Second Anniversary Note: What's Coming Next
A History of Mankind is entering its third year, so here's the outlook
A History of Mankind recently had its second anniversary, and Substack was kind enough to remind me (I hadn’t noticed). So, I think it’s a good time to take stock of things.
As we approach 50,000 subscribers, I can only thank every one of you, everyone who is on board with this. Whether you are in the free or the paid tier, thank you. And if you are in the paid and founding tier, extra thanks! Everyone says it, but the most precious thing I writer has is an audience. Without an audience, you’re just a guy typing stuff, hoping for the very slim chance that you’ll be the next Franz Kafka.
I’ve often told the story of how A History of Mankind came about, and I will briefly repeat it here: in a nutshell, I always thought, since I was about 20, that one day I would write a comprehensive story of mankind, because I love history, I love writing, and I feel that no single writer has quite captured the beauty, uniqueness and craziness of the human experience just yet.
It’s by chance that, after two decades of taking notes, I had the opportunity of writing and publishing a book on the comparative history of ancient Chinese and Western philosophy, and the rest flowed from there. In early 2022, I posted here the very first part of A History of Mankind, which is free to read for everyone (unlike the rest or the archives, sorry! You need to be paying subscribers to read the rest, as all pieces get paywalled after a couple of months, even those that are originally free).
The rest is history, I must say. We got to 79 posts by September, 2023 (they are divided by subject here), and the pace has accelerated since, so we’re now, in early March, 2024, approaching 130 posts altogether.
This doesn’t count all the extra content: nineteen Q&As so far, which are only half-free (the actual Q&A part is paywalled), various posts recommending content that I think it’s worth your time, a bunch of extracts from my latest book, and A Chat with Rob Henderson that is the first example of this new kind of thing I want to do with interesting people who have nice insights on history, recent and not so much.
The regular History of Mankind posts are now describing events pertaining to the 5th and 4th centuries BC. The way things are looking, I’m confident in saying that over the rest of this year we’ll handle human history all the way to 2nd century BC. That means, the menu for the next nine months includes: Alexander the Great (the dude in the pic!) and his conquests, the rise of the Roman Republic — including the Punic Wars — and the first stages of its fall, the first Indian empires, China’s unification wars and its most famous emperors — including the First Emperor — and the first civilizations of Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) and Peru.
As long-time readers know, this is just a very rough outline of what’s on offer. I don’t intend to describe Alexander’s campaigns without delving very deeply on their impact on human history, from Buddhist statuary to Roman conquest fantasies. The Hellenistic era that followed Alexander will include plenty of discussion of scientific and cultural advancements brought about by perhaps the most brilliant generation ever, that of Greeks who lived between Alexander and Rome’s conquest of Greece; and of the Jewish thinkers who put the final touches on the Bible while all this happened. The posts on India and China will look very deeply at religious and political events there that eventually had a massive impact everywhere else, and so on.
I wouldn’t ask you to pay for my content if it were Wikipedia cut-and-paste stuff, or something that an AI can regurgitate in 0.5 seconds. You guys know it isn’t so. You guys know that this is a labor of love, the result of very long-term planning and continuous reading, assessing and searching. I wouldn’t have the time, and the luxury, to do any of this if not for the support of my paid subscribers, so here’s to them, to you guys. I can tell you one thing about history, right now, that is a constant across time and space, that does not ever change: writers, historians, thinkers, people like me, we live off you, we live off patrons, people who will help us dedicate time to these investigations.
It was people like you who financed the greatest Greek thinkers, Chinese philosophers, Indian renunciants who came up with the ideas underpinning science, theory and the great religions of mankind. And also some cranks: I can only hope I’m not one of them.
Writing stuff for a living has always been very, very hard, especially when that stuff is not dedicated to the masses: playwrights, tier-1 journalists and speech-writers (sometimes) do fine without patrons. People like me can’t. Like my predecessors, I depend on you. I wish it were otherwise, but that’s the reality. Substack has created this wonderful platform allowing readers to support creators, so I urge you to use, to keep using it, to keep the flickering light of free thought and free speech alive.
I can only keep telling you guys the truth about the emergence of certain genes because of sexual preference or about the actual skin tone of certain Egyptian kings for as long as I can pay the bills and feed my kids. If I can’t, I’ll have to go back to lying for a living.
Before I embarked in the History of Mankind project, I had a long career in journalism, part of my quest to see the world and not having an academic mindset. That’s how I ended up employed by China’s and Spain’s state-run news agencies, which are different, but not as different as one would hope. I also spent, more happily, a decade and a half as correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News, in Asia and Europe, and was later a communications professional for big international banks, some of which are — to be blunt — evil. Perhaps not the ones that employed me, bless their hearts, but others certainly are.
So, as you see, I’ve done a lot of truth-massaging to stay afloat over the years: it’s not a stretch, indeed to some extent a point of pride, to say that I’ve been a propagandist for hire. I most definitely don’t want to do that again, if I can avoid it. So, please, if you can, support me within your means. Help me able to be write truthful stuff, without fear of the consequences.
Thank you again, everyone, from the bottom of my heart. And remember that older posts are accessible through these two lists. I don’t say this enough, so let me stress it again: don’t be fooled by the titles of the posts; they are almost never exclusive so, for example, in a post about Athens’ Sicilian Expedition I will discuss multiple other events and issues pertaining to the era besides the actual Expedition, because each post of A History of Mankind is a little chunk of the whole flowing narrative: