Millennium

From Religion to Revolution: How Civilization Has Changed over a Thousand Years

By: Ian Mortimer

Narrated by: John Lee

History's greatest tour guide, Ian Mortimer, takes us on an eye-opening and expansive journey through the last millennium of human innovation.

In Millennium, best-selling historian Ian Mortimer takes the listener on a whirlwind tour of the last 10 centuries of Western history. It is a journey into a past vividly brought to life and bursting with ideas, that pits one century against another in his quest to measure which century saw the greatest change.

We journey from a time when there was a fair chance of your village being burned to the ground by invaders - and dried human dung was a recommended cure for cancer - to a world in which explorers sailed into the unknown and civilizations came into conflict with each other on an epic scale. Here is a story of godly scientists, fearless adventurers, coldhearted entrepreneurs, and strong-minded women - a story of discovery, invention, revolution, and cataclysmic shifts in perspective.

Millennium is a journey into the past like no other. Our understanding of human development will never be the same again, and the lessons we learn along the way are profound ones for us all.

Download the accompanying reference guide.©2014 Ian Mortimer (P)2016 Audible, Inc.

Really spectacular

You must listen all the way through to see the genius of this book. Worth it in every sense.

Good Until the Last Two Chapters

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes, but I would warn about the unsatisfactory last two chapters. In these chapters he tries to predict the future. If/when they are seen in the future, they will likely have missed the mark.

Would you be willing to try another book from Ian Mortimer? Why or why not?

Perhaps. He brings an interesting perspective to history, but he falls into the trap of predicting the future.

Any additional comments?

Towards the end of the book, Mortimer discusses the "unskilling" of modern society. In his opinion we are unskilled, because we are unable to fabricate the basic necessities of living (e.g., weave cloth, fabricate furniture, etc.). He fails to realize that the "old skills" have been replaced by new skills. A 13th century person would have no idea of how to cope in the modern world; just as a modern person would no idea of how to cope in the 13th century.

Superb, provocative, and required reading!

Provides clarity for the past history and present condition of Earth (in particular Western Europe) and its human population, and a striking and challenging preview of the future.

All Ian Mortimer books are highly recommended overviews of various eras of human social and cultural history in Western Europe and Britain based on detailed reviews of currently available historical records.

John Lee is, as usual, a wonderful and precise reader.

Dense with Information – Maybe too Much

I enjoyed this book a lot, but by the time a was half way through, I felt like I was in a college lecture hall for a class where I had done none of the homework. At first, I was picking up a lot of details. By the end, I was only retaining a few common themes. Primarily that some things that seem good can have bad side effects and somethings that seem bad can have good side effects, and the effects, good or bad, may come a century later. Any romantic notions you may have of living in historic times will be left behind. Though it may not seem so at times, we have come a long way in terms civility and medicine.
I will listen a second time, but one chapter at a time and probably out of order to see if I retain more. I would recommend the book, but wonder if it would be better on paper.

Best introduction to Western history I know

It amazes me how much more worthwhile these 15 hours were than every history book I read in school combined. Those books were full of kings and wars. They thought the only important matter in society was power relations. An idea that's dominant again today. But I digress.

Those books had nothing to do with me and were boring, and I forgot everything in them. This book emphasizes the importance of /ideas/. Sometimes those ideas are about power, like when Pope Gregory VII decide that popes, not kings, should rule Europe. But Mortimer emphasizes Gregory not as yet another grasper for power, but for how that power was used to inject education and debate into the culture of Europe. He emphasizes thinkers like Abelard and Erasmus; technology like agriculture, printing, and clocks; cultural changes like the change from slavery to serfdom, the spread of monasteries, the re-invention of law, the rediscovery of individuals and liberalism.

And this book also emphasizes /peace/. The history books when I was a child saw times of peace as a vacuum, an empty space where nothing happened, and skipped over them, giving the impression that human history is nothing but horrors. Mortimer emphasizes the times when peace was achieved, and tries to explain how it was achieved.

Overall, I would say the most important things this book does is make people aware that the 20th century was not, as most think, a time of tremendous change. He fails to notice how much technological change has slowed in the past 50 years, but does emphasize that we think of the years from 1000-1900 as unchanging only because it never occurs to us that there were times when one could not measure time, or read a book, or know what law one was under, or imagine someone inventing something new, or think of "rights" as anything other than those granted by one's owners.

The last chapter is, sadly, disastrous, because Mortimer's knowledge of the past does not provide him the ability he thinks it does of seeing into the future. Not because this knowledge could not do so in principle; because he himself ignores the lesson of history that the limitations of the present have /always/ seemed permanent He writes that "It should be obvious to all that endless growth of manufacturing and food production on a planet of limited size is impossible," even though most people over most of the entire thousand years that he covered would have also said that people had finally reached the maximum possible exploitation of natural resources. He discusses the limitations of fossil fuels, dismisses nuclear fission as a temporary solution, and never mentions nuclear fusion or space-based solar power. He discusses the limits of steel, but never mentions developments in plastics, ceramics, carbon composites, or nanotechnology. He discusses the exhaustion of agricultural space without remembering that space is 3-dimensional. He has read a few books, but has somehow not learned, from all his history, to recognize that humans have /always/ been at the limits of their resources and technology, back to the paleolithic. He presents Thomas Piketty's "r > g" as an insoluble problem for free markets and liberalism, without noticing that it could be solved for this generation in each by a single act of Congress or Parliament to raise the inheritance tax. Future generations who will have lifespans of centuries will have to deal with it again, but the answer is still simple theoretically, if not politically: tax the rich.

Bad ending - literally

I liked the tour through each century. I think I learned more about changes in humanity from this book than any class in school. What I did not like was the last chapter. Mr Mortimer predicts the future, he should have stopped with his original intent to document historical change.

Great overview of history

A great book for people looking to overview the "under the hood" changes in Western civilization as well as the more obvious ones in later centuries. I found his future predictions depressing though at least interesting and thought-provoking takes compared to the crazed ideas of climate change making humanity extinct or the idea that liberal democracy/socialism/whatever ideal government will persist infinitely into the future. Sure, we've heard the preachy message of environmentalism a thousand and one times, but at least here it is presented in it's more realistic form instead of the loud, obnoxious one.

I also smiled a bit when even the atheist admitted of the men who affected the most change in the millennium as a whole, God was the One who encouraged the most change.

Past yes future now

Great and enlightening discussion of past centuries, much less persuasive is his basis for his future outlook. I highly recommend the book for the trip thru the past part.