Читать книгу Fifty Things You Need to Know About World History - Hugh Williams - Страница 5

The world in which we live is growing smaller, and shrinking. There is hardly a corner of it that has not at some time or another appeared on television in our homes. The activities of African, Asian and Middle Eastern politicians are often as familiar to us as those in our own country. The world is a bubble into which, thanks to the internet and other forms of mass communication, we peer at will. But where do we fit into the seething mass we see? What do we have in common with other people, places, cultures and ideas? What do they share with us?

One book cannot possibly answer all those questions but, with the help of history, it can provide a guide. History is one of the most important things that we possess: knowing about the past helps us manage the present and plan the future. And today we need a knowledge of history more than we have ever done before. Our world may be smaller but it is also more complex. We have become participants in even its most extreme activities. We watch the progress of wars on CNN or the BBC and, if we want, travel to its most dangerous places. I read a newspaper report recently about an elderly British pensioner who spends his time visiting Afghanistan, Iraq and North Pakistan. ‘You don’t think about roadside bombs, or being kidnapped,’ he said. ‘You know it happens, but you’re just too busy taking it all in.’ Exactly what he was taking in, the newspaper did not go on to say–presumably it was the experience of being there, of doing something unusual and rather dangerous. While we might admire the pluck and energy of someone taking his holidays in war zones, the fact that it happens at all is rather mystifying and confusing. Man was once an explorer: now he is just a tourist.

These extraordinary developments have helped create a world that is easy to see but difficult to understand. Discussions about world problems and their possible solutions are commonplace. People of influence think globally, in politics and economics, the environment and entertainment. At the same time we sometimes feel that our national identity is slipping away from us to be replaced by forces that are unfamiliar and uncertain. We would probably quite like to become citizens of the world, if only we knew what that meant. How should we balance national interests against global requirements? Where does our country end and the world begin?

The upheavals that surround us become inexplicable unless we can put them into some sort of context. That is one of the uses of history: to create a shape that helps make sense of the confusion in which we live. In 1919, H. G. Wells published The Outline of History in which he used his skill as a novelist to trace the history of mankind from prehistoric times to the present day. It was hugely popular. ‘The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history throughout the world,’ he wrote in the Introduction to a later edition, ‘has become very evident during the tragic happenings of the last few years.’ He might well have written exactly the same sentence were he to publish his book today. The world moves on and its glories and disasters move with it. We will always need help in understanding its history.

But, people will say, the history of the world is so big and so long that to take fifty things from it is impossible. It cannot be reduced to such a formula without becoming ridiculously oversimplified. That is always a danger. In history it is always easier to complicate than simplify. The fifty things described in this book are not the only fifty things you need to know about world history, to make that claim would be absurd, but they are fifty very important things each of which provides a vantage point from which to survey large historical trends. Some of them are huge, others comparatively small. Each is unique and made an important contribution to the way in which world civilisations changed and grew. Taken together they provide a structure, a framework, on which to hang the great events of history.

There is another obvious and fundamental question relating to the selection of events from world history. Where do you begin? And once you have decided on your starting place, where do you end? I am writing this in a house on the East Devon coast in Britain, which is now a World Heritage Site because its cliffs and rocks are millions of years old. Today this beautiful part of the country has a temperamental climate – wind, rain and sun in almost equal measure. Once, however, it was almost tropical and dinosaurs, whose fossilised footprints can still be found along its beaches, plodded around in burning heat. I used to spend a lot of holidays in the Dordogne area of south-west France where, in the caves around Les Eyzies, some of the earliest signs of primitive man were discovered in the latter half of the nineteenth century. As I paddled with my children down the gentle summer waters of one of France’s grandest rivers I could look up to the caves and hollows where Cro-Magnon once lived. He hunted with primitive spears and drew crude pictures of the world around him on the walls of his subterranean home. In September 1940, a few months after their country had fallen to German occupation in the Second World War, four teenagers stumbled on the wall paintings in the Lascaux Cave near Montignac, vivid pictures of horses, bulls and stags drawn by people who lived in the area 15,000 years ago.

