Why the past 75 years of human history have been 'an anomaly'

With two wars raging and dynastic power on the rise around the world, the post-1945 world order feels like it’s being tested like never before.

One British historian says it’s more like a return to normality.

"It was just so unusual in world affairs to have an orderly period with rules and two clear dominating participants," Simon Sebag Montefiore says. "While most of world history is about many, many medium powers and a few big powers and lots of small powers all fighting for survival and power."

Today, On Point: How a world historian views our current moment, and where we could be headed next.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, British historian. His latest book is “The World: A Family History of Humanity." He’s also the author of a history of the Middle East called “Jerusalem: The Biography.”

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Simon Sebag Montefiore is an acclaimed historian. His knowledge of the Middle East, Russian and Soviet history in particular, has been called encyclopedic. In his most recent book, he turned that encyclopedic mind towards nothing short of a history of the entire world.

This time, told through the stories of specific families throughout human history and across international borders, just as those borders themselves fluctuate along with the rise and fall of empires and the families that ruled over them. And by the way, The book, called “The World: A Family History of Humanity," is also very funny, complete with characters such as Basil the unibrow horse whisperer.

Because let's admit it, humanity also has a deeply absurd streak. Now, Sebag Montefiore's book was first published in 2022, but it's been recently reissued along with a new conclusion. And it's that conclusion we'd like to focus on today. Because in it, he writes about what he calls the beginning of the end of the 70 year peace, and humanity's creeping and possibly inexorable return to a time where people around the world aren't enjoying the fruits of liberty and democracy, but instead are subject to the mercurial, self interested actions of dynastic rule.

Simon Sebag Montefiore, welcome back to On Point.

SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE: It's great to be to be with you today, Meghna. How are you?

CHAKRABARTI: I'm doing quite well and looking forward to this conversation. But, before we get to the new addition to, or new addition and addition to your book, Simon, since I mentioned Basil the unibrow horse whisperer, I think we need to tell everyone listening a little bit more about who this person is.

Tell us.

MONTEFIORE: Oh Basil. Basil I was the first of the Macedonian dynasty in the Byzantine Empire. And in the Middle Ages, and he was a fascinating character who came to power essentially because of his brilliant ability to calm horses, to groom horses.

And through that, he became great friends with the emperor, perhaps even homosexual lovers with the emperor, and the emperor promoted him to Caesar. And in the end, Basil savagely assassinated the emperor himself and seized power and founded an extremely successful dynasty. One of the most successful dynasties in the Byzantine empire, because the Byzantine empire, they never called themselves Byzantine.

They called themselves Romaioi or the Roman Empire, they were the Eastern Roman Empire. And just one of the many vast states that seemed to be eternal players in the world game for many centuries that vanished completely. And of course, world history is full of these. And that's why, when one looks at the world today, one has to realize that states that we think of as completely eternal may not be, may be more temporary than we think.

For example, Russia itself as an empire was only founded by Peter the Great in the early 18th century, 1721 to '22. Before that, it was called the Grand Principality of Moscow. And Russia itself has only been a big player in the way that we know it today for 300 years.

CHAKRABARTI: Very short in comparison to other previous empires that lasted thousands.

MONTEFIORE: Correct.

CHAKRABARTI: But this is the thing that I find so compelling about your book and why I'm glad you reissued it with this new conclusion. Because history isn't simply events, right? History is the people who precipitate and cause those events and have to experience them, as well. So just sticking with Mr. Basil of the famed unibrow.

What is it about his story that you felt justified a chapter in your book? What is it about him and how he ruled that tells us more about ourselves even now?

MONTEFIORE: He's a surprising character because he didn't come from the elite. He rose to power through personal connections.

He was sponsored by a very powerful princess, a magnate, a female magnate. Then he was sponsored by the emperor. So his career is really about how patronage, connections, coteries form webs of power that can change history. So that's really the significance of him. And also the fact that his family ruled for a big chunk and were incredibly successful.

And you wouldn't really have expected that from this completely uneducated horse groom. So history is full of surprises like that. The reason why I chose families, and he's a classic example of this, is that most world histories and we love reading them, are filled with themes, lists of commodities and trade routes and new scientific inventions.

