Not Only Europe: Voltaire’s History of the Human Spirit

About this book

"In most of our universal histories we have treated other men as if they did not exist," Voltaire writes on his first pages. He took up universal history where the famous Bishop Bossuet had stopped, at Charlemagne — but asked a different question: not how God guided empires, but how people lived, what they invented and how their customs changed. This short work is an early version of his great Essay on the Customs and the Spirit of Nations (1756), one of the first attempts in Europe to write a history of the whole world.

China, for Voltaire, is a state that had laws, officials and astronomers more than four thousand years ago, and a morality built on Confucius, without a ruling priesthood: "In other countries the laws punish crimes; in China they do more, they reward virtue." India gave us our numerals and chess. The scholars of Baghdad and Córdoba kept Greek science alive and taught medieval Europe astronomy, chemistry and medicine, while the West was sacked by Vikings and torn by feudal wars. Then Voltaire follows Europe after Charlemagne: the Normans and the Danes, Alfred the Great, Moorish Spain, Byzantium, William the Conqueror, the rise of Venice, the taking of Toledo and the Cid.

Rendered into modern English by BlusaBooks with the help of AI tools, working from images of the pages of the 1752 edition (London on the title page), where it was printed together with Micromégas and the History of the Crusades. A complete, sentence-by-sentence text — not a summary. The text ends around the year 1100, where the 1752 edition ends; one torn place in the original is marked "…".

What is inside

• sixteen parts: Voltaire's foreword; China; India, Persia, Arabia and Islam; Persia; Muhammad; the caliphs; the Normans; the Danes in Normandy; England in the 9th century; Spain and the Muslims; progress of the Muslims; the empire of Constantinople; the Western Empire and Italy; the Norman Conquest of England; Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries; Spain until the 12th century
• the complete text with 127 footnotes — names, places and events explained on the same page, and where Voltaire was wrong, the note calmly says what historians know today
• twelve colour illustrations, each in the manner of the art of its own culture — Chinese silk painting, Mughal and Persian miniatures, the Baghdad school, Byzantine mosaic, the Bayeux Tapestry, Italian fresco (created with AI tools)
• a Commentary section at the end: each part in plain words and what modern historians say
• foreword: why Voltaire began with China, his quarrel with Bossuet, and how to read the book today

Who it is for

Readers of world history and the history of ideas; anyone interested in China, India and the Islamic Golden Age; lovers of the Enlightenment and of Voltaire; students and teachers looking for a primary source that is easy to read; lovers of old books.

A historical source: Voltaire writes as an Enlightenment author of the 18th century, with the views and the irony of his time, also about religions; the notes and commentary explain what we know today, respectfully towards all faiths and peoples.