The Penguin History of the World

6 Whole World History

The story told in this book has no end. However dramatic and disrupted, a history of the world cannot pull up short and come to a halt at a neat chronological boundary. To close with the year in which the author ceases to write is merely formal; it can say little about the future of the historical processes then under way and thus severed in mid-life. As history is what one age thinks worth noting about another, recent events will acquire new meanings and present patterns will lose their clear outlines as people reflect again and again on what made the world in which they live. Even in a few months, present judgments about what is important will begin to look eccentric, so fast can events now move. Perspective is harder and harder to maintain.

This does not mean that the record is no more than a collection of facts or just a succession of events constantly reshuffled like the images of a kaleidoscope. Discernible trends and forces have operated over long periods and wide areas. In the longest run of all, three such interconnected trends stand out: the gradual acceleration of change, a growing unity of human experience, and the growth of human capacity to control the environment. In our day, for the first time, they have made visible a truly unified world history. Blatantly, the expression ‘one world’ remains little more than a cant term, for all the idealism of those who first used it. There is just too much conflict and quarrelling about, and no earlier century ever saw so much violence as the twentieth. Its politics were expensive and dangerous even when they did not break out in overt fighting, as the Cold War showed only too clearly. And now, just into a new century, new divisions are appearing still. The United Nations is still based, ironically (even if a little less firmly than fifty years ago), on the theory that the whole surface of the globe is divided into territories belonging to nearly 200 sovereign states. The bitter struggles of the Balkans or Burma or Rwanda may yet reopen and the simplicity upon which many would like to insist of an Islamic–western clash of civilizations is cut across in half a dozen ways by the ethnic divisions of even so Islamic a country as Afghanistan.

Much, much more could be said along the same lines. Yet that does not mean that humanity does not now share more than it has ever done in the past. A creeping unity has seized mankind. An originally Christian calendar is now the basis of governmental activity around most of the world. Modernization implies a growing commonality of goals. Clashes of culture are frequent, but were more evidently so in the past. What is now shared is at the humdrum level of the personal experience of millions; if society is a sharing of references, our world shares more than ever before, even if, paradoxically, people feel most acutely the distinctions between them in their daily experience. Yet when those who lived in neighbouring villages spoke significantly different dialects, when in the whole of their lives most of them would only exceptionally travel ten miles from their homes, when even their clothes and tools might provide in their shape and workmanship evidence of big differences of technology, style and custom, that experience was in important ways much more differentiated than it is now.

The great physical, ethnic and linguistic divisions of the past were much harder to overcome than are their equivalents today. This is because of improved communication, the spread of English as a global lingua franca among the educated, mass education, mass production of commonly required artefacts, and so on. A traveller can still see exotic or unfamiliar clothes in some countries, but more people over most of the globe now dress alike than ever before. Kilts, kaftans, kimonos are becoming tourist souvenirs, or the carefully preserved relics of a sentimentalized past, while in some areas traditional clothing is seen by others as the sign of poverty and backwardness. The efforts of a few self-consciously conservative and nationalist regimes to cling to the symbols of their past only bear this out. Iranian revolutionaries put women back into the chador because they felt the experience pouring in from the world outside to be corrosive of morality and their image of tradition. Peter the Great ordered his courtiers into western European clothes, and Atatürk forbade Turks to wear the fez, to announce a reorientation towards a progressive, advancing culture and a symbolic step towards a new future.

However, the basis of shared experience now available is only secondarily a consequence of any conscious commitment. Perhaps that is one reason why it has been so neglected by historians, and has tended to lie below their horizon of interest. Yet in a relatively short time, millions of men and women of different cultures have been in some degree liberated from, for example, many effects of climatic differences by electricity, air-conditioning and medicine. Cities all over the world now take street lighting and traffic signals for granted, have policemen on point duty, transact business in similar ways in banks and supermarkets. Much the same goods can be bought in them as are available in most other countries (in season, the Japanese now sell Christmas cakes). Men who do not understand one another’s languages service the same machines in different countries. Motor cars are everywhere a nuisance. Rural districts still escape some of these concomitants of modern life in some places, but big cities, which now for the first time in human history contain more people than do rural areas, do not. Yet for millions of their inhabitants the experiences they share are also ones of squalor, economic precariousness and comparative deprivation. Whatever the differences in their Muslim, Hindu and Christian origins, and whether they shelter mosques, temples or churches, Cairo, Calcutta and Rio offer much the same misery (and, for a few, a similar opulence). Other misfortunes, too, are now more easily shared. The mingling of peoples made possible by modern transport means that diseases are shared as never before, thanks to the wiping out of old immunities. AIDS has now appeared in every continent (except, possibly, Antarctica), and we are told it is killing nearly 6,000 people a day.