But the people are missing. And on the other hand, we love biographies that are filled with personal details, but are distorted in that direction, too. So what I wanted to do was find a way to combine the real global span of world history and the intimacy, the grip, the grit, the juice of biography. And this is the way I found to do that.

CHAKRABARTI: And in that conclusion, you write that the most successful leaders are visionaries, transcendent strategists, but also improvisers, opportunists, and creatures of bungle and luck. All those words actually sound very familiar, given where we are as a species today.

So this is what I want to spend quite a bit of time talking about with you, Simon. Because you present this idea, in the conclusion of this, of your book, of the 70-year peace and how it may be coming to an end. So what is the 70-year peace in your mind?

MONTEFIORE: I think that when we look at the world today, people are unsettled, confused, and befuddled almost by what is happening to the world.

And what they don't realize is that what we've really been living through is an exceptional period, an anomaly in world history, in which, for around 70, 75 years, the world was governed, was controlled, was overseen and policed by, essentially, by two and then one mega powers. And that was the Soviet Union, United States, and then just the United States.

And during that period also, the reason why a rules-based, a rule-based world order came in, came into existence was because of the shock. Of the two great wars, the two world wars ending in 1945, and the terrible things that happened, particularly in the second one. And because of that, within our societies and in the world society, in the world game, rules were brought in.

Now, of course, it wasn't, the 70-year peace was not a complete peace. There were many brutal wars, many of which are forgotten, in which I recount, Angola, Congo, many others, Vietnam. And so it wasn't really a full period of peace. But two superpowers kept order. So for the first 40 years, 1945 to '85 the Soviet Union and the United States played a sort of game of chess, two players, from '85 to around 2015 or the election of Trump, 2016.

It was a game of solitaire, the unipolarity of the United States. And since then, we have seen a breakdown in that sort of control, that sort of discipline, that sort of order. And it's confusing for us, but in fact, we're returning to the way the world was always run or not run.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm glad you mentioned about the fact that the 70-year peace wasn't exactly a peace everywhere or for everyone.

We're going to return to that point a little bit later in the show, Simon. But you start, when you explain what the 70-year peace is in the book, you actually begin by looking at Russia's invasion of Ukraine as a marking point for the possible end of this unprecedented period of peace. Why that moment?

MONTEFIORE: It was a very important moment because it was to overturn the whole way that international affairs had been organized since 1945, the creation of the United Nations. And since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Russia had accepted that all the 15 republics of the Soviet Union became independent states.

And that had been recognized in treaties and agreements. And president Putin made a decision probably encouraged by study of history, his isolation during the COVID lockdowns and other factors, too. But he made a decision to challenge that whole order. Now, he thought he was going to get away with it, by the way, without any resistance.

I also think if he tried it in 2014, he would have got away with it. So I think that he felt that he'd missed an opportunity, but he also felt he saw a unique moment that he would be able to achieve this. The EU had broken up, the Americans had withdrawn from Kabul in a humiliating retreat.

There was a slightly comical prime minister of Britain in Boris Johnson.

CHAKRABARTI: Slightly.

MONTEFIORE: And Ukraine, which he regarded as not a real authentic state or nation, had actually elected a comedian as president. And that must have seemed to him the final sign. That he would be kicking at a kind of, he would be kicking a house of cards, and that Ukraine would collapse.

And of course, as we know, it didn't, but nonetheless, this changed the international order and it gave a chance for other powers to empathize with Russia, to ally with Russia, Iran, China, who'd long regarded the rules based international order as the invention of the capitalist West. And so the invasion was more than just Russia trying to win back a province that it regarded as an essential part of its empire.

This became a means for much of the rest of the world to challenge everything that America held dear.

CHAKRABARTI: I've got a follow up to that in just a second, but when you mentioned both Boris Johnson and Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the same sentence. Zelenskyy, though a comedian in his previous profession, a man standing up with great dignity and strength to be there for his people and lead them through a war. That as a counterpoint to Boris Johnson, who was having parties in London during COVID while the rest of his nation was under threat of arrest if they left their houses.

Very interesting example of what you write about, how you can never really know what happens. Because leaders roll the dice, right?

MONTEFIORE: That's right. I think the real point you're making is that Boris Johnson was a politician who turned out to be a comedian.

Zelenskyy was a comedian who turned out to be a statesman.

