History of the World

The **History of the World** traditionally uses the historical periodisation of Classical Antiquity, Middle Ages, Early Modern, Late Modern, and Contemporary Age. It was developed for and applies best to the history of Europe and the Mediterranean. Yet when applying the periodisation to world history we must be careful of our preconceptions.

## Overview

Civilisation first flourished in ***Classical Antiquity*** (3500 BC-476 AD) in the so-called Cradles of Civilisation. Most of these few areas eventually saw the rise of a series of empires of unprecedented size develop. Regional empires faced common problems associated with maintaining huge armies and supporting a central bureaucracy, and invariably fell, but not before having a profound cultural influence on the later cultural development of the regions. The ***Middle Ages*** (476-1453 AD) spans the era between the decline of these foundational cultures and the start of an age of truly world history. It is sometimes called the "*Age of Diverging Traditions*" because regional differences continued to deepening throughout this millennia, until by about 1453 mankind was probably more diversified than ever before or since. For the European world it was largely an era of backwardness and superstition, but this was in sharp contrast to other regions. The Islamic Middle East enjoyed a extraordinary cultural flowering, at least until the arrival of the Mongols in the 13th century. In China, the Confusion bureaucracy provided great unity of character, despite the perpetual rise and fall of dynasties, and contributing four great inventions to mankind: the compass, paper-making, gunpowder, and printing. The story of the ***Early Modern Age*** (1453-1763) is dominated by the astonishing success of one civilization among many, that of Europe. There are two aspects to this process: there was a more and more continuous and organic interconnection between events in all countries prompted by the European Age of Discovery; and the mid-15th-century invention of the printing press revolutionized communication and facilitated ever greater advances in learning. By the ***Late Modern Age*** (1763-1945 AD), the accumulation of European knowledge and technology had reached a critical mass that brought about the Industrial Revolution. Europe produced wealth on an unprecedented scale, and it dominated the rest of the globe by power and influence as no previous civilization had ever done. Europeans or their descendants ran the world, and even politically independent countries had in practice to defer to European wishes and accept European interference in their affairs. Yet the European world came to an end when the civilization revealed its full self-destructive potential in two World Wars. The wars left the ***Contemporary Age*** (1945-current) with two countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, possessing principal power to influence international affairs. Each was ideologically suspicious of the other, leading to a forty-five-year stand-off and nuclear arms race between the pair and their allies until 1991. Yet the end of the Cold War simply opened the world eyes to the new complexity of the world.

## History

### Prehistory

Towards the end of Prehistory, around 4000 BC, all the essential building blocks of civilisation were beginning to fall into place. The development of agriculture permitted humans to settle into denser and more permanent compounds that gradually became towns. Towns became centres of trade, absorbing agricultural produce, and in return providing manufactured goods and a degree of military protection. Farther flung trade network were stimulated by the development of metal working in copper, bronze, and gold. As towns developed a complex economic and social structure, sophisticated language and early writing systems were needed, as well as complex religious practices, for religion has deep roots early in Prehistory.

### Classical Antiquity History

Civilisation has been one of the great accelerators of man-made change. Historians generally accept that it arose independently, or with a minimum of influence, at least six times in the so-called Cradles of Civilisation: Mesopotamia in Iraq, the River Nile in Egypt, the Indus River in India, the Yellow River in China, and twice in the Americas in Mexico and Peru. Most but not all developed in river valleys, which gave the inhabitants considerable advantages: a reliable source of water for drinking and agriculture; additional food from fertile soil and fish; ease of transportation; and people were forced to work cooperatively on flood defences and irrigation projects. These few flickering civilisation slowly sparked others through interaction, stimulation, and inheritance. They also nurtured the two great innovations of Ancient History: writing and organized religion in all its diverse forms; Hinduism, Judaism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Jainism, Taoism etc. Not all were equally successful. Some of these early civilizations are still real foundations of our own world, while others such as Ancient Egypt faded, leaving little or no influence, except perhaps upon our imaginations when we contemplate the relics which are all that is now left of them.

