Reviews for World's History,vol.1-std.gde.

The average rating for World's History,vol.1-std.gde. based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-05-22 00:00:00 Ivory Clinton II This book is a mix of incredible scholarly knowledge, an excellent argument, and a somewhat stiff writing style and narrow topical range. Tripp surveys Iraqi history since the Ottoman Empire with a heavy focus on the Hashemite and Republican periods. The level of detail, however, is somewhat mind numbing: there are so many people with very similar names, and Tripp doesn't go into much of the biographical detail that normally helps me sort through complex stories with lots of characters. He also focuses almost exclusively on politics, excluding cultural, social, gender, and other lines of history that I'd like to know more about. He's very good with the politics, but that's about it. It's definitely the kind of book that policy makers should have read before we got involved there because it shows how certain aspects of Iraqi political culture were deeply ingrained and most likely could not be changed in a short time span. He describes the essential traits of Iraqi politics and shows them fueling politics and restraining change. Iraq's political history is a whirlwind of coups and rebellions, but Tripp shows that the essential elements have remained strong throughout these rapid shifts in government. These elements include authoritarianism, strong limits on popular participation, patrimonialism, sectarianism, tribalism, violence, the failure to subjugate the military to civilian control, the lack of the concept of a loyal opposition, and, most importantly, the view of the state as a vehicle to seize for the benefit of oneself and one's power base and the enfeeblement of one's foes. This last point has probably been the biggest constraint on change and reform in Iraqi politics. When you seize power in Iraq, you have to reward the shaky, self-interested coalition that got you there. Doing so requires funneling state largesse their way and weakening their enemies. If you try to reach out and help the people via reform or liberalization, you'll probably just alienate the elites whose support you need to stay in power (and keep your head). Moreover, the security services over and over again in this book exercised a de facto veto power over domestic reform, putting another constraint on reform. Thus in Iraqi politics we and repeatedly see the gravitational pull of these traditions and norms of power. There's a strong tendency to rely on and support as narrow a power base as possible (the political science concept of a selectorate is useful here): sect, tribe, clan, family. Saddam Hussein cracked the norm of Iraqi politics (and stayed in power for 25 years) by making the security services equivalent to his tribe and family and by being even more ruthless than any of his predecessors. Some people might call this an "essentialist" narrative or whatever; I think Tripp is just showing the remarkable staying power of these aspects of Iraqi politics. The evidence is there. Another point this book hammers home is that the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraqi politics is pretty old. Even under the Ottoman Empire, a Sunni minority had controlled these 3 vilayets. The British empowered the Sunni Hashemites, and most of the Republicans and Baathist leaders were Sunni as well. These tensions may have become exacerbated in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, but they had definitely existed in Iraqi politics since the start of the century. This book is full of revolts and protests that pitted the sects against each other. One could say that our invasion kicked off a revolution in Iraqi politics by enabling the Shia to become the dominant party. In keeping with Iraqi political culture, Shia leaders have used the state largely to solidify their power base and get revenge on their opponents. This core aspect of Iraqi politics, deriving from the tribal and sectarian nature of a state without a nation, remains alive and well today, largely unchanged by the well-meaning but misguided and hubristic American invasion. Anyone who read this book before, I don't know, invading the country would have had a much clearer view of how thoroughly non-democratic the political culture of Iraq was and how unlikely this was to change, especially via outside intervention. A note for American presidents: maybe it would be a good idea to read one book about a society you are about to invade next. I recommend this book for Presidents and presidential contenders, especially Republican ones, and people with a lot of patience for stiff writing who nevertheless want a deeper sense of Iraqi history.

Review # 2 was written on 2013-05-03 00:00:00 Gary Mallams One of the most difficult aspects of writing history books must be deciding how much detail to include. If the author doesn't go into enough depth, readers can be deprived of substantive information. If the author includes too much, the reading can become burdensome. Charles Tripp's A History of Iraq falls more into the latter camp. While it provides many important details, such as the names and motivations of many Iraqi leaders, the tenets of the Baathist Party, and UN resolutions aimed at curbing human rights abuses and ending suspected weapons programs, it tends to get bogged down in excessive amounts of specifics. Every tribe and faction (and there are legions of them), no matter how briefly they were a part of Iraqi politics, get a place in this book. Aside from the fact that this is extremely hard to follow in many instances, there are two other problems I had with it. The first is that for all the details described, there are still many terms, issues, and processes left unexplained. For example, after describing the first few Iraqi kings beginning in the 1920s, the author turns his focus to regents, presidents, prime ministers, and other high ranking officials. It was never clear to me what the actual role of these positions was, as if the author assumed readers would already know these things. The second problem was that the entire focus was on the elites in the government. There were a few mentions of regular citizens here and there, but even these were typically just to remind readers that the lower classes were continually neglected and living in poor conditions throughout the last few hundred years. No real information is provided as to their daily lives. As for the scope of the book, it spends a little time discussing the three provinces—Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra—when they were ruled by the Ottoman Empire beginning in the early eighteenth century. It moves on to the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, which forced the sultan to reinstate the Ottoman Constitution; spends quite a bit of time with the British occupation, which began in 1914 and lasted unofficially for decades afterwards; and goes up through Saddam Hussein's reign, which began in the 1970s (and was still going on when the book was published). It also discusses the central recurring themes of Iraq: the division many Shia felt between allegiance to their Arab country and their Persian religious leaders, the many feuds over oil revenue, the system of patrimony that kept ruling families in power, the often violently coercive tactics used, and, of course, "the long-unanswered question of the identity of Iraq, as a potential nation-state or as an administrative part of a larger Arab nation."