Ancestors

Where do we come from and why do we care?

From Maya Jasanoff, winner of the prestigious Cundhill History Award 2018, this is an extraordinary, major exploration of ancestry and its defining role in human history.

We live in an age of identity politics, with complicated questions of home, displacement, heritage and community. We have been bowled over by the technology to identify the origins of our ancestors, but we don’t necessarily know how to respond to our own historical contexts.

This book asks big questions. Who gets to belong in a community and who doesn’t? Which people and relationships are valued and which ones aren’t? Where do you fit in a social hierarchy and what privileges or disadvantages come with it?

The author of this thrilling work of history is Maya Jasanoff – the multi award-winning historian, traveller and biographer. She hails from two ethnicities, two religions, two continents. She will investigate her own genealogical background by situating her ancestry against historical patterns and contexts – and demonstrate how every individual story fits into larger communities.

We cannot pretend ancestry doesn’t play a major role in the way identities are formed, informing deep, if rarely acknowledged assumptions about status, race, ethnicity and nationhood. This book offers a nuanced, brilliant exploration of us – all of us, worldwide, from the origins of humanity up to the origins of generations today.