    From around 500 BC, we see the rise of a series of empires of unprecedented size and complexity develop. Well-trained professional armies, unifying ideologies, and advanced bureaucracies created the possibility for emperors ruling populations upwards of tens of millions. In Europe, Ancient Greece (759-404 BC) was an era of war and conflict, first between the Greeks and Persians, then between the Greek city-states themselves. In the end the Greeks are remembered as poets and philosophers; it is an effervescence of culture unlike anything that had been seen before that constitutes their major claim on our attention. They provided the foundation of Western civilisation; architecture, philosophy, science, mathematics, literature, mathematics, history, drama, music, the Olympic Games, and our idealisation of democracy. In the late-4th-century, the ideas of these Greek thinkers were spread as far as Egypt, the Middle East, and north-western India through the conquering exploits of Alexander the Great.

Alexander’s extraordinary achievement barely outlasted his death, but another

If the Ancient Greeks contribution to European civilisation was essentially mental and cultural, then that of Ancient Rome (753 BC-476 AD) was structural and practical; its essence was the empire itself. Beginning in the 3rd century BC, the Roman Republic began expanding its territory through conquest and alliances, so that by the time Augustus became the first Roman Emperor in 31BC, Rome had already established hegemony over almost all of the Mediterranean. The empire reached the zenith of its extent under the emperor Trajan, and relics can still be seen from England to Mesopotamia of the engineering achievements the Romans. From 180 AD, a series of dire emperors ushered in the Crisis of the 3rd Century, during which the Roman Empire nearly collapsed under the combined pressures of barbarian invasions and internal political crises. Yet somehow the empire survived, dragged back from the brink by a cabal of Illyrian emperors culminating in Diocletian, who reformed almost every aspect of the Roman order; political, economic, social, and military. The Golden Age of Rome was long dead. This was an age of iron, and these were men of iron. Meanwhile, the Roman Empire had nurtured, and occasionally persecuted, Christianity from an obscure Jewish sect, to the religion of almost 10% of the population of the empire. A mysterious decision by Constantine the Great at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (October 312) can be seen now as one of the great turning points in the history of the Christian Church and the world. His triumph was not the birth of Christianity, but it was the beginning of Christendom, the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, and eventually in Europe and the Western world.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the Silk Road lay another regional empire of comparable in power and influence to the Roman Empire, Imperial China; first under the short-lived Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE), followed by the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD). During this period, Chinese civilization crystallized, agriculture and commerce flourished, and the population reached 50 million.

A mysterious decision by Constantine the Great at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (October 312) can be seen now as one of the great turning points in the history of the Christian Church and the world. His triumph was not the birth of Christianity, but it was the beginning of Christendom, the establishment of Christianity as the dominant religion in the Roman Empire, and eventually in Europe and the Western world. Whether Constantine the Great was good for the Roman Empire is harder to assess. On the positive side, his decision to create a new and near impregnable capital at Constantinople, allowed the empire to endure as the Byzantine Empire for over one thousand years. On the cost side, Constantine’s cynical rise to power brought chaos to the empire, and then left chaos in his wake, that would inexorably lead to the Decline of the Roman Empire.

The decline of something as complex as the western half of Roman Empire obviously cannot be explained simply. The causes were a synergy of interacting tensions; political, economic, military, and social. Over time the division of the empire into East and West became permanent, and these tensions were felt disproportionately in the West. In the East, once Theodosius finally established a lasting peace with Sassanid Persia by in 387 AD, the huge region of Anatolia, Syrian, Palestine, and Egypt were shielded from intruders, becoming the economic life-blood of the Eastern Empire. While East and West were both plagued by political instability and civil wars, its greater economic stability allowed the bureaucracy beneath the imperial court in the East to fair far better, eventually becoming the famed Byzantine bureaucracy. Another factor was that the Western Empire simply had more troubled borders: huge Rhine and upper Danube frontiers; Britannia was plagued by Picts in the north and Saxon pirates in the south; and in north-western Africa the Moors were a persistent nuisance. And then there were the social factors. One of the great geniuses of Roman Empire had been its ability to incorporate new peoples into her ethnically diverse empire, without being weighed-down by prejudice, with one exception. In her declining years, all the most capable generals were of Germanic descent, yet were consistently denied access to power. Finally, there were the religious tensions. Christians pursued the persecution of pagans, with the same zeal as they had once been persecuted, at a time when the empire needed unity. In 453 AD, the Germanic general Odoacer collected-up the imperial regalia of the last western emperor Romulus Augustulus, and sent it to the eastern emperor Zeno, as a clear message that there was no longer any need for a western emperor. Nevertheless, the heritage of Rome endured in the Eastern Roman Empire for centuries, although Western European historians prefer to refer to it as the Byzantine Empire, to obscure the uncomfortable fact that the barbarians who delivered Ancient Rome's final death knell were the Crusaders.

