The Best of 2024 in A History of Mankind

A yearly roundup, leaving the Year of the Three Bidens behind, man

It was a great year for this newsletter, so I’m sad to see 2024 go. I earned my “hundreds of paid subscribers” badge and cracked 50,000 subscribers altogether (the vast majority, of course, free). There were many other, shall we say, interesting moments.

The History of Mankind project is moving forward at pretty good speed. We started the year in the Fifth Century BC, with the Sparta Against Modernity post, and ended it in the First Century BC, with Sulla’s Revolution, a post that, I hope, will help restore Sulla’s ancient reputation as a very shrewd, somewhat cold but fundamentally brilliant statesman.

At the current pace, in 2025 may very well get all the way to the pivotal year of 378, in which an army from Mexico’s Teotihuacan defeated the first Maya empire, that of Tikal, and Roman forces were defeated by Gothic barbarians at the Battle of Adrianople. That also was an in interesting year: just as Gothic soldiers killed Roman emperor Valens, Teotihuacan’s forces executed Great Misty Claw, Tikal’s king, and a new era of great disruptions started in both continents.

In 2024, I started to experiment with the new “Quick Take” format, presenting modern-ish themes or discussions from a historical perspective. The idea with this format, as I’ve said before, is to get input from as many people with suggestions and knowledge as possible. I’m only human and I can’t always be right (I supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq, for example) so I’m happy willing resigned to be proven wrong on occasion at least.

I like that, with this format, I got people intrigued about the centuries-long conspiracy — I can’t call it otherwise — to inflate the contributions of Islamic scholars to the salvage of classic Graeco-Roman texts, and about the parallels between the Ukrainian War, the Spanish Civil War, Munich 1938 and the Hiroshima moment.

All in all, the year was great, and want to thank you guys for reading my stuff. It really means a lot to me. And I couldn’t say enough about my appreciation for paid readers who — now that I left the dastardly corporate world behind for good — make it possible for me to devote my time to this project and still be able to put food on the table.

Here’s a roundup of the best-performing paid posts of the year, in terms of views, likes, comments, reposts, etc:

Pericles’ Winding Road to Power (A History of Mankind 110)

Sparta Against Modernity (112)

The Confucian Schools (116)

Gorgias & the Sophists (114)

The Great Jewish Divide: Pharisees & Sadducees (199)

The Imperial Roman Republic (190)

The Fight for the Western Mediterranean: Carthage Vs Greeks (101)

The End of Greek India (180)

The Gracchus Revolution: Plebeians Vs Patricians (191)

The Italian Plot Against the Republic (204)

As you can see, a nice mix of Western and Eastern subjects. I was pleasantly surprised by how well some of the most complex posts about philosophical-political discussions and the like (particularly the ones on Pericles, the Confucians and the Sophists) did.

Some of the Q&As did pretty great. It looks like people like the concept, as it’s a great chance to keep up with the latest scholarship on topics I discussed previously and answer questions from paid subscribers.

The first Q&A of the year, focusing on climate change in the Indus Civilization collapse and the origins of North African farming, did best; other star performers discussed puzzling discoveries filling in the gaps for the peopling of the Americas, plus questions on Alexander the Great, steppe migrations and the history of circumcision; and debates about the importance of Turkey's Çatalhoyuk site, Alexander the Great's greatest hit and African civilizations.

As for the free posts, mostly Quick Takes, the top two were head and shoulders above the rest, especially in terms of traffic:

No, Muslim Scribes & Translators Didn't Save the Graeco-Roman Legacy

Hitler & Mussolini Were Absolute Idiots

I was rather shocked that the post on the erasure of the Chinese tradition in the Western mind did so well. I thought it was more of a personal gripe, but it turns out that the view resonated with a lot of people. Mind you: Substack is not accessible in China (I’m writing this from Beijing, on a VPN to evade the Great CyberWall) so it’s not like millions of Chinese came over to say “yeah, Chinese stuff is great!”

Why Western People Love Japanese Stuff & Despise Chinese Stuff

The unplanned series on misremembered historical lessons contributing to the mess in the Ukraine did well, particularly the post in which I relied on the experience of my two grandparents in the Spanish Civil War:

The Spanish Solution to the Ukrainian War

A number of people wrote to say they loved the first part of the Munich 1938 post, not so much the comparisons with Kiev 2022 in the second half of the post:

Everything You Think You Know about Munich 1938 Is Wrong

Something similar happened with the follow-up post:

Japan Didn't Surrender Because of the Nukes, and Ukraine Wouldn't Either

I was a bit sad that a couple of posts I quite enjoyed writing underperform. I thought I did a pretty decent job of proving that Joseph Henrich’s very famous thesis about the Christian church driving the western ban on Christian marriage is just wrong, but still not many people seemed all that enthused by the subject.

This is fair, I guess. And you know why? Because deep down, whether you are Christian, Atheist or Hindu… you understand deep down that sex with your first cousins is just creepy. We have that taboo drilled into us since the times of the Indo-Europeans on the steppe. In a nutshell, that’s why it wasn’t a Christian thing to start with:

The Christian Church Didn't Save the West from Cousin Marriage

Another underrated post (I believed) was a victim of American politics, as I mostly wrote it just before poor Joe Biden was unceremoniously kicked aside and replaced by a younger, very rad candidate whose name just escapes me: so he was old news already when I published the post. Sad! All the media spent the first part of the summer telling me, and this is an exact quote, that Biden was “sharp as a tack,” so it’s their fault:

The Roman Joe Biden

Roman history aficionados know about the “Year of the Four Emperors,” the fateful 69 AD that ended with Vespasianus in command of the empire. In the Biden post, I tried to explain how 238 AD was the “Year of the Three Bidens,” three experienced guys — Gordian I, Pupienus and Balbinus — who ruled one after another in a rush of confusion amid a cloud of senility:

We don’t know all that much about these fellas, other than they were cranky, elderly senators (all over sixty) driven by the senate to take control of the state in 238 AD.

Rome entered that year under the firm, if slightly aggressive, grip of Emperor Maximinus, a fearsome military man who had taken power violently and violently despised the senate. When the senate first rebelled against the brute, it appointed a blue-blooded Roman living in Africa as emperor.

Gordian I was such a perfect Biden that the similarities are baffling: he was 80 on accession, and his eldest surviving son, co-emperor Gordian II, was a Roman Hunter Biden through and through. He was only known by his contemporaries as a great seducer, sometimes called “the Priapus of the century” because of his sexual exploits.

These two could have been fodder for great books. Both Gordians, however, were killed by Maximinus loyalists, so two more elderly senators — Pupienus and Balbinus — were called to bring some stability and reach-across-the-aisle pizzazz, after Maximinus himself was also murdered.

The two oldsters ruled Rome, and little outside the city of Rome itself, for about three turbulent months filled with a bunch of malarkey. Old men can bear grudges all right and they soon started to hate each other, and everyone got bored of them, so they were both murdered by the Praetorian Guards.

Happy New Year everyone!