From ancient dynasties to modern fortunes, family has long defined our past, present and future.
…
Everything has a story, and writers have been trying for thousands of years to compose a universal history of everything. “In the most ancient times,” thought the Hellenistic historian Polybius, in the second century BC, “history was a series of unrelated episodes, but from now on history becomes an organic whole. Europe and Africa with Asia and Asia with Africa and Europe." For the past hundred years or so, each generation of English-speaking readers has been treated to a new blockbuster that attempts to piece together world history. The "The Outline of History” (1920) by HG Wells, written “to be read as much by Hindus or Muslims or Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans,” argued “that men constitute a universal brotherhood… that their individual lives, nations and tribes them, cross and intermingle and continue to merge again at last into a common human destiny." Then came Arnold Toynbee, whose twelve-volume "Study of History” (1934-61), condensed into two bestsellers, proposed that human civilizations rose and fell in predictable stages. Over time, Jared Diamond swept with “Guns, Germs, and Steel” (1997), providing an explanation with agriculture and animals for the phases of human development. Most recently, the field belongs to Yuval Noah Harari, whose “Sapiens” (2011) describes the rise of humanity over other species and offers Silicon Valley-friendly speculation about a post-human future.
The appeal of such chronicles lies in the way they shape history in the service of a main plot, identifying laws or trends that explain the course of human events. Western historians have long mapped history as the linear, progressive elaboration of some larger design—courtesy of God, Nature, or Marx. Other historians, most influentially the 14th-century scholar Ibn Khaldun, embraced a sine wave model of cultural growth and decline. The cliché that "history repeats itself" promotes a cyclical version of events, reminiscent of Hindu cosmology that divided time into four ages, each more degenerate than the last.
What if world history is more like a family tree, its bearers difficult to trace through staggered ranks, multiplying branches, and an ever-expanding jumble of names? This is the model, heavier on the teachers than on the plot, proposed by “The World: A Family History of Humanity” (Knopf) by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a new composition that, as the title suggests, approaches the scanning of world history through the family. —or, rather, through families in power. In some thirteen hundred pages, Cosmos offers a monumental overview of dynastic rule: how to acquire it, how to keep it, how to squander it.
…
"The word family has an air of warmth and affection, but of course in real life families can also be nexus of struggle and cruelty," Montefiore begins. The dynastic history, as he tells it, was from the beginning full of rivalry, treachery and violence. A case in point might be Julius Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, the founder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, who established his rule by trapping and murdering Caesar's biological son, Caesar, the last of the Ptolemies. Octavian's cruelty seemed mild compared to many other ancient successions, such as that of the Achaemenid king Artaxerxes II, who was opposed by his mother and her beloved son. When the beloved died in battle against Artaxerxes, Montefiore reports, their mother executed one of his murderers by boating, “in which the victim was confined between two boats while force-fed honey and milk until worms, rats and flies infested the living cocoon of their excrement, eating the living." He also ordered the family of Artaxerxes' wife to be buried alive and murdered her daughter-in-law by feeding her poisoned birds.
As such episodes suggest, it was one thing to hold power and another to pass it on peacefully. "Succession is the great test of a system, few do well," observes Montefiore. Two different models came together in the thirteenth century. One was practiced by the Mongol empire and its successor states, which tended to hand over power to whichever of a ruler's sons proved the most skilled in war, politics, or intra-family feuds. The Mongol conquests were accompanied by rampant sexual violence. The DNA evidence suggests that Genghis Khan may be "literally the father of Asia," Montefiore writes. He insists, however, that "the women of nomadic peoples enjoyed more freedom and authority than those in sedentary states" and that the many wives, concubines, and concubines in a royal court could occasionally wield real power. The empress of the Tang Dynasty rose from sixth-grade concubine through the roles of empress consort (wife), guardian (widow), and regent (mother), eventually becoming empress in her own right. More than a millennium later, another low-ranking concubine who became de facto ruler, Empress Dowager Cixi, contrasted with her peer Queen Victoria: “I don't think her life was as interesting and eventful as mine... She had nothing to say about politics. Now look at me. I have 400 million dependents on my judgment."
