 ships commanded by the duke of Medina Sidonia - had not been scattered by an English fireship attack off Calais, aided by a prevailing wind? Then the armada would have been able to transport the Spanish army waiting on the French coast and invade a poorly defended Elizabethan England, so that the country today might still be a Catholic nation and the British Empire, especially in the North Americas, might never have come to pass.

• What if, in the years that the American War of Independence was fought from 1775-1783, anyone of 13 identified events had turned out differently, including the time when the British Captain Patrick Ferguson had the American commander George Washington in the sights of his rifle but could not bring himself to shoot an unarmed enemy in the back? Then the United States would probably not have achieved independence from Britain any sooner than Canada and the whole nature of the new state would have been profoundly different.

• What if, in 1776, the wind and the fog had not allowed Washington to make a night-time withdrawal of his entire army from Brooklyn Heights where a superior British force was waiting to over-run them, an event described as the Dunkirk of the American Revolution? Then the Revolution might well have been finished almost as soon as it had begun.

• What if, in 1815, Napoleon had managed to beat Britain's Wellington and Prussia's Blücher at the Battle of Waterloo, which Wellington himself described as "the nearest-run thing you ever saw"? Then France would have dominated the continent of Europe and the rise of a 20th century militarist Germany might never have happened.

• What if, in 1862, a copy of the Special Orders of the Confederate General Robert E Lee had not been accidentally discovered and exploited by the Union General George B McClellan? Then the bloodiest day of the American Civil War, the Battle of Antietam, would probably have gone Lee's way and could have won ultimate independence for the rebel Confederacy.

• What if, in the years of the American Civil War from 1861 to 1865, each of five scenarios examined here had gone just a little differently as speculated? Then, the eleven Southern States could so easily have won their independence and the world would have had to live with a divided United States.

• What if, in 1914, the German invasion of France had followed exactly the infamous Schlieffen plan or Britain had decided not to join the war or - having joined - the British commander John French had been allowed to take his troops out of the line as he wanted? Then the war would have been over by Christmas, millions of lives would have been saved, the Germans would have won or at least achieved a stale-mate, the Russian Revolution would not have happened without German delivery of Lenin, the conflagration would never have become a world war, the USA would not have joined the conflict, the British Empire would have lasted longer, and there might never have been a Second World War.

• What if, in the summer of 1941, Hitler had not over-reached himself with the invasion of Soviet Union, but instead and more cleverly had either invaded the French-occupied Middle East or neutral Turkey, before striking out into the rich oilfields of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia? Then the German Reich would have had all the fuel it needed and could have invaded Russia later from both the south and the west in a successful pincer movement that would have decisively won the Second World War.

• What if, in 1942, the Americas had not been able to de-code the Japanese Navy's signals and anticipate the attack on Midway Island, so destroying four first rank enemy aircraft carriers when the numerical odds were so against them? Then the Japanese would have taken Midway and perhaps Hawaii, lengthening the Second World War, not just in the Pacific but also in Europe.

• What if, on 6 June 1944, the weather in the English Channel had remained as bad as the day before, so that Operation Overlord - the Allied invasion of Normandy - had failed or been cancelled? Then it is possible that Stalin's forces might have occupied the whole of continental Europe or the northern-most part of Japan or that the use of atomic bombs would have been on Germany rather than Japan.

• What if, the so-called Cold War had not been "a kind of ideological permafrost", but had ignited over any number of incidents concerning Berlin, such as the Soviet blockade of the city in 1948 or the building of the Berlin Wall in 1961? Then, the imbalance in the conventional forces of the Warsaw Pact and NATO in the communists' favour would have meant the early American use of tactical nuclear weapons and the possibility of full-scale nuclear war.

• What if, in 1946, the Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek had not been persuaded by American pressure to halt his attack on communist-controlled Harbin, so allowing Mao Zedong's forces ultimately to take over all China except Taiwan? Then, without the support of a communist China, North Korea would not have dared to invade South Korea and communists would never have taken over Vietnam and Cambodia.

“More What If?” edited Robert Cowley

Following the success of "What If?" - a review of 20 military engagements published in 1999 reviewed above - the same editor two years later compiled this collection of 25 historical turning points, not all of them military with more of an emphasis on the 20th century (14 of the 25 events):

• What if, in 424 BC, in the battle of Delium when the the forces of Thebes routed the Athenian army, the forty-five year old philosopher Socrates had not managed to escape alive? Then Plato and Xenophon would not have been so influenced by Socrates' thinking and the course of Western philosophy and Christian civilisation would have been somewhat different.

• What if, in 36 BC, Mark Anthony had been successful in his campaign against the Parthians ? Then he might well have defeated Octavian at the crucial battle of Actium in 31 BC and there would have been a bipolar (Rome and Alexandria) world instead of Roman domination.

• What if Pontius Pilate had spared the life of Jesus Christ and there had been no crucifixion? Then Christianity might still have spread widely but taken on a much more Judaic form.

• What if, on 14 October 1066, that Norman arrow had not entered the eye of the half English, half Danish defender Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings ? Then England would have remained a key part of the northern Scandinavian empire instead of becoming an integral component of the southern Latin world.

• What if the Ming dynasty that sponsored the seven epic voyages of the Muslim eunuch Zheng He between 1405 and 1433, reaching across the Indian Ocean as far as the east coast of Africa, had not abandoned any such exploration but encouraged it to go further? Then not only would the history of India and the Middle East have been very different, but the African slave trade introduced by the Portuguese would not happened and possibly America would have been discovered by the Chinese rather than Columbus.

• What if, in April 1521, following the trial of the alleged heretic Martin Luther in the German city of Worms, the Emperor Charles V had not released Luther but had had him executed? Then Luther would not have had another 24 years to write and preach and the Reformation would have taken a totally different form.

• What if, in August 1641, King Charles I had not left London but had instead remained, contracted the plague that broke out just 100 yards from his home, and died together with his family? Then there would have been no English Civil War, the throne would have been taken by Charles's sister Elizabeth, and the historic struggle between crown and parliament would have taken a rather different direction.

• What if, in 1802, French military forces in Haiti had not been devastated by a yellow fever epidemic? Then France might well have held on to its 868,000 square miles of territory in Louisiana instead of the following year selling it to Thomas Jefferson's administration for the bargain price of $15 million (some 4 cents an acre) and the United States might not have had a civil war and would today have a very different social mix.

• What if, on 22 September 1862, President Abraham Lincoln had not taken advantage of the proclaimed Union civil war victory at Antietam to issue the Emanicipation Proclamation freeing the black slaves in the Confederate states? Then the American civil war might well have ended in a negotiated peace and the racial divisions in the United States would have worked themselves out in a very different manner.

• What if, in July 1870, France had not treated the Ems Telegram from Bismarck's Germany as a cause for war but simply ignored it? Then France would not have lost the Franco-Prussian war and surrended its provinces of Alsace and Lorraine; since these provinces would have remained French, there would have been no need for the First World War; since there would have been no Treaty of Versailles, there would in turn have been no Second World War and no Holocaust.

• What if, in August 1912, Theodore Roosevelt had won the Republican nomination instead of the incumbent President William Howard Taft in the USA (after all, he had won 10 of the 12 primaries)? Then America would have had a more interventionist President during the First World War and the conflict would probably have been brought to an end a year or so earlier than was the case.

• What if, in 1915, the German kaiser had over-ruled the objections of his chancellor Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg and used unrestricted submarine warfare to enforce an economic blockade against Britain? Then Germany might well have been able to bring the Allies to the peace table within a year and most of the deaths in the trenches would have been avoided but at the expense of significant territorial concessions to Germany.

• What if, in 1917, Germany had not tranported Lenin back to Russia (a country he had only revisited once in 17 years of foreign exile) in time to galvanise the Bolsheviks into leadership of the October revolution? Then, without Lenin's fanatical drive, the revolution would not have taken place and a social democratic regime may well have taken root, meaning that Stalin would not have come to power and Hitler could not have used the Red threat to mobilise the forces of Nazism.

