The Times History of the World. Richard Overy

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СКАЧАТЬ historians now accept that world history works like this. The rise and fall of civilizations evidently has causes, many of which are explored in the pages that follow. But it does not follow from this that history ought to progress, or that it follows internal laws or patterns of development. History does not move forward entirely blindly, but its progress is more often than not accidental, not patterned, and the circumstances of its development contingent rather than purposive—a product of a particular set of circumstances at a particular time rather than a necessary progress from one stage to the next. The same objection can be raised to the popular idea that there are turning points in history, key battles or events that have determined the course of history. Some events are clearly more important than others. History might now be written differently if the Roman army had not defeated Hannibal at Zama in 202 BC, but this was just one event in a much wider world of human activity, insignificant in India or China of the 3rd century BC. On balance human history moves forward on a broad front, less affected by ‘turning points’ than might be expected. If one set of events had never happened, there would just be a different narrative which would now be accepted as part of the past as readily as any other. History has neither pattern nor purpose. It is simply the record of what has been.

      There are nonetheless broad common factors that have shaped the development of human communities wherever they have settled. The most important element has been the continuous and complex relationship between mankind and the natural world. Natural phenomena have defined a great deal of the human story. Until quite recently most natural forces were beyond human capacity to control or mediate or even to understand. Some still remain so. In the spring of 2008 a ferocious cyclone, which laid waste large parts of southern Myanmar, and a powerful earthquake in China, killed at least 150,000 people between them. Natural disasters—earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, soil erosion, rising sea levels, crop failure—have been a constant feature of all history. The shaping of the landscape determined patterns of settlement, forms of husbandry, the possibility of exploration and trade. The seas and rivers have been both barrier and pathway. The siting of cities, artificial additions to the landscape, has been determined by access to river communications, or the existence of a natural harbour, or the natural defensive walls provided by high outcrops of rock or hillside. For the past 5,000 years and the introduction of widespread agriculture, the relationship between population size and food supply has added a further natural factor restricting or enhancing the prospects of particular societies, or creating violent tensions between communities that lived by hunting and those with settled pastoral traditions. This competition is not confined to the ancient past, when, for example, waves of hunters from the plains of Eurasia descended on Europe in the 5th and 6th centuries; the near extermination of the North American buffalo in the 19th century by white hunters, an animal on which some Native American tribal societies depended, opened the way for the vast grain-growing prairie belt and the emasculation of the Native American population.

      The supply of food, or its absence, famine, is a constant through human history. It exercised the ancient Egyptians, who developed complex irrigation systems to compensate for a buoyant population surrounded by desert; 3,000 years later Adolf Hitler argued that Germans needed ‘living space’ in Eastern Europe to provide a proper balance between population and food supply; the contemporary world, trying to support a vastly greater population, witnesses famines in Africa side-by-side with an overabundance of food in the richer West. A new food crisis in 2008 has prompted the bleak conclusion that food output must expand 50 per cent by 2030 to meet demand. For most people through most of recorded history the search for food has been unyielding. In hunting communities, as long as there existed a wealth of animal life or fish, food was not a problem. In settled, agricultural communities, on the other hand, the supply of food was restricted either by problems of soil or changeable climate or by the maldistribution of food between rich and poor, or both. Tilling the soil was no guarantee of a decent diet; a Roman feast or a groaning Victorian banquet gives no clue as to how inadequate was the food supply for the slaves who grew and garnered it in Roman Italy, or for the Victorian poor, most of them cut off from the land and dependent on a monotonous starch-rich diet. In post-Renaissance Italy there developed one of the most sophisticated cuisines in the world, informed by a wealth of gastronomic master-works, but the later peasant workers of the Po Valley suffered debilitating pellagra from eating a stodgy maize-based diet that inflated their abdomens and eventually killed them. In settled civilizations, an adequate, varied, artistically presented or innovative diet was the preserve of the rich. It was no accident that the Russian Revolution of February 1917 began with a demonstration for bread by hungry women in St Petersburg (Petrograd).

      The relationship between mankind and environment has changed a good deal over the past 200 years. Larger and more regular food supplies together with changes in healthcare have provoked a population explosion. Global population was around 800 million in the 18th century; currently it is an astonishing 6.7 billion. A result has been the massive expansion of the agricultural base, partly from utilising virgin lands, partly from raising yields artificially through plant- and stock-breeding or the addition of chemical fertiliser. These changes have provoked deforestation and the transformation of natural habitat. Heavy hunting has brought thousands of land and sea creatures to the edge of extinction. The world’s urban population has grown dramatically since 1900 and now stands at just over 50 per cent of the whole, producing huge sprawling cities and high levels of human pollution. To meet the daily needs of such a population has meant expanding industrial production, depleting the earth’s natural resources, and creating a growing chemical imbalance in the atmosphere that has damaged the ozone layer and threatens through so-called ‘global warming’ to undermine the fragile basis on which 6 billion people can subsist. Demands for a higher living standard from Western populations already rich in resources, and for catch-up living standards in much of the rest of the world, has accelerated the depletion of resources, the transformation of the landscape and the unnatural climate change. The rich United States has 5 per cent of the world’s population but generates annually 25 per cent of the ‘greenhouse gases’ that cause climate change. The most alarming scenarios are now painted of the capacity of man to forge new natural disasters to which there will be no answer—enough methane gas perhaps to cause a global explosion in a century’s time, or the release of bacteria from the frozen icecaps millions of years old, from which current populations would have no prospect of immunity. The relationship between man and nature has about it a profound irony. The attempt to master the natural world has simply given nature new and more terrible powers.

      Only in one respect has it proved possible to tame nature sufficiently to alter human society for the good. Over the past 150 years, in itself a fraction of the long history of man, it has proved possible to understand and then prevent or cure most medical conditions. For all the rest of human history, disease and disability were an ever-present reality for which there was almost no effective relief. The establishment of cities and animal husbandry combined to create ideal conditions for the establishment of a cluster of endemic epidemic diseases which periodically killed off wide swathes of the human host. The earliest epidemics in the cities of the first civilizations in China, Egypt or Mesopotamia included smallpox, diphtheria, influenza, chickenpox and mumps. With the opening of trade routes and regular invasions, disease could be spread from populations that had developed some immunity to those biologically vulnerable. Athens was struck by a devastating plague in 430 BC which undermined its political power; the Antonine plague in the late-2nd-century AD Roman Empire killed around one-quarter of the populations it infected, probably with smallpox. Bubonic plague, transmitted by fleas carried on rats, killed around two-thirds of its victims. Plague originating in Egypt in 540 AD spread to the Eastern Mediterranean where again one-quarter of the population died. The famous Black Death in the 14th century swept from Asia to Europe, killing an estimated 20 million and reducing Europe’s population by one-quarter. Epidemics died out partly because the pathogens had no other victims to kill. Modernity was no safeguard either. Cholera coincided with the industrialization and urbanization of Europe and produced regular pandemics in Asia, the Middle East and Europe between the 1820s and the 1890s. ‘Spanish influenza’ struck Europe at the end of the First World War with populations unnaturally weakened by lack of food; it was the world’s worst pandemic, killing 60 million people in just two years.

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