The Outline of History

Written in the shock following the First World War, this chronicle begins with the formation of the Earth and ends in Wells’s own present, on the argument that people who knew only their national histories had just spent four years slaughtering each other. He moves from geology to the first life, then through Sumer and Egypt, Greece and Rome, the great religions, the Mongols, the age of exploration, and the wreck of 1914, hunting throughout for evidence of a common human purpose. He rejected racial hierarchy at a time when respectable scholars did not, and pressed the case for world government. It sold more than two million copies and taught a generation what history was for. Free PDF and EPUB editions are available here.