A Short History of the World Read online

  A Short History

  of the World

  by

  Christopher Lascelles

  Contents

  Preface

  I. Pre-History

  II. The Ancient World

  III. The Early Middle Ages

  IV. The Late Middle Ages

  V. The Ascent of the West

  VI. The Modern Period

  VII. The 20th Century

  What's Next?

  Tell a Friend

  About the Author

  Recommended Reading

  Also available by Crux Publishing

  Copyright and Credits

  Website:

  www.lascelleshistory.com

  Facebook:

  facebook.com/ashorthistoryoftheworld

  Twitter:

  @historymeister

  History, n. an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

  AMBROSE BIERCE, The Devil's Dictionary

  ‘To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child.’

  MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO, Roman Orator

  ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.’

  GEORGE ORWELL, Author

  ‘It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.’

  SEAMUS HEANEY, Poet

  Preface

  History is generally taught in an episodic, fragmentary fashion, leaving students with a lifelong lack of understanding as to how each part relates to the whole. We learn about the Fire of London, Christopher Columbus and the Second World War, but we are seldom given a coherent picture of how they all fit together.

  As a young boy, I remember making an active decision to stop studying history, put off as I was by bad teaching and the proliferation of dates that I could never hope to remember. I was equally frustrated that I could not visualise where all the places were; Napoleon may well have been defeated at Waterloo, but where on earth was Waterloo?

  Those who wish they had a better general knowledge of world history often find themselves time-poor and caught up in information overload. The result is that not everyone has the time, or the focus, to read a long history book.

  This book is a response to all these problems. It aims to give a short and succinct yet broad overview of the key developments and events in the history of mankind in a way that is, I hope, enlightening and interesting. The inclusion of 32 different maps should allow readers to visualise where events occurred and how they relate to each other.

  I do not purport to add any new insight or to unearth any new information; there are plenty of historians much better qualified to do that. I aim only to condense the generally accepted mainstream view into a simplified linear whole. While each country, each key character, each movement and each discovery deserves its own book – if not its own library – I have purposefully kept this book as brief as possible in order to make the information accessible to the widest range of people.

  Many thanks to Siobhain Prendergast and Kevin and John McNeer for help with the copy-editing, and to Adrian Bignell, James Cranmer, Susie Arnott, Bart Kuyper and Ewa Prygiel for making it happen.

  I hope that you enjoy it and that it fills the gaps.

  Christopher Lascelles

  London 2012

  p.s. Double click on the maps to enlarge them!

  I

  Pre-History

  The Big Bang - 3500 BC

  The Beginning

  There is general consensus among members of the scientific community that the universe in which we live burst into existence following a cataclysmic explosion, or ‘Big Bang’, 13.7 billion years ago. The swirling masses of matter and energy that resulted from this Big Bang were pulled together by electrostatic forces over the coming billions of years to form galaxies, stars and planets, including the planet on which we live.

  Incredible distances exist between galaxies. Earth is a small planet in a galaxy we call the Milky Way. Nobody knows exactly how many stars there are in the Milky Way, but estimates range from 100 billion to 400 billion. What’s more, there are purportedly at least 100 billion other galaxies in the known universe. That is a lot of stars and an incredible amount of space if you consider that the average distance between two stars is roughly 30 trillion miles.

  About 4.5 billion years ago, gaseous, solid, and other matter pulled together to form planet Earth. A few hundred million years later it is thought that a huge object, or maybe even a planet, crashed into Earth and blew out enough matter to form a satellite body that then became our moon. After this literally earth-shattering event, Earth took millions of years to cool down.

  A bombardment of meteors may have brought water to Earth in the form of ice. As the planet’s crust cooled, water vapour emitted from volcanoes condensed and accumulated as oceans after rain from the newly formed atmosphere no longer evaporated on the planet’s hot surface.

  Life

  Approximately three and a half billion years ago, microscopic single-celled organisms made of complex organic molecules appeared deep in these new oceans, when the land was still a hostile place dominated by volcanoes. These organisms were the most advanced life-forms on the planet for another three billion years until suddenly (relatively speaking that is), within the period of a few million years, bacteria in the sea began processing carbon dioxide, water and sunlight to produce oxygen. This helped the single-celled microbes in the sea begin to stick to each other and create multi-cellular organisms that grew into animals.

  These animals began to reproduce, to evolve and eventually, when there was enough oxygen in the atmosphere to protect against the sun’s radiation, to crawl onto land. Amphibians, insects, reptiles, mammals and birds all arrived on land, more or less in that order, over the next few hundred million years. At least that is the generally accepted version of events, but creationists ridicule this theory, arguing that it is not possible for a frog to become a human, regardless of the time frame.