• What if, on 15 February 1933, Italian immigrant Giuseppe Zangara had succeeded in assassinating American President-elect Franklin D Roosevelt? Then the US Presidency would have fallen to the utterly mediocre and reactionary John Nance Garner and the effects of the Depression would never have been counteracted by the imaginative New Deal.

• What if, in October 1938, the British and French had not forced the Czechoslovaks to accede to the Munich Agreement on the transfer of the Sudentenland to Nazi Germany? Then the Czechoslvaks would certainly have resisted a German invasion and put up a tenacious resistance and the French and the British would have been compelled to enter the Second World War a year earlier than was the case, but this would have been militarily and economically much more to the disadvantage of the Germans than the Allies and the war would have taken a different trajectory with the probability that the Holocaust would not have happened.

• What if, in May 1940, Lord Halifax rather than Winston Churchill had replaced Neville Chamberlain as the British Prime Minister? Then the speculation is that Britain might have used Italy to facilitate an immediate armistice with Germany, surrendering continental Europe to Nazism until the Soviet Union beat the Germans alone and itself then occupied all Europe except Britain.

• What if, in the period July to September 1942, Australian troops had not managed to block the advance of the Japanese along the formidably inhospitable Kokoda Trail in New Guinea? Then the Japanese would have been able to take Port Moresby and use it to launch an invasion on the unprotected north-eastern Australia.

• What if, in World War II, the Allies had not managed to break the codes used by the German Enigma machines? Then, among many possibilities, perhaps there would not have been sufficient information to enable the Allies to sink tankers taking fuel for Rommel's panzer corps in North Africa and this would have enabled him to win at El Alamein and go on to take Cairo.

• What if, in the summer of 1942, Pope Pius XII had issued to the world his draft protest against the Nazi deportation and slaughter of the Jews? Then, according to this estimate, as many as 90% of the Holocaust's actual victims could have been saved.

• What if, in the Autumn of 1944, the British General Montgomery or the American General Patton had been allowed to strike hard and fast into Germany instead of maintaining Eisenhower's 'broad front' approach? Then it is suggested that the Second World War would have ended many months earlier, saving many military and civilian lives and resulting in Berlin falling into the hands of the Allies with reduced scope for post-war communist domination of Eastern Europe.

• What if, on 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler had not committed suicide in his Berlin bunker? Then he would have been captured by Soviet troops, tried in Nuremberg with other Nazi leaders, and hanged a year and a half after the war.

• What if, in August 1945, atomic bombs had not been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Then it is suggested the resistance of the Japanese and the difficulty of local logistics could well have resulted in the Pacific War continuing for another two to five years and invasion and/or starvation could have cost the lives of up to five million Japanese and a similar number of lives of other nationalities.

• What if, in July 1944, President Roosevelt had not reluctantly abandoned his support for his Vice-President Henry Wallace at the Democratic Convention? Then, six months later when FDR died, it would have been Wallace - socially progressive but overly well-disposed towards the Soviet Union - rather than Harry Truman who led the United States and the free world in the early years of the Cold War.

• What if, in the years 1947 & 1948, John Kennedy had died from the attack of Addison's Disease that struck him in Ireland, Richard Nixon had not had Whittaker Chambers' testimony on communist spies to launch his career, and Lyndon Johnson had failed to win the too-close-to-call Texas Democratic senatorial nomination race? Then the USA would not have had these three men as post-war presidents and the recent history of the United States would have been different.

• Finally, what if, in 1531-32, the Spanish conquistador Pizarro had not found potatoes in Peru? Then so many developments in world history could have been so different because the availability of potaoes enabled the feeding of the miners of Potosi who generated the silver on which the 17th century Spanish empire was based, the survival of the native Irish in the face of the settlement of Cromwell's troops, the resilence of the Prussian peasants during the Seven Years War (1756-63), and the subsequent rapid expansion of the population in Europe which fuelled both the industrial revolution at home and massive emigration overseas.

“Europe At War 1939-1945: No Simple Victory” by Norman Davies

This 500-page work written by the British historian Norman Davies covers a familiar subject in what is intended to be a fresh manner with a new emphasis. Less than 60 pages is devoted to a chronological narrative of the actual warfare. The rest of the book is thematic, examining the war through the position of politicians, soldiers and civilians respectively. Unusually more space is devoted to the civilian perspective than the military one with over 140 pages describing the experiences and suffering of the 500M people afflicted by what was total war as never before encountered in human history.

The main theme of this work is that the Western nations have failed to comprehend and acknowledge the scale of the battles and the deaths on the Eastern Front which are such as to require a balanced judgement to conclude that "the Soviet role was enormous and the Western role was respectable but modest". For instance, consider this table which sets out estimates of deaths in the major individual battles and campaigns.

Deaths in individual battles and campaigns

Operation 'Barbarossa': battles of Byelorussia, Smolensk & Moscow 1941	1,582,000
Stalingrad September 1942-31 January 1943	973,000
Siege of Leningrad September 1941-27 January 1944	900,000
Kiev July-September 1941	657,000
Operation Bagration 1944	450,000
Kursk 1943	325,000
Berlin 1945	250,000
French campaign May-June 1940	185,000
Operation Overlord 6 June-21 July 1944	132,000
Budapest October 1944-February 1945	130,000
Polish campaign September 1939	80,000
Battle of the Bulge December 1944	38,000
Warsaw Rising 1 August-1 October 1944 (exc civilians)	30,000
Operation Market Garden September 1944	16,000
Battle of El Alamein October-November 1942	4,650

The first seven of these campaigns were on the Eastern Front and, to give some kind of perspective, the death toll in Operation Barbarossa - the German invasion of the USSR - was 12 times that of the the opening phase of the invasion of Normandy by the Western allies. Controversially Davies opines: "All in all, the open-minded observer will be tempted to view the war effort of the Western powers as something of a sideshow."

He underlines his theme by setting out estimates of military war dead in Europe.

Military war dead in Europe 1939-1945 (estimated)

USSR	11,000,000
Germany	3,500,00
Romania	519,000
Yugoslavia	300,000
Italy	226,000
UK	144,000
USA	143,000
Hungary	136,000
Poland	120,000
France	92,000
Finland	90,000

Davies writes: "the most obvious conclusion stands out a mile: the war assumed a far grander scale in the East than in any of the fronts where the Western Allies were involved".

If the main theme of "Europe At War" is to acknowledge the size of the Soviet effort and sacrifice in the defeat of Nazi Germany, the second theme is to highlight that the political leadership and military forces of the USSR were guilty of aggression and barbarities that easily bear comparison with that of their enemy. Davies does not flince from making such a equation. Indeed he writes of "the central paradox of the Second World War in Europe" as being that: "The two principal combatant states, which fought a series of campaigns of unparalleled ferocity, were both engaged in systems of internal repression of unparalled inhumanity". He adds: "If one sits back and forgets one's ingrained reactions, one should be able to see that the war in Europe was dominated by two evil monsters, not by one. Each of the monsters consumed the best people in its territory before embarking on a fight to the death for supremacy".

He gives attention to:

• the infamous Soviet pact with Germany from 1939-1941 which led to the Soviet invasion of Poland at the same time as the Germans, followed by the massacre of 25,000 Polish officers at Katyn
• during the time of the pact, the unprovoked attack on Finland in 1939 and occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1940
• when in 1942-43, territory lost to the Germans was regained, the shooting of all males alleged to have collaborated and the gang-raping of women so suspected
• the incident at Nemmersdorf in 1944 when a Soviet raiding party massacred German civilians including the stripping and crucifying of women
• when Germany itself was occupied and especially when Berlin was attacked and taken, the mass rapings of around 100,000 women
• at the end of the war, when a million Soviet prisoners of war were repatriated, the shooting of the officers and the dispatch of the rest to slow death in the GULags.

“1943: The Victory That Never Was” by John Grigg

The thesis of this book is easily stated: the Western Allies could and should have invaded France in 1943, rather than 1944, which would probably have shortened the Second World War, certainly spared many lives and possibly have altered the course of the subsequent Cold War.