CHAKRABARTI: But neither were guaranteed. Exactly. Perhaps I'm saying Johnson, in Johnson's case, we probably should have seen that coming.

MONTEFIORE: We should have.

CHAKRABARTI: But when we come back, Simon, I want to talk to you much more about this conclusion and also reach back occasionally to some of the families that you write about and try to glean some lessons from them about this place that we are as a species now.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Now Simon, in your book, and in the new conclusion that you've added to it, you write that Putin's invasion of Ukraine is not a new way of exerting power.

"Its flint-hearted ferocity is a return to normality in a way that diness in this book would recognize as routine." And then you say essentially normal disorder has been resumed. So tell us a little bit more about that normality that you talk about. Because I would argue that obviously exerting power has never gone away amongst the nation's most power, the world's most powerful groups or nations.

Even the use of violence to exert that power. Because while the United States had and perhaps still does have extensive soft power, this country itself, even prior, prior to Putin's invasion of Ukraine, has tried to use conventional use of force to extend power. It's easy enough to point to both Iraq and Afghanistan.

So what's different about that?

MONTEFIORE: That's the argument that that the autocratic world would make. They would say it's exactly the same and that Western values are just pure hypocrisy. But if we look at the Putin invasion, of course, they are, Putin is trying to regain Ukraine, believing that the Russian state is meaningless without the possession of Ukraine.

And many Russian leaders have believed that, from the Tsar Alexei to Peter, his son, Peter the Great, to Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin who really conquered in the 18th century. And right through to Lenin and Stalin, who in the Russian civil war, really put all that emphasis on regaining Ukraine, essential because of its population.

It's resources and its wheat, its ability to produce wheat, the grain basket of Europe. What was unusual about this was the completely bold and unabashed way that Putin talked about empire, for a start, before he made this invasion. And of course, until recently, until World War I, it was a perfectly respectable way to build your country, was by war.

It was only with the World War I that it became less respectable, that people began to realize that warfare was not such a glamorous and wonderful thing. Ad that it was a grinding destruction of humankind. And that went right way through, from World War I, onwards, and that has suddenly changed again with Putin's invasion.

War has become, once again, a valid way in itself to promote power.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm going to press on this a little bit more Simon, because again, I want to take advantage of that encyclopedic knowledge in your head, because I will buy your analysis that Russia, and Russia, particularly Vladimir Putin right now is justifying his actions by hearkening back to this great and somewhat imagined past of Russian history.

And that is different from what has propelled, let's say, America's imperial, and I will call it that, exploits around the world. In the various wars this country has either initiated or been involved with, its attempts to, quote-unquote, spread democracy, to spread American, the American form of capitalism.

But even that too is not unique, right? Thinking of the British empire, it was definitely an economic empire, but also justified, or the attempts to justify it included this idea of bringing the civilizing forces of British culture to the great unwashed of the world, right? It wasn't just exclusively, we want to rule you.

It is, we can better you.

MONTEFIORE: Yeah, virtually all empires start with acts of commercial venturing and astonishing violence. And all empires are established that way. The second stage is the establishment of imperial bureaucracies to rule these. And a sort of philanthropic humanitarian justification for ruling, and the British empire in that way is very like other empires before it.

And it's not, if you read about the Dutch empire, if you read about the French empire, if you read about the Spanish and Portuguese empires, all of them have similar ideologies. It's just the British one at the moment is under great scrutiny for all sorts of reasons, which are to do with Anglo American scrutiny of their past, of which is happening at the moment, which is fascinating and essential, I should say.

So yeah, all empires are a combination of self-interest and hypocrisy and also often genuinely humanitarian projects, and it's all about the balance of those different, of those different human spirits, isn't it?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Fairly recently when King Charles said he was going to request an examination of the crown's role in the transatlantic slave trade.

First, I laughed, because I thought, what examination is needed? It's obvious. But to your point, perhaps it's a good thing that self-examination is going on.

MONTEFIORE: Yeah, this is one of the great things about history at the moment, and I reflect it very much in the book.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

MONTEFIORE: Is that lots of things about our history weren't really well known, or weren't, like for example, slavery and from the slavery that we're obsessed today with, Atlantic slave, the transatlantic slave trade that we know so well because of American history because of British history and the British role in it. Britain abolished the slave trade, but also Britain was the dominant player in the slave trade for over a century.

