Andrew Taylor - Books That Changed the World

Andrew Taylor is the author of Walking Wounded: the Life and Poetry of Vernon Scannell; Gods Fugitive: the Life of C. M. Doughty and A Plum in Your Mouth, among a total of ten books. He has worked as a journalist in television, newspapers and magazines in Britain and the Middle East.

The 50 Most Influential Books in Human History

Andrew Taylor

First published in hardback 2008 by Quercus Editions Ltd

This is the ebook edition published in 2014 by
Quercus Editions Ltd
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Copyright Andrew Taylor 2008, 2014

The moral right of Andrew Taylor to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

eBook ISBN 978 1 84916 561 7
Print ISBN 978 1 78206 942 3

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www.quercusbooks.co.uk

c. 8TH CENTURY

Homer

5TH CENTURY BC

Herodotus

5TH CENTURY BC

Confucius

4TH CENTURY BC

Plato

2ND CENTURY BC2ND CENTURY AD

2313 BC

Horace

c. AD 100170

Ptolemy

2ND OR 3RD CENTURY AD

Mallanaga Vatsyayana

7TH CENTURY

1025

Avicenna

1380s90s

Geoffrey Chaucer

1532

Niccol Machiavelli

158595

Gerard Mercator

160515

Miguel de Cervantes

1623

William Shakespeare

1628

William Harvey

1632

Galileo Galilei

1687

Isaac Newton

1755

Samuel Johnson

1774

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

1776

Adam Smith

1776

Thomas Paine

1798

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1813

Jane Austen

1843

Charles Dickens

1848

Karl Marx

1851

Herman Melville

1852

Harriet Beecher Stowe

1857

Gustave Flaubert

1859

Charles Darwin

1859

John Stuart Mill

1869

Leo Tolstoy

1878

New Haven District Telephone Company

1885

Translated by Sir Richard Burton

1888

Arthur Conan Doyle

1899

Sigmund Freud

1905

1920

Wilfred Owen

1920

Albert Einstein

1922

James Joyce

1928

D.H. Lawrence

1936

John Maynard Keynes

1947

Primo Levi

1949

George Orwell

1949

Simone de Beauvoir

1951

J.D. Salinger

1958

Chinua Achebe

1962

Rachel Carson

1964

Mao Zedong

1997

J.K. Rowling

How can we ever change the world? Military leaders, such as Genghis Khan or Napoleon have certainly managed to change large parts of it, though generally not for as long as they expected; scientists devising cures and vaccines for disease can spread a more benign influence across whole continents; the thoughts of religious leaders or philosophers, like Jesus Christ, Mohammed, Plato or Confucius, can sweep through generations like fire. But books?

Reading books is generally a solitary, unassuming pastime: bookishness is the very antithesis of the man-of-action qualities that seem to shake the world by the scruff of its neck. The pen may boast of being mightier than the sword, but it is generally the sword that wins in the short term. It is that phrase, though, which gives the game away: in the short term, writers can be bullied, imprisoned or executed, their work censored, and their books burned, but over the long sweep of history, it is books and the ideas expressed within them that have transformed the world.

From the first cave paintings 30,000 years ago, the passing on of thoughts and ideas from one person to another, from one generation to another, has been the key to civilization. For centuries, this could only be done by painstakingly copying one manuscript to another, or by memorizing long screeds of poetry the works of Homer, for instance, survived for maybe 200 years before being written down. Then there was the transformative technology of print, first in the East, much later in the West. The Diamond Sutra, an ancient Buddhist text printed in China in AD 868, is thought to be the oldest printed book surviving, pre-dating Gutenbergs Bible in Europe by nearly six centuries. With print, philosophers, theologians, historians, scientists and poets could pass on their ideas about life, about the world, about eternity and the present moment, about the way that people have thought and behaved in the past, and about how they always think and behave to hundreds, even thousands of people at a time.

As a result, people who may never have heard of the Flemish cartographer Mercator of Rupelmonde still carry in their heads today a picture of the world that he devised 400 years ago; Odysseus, Don Quixote and Ebenezer Scrooge are familiar characters to children to whom the names of Homer, Cervantes and Dickens may mean nothing. The patient on the operating table may not know about William Harvey, but he has good reason to be grateful for The Motion of the Heart and Blood; because of the compilers of Shakespeares First Folio, people who have never seen his plays may still describe themselves as tongue-tied or tell others they are living in a fools paradise. In great ways and small, books spread their influence, even among those who never turn their pages.

But which books? There are few better ways of starting an argument than producing a list, whether it purports to rank the best opera singers, the most influential politicians or the greatest footballers, and I have been left in no doubt over the last few months about the passion with which people will defend favourite books and authors whom they feel to have been unjustly excluded. About some on the list, like the Bible and the Quran, Shakespeares First Folio and Darwins On the Origin of Species, there can be little argument but where are Euclids Elements or Thomas Mores Utopia? Eliot, either George or T.S., depending on your point of view? How could you choose Dickenss A Christmas Carol rather than Bleak House or David Copper field? Or The Pickwick Papers? What about Thomas Paines Rights of Man or A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft?

The answer is that any list can only be subjective. These are the books that, in their different ways, have changed my world but they are also books that I believe have demonstrably changed the world in one way or another for millions of other people. Often, they have enhanced the richness of human experience; sometimes, their civilizing effect, or otherwise, depends on the views one holds, a category that includes the great religious books. And very occasionally, books such as