Even a few centuries ago a traveller from imperial Rome to imperial Luoyang, the Han capital, would have found many more contrasts than a modern successor. Rich and poor would have worn clothes cut differently and made from different materials than those he knew, the food he was offered would be unusual, he would have seen animals of unfamiliar breeds in the streets, soldiers whose weapons and armour looked quite unlike what he had left behind. Even wheelbarrows had a different shape. A modern American or European in Beijing or Shanghai need see little that is surprising even in a country that is still in many ways deeply conservative; if he chooses Chinese cuisine (he will not need to) it will seem distinctive, but a Chinese airliner looks like any other and Chinese girls wear fishnet tights. It is only a little while ago that junks were China’s ocean-going ships, and looked wholly unlike contemporary European cogs or caravels.

Shared material realities advance the sharing of mental signposts and assumptions. Information and popular entertainment are now produced for global consumption. Popular groups of musicians tour the world like (though more easily and prosperously than) the troubadours who wandered about medieval Europe, presenting their songs and spectacles in different countries. Young people in particular cheerfully abandon their distinctive local ways in the indulgence of tastes binding them to other young people far away who have spare cash in their pockets – and there are now hundreds of millions of them. The same movies, dubbed and subtitled, are shown worldwide on television to audiences that take away from them similar fantasies and dreams. At a different and more consciously intended level, the language of democracy and human rights is now enlisted more widely than ever to pay at least lip-service to western notions of what public life should be. Whatever governments and the media actually intend, they feel they must say increasingly that they believe in a version of democracy, the rule of law, human rights, equality of the sexes and much else. Only now and then does there occur a nasty jolt, an exposure of hypocrisies in practice, the revelation of unacknowledged moral disagreement or of blunt rejection by cultures still resistant to changing what they see as their traditions and sensibilities.

True, millions of human beings still inhabit villages, struggling to make a living within highly conservative communities with traditional tools and methods, while all-too-visible inequalities between life in rich and poor countries dwarf any differences that existed in the past. The rich are now richer than ever, and there are more of them, while a thousand years ago all societies were by modern standards poor. Thus, in that way at least, they were closer to one another in their daily lives than they are today. The difficulty of winning one’s daily bread and the fragility of human life before the mysterious, implacable forces which cut them down like grass, were things all men and women had in common whatever language they spoke or creed they followed. Now, a majority of mankind live in countries with an average per capita annual income of over $3,000 – above the level of what the United Nations calls ‘middle income countries’. But even within these countries the majority of people earn less than one-tenth of this sum per year, and there are colossal distinctions even among the poor. Such disparities are relatively recent creations of a brief historical era; we should no more assume they will endure for long than that they will easily or swiftly disappear.

The leading classes and élites, even in the poorest countries, have for at least a century looked to some version of modernization as a way out of their troubles. Their aspirations appear to confirm the pervasive influence of a civilization originally European. Some have said that modernization is only a matter of technology and that more fundamental matters of belief, institutions and attitudes remain stronger determinants of social behaviour, but this side-steps questions about the way material experience shapes culture. The evidence is growing that certain master ideas and institutions, too, as well as material artefacts and techniques, have already spread generally among mankind. Whatever the practical effect of such documents as the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, the interest shown in drawing them up and signing them has symptomatically been intense, even when some signatories have had little intention of respecting them. Such principles always turn out to be derived from the western European tradition, and whether we regard that tradition as greedy, oppressive, brutal and exploitative, or as objectively improving, beneficent and humane, is neither here nor there. Aztec and Inca civilizations could not stand up to the Spanish; Hindu and Chinese civilizations were only slightly more successful against later ‘Franks’. Such statements can be true or untrue: but the facts are neither admirable nor repugnant. They register the fact that Europe reshaped an old, and made the modern, world.