The political liability of these methods of dividing heirs was that rival claimants could split the kingdom. The Ottomans handled this problem by sending a brigade of mute executioners, known as the Dumb, to strangle a sultan's male relatives and thus limit the spread of royal blood. This created intense power games in the harem as mothers fought to place their sons at the front of the line for succession. A sultan had to stop visiting a wife as soon as she gave birth to a son, Montefiore explains, "so that every prince may be supported by a mother." Suleiman the Magnificent – whose father paved the way for him by having three brothers, seven nephews and many of his sons strangled – broke this rule with a young Ukrainian captive named Hürrem (also known as Roxelana). Suleiman had more than one son with Hurrem, freed her and married her. He then strangled his eldest son by another mother. But that left two of his and Hürrem's surviving grown sons jockeying for the top spot. After a failed attempt to seize power, the younger fled to Persia, where he was hunted down by the Dumb and Hanged.
A different model for building a dynasty was based on the seemingly calmer method of intermarriage. Alexander the Great was an early adopter of exogamy as an accessory to conquest. Montefiore says he merged "the elites of his new empire, Macedonians and Persians, in a mass multicultural marriage" at Susa in 324 BC. Many other empire builders over the centuries followed suit, most notably the Mughal emperor Akbar, who followed his submission to the Rajputs and married an Amber princess, and thus, Montefiore notes, began "a fusion of the Tamerlane lineages and the Rajputs with Sanskritic and Persian cultures' that transformed the arts of northern India. But it was in Catholic Europe, with its insistence on monogamy and primogeniture, that the royal wife became an essential tool of dynasty building. (The Catholic Church itself, which imposed celibacy on its own Fathers, Mothers, Brothers and Sisters, maintained authority in the family when Popes placed their nephews—nipote, in Italian—in positions of authority, a practice which, as points out Montefiore, gave us the term "nepotism".)
The archetypal dynasty of this model was the Habsburgs. The family had risen to prominence in the thirteenth century by the self-styled Count Rudolph, who presented himself as the godfather of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II. Rudolf, recognizing the strategic value of family alliances, casually married off five of his daughters to German princes, thus helping to consolidate his position as king of the Germans. His method was violently echoed by the Habsburg-backed conquerors, who, to shore up their power, forced the relatives of Motecuhzoma and Atahualpa into marriages. And it was to the Habsburgs that Napoleon Bonaparte turned when he sought a mother for his own longed-for heir.
The ruthless biology of primogeniture tended to reduce women to the position of nurturers – and occasionally men too. Otto von Bismarck mockingly called Saxe-Coburg, the home of Queen Victoria's husband Albert, "the breast farm of Europe." This system led to inbreeding and had genetic value. By the sixteenth century, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V suffered from a massively protruding jaw, with his mouth hanging open and a stubby tongue slurring his speech. His son Philip II faced a congenitally incompetent heir, Don Carlos, who, Montefiore summarizes, abused animals, whipped maids, dethroned a servant, and burned a house; he also attempted to assassinate several courtiers, stage a coup in the Netherlands , stabbing his uncle, murdering his father and killing himself by "swallowing a diamond". The Spanish Habsburg line ended a few generations later with "Carlos the Hexed," whose parents were uncle and niece; who, according to Montefiore's description, "was born with a swelling of the brain, one kidney, one testicle, and one jaw so deformed he could barely chew but a neck so wide he could swallow chunks of meat,” along with “ambiguous genitalia” that may have contributed to his inability to become an heir.
