![]() ![]() A prime example might be Julius Caesar’s adopted son Octavian, the founder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, who consolidated his rule by entrapping and murdering Caesar’s biological son Caesarion, the last of the Ptolemies. Dynastic history, as he tells it, was riddled with rivalry, betrayal, and violence from the start. “The word family has an air of cosiness and affection, but of course in real life families can be webs of struggle and cruelty too,” Montefiore begins. In the course of some thirteen hundred pages, “The World” offers a monumental survey of dynastic rule: how to get it, how to keep it, how to squander it. What if world history more resembles a family tree, its vectors hard to trace through cascading tiers, multiplying branches, and an ever-expanding jumble of names? This is the model, heavier on masters than on plot, suggested by Simon Sebag Montefiore’s “ The World: A Family History of Humanity” (Knopf), a new synthesis that, as the title suggests, approaches the sweep of world history through the family-or, to be more precise, through families in power. The cliché that “history repeats itself” promotes a cyclical version of events, reminiscent of the Hindu cosmology that divided time into four ages, each more degenerate than the last. Other historians, most influentially the fourteenth-century scholar Ibn Khaldun, embraced a sine-wave model of civilizational growth and decline. ![]() Western historians have long charted history as the linear, progressive working out of some larger design-courtesy of God, Nature, or Marx. The appeal of such chronicles has something to do with the way they schematize history in the service of a master plot, identifying laws or tendencies that explain the course of human events. More recently, the field has belonged to Yuval Noah Harari, whose “ Sapiens” (2011) describes the ascent of humankind over other species, and offers Silicon Valley-friendly speculations about a post-human future. In time, Jared Diamond swept in with “ Guns, Germs, and Steel” (1997), delivering an agriculture- and animal-powered explanation for the phases of human development. that their individual lives, their nations and races, interbreed and blend and go on to merge again at last in one common human destiny.” Then came Arnold Toynbee, whose twelve-volume “ Study of History” (1934-61), abridged into a best-selling two, proposed that human civilizations rose and fell in predictable stages. Wells’s “ The Outline of History” (1920), written “to be read as much by Hindus or Moslems or Buddhists as by Americans and Western Europeans,” argued “that men form one universal brotherhood . . . ![]() Europe and Africa with Asia, and Asia with Africa and Europe.” For the past hundred years or so, each generation of English-language readers has been treated to a fresh blockbuster trying to synthesize world history. “In earliest times,” the Hellenistic historian Polybius mused, in the second century B.C., “history was a series of unrelated episodes, but from now on history becomes an organic whole. He is the guy who hits the studio and comes out with a song like I'm So Dirunk or Eish! But Gabriel knows how to handle the other two guys,” says Gabu.īesides music, Gabu is president in two companies, namely Celebrity Merchandise Ltd and Gudu Holdings.Everything has a history, and writers have for thousands of years tried to pull together a universal history of everything. He is funky, loves to party and talking trash too. He gets to shows in time and knows how to 'kill'. “Gabu is the smart worker, well-mannered and follows the set procedures and schedules. Gabu adds that his three distinct characters define who he is. They have been with me all the way and I celebrate them!” “It has not been an easy journey, but I salute my fans for standing with me since I unleashed my first single with some 13 years ago. Gabu feels his more than one decade career in music has been a bumpy, but interesting ride. He will be celebrating his fourth birthday in March and I believe I have and will always be a good example to him,” he says. “The most important job that I have as Gabriel, and it really pays me very well, is being a father. ARTISTE Gabu aka Buganya says being a daddy is his most important work.īorn Gabriel Kagundu, the P-Unit rapper is celebrating 13 years in the music industry and says his four-year-old son, Khai, means the world to him. ![]()
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