Grigg, a freelance journalist, first put forward this thesis in the original edition of “1943” published in 1980. The book was republished in 1999 with a preface in which the author states: “The text is unaltered from the original edition of 1980, because nothing that has appeared since...has drawn my attention to any factual inaccuracy, or caused me to feel less confident in challenging what is still the predominant view”.

I only read the reissue of the book in 2000, as a result of a recommendation from my good friend Eric Lee. I found it immensely refreshing and stimulating to read a book about the war that is so strategic in its thinking, so comprehensive in its sources, and above all so willing to challenge traditional judgements.

Grigg asserts that the conventional wisdom on the timing of the invasion is “blind as well as bland” and brings a forensic judgement to bear on events and decisions so often regarded as almost inevitable.

His argument has many strands, the main ones being that Roosevelt and Churchill allowed themselves to be misled by key military advisers into placing far too much importance on the role of the Mediterranean theatre and that Churchill especially was wrong to believe that carpet bombing could break the Germans and wrong to marginalise the involvement of de Gaulle and the Free French.

He criticises Roosevelt’s gratuitous and mistaken insistence on “unconditional surrender”, Admiral King’s obsession with the Pacific Theatre, the erratic and fanciful political thinking of Churchill, General Brooke’s fallacious concentration on Italy, the brutality of Harris’s bombing policy, and the excessive caution of Montgomery when boldness was needed.

He makes a moral, as well as an operational, critique on area bombing: “As a calculated policy for terrifying civilians of all ages into submission, it was a grave affront to those minimal standards of civilisation which a civilised country should respect, even when engaged in a life-and-death struggle…it was simply heinous”.

One by one, Grigg addresses and dismisses the main counter-arguments to the view that the cross-Channel invasion should have been a year earlier.

“Impossible to land in 1943”. While the Germans were tied down on the Eastern Front, by the end of 1942 the American Army alone had 5,397,000 men trained and ready.

“Atlantic Wall too strong”. In fact, the Wall was much stronger when the invasion occurred that it was the year before.

“Not enough landing-craft”. The armada which set sail for Sicily in July 1943 was larger than that which set sail for Normandy in June 1944.

“Technical resources inadequate”. The remarkable “Mulberry” artificial harbours used at Arromanches and (less successfully) at “Omaha” could have been produced in 1943, if there was the pressure to manufacture them then.

Grigg believes that the invasion victory of 1944 “seems almost ridiculously cheap”. He contrasts the 10,00 casualties, of whom about 2,500 were killed, with the 60,000 casualties, 20,000 of them killed, on the first day of the Battle of the Somme.

As for “the victory that never was”, he writes: “By not invading until 1944 the Western Allies prolonged Europe’s agony and condemned a multitude of heroes and innocents to death”.

Grigg writes extremely well and his arguments are cogent and (seemingly) compelling. So often, historians benefit from hindsight, but one of Grigg’s strengths is that he uses the information and the arguments available at the time.

Therefore it is difficult to find fault with the cold logic of his case, but of course war – like life – is not logical.

As Grigg himself recognises all too well, a successful invasion in 1943 would have required a clear and determined strategy to that effect in 1942. However, the psychological effect of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in late 1941 and the German victories in North Africa in early 1942 meant, I believe (and I have written a book about the war centred on 1942), that at this time the Western Allies simply did not believe that they could mount a successful cross-Channel attack so soon.

"A Short History Of Africa" by Roland Oliver & J.D. Fage

Africa is the poorest continent, but it has a rich history that is little known or appreciated outside its borders. This lucid and balanced account of its history was first published in 1962 and the current edition is dated 1995.

Oliver & Fage start by emphazing that African history is the longest of any: "In historical times .. the backwardness of Africa was always a backwardness relative only to the mainstream of human development in the more favoured parts of Europe and Asia. In pre-historic times - at least through all the long millennia of the paleolithic or 'Old Stone Age' - Africa was not even realtively backward; it was in the lead. Archaeologists today are increasingly confident that it was in Africa, and more specifically in eastern equatorial Africa, that man's ancestors became differentiated from other primates." Then, of course, Africa was host to the incomparable Egyptian civilisation of five millenia ago.

Other civilisations of the continent include the first Phoenician colonies on north Africa in about the 8th century B.C., the addition of this region to the Roman Empire, the Arab conquest of north Africa in the 7th century A.D., and the Sudanic civilisation and the kingdom of Ghana of a millennium ago. However, it is the case that large parts of African history are virtually unknown because there are no records - for instance, ".. from the fourth century until the ninth East Afica disappears entirely from the historic record".

African history took a dramatic and ugly turn with the intervention of the European states and the development of the slave trade. It was the Portuguese who started from about 1510 to transport African slaves to the early Spanish colonies in tropical America. By the 17th century, the rapidly growing European demand for sugar - a crop making heavy demands for labour - promoted a huge growth in the slave trade to the Dutch, French and English colonies of the West Indies. According to the figures of Oliver & Fage, the 17th century total for slaves transported across the Atlantic was at least 1,340,000; this exploded to at least 6,050,000 in the 18th century; and it was still around 1,900,000 in the 19th century. The British were at the heart of this barbaric trade - by the end of the 18th century they were carrying nearly half the slaves taken to America - but in 1811 they were the among the first to abolish slavery. Oliver & Fage are honest enought to record, however, that: "There had been slavery in Kongo, as in every other part of Africa, long before Europeans began to export slaves overseas".

Of course, the gradual end of the slave trade did not mean the conclusion of European interest in Africa. Far from it: colonisation was to do as much damage. Again it was the Portuguese who were in the lead with small-scale endeavours from the end of the 15th century and a settlement at the Cape from 1652. However, what Oliver & Fage call "the colonial fever" was a feature of the 1890s. They make the point that: "The international hysteria which led to partition was caused not by the few European powers who already had small interests in tropical Africa but by a sudden stampede of those powers who had previously had no interests there at all". These were Belgium (actually King Leopold II acting personally) and Germany who joined Britain, France and Portugal and so created "a scramble" that dragged in Italy and Spain and led to European governments claiming sovereignity over all but six of some 40 political units into which they had by then divided the continent (and, of these six, four were more technical than real).

This scramble took a mere two decades and resulted in six decades of colonialisation. The first nation to achieve independence was the Gold Coast which became Ghana in 1957. De-colonialisation then proceded rapidly (except for the Portuguese and Spanish territories), but the longest struggle was in apartheid South Africa. The African National Congress was actually founded in 1912, but it was not until 1994 that the first democratic elections were held in the country. Independence, however, has been a troubled experience with considerable political instability and more than 50 military coups while the population has suffered drought, starvation and most latterly HIV/AIDS. In many respects, the story of Africa is only just beginning.

"A Short History Of The American Revolution" by James L Stokesbury

I went to see the film "The Patriot" (2000) starring Mel Gibson and I thought that the American revolution could not possibly have been that simplistic so, on a trip to Washington, I bought Stokesbury's book at the National Museum of American History. Stokesbury is an American who works as a professor of history at Acadia University in Canada. His book - first published in 1991 - is a lucid account of a seminal event encompassed in just short of 300 pages.

I suppose that, for the half of all Internet users who are American, the story of the revolution is a very familiar one, taught in schools and part of the psyche. However, for someone like me - British and with no schooling whatsoever in the period - Stokesbury's book was a revelation. I just learned so much.

For starters, I had thought of the war as a relatively intense and short-lived affair of some months. In fact, it lasted eight years (1775-1783) and involved twenty or so major battles. For much of the time, though, "the war just bumbled along" and frequently looked like "a sort of equilibrium". It looked as if "neither side was capable of winning it and both were tired of waging it" and, five years on, it was "less a contest of physical forces than of willpower or, more correctly, staying power". Arguably the decisive battle of the war was Yorktown in late 1881, but peace was not signed until almost two years later and the British maintained their holdings in America even longer than that. At the end of it all, "The country was militarily exhausted and financially ruined".