While 476 AD is obviously a Eurocentric date to mark the end of Classical Antiquity, similar dates could be chosen for other areas of the world; 220 AD in China, and 550 AD in India. In China, the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD) rivalled in terms of unity, power, prestige, and influence the Roman Empire that lay at the other end of the Silk Road. The first of the five great dynasties of Chinese history was considered a Golden Age in the arts, politics and technology. It so thoroughly established what was thereafter considered Chinese culture, that “Han” became the word denoting someone who is ethnically Chinese. Meanwhile, the foundation of India culture derived from two empires. Firstly, the Maurya Empire (322-180 BC) was the first to stretch over the entire Indian subcontinent, barring only the southern tip. Then the Gupta Empire (320-550 AD) brought Indian culture to its classical zenith in terms of the arts, architecture, sciences, religion, and philosophy. All these empires faced similar problems to the Roman Empire: supporting huge armies and a central bureaucracy, with costs falling most heavily on the peasantry; as well as barbarian pressure on the frontiers hastening internal dissolution.

### Middle Ages

With the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the civilised world in Europe and the Mediterranean had shrunk. Western Europe fractured into a tapestry of so-called Barbarian Kingdom such as the Franks, characterised by economic and cultural regression, depopulation and ignorance. From this upheaval in the west, the Christian Church was often the sole institutional survivor of the Roman Empire. Yet Roman civilisation not only endured in the Byzantine Empire, but actually enjoyed something of a resurgence under Justinian the Great. However, it did not last, in what turned out to be a long cycles of struggle and recovery.
In the 7th century Arabia became the cradle of the world's third great Abrahamic religion, Islam, as well as the third inheritor of the Roman Empire; and for centuries the greatest of the three. Muslims believe that, just like Moses and Jesus before him, God sent Muhammad as the final prophet to restore Abrahamic worship of the one true God, after what they perceived as straying. The Muslim Arab armies then embarked on a remarkable era of conquest born on the fire of religious zeal. By 750, the Muslim Empire stretched from Atlantic coast of Spain to the Indus River in India to the border of China. Europe itself was only saved from the relentless Muslim wave by the mighty walls of Constantinople.

King Charlemagne of the Franks has been called with considerable justification the "Father of Europe", idealised by kings and knights throughout Medieval Europe. With Charlemagne, kingship took on more clearly the responsibility for the spiritual, material, and cultural well-being of his subjects. The Dark Ages were a long period of rebuilding for Europe and the Carolingian Renaissance he spurred was a crucial step. Yet his administration and cultural achievements were primitive when compared to those of the Byzantine Empire or especially the Muslim world. Centred in Baghdad, the Abbasid Caliphate oversaw an Islamic Golden Age; an effervescence of culture and learning unlike anything that had been seen since Classical Greece. Muslim scholars translated the works of the Greek, Buddhist and Hindu men of learning, and forge new advances in the arts, theology, philosophy, mathematics, science, medicine, engineering and architecture. The prosperity, luxury and delight of Baghdad at this time has been impressed on the western imagination by one of the most famous works of Arabic literature; the Thousand and One Nights.