  Once life started it took a number of different forms, most of which we will never know as geologists recognise at least five episodes in the history of our planet when life was destroyed, suddenly and extensively, in mass extinctions. We have no idea what caused such extinctions; suggestions have ranged from meteor impacts to solar flares and volcanic upheavals, all of which may have caused sudden global warming, global cooling, changing sea levels, or epidemics.

  The two largest extinctions to have occurred were the Permian Mass Extinction and the K-T Extinction.1 The Permian Mass Extinction of 250 million years ago wiped out up to 96 percent of species existing at the time due to drastically declining oxygen levels. The K-T Extinction of 65 million years ago destroyed the dinosaurs that had already roamed our planet for close to 150 million years.

  This puts the six or seven thousand years since the appearance of the first proper human civilisations into perspective. Given the length of time in which we have existed in relation to the beginning of our planet, it is not unimaginable to think that human life will also become extinct – and perhaps a lot sooner than we think – for any one of the above or other reasons.

  The Birth of Man and the Exploration of the Earth

  From the very little evidence we have,2 it is generally understood that ape-like primates first appeared in the forests of Eastern Africa roughly 20–30 million years ago. Climate change may have destroyed their natural habitat, forcing them out into the open savannah where they evolved the ability to stand in order to keep an eye out for predators. The advantage of walking on two legs enabled them to have their hands free to carr
y food and children, which would have played a considerable part in the success of their evolution.

  Two and a half million years ago a species of these primates began using tools, as evidenced by materials found with their remains. As a result of this, the species was named Homo Habilis or ‘Handy Man’, and is generally thought to be the first direct ancestor of Homo Sapiens, or modern humans. Homo Ergaster, Homo Erectus, Homo Heidelbergensis and the better-known Homo Neanderthalensis, or Neanderthal man, are categories of hominids that have been assigned in order to describe and name fossils of our early relatives who are believed to have lived between Homo Habilis and the present day, with each one evolving greater brain capacity over time.

  Fossil remains discovered to date suggest that by a million years ago Homo Erectus (Upright Man), our first ancestor to walk truly upright, had spread across the world, having migrated outwards from East Africa.3 There then follow two schools of thought: one is the Multi-Regional Theory of Evolution that states that humans thereafter evolved separately wherever they made their home; while the other, and the generally more accepted view, is that there was a second major migratory movement4 by Homo Sapiens (Wise Man), once again out of Africa, starting approximately 60-80,000 years ago – very possibly along the same routes as previous migratory movements – with Homo Sapiens gradually replacing all other types of hominid. The assumptions for the ‘Out of Africa’ theory are based on research that has traced our roots back to a common African ancestor by studying the differences in the genetic code of people living around the world today.

  While Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals originated in different parts of the world,5 they nevertheless came into contact. To this day, there is much discussion as to how close the two species might have been to each other and whether or not they interbred.6 Either way, there is strong evidence to suggest that Neanderthals learned to hunt in coordinated groups, use tools and fire, speak, and even bury their dead. Making fire was important in that it allowed early man to cook food, thereby making it more digestible and increasing the number of food sources available to him. This would have considerably helped with man’s evolution.

  From around 30,000 BC – with few exceptions – traces of Neanderthals disappear and evidence of Homo Sapiens rapidly increases. This may have been caused by a number of different factors, including Homo Sapiens outcompeting or killing Neanderthals, the introduction of a disease to which Neanderthals were not immune, a change of climate with which they could not cope, or a host of other reasons that we can only speculate about due to a lack of conclusive evidence. What we do know is that from around this time, Homo Sapiens reigned supreme, as no fossils of any other hominid discovered so far have been dated back to earlier than around 30,000 BC, give or take a few thousand years.

  We do not currently know if the causes for human migrations were competition for resources, climate change, or simply the desire to explore. Regardless of the reasons, the general view is that Australia was reached approximately 50,000 years ago and that, by circa 15,000 BC, Homo Sapiens crossed into present-day Alaska via what is now the Bering Strait, when it was either dry land or frozen.7 Then, within a few thousand years, they reached the southernmost tip of South America and, with the exception of a few islands in the Pacific, most of the world was colonised by humans by this time. From then on, life in the Americas would develop in complete isolation from the rest of the world until European colonisation began in 1492, notwithstanding a brief visit by the Vikings around AD 1,000.

