Let us begin with a few quibbles. Jacob Mchangama’s history of free speech can feel rushed in its epoch-spanning opening chapters. The author regularly and tragically applies cutie-pie neologisms to the re­mote past. (Medieval monasteries were “safe spaces”; Henry VIII combated “fake news.”) Perhaps attempting to broaden the book’s appeal, Mchangama draws unjust equivalencies between progressive cancel culture and conservative opposition to critical race theory. Yet, despite these very real flaws, he has composed a soaring global account of free speech’s origins and fortunes. Readers interested in the past and future of this embattled right should rush to purchase a copy.

Free Speech begins in the ancient world, in the shadow of “the first organized mass burning of books in recorded history.” The year is 213 b.c., and the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang has ordered all Confucian literature to be put to the flame. As Mchangama cheekily notes, the question of whether recalcitrant scholars were buried alive or dead “is a matter of debate” among historians. What is more certain is that, in ancient times as today, authentic freedom of expression was the dis­favored exception rather than the re­liable rule.

That pockets of tolerance did exist in antiquity is, of course, a central part of free speech’s story. Swooping down among the ancient Athenians, Mchangama observes the orator De­mos­the­nes arguing that free speech “distinguished democratic Athens from her bitter rival, the oligarchic Sparta.” Glancing toward Rome, he finds a re­public in which “political discussions were [so] free [that] senators would often attack each other viciously.” Despite their relative openness, however, and as Mchangama readily concedes, neither the Greeks nor the Romans understood such liberality to be all-encompassing. As Socrates learned to his peril in 399 b.c., impiety (asebeia) remained punishable by death under Athenian speech codes, as did “profaning the Eleusinian Mys­teries,” annual rites honoring the cult of Demeter and Per­sephone. Rome, mean­while, limited its broadest range of expression to a “small and self-perpetuating elite.” For Cicero and his contemporaries, the important standard was free speech for the “best men,” not the “artisans, shop­keepers, and . . . scum” who would surely abuse it.

A similar flexibility (some might say hypocrisy) is on display as Mchangama looks eastward to the domain of ninth- and tenth-century Islam. There, a “medieval Tom Paine” by the name of Ibn al-Rawandi declared the Koran “absurd,” prophets “unnecessary,” and the hajj “an exercise in futility.” Joining al-Rawandi in iconoclasm were such freethinkers as Abu Bakr al-Razi and Ibn Sina, famed Persian physicians whose work elevated reason at the expense of religious fanaticism. That all three men were allowed to retain their heads suggests, as Mchangama puts it, “that Islam was uniquely hetero­dox among the monotheistic faiths of medieval times.” Nevertheless, it is also the case that al-Rawandi’s writings were allowed to vanish from the face of the earth and that the early eleventh century saw “the hardening and widening of apostasy laws.” The medieval Islamic world’s appetite for impiety may have been surprisingly ample, but, as in the ancient West, it was not without its limits.

Unlike some volumes that trace a single theme across disparate places and times, Mchangama’s book contains no explicit thesis to which all of history is forced to conform. Instead, and to the author’s credit, what emerges is a series of unobtrusive patterns. Free speech and national-religious orthodoxies have always and everywhere been enemies. The powerful will inevitably use their standing to suppress the ideas of rivals. Free speech, when actually present, is well worth any attendant diminishment of public cohesion, leading as it does to prosperity, growth, and the flourishing of human cultures.

Developing the first of these motifs, Mchangama takes the reader through territory that is no less compelling for being familiar. Despite the “freedom of conversation” vows elicited from a post-exile Charles II, British parliaments of the 1660s passed a surfeit of anti-Catholic statutes, as well as laws criminalizing Protestant dissent. The Great Persecution that followed saw the imprisonment of tens of thousands between 1660 and 1688. Similar ac­tions in ancien régime France led to the censorship of books written against “religion,” “service to the king,” and “the good of the state,” a project carried out with such fervor that even Denis Diderot served a brief stint in jail.