I had not appreciated either how much the American War of Independence was in fact a civil war. About 50,000 Americans actively fought for the British side. Stokesbury puts it this way: "The general estimates are that perhaps a third of the population were active supporters of the Revolution or Patriots; and one third were actively for the King or Loyalists or Tories; with the other third wanting to be left alone as much as possible; or, that one quarter took either active position, and as much as one half formed the amorphous and neutral middle". One of the dreadful features of so many civil wars is often atrocities and, in this case, both sides were guilty of brutalities.

I had certainly not understood that this so-called American war was in effect a world war. From the start, the British employed foreign units, notably some 30,000 Germans (most of them from Hesse-Cassel). For their part, the Americans sought and obtained allies from the European powers opposing the maritime strength of thalassocratic Britain. First, the old enemy France declared war on Britain; then Spain and the Netherlands came out against the British; and finally the Baltic powers - Russia, Denmark and Sweden - combined in an anti-British coalition called 'Armed Neutrality' and, before the war ended, Prussia, Portugal, Austria and the Two Sicilies had all joined this alliance. So, as well as America, there were major theatres of war in the West Indies, the Mediterranean, India, and the English Channel.

Through the mists of time, we tend to see history in black and white terms in which events had almost an inevitability about them. Stokesbury makes it clear that reality was much more complicated.

For a start, in spite of all the intense research of the period, so much is still unknown or unclear. We do not even know who fired the first shot of the war on 18 April 1775 at Lexington. The conduct and casualties of many of the battles are confused.

Also the supporters of independence were far from a united army battling the evil British. There was enormous conflict between the Continental Congress and the individual states - a tension which continues today - and immense rivalry over who was to command which forces with the infamous Conway cabal against George Washington. There was desertion, mutiny and even treason in the shape of Benedict Arnold. Stokesbury writes: "It is fair to say that George Washington was the one indispensable man of the American Revolution and that, without him, there were several times when the whole enterprise would probably have collapsed".

Then there is the odd situation of New York, then - as now - the chief city of the continent. For most of the war, it was securely held by the British and the Americans could do nothing to retake it. Stokesbury explains: "The military theory of the period held that, if you took the enemy's capital, or his major cities, he would have sense enough to make peace. But the Americans were not involved in a conventional eighteenth-century war".

Finally there is a tendency to think of both the outbreak of the revolution and its success as inevitable. A more sensitive handling of genuine grievances by King George III and his Ministers would have made all the difference. Canada was kept for the British and the thirteen states could have been secured as well. A more determined effort by the British at the end of the first year of the war - following the taking of New York - and world history could have been very different. If one sees the conflagration as a world war, then Britain won in four of the five theatres.

And not one mention of Mel Gibson ...

Monument to mark the signing of Magna Carta
at Runneymede in 1215

"The English Civil War" by Maurice Ashley

This year (2002), the Queen Mother died and the Queen celebrated her golden jubilee - reminders of the long legacy that is the English monarchy, but it was not always so. In almost 1200 years, there was one period - the so-called Interregnum of 1649-1660, when this country was a republic and the reason was the English Civil War.

Maurice Ashley's account of this seminal conflict was first published in 1974, but it has recently been reprinted because it combines the virtues of authority and brevity (less than 150 pages).

Like so much of our supposed knowledge of history, the concept of the English Civil War is a substantial over-simplification. It was not an exclusively English affair but involved forces from, and battles in, Wales, Scotland and Ireland as well. Furthermore it was not so much a single conflict as a series of five wars: the First Bishops War of 1639, the Second Bishops War of 1640, the First Civil War of 1642-1646, the Second Civil War of 1648 and the Third Civil War of 1649-1651.

What caused such a constitutional and military upheaval? Ashley tells us that: "This is a topic of continuing controversy among academic historians".

As far as long term causes are concerned, he himself identifies Charles I's financial difficulties, leading to grievances over arbitrary taxation, and the animosity of the Puritans towards the leaders of the Church of England. The more short term causes were sub-sets of these more fundamental issues: controversy over the King's levying of tonnage and poundage and conflict over the innovations introduced by the King in the practices of the Church of England.

Once the Parliamentarians had won the first war, the outbreak of renewed conflict was caused by dissatisfaction with the imposition of Puritanism and the unpopularity of the many county committees. Then, when Charles I was executed in 1649, the unscrupulous methods used by his son to regain his throne led to the third civil war.

What was the social dimension of the cleavage between the Monarchists or Cavaliers and the Parliamentarians or so-called Roundheads (most of them, like the Cavaliers, had long hair)? Ashley is quite clear that this was not a class war and that county histories prove conclusively that it was not a class conflict. Although a majority of peers understandably sympathized with the King, the gentry were divided down the middle.

In modern day terms, the armies involved were not large. At the outbreak of the main conflict in 1642, the Parliamentary leader the Earl of Essex had at his disposal some 15,000 men, while the King commanded around 13,500. When the Scottish army moved into England in 1644, there were about 21,000 men involved. Then, when the Parliamentary forces set up the New Model Army in 1646, the complement was 22,000. However, moving these men around the battle areas was a complicated affair since, in those days, officers had neither watches nor adequate maps.

Like many wars, this was a messy business with the advantage swinging from one side to the other and the focus moving from one place to another. However, there were many set-piece battles. In the first civil war, there was the indecisive battle of Edgehill in 1642, the Parliamentary triumph at Newbury in 1643 which was a turning point, and the biggest battle of them all at Marston Moor in 1644. Most of the time, the King was headquartered in Oxford, while Parliament's hold on the capital London throughout the conflicts and the superiority of its financial resources were crucial to its ultimate success in the civil wars.

History is always enlivened by characters. Certainly the devious and vacillating character of King Charles was frequently an important element in both the wars and the negotiations, while his nephew Prince Rupert proved to be a brave and resourceful commander. On the Parliamentarian side, there were other colourful characters, notably John Pym who was a consistent and vehement opponent of the King until his early death from cancer.

Above all, of course, there was the famous Oliver Cromwell whom Ashley describes as "a born cavalry officer" and "a splendid military organiser" who was "a vehement Puritan" with "a hot temper". After the civil wars, from late 1653 until his death in 1658, he governed as Lord Protector. Ashley is quite clear that Cromwell was "not a dictator". He was "a strong man, a born leader and a tolerant ruler" who permitted Roman Catholics and Anglicans to worship privately in London and allowed the Jews to return to England.

Statue of Oliver Cromwell outside
the Houses of Parliament in London

What were the main constitutional results of these civil wars? In Ashley's view, the answers are three-fold:

• The feudal rights of the Crown and the Tudor prerogative courts were never to be restored.
• The King's power to levy taxes without the consent of the House of Commons or his right to arrest members without just cause was destroyed.
• Parliament became "an unchallengeable part of the British constitution" and the Church of England ceased to be the sole religious institution.

In the next three and a half centuries, England has had no civil war. Not many countries can say that.

"Chartism After 1948" by Keith Flett

Chartism was a vitally important British movement for political reform that was possibly the first mass working-class movement in the world. Its objectives were universal suffrage for all men over the age of 21, equal-sized electoral districts, voting by secret ballot, an end to the need for a property qualification for Parliament, pay for members of Parliament, and annual election of Parliament.

Chartism can be said to have started in 1836 with the formation of the London Working Men's Association, involved the submission of three huge, and ever-larger petitions to Parliament (all turned down), and peaked in 1848 with the rejection of the third petition and local disturbances at a time when the rest of Europe was experiencing one revolution after another.

So was Chartism a complete failure? The central thesis of Flett's book is that Chartism did continue after 1848 and laid the ground for the development of radical independent working-class education. This in turn led to the enactment of the Education Act of 1870 which introduced secular rate-supported elementary schools and opened the way to free and compulsory elementary education. Arguably it is state education which has most empowered the working-class.