By the nineteenth century, European dynasties formed an inbred density of cousins, almost all descended from Charlemagne and many, more closely, from Queen Victoria. World War I was the family feud to end them all. Sparked by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph, the war pitted three first cousins against each other: Kaiser Wilhelm II, Tsar Nicholas II, and King George V (By then, his only son Franz Joseph had killed himself His wife—and his first cousin—had been stabbed to death; his brother, Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, had been executed; and another first cousin, Emperor Pedro II of Brazil, had been deposed. ) The war, Montefiore observes, would ultimately “destroy” the dynasties it was designed to save”: the Habsburgs, Ottomans, Romanovs, and Hohenzollerns had all been driven out by 1922.
With the rise to political power of non-royal families in the twentieth century, Montefiore's model of dynastic power changes from monarchs to mobsters. The Mafia model applies as easily to the Kennedys, whom Montefiore calls "a macho family business" with Mafia ties, as it does to the Yeltsins, Boris and his daughter Tatiana, whose designated oligarch family chose Vladimir Putin as their heir. In Montefiore's view, Donald Trump is a wannabe dictator who has installed a "disorganized, corrupt and nepotistic court" in the most iconic palace of democracy.
The Mafia metaphor also captures an important truth: the story of family power is a story of successful jobs, including the latest order from Mohammed bin Salman to dismantle Jamal Khashoggi—which has been linked to infighting within the House of Saud—and the arrangement of Kim Jong Un, the assassination of his half-brother. By the end of the eighteenth century, the concept of family was taking on another role. Modern democratic governments have seized upon the language of kinship—the Jacobin "brotherhood," the "Founding Fathers" of the United States—to forge political communities cut off from particular dynasties. Versions of the "Father of the Nation" title have been bestowed on leaders from Argentina's Jose de San Martin to Zambia's Kenneth Kaunda. Immanuel Kant, among others, believed that democracies would be more peaceful than monarchies because they would be free from dynastic struggles. But some of the bloodiest conflicts of modern times hinge on who does and who does not belong to which ethnic "family." Mustafa Kemal renamed himself "Father of the Turks" (Ataturk) in the wake of the Armenian Genocide. A century later, Aung San Suu Kyi, the daughter of Myanmar's "Father of the Nation", has refused to condemn the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya, who have been denied citizenship and thus excluded from being counted as Burmese.
It was partly to counter the genocidal effects of nationalism that, in 1955, MoMA's curator of photography, Edward Steichen, presented “The Family of Man,” a major exhibition designed to display “the essential unity of mankind throughout people". The problem is that even the most closely knit human family can be divided against itself. In the final days of the Soviet Union, Montefiore recounts, US Secretary of State James Baker discussed the possibility war in Ukraine with a member of the Politburo. The Soviet official remarked that Ukraine had twelve million Russians and many were in mixed marriages, "so what kind of war would this be?" Baker told him, "A normal war."
"The World" has the weight and character of a dictionary, being divided into twenty-three "acts," each characterized by elements of the world's population, and subdivided into sections headed by family names. Montefiore makes good on his promise to write an "authentic world history, not unbalanced by too much focus on Britain and Europe." With vivid sentences and lively vignettes, it captures the widening global circuits of people, commerce, and culture. Here is the Roman emperor Claudius parading through the streets of present-day Colchester on an elephant; there is Manicongo Garcia holding court in present-day Angola "among Flemish tapestries, wearing Indian linen, eating with American silver cutlery." Here are the Anglo-Saxon Mercian kings using Arabic dirhams as local currency; there is the Khmer ruler Jayavarman VII converting the Hindu site of Angkor for Buddhist worship.
It is largely up to the reader, however, to make sense of these portraits, especially when it comes to the conceit at the center of the book. First, a "family history" is not the same as a "history of the family," of the kind pioneered by social historians such as Philippe Ariès, Louise A. Tilly, and Lawrence Stone. Montefiore merely refers to changes such as the consolidation of the nuclear family in Europe after the Black Death and the effects on the family of the Industrial Revolution and modern contraception. It offers no solid analysis of the effects different family structures had on who could hold power and why.
