The Big Turning Points of World History, in One Sitting

Most of us know history in patches: the Romans, the Tudors, two world wars. What happened in between, and what the rest of the world was doing at the time, is usually left blank.

This article fills in the outline, in date order. It is a sketch. Each turning point gets a few lines on what changed and what followed. The quotations come from my book World History.

From the first farms to the first empires

The oldest fossils assigned to our lineage, found at Jebel Irhoud in Morocco, are roughly 300,000 years old. For most of the time since, Africa was our only home. Roughly 60,000 years ago small bands left it and walked into a world with no other people of our kind.

For around 95 per cent of our species' existence, people lived by foraging. Then, from about 10,000 BCE in the Fertile Crescent, some communities began to plant and harvest on purpose. Farming later arose independently in perhaps a dozen places, from China to New Guinea to Mexico.

It was a bargain with costs. Farming produced more food and more people, along with harder work, worse health and new inequality. Grain could be stored, counted and taxed, and that surplus fed priests, soldiers, scribes and the first elites who lived off other people's labour.

Counting grain led to something larger.

Writing was not invented to record stories. It was invented to keep accounts.

From about 8000 BCE, villages across the Near East used small clay tokens that apparently stood for goods: a measure of grain, a sheep, a jar of oil. Only slowly did accounting marks grow into signs that could hold law, poetry and memory.

Between the Tigris and the Euphrates, Sumer built the first cities and the first written laws. Egypt, fed by the Nile's yearly flood, lasted some 3,000 years. Around 1754 BCE Babylon carved Hammurabi's laws in stone. An eye for an eye was, for its age, a limit on revenge.

These kingdoms were connected, and connected systems can fail together. Around 1200 BCE a web of Bronze Age states collapsed within decades, as drought, raiders and broken trade fed on one another. What survived was lighter and more portable. Phoenician traders carried a 22-letter alphabet across the sea, and writing began to escape the scribes.

Between about 800 and 300 BCE, thinkers in Greece, Israel, India and China asked how a person should live. Their answers still shape billions of lives. Athens tried direct democracy for its free male citizens from 508 BCE. Rome balanced consuls, Senate and assemblies for almost five centuries, then ruled the Mediterranean with roads, aqueducts, concrete and law. At the other end of Eurasia, Han China matched it in scale with a large, Confucian-trained bureaucracy. The western Roman Empire wore down over centuries and ended in 476 CE.

For the next thousand years faith, more than the state, was the deepest organising force. Christianity went from a persecuted sect to Rome's official religion within four centuries. Islam spread from Arabia across three continents in about one. Buddhism travelled with monks and merchants from India to China, Korea and Japan. Scholars in Baghdad translated and advanced Greek, Persian and Indian learning, and algebra and the zero reached Europe through them.

The connected Old World

Trade tied these regions together well before any European ship crossed an ocean. The Silk Roads passed silk, spices, faiths and disease from hand to hand between China and the Mediterranean. Monsoon winds powered a trading world linking East Africa, Arabia, India and China. The Mongols built the largest land empire in history by terror, then made it safe to cross from Korea to Hungary.

West Africa was rich and central to this web. In 1324 Mansa Musa, ruler of the Mali Empire, passed through Cairo on pilgrimage to Mecca and gave away gold so freely that a scholar writing about twelve years later reported its value there had still not recovered.

The same routes carried the Black Death out of Central Asia. It killed perhaps a third or more of Europe's people and cracked the feudal order.

Meanwhile, with no contact at all, Cahokia and the Maya built cities, calendars and pyramids in the Americas. Civilisation arose more than once.

A map of the world in 1400, drawn by an honest observer, would not have put Europe at its centre.

The centre was a belt of great cities in China, India and the Islamic heartland. Venice, Genoa and Bruges sat on the western rim.

Print, and two worlds joined

Two changes turned that rim into the storm centre.

The first was cheap copying. Before the 1450s every book in Europe was copied by hand, and a scribe could spend months on a single Bible. Gutenberg's movable metal type, in Mainz around 1450, let a text be printed by the hundred. Luther's protest of 1517 spread through the press, split Western Christianity and opened more than a century of religious war. Once copying was nearly free, no authority could fully control what people read.

The second was 1492. Decades earlier, Admiral Zheng He had led vast Ming fleets across the Indian Ocean before China's rulers turned inward. Columbus sailed west for Asia and reached a continent unknown to Europe, joining two worlds sealed off since the Ice Age.

Crops, animals and microbes crossed in both directions. Potatoes fed Europe and horses remade the American plains. Old World diseases killed perhaps nine in ten Indigenous Americans within a century. American silver flowed to China through Europe and Manila and bound the planet into one economy. More than twelve million Africans were shipped across the Atlantic in chains.

By 1750 the world was economically one, and the gains went to a few Atlantic powers built on colonies and slavery. Even then Europe was not alone at the top: in the sixteenth century, the three largest and wealthiest states west of China were not European.

Steam, science and revolution

Between Galileo and Newton, Europe learned to test ideas against evidence instead of authority. Enlightenment thinkers then argued that reason, rights and liberty should govern human affairs.

The steam engine changed the arithmetic of work. Before about 1700 nearly all work came from muscle, wind and falling water, and that was a hard ceiling: when economies grew, population rose and swallowed the gains. Coal and steam broke the ceiling. Around 1800 industrial Europe pulled ahead of Asia in wealth and power for the first time, and the gap opened quickly.

Politics moved with it. The United States founded itself on a written idea of rights. France toppled its monarchy and then consumed its own in the Terror. In Haiti, enslaved people overthrew their masters and beat Napoleon's army to found the first free Black republic. Factories pulled millions off farms, into cities and onto the clock.

The twentieth century and after

In 1914 a single assassination in Sarajevo set Europe's alliances in motion, and four years of industrial war broke four empires. The Russian Revolution of 1917 built the first communist state. The Second World War killed perhaps 70 to 85 million people and ended with the Holocaust revealed and the atom bomb used.

After 1945 came the Cold War, fought through arms, proxies and spies but never directly, and the end of Europe's empires within a generation. The vote, civil rights, the end of apartheid and women's liberation slowly widened who counted as fully equal. From about 1950, population, energy use and pollution all rose together, on a curve scientists call the Great Acceleration.

The century produced its worst horrors and its greatest gains from much the same science and power. In two centuries lifespans more than doubled, and extreme poverty fell to historic lows.

The current chapter has familiar ingredients. Computing and the internet did for information what print did for books, only faster. We can now read and edit the genome. The fossil energy that built the modern world is warming the planet. Machines that learn, write and reason are arriving quickly. In 1989 a political scientist asked whether history had reached its end.

Events had not read the essay.

What to take from this

• Farming brought surplus, and surplus brought rulers, taxes and writing.
• Writing began as bookkeeping and outlived every state that used it.
• For a thousand years, faiths organised more of life than governments did.
• Until about 1400 the centre of the connected world lay in Asia and the Islamic lands, with Europe on the edge.
• Trade routes have always carried ideas and disease along with goods.
• Cheap print and the joining of the Americas to the Old World shifted the balance. Steam then widened the gap.
• The powers that lengthened and enriched lives are the same ones that could undo them. No order has been permanent.

If you want the long version, World History: 100 turning points, from the first humans to the age of AI gives each of these moments its own chapter, in date order, with a detailed plate in every one. It is a 314-page PDF and costs £9 on Gumroad: https://matsiems.com/books/world-history.