This is a well-researched and ably-written study that reflects well on Keith Flett's passion for working-class history and assiduousness in tackling many contemporary sources, especially the late Chartist and radical working-class press. It is a specialist work that will not have a wide readership, but nevertheless a valuable addition to our corpus of understanding of this seminal period.

“A Traveller’s History Of China” by Stephen G. Haw

Covering 3,000 years of Chinese history in just 300 pages is no mean feat, but Haw accomplishes it with some skill in an informative and readable introduction to this immense subject.

It is argued that China has “arguably the longest continuous history of development of any civilisation in the world”. It is a history of immense fragmentation with constant conquest and chaos. Three millennia ago, there were some 170 states. Yet, in the midst of this turmoil, there has been true genius with lasting philosophy, superb craftwork and brilliant invention.

The name ‘China’ comes from the Sanskrit name of Cinasthana which is what the Indians called the state of Qin (221-206 BC). It was this state that unified under one ruler an area approximating what we know now as China and it was the First Emperor of Qin who instigated both the Great Wall and the terracotta army.

The Chinese were responsible for a remarkable number of inventions, with major advances in science and technology occurring particularly about the turn of the first millennium. Among these inventions were paper, the foot stirrup, the collar harness, spinning and weaving machines, the crossbow, the wheelbarrow, the compass, cast iron, and of course gunpowder. Amazingly it took centuries for many of these discoveries to reach Europe.

Haw explains that, during the period of the Sony Dynasty (960-1279), “China was undoubtedly the most advanced nation in the world at this time”.

However, invasion and domination then followed. The Mongols and the Manchus took over; later the western powers, notably Britain and France, provoked wars and extracted concessions; then came the invasion by the Japanese.

The ‘father’ of modern China was Sun Yat-sen who led the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 and briefly became the first President of the new republic. To this day, he is revered by Nationalists and Communists alike. Haw describes his ideals as “democratic and socialist” and, if he had been able to retain power, the modern history of China might have been very different.

As it is, five decades of totalitarian communism have given way to a stunning economic transformation of the country that must now challenge the existing political order. As Haw points out: “The structure of the machinery of government today is fundamentally identical with what it was under the later imperial dynasties. There is no emperor at the top, but instead there is a small committee of the leading members of the [Communist] Party which holds much the same position”.

The dynamic tension between the economy and the polity must change this – possibly sooner than many expect.

"A Brief History Of The Czech Lands To 2000" by Petr Čornej and Jiří Pokorný

My wife is half Czech, we have many Czech friends and we visit the Czech Republic regularly so, on a recent trip to Prague, I chose to read a history of the country, but made sure that I selected a brief and modern work. In fact, this little book - translated from the original Czech - only runs to 95 pages and the authors have done a commendable job in making a rich history so concise and accessible. Čornej is responsible for the period up to 1914, while Pokorný takes over for the remainder of the 20th century.

It is a history of the Czech lands - that is, Bohemia , Moravia and part of Silesia - which became a joint state in the Middle Ages, since what is now the Slovak Republic - which from the 11th-19th century was an integral part of the Kingdom of Hungary - only features for the period 1918-1993. The Latin name Bohemia actually derives from Celtic tribe of the Boii who conquered the Czech territory in the period of the rise of Ancient Rome (1st-3rd century BC).

Most peoples celebrate a 'golden age' in their history and the Czechs have two. First, there was the era of the Greater Moravian Empire (the epithet was actually the creation of later times). This existed from 830 to 907 when it fell to Hungarian raiders. Čornej writes: "Greater Moravia left behind a remarkable cultural legacy that the world has come to know only since 1945 as a result of archaelogical finds". The second political and cultural flourishing occurred under the reign of Charles IV (1346-1378) who was the first ruler of Bohemia to become King of the Romans and, after his cornation in Rome in 1355, Holy Roman Emperor. Charles chose Prague for his residence and, under his leadership, the city was enlarged, there were important constructions like the Charles Bridge, and a university - the first in Central Europe - was founded.

As a result of the teachings of the non-conformist preacher Jan Hus (who was originally influenced by the English thinker John Wyclif), the Czechs became a thorn in the side of Christian Europe and, in the course of 1420-1431, no less than five crusades against Hussite Bohemia ended in failure. Ultimately, however, the so-called Bohemian Estates were defeated by Catholic forces in a small battle at White Mountain (located on the outskirts of Prague) on what was arguably the blackest day in Czech history (8 November 1620).

It took the First World War and the break up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire before the Czechs could win their independence and the Slovaks joined them to create the new state of Czechoslovakia on 28 October 1918. It proved to be the only democratic state in Central Europe at that time and Pokorn points out that: "The majority of indices of production and living standards placed Czecholsovkaia in 10th to 15th position in the world".

For seven or eight centuries now, the history of the Czech lands has been shaped crucially by its relations with Germans and Germany. It was in the 13th century when a substantial stream of colonists from overpopulated German areas started to arrive in Bohemian and Moravia. Indeed my wife's family comes from a town which was long called Nemecký Brod (German ford), after the German miners who founded it, but at the end of the war was renamed Havlíčkův Brod after a famous Czech journalist.

It was the existence of the Sudenten Germans that allowed Hilter - with the acquiescence of Britain and France - to force upon the Czechoslovaks the Munich Agreement of September 1938 which, together with subsequent loses to Poland and Hungary, resulted in Czechoslovakia losing a third of its territory including its natural defences, before six months later suffering a Nazi invasion and occupation. In 1945, therefore, some 2.7M Germans were expelled from Czechoslovakia in a process which still complicates Czech-German relations, especially in the context of the Czech Republic's entry into the European Union.

The last decade or so of this history has witnessed momentous events: the velvet revolution as four decades of Communism was overthrown and the velvet separation as the Czech and Slovak peoples formed their own states. As the Czech Republic prepares for accession to the European Union, it is back where it always belonged - at the heart of Europe.

"Czechs And Balances: A Nation's Survival Kit" by Benjamin Kuras

Like the book by Čornej and Pokorný, this is a short and episodic history, but not quite as short (197 pages), while being even more episodic. It is written in very fluent English by a Czech writer who has lived in London since 1968 and Kuras adopts a light-hearted, even irreverent tone, which makes what could otherwise be a dry topic readable and frequently amusing.

In fact, the first half of the book is an analysis of the Czech character and the Czechs' legends. Kuras believes that, above all: "The Czechs love their comfort ['pohoda' in Czech]. So much so that their comfort considerations usually overcome such hollow concepts as ideology, idealism, heroism, honour, gallantry". Kuras summarizes a successive of legends, many of which - such as, King Barley, Prince Bruncvik, Saint Wencelas and the Knights of Blanik - conclude with the promise of the hero returning to save the Czechs at the hour of their greatest need which - as he humously points out - has apparently not yet occurred in spite of successive foreign occupations and totalitarian regimes.

Before launching into the chronolgical hisory that fills the second half of his book, Kuras talks of "that uniquely Czech way of solving political differences" called 'defenestration' (that is, "solving political differences by throwing opponents out of windows"). There are three infamous occasions of such acts:

• In 1419, anti-Hussite councillors were thrown out of a window in Prague City Hall where a furious crowd finished them off, which led to a 15 year Hussite revolution.
• In 1618, Czech nobles threw three Habsburg representatives out of a window in Prague Castle and, although they landed in a dung heap and survived, the result was the Thirty Years' War - "a period of the greatest national self-confidence and self-esteem Czechs have ever known".
• In 1948, the last democratic member of the first Communist-led Government, Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk (who was godfather to my wife's brother), either jumped or was pushed from a window of his Ministry.

On this day, 21,000 Protestants (mainly Czech but some German) were defeated by 26,000 Catholic (international with some Czech) armies in "a walkover" lasting just two and a half hours, as a result of divisions among commanders and a reluctance of poorly-paid mercenaries to fight. The consequnces were a land which was 85% Protestant becoming almost wholly Catholic within 10 years and almost half the population being massacred, starved or exiled by the impact of 30 years of war.

