What's been happening? (Part 2)

This is the second of two posts in which I try to give a proper answer to "what's been happening?". I am attempting to give an overall picture of how things became the way they are.

Part 1 was on prehistory and started with the big bang, this part is on human history and starts at the dawn of civilization.

I am not a historian and I hope that this account at least gives a rough outline of what our species has been up to. If there is something you really think should have been included that I missed, it is likely I am just unaware of it or its importance and I would really appreciate you leaving it in a comment.

Ancient history

After fire, our first great technologies were the plants and animals we crafted. Through selective breeding, the efforts of a hundred generations produced the fruit of Eden. In the Old World, barley and wheat were turned from grasses that produced little food to laden plants. In the New World, corn underwent the same transformation.

Similarly, sheep and cows were bred in the Old World. There were those who herded animals and others who tended fields. By about 10,000 years ago, our time as hunter-gatherers had ended and the era of farmers had begun.

Mesopotamia, modern-day Saudi Arabia and Iraq, had a very different climate 7000 years ago. It was green and fertile, unlike the harsh deserts of today.

It was here that the first towns and cities emerged. The excess from the harvests allowed people to undertake activities other than food production. To increase the yield of fields, large irrigation projects were undertaken, and leaders emerged. Some claimed they were a conduit to a supernatural being in control of the harvest, leading to organised religion, and with it, taxes.

In order to keep track of the amount of grain being stored, it became necessary to keep records. Clay tablets were fashioned and cuneiform markings pressed into them. This was the first writing.

As the food supply increased, so too did the population. Cities grew, many whose names are now lost to time. One name that survived to our era was Eridu. A city that was founded 7 and a half thousand years ago in 5500 BC*.

*For those unfamiliar, X BC or before Christ, means that an event happened X years before the birth of Christ. That means an event in 1000 BC occurred 3023 years ago at year of writing.

As the cities grew, so too did the power of their leaders. Nature has never been merciful, but a new type of cruelty was born with those early settlements. Much blood was spilt in the name of forgotten gods and in conquests for cities that have since been effaced from history. Our unique, self-conscious position among the animals allowed us to be terrifyingly creative when inventing new forms of suffering. Around 2500 BC, such a conquest by a leader known as Sargon of Akkad led to the first empire, Akkadia.

Around the same time that the Egyptian civilisation was forming along the Nile, the people of the Indus valley in present day India and Pakistan were creating the Harrapan civilisation, and the Minoans, forerunners of the Greek civilisation, had emerged on Crete.

For much of human history, the past resembled a cycle rather than a path. Civilisations would grow, decay, collapse and then be reborn into a new form with some memory of what had come before. For example, between 2500 BC and 1000 BC, Egypt experienced this cycle 3 times. These are known as the old, middle and new kingdoms. Collapse came from many factors: changing climate in the region, failed harvests and famine, disease such as smallpox and invaders from unmapped lands.

It was not uncommon in history for nomads to come across abandoned cities, far bigger than anything that existed in their civilisations, and to be left only to wonder at the people who had built them as they camped outside their haunted walls.

One such apocalypse around 1000 BC is remembered as the Late Bronze Age collapse. It is still not known exactly why it happened, but one theory is it was due to a delicate system of trade that had linked the civilisations in the region (nearly all the civilisations in the world at that time) tightly to each other. As one civilisation fell, they all did.

Invasions from “barbarian” lands have been a threat until relatively recently in world history. Only in the last 500 years did the technology of the settled peoples allow them to become the masters of those dwelling on the steppe. For much of history, a bow and a horse represented the pinnacle of military technology. It was often tribes from Anatolia (modern day Turkey) and beyond that swept down to bring ruin to the civilisations of Mesopotamia.

In the East, there was another centre of civilisation. Isolated by the Himalayas and the vast steppes, the Chinese were developing near the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. Due to the fertility of the soil there, two harvests were possible each year. For this reason, humanity has always grown quickly in this part of the world.

First the Chinese existed in a kind of feudal system. Local regions were controlled by warlords who, in principle, answered to an emperor. This system weakened and collapsed, leading to great instability. Confucius was a man who called out for order. His words, transmitted through time by his followers, would not be influential in his own time, but would come to have an almost religious significance in Chinese culture.