From the coastline of Scandinavia, the Vikings created a maritime empire stretching from that stretched from central Russia in the east, to Normandy in France, to Greenland in the west, and even as far as the shores of America. The British Isles and France experienced the most dramatic influx of Viking peoples, with startlingly differing effects; it helped England and Scotland to unite into embryonic nations, while France descended fully into regional feudalism with the king as a mere figurehead. While Western Europe slumbered in the Dark Ages, the Byzantine Empire enjoyed one last great flowering, in a Golden Age ushered in by the Emperor Basil I and his successors.

In the year 1000, the Viking onslaught on Western Europe was dying down, but there was still nothing to indicate the European Age to come. Western Europe was a fragmented backwater with little learning or culture to compare to the Abbasid Muslim world or the Byzantine Empire under Basil I and his successors. China was the richest, most skilled and sophisticated empire on earth, as well as the most populous. Under the Tang and the Song dynasties, the Chinese enjoyed a spectacular Golden Age that credited her with many of the most significant innovations in history: gunpowder weapons, movable type, the compass, paper making, books, and paper money. Influence from China helped stimulate the emergence of a rich and unique culture in Japan. Meanwhile, for the Indian subcontinent, the Early Middle Ages were an era of smaller Hindu states in a complex and fluid network. In India the great stabilisers were provided by religion and a caste system inseparable from it, soon to be disrupted by Muslim incursions.

The slumber of the Western Europe was shaken in the 11th century by a new sense of self-confidence, exemplified by the Normans, a Viking people who settled in Northern France. In 1066, they crossed the Channel and conquered Anglo-Saxon England. Norman adventurers then carved out an Italian kingdom from Byzantine Southern Italy and Muslim Sicily. The Western Christian Church also had a new aggressive attitude, sparking the Great Schism with the Eastern Orthodox Church, as well as the first great clash between Church and state of the Middle Ages; the struggle between the Pope and Holy Roman Emperor known as the Investiture Controversy. Meanwhile, the dramatic rise of the Seljuk Turks triggered the decline of the Byzantine Empire, and the further fragmentation of the Muslim world.

One excellent outlet for Western Europe’s new found self-confidence was warfare under the implied moral authority of the papacy. Western European nobles and kings launched a series of Crusades to check the spread of Islam and retake the Holy Land. Taking advantage of division within the Islamic world, the First Crusade succeeded in conquering Jerusalem and carving out states in the Eastern Mediterranean. The religiously-motivated campaigns were often farcically disorganised, ruthless and duplicitous, and carried out a series of massacres of staggering brutality against Jews, Muslims, and Orthodox Christians. The two-century attempt to recover the Holy Land ultimately ended in failure, once the Muslim world united under Saladin, and served more to weaken the Byzantine Empire as the bulwark of Christendom against the Muslim east. Yet the Crusades had a profound impact on Western civilisation: they reinforced the link between Western Christendom and the feudal system, bringing a measure of social stability; enabled the Italian city-state to flourish with the reopening of the Mediterranean to commerce; and constituted a wellspring for accounts of heroism, chivalry, and piety that underpinned growth in medieval literature, romance, and philosophy. They were ultimately an important factor in the robust population and economic growth that Western Europe enjoyed in the 12th and 13th century. The Crusades also consolidated the Pope’s leadership of the Catholic Church, whose authority was enlarged to encompass the last remaining pagans in eastern Europe, as well as over sects such as the Celtic Church of Ireland and the Cathars. Meanwhile the aggressive stance of the papacy continued in the next medieval clash between Church and state, over Thomas Becket in England.
The 13th century was the apex of medieval civilisation in Europe. Robust population growth greatly benefited European trade. Her growing confidence was expressed most famously in the great Gothic cathedrals, but also in the founding of the first great European universities. Feudalism was in decline and modern nations began to take shape, with France emerging as the most powerful and culturally influential, and England despite upheavals with the most settled system of government. The kingdoms of Spain and Portugal reconquered most of the Iberian Peninsula, leaving the Muslims clinging on in Granada. The Italian cities flourished as prosperous, independent, and dazzlingly cosmopolitan city-states. At the same time, in the steppes north of China, the nomadic Mongol tribes were united under Genghis Khan, who launched an unparalleled journey of conquest that created an empire, stretching from the Sea of Japan and China, to the heart of the Muslim world and the doorstep of Eastern Europe. The vast transcontinental empire connected the east with the west with an enforced Pax Mongolica, allowing the dissemination and exchange of trade, technologies, commodities, and ideologies across Eurasia.

