In Morocco, zealous Spanish troops hacked off the heads of Moorish insurgents, which Franco considered an “exemplary punishment”. Ninety years later, those 11 peoples are busy fragmenting themselves in genocidal civil wars. The empires of others, as Gilbert makes clear, were less benevolent. In 1904 the “11 separate peoples” ruled by the Habsburgs agitated for autonomy.
Gilbert also laments the decline of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He seems to be sneakingly fond of Britain’s empire, and among his manifold excerpts from the Times is a letter in 1901, after Queen Victoria’s funeral, which reports that “African chiefs have ordered tom-toms to be beaten or cattle sacrificed” to ensure the repose of the old trout’s soul. He defines the century’s agenda well, concentrating on the disintegration of those European empires which profitably gobbled up the globe during the 19th century, and connecting decolonisation abroad with movements of liberation at home: campaigns for workers’ rights, and for female suffrage.
Gilbert begins with the Boer war and the Boxer rebellion, early challenges to imperial hegemony. Gilbert’s, however, is a long, long century, and on his exhausting trek – this 900-page volume is the first of three – he intends to allot 35 pages to each of its years. Eric Hobsbawm ingeniously abbreviated the subject in his “short century”, arguing that modern history began belatedly in 1914 and prematurely ended in 1989, when the Berlin Wall collapsed. Even the emissions from our innocent refrigerators are stealthily gnawing a hole in the sky.
Like Trotsky, Martin Gilbert pauses reflectively in 1933, aware that, with Hitler newly installed as German Chancellor, the worst is yet to come. But is the same technology engaged in a war against the human race which it claims to be serving? Ours is the century of machine guns, gas chambers and atom bombs. He was wrong about comforts, which the 20th century has lavished on us: automated bank tellers and supersonic jets, video recorders and cellular phones – all those technological boons which (as Freud declared) turned modern men into “prosthetic gods”. He deplored it as “the most disturbed century within the memory of humanity”, and advised his contemporaries that, if they wanted peace and comfort, they had chosen the wrong time to be born.
In 1933, Trotsky – exiled in Turkey, en route to Mexico and his appointment with the icepick which Stalin’s thugs drove into his brain – took stock of the 20th century so far. Finally, believing the letter has come, he dies, free in spirit.8 Sunil Khilnani is the author of ‘The Idea of India’ (Hamish Hamilton).. He becomes convinced that he will receive a letter from the Raja, and he waits, dreaming of building up a collection of letters to read when he grows up. The Post Office tells the story of Amal, a young boy struck by illness and facing death. From his bedside window he watches the bustle outside a new building – the post office. He will have heard in a strange language the play he wrote in 1911, after the deaths of his youngest son, his daughter and his wife.
