A Short History of the World by H. G. Wells, with updates by G. P. Wells and Raymond Postgate. Penguin Books, 1965 [Original version 1922]. 363 pages.
(A quick search indicates that the version I discuss here is no longer in print. The link above is to a reprint of the original version of this book.)
Nowadays, we mostly remember H. G. Wells as a pioneer of science fiction, but in his own day, he was better known for his nonfiction. Although he had no remarkable academic credentials, he was a prolific writer and a bold thinker, and he set England abuzz with often outrageous ideas, which changed constantly. A few years ago, I happened upon a volume of his Short History of the World, which is his second attempt at summarizing world history, the first and longer being the Outline of History. I finally sat down to read it recently and might as well offer my thoughts.
Wells opens the book by assuring us that this will be a dispassionate review of the history of the world with no personal editorializing, but anyone with a passing knowledge of Wells probably knows that refraining from editorializing was something of which he was incapable, so this is very much a vision of world history through the eyes of its particular author. But Wells is a difficult man to pin down because his ideas changed from year to year: Right at the turn of the century, he advocated the genocide of all non-white races, but a handful of years later, he was reading Booker T. Washington and expressing sympathy for the plight of the American negro. He liked eugenics one minute and later rejected it. He was a member of the Fabian Society but got kicked out when he argued in favor of polygamy. G. K. Chesterton gives Wells some backhanded compliments in his book Heretics, describing him as always growing—but it’s unclear if he was really growing or simply throwing ideas against a wall to see what would stick.
If Wells had any consistent principles, they were his atheism and his belief in the goodness and inevitability of a future worldwide government. The latter appears to have been his guiding light throughout his intellectual life and the reason why he was mostly a socialist and at times (maybe) a fascist. We may take this as his religious belief, something he clung to despite all obstacles and evidence to the contrary. It is remarkable that he could study history as he did and still believe in some far-off utopia: His portrayal of the past is a catalog of folly and duplicity, yet he continued to believe that this foolish animal called man would in the future produce global unity. Therefore, despite his atheism and malleability, we may say that he was a man of deep faith.
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