Review | The Story of China: historian Michael Woods presents a sweeping tale in fewer than 600 pages
Telling the history of China inevitably involves compromises, but Michael Woods’ evocative book swoops through the dynasties with both broad strokes and personal stories.
The Story of China by Michael Wood, St Martin’s Press. 4/5 stars
How do you tell the story of China? For all those historians who write on the subject, that remains a confounding question. Concentrate on the ebb and flow of dynastic rule, and you neglect the individual living through history. Focus too narrowly and you miss the grand, narrative drama. Write too accessibly and you dumb down the complexity; incorporate all the nuance and you have a work such as The Cambridge History of China, which runs to 15 masterful but intimidating volumes.
Michael Wood’s The Story of China is an attempt to thread this historiographical needle, offering a sweeping narrative history of China that takes time to zoom in on the ground-level experience while still coming in at fewer than 600 pages (references excluded).
It has been some time since one of these expansive single-volume histories, aimed at the general reader, has been published in English: John Keay’s China: A History (2008) is the last such mass-market volume. The recent trend in such general-interest China histories has been towards books examining specific elements of modern China, such as Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally: China’s World War II, 1937-1945 (2013) or Frank Dikötter’s People’s Trilogy: three volumes that tell the story of communist rule from 1949 to 1976.
The Story of China feels like something of an anachronism, then, though in many ways the contemporary global moment seems the perfect time to remind readers of China’s long and storied history.
