The Times History of the World

Those who pioneered a critical, scientific view of the world ran great risks. In 1616 the Catholic Church banned Copernican teaching, and placed Galileo under house arrest for challenging scripture. Galileo was fortunate: a few years before, in 1600, Giordano Bruno, another Copernican, was burnt at the stake in Rome. Hobbes was forced into exile, suspected of atheism; John Locke, who wrote the founding text of modern liberal representative government in the 1680s was also forced to write in exile, and his works circulated in parts of Europe in secret, too subversive for open sale. Writers of the 18th-century ‘Enlightenment’, during which critical thinking began to flourish for the first time, had to steer a careful line between what could or could not be said. Rousseau was also banned for life from his native city of Geneva for his radical democratic views. But it was a tide that could not be held back. By the early 19th century most of the modern Western sciences had been established on a firm scientific basis; political and social theory exploded traditional claims to authority (expressed most clearly in the founding of the American Republic in 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789); organized religion in its Western guise was shown to be unable to defend its major contentions about the nature of the universe and of man’s place in it and an alternative, naturalistic, rational model of the world was substituted. The triumph of free expression now seems irreversible, but the revolution represented by modern thought was not inevitable and its progress was subject to fits and starts. It is still not entirely clear why the prevailing authorities in Europe came to tolerate the new intellectual wave when a century before it might have been violently suppressed. The publication in 1859 of On Liberty by the English philosopher John Stuart Mill summed up what had been achieved in modern Europe. There was no other freedom, Mill asserted, more fundamental than the right to say what you like without fear that you will be silenced.

The formal acquisition of scientific, material knowledge about all aspects of the natural world and its application to human societies has been responsible for transforming world history more fundamentally than any other development in the past 6,000 years. Whatever case can be made for showing that there are strong lines of continuity throughout world history, the possibilities opened up by transcending the narrow world view of a God-centred and God-given universe have been unprecedented. It is a story intimately bound to the wider history of the rise of Europe (which with European expansion to America came to be regarded as the Western world) over the past 500 years. Historians have often been tempted to see this is as a happily progressive narrative while the rest of the world stagnated. From a Western perspective the idea of ‘the triumph of the West’ has an evident plausibility. Yet it begs the larger question of why Europe did evolve in very different ways, not only from the other civilizations existing alongside, but from all previous civilizations. What has been distinctive about the West, as Karl Marx argued in the mid-19th century, is the fact that it proved capable of expanding world-wide; Marx thought that no other culture or civilization would be capable of withstanding what Europe had to offer or what it forced upon them.

There is no agreed or straightforward answer to the question ‘why Europe?’ Geography was clearly favourable—a temperate climate, generally adequate food supplies, population growth steady but not excessively large, few of the debilitating, parasite-borne diseases that affected large parts of Africa and Asia with elephantiasis, river-blindness, bilharzia or malaria. The long European shoreline, never very far from any human habitation, encouraged the development of seaborne trade and exploration and the development of early sea power. Seafaring technology was one of the earliest and most important of the technical revolutions and Europeans exploited it fully. Europe also succeeded in stemming the tide of regular invasion which had characterized European history for almost a thousand years from the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. The Tatar invasions of the 13th century and the expansion of the Ottoman Turkish Empire into south-eastern Europe during the early modern period were checked sufficiently to allow central and western Europe to consolidate the state system, to build a settled network of cities, and a regular trading network. The military organization of Europe was transformed by the application of gunpowder and the development of cannon and musket-fire. Although these innovations were usually used against other Europeans, they gave Europeans a clear advantage whenever they found themselves fighting non-European peoples. It is sometimes argued that post-Reformation Protestantism, with its emphasis on individualism, played an important part in making Europe different, but the earliest explorers and imperialists were Catholic Portuguese and Spanish, while the Americas were discovered by an Italian from Genoa, Cristoforo Colombo. The long history of the Crusades against the Arab Middle East showed that there was nothing passive about Catholic Christianity.

The distinctive characteristic of European societies as they solidified into an early version of the modern states’ system was their willingness to look outwards towards the wider world. The voyages of discovery were not isolated examples of a lucky piece of exploration, but rapidly embraced the whole globe, making it clear in the process that the earth was round rather than flat. Only Europeans embraced the world in this way: map-making, navigation, inland exploration, elaborate descriptions of native communities and exotic fauna and flora, all contributed to creating a view of the world fundamentally different from the view from Constantinople or Beijing. Not only did Europeans discover large areas of the hitherto unknown (at least to Europeans) but they began a process of aggressive settlement across the Americas, in parts of Africa and India and into the archipelagos of the western Pacific ‘spice islands’. If occasionally briefly reversed, European expansion proved irresistible and European appetites insatiable. The Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés captured the Aztec capital Tenochtitlán in 1520 with 300 Spanish troops and some local allies aided by the fact that around half the city’s 300,000 inhabitants had died of imported smallpox. Once the imperial toeholds were established across the oceans, Europeans never abandoned them. They became a source of remarkable wealth, helping eventually to make Europe richer than any rival civilization, and making it possible to defend and extend the imperial frontier.