After the Bronze Age collapse in the West, smaller powers could emerge. One of these was Israel. The God of Israel would shape world events to the present age. The fortunes of those in the region waxed and waned, Israel fell to the Babylonians who were in turn overcome by the Persians. In Europe, the Greek civilisation grew, leading to the concepts of democracy and philosophy being born in Athens. In 500 BC the Macedonians, led by Philip of Macedon, invaded Greece. Philip was assassinated, but as fate would have it, his son was one of the greatest military leaders to ever live. Alexander the Great swept across the known world and invaded it all. His empire stretched from Greece to India, from Turkey to Egypt.

At the edge of this great empire, the largest by percentage of world population ever, was Italy. Italy was controlled by the Etruscans, but a city had allied with its neighbours to resist them. The name of that city was Rome. Influenced by the Greeks, Rome was a democracy. This meant the decisions were controlled by a wealthy class of men in the city, so quite different from our current ideas of universal suffrage, but a democracy nonetheless. As we still see today, democracies are more warlike, or at the very least, more successful at waging war than autocracies.** Rome, one of the greatest empires of history, made almost all its territorial gains as a republic rather than an empire. One mechanism for this was the political power of foreign conquest. A tribute where the spoils from other lands were paraded through the streets was a necessary tool for gaining political power.

**This is an argument made by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith in their book “The Dictator’s Handbook”.

Through the Punic wars with Carthage and the conquest of Greece, by 100 BC the Romans controlled the Mediterranean. The republic reached its end under the ambition of Julius Caesar. Caesar spread Roman influence to Britain, and upon declaring “the die has been cast,” marched into Rome and took power. He was stabbed in the senate, but after the dust of the ensuing chaos had settled, his great-nephew, Augustus Caesar, became the first Roman emperor.

Thereafter was a period of peace known as the Pax Romana. For two hundred years, the existence of such a dominant force in the region suppressed major conflict. Such peace would not be known again until modern times.

In these early times, many prophets, philosophers and religious leaders emerged. Seeing the instability around him, Confucius called out for strong central leadership. Aware of the suffering in the world, a Nepalese prince, Siddhartha Gautama, taught others to let go of their worldly desires and escape the cycle of rebirth. He became known as the Buddha. Various priests reinterpreted the ancient Aryan religion and created the basis for Hinduism. A Jew, a follower of the God of Israel, began preaching in Judea. Thirty percent of the people on Earth today believe him to be the son of that God, and are known as Christians.

During this time, civilisations came and went in the New World. Until contact with Europeans, it seems a similar cycle of birth, decay and rebirth was the law. The Olmecs, Mayans and Aztecs each had their time. It is hypothesised that the lack of domesticable animals in the region is what prevented civilisations in the New World and sub-Saharan Africa from reaching the same heights as those in Eurasia.***

***This is a famous argument put forward by Jared Diamond in his book “Guns, Germs and Steel”.

Eventually Rome fell. The Empire was first split into the Western and Eastern Byzantine Roman empire. In time, the economy of the Western Empire was so weakened by a lack of slave labour, piracy, and the wealthy setting up their own fiefdoms rather than paying taxes, that it could resist outside forces no longer. In a strange parody, the last Roman emperor, a 9-year-old boy called Romulus Augustulus, was deposed in 476 AD by a Germanic king, marking the end of the classical age.

The medieval era

Around 600 AD, there was a new prophet. About 25% of people believe him to be the last prophet of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). They are known as Muslims. The power of the message was such that it led to one of the most rapid expansions of territory in history. In a few short decades, the Arabs conquered the land from Spain to Pakistan, and from Georgia to Yemen. For hundreds of years the Islamic world would be a shining beacon of civilisation, while Europe wallowed in the dark ages.

Thanks to the first king of France, Clovis (or equivalently Louise), the Germanic tribes were converted to Catholicism. This meant that even after the fall of Rome, the Pope (the bishop of Rome) remained powerful. When the Muslims invaded Spain, they could have continued into the rest of Europe had they not been stopped by Charles the Hammer Martel. For this, the pope rewarded Charles. His grandson, Charlemagne, would come to use this favour and his love of conquest to unite much of Europe. He created the Holy Roman Empire, although, since it was his sheer force of personality that held those lands together, the empire would collapse soon after his death and require 200 years to pass before reformation.