Some ‘western’ ideas and institutions derived ultimately from Europe have often been deeply resented and resisted. Women are still not treated in the same way – whether for good or ill is here irrelevant – in Islamic and Christian societies, but neither are they treated in the same way in all Islamic societies which now exist, or within all of what we might call ‘western’ societies. Indians still take into account astrology in fixing the day of a wedding, while English people may find train timetables (if they are able get accurate information about them) or imperfect weather information, which they believe to be ‘scientific’, more relevant. Differing traditions make even the use of shared technology and ideas different. Japanese capitalism has not worked in the same way as British, and any explanation must lie deep in the different histories of two peoples similar in other respects (as invasion-free islanders, for example). Yet no other tradition has shown the same power and allure in alien settings as the European: it has had no competitors as a world-shaper.

Even its grossest manifestations – its material greed and rapacity – show this. Societies once rooted in the centrality of the immaterial world and in moral self-improvement have taken up the belief that limitless improvement in material well-being is a proper goal for them. The very idea that willed change is possible is itself deeply subversive, as is the notion that it may be a road to happiness. Large numbers of people now know that things have changed in their own lifetimes, and sense that there can and probably will be still further change for the better. A spreading and unquestioning, not very reflective, acceptance that human problems are in principle manageable or at least remediable is a major psychological transformation; it was hardly foreseeable, let alone established, even among Europeans only a couple of centuries ago. Although for most of their lives millions of human beings still rarely contemplate the future except with deep unhappiness and misgiving – and that is when they can summon up the energy to consider it at all, for they are often still going hungry – in the normal course of events more millions than ever before do not go hungry, nor do they seem in any obvious danger of doing so. More people than ever before now take it for granted that they will never know real need. A smaller, but still huge, number find it easy to believe that their lives will improve, and many more feel they ought to.

This change in outlook is of course most obvious in rich societies, which now consume much more of the earth’s resources than the rich could do even a few decades ago. In the western world, for all its comparatively deprived minorities and underclasses, most people are now in this sense rich. Only about 200 years ago a typical Englishman would have been unlikely in the whole of his life to have been able to travel more than a few miles from the place where he was born except on his own two feet; only 150 years ago he would not have had assured supplies of clean water. A hundred years ago, he still faced a good chance of being crippled or even killed by a casual accident, or by disease for which no remedy was known or existed, and for which no nursing care would be available to him, while many like him and his family ate meagre meals so lacking in balance and nourishment (to say nothing of being dull and unappetizing) that their like is now eaten only by the poorest in the United Kingdom; and they could expect in their fifties and sixties (if they survived so long) the onset of a painful and penurious old age. Much the same could be said of other Europeans, and of North Americans, Australasians, Japanese and many others. Now millions of even the poorest worldwide can glimpse possibilities of changes in their lot for the better.

More important still are those who have come to believe that such change can be sought, promoted and actually brought about. Their politicians tell them so; it is now evident that peoples and governments implicitly believe it to be a matter of fact that many specific problems in their lives and the lives of their societies can be solved. Many go further and feel that, therefore, they will be. This cannot, of course, logically be taken for granted. We may well be at the end of cheap fossil fuel and plentiful water supplies. We may well also feel sceptical about rearranging the world to increase the sum of human happiness when we remember some of the twentieth century’s attempts at social engineering, or the superstition and sectarianism, intransigent moralisms and tribal loyalties that still cost so much in misery and blood.

Nevertheless, more people than ever now behave as if most of their problems are in principle soluble or remediable. This is a revolution in human attitudes. No doubt its deepest origins lie far, far back in those prehistoric millennia of slowly growing capacity to manipulate nature, when pre-human beings learnt to manage fire or to put an edge on a convenient piece of flint. The abstract idea that such manipulation might be possible took shape only much more recently, and at first as the insight of only a few in certain crucial eras and cultural zones. But the idea is now commonplace; it has triumphed worldwide. We now take it for granted that people everywhere should and will begin to ask themselves why things remain as they are when they evidently might be made better. It is one of the greatest of changes in all history.