If these were dark days for the Czechs, the 20th century saw widely oscillating fortunes - the diplomatic triumph of 1918 when Czechs and Slovaks united to win an independent state, the betrayal and dimemberment of the 1938 Munich Agreement followed six months later by Nazi occupation, the joy of liberation in 1945 followed by the Communist takeover of 1948, the false dawn of the 1968 Prague Spring before the eventual velvet revolution of 1989.

Writing in the mid 1990s, Kuras concludes; "six years after the fall of communism, it is still by no means decided whether the Czech Republic is on its way to becoming a true Western democracy, as craved by most of its people and hoped for by its Western fans, or a mafia-controlled market economy with corruptible officials on every step of the political, judiciary and economic ladder, and across the political spectrum, where election results are irrevalent, Latin American style".

"Twelve Days: Revolution 1956" by Victor Sebestyen

When revolutions suddenly swept the countries of Central and Eastern Europe in late 1989, one Communist country avoided such convulsions, although arguably it was the trigger to the changes in those other states. That country was Hungary which had already had a (failed) revolution 33 years earlier.

Victor Sebestyen was born in Budapest and was an infant when his family left Hungary as refugees. His new book marks the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian revolution and is a well-researched and well-written account of this historic event, drawing on fresh evidence from Moscow, Washington and Budapest plus interview with participants.

Of course, the core of the work (some 170 pages) is the 12 days of the title: 23 October – 4 November 1956. But, very helpfully the scene is set with a review of key events since 1944 (another 100 pages) and then there is a short aftermath section (20 pages). As Sebestyen puts it: ”It is a story of heroic failure, of awe-inspiring courage in a doomed cause, and of ruthless cruelty” and ”This revolution was marked by idealism and breathless excitement , as well as by violence and utter confusion”. Indeed he insists: ”It was the least-organised revolution in history. There were no leaders, no plans”.

The Hungarian revolution did not come out of nowhere. Under the hated regime of Mátyás Rákosi, in a small country of less than 10 million between 1950 and 1953 more than 1.3 million people were prosecuted and half of them were jailed. Yet, when the revolution came, it was sudden and unexpected. It started with student protests over conditions at colleges and universities and demands to be free of the official Communist student organisation. It was the spark that lit the tinder but, as Sebestyan puts it: ”Like so much that happened over the next few days, this opening move of the revolution was haphazard, spontaneous, rudderless”.

It is not known who fired the first shots, but Sebestyan believes that it was “almost certainly a trigger-happy AVO recruit” (the AVO was the despised state security service) and the first demonstrators to fall were two students. The Parliament Square was the scene of a subsequent massacre by Soviet troops in which another 75 died.

Although there were demonstrations throughout the country and resistance in a number of towns, most of the fighting was in the capital Budapest and the fiercest battles were around a small number of locations, most notably the Corvin Cinema (where Gergely Pongrácz emerged as leader) and the Kilián Barracks (where army colonel Pál Maléter took charge). Much of the fighting was done by young factory workers under 30 and some brutal retribution was taken against AVO members who were beaten and hanged in the streets.

Astonishingly the first Soviet military assault was held by the revolutionaries and eventually a cease-fire was agreed, with the Russians promising to remove their troops from Hungary. For a few breathless days, it looked as if the revolutionaries had won, although this was a period when rival groups argued and even on occasions fought with one another. However, the Soviets lied repeatedly to the new Hungarian multi-party government as they marshalled a huge invasion force. They deceived the Hungarian military leadership into allowing themselves to be arrested and then launched 'Operation Whirlwind' involving nearly 150,000 troops and 2,500 tanks. The revolution was quickly crushed.

The central character in the Hungarian revolution was Imre Nagy, the loyal but reformist Communist who had been Prime Minister from 1953-1955 and was again from 24 October to 4 November 1956. He was a brave and decent man, but cautious and indecisive when he needed to seize the moment.

Sebestyen makes clear how Nagy had never wanted a revolution, made utterly inadequate early speeches to the revolutionaries, and was constantly a day or two behind the political mood of the fighters until the final days when he formed a broad-based government and then finally declared that Hungary had left the Warsaw Pact. He writes: ”Nagy has been weighed in the balance again and the scales have slightly tilted. Nagy died better than he had lived.”

At the end of it all, some 2,600 Hungarians had been killed, roughly two-thirds of them following the second Soviet assault. The Russians lost less than 60 soldiers. In a matter of months, around 200,000 people fled Hungary. In the country itself, the new Communist leader János Kádár – who had initially supported the revolution and been in the new Nagy government – instituted savage reprisals. Around 22,000 were jailed and about 330 were executed, including Imre Nagy and Pál Maléter.

The Hungarian revolution coincided with the last week of President Eisenhower's re-election campaign in the United States and the invasion of Suez by the British and the French, so the eyes of the world were elsewhere. Nevertheless, as Sebestyen makes clear, the US never anticipated such an armed revolt against Communism and, when it came, had no intention of risking its already delicate relations with the Soviet Union.

Although the Hungarian revolution failed, János Kádár – who remained in power until 1988 – gradually relaxed his grip and – as Sebestyn puts it - “”In many ways Hungary was the most relaxed and most prosperous of the Soviet satellites”. Indeed the reform movement inside and outside the Hungarian Communist Party went so far that, in 1989, it was the opening of the Hungarian border to Austria that allowed so many East Germans to leave the Communist bloc and provoke the tearing down of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent revolutions in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere.

Footnote: On my first visit to Hungary in 1991, the last Russian troops were leaving that week and I made a point of visiting the grave of Imre Nagy. On a more recent visit in 2005, I visited some of the scenes of the heaviest fighting in the 1956 revolution, including the Kilián Barracks and the Corvin Cinema.

Roger at site of fighting at the Corvin Cinema

“A Traveller’s History Of India” by SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda

I attempted two other histories of India, but found them too dense and too lengthy, before turning to the "Traveller's History" series which I used for China. Again I found a thoroughly accessible and immensely readable work. SinhaRaja Tammita-Delogoda (T-D) is from Sri Lanka but his knowledge of India is impressive and his insights illuminating.

India is named after the River Indus which is now in Pakistan. It is a place where "People still believe in the same religion, they still worship the same gods and they still chant the same verses and hymns which they recited 4,000 years ago". T-D inists: "Alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia, it is one of the very cradles of civilisation".

The traditional religion is Hinduism which dates back to at least 1500 BC and today nearly 82% of the population are Hindus of one sort or another. The Muslim population comprises 11% which, given the size of the total population, means that India has the second largest Muslim population in the world (after Indonesia). T-D asserts: "More perhaps than any other country in the world, India's culture and society has been moulded by religion".

The Indus Valley civilisation is the first real landmark in the history of the subcontinent. It is thought to date from around 2500 BC and to have lasted almost 1,000 years. It was based on the two great cities of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro which were only discovered by accident in 1856 by two British engineers.

The next stage began with the Aryans, barbarian invaders from the north, who dominated from around 1500 to 334 BC. The word 'Arya' means 'high born' and the four classes of Aryan society represent the origin of the Hindu caste system, a structure of more than 2,000 groups which still has an important influence today. This is the era of the two great epic poems, the Mahabharata (100,000 verses) and the Ramayana (25,000 verses).

The Mauryas, who ruled from 330-184 BC, represented the first Indian empire and Asoka ('The Sorrowless One'), who was in charge for 37 years, is one of the most famous figures in Indian history. T-D writes of the Mauryas: "No Indian dynasty before them had enjoyed so much power, and it is doubtful whether any regime since has been able to exercise such complete and effective control over so much of this vast country".

The collapse of Mauryan power saw the break-up of India into several different kingdoms, a state of affairs that was to last for almost 500 years, until the rise of India's next great imperial dynasty, the Guptas. The Gupta empire was a golden age of Indian civilisation which saw world pre-eminence in mathematics (Indian scholars invented the zero symbol and the decimal system), as well as Vatsyayana's famous fourth century treatise on the art of love, the Kama Sutra.