Charlemagne brought the feudal system to Europe. This was the age of chivalry, castles and serfdom.

Searching for immortality, Chinese alchemists stumbled upon a substance called saltpetre. It burned quickly. Unknown to them, this was because it was full of oxygen. By putting the substance in a bamboo shoot, they could generate large volumes of gas from a small amount of powder. This allowed them to shoot projectiles out of the cylinders. They invented fireworks, but for reasons we can only speculate about, missed the ramifications of their invention. Gunpowder travelled slowly but irrevocably along the silk road where its military applications were gradually realised.

In 850 AD, central Europe would come to a grim realisation. Ferocious fighters from the north pillaged and enslaved from Britain and Paris to Moscow and Constantinople. The Viking age of dominance had come. For 200 years, these north-men dominated the continent and forced serfs to hide in their lord’s castles for protection. The turning of the tide came in the battles of 1066 when the Vikings were expelled from Britain.

Gradually, towns developed as serfs either ran off to become mercenaries or bought their freedom from their lords and the feudal system started to end. In Europe, 1100 AD was a time of gothic architecture like Notre Dame, and of crusades.

In religious fervour and cries of “Deus Vult” (God wills it), the pope declared a crusade to reclaim the holy land of Jerusalem. The crusades began successfully, the 1st crusade establishing many crusader kingdoms in the Middle East, but over the next few hundred years and many less successful crusades, by 1300 all the land had been reclaimed by Islamic forces.

From 1350 to 1450, Britain and France engaged in the 100 years war. During the war, the longbow was surpassed by cannon technology and the British lost their advantage. It was due to this war that it became unfashionable to talk French in the British court, and the language of the common people, a Germanic tongue called English, was used instead. If it had been otherwise, perhaps French would be the predominant language today.

For most of her history, Chinese foreign policy was focused on preventing the tribes of the steppe from unifying. These tribes, with their skilled riders and bowmen, were a force to be reckoned with in any era and would periodically sack the lands around them when united. One of the last great tribal invasions was that of the Mongols. They created the greatest land empire in history. They subjugated every nation from Korea to the Calif of the Islamic empire and the Kievan Russ (today’s Russians) beyond the Urals.

The creation of the modern world

The world would come to change due to a marriage. Ferdinand of Castile and Isabella of Aragon unified two houses in northern Spain (territory that had been won back from Islamic forces) and had the strength to remove Islam from Spain completely in 1450. However, their true significance came from funding explorers to sail into the unknown regions of the world. In 1494, one such explorer, an Italian by the name of Christopher Columbus, reached Barbados. A new era in human history had started.

As settlers came to the New World, they spread disease from the Old. The natives, without resistance to the diseases the settlers were already immune to, died in apocalyptic numbers. As much as 99% of the native inhabitants of the Old World died in this way.

Their deaths led to a labour shortage for the Spanish and Portuguese settlers and the first African slaves were sold into bondage and taken to the New World. Slavery had always been a part of the human experience, the Islamic empire used sub-Saharan slaves and Slavs had been enslaved so much their name became synonymous with it. However, the clear visual difference between slaves and masters in the New World, coupled with the economic machine that was the Golden Triangle, meant slavery in the New World was intensified in a way unique in human history.

The Golden Triangle was to sail a boat from Europe to Africa, fill it with slaves in conditions where 1 in 6 of those being transported died during the crossing, and then sell the slaves in the New World to buy produce grown in plantations, such as sugar. This produce was loaded where the slaves had been crammed and sold in Europe. The ship was then ready to sail to Africa again to repeat the cycle.

Spain waged war in Europe and, depleting the gold it had taken from the New World, found itself bankrupt. It declined and its short time as the dominant world power ended. The Golden Triangle came to be dominated by the British, French and Dutch.

In 1500, Christianity, which had already split into Orthodox and Catholic at the time of the fall of the Western Roman empire, shattered into a thousand different sects as Martin Luther started the Reformation. This would lead to many wars in Europe and the after effects can still be felt in the Troubles of Ireland.

Many, leaving either out of fear of religious persecution or seeking opportunity, left the Old World to settle in the New. In this way, the first states of America formed. Initially, many European nations were represented in North America, including Spain, Britain, France, Sweden, and the Netherlands. But by 1750, the dominant power in what would become the USA was Britain.