  From Hunter-gathering to Farming

  Humans initially led a nomadic ‘hunter-gatherer’ existence, moving from area to area, hunting animals and eating any digestible foods they could find, such as plants, nuts, berries and fruit. Eventually, people began returning every year to the same and the most fertile places. About 10,000 years ago, it seems humans worked out how to sow crops, a discovery that allowed them to move from hunting and gathering to farming and which had such a significant effect on the subsequent development of mankind that it has been named the ‘Neolithic Revolution’.8

  Once people began living near each other, increased communications led to greater cooperation and to the exchange of knowledge. Yet it was the availability of more food that was fundamental to how mankind developed: more food led to more people and more people led to more settlements. The ability to produce and store food also meant that societies were eventually able to support non-food producing specialists such as artisans, holy men, bureaucrats and soldiers as well as political leaders.

  While crops were helpful in yielding yarn for clothing, other clothes were provided by the hides of animals such as sheep, goats, cows and pigs, all of which mankind gradually domesticated. These animals also helped in other ways; their manure helped increase crop yields, as did the animals themselves by pulling ploughs, which in turn made more land suitable for farming.

  A productive virtuous circle was established, but living together in permanent dwellings came with a downside: it meant that humans were now living near their own refuse and excrement. This was not conducive to hygiene at a time when humans neither understood the benefits of cleanliness nor knew about the existence of germs. Living in closer quarters with livestock also meant that diseases, which had developed in animals and to which humans had no immunity, were now able to jump across to humans and infect them. The major killers of humanity through the centuries – smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, measles, plague, cholera and AIDS – are all thought to have evolved originally in animals and then transferred over to humans via fleas or other carriers.

  Jumping forward for a moment, the Black Death in the 14th century, the destruction of the native American populations at the time of Columbus, and the influenza of 1918 that reportedly killed some 20 million people – along with other plagues throughout the centuries – may all have originated in this way. The 21st century is no exception, with Swine Flu and Bird Flu acting as nasty reminders that rearing animals in close quarters – and inhumanely – might still come back to bite us (no pun intended).

  II

  The Ancient World

  3500 BC - AD 500

  The First Civilisations

  The earliest evidence that has been found of complex societies comes from Mesopotamia – modern-day Iraq and Syria – in around 3500 BC. The mild wet winters and long, dry, hot summers characteristic of the area were ideal for growing crops, and it is here that plants were first domesticated. Importantly, the land was also located between two major rivers – the Tigris and the Euphrates – which provided ready access to water and thus to irrigation.9 When viewed on a map, the area itself is crescent-shaped and for this reason, along with that of the fertility of its land, it has been named the ‘Fertile Crescent’.

  Mesopotamia was positioned at the crossroads between Africa, Europe and Asia – a convenient location for people to meet to trade goods and share ideas. The area also had few natural boundaries and was therefore difficult to defend. As a result, its history between 3500 and 400 BC is that of the rise and fall of kingdoms and continuous wars over territory. Due to the numerous shifts in power over time, and a general lack of information from the period, this history is not always easy to follow.

  One of the earliest civilisations in the world – that of Sumer – dominated southern Mesopotamia from approximately 3300 to 2000 BC. It is generally believed that the Sumerians were the first people to establish true cities of up to 50,000 inhabitants. Sumer’s main city of Uruk may well have been the largest city in the world at one time and some temples from this age still stand in Iraq today. It is also from Sumer that we have the earliest example of one of the most important developments for humankind: writing in the form of pictograms used by temple officials to record basic information about crops and taxes. Apart from what we have surmised about world history through archaeology and geology, we know very little of what actually happened until the appearance of writing, which acts as the dividing line between pre-history and history.

  Ancient
Egypt: Land of the Pharaohs (3100 BC)

  Around the same time another civilisation sprang up in Egypt around the banks of the river Nile – a river whose annual floods provided the much-needed water for irrigating crops. The fertility of the soil around the Nile contributed significantly to the growth of Egyptian power as it allowed the Egyptians to become rich from supplying food to other parts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The desert acted as a defensive barrier and the lack of invaders ensured political stability in the land.

  In circa 3100 BC, this patchwork of different kingdoms was united under a powerful king, or pharaoh, called Nemes, who built the capital, Memphis, from which Egyptian dynasties ruled for the next thousand years. Egypt became the largest kingdom in the world, with up to a million subjects ruled by approximately 30 different dynasties over the following 2,500 years. The pharaohs were recognised as gods by the population.

  The time pharaohs spent preparing for death partially explains the dedication with which they built the great pyramids – in effect giant tombstones – between 2700 and 2200 BC. Incredibly, even today, nobody really knows how they were built. What we do know is that they were extremely tall structures for their time and beyond; the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, built over 4,500 years ago, was the tallest building on Earth until Lincoln Cathedral was completed in England in AD 1311 (if you include its wooden spire that is). That’s over 3,000 years later.

  Civilisations in the East

  Beyond Egypt and Mesopotamia, two other major independent civilisations arose along other waterways – one in north-west India along the Indus River, crossing into present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the other along the Yellow River in China.