A Short History of the World
Read A Short History of the World Online
Authors: Christopher Lascelles
Tags: #Big History, #History, #Napoleon, #Short World History, #World History, #Global History, #Short History, #Best History Book
A Short History
of the World
by
Christopher Lascelles
Contents
Also available by Crux Publishing
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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 carry 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 movement
4
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.