The most visible grounds for this change have been provided by mankind’s increasing ability in the last few centuries to manage the material world. Science provided the tools for that. It now appears to offer more than ever. We stand at the edge of an era with the promise and threat of an ability to manipulate nature more fundamentally than ever (for instance, through genetic engineering). Perhaps there lies ahead a world in which people will be able to commission, as it were, private futures to order. It is now conceivable that they could plan the genetic shaping of unborn offspring, and buy themselves experience ‘off the shelf’ as information technology becomes available to create virtual realities more perfect than actuality. It may be that people will be able to live more of their conscious lives, if they wish to do so, in worlds they have constructed, rather than in those provided by ordinary sense-experience.

Such speculations can be intimidating. They suggest, after all, great potential for disorder and destabilization. Rather than wondering about what may or may not happen, it is best to reflect firmly on the historical, on what has already changed human life in the past. Changes in material well-being have, for instance, transformed politics not only by changing expectations but also by changing the circumstances in which politicians have to take decisions, the ways in which institutions operate, the distribution of power in society. In only a few societies nowadays can or does religion operate as it once did. Science not only hugely enlarged the toolkit of knowledge humanity can use to grapple with nature, but has also transformed at the level of daily life the things millions take for granted. Over the past century it has accounted for much of a huge increase in human numbers, for fundamental changes in the relationships of nations, for the rise and decline of whole sectors of the world economy, the tying of the world together by nearly instantaneous communication, and many more of its most startling changes. And whatever the last century or so may or may not have done for political democracy, it has, thanks to science, brought a great extension of practical freedoms. Overwhelmingly western in its contemporary origin, though often building on Asian roots, the expressions of scientific knowledge in better technology swiftly became global in their effect.

Only among the intellectual leadership of the richer societies has there been some qualification of the confidence, evident and hardly challenged until 1960 or so, in human ability to manage the world through science and technology (rather than, say, through magic or religion), and so to satisfy human wants. Such qualification may prove to have much further to go. We now know more about the fragility of our natural environment and its susceptibility to change for the worse. There is a new awareness that not all the apparent benefits derived from the manipulation of nature are without their costs, that some may even have frightening implications, and, more fundamentally, that we do not yet possess the social and political skills and structures to ensure that humanity will put knowledge to good use. Discussion of public policy has only recently begun to give due weight to many of the concerns thus aroused, of which those most attended to can be summed up as ‘environmental’ – pollution, soil erosion, dwindling water supplies, the extinction of species and forest depletion are among those most noticed.

This awareness is evident in the attention given in recent years to the problem of ‘global warming’, the rise in average temperatures on the world’s surface, believed to be produced by changes in the atmosphere and stratosphere that affect the rate at which heat is dispersed and lost from it. The facts themselves were until recently in dispute, but in 1990 a United Nations conference at Geneva conceded that global warming was in fact a growing danger, and that it was largely a matter of the accumulation of man-made gases in the atmosphere. This, it was agreed, had in a century already produced a measurable increase in average temperature; climate was in fact changing faster than at any time since the last Ice Age. At present, the authoritative consensus is that human agency has been a major contributor to this.

Argument continues about the likely rate of further increase and its possible consequences (in, for instance, rising sea levels) while work began on the preparation of a framework convention on man-made climatic change, which was ready by 1992. Its main aim was the stabilization of levels of emission so that in 2000 they should still be at 1990 levels. At Kyoto in 1997 this was turned into a regulatory agreement covering the emission of all major ‘greenhouse’ gases (as they were called); it imposed levels of reduction for emissions and timetables that placed the main burdens on developed countries. So far 191 countries have ratified the protocol, which gives some reason for hope. But the United States has yet to agree to it, and the present aim of the signatory countries is a very modest one: to keep future global warming to less of an increase than two degrees centigrade in global mean temperature. Meanwhile, signs of the bad effects of human-induced climate-change multiply and the first attempts are already being made to seek legal remedies for damage caused by it in terms of flooding.