Towards the end of the 10th century, a succesion of Turkish invasions brought Islam and a set of Turkish dynasties to India which changed the nature of the nation for ever. However, it is the Mughal Empire of 1526-1707 which represents what T-D calls "one of the most glorious and fascinating episodes in Indian history". The word Mughal is an Indian spelling of Mongol and Babur, the founder of the Mughal empire, was a descendant of Gengis Khan. It is this empire which has left behind those sites most appealing to tourists to modern-day India, including the Red Fort in Old Delhi, the Taj Mahal at Agra, and the one-time capital of Fatehpur Sikri.

The 18th century saw the arrival of European merchants and the foundation of European colonies. Starting first around Madras, Calcutta and Bombay, it was British rule which came to dominate as India became 'the jewel in the crown' of the British empire. The British governed the subcontinent for almost 150 years, "completely transforming its appearance, its institutions and its culture" and even building a new capital at New Delhi. T-D explains: "In less than 200 years, they made an even greater impact than the Muslims had in 800. They measured and mapped, standarized and centralized, bridged and connected the subcontinent into a single workable unit".

Following the success of the independence movement led by Gandhi, in 1947 Muslim Pakistan was separated from the largely Hindu India which triggered an orgy of violence. At least five million refugees fled each way and at least half a million were killed. Subsequently east Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh. Meanwhile, since independence, India has been the world's largest parliamentary democracy. However, T-D is frank about the problems: "Political corruption on an unimaginable scale, increasingly criminal and violent politics, rising caste conflict, separatism and militant communalism - these are some of the spectres which India will have to face in the new century".

“Conquistadors” by Michael Wood

This book is the product of a series of television films made for the BBC in the UK and PBS in the USA. The author of the book and the presenter of the films, historian Michael Wood, is someone with whom I travelled to eastern Canada in 1966, although I have never met him since. His style of both writing and presenting is one of infectious enthusiasm for his subject and the 16th century conquest of Latin America by the Spanish conquistadors is an ideal topic for his considerable talents.

Accompanied by many superb photographs and some helpful maps, essentially Wood tells four stories as he retraces the epic journeys of those involved:

• Between 1519-1521, Hernan Cortés overthrew the mighty Aztec empire of Montezuma in Mexico. Initially welcomed by the Aztecs, the Spaniards commenced a slaughter of the natives and had to flee the island city of Tenochtitlán in the so-called ‘Night of Tears’. When Cortés returned, he laid siege to the city and then fought through it district by district, culminating in the massacre of its inhabitants. Already weakened by the ravages of the new disease of smallpox (itself brought over by Spanish emigrants), the Aztecs thought that the conquistadors were gods returning to fulfil an ancient prophecy and that Cortés had ‘secret weapons’ in the form of horses, dogs and gunpowder. To this day, when visitors to Latin America suffer upset stomachs, it is said to be ‘Montezuma’s revenge’.

• Francisco Pizarro – from the same region of Spain as Cortes and a distant relative – conquered the Incas of Peru or, as it was then known, Tawantinsuyu, the Land of the Four Quarters. Like the Aztecs, the Incas were devastated by smallpox and divided by civil war, but still it is incredible that an invading force of less than 200 could overthrow an empire of at least five million. Again guns and crossbows – together with fearlessness and brutality – overcame the odds. However, following the murder of the Inca leader Atahuallpa in 1533, eventually his successor Manco led a great revolt, resulting in defeats at the battles of Sacsahuaman (1536) and Ollantaytambo (1537) and his withdrawal to the lost city of Vilcabamba.

• In pursuit of the fabled El Dorado, in 1541-1542 Gonzalo Pizarro (half-brother of Francisco Pizarro) and his one-time companion, the one-eyed Francisco Orellana, crossed the Andes from Peru and accidentally discovered Amazonia. Pizarro became hopelessly lost and it took sixteen months and unbelievable deprivation before, with only half his men, he found his way back to Quito. Meanwhile Orellana and his group were supposed to be going down river to seek help, but instead finished up traversing the entire length of the mighty Amazon – a journey which took eight months - before sailing round the Atlantic coast to the nearest Spanish settlements near Trinidad - a voyage of 1,200 miles.

• Finally, there was Cabeza de Vaca, who set sail from Cuba but fell foul of a tempest and spent five years travelling in what we now call Texas, before finding three other survivors living down the coast. In the course of 1535-1536, this tiny group – regularly accompanied by local natives - walked north-west around the Sierra Madre mountains, crossed the Rio Grande river, and toiled south down the Pacific coast until they reached Mexico City – an amazing journey of 2,500 miles.

“The Middle East” by Bernard Lewis

This 417-page book, first published in 1995, is subtitled “2000 Years Of History From The Rise Of Christianity To The Present Day”. The style is fluent and the scope wide. It is structured in three main sections: a chronological section covering the period from the time of Christ to the mid 16th century when Islam was at the height of its power; a thematic section with chapters on the state, the economy, the elites, the commonality, religion & law, and culture; and another chronological section from the mid 16th century to the end of the 20th century.

The period from the advent of Christianity to the advent of Islam – the first six centuries of the Christian era – was shaped by a series of major developments: the rise of Christianity itself, the shift of the centre of gravity of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople, the Hellenisation of the Middle East, and the steady growth of what today would be called the command economy. Between the 4th-6th centuries, Arabia seems to have sunk back into a sort of dark age which Muslims call Jahiliyya or the Age of Ignorance.

The Islamic era began in 622 with the migration of the Prophet Muhammed and his followers from Mecca to Medina – an event known to Muslims as Hijra. The rapid rise of Islam through a series of conquests was stunning. Lewis writes: “Within little more than a century after the Prophet's death, the whole area had been transformed, in what was surely one of the swiftest and most dramatic changes in the whole of human history.” But he adds: “It is the Arabization and Islamization of the peoples of the conquered provinces rather than the actual military conquest itself, that is the true wonder of the Arab empire.”

Yet, from the very beginning, the world of Islam was riven by dissension, principally over the issue of how one should choose the successors to the Prophet Muhammed. The majority view – the Sunni tradition - is that the successors should be 'elected' and the first four caliphs became known as 'the rightly guided ones'. However, the alternative view – the Shi'ite tradition – is that the successors should be chosen from the Prophet's actual relatives and their descendants and all but the first of the four rightly guided caliphs were killed by assassins. As well as this division, the Sunni majority contained many schools of sharia law, four of which survive in modern times.

The middle of the 8th century saw the replacement of the Umayyad caliphate (661-749) by the Abbasid caliphate (749-1258) – a change which Lewis describes as “a revolution in Islamic history” - and the capital was moved from Syria to Iraq. Later came two waves of invaders from the Steppes: the Seljuk Turks in the early 12th century and then the Mongols in the mid 13th century. Between the 10th -13th centuries, Sunni Islam fought, and largely won, struggles against Shi'ite dissidents who were tamed or overcome, Christian crusaders who were repulsed, and the heathen Mongols who were converted and assimilated.

By the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent (1520-1566), the Islamic empire was at the peak of its power. Some historians have argued that the pig set the geographical limits of Islamic expansion, since the Muslim faith did not take root among the pig-rearing and pig-eating peoples of Spain, the Balkans, and western China.

Lewis notes: “In the high Middle Ages, the commerce of the Islamic Middle East was in every way ahead of Europe – richer, larger, better organized, with more commodities to sell and more money to buy, and a vastly more sophisticated network of trading relations. By the end of the Middle Ages, these roles were reversed.”

Among the factors inhibiting the Islamic world in the development of commerce and industry at this time were the lack of forests and therefore timber, the lack of rivers and therefore water power, the shortage of metals, the paucity of roads and wheeled vehicles, the ban in the Koran of usury, the destructiveness of invasions, and the domination of the state by military aristocracies with little interest in trade and production.