Among Mchangama’s virtues as a guide is his dogged ecumenicism where religious tyranny is concerned. While some contemporary readers may associate blasphemy laws primarily with Muslim cultures, similar codes have obtained, at various times, in Maryland and Madrid, Holland and Hong Kong. In Mchangama’s convincing telling, such edicts are damaging not only in their design but in their unintended con­sequences, which spin inevitably outward from the “heretical” to society at large. “Whatever ideas and epithets are deemed beyond the pale,” the author writes, “cannot be effectively elimi­nated without jeopardizing freedom of speech for all.”

It is in the service of his second major observation that Mchangama hits upon a still more discouraging irony. Sur­veying supposed champions of free speech, he finds not only an array of understandable shortcomings but such wanton hypocrisy that one is tempted to burn some of one’s own library in protest. Having crafted, in 1644’s Areopagitica, one of the English language’s most significant paeans to free speech, John Milton went on to support anti-Catholic blasphemy bans and to join the corps of licensors created by the loathed 1643 Ordinance for the Regulating of Printing. (Through­out, Mchangama employs the phrase “Milton’s Curse” to refer to any “selective and unprincipled defense of free speech.”) No less a personage than Voltaire practiced similar duplicity when he attempted to manipulate France’s censorship regime to suppress the output of his enemies. Perhaps most disheartening of all is the conduct of Martin Luther, whose late-in-life blunders are well deserving of scrutiny. Having been hounded for years because of his beliefs, he eventually took up his own ravenous persecution of Anabaptists, Sacramentarians, and Jews.

So susceptible is free speech to the whims and failings of backsliders, in fact, that it would be easy to dismiss the entire venture as a fantasy and resign oneself to intellectual shackles in this life. Mchangama, happily, is having none of it. Wherever freedom of ex­pression has nudged ahead of the censors, human beings have thrived, a sequence that has repeated itself from Athens to rural Sweden to (early) Silicon Valley. Though Free Speech fairly bustles with examples of the phenomenon, a pair are worth highlighting. According to a study cited by the author, European cities that by the late 1400s possessed printing presses grew 60 percent faster than those without them between 1500 and 1600, with “printing presses account[ing] for between 20 and 80 percent of that growth.” A similar audit of popular educational attainment reaches an analogous conclusion. Permitted to read the Bible in their own tongues, the largely Protestant peoples of northern Europe approached 100 percent liter­acy by 1900. In Catholic Spain and Italy, by contrast, “the rate was still only about 50 percent.”

Free Speech is not, as these examples might suggest, a merely anecdotal volume. Rather, its author builds on pithy illustrations to create a profound sense of free expression’s global story. As one might expect, this chronicle is one of fits and starts, with untrammeled speech taking a step forward here and another backward there. By the time one arrives at our current moment, the impression is of a right that, while never fully won or lost, is perpetually threatened, despised, and worthy of all-out defense.

Endangering free speech today is nothing less than the combined might of autocratic governments, California tech firms, and the progressive radicals responsible for the emergence of cancel culture in America and the West. Considering the myriad successes of the latter group, Mchangama allows that “the underlying assumptions of American ‘free speech exceptionalism’ have lost much of their unifying ap­peal.” Nevertheless, his argument in free expression’s favor is full-throated and unapologetic, not least because he rejects utterly the idea that democratic nations must fill their statute books with hate-speech “exceptions.” For Mchangama, both the past and the present advise against such compromises. Just as “the constant erosion of constitutional principles” in Weimar Germany “helped pave the way for Hitler and the Nazis to abolish free speech once and for all,” so contemporary laws against unsavory speech create the conditions in which future tyrants may thrive. Furthermore, and as the author wisely notes, “suppression may actually serve to amplify rather than silence hate speech.”

Conservatives will not agree with every word from Mchangama’s pen. To repeat only one charge, the author gravely misunderstands the reasoning behind anti-CRT statutes and seems not to have weighed society’s interest in maintaining curricular integrity in public schools. (An instructor who teaches incorrect sums is not merely practicing “free speech,” nor is one who expounds crypto-racist hokum.) This blind spot notwithstanding, however, Mchangama has written an admirable and useful book — one that readers are likely to consult with pleasure for many years. Among volumes dedicated to our “first freedom,” it will not soon be surpassed.