Examples of ‘pre-history’, excitingly close to our everyday lives, are important in establishing how the world as a whole began to evolve. But in terms of explaining how mankind organised itself to create the world we recognise today, our starting point should be much later, at a time when man was beginning to organise himself into some sort of social structure, building places to live in rather than simply using the natural resources around him, and communicating in a language that was capable of being written down. This brings us forward to a time nearly 6,000 years ago, to the civilisation that existed in the Middle East in an area that today makes up Iraq and parts of Syria and Turkey.

The finishing point is more arbitrary. We can define a beginning, but we cannot predict the end. I can remember my wife, a journalist and broadcaster, asking me once what I thought she might say to a group of sixth-formers that she had been asked to address. The head teacher wanted her to come up with something that her pupils would find valuable and remember in later life. This was more than twenty years ago. The Berlin Wall had been torn down and we all felt optimistic and confident about the future. I suggested that she talk to them about a world that might at last be changing into a place of peace and prosperity. How wrong I was. Today world peace seems as distant as it ever was. As for prosperity, that too seems to have taken a battering thanks to the ceaseless turbulence in the financial markets. At the moment conflict and debt are the world’s stopping points, and it is with these that this history will end.

Though this book looks at events about 6,000 years ago, much of it is concerned with the events of the past few hundred years. That is a sobering thought. Mankind seems to have accelerated the pace of change as he has grown older. We know from our own lives how rapidly things develop from one generation to another. For most of us today, life without email would be unthinkable. It is actually quite difficult to buy a flight ticket unless you have a computer. But these inventions did not exist in any form whatsoever until I was a grown man, and are completely beyond the grasp of many people in the generation before mine. In the history of the world such rapid transformations are unusual. I would speculate that someone from 1700 would not have been as bewildered had he found himself living in 1800 as a person from 1900 transported to the year 2000. But just because transforming change seems to pick up speed with time, we should not make the mistake of putting more emphasis on events that have taken place more recently in any particular cycle. That would simply unbalance the narrative of the world’s historical development.

The other factor to take into account is the role of European civilisation. European people have been remarkably successful in spreading their practices and ideas around the world ever since mankind formed himself into discernible social groups. Their civilisation has tended to triumph where others have been lost. But the history of the world is not the history of Europe. It did not begin that way and, who knows, may not end that way either.

Throughout his life on earth, man has been driven by certain principal aspirations and I have taken some of these as the five themes of this book:

The first engine of man’s development has revolved around Wealth – the story of his ambition to be rich, and to buy and sell and make money through barter and exchange. This section is mainly about man as a trader and entrepreneur.

The second theme is Freedom – the story of the explosive ideas and inspiring people that have led man on his journey to become master of his individual fate, and to be free. This part of the book is about rebellion and revolution and the bravery of those who spoke or acted against oppression.

The third of man’s aspirations has been for Religion – the story of his continuing hope that his life has more lasting value than the one he spends on earth. This theme is used to describe the spread of the world’s religions and their heritage.

The fourth part of the book is about Conquest – the story of man’s appetite for expansion and territorial gain. This is all about the rise and fall of great empires, from the ancient world to the present day.

The fifth aspiration is Discovery – the story of man’s hunger to find and invent new things in the world around him in science and the arts. Here, some of the great inventions that have changed the nature of the world sit side by side with the achievements in exploration that improved our knowledge and understanding of it.

Inevitably there are times when these themes overlap, as the paths through our past crisscross one another. Religion was sometimes man’s motive for conquest; conquest was often carried out in search of wealth and so on. The Spanish conquest of South America in the sixteenth century is a good example. The conquistadors were motivated by both religious conviction and a desire for riches and their story might have been included in more than one place.

A good history book should be a companion as well as a teacher. It should help people understand as well as simply learn. From understanding comes confidence and hope, two feelings that sometimes seem in rather short supply in the world today. So if history can help us understand perhaps it can also help to inspire. And why not? After all, the world is ours: we owe it to ourselves to enjoy it.