The European agricultural revolution and then the European industrial revolution simply had no counterpart in the Islamic world so, by the 19th century, the Middle East had become much weaker than Europe and the European powers progressively encroached on the Ottoman Empire. As well as the long continuing shortages of timber, water and minerals, there was what Lewis describes as “the immense institutional and ideological barriers to the acceptance of new ways and new ideas”. The printing press was not taken up by the Turks until 1729 and, when the first press was closed in 1742, a mere 17 books had been produced.

The final defeat of the Ottoman Empire came with the First World War, following which the victorious powers of Britain and France largely divided the Arab lands into various colonies and protectorates. Following he Second World War, all the Arab nations acquired their independence and the United Nations established the state of Israel which fought five wars to maintain its existence in the face of Arab opposition - a conflict that remains unresolved to this day.

Writing in 1995, Bernard lewis concludes his history of the Middle East with an optimism largely belied by the events over the following decade: ”Despite many reverses, European-style democracy is not dead in the Islamic lands, and there are some signs of a revival.”

“Islam” by Jonathan Bloom and Sheila Blair

This 258-page book, first published in 2000, is subtitled: “A Thousand Years Of Faith And Power”, so it covers the period from the 7th-16th centuries which is the first millennium of Islam. It is the companion volume to an acclaimed three-hour documentary of May 2001 on the American PBS television channel called “Islam: Empire Of Faith”. The book consists of three sections.

The first section, entitled “Muhammed And The Origins Of Islam”, covers the period 600-750. The Prophet Muhammed was born around the year 570. He married an older widow called Khadija and they had four daughters, each of whom played a role in the early history of Islam, and two sons, both of whom died in infancy. It was decided that the new era had begun on the first day of the first lunar month of the year in which Muhammed arrived in his new home of Yathrib (16 July 622 CE).

When Muhammed died, he left no legal successor and he had only one surviving daughter, Fatima, who was married to his cousin, Ali. In the subsequent struggle over authority, the followers of Ali become known as Shi'ites and this position finished up as very much a minority one in the Arab world as a whole. Those who supported a system of caliphs became known as the Sunnis and they now represent the overwhelming majority of Muslims in the world today. Shi'ite followers are divided into the Zaydis (or Fivers), the Ismailis (or Seveners) and the Twelvers. Sunni followers are divided into four main schools: the Hanafi school, the Maliki school, the Shafii school, and the Hanbali school.

The two holy works of Islam are the Koran (consisting of 114 suras or chapters) and the hadith (consisting of the collected sayings and deeds of the Prophet). These two works, along with consensus and analogy, provide the basis of the sharia, the rules and regulations that govern the everyday lives of Muslims.

The second section, entitled “The Golden Age”, covers the period 750-1250. Following the rapid and decisive military victories of the forces of Islam, a great empire existed that stretched from the shores of the Atlantic to the steppes of central Asia and the plains of northern India. Regional and imperial capitals such as Córdoba, Fez, Cairo, Baghdad, Isfahan and Samarkand flourished at a time when European urban civilisation withered. There was, nevertheless, much internal conflict as in the 11th century Arabs, Persians and Turks as well as Sunnis and Shi'ites fought among themselves. This internal turmoil was followed by the external challenges of successive Christian crusades. Nevertheless commerce, science and education thrived in the Muslim world and Europe was intellectually backward by comparison.

The third section, entitled “The Age Of Empires”, covers the period 1250-1700. The Golden Age of Islamic civilisation was brought to an abrupt end in the early 13th century by a series of cataclysmic invasions, with three regional powers emerging: the Mongols in Iran, the Mamluks in Egypt and Syria, and and a series of dynasties in the Maghrib (modern day Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia). The longest-lasting of all Muslim empires to rule in later times was the Ottomans (1281-1924) and the apex of Ottoman development was the 44-year reign of Süleyman from 1520-1566. The Ottomans' great rivals to the east were the Safavids (1501-1732) of Persia (modern day Iran). The authors declare that “the first thousand years of Islamic civilization was one of the most glorious in the history of mankind”.

In the “Introduction”, husband-and-wife team Bloom & Blair point out that Islam is now a faith followed by more than one billion people, approximately one-fifth of the world's population, and, in the United States, there are now more Muslims (over four million) than Episcopalians.

“The Palestine-Israeli Conflict” by Dan Cohn-Sherbok and Dawoud El-Alami

This is an unusual book on a difficult subject. Most of the book consists of two separate and very different accounts of the Palestine-Israeli conflict by American rabbi Professor Dan Cohn-Sherbok and distinguished Palestinian Dr Dawoud El-Alami respectively, both of whom are academics at the University of Wales, Lampeter. The two sections are very informative and, while inevitably partial, impressively measured. The last 20 pages consist of a debate between the two in which the temperature rises somewhat. A six-page chronology and a couple of maps add to the usefulness of this work to anyone wanting to understand this historic conflict.

Although this book's chronology starts at 1862 and the first civil unrest between Palestinian peasants and Jewish settlers occurred in 1891, at the very heart of the conflict is the creation of Israel in 1948, preceded by the Balfour Declaration of 1917, British Government White Papers of 1922, 1930 and 1939, and the United Nations General Assembly declaration of 1947.

For Cohn-Sherbok, this is overwhelmingly a moral issue: “The onslaught against European Jewry [in the Holocaust] is one of the most horrific chapters of modern history. Is this not sufficient moral grounds for the Jewish quest to obtain a foothold in their ancient homeland?” However, for El-Alami, it is essentially a legal issue: “On what basis did the British believe that they were entitled to promise to the Zionists a land that belonged to others? This question lies at the core of the Palestinian position.”

Cohn-Sherbok cries out: “In a world now faced with the very real threat of mass destruction, the flames of hostility continue to burn bright, with the threat of Jewish extermination as intense as ever.” But El-Alami pleads: “It was not Arabs who inflicted the holocaust on European Jewry, but their fellow Europeans, yet it is Arabs who have paid the price.”

The Israelis will never forget how, the day after the declaration of independence, five Arab states attacked with the intention of extinguishing the state of Israel at birth. This was the first of six wars and even today there is the constant threat of rocket attacks and suicide bombers. However, the Arab word remembers that, by the time the first war ended, half a million Arab refugees had fled from Israeli territory. Some of the territories occupied by the Israelis in 1967 remain under harsh military control, there have been a host of illegal settlements and an illegal separation wall, while the Palestinian refugee problem has now risen to some four million, most living in appalling conditions.

Both sides can refer to terrible atrocities that have deepened the bitterness. Arabs can recall the 1948 massacre by the Irgun at Deir Yassin when 107 were murdered, the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees in Sabra and Shatila camps by Lebanese militia forces while the Israelis turned a blind eye, and the 2002 attack on Jenin when - according to the Palestinians but not Human Rights Watch – hundreds were killed by the Israeli army. Israelis have their own horrors to recall: the 1972 Black September seizure and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the 1985 Palestinian Liberation Front hijacking of the “Achile Lauro”, and the 2002 suicide bombing at a discotheque in Tel Aviv which blew apart 21 young people.

What is the answer?

Cohn-Sherbok identifies five necessary ingredients for a lasting peace:

1. A conscious recognition on all sides that Israel has a right to exist
2. Recognition of the aspiration of the Palestinian people for a homeland of their own
3. Neighbouring Arab countries to carve out from their lands a Greater Palestine connected with a Palestinian homeland in the occupied territories
4. Rejection of the concept of bi-nationalism in a unified Jewish-Arab state
5. Economic, political and cultural support from Arab nations for an independent Palestinian state

El-Alami does not present such a clear list but makes clear that, in his view, there must be an end to the occupation of the West Bank, removal of the Jewish settlements in the occupied territories, removal of the wall, and a right of return for Palestinians.

Such conflicting objectives will be hard to reconcile but, since the latest edition of this book in June 2003, there has been the Geneva Accord of December 2003 [click here] which might eventually prove to be the basis of a settlement. One can only hope.

All reviews by ROGER DARLINGTON

Last modified on 11 July 2007

Any of these books can be purchased on-line from any one of the following suppliers:

Amazon click here
Books On Line click here
Waterstones click here

L>