A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

INTRODUCTION
I was about twelve years old when I came upon a bundle of magazines tied with string in a secondhand
bookshop - the original edition of H. G. Wells’s Outline of History, published in 1920. Since
some of the parts were missing, I got the whole pile for a few shillings. It was, I must admit, the
pictures that attracted me - splendid full-page colour illustrations of plesiosaurs on a Mesozoic
beach; Neanderthal men snarling in the entrance to their cave; the giant rock-hewn statues of
Rameses II and his consort at Abu Simbel. Far more than Wells’s text, these brought a breathless
sensation of the total sweep of world history. Even today I feel a flash of the old magical
excitement as I look at them - that peculiar delight that children feel when someone says, ‘Once
upon a time ...’
In 1946, Penguin Books republished ten volumes of Wells to celebrate his eightieth birthday,
including the condensed version of the Outline, A Short History of the World. It was in this edition
that I discovered that strange little postscript entitled ‘Mind at the End of Its Tether’. I found it so
frustrating and incomprehensible that I wanted to tear my hair: ‘Since [1940] a tremendous series
of events has forced upon the intelligent observer the realisation that the human story has already
come to an end and that Homo sapiens, as he has been pleased to call himself, is in his present form
played out.’ And this had not been written at the beginning of the Second World War - which might
have been understandable - but after Hitler’s defeat. When I came across the earlier edition of the
Short History I found that, like the Outline, it ends on a note of uplift: ‘What man has done, the
little triumphs of his present state, and all this history we have told, form but the prelude to the
things that man has yet to do.’ And the Outline ends with a chapter predicting that mankind will
find peace through the League of Nations and world government. (It was Wells who coined the
phrase ‘the war to end war’.)
What had happened? Many years later, I put the question to a friend of Wells, the biblical historian
Hugh Schonfield. His answer was that Wells had been absolutely certain that he had the solutions
to all the problems of the human race, and that he became embittered when he realised that no one
took him seriously. At the time, that seemed a plausible explanation. But since then I have come
upon what I believe to be the true one. In 1936, Wells produced a curious short novel called The
Croquet Player, which is startlingly different from anything he had written before. It reveals that
Wells had become aware of man’s capacity for sheer brutality and sadism. The Outline of History
plays down the tortures and massacres; in fact, it hardly mentions them. Wells seems totally devoid
of that feeling for evil that made Arnold Toynbee, in his Study of History, speak of ‘the horrifying
sense of sin manifest in human affairs’. Wells’s view of crime was cheerfully pragmatic. In The
Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind he spoke of it as ‘artificial’, the result of ‘restrictions
imposed upon the normal “natural man” in order that the community may work and exist.’ He
seems quite unaware that the history of mankind since about 2500 B.C. is little more than a nonstop
record of murder, bloodshed and violence. The brutalities of the Nazi period forced this upon
his attention. But it seems to have been the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the revelations
of Belsen and Buchenwald, which convinced him that man was bound to destroy himself from the
beginning, and that ‘the final end is now closing in on mankind’.
I am not suggesting that Wells’s view of history was superficial or wrong-headed; as far as it went,
it was brilliantly perceptive. As a late Victorian, he was aware of the history of mankind as a
marvellous story of invention and achievement, of a long battle against danger and hardship that