But at the same time, that led me to look at many other slave trades, and that's the great thing about a truly global history. And there are many slave trades that people don't know about. For example, the East African slave trade was a massive slave trade, and it was controlled basically by the Omani family from Arabia, which ruled the whole East Coast of Africa for a couple of centuries, which most people don't know about.

And of course, when you start to look into slavery. You realize that it, tragically, it was an essential part of human existence in societies. From the earliest records in Sumeria right up to the 1830s, when Britain started the process of abolishing it.

CHAKRABARTI: So let's stick with the crown, the monarchy in the UK for a second, because that'll help us refocus on this idea of families throughout history.

What purpose right now do you think not just the crown in the UK, but the family now, coming to a point at King Charles, right now is serving for the British people?

MONTEFIORE: You can apply rational rules to the question of why constitutional monarchies work in Northern European kingdoms.

And of course, because it's not just, Britain's the most famous, but of course there's Holland, there's Sweden, there's Norway, there's Denmark and so on. Why do they work? The answer is idiosyncratic, but it does work, and you only have to look at the crises we've had in Britain recently with two prime ministers falling, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. And the experience that was on display when Queen Elizabeth II in her nineties received those prime ministers.

And then in the middle of this crisis, she died and was succeeded by Charles III, who's extremely experienced in terms of service and duty for decades. You just saw the reassuring nature of the soft power of the monarchy. And how well that works, actually. And one can make, one can contrast that with France or America, for example, where one, it's extremely hard to remove an American president.

It's a lot easier to remove a British prime minister. But secondly, where because the presidential power remains with the monarchy, if you like, rather than as it works in America, you saw why the idiosyncratic system of constitutional hereditary monarchy works in a way that defies rational analysis.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Defies rational analysis, but you make the point in your book, and almost every one of the families that you explore. Especially in that conclusion, that new conclusion, that we have to acknowledge what E. O. Wilson famously said, is that we still have primordial emotions, essentially and that really is what drives so much of human history.

But there's something in particular about the staying power of dynastic rule. Even Britain, as you mentioned, the appropriate way of looking at it is that it is a constitutional monarchy. The crown has power, but not really the operational power that it takes to run the country. What I wonder, by the way, just to note, that was also hard won in British history, as well. But what I wonder is have we never fully let that go, even in the United States, right?

Because you mentioned one of the --

MONTEFIORE: Yes. I was going to say, one of the ironic things is in the countries like Britain and Holland, where you have a hereditary constitutional monarchy, idiosyncratic as it is, you have no political families, while in the United States, which is Republican, was founded on opposition to a British monarchy, you actually have a multitude of political families.

You only have to look at the governors of America to see the number of them that are children of governors or senators, the number of senators that are children of senators. And that's before you even get to national political dynasties, like the Trumps, the Kennedys, the Roosevelt's, the Adamses and so on, the Bush's.

So that's one of the ironic things about hereditary monarchies and republics. But better example is India or Pakistan, for example, two massive democratic nations which have been dominated by families. Of course, the present Prime Minister Modi is an antidote to 60 years of domination of India, the world's biggest democracy by the Gandhi-Nehru family.

And you only have to look at, for example, Pakistan today, where the government is actually a dynastic government. There's been, there's a Bhutto in it, who I think he's foreign minister today. He is like the son, the grandson, the great grandson of feudal magnates who have also been presidents, prime ministers, and foreign ministers of Pakistan.

The prime minister is the brother of another prime minister. The Sharif family, from the Sharif family. In other words, throughout South Asia in particularly, as well as in the United States and in many other countries, these demo dynasties, as I call them, elected families to power, retain enormous prestige and power.

There are many other examples. Kenyatta, the son of the first president has just left power in Kenya. Marcos, the son of Ferdinand Marcos, Bongbong Marcos, is now ruling the Philippines. And there are many other examples of this. So the great thing about demo dynasties, though, is that families retain the prestige, but you can get rid of them and you don't have to reelect them.

And that's good. But the idea is reassurance. Continuity and a family that we recognize as something like our own.

CHAKRABARTI: I would say all of this coalesces around the first presidency, around former president Donald Trump. And here's why. Because you make the exquisitely important point in the book that first of all, what is the most important thing to most people?