Wealth itself would not have made Europe distinctive. The rulers of China and India were fabulously rich. What made the difference was how that wealth was used. The application of rational organization and scientific technique made possible a remarkable economic revolution. An important fraction of the wealth generated in Europe was mobile wealth, mobilized to develop yet further wealth by banks and commercial houses, which developed across Europe from the late 17th century. This was the engine that made commercial capitalism possible and it was fuelled by an acquisitive urge that was subject to few customary or religious restrictions. From the late 18th century the mobile wealth was used to fund a second revolution of technique. Although inventiveness was nothing strictly European—Chinese scientists and engineers had anticipated many European discoveries, including gunpowder—the critical difference was the application of invention. The development of steam technology in Britain made possible the mobilization of new and efficient forms of energy quite distinct from the water or horse-powered technologies of other cultures. The development of gas and later generated electricity as an energy source, the mastery of turbine technology, the perfection of rail locomotion, were all uniquely Western, a blend of European and American innovation. In a mere hundred years the gap between Western technique and the rest of the world was unbridgeable, making possible the rapid expansion of European states as imperial powers. The British American colonies won their independence in 1783, and European settlers, enjoying the same technical advantages and territorial ambitions, occupied the whole area of North America between Mexico and Canada by the middle years of the 19th century.

The economic and technical revolutions relied on a high level of social and spatial mobility. Europeans moved abroad in large numbers, bringing with them Christianity, guns, and trade. In western Europe there were few barriers to social mobility, allowing new classes of successful bankers, merchants and manufacturers to play an influential part in public affairs. The establishment of secure property rights and respect for individual wealth-making removed any legal inhibitions on the right to make money. The publication of Adam Smith’s classic The Wealth of Nations in 1776 provided a sound intellectual basis for the claim that the interests of communities were best served by allowing the free play of market forces and individual pursuit of economic well-being. Economic individualism and belief in the benign concept of the market had no equivalent in other cultures. Internal mobility was also important. The new industries attracted large numbers of rural workers who were no longer tied to the soil, at least in western Europe. Rapid population growth from the late 18th century, which threatened to put a severe strain on food supplies, was absorbed into the new cities; at the same time rising agricultural yields and the application of modern techniques (fertiliser cycles, threshing machines, stock breeding) made it just possible for the mobile urban population to be fed. The new wealth could then be used to fund overseas food production and imported foodstuffs. In 1877 the first refrigerated food was carried on board ship between Argentina and France making it possible to bring meat and fruit half-way across the world.

The economic revolution was accompanied by other important changes. In Europe and the United States the idea of education for all replaced the traditional distinction between illiterate mass and the educated few. Education was basic for most people, but opportunities for higher forms of training or for university expanded throughout the 19th century and became general in the twentieth. Civil rights and the rule of law were applied in most European states and the settler communities overseas, and limited progress was made towards representative forms of government. One of the most striking aspects of the move to greater emancipation was the gradual recognition in the liberal West that women should have equal rights—social, sexual, political—with men, even if the principle has not always worked as it should. Finally, the idea of the modern nation-state, in which identity was derived from being a citizen of a particular nation, defined by territory, shared culture and language, although far from universal even in Europe in the 19th century (and certainly not applied to Europe’s empires), set the model that has been subsequently established worldwide. The United Nations now counts 195 sovereign states, all but three as members.

The impact of Western wealth, military advantage, technology and ambition on the rest of the world was catastrophic. India was conquered, the Mughal emperors overthrown, and British rule imposed. China succeeded in keeping the West at bay, but at the cost of regular punitive expeditions, and the final sapping of China’s traditional political system by Western-educated Chinese who wanted China to adopt modern politics and economics. The Ottoman Empire crumbled under the remorseless pressure of Europe, which took over the whole of North Africa and encroached on the Ottoman Middle East. The Empire finally collapsed in 1919 at the end of the First World War. Everywhere else traditional societies, long isolated from any contact with a wider world, were visited, annexed, fought over and incorporated into the Western orbit. What resulted was usually an unstable mix of tradition and novelty, the old order sufficiently challenged or undermined that it could no longer function effectively, the new order mediated by surviving social traditions, religious practices and native cultures. The one exception was Japan. Contact with the West in the 1850s was perceived to be an immediate threat. In 1868 the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown, the Meiji emperor restored, and a rapid process of modernization undertaken to shield Japan from Western imperialism. Within forty years Japan’s modern armed forces could defeat the much larger Russian army and navy in the war of 1904–5; in the 1930s Japan invaded large parts of China and in 1941 Japanese forces launched a swift and successful campaign against American and European territories in the Pacific and South-East Asia which was reversed only by the exploitation of Western technologies yet more advanced.