By about 1453 mankind was probably more diversified than ever before or since. Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and western European civilisations all lived independently long enough to leave an enormous weight of tradition in the ground-plan of our world. The insulation of one civilization from another was never absolute; there was always some interaction of ideas going on. Yet the age of independent civilisations was coming to a close. Outside Europe, extraordinary things had been achieved. The Chinese threw-off the yoke of a foreign Mongol dynasty, and reasserted control under the ethnic Han Ming dynasty. Japan enjoyed a long period of relative stability under a Japanese form of feudalism, dominated by the military rule of warlords or Shogun. India was brought under Muslim rule, but Indian and Hindu identity survived largely intact. Rich and unique civilisation evolved in the Americas, despite complete isolation from the rest of the world. Yet for all the that, the story of the growing integration of world history after 1453, is dominated by the astonishing success of one civilisation; that of Europe. It was with the modernisation of Europe that the Modern World History began.

### Early Modern History

By 1517, most of the basic characteristics of modern Europe were falling into place. With the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella, and the completion of the Reconquista, modern Spain could be said to have emerged. As had the core of Russia, with decline of two-centuries of Mongol dominance under Ivan the Great. England emerged from the turmoil of the War of the Roses, with a powerful new dynasty, the Tudors. Meanwhile, explorations by the Portuguese and Spanish began the Age of Discovery, leading to the sea passage round Africa to the East, to European sightings of the Americas, and to Magellan's magnificent circumnavigation of the globe. The artistic flower of the Renaissance burst into full bloom with the unparalleled talents of da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. The arrival of the printing press introduced the era of mass communication, which would permanent altered the structure of society.

Through the revolutionary potential of the printing press, the reforming ideas of an obscure monk from a tiny German duchy called Martin Luthar, spread rapidly throughout Europe. Luther's theory was that if everyone just returned directly to the Bible, they would see the one single truth. Instead, he sparked off the Protestant Reformation, a European conflagration of unparalleled violence, that ravaged Western Christendom for more than a century, that destroyed forever the religious unity of Europe, and had far-reaching political, economic, and social effects. Meanwhile, the Age of Discovery brought Europeans into contact with the immensely wealth but underdeveloped Inca and Aztec civilisations in the Americas, which ended in ruin to both, and almost inadvertently kicked-off the age of European colonialism. The discovery of vast quantities of gold and silver in the Americas shifted the European Balance of Power, introducing Spain as a new great power, while the Reformation added new religious zeal to the rivalry and sometimes peculiar bedfellows; even long-time rivals France and England would occasionally find themselves on the same side. Early 16th century West Europe was overshadowed by three glamorous king. While England's Henry VIII with his six wives has an assured niche in popular history, Western Europe was dominated by Francis I and Charles V, whose bitter personal rivalry achieved little other than draining the resources of France, Spain and imperial Germany, as well as bringing an end to Italy's medieval heyday. Yet Europe's foremost powers was none of these three. Under Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Turks controlled from Hungary through the Middle East to as far west as Algeria, and enjoyed a Golden Age of legal, administrative, and cultural achievements.

Out of the ferment of the Renaissance and Reformation there arose in the late 16th century one of the most important developments in European intellectual tradition; the Scientific Revolution. Much of the work done during the late-16th and 17th century is still considered today as the foundation of the major fields of modern science, including mathematics, physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, and medicine. Scientific advances had little immediate practical effects, but gradually they were applied substantially to inventions in the late 18th century Industrial Revolution. Meanwhile, the social and political upheaval of the Protestant Reformation rolled on in Europe, with turmoil in Catholic France which emerged with a measure of religious, and in Protestant England which moved towards an increasingly staunch Puritanism that would play a role in the subsequent English Civil War. The Reformation also sparked rebellions against their overlords in the Netherlands and Ireland, with starkly contrasting results.