It is their family, their immediate family, the source of, most of the time, stability, belonging, care, that irrational power of love. And in a sense, when you think of nations, the point you make in the book is that when nations, democratic institutions within nations begin to fail to provide that same stability, we as irrational organisms look to family to provide a sense of stability.

And that translates itself. For example, into someone like Donald Trump, who many of his most ardent believers feel him as a father figure. And he was allowed to bring in members of his own family. The Kennedys did it too. But he was allowed to bring in members of his own family to assist him.

Very carefully and closely in the running of the country. Plus, they behaved, as I would say, as quasi monarchs, because of the way that they enriched themselves while he was in office. But underscoring all of this, as you point out, is the failure of the democracy that allowed a Trump to go into office in the first place?

Tell me more about that.

MONTEFIORE: I do think that the existence of these dynasties, demo-dynasties is not in itself a sign, that it's not actually contradictory to the working of democracy, but it can be. And it depends on the nature of the office holder. For example, Franklin Roosevelt couldn't have been more privileged in his background. And he was president for, he won four elections. But he was extremely respectful of democracy. Donald Trump isn't that. I think one of the reasons why Donald Trump was obsessed with people like President Putin and Marshal Kim of North Korea is that he envies their power, and he envies that absolute power.

I think he wants to be an American czar. And of course, that's a very frightening thought, and he's said that, he's said that even in this presidential campaign. Which hasn't quite started fully yet, but even now, he's already said, I'm going to be a dictator for day one.

I don't know many dictators that were only content to be dictator for day one. They normally extended that on to day two and three as well.

CHAKRABARTI: I guess the point I'm making is to really raise to the surface something that you write about so clearly in the book. You state that family power around the world is resurgent because that kind of power is very characteristic of our species. And you also write that dynastic reversion is to be expected when states are not trusted to deliver justice or protection. And that some states, being nations, are becoming absolutist Republican monarchies. Tell me more about that.

MONTEFIORE: There are many examples of this. You have to look at the whole Arab world. Some of the dictators who fell, for example, in the Arab Spring in '11, people like Gaddafi and Mubarak, and Saddam Hussein earlier in this century were planning to make their sons their successors, but all over the world that's happening.

You only have to look at Hun Sen in Cambodia, the Ortegas in Nicaragua. There are many examples. But the most famous ones are the Aliyev family in Azerbaijan which has just launched a successful war against Armenia, which very few people have noticed, I think, in the States.

And also of course the Assad family in Syria, we're in the second of those in both cases. But perhaps the most prominent are the Kims of North Korea, and they are now, this is now Kim III, and there's going to be, most likely, a fourth in his young daughter whom he's grooming for power.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Simon, I want to return to a point that you made earlier, because in discussing the 70-year peace, as you call it, the period roughly between 1945 and 2016 or 2000, even all the way up until the Russian invasion of Ukraine, basically you define that period as a time where humanity mostly had a rules-based world order.

And that made room for many significant changes in terms of civil rights and social rights, et cetera. We'll come back to that. But what you had said earlier is that by no means does that indicate that rules-based world order was enjoyed by everyone. That even during this 70-year peace, there were, what, tens of millions, perhaps even more than 100 million people who died in various conflicts that you chronicle in the book, other genocides, et cetera. So I just want to hear a little bit more from you about why you still consider that a unique period in human life, when history being the slaughter bench of humanity, as you quote Hegel, as saying.

Why?

MONTEFIORE: Yeah. I think it was an astonishing period. I think, as you said, not only was there a rules-based, the idea of international law and United Nations and other international bodies were created, an idea of rules was created, which had never really happened before.

They tried it with the League of Nations after World War I and that had failed, of course. Maybe this one is also now failing, of course, too. I also think you're right that, and I make this point in the book. It really is a world history. It's not just about the usual suspects in America and Britain and Europe.

In this book, you'll see that I go into wars like Angola, like Congo, like Ethiopia, like Iran, Iraq, in which millions of people were killed and no one really, often people neglect those and don't mention. Because they're not about people that traditionally Western societies have cared enough about.

And so one of the reasons I wrote the book was to correct that impression, not just in the 20th century, but in all other centuries, too. And that was one of the fun things about writing this book. At the same time, as you mentioned, within our Western societies, this new respect for pluralism, for individualism and for rights and tolerance allowed what I call the great liberal reformation of civil rights, of gay rights, of rights for women of rights to abortion and so on.

