A History of the World (2 page)

So what follows is inevitably an elitist history, since the people who had the power, money or leisure to change societies were disproportionately drawn from those who were already privileged. This sometimes does mean ‘kings and queens’. Only a member of the privileged Mughal ruling family could have become emperor when Aurangzeb did. But the fact that it was Aurangzeb, and not one of his brothers, had important consequences, because he was a religious zealot who bankrupted Mughal India and inadvertently opened the door for the British. Cleopatra was a pure-bred member of the Greek ruling house of Egypt (not that they were very pure) but the fact that she, and not her brother, ruled at the time of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony had consequences for the classical world.

Later, as the churn of more educated societies throws up a wider range of characters, the class background of the change-makers widens. But the great men or great women are the ones with the brains, courage or luck to make breakthroughs that others do not. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, matters more than the very clever physicists of his time who were never at Los Alamos. Hitler was a lower-middle-class drifter who became a brilliant demagogue. Germany without Hitler would have been different, and his story is vastly more important than the story of the many ultranationalist
beer-hall orators whose parties shrivelled and vanished. So it is clear, I hope, that when I say this is a ‘great man’ way of telling history, I am not suggesting that anyone stands outside the coincidence of their time and place – the social moment which empowers them or neuters them. Nor am I using ‘great’ in a way that implies moral admiration. Some of the greatest of great men have also been the biggest bastards alive.

As this story advances I hope readers will enjoy the nit and grit of little facts that switch on the lights, all of which are plundered from real historians. In a recent book on Italy we learn that at the start of Italian unification, in 1861, a grand total of 2.5 per cent of Italians spoke what we would recognize as Italian.
¹
From another, that to pass their exams, Chinese bureaucrats in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had to memorize 431,286 different characters.
²
The first throws light on Italy’s struggle to be a modern nation. The second reminds us why China took so long to develop a large literate middle class. Had it done so – had Chinese depended on twenty-odd phonetic letters – then China’s history would have been different.

The shape of human history can be told through numbers, the rising number of people on the planet, from perhaps a few thousand pairs at our last moment of near-extinction to today’s leap towards seven billion now and nine billion before long. If we put these numbers on a graph, with a timeline as our horizontal, then the story would still be a simple but dramatic acceleration leap.

To begin with, the long flat acres of time when the human population barely seemed to move. There are up to seventy thousand years of hunter-gatherer family groups spreading slowly from Africa. There are around ten thousand years during the invention of agriculture, the development of tribal societies and small towns, when the population curve only slowly starts to stretch its neck upwards.

Next come the beginnings of civilizations, around 5,500 years ago, with the next great invention after farming, which is writing. Then follows the rest of human history, starring trade and the industrial revolution. In our own times the people-line rockets skywards, mainly thanks to cleaner water and medicine. Why has the acceleration happened? Why such a slow burn, followed by a rocketing population? It originates in the ability to alter the rest of the natural world shown by
Homo sapiens sapiens
(and what an exuberantly boastful tag we have
chosen – two ‘wises’, not one). Other creatures adapt to the environment around them, evolving characteristics and behaviour which give them a niche, a biological cranny, in which they can survive and even thrive. Merely by living, they may change that environment, as anyone who has seen termite nests, or watched the impact of beavers on a river, can confirm. All life changes the world, which is in a constant process of flux.

Humans, however, with their superior mental and communications skills, have taken this ability to shape the world to a different level. We have hunted and driven other mammals to extinction. We have tethered and changed animals beyond recognition – look at the ancestors of the modern cow, or the Highland terrier. We have done the same to plants – taking a corn-cob all the way from a fingerbone-sized piece of starch to a swollen barrel of nourishment, for instance. Now, with fish farms we are altering even the size, shape and musculature of fish. This has given us a surplus of energy no mere predator could hope for. Using it, we have grown from family groups to tribes to villages to cities to nations, allowing us to change much more of our original environment. We have altered the courses of rivers and dug into the mineral covering of the planet, pulling out coal, oil and gas to give ourselves more power, exploiting ancient vegetable reserves that lived and died long before we arrived. In very recent times our understanding has allowed us to develop medicines and technologies that have extended our lifespans dramatically.

Again, none of this has come about because of impersonal forces. It has been done by the accumulated acts of millions of individual humans, working away in our own immediate interest like the tiny creatures who make up vast coral reefs – except, of course, with self-consciousness, and so able to give a running commentary on it all. One survey of human history concludes simply: ‘What drives history is the human ambition to alter one’s condition to match one’s hopes.’
³
A better chewy root; a fatter goat; safety in the trees from the raiders; a livelier tune; a more interesting story; a new flavour; more children for one’s old age; a way to avoid the taxman; a watch; a mangle; a bicycle; an air-ticket to the sun – these are the modest lures and small whips that drive us forward until the next leader of some kind makes another leap.

There is no evidence that we have changed biologically or in our
instincts during the time covered by this book. There have been small evolutionary changes. The way our upper and lower teeth meet has altered as our diet has changed; the ‘overbite’ caused by more grinding of grain came quite late on. Human groups who kept cows so as to drink their milk developed digestive systems to cope, while Asians who never did this did not. The different human populations that scattered out of Africa in different directions, and eventually squatted down in fertile spots, became separated from one another. They developed cosmetic differences: skin colour, eye shape and subtle variations in skull design, which produced a certain mutual suspicion after those geographical distances were closed again. But in our rough size and strength, our abilities to imagine, reason, communicate, employ delicate hand strength, plan and sweat, we have stayed the same. We know more. We have not got smarter.

