The Undivided Past: History Beyond Our Differences

We feel we are part of a particular nation, race or civilization. We define ourselves by our religion, gender or class. These are forms of solidarity that lie at the heart of our understanding and in many ways make us human. But there is in each case a terrible flipside to such solidarity: when we begin to define ourselves not through what we admire, but through what we hate, creating systems and ideas through which we define others as less than human, as threats and, ultimately, as mere things to be destroyed.

The Undivided Past is a remarkably ambitious, entertaining and important book. It is a warning-at a time of acute anxiety in many parts of the world-as to just how careful as to how we see both ourselves and others. In what is in many ways David Cannadine's masterpiece, The Undivided Past is a clarion call to us all to be very wary of the intellectuals, historians and politicians who assert a binary, Manichean, 'us-and-them' view of the world. Cannadine shows how these great categories, so beloved of many thinkers, have done untold damage to our lives and how, at the back of so many concepts which we come to imagine simply as common sense, there will so often lie some terrible, and indeed murderous, simplification.

This is a book which takes ideas very seriously. Ideas about religion, nation, class, gender, race and civilization are at the heart of our history, but they are also ideas that contradict each other, overlap, have little bearing on our lives as they are really lived and, above all, that threaten our common humanity.