Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 15

History often gets told in chronological order, which makes sense. Much of the content of this book is presented in chronological order, but not all of it. I thought it would be a good idea to break out some of the big influences on how people behave — things like philosophy and religion, styles of warfare, and even individual personalities. Giving these developments their own parts of the book (3, 4, and 5) allows you to come at the same events and eras from different perspectives.

Even when I tell you things in the order in which they happened, though, I sometimes refer to latter-day developments that resulted from long-ago events, or I use modern examples of how things today can work pretty much as they did then (whenever then was).

When studying history, it helps to start by thinking about where humanity is now and work backward, asking the questions that the journalists, pundits, and podcasters did when talking about the COVID-19 pandemic: How did we get here? Why are we here now, and not later or before? You don’t have to start with now, though. You can work backward from an interesting event that began in, for example, 2003.

Earlier in this chapter I mentioned such an event, the war in Iraq. It started when U.S. planes bombed a bunker where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was thought to be meeting with top staff. (The raids didn’t get him then but were followed up with an invasion that led to his eventual capture and execution.) To trace every thread of that war through time would be too ambitious, but you can follow a few threads. Warm up the WABAC Machine, Sherman.

Among the reasons that U.S. President George W. Bush and his advisers cited for invading Iraq was the need to remove a brutal dictator. Saddam came to power in 1979, when his cousin and predecessor, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, stepped down, or (as many people believe) was forced out of office. Al-Bakr’s career included ousting two previous military dictators and helping with the overthrow of Iraq’s monarchy in 1958.

The monarchy dated to the 1920s, when the United Kingdom (Britain), which ruled Iraq as a colony, installed Faisal I as king. A descendant of the family of the Prophet Mohammed, Faisal was not from Iraq, but from Saudi Arabia, and the British expected him to answer to London. Yet he helped secure Iraq’s independence before he died.

The League of Nations, a short-lived predecessor to the United Nations, had cobbled Iraq together after WWI. The body put Britain in charge of Baghdad and Basra, two adjacent parts of the old Ottoman Empire (which fell apart in WWI), and a few years later threw in Mosul to the north.

The Ottomans first conquered that territory in 1535. Baghdad (later Iraq’s capital) had been a center of the Islamic world since Arabs conquered the region in the seventh century; before that, it was a province of the Persian Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the region in the fourth century BC. (The designation BC can be confusing. It means before the time of Jesus — in this case, 400 years before. I explain BC, along with AD, BCE and CE, in more detail in Chapter 3.)

In fact, when Alexander died in 323 BC, he was just south of the city of Baghdad, in Babylon, one of the most famous places in the ancient world and one of those early cities that arose in the Fertile Crescent after agriculture took hold. Babylon had been the capital of a kingdom established by a people called the Amorites in the 19th century BC. Archaeologists think it was a much older town that grew to city size by 2400 BC, more than 4,400 years ago.