The Times History of the World. Richard Overy

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СКАЧАТЬ choice of Beijing, capital of China, as the host city for the 2008 Olympic Games has produced an extraordinary, if brief, historic marriage of East and West. The games symbolize the world of classical Greece, whose legacy has played such an exceptional part in the development of the Western world. Greek civilization gave the West professional medicine, geometry, ethical speculation, democracy, an ideal of participatory citizenship, codified law, the first history, a science of politics and an artistic heritage imitated again and again down the ages. Many of our common terms today—from economics to psychiatry—are Greek in origin.

      China, on the other hand, is seat of the most ancient and continuous of civilizations. Always the site of the largest fraction of the world’s population, China for thousands of years, despite waves of invasions, sustained a way of life and a social structure which proved remarkably enduring. Chinese values and intellectual life were not, unlike Greek civilization, diffused widely outside the frontiers of what was loosely defined as ‘China’. Western critics in the 19th century regarded China as a stagnant culture, unmoved for centuries, but the artistic, scientific and intellectual life of China, though very different from that of the West, was rich and diverse. A good case can be made for arguing that China has been a fixed point throughout the period of recorded history, where Greek culture has been anything but continuous, relying for much of its survival on the intercession of the Arab cultures of the Middle East that succeeded the Roman Empire, in which aspects of Greek thought were kept alive and then re-exported to late medieval Europe.

      The China of the 2008 Olympics is still a central part of the world story, but it has come part way to meet the West. From the late 19th century traditional Chinese society crumbled under Western impact. A nationalist revolution overthrew the emperors and the old way of life after 1911. A second communist revolution transformed China into a more modern industrial state after 1949. Over the past 25 years China has undergone a third revolutionary wave by embracing the fruits of modern global capitalism and becoming one of the world’s major economic players. China has not become an Asian ‘West’, but has adapted what the West has had to offer and has turned China into a world ‘superpower’. The relationship between East and West has come full circle. For centuries the West pushed outwards into the world exporting, usually violently, a version of Western civilization. China was long resistant to this pressure; now China can exert pressure of its own, challenging the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the remorseless march of Western economics, political models, consumerism and popular culture.

      The meeting of Greece and China weaves together two of the central threads of world history. But the Olympics are also a symbolic fusion of ancient and modern. Although the original games are far removed from the glossy, commercialized, technically sophisticated and ruinously expensive modern version, their revival is a reminder that there are easily understood reference points back to the Europe of more than 2,000 years ago. Boxing, wrestling, javelin-throwing and running are simply what they are, the same for a modern audience as they were for the Greeks. Even the marathon, the icon of the current Western obsession with keeping fit, describes a Greek legend, when a soldier runner covered 26 miles non-stop under a gruelling sun from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to warn of the approaching Persian fleet, only to drop dead from the effort on his arrival. Distant though the ancient world seems, the span of recorded human history is remarkably short in relation to the long history of prehistoric man and the infinitely longer history of the earth. The span can be covered by just a hundred human lives of 60 years, stretched out one after the other. Only 50 human lives will take you back to those first Olympic Games.

      To think about the past as something connected by a continuous thread of human activity runs the danger of imposing a false sense of unity, but for much of the earth’s surface, over long periods of time, fundamental change has been absent. Anthropological evidence has for a long time been able to describe practices and beliefs that are clearly connected with a world so distant that it has been transmuted into myth. One hundred human lives laid end-to-end is not very many. To put it another way: it is possible to house an artefact from every major civilization of the past 5,000 years in a single cabinet and to recognize that until the last few hundred years those artefacts—whether a pot, a fertility doll, an arrow-head, a shoe, a coin—bear a remarkable underlying similarity. The recorded history of the world can be read at one level as a unitary experience, a brief 4 percent of the time modern hominids have been evolving, a hundred human lives.

      Of course these lives were not the same wherever they were lived. Whatever homologies can be detected between peoples and civilizations, the experience of world history over the past 6,000 years is a series of fractured narratives, divided geographically and segmented by differing cultures, religious practices and political orders. The whole course of world history has been a process of cultural exchange and discovery, of imperial expansion and decline; sometimes links once made were then ruptured again; at other times communication enriched both cultures. In the past 500 years that process of discovering, mapping and understanding the world as a whole has accelerated, but for most previous civilizations the ‘known world’ was only what was immediately known. The modern concept of ‘world history’ which this book encapsulates was meaningless to most human civilizations through most of human history. For large areas of the globe there was no written culture so that ‘history’ survived as myth or folk memory, dating was arbitrary or non-existent, and the world was circumscribed by the very limited geographical reach of particular peoples. Rome was an exception, but even for Romans the known world was centred on the Mediterranean and the barbarous (meaning alien) outside was scarcely understood or valued. China for centuries regarded itself as the centre of the universe, and the outside world, to the extent that it intruded at all, was supposed to revolve like so many blighted planets around the Chinese sun. The history of the world is a very Western idea and it has become knowable only in the last century or so as Europeans and their descendants overseas produced sophisticated archaeological techniques and scholarly skills to unlock many of the remaining secrets of the past. When the English novelist H. G. Wells wrote his famous Outline of History, published in 1920, he was able to do so only on the foundation of an outpouring of new research in the last decades of the 19th century. Wells was preoccupied, he wrote in his introduction, with ‘history as one whole’, and he was one of the first to attempt it.

      The more that came to be known about the many civilizations and cultures that made up human history, the more tempting it was, like Wells, to try to see history as a whole and to explain the process of historical change as a uniform one. This ambition had roots in the 19th century, where it was famously attempted by the German thinkers Georg Hegel and his erstwhile disciple Karl Marx, who both suggested that historical change was dynamic, the result of shifting patterns of thought or the transition from one economic system to another, each stage of human development incorporating the best from the past but each an advance on the one before it, until humankind finally reached an ideal society. The 19th-century view, coloured by the remarkable technical progress of the age, was to try to see a purpose behind historical change—not a mere random set of events, or a set of parables or myths to educate the present, but a triumphant account of the ascent of man. Neither Hegel nor Marx was a historian, and they both regarded China as a backwater that had somehow failed to move like the rest of the world. The 20th century witnessed more historically sophisticated attempts to find a unity in world history. The German philosopher Oswald Spengler published just after the First World War two volumes of an ambitious study of the pattern of all world history. Each civilization, Spengler argued, had a natural life-cycle, like any organism, of birth, growth, maturity and death, a run of approximately 1,000 years each. He called his volumes The Decline of the West in order to argue against the optimism of the previous century and to demonstrate that Western civilization, for all its belief that it represented the full flowering of human history, was doomed to go the way of the rest. The British historian Arnold Toynbee thought Spengler’s view of history too schematic, but he produced 10 volumes of A Study of History between 1934 and 1954 in which he too detected a common pattern in all previous civilizations which explained their birth, rise to cultural fruition and eventual collapse. Both Spengler and Toynbee rejected the idea that the purpose of history was the triumph of the West, but they both thought that history could be understood as a single, repeated pattern, from ancient Egypt to the modern СКАЧАТЬ