Capsule History

How long is 12,000 years? It took H. G. Wells more than 1,100 pages to cover the ground in briefest detail in his Outline. It is taking Arnold Toynbee at least six volumes in his Study. But this week, U.S. readers could get the 12,000 years of man's history in a capsule--a full History of the World (Harcourt, Brace; $3) all in 300 pages.

Author Rene Sedillot is a Parisian economist who began his project in 1941 "because I didn't want to write collaborationist articles, and yet didn't want my pen to turn rusty." His book won critics' applause in Paris, sold nearly 100,000 copies in Sweden, was published in London, may soon come out in Argentina and Norway. U.S. readers will find that there is good reason for this success: for all its brevity, Sedillot's history is a bold and breathless tale of suspense.

Spotlight on Europe. As the centuries whisk by, Sedillot takes only 18 pages to wrench Man out of the amoeba and plunk him down on the banks of the Nile. For the next 20 pages, history flashes from the Indus to the Mediterranean like a restless spotlight, fixing for a moment on King Hammurabi of Babylonia, the empire of Assyria, the fabulous and frivolous Palace of Knossos, and the Phoenician masters of the sea.

After that, despite the thunderous threats of an Alexander or a Genghis Khan, Europe keeps the stage. Greece falls exhausted from her wars; Rome emerges as the "carrier" of Greek culture, and ends as the "carrier" of Christianity. Christendom, which strives in vain to find a political heir to Rome, eventually splits into the ages of Italy, Spain, France and England.

Because he is an economist, Sedillot places heavy emphasis on man's material march. He is strong on the movement of trade, sometimes weak on the movement of ideas. As a result, he seems more at home in Rome than in Greece, more understanding of the clever, quarrelsome city-states of Italy ("The word imbroglio is hers") and the colonial sweep of Spain ("Next to God came spices") than of the Middle Ages. He hastens over Plato and Aristotle in a sentence, barely nods to St. Augustine, gives no indication at all of the significance of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Verdict on Progress. But there is an advantage to viewing Man at a single sitting, if only to see his mistakes bundled so tightly together. "Even in her errors," says Author Sedillot, "the Age of 'Progress' is no innovator. Monetary catastrophes are as old as--money. Famine is but an old curse revived. Hitler's and Stalin's labor camps have done no more than renew the worst forms of ancient slavery. Atheism and superstition nourished in Rome of the decadence. The pacifist illusion wrought havoc in Hellas. State control and socialism were known in Egypt under the Pharaohs, in Peru under the Incas. The dictatorships of the 20th Century take the mind back to the Greek tyrannies, which were built on popular support . . ."

Economist Sedillot's own verdict on history: "Twelve thousand years, in which [Man] has discovered more about the world and very little about himself."

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