The History of the World in 100 Plants

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The book can also provide some facts that can be surprising and new; for me, these included that some inventions happened in several places more or less at the same time (farming, writing, pottery, coins); that the first liquid we used from cows was blood not milk; that there is jade up in the Italian Alps; that there are bull-leapers even today (recortadors); that Xanadu can from the city name of Shangdu. And much more.

Though the book acts as an enthusiastic and informative guide to the ways in which objects can tell us stories about ourselves and our past, it remains aware of the issues with museums and the destructive process of collecting that filled them. It engages with the debate, offering no answers, but posing questions that the reader can consider, and manages to balance a celebration of the artefacts and their cultures without negating the controversial aspect of their current home. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants.  We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. As we were leaving the museum, I asked my brother-in-law (who is settled in England) what book I should buy from the museum, and he suggested the tome under discussion. He had listened to the original BBC radio series and liked it very much. Well, I have to thank him, because this book opened up a whole new vista on how we should view objects in a museum, and why my whirlwind tour left me disappointed. Some of these objects came to the museum through violence, when the people who made them were deprived of any chance to speak for themselves, and MacGregor inevitably becomes a kind of vetriloquist, trying to speak on behalf of the silenced. And yes it must be better that we tell all of the truth we can find of these histories so as not to repeat them, but here is this bark shield dropped by the man who ran from the musket shots of Cook's guards in Botany Bay and even now the suffering and subjugation of the indigenous Australian population continues and it is not only a case of not repeating as thinking how we can make reparations. I hope that the objects help to open such conversations and make space for, not replace, the voices of oppressed people. I love this book. I got it from my dear friend Dean, who is a museum professional, as a gift last Christmas. The reading of it has lasted me the entire year and has been a source of continual wonder. It consists of a series of short essays on 100 objects chosen by the director of the British Museum to tell the story of the history of the world. The objects are beautiful, inspiring, ingenious, inventive, compelling, challenging, complex, profound. I kept the book by my bedside. Sometimes I would read several essays in a row. But more often my reading was more spaced out because a single essay could set off a chain-reaction (like the entry on the Standard of Ur, which led me to read Sir Charles Leonard Woolley's first-hand account of his fabulous archeological discoveries in the ancient Sumerian city in the mid-1930s). I spent hours researching the objects on the Internet, looking at images, looking at maps.Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. The fossils of plants power our industries and our transport. Across history we have used plants to store knowledge, to kill, to fuel wars, to change our state of consciousness, to indicate our status. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants.

The book is organized into 20 sections of 5 objects. Those 20 sections are arranged chronologically, but more interestingly, a common theme for each section ties the objects together. So for example, section 1 is titled “Making us Human” and the 5 objects are: 1.) Mummy of Hornedjitef; 2.) Olduvai Stone Chipping Tool; 3.) Olduvai Handaxe; 4.) Swimming Reindeer; and 5.) Clovis Spear Point. Each section is organized similarly. From the author of The History of the World in 100 Animals, a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week, comes an inspirational new book that looks at the 100 plants that have had the greatest impact on humanity, stunningly illustrated throughout. As humans, we hold the planet in the palms of ours hands.The objects are interesting and well chosen to illustrate the cultures they came from and the changing technologies, beliefs, and challenges of the people who made them. If you regard the pieces as academic then they're pretty engaging. If you consider them for the lay reader / mass public ... then they're a little dry in places.

The ceremonial sloping wooden stool carved in an intriguing half-animal, half-human form that was made by the Taino people of the Caribbean whose society was devastated by the arrival of the Europeans in the West Indies. From the author of The History of the World in 100 Animals , a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week, comes an inspirational new book that looks at the 100 plants that have had the greatest impact on humanity, stunningly illustrated throughout. The religions that survive today are the ones that were spread and sustained by trade and power. It's profoundly paradoxical: Buddhism, the religion founded by an ascetic who spurned all comfort and riches, flourished thanks to the international trade in luxury goods." I don't see anything ironic about this, because before people saw the suffering that came with unethical trading practices and unscrupulous struggles for wealth, what need had they to reject them? Buddhism followed the poison for which it presented itself as the antidote. If you read about the Oxus Gold Chariot and didn't think know the tradition of respect for religious diversity in Zoroastrian Iran persisted into the Muslim era, this chapter is for you. Shah Abbas, a contemporary of Elizabeth I, eager to develop trade relationships, had a very multicultural court at Isfahan, and this standard, made for a Shi'a ceremony but with skills and materials from distant lands, shows what a cosmopolitan place Iran was through the period. This is a wonderful book that selects 100 objects in the British Museum to tell the story of civilization throughout the world. Instead of exclusively focusing on British, or European, or North American artifacts, Neil MacGregor, has put together a truly comprehensive historical atlas from every continent except Antarctica. It was a joint project between the British Museum and the BBC and it had to cover from the beginning of human history to the present. While Mr. MacGregor was the director of the British Museum from 2002 to 2015, you can tell that this was a huge team effort just by the range of objects selected and the depth of detail regarding those objects.We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. But we couldn’t live for a day without plants. Our past is all about plants, our present is all tied up with plants; and without plants there is no future. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants. We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world.