All of these amazing achievements and the fact that anti Semitism became a taboo in society. And the amazing achievements, even in our Western societies, and of course that spread to other societies as well were achieved, were put into, placed into law during this period.

Now, as our democracies are facing great challenges as the rule-based order is splintering, within our societies, those achievements themselves are now under threat, and will all have to be fought for again. Nothing can be taken for granted now. The democracies are really suffering from the challenge of what the great 14th century Arab historian, Ibn Khaldun, called Asabiyyah, which he said was cohesion, a sort of idea of social solidarity.

And that's an essential idea for any society to work, and we've slightly lost it, and we're in danger of losing it in our Western democracies.

CHAKRABARTI: But let me just jump in here, Simon, if I could. I'm going to focus on the United States, it's American democracy itself that's undermining itself, right?

I won't buy any kind of argument from someone else who says China did it or Russia did it. Especially for a uniquely powerful democracy such as the United States was and is. The only undermining can happen from within, right?

MONTEFIORE: Correct. Because societies, societies like democracies and capitalist societies really depend on, in terms of private life and commercial life, they depend on trust.

And in terms of political life, they depend on trust and respect for opponents. When political feuding becomes a zero-sum game, then you lead to the challenge of things like succession. Succession in any political society, and it's one of the things that really runs through the whole of the book, is always a test of any society in any system.

And in Donald Trump, for example, his challenge to the election, that's a very dangerous thing. That is a very dangerous thing. Because that challenges the whole basis of trust, of the passing on of power, succession. And so what we're seeing is what Ibn Khaldun talked about was Asabiyyah, the decay of Asabiyyah, cohesion of social solidarity within democracies, and democracies need that to work.

And so that is why we have a feeling, particularly in the United States, but also in Western European democracies like where I'm talking from, Britain. We feel this is happening before our eyes. But all is not lost. These spirits can be regained. Let's not forget that in both of our worlds, but particularly in the United States, you had a civil war in which hundreds of thousands of people perished, and out of that came a better society. At a terrible cost, of course.

And I don't think for a second we're going to approach anything that dire this time around, but my point is that societies can recover from these crises. And when democracies mobilize themselves and deploy their forces, they are astonishingly dynamic and flexible in a way that, for example, autocracies aren't. And so that's always worth bearing in mind.

All is not lost.

CHAKRABARTI: And you know what? You point out in the book something that's fascinated me as well, and it was most, I think, eloquently written about by Steven Pinker, the Harvard psychologist. That even in this human history full of war, crime, death, the exertion of power, et cetera, that in the past century or so, perhaps, actually, it's important that it's contemporaneous with the 70-year peace. By other measures, human beings are better off than they ever have been before. And this is worldwide, right? You talk about the increased lifespan that we've been seeing across the world. Except recently in the United States, the eradication of poverty for billions of people.

These are great advancements that won't necessarily come to an end, even if the 70-year peace does, right?

MONTEFIORE: Correct. Correct. We're in, we've seen an astonishing period of massive advances. For example, famine was virtually wiped out in the 20th century, except when it was caused by politics or war, which, of course, is an exception. But technology, medical, scientific advances have been astonishing. There's amazing figures like, for example, in Sierra Leone today, the life expectancy. Sierra Leone in West Africa, the life expectancy of Sierra Leone and other West African countries is greater than it was in Britain and France in around 1900 at the height of their empires when they rule much of Africa.

So that gives you a sort of feeling of the sense of the vast improvements. Life has never been better in terms of Western comforts. Yes, life expectancies have been going down slightly in Western nations. And also, there are medical challenges. For example, resistance to antibiotics could become a massive life changing crisis.

It could make routine surgery un-routine again, and quite risky. So there are all sorts of things that could happen, but ultimately life has never been so good, despite the wars, the terrible wars that are raging, that we're agonizingly watching today.

CHAKRABARTI: One of the things I love about your book and the vastness of it in covering almost all of human history.

And in different parts of the world, through the stories of these families, is that it's a very powerful reminder that no matter what every empire thinks it's the last, and it never is, right? Power flows, nations rise and fall. There are great triumphs and great tragedies. It just moves, it flows across humanity.