Two decades or so is hardly long enough to expect or find politically acceptable solutions to a problem of such magnitude. There seems to be no reason to assume that things will not get worse before they can get better, but, more important, also none that agreed solutions cannot be found. Humanity’s confidence in science has, after all, been based on real success, not on illusion. Even if that confidence is now to be qualified, it is because science has made it possible to do so by giving us more knowledge to take into account. It is reasonable to say that while humanity may have been producing much irreversible change since it successfully displaced the larger mammals from their prehistoric habitats, and if, consequently, some grave issues are now posed, the human toolkit has not been shown to be exhausted. Humanity faced the challenge of the Ice Ages with far poorer resources, both intellectual and technological, than it faces climatic change, with today. If interference with nature has led to the appearance of new, drug-resistant bacteria by mutation through natural selection in the changed environments we have created, research to master them will continue. What is more, should further evidence and consideration oblige humanity to abandon the hypothesis that global warming is mainly a man-made phenomenon – if, say, it were to become plausible to say that natural forces beyond human control or manipulation, such as those producing the great Ice Ages of prehistory, were the determining forces at work – then science would apply itself to dealing with the consequences of that.

Even irreversible change does not in itself warrant any immediate abandonment of confidence in the power of the human race to pull itself out of difficulties in the long run. Although we may already have lost some choices for ever, the arena within which human choice can be exercised – history itself – is not going to disappear unless the human race is extinguished. That humanity’s extinction should occur by natural disaster, independently of human action, is possible, but speculation about that is hardly useful (even actuarially) except over a limited range of cases (that the world should be hit by a monster asteroid, for example). The human being remains a reflective and tool-making animal and we are still a long way from exhausting the possibilities of that fact. As one scholar strikingly put it, from the point of view of other organisms, humankind from the start resembles an epidemic disease in its successful competitive power. Whatever it has done to other species, though, the evidence of numbers and lifespan still seems to show that human manipulative power has so far brought more good than harm to most human beings who have ever lived. This remains the case, even if science and technology have created some new problems faster than they have yet produced solutions.

The power of humankind has almost imperceptibly encouraged the benign spread of assumptions and myths drawn from the historical experience of European liberalism into other cultures and of an optimistic approach to politics, even in the teeth of much recent and even contemporary evidence. That there may be huge prices in social adaptation to pay, for example, for effective response to global warming cannot be doubted, and it is fair to ask whether they can be paid without large-scale suffering and coercion. None the less, confidence in our collective ability to shape political solutions remains high, to judge by the widespread adoption of forms of political participation. Republics exist around the world these days, and almost everyone speaks the language of democracy and the rights of man. There are widespread efforts to bring to bear a rationalizing and utilitarian approach in government and administration and to replicate models of institutions that have been found successful in countries in the European tradition. When black men clamoured vociferously against the white-dominated societies they lived in, they wished to realize for themselves the ideals of human rights and dignity gradually evolved by Europeans. Few cultures, if any, have been able altogether to resist this forceful tradition: China kow-towed to Marx and science long before it did so to the market. Some have resisted more successfully than others, but almost everywhere the individuality of other great political cultures has been in some measure sapped. When modernizers have sought to pick and choose within the dominant western political model, they have not found it easy to do so. It is possible, at a certain cost, to get a selective modernity, but it usually comes in a package, some of whose other contents may be unwelcome.

For the sceptical, some of the best evidence of the ambiguous outcome for social well-being of the growth of uniformity in political culture has been provided by the continuing vigour of nationalism, whose success has been consummated virtually worldwide in the last hundred years. Our most comprehensive international (a word whose commonplace acceptance is significant) organization is called the United Nations and its predecessor was a League of Nations. The old colonial empires have dissolved into scores of new nations. Many existing national states have to justify their own existence to minorities that themselves claim to be nations, and therefore to have the right to break away and rule themselves. Where those minorities wish to break up the states that contain them – as do some Basques, Kurds and Tibetans, for example – they speak in the name of unachieved nationhood. The nation seems to have been supremely successful in satisfying thirsts other ideological intoxicants cannot reach; it has been the great creator of modern community, sweeping aside class and religion, giving a sense of meaning and belonging to those who feel adrift in a modernizing world in which older ties have decayed.