The changes ushered in by the rise of European and American power have developed exponentially. The history of the past 250 years shows a dizzying transformation: global horizons have narrowed with mass communication and the development of a homogenized consumer culture; a level of knowledge and technical achievement unimaginable a century ago makes it possible to explore planets millions of miles distant, to revisit the earliest moments of the universe, to understand the genetic codes that dictate human biology, to harness lasers and micro-electronic components to produce a technical base not only of exceptional sophistication, but one that is also democratic in its reach. Some sense of the sheer speed of change can be illustrated in numerous ways, but few examples are more remarkable than the difference between the colonial wars of the late 19th century, fought with Gatling machine guns, rifles and small artillery pieces and the Second World War fought only forty years later with tanks, high-speed aircraft, radar, radio, missiles, and, in its late stages, with jet aircraft and nuclear weapons.

The Western experience, for all its technical and social achievements, has nonetheless been profoundly ambiguous. There have been perhaps no other civilizations which have been so publicly anxious about the prospects for their survival, so fearful of pride before a fall. The two world wars, both generated in Europe, compromised that claim to be the heartland of modern civilization and a source of social progress and moral authority, which had been relayed throughout the last decades of the 19th century. Exporting ideas about civil rights and nationhood accelerated the decline and disappearance of the old European empires. The transfer of the British crown colony of Hong Kong to Chinese rule in 1997 marked a symbolic end to a long history of coercive European expansion and acknowledged China’s growing international stature. The export of Western technology and commercial skills resulted in the collapse of many European industries and the transfer of large-scale manufacturing to the rapidly growing economies of eastern and south-eastern Asia. The global reach of Western commerce and the remorseless march of English as the global language has produced a backlash against what are perceived to be new forms of imperialism, and against the crass failure of Western states to understand the complex differences that still mark off communities in Asia, Africa, Latin America or the Middle East from the Western model. Islamic terrorism is only one of the many fruits of hostility to the idea that somehow the Western model ought to be appropriate in any cultural or geographical context.

Where, then, is this history going? Accelerated change can be read several ways: it could either mean speeding downhill to the edge of the precipice, or climbing rapidly to a richer, more secure and more peaceable world. Historians would do well do be humble in the face of the future. The unpredictable and unpredicted can be found throughout the chapters that follow. How few commentators and Sovietologists thought in the late 1980s that the Soviet bloc would possibly collapse in a matter of a few years; how many observers thought, wrongly, that HIV/AIDS would provoke an unstoppable pandemic which would decimate the world’s population. One thing can be said with certainty: for all the talk of a new unipolar world built around the massive military power of the United States and the appeal of the Western model, the foreseeable future will have China, Russia, India and the Middle East, the great bulk of the world’s population, developing in ways that are not consistent with an ideal Western model, capable of exerting a growing influence on global economic structures and the distribution of political influence, able perhaps to restore at least some of that diversity in historical experience characteristic of all recorded history up to the 19th century.

Taking the longer view there is little to be said. A hundred human lives of 60 years will take us to 8,000 AD. Perhaps the acceleration of history will provoke a sudden crash long before that. There remain the awful paradoxes that the more ‘progress’ there has been, the more violence, discrimination and crime has been generated and the more economic desires are satisfied, the nearer the earth moves to ecological crisis. As Nietzsche remarked more than a century ago, ‘the universe does not need man’. Human history may well be finite. On the other hand, the history of the world hitherto has shown man to be a remarkably adaptable, ambitious, unscrupulous, technically adept creature. This history so far is no simple parable of survival and triumph; the future of the world may have to be just that.

Richard Overy, 2008

ONE HUMAN ORIGINS AND EARLY CULTURES

Recorded history is only the tip of an iceberg reaching back to the first appearance on earth of the human species. Anthropologists, prehistorians and archaeologists have extended our vista of the past by hundreds of thousands of years: we cannot understand human history without taking account of their findings. The transformation of humankind (or, more accurately, of certain groups of humans in certain areas) from hunters and fishers to agriculturists, and from a migratory to a sedentary life, constitutes the most decisive revolution in the whole of human history. The climatic and ecological changes which made it possible have left their mark on the historical record down to the present day.