Upset by a lack of representation and high taxes, Americans declared, without any slave owning irony, that it is a self-evident fact that every man was created equal. This contradiction would be resolved in blood during the civil war a century later. A country destined to become the world’s first true superpower was born.

In Europe, a scientific revolution occurred. First, the Renaissance saw the rediscovery of the wisdom of the Greeks and Romans, whose thoughts had been carefully passed down by monks for the past few thousand years. Then the Enlightenment arrived and revolutionary political, scientific and economic visionaries such as John Locke, Isaac Newton and Adam Smith spread their messages. Finally, the Industrial Revolution started in Britain. The small island, whose position in the world had been elevated by its navy, now had the means to create an empire unlike any that had come before.

An empire was built that covered more of the world than any other. One where somewhere in the British Empire, it was always day. Hence the boast, “the sun never sets on the British empire”.

Africa was carved up among the European powers, an era of colonialism where lines were drawn on maps in Brussels by people who knew nothing about those who lived there. Much of the violence in Africa and the Middle East today can be attributed to unnatural borders that force peoples with little to do with each other into nations.

The people of China and Japan both came to realise at this time that they had fallen behind through isolationist policies. China regards the 1800s as a century of embarrassment where it lost the two opium wars, was forced to surrender Hong Kong and had to accept the western drug trade. Japan, which had closed itself off to the world after becoming wary of Christianity, was forcefully reopened by an American gunboat.

India, which had been acquired for the British empire through the efforts of the British East India Company, both benefited and suffered under imperial rule. Great railways, telegraph links and education systems were set up across the subcontinent, but there was strong resentment of the foreign domination, brutal in its suppression of dissent. Independence would take a hundred years.

This world order burnt in the flames of two world wars. In the first half of the 20th century Britain expended her empire fighting Germany, which had destroyed France. This left the USA and Russia as the last ones standing in the international power struggle.

At opposite ends of the world map, the USA and USSR stared each other down. An ideological war between capitalism and communism was forced to remain cold by the existence of atomic bombs. Weapons completed in the last moments of the second world war that could ensure the complete destruction of both the USA and USSR, should they declare war directly.

More fallout from the wars was the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in WW1. France and Britain divided the middle East between them and rewarded tribes who had helped them, creating the countries Jordan and Saudi-Arabia in the process. The lines they drew, ignorant of geographical and ethnic boundaries, would put Kurds, Shia and Sunni into the single nation of Iraq, leading to bloodshed.

Proxy wars were fought between the USA and USSR, Capitalism and Communism, from Korea to the Congo. Finally, due to economic stresses, in 1991 the USSR collapsed and a single political entity dominated the globe.

In the years since then, the hegemony of the United States has faltered, its economy slowly becoming eclipsed by that of the CCP’s China. Its military might remains, however, unrivalled.

With the invention of the internet, information flowed freely to the population. A kind of library of babel became accessible to almost all citizens of the developed world and communication between those in different nations became easy. Whether this will be a stabilising or destabilising force remains to be seen.

The threats we face today

Since the invention of nuclear weapons, war between any of the great powers has become a mortal threat to humanity. This is the case even for a “limited” nuclear war between India and Pakistan. It is thought that the dust expelled into the stratosphere by such a conflict would blot out the sun, leading to 5 to 10 years of nuclear winter. Such a scenario would likely lead to the deaths of billions from starvation and the collapse of modern civilisation.

Another threat is global warming. As humans have continued to burn fossil fuels for energy, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased. This makes the atmosphere less efficient at expelling heat and so the planet warms. Major political projects have been undertaken to limit this warming and the most apocalyptic predictions are now considered unlikely, although due to the existence of climate tipping points, more action is required to ensure disaster is avoided.

After the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has become acutely aware of the threat that the smallest of lifeforms pose to humanity. An engineered virus improperly contained or maliciously released could spell the end for civilisation as we currently know it.

Technology has continued to march forward. Private companies controlling space flight now seems to be the way forward for space exploration. Strides in artificial intelligence have been made, leading many to wonder if it might be the creation of generalised intelligence, rather than any of the previously mentioned threats, that will wipe us out. On the other hand, technology such as AI may free us from our jobs and alleviate our suffering.

Whatever may happen, I hope that you, in this delicate moment in history, enjoy this rich and incredible world around us and, just maybe, make it a better place.