Once again, whatever view is taken of the relative waxing or waning of the state as an institution, or of the idea of nationalism, the world’s politics are for the most part organized around concepts originally European, however qualified and obscured in practice, just as the world’s intellectual life is increasingly organized around the science originating in Europe. Undeniably, as we have seen before in history, cultural transfers can work unpredictably and thus have surprising consequences. Exported from the countries that first crystallized them, such notions as the state or the individual’s right to assert himself or herself have produced effects going far beyond what was envisaged by those who first confidently encouraged the adoption of principles that they believed underlay their own success. The arrival of new machines, the building of roads and railways and the opening of mines, the coming of banks and newspapers transformed social life in ways no one had willed or envisaged, as well as in ways they had. Television now continues the process which, once begun, was irreversible. Once disseminated methods and goals were accepted, then an uncontrollable evolution had begun.

It is quite possible that ideas and technologies created mainly by Europeans will find their future global form at the hands and minds of people from other cultures. Indeed, much of the information we now have at our disposal indicates that this is likely, at least in some fields. The big story of the last fifty years seems to be the gradual transfer of wealth and power from the western to the eastern hemisphere, accentuated by the most recent economic crisis. This is not something new in human history. In many ways it is a return to the situation prior to the nineteenth century, when Asia was by far the most productive continent on earth, though not always the most technically advanced one. And of course this does not mean that Europe and its various offshoots will be irrelevant to history as it continues to unfold. But it does mean, perhaps, that significant elements of future global civilization will be centred on Beijing and Delhi, rather than Washington, Paris and London.

Such developments will ask all kinds of questions about how humanity will cope with change. Though continuing to shape it, humankind can no more than in the past control the course of history for long. Even in the most tightly controlled essays in modernization, new and unexpected needs and directions erupt from time to time. Perhaps there now also looms up the spectre that modernization’s success may have communicated to mankind goals which are materially and psychologically unachievable, limitlessly expanding and unsatisfiable in principle as they are.

This can hardly be a prospect to be lightly regarded but prophecy is not the historian’s business, even if disguised as extrapolation. Guesses, though, are permissible if they throw light on the scale of present facts or serve as pedagogic aids. Perhaps fossil fuels will go the way that the larger prehistoric mammals went at the hands of human hunters – or perhaps they will not. The historian’s subject-matter remains the past. It is all he has to talk about. When it is the recent past, what he can try to do is to see consistency or inconsistency, continuity or discontinuity with what has gone before, and to face honestly the difficulties posed by the mass of facts that crowd in on us, in recent history in particular. The very confusion they present suggests a much more revolutionary period than any earlier one and all that has been said so far about the continuing acceleration of change confirms this. This does not, on the other hand, imply that these more violent and sweeping changes do not emerge from the past in a way that is explicable and for the most part understandable.

Awareness of such problems is part of the reason why there now seem to be so many fewer plausible ways of seeing the world than in former times. For centuries, the Chinese could think untroubledly and unquestioningly in terms of a world order normally centred on a universal monarchy in Beijing, sustained by divine mandate. Many Muslims did not, and some still do not, find much place in their thinking for the abstract idea of the state; for some, the distinction of believer and non-believer is more significant. Many millions of Africans long found no difficulty in doing without any conception of science. Meanwhile, those who lived in ‘western’ countries could divide the world in their minds into ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, just as Englishmen could once distinguish ‘Gentlemen’ from ‘Players’ on the cricket field.

That such sharp disparities are now so much eroded marks the degree to which we are ‘one world’ at last. The Chinese intellectual now speaks the language of liberalism or Marxism. In Jeddah and Tehran, thoughtful Muslims have to confront a tension between the pull of religion and the need to have at least some intellectual acquaintance with the dangerous temptations of an alien modernism. India at times seems schizophrenically torn between the values of the secular democracy its leaders envisaged in 1947 and the pull of its past. But the past is with all of us, for good and ill. History, we must recognize, still clutters up our present and there is no sign that that will come to an end.