If we have not got cleverer, how have we increased so many times over, and often improved our individual material lives so successfully? The answer is that we are a collaborative and learning creature, gathering up the work and successes of the past and building on them. We stand not on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of our grandparents and of our great-great-great-grandparents too. The point was made recently by a clever researcher who tried to build a simple electric pop-up toaster completely from scratch. It was almost impossible. You need the history of oil exploration, plastics and so on first, and the industrial specialization that followed.

Left to itself (undisrupted by war, natural catastrophe or famine) this process produces, quite necessarily, that acceleration in human population. Writing was invented in Mesopotamia – and independently in China and America and India. But once it was moving around the Mediterranean, it was quickly adapted and advanced. It did not have to be reinvented by the French, the Ottomans or the Danes. Farming was invented up to seven times in different parts of the world between twelve thousand and five thousand years ago; but as has been pointed out, the steam engine did not need to be invented seven times to spread around the world.
⁴

There is another consequence of this, which may make us flinch. Farming was created by millions of people learning independently about the shapes of grasses, how to tend them, where to make water flow, and so on. It was a change embodied in human family experience,
and therefore a cautious one, even if its consequences were momentous and unexpected. The industrial revolution was different. Steam power needed coalminers and metallurgists, lawyers and financiers; but few people who travelled on trains or wore the clothes produced by steam-driven machines needed to understand the technology. Specialization means that, overall, the advances are no longer embodied in individual lives; most of us need only take them on trust. As human civilization becomes more complex, individuals necessarily understand less about how it actually works. The personal ability of most of us to affect the course of our society (never strong) may seem, therefore, to vanish. Of the billions of us today who depend on digital technology or modern medicine, very few have the faintest clue about how it all happens. Individually, we have almost no control over anything. This is why politics, our only wobbly lever, continues to matter so much.

And history is also the story of the bumps and setbacks that occur when more people, using more energy, build larger societies. Throughout early history, many big setbacks were caused by nature – by volcanic eruptions, sometimes big enough to destroy crops, summers and even ecosystems; by changes in weather systems big enough to destroy whole human cultures; and by lesser events such as floods, earthquakes and rivers changing their course. Much of early human religion is devoted to a worried and puzzled attempt to ask the rains to keep coming and the underground rumbling to stop. The story becomes more interesting as soon as humans are able to do more than react – build dams, irrigate, or move.

Later on, the disruptions to human development may still be caused by natural events, but the likelier culprits are human. Once we settle we can quickly become victims of our own laziness and ignorance, killing off handy animal species, or deforesting land for farming, which then blows the topsoil away. The inhabitants of Easter Island made this mistake; but so did the ancient Greeks and the Japanese, who both nevertheless found ways to cope. Once we trade across large areas, we spread diseases to which some bodies are less hardened than others. This set back human development in the late Roman and Chinese world. It had even more awesome consequences when, after thirteen thousand years of separation, the peoples of Europe arrived in the Americas.

Then we come to the rueful reflection of the Caribbean poet Derek Walcott, quoted above, who thought history was boredom interrupted by war. There has certainly been a lot of war. New research has shown that early hunter-gatherer societies were frantically warlike: kingdoms and empires just meant more people and better weapons, so bigger fights.

But war often has an ambiguous effect. It is horrible, obviously. But conflict drives new inventions, makes people think more deeply about their societies, and by destroying some realms, allows new ones to emerge. Adversity makes the survivors stronger. The disappearance of easy-to-catch fish or deer forces people to develop new ways of fishing and hunting. Floods make people devise flood defences and new irrigation; and by requiring villages to combine together, they have set them on the road to creating states. Plagues depopulate regions but can also, as in Europe in the fifteenth century, free the survivors to lead different and more adventurous lives. Wars spread terror and destruction – but also technologies, languages and ideas.

Amid so much bold assertion, it is worth remembering that history amounts to the fragments that survive from a vaster buried story. Some of the most wonderful moments of advance have happened to people (and in places) about whom (and which) we are almost completely ignorant. Who was the first to realize that squiggles could be made to stand for sounds of parts of words, and not only as mini-pictures of something else? Who first understood that it was possible to read without speaking the words out loud? Who fermented grain and drank the results? From southern China to Arabia, wet soils and shifting deserts have hidden civilizations which were once mighty and which collapsed for reasons we may never understand.

There is so much we do not know. We do not know why the great palaces of the Greek Bronze Age were deserted and how those people lost the art of writing. For most of history, all we have left are the accidental remains, the things that could not rot or that somehow survived the sandpapering of time. In most places the wood and earth buildings, colourful textiles, languages, paintings, songs, music and stories have gone for ever; the cultures that were mostly made of wood and wool, tunes and stories, are the ones hardest to retrieve.

What follows will be very disproportionate. Not only the endless savannahs of prehistory but the long periods of quiet social stability,
the lulls, will be passed over in a paragraph or two. Convulsions that take place in a few decades in small places, such as in Greece around 400–300 BC or in Europe around 1500, will be pored over. For change is increasing – but also discontinuous and sometimes sudden. The conditions for a revolutionary break can be searched out, back through earlier centuries or decades, but the moment of breakthrough is still the nub of the story.

However, before we start, let us pause and admire the 99 per cent; the forgotten heroes of the quieter years, busy with the hard graft of just getting on, keeping going and surviving – that peasant who followed his oxen, the farmers who worked and fed families and paid taxes without ending up being killed by Mongol raiders or recruited by Napoleon, the women who dug and birthed and taught in ten thousand vanished villages. This is a book about great change-makers and their times, but all of it takes place surrounded by the rest of us who kept the show on the road.