Civilisations by David Olusoga review – a riposte to European superiority

In the summer of 1520, towards the end of his life, the great German artist Albrecht Dürer travelled from his home in Nuremberg to the Low Countries, to meet his new patron, the Holy Roman emperor Charles V. At the same time, halfway across the world in the middle of the Americas, the Spanish adventurer Hernán Cortés was carrying out his merciless siege of the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán. By the time it fell, on 13 August 1521, much of the city lay in ruins, and as many as 100,000 of its inhabitants had already died. Many more were massacred as the victors set about plundering whatever they could lay their hands on. When the first shipment of spoils arrived in Brussels, Dürer was one of those who flocked to examine it. He was blown away. “All the days of my life,” he wrote in his diary, “I have seen nothing that rejoiced my heart so much as these things, for I saw amongst them wonderful works of art, and I marvelled at the subtle ingenuity of men in foreign lands. Indeed I cannot express all that I thought there.”

This vignette of cross-global inspiration is one of the highlights of David Olusoga’s new book, a richly illustrated companion volume to the two episodes he is presenting in the BBC’s new Civilisations. In outline, its format is fairly Eurocentric and conventional. Despite all the fuss that has been made about the TV project’s updating of Kenneth Clark’s 1969 series Civilisation, Olusoga’s own approach is framed in terms that would hardly have shocked audiences 50 years ago: the first half of the book considers contact between civilisations in “the European Age of Discovery” (from the 15th to the 18th centuries), while the second looks at the impact of industrialisation on the art and artists of the 19th century.

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Non-European cultures make an appearance only when they come into contact with Europeans. The book’s artistic focus is likewise entirely traditional. We are shown a bit of sculpture, some architecture, a few photographs, and above all lots of paintings – the industrialisation and commercialisation of the artistic world itself, and the growing importance during these centuries of cheap, mass-market printed images remain invisible. It’s also perhaps odd to find Clark faulted for his lack of attention to female artists by an author who includes only one (the late 17th, early 18th-century German botanist Maria Sibylla Merian), refers unselfconsciously to “mankind”, and persists in describing all geographical entities as female (Rome has “her” legions, Christian Europe suffers from “her” isolation).

But Olusoga is a smart and inventive narrator, with a keen historical curiosity and effortless style. No matter the conventional format, he fills it with unconventional, subversive storylines. He’s keen to overturn 19th- and 20th-century prejudices about the relative merits of different civilisations. For Clark, western culture was obviously the best, nobler than what he dismissively termed “the Negro imagination”. Olusoga doesn’t mention this offensive slight until the end of his afterword, but his own work is a magnificent riposte to it. For if there is an argumentative thread that connects all the parts of this book, it’s his portrayal of European civilisation as a slow but inexorable historical plague, which destroys everything it comes into contact with: other cultures, the natural world, and millions upon millions of its own people.

Whenever they come up against a superior power, Europeans look weak and ridiculous. They were “a harmless sort of people” who lacked all the rudiments of civility, noted a surprised Chinese mariner in 1543: they ate with their fingers rather than chopsticks, had no system of ceremonial etiquette, couldn’t understand “written characters”, and displayed “their feelings without any self-control”. Yet given the chance, they invariably wreaked havoc. From the brutal Castilian invasion of the Canary Islands in the 15th century, to the 19th-century destruction of the native peoples and habitats of North America, Australasia and the Pacific, through to the great mechanised slaughter of the first world war, this is a grim story of human suffering. As often as not, the artistic objects it holds up for our inspection are but fragmentary relics and reflections of entire civilisations obliterated by European greed, hubris and disease.

In the same bracingly revisionist vein, Olusoga sees slavery everywhere he looks: African, European, Islamic, Malay, Japanese. We cannot truly appreciate the inanimate artefacts of the past, he implies, or interpret them as markers of civilisation, without understanding that they were produced by cultures that simultaneously traded in flesh and blood.

All this means that he has little time for individual genius, inspiration or exaltation. The book is at its most interesting and original when deconstructing the very notion of civilisation, most bland when discussing groundbreaking artists such as El Greco, Rembrandt or Picasso. Rather than being an art-based history, which takes its cue from specific works, this is the opposite, and helpfully so – a history, illustrated with a selection of beautiful objects.

As a result, the best chapters are those that successfully juxtapose different cultures, and show the interactions between them. It’s illuminating, for example, to learn of the connections between Dürer, the artistic virtuoso of Renaissance Europe, and his nameless, highly skilled African contemporaries, the ivory carvers of Sierra Leone. Another engaging section sets George Catlin’s prolific mid-19th century portrayals of Native American men and women side by side with the fascinating portraits of New Zealand Maori that were painted a few decades later by the Czech immigrant Gottfried Lindauer. And the book starts with a thrilling tale of racism, plunder and centuries of artistic hybridity: the story of the brass sculptures of the ancient African kingdom of Benin, and how they ended up in the British Museum.

Olusoga’s relaxed, fluent prose is a pleasure to read, and the many pictures (all in colour) are a treat. So many different themes and examples are packed into this brief book that its second half, especially, sometimes feels like an enjoyable, helter-skelter romp through the history of art: here’s the invention of the camera, now quick, on to the impressionists, and look – we’ve arrived in Tahiti! Still, it’s hard not to cheer an author who chooses to illustrate the modern afterlife of Aztec culture by using a still from a James Bond movie. Like Clark’s treatment a generation ago, this is a personal, idiosyncratic vision, and all the better for it.