To the point where there was a time where people in Europe are still painting themselves blue, while great civilizations rose in China and the Middle East and Northern Africa. What I want to know is, are you optimistic about the future, or are you still mostly pessimistic about the potential end of this 70-year peace?

MONTEFIORE: You know, when you look at world history and you start right in the sort of fourth or fifth century millennia, centuries, millennia before Christ, from the very beginning that stories appeared, humans worried that the world was coming to an end.

And throughout human history you see this, that everybody's always convinced that the end is nigh, the apocalypse is imminent. We are living in the end days. And normally they were wrong. I think that reflected a sense of fragility, a sense of gratitude, a sense of guilt at the human species supremacy on Earth.

And a sense of respect for nature which is a big theme of the book. But today, it is, we are in more peril than we ever have been before. That there are crises of climate change. More immediately there's nuclear proliferation. And ... nuclear powers could proliferate very quickly.

If more powers start to gain nuclear weapons. And Iran is at this very moment, hell for leather moving towards producing nuclear weapons. North Korea has already done so. So we are in a great period of danger. And then of course there's the challenge of AI and the new technologies, which also are a real threat to our systems and our worlds.

But also, could be great opportunities. And that's the point. All of these things could be great opportunities. Nuclear power can be a great way to provide energy. AI can destroy our societies, but it also could allow us to work less, people to spend more time with their families. Imagine that. No longer go to offices and so on.

Do less work. That could be a great thing, right? So we don't have to be in complete despair at the moment, even though so many terrible things are happening in the world, in Ukraine, in Gaza, and so on, and we are in great danger. But I am ultimately optimistic that humankind, human history is literally a chronicle of disasters, of natural disasters of empires falling.

And yet — and yet — I believe that ultimately human creativity, flexibility, ingenuity can solve these problems.

CHAKRABARTI: I just have time for a couple of more questions for you, Simon, and the last one will be coming back to what you just said, about you're not in despair. But I wanted to just slip in a quick economic question to you. Because in your conclusion to the book you really provide this striking social and historical analysis about how this 70-year peace, as you call it, may come to an end.

But that, once again, just got me thinking of your discussion of how democracies that don't provide justice and security for their people are the same democracies that allow the rise of these dynastic families. There has to be an economic question in here, as well. What role do you think that unfettered capitalism has played in this, just as corruption or the pouring of a nation's wealth into a monarchical treasure chest had in the past?

MONTEFIORE: The key thing is that capitalism is a very flexible system that can be, that could be turned up and turned down. Completely unfettered. It can be disastrous, as we saw with the robber barons, in the United States, the oligarchs in 1990s Russia and so on.

But it can always be tinkered with and changed and calibrated. And that is the key thing. That, for example, capital businesses may make great fortunes out of AI, for example, but that will only increase the obligation for governments and private enterprise to calibrate the amount of profits that they give back to people. If they don't, there'll be social revolutions.

But if they do, social revolutions are quite easily avoided. And that is where economics comes into this. But your wider point is after 1945, much of the world was, many states were formed in the postcolonial world, that looked like Western democracies with presidents and elections and term limits and legislatures, but many of them have failed to provide justice and any sense of economic equality.

And that's why those states are disintegrating now and why they are turning to autocracies to clan based or lineage-based safety systems. And that's why in huge areas of the world, particularly in places like the Sahel in sub-Saharan Africa, the states that were created by the imperial powers after 1945, particularly after 1960, are now merging into each other.

Borders are being challenged, and there will be insurgencies and exurgencies. Large areas can be turned into great warscapes because of this. And yes, economic and economy and justice are the two great challenges that societies have to fulfill. And they can be easily calibrated if there is good enough governance to enforce that.

CHAKRABARTI: Your book provides this very rich historical analysis, and unfortunately, none of us have a perfect understanding of what the future will bring. So in the last few seconds that we have, Simon, with that in mind, what do you think our duty is to the now, to the present, that keeps you optimistic, as you said?

What can we be doing now?

MONTEFIORE: I think the key thing is since you're talking to a historian, is not to have too much history. To think about how people, how families, how young people, how old people want to live. Now, not to dwell on the past, not to dwell on the history, but just to ask, how do people want to live today?

And to try and make that happen for them. That's our great challenge.