To the extent that "The World" has a plot, it is about the resilience of dynastic power in the face of political transformation. Even today, more than forty nations have a monarch as their head of state, fifteen of them in the British Commonwealth. However, in democracies, too, the possession of political power is very often a matter of family ties. "Well, Franklin, there's nothing like keeping the name in the family," remarked Teddy Roosevelt at the wedding of his niece Eleanor to her cousin. Americans question how many US presidential candidates in the past generation were family members of former senators (George H. Bush, Al Gore), governors (Mitt Romney) and presidents (George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton). This is nothing compared to post-war Japan, where almost every prime minister comes from a political family and about thirty percent of parliamentary representatives are second generation. In Asia more generally, the path to power for women, in particular, has often been through male relatives: of the eleven women who have led Asian republics, nine were the daughter, sister or widow of a male leader. This is not how democracy was supposed to work.
Why is hereditary power so hard to shake? Montefiore argues that “dynastic reversal seems both natural and realistic when weak states are not trusted to deliver justice or protection and loyalty remains relative rather than institutional” – and new states, many suffering from colonial sovereignty, are rarely strong states. Then, people in power can bend the rules in ways that will help them and their successors maintain them. It's not just monarchies that are becoming authoritarian: democracies can get there on their own.
A fuller answer, however, is based on the material reality of inheritance, which has systematically enriched some families and deprived others. This is most clearly seen in the history of slavery, which, as Montefiore often points out, has always been twinned with the history of the family. Transatlantic slavery, in particular, was "an anti-family institution" that captured families and broke them up, while creating conditions of sexual slavery that produced false parallel families. Sally Hemings was the daughter of her first owner, John Wayles. the half-sister of her next owner, Martha Wales, and the mistress of another, Martha's husband, Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson's children by Wales and Hemings were both half-siblings and cousins—one enslaved, the other free. Even without such close ties, European family privilege was magnified in the distorting mirror of American slavery. In Guyana in 1823, for example, an enslaved man and his son Jack Gladstone led a rebellion against their British owner, John Gladstone. Jack Gladstone, for his role in the rebellion, was exiled to St. Lucia. John Gladstone, for his ownership of more than two thousand slave laborers, received the largest payment made by the British government to a slaveholder when slavery was abolished. John's son William Gladstone, the future Liberal Prime Minister, gave his maiden speech in Parliament defending John's treatment of his work.
Inheritance of money and position largely explains the prevalence of dynastic patterns in other areas. Thomas Paine argued that "a hereditary monarch is as absurd a position as a hereditary physician," and yet in many societies being a physician was often hereditary. The same goes for artists, bankers, soldiers and more. The Paris executioner who beheaded Louis XVI was preceded in the job by three generations of family members. The Montefiore family itself, Britain's most prominent Sephardic dynasty, makes the occasional appearance in these pages, alongside the Rothschilds (with whom the Montefiores intermarried). Both were banking families, and their prominence remains in part due to the accumulation of wealth from generation to generation. A recent study of occupations in the United States shows that children are disproportionately likely to have the same job as one of their parents. Children of doctors are twenty times more likely than others to go into medicine; children of textile machine operators are hundreds of times more likely to operate textile machinery. Children of academics - like me - are five times more likely to go into academia than others. They are nepo babies all the way down.
There is an obvious tension between the ideal of democracy, in which citizens enjoy equal status regardless of marital status, and the reality that the family remains the primary mediator of social, cultural and economic opportunity. This does not mean that democracy is bound to be dynastic, nor does it mean that families must be replaced by the state. It means that dynasties play as persistent and paradoxical a role in many democracies as families do for many citizens of those democracies — they can't live with them, they can't live without them.
*Published in the print edition of the issue May 29, 2023, with Title "Succession'.
**Cover photo: In his new book, Simon Sebag Montefiore traces the dangerous and prescriptive power of descent through centuries of rivalry, treachery and violence. Illustration: Sophie Hollington
Source: new yorker