Agriculture made possible not merely a phenomenal growth of human population, which is thought to have increased some 16-fold between 8000 and 4000 BC, but also gave rise to the familiar landscape of village communities which still characterized Europe as late as the middle of the 19th century and which even today prevails in many parts of the world. Nowhere are the continuities of history more visible. The enduring structures of human society, which transcend and outlive political change, carry us back to the end of the Ice Age, to the changes which began when the shrinking ice-cap left a new world to be explored and tamed.

FROM c. 5 MILLION YEARS AGO

HUMAN ORIGINS

Global cooling between five and six million years ago saw savannahs replace the tropical forests of sub-Saharan Africa. The appearance of this new environment was in turn matched by an evolutionary pulse that gave rise to new carnivores and omnivores. Among them were the hominines, the ancestors of modern man.

The earliest hominine fossils, discovered in the Afar region of Ethiopia, are the fragmentary 4.5-million-year-old remains of Ardipithecus ramidus. Better evidence is available of the later and more widespread Australopithecenes, or “southern apes”. Skeletal and fossilized footprints of Australopithecus afarensis, dated to between three and four million years ago, indicate a serviceable if not fully bipedal gait, hands still partly adapted for specialized tree climbing and a brain approximately one-third the size of ours. This species is the probable ancestor both of the robustly built Australopithecines boisei, aethiopicus and robustus, all with large teeth and herbivorous diets, and of our genus, Homo, meaning “man”. A major discovery thrown up by fieldwork since the 1950s has revealed that these closely related but nonetheless distinctive species not only lived at the same time but side by side in the same habitats. Finds of more species are expected.

From between two and three million years ago, there is evidence of important evolutionary trends in Homo: brains became much bigger, a process known as encephalization; and full bipedalism was attained—as the 1974 discovery of the fossil skeleton known as ‘Lucy’ shows. As larger brains need better diets to sustain them, the increase in brain size could only have occurred as a result of significant evolutionary pressures. The problem was compounded because hominines stayed the same size, with the result that their bigger brains could be achieved only by reducing the size of another organ, the stomach, a trade-off which in turn reduced the efficiency of the digestive tract, which in turn demanded a still better diet.

EARLY TECHNOLOGIES

The most convincing explanation of this development—the expensive tissue hypothesis—holds that a move towards an energy-rich diet, particularly animal proteins, was responsible. And indeed the earliest-known stone tools, found in Gona, Ethiopia, suggest that 2.5 million years ago meat was a central part of hominines’ diet, with the sharpened stones used to cut flesh and pound marrowrich bones from carcasses either scavenged or brought down and then defended against carnivores. Burnt bones found in southern Africa indicate that by 1.5 million years ago hominines had learned to “cook” their food, a development which again would have compensated for smaller stomachs by breaking down animal proteins before digestion took place.

OUT OF AFRICA

This pattern of development was the basis for the first colonization, by Homo erectus, 1.8 million years ago of areas outside sub-Saharan Africa. Then, around 500,000 years ago, Homo heidelbergensis migrated into north Africa and the Near East, reaching northern Europe about 400,000 years ago (however there is also good evidence in northern Europe for hominines 700,000 years ago). Homo erectus and heidelbergensis are sometimes considered to have shared a common ancestor, a type designated as Homo ergaster, and best known from the skeleton found at Nariokotome in Kenya’s Rift valley. By perhaps 1.5 million years ago, all three had brains of about 1000cc (61cu in) and an adaptable stone technology: the weight and careful shaping of the edges of their distinctive handaxes, whether pointed or oval, made them effective butchery tools.

Stone technology was not the only factor in the evolutionary pressures that led to larger brains. It was also to do with allowing hominines to remember, to manipulate, to support and to organize others in more complex ways. Perhaps paradoxically, as hominines developed these more sophisticated social structures, so they simultaneously became less reliant on one another and better adapted to living in smaller groups. This in turn allowed them to colonize harsher barrier habitats such as the Sahara at the margins of their homelands from where they could colonize new, more temperate areas beyond.

MODERN HUMANS

From about 500,000 years ago, this early burst of colonization came to a halt. Instead, though there were undoubtedly many dispersals of populations and much intermingling of genes, regional groups of separate populations living side by side such as the Neanderthals developed. But from 100,000 years ago, another major dispersal began when anatomically modern people—Homo sapiens sapiens—emigrated from sub-Saharan Africa. By 50,000 years ago, Australia had been reached, by boat; 33,000 years ago, the western Pacific islands were colonized; 15,000 years ago, the Americas were reached. Major expansion into the Arctic began about 4500 years ago as the continental ice sheets retreated. Finally, 2000 years ago, humans began to settle the deep Pacific islands from where they reached New Zealand around 1200 years ago, 1000 years before the island’s discovery by Captain Cook.