The Protestant Reformation would meet its bloody conclusion in imperial Germany with the devastating Thirty Years War, that caused the deaths of perhaps 25% of her total population, with losses of up to 50% in some regions. After 1648, religious issues retained political importance, but no longer dominated international alignments. In undermining the authority of the Church, the Reformation made possible the absolute rule of powerful monarchs, notably in France and Russia. Yet in questioning the Church, almost inevitable people began to question the divine right of kings. In the long struggle for representative government, England was at the forefront, emerging from the English Civil War as a parliamentary monarchy, after a brief experiment as a republic. The intellectual basis of the struggle, would be won provided by the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. Meanwhile, with the steady decline of Spain's power and prestige, other European nations were quick to dispute their claims to the Americas and the Far East.

In the later half of the 17th century, European politics and culture was dominated by one man, "Sun King" Louis XIV of France. Endowed with a divine right to wield absolute power, he was notorious for his aggressive approach to foreign policy, working tirelessly to expand the borders of France, and retaining much of this territory even when much of Europe was ranged against him in the Nine Years' War. Meanwhile, another autocratic ruler, Peter the Great, dragged Russia kicking and screaming into Europe and transformed it into a great power through successful wars against the Ottoman Empire and Sweden. On the opposite side of the spectrum, Britain endured a second tense struggle for political power in the Glorious Revolution, from which it emerged as a Parliamentary Monarchy, rivelled only by the Dutch Republic in terms of representative government. Neither was democratic in the modern sense; barely 3% of the wealthiest British citizens were eligible to vote. Yet as the Scientific Revolution was reaching its zenith in the work of Isaac Newton, a new social movement, the Age of Enlightenment, was providing the intellectual underpinnings of the long struggle for representative democracy.

With the emergence of France under Louis XIV as potentially the dominant political and cultural power in Europe, the European balance of power came into full effect. When king Charles II of Spain died without a heir, and the Spanish throne was left to a grandson of Louis XIV, the result was the Spanish War of Succession pitting France against a grand alliance of most of Europe. When the dust settled, a settlement was reached that ultimately left no one completely satisfied but kept the balance of power in place. The war characterised many of the conflicts throughout the 18th-century, constantly shifting alliances to prevent the hegemony of one nation or alliance. Another change in the balance of power was the gradual emergence of Prussia as a great power under Frederick the Great. His reign would be a blueprint for the ideas of an Enlightened Absolute Monarchy; a moderniser, a reformer, and militarily aggressive. Frederick would demonstrate his military genius and the prowess of the Prussian army in the War of Austrian Successions.

### Late Modern Age

The transition into the Late Modern Age was marked by two of the major turning points in history. The first turning point was the Seven Years’ War (1756-73), the fourth in a series of loosely interconnected European wars of the 18th century, that included the Nine Years' War, the War of Spanish Succession and the War of Austrian Succession. Winston Churchill described it as the first "world war", dividing all the European great powers into two rival alliances, and spilling over into North and South America, the Caribbean, West Africa, India, and the Philippines. Ultimately, it ended France’s century-long supremacy in Europe, and marked Britain as the predominant colonial power, well on the way to establishing the British Empire, the largest empire in history. It also left all the belligerents saddled with crippling war debts, directly leading to the Partition of Poland from 1772, the American War of Independence from 1775, and the French Revolution from 1789. Meanwhile, the ideas of the giants of the High Enlightenment – Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant – were providing the philosophical basis for a century of revolutions in the Western world. The other turning point was an economic development underway in Britain that truly deserved the name "revolution". The Industrial Revolution would bring about a huge increase in the volume and variety of manufactured goods, saw improved systems of transportation and communication, and impacted almost every aspect of human society in some way. In 1760, China, India, and Europe were roughly equivalent in terms of commercial output. A century later, the Industrial Revolution had transformed Europe into the dominant manufacturing power in the world. At the same time, it also bought about the evils of worker exploitation, pollution, and urban squalor.