History of the World

History of the world

This is a combination of my own words and cutting and pasting from Wikipedia; I'm not making any money nor trying to claim credit here; the point is to present a big sweep picture; all credit where credit is due. 

Human history/ gradual accretion of discoveries and inventions, as well as by quantum leaps—paradigm shifts, revolutions—that comprise epochs in the material, cultural and spiritual evolution of humankind. Debate of gradualism/ punctuated equilibrium/ revolutions or derivative? Fuck, why always this framing as one or the other? It can be a process containing all these factors. You can tweak the evidence and shoehorn thoughts to conform to whatever premise you want to emphasize. You need a wide net to catch it all.

Whole angle of climatic factors that forced people to change in varying circumstances, not 1 to 1, but a definite limiting factor. End of Pleistocene, Younger Dryas Event (1300 years between 12,900 & 11,500 BP, Lake Agassiz ice dam breaks/ more water than all lakes in world today/ drains through St. Lawrence River, rapid influx of fresh water, disrupts N. Atlantic thermohaline circulation, rapid return to glacial conditions in northern latitudes, drought in Levant), El Ninos, Atlantic oscillation, Medieval Warm period (AD 800- 1300), Little Ice Age (1250- 1650)

-all through history there has been conflict: when do those seeds first get sown, for what reasons? Generalizable? The first human displacements and initial outmigrations would be the beginning. All the gods and reasons maybe gets down to needing land and space to exercise your brand of humanity; the conflict is basically over controol of space and resources.

Upper Paleolithic: 40,000 – 10,000 ya, Great Leap Forward/ 50 – 40,000 ya, universals of human culture/ first step of modern set of cultural attributes: abstract thinking, planning, innovation, symbolic behavior, burying dead, clothing/ sewing, cooking, music, games, expand to inhospitable areas, advance and specialization of tools/ prepared core, fishing, images/ cave paintings/ figurative art, jewelry, pigment/ self ornamentation, long distance trade, LANGUAGE/ FOXP2 gene/ possible mutation/ necessary for these symbolic changes/ contemporaneous anyway

Mesolithic: begins with Holocene warm period/ 11,660 BP and ends with introduction of farming/ end of Younger Dryas Event

-Epipaleolithic: in areas of limited glacial impact/ headed towards agriculture, Mesolithic more pronounced as a period in areas of glacial impact/ i.e. hunting gathering shifting styles as glaciers melt/ not headed towards agriculture, Neolithic delayed in N. Europe till 5000 BC

-somewhere in here: dawn of modern language groups, Indo European, by connecting languages/ genes, you see the spread of humanity

Neolithic/ Agriculture : climatic changes of Younger Dryas event forced development of farming w/ drought in Levant?, from 10,000 ya in Middle East, Neolithic revolution, hunting gathering to settlement, accumulation of surplus food/ non-subsistence economy, pottery, ethnic religion, goddess of the field/ fertility metaphor, irrigation, astrology, social organization/ more hierarchy/ chiefdom type, domestication/ animals/ 8000 BC/ pastoral transhumance/ livestock/ inherited inequalities of wealth, systematic warfare more common than Paleolithic, more wealth to plunder, “fortified lifestyle”

-einkorn wheat, millet, spelt

-dogs 15,000 BC, goats 10,000 BC, sheep 9-11,000 BC, cattle 8000 BC, pigs 9000 BC, cat 7500 BC, chicken 6000 BC, donkey 5000 BC, horse 4000 BC, camel 4000 BC, honey bee 4000 BC

-“Neolithic package”: farming, herding, polished stone axes, timber long houses, pottery, spread into Europe

-first signs of deforestation/ to make room for agriculture

-late Neolithic: the wheel

RELIGION: reflects socio-economic-techno changes over time: animism, shamanism, ancestor worship, pantheism, paganism, goddess of the field/ fertility/ agriculture, gods of war, ethnic gods, universal gods/ monotheism, monism/ Buddhist/ Jain/ Hindu, Dualism/ Gnostic/ Zoroastrianism

-Monism: all is one, Buddhism: pluralism and monism are speculative views/ middle path of the two: all is one/ all is different/ KDB paradox

-Buddhism does not encourage ontology (pluralism)/ study of units of existence, categories of being, order of life, ATOMISM is ontology at its finest/ 500 BC Leucippus & student Democritus, Aristotelian thought dominated in Middle Ages until Renaissance/ scientific revolution, Newtonian physics, Descartes, Boyle, Hobbes, Galileo = atomists

Bronze Age 3300 – 1200 BC:  writing: history begins, 4000 BC/ more at accounting, 3000 BC/ early writing, Egypt 3200 BC, 2900 first Egypt dynasty, later Bronze = more social stratification

Early civilization: Mesopotamia (Tigris/ Euphrates Rivers), Nile, Indus River valley, Yangtze and Yellow River valleys in China, City and Trade, Expansion/ migration

Antiquity : 3000 BC to early Middle Ages in Europe, recorded history = @ 5000 years, Jericho, Sumeria FROM 5300 BC, Babylonia, Assyria, Elam (Iranian)/ before 5000 BC, Achaemenid Empire, Hittite Empire (Armenian/ Anatolian), Phoenicians 1500-300 BC/ Carthage, Egypt, Nubia, Iron Age 1200 BC in Near East/ 800 BC central Europe/ 600 BC northern Europe, Kingdom of Israel 1550-300 BC, classical antiquity (700 BC) = beginning of recorded Greek history/ founding of Rome, 476 CE (AD) = end of antiquity/ fall of Roman empire

Middle Ages: 6^th – 15^th centuries, printing press/ movable type (mid 15^th), Urbanization of northern, western Europe, Islamic conquests, Islamic golden age/ ended by the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258, Mongol invasions, black death

-wheel eventually leads gears, clocks, machines, water wheel

-Renaissance 6 simple machines: lever, wheel and axle, pulley, inclined plane, wedge, screw

-wheel leads to propeller, jet-engine, fly wheel/ gyroscope, turbine

-hard surface roads, rubber eventually

Modern

-early modern:  16^th century to about 1750, Renaissance, humanism, Age of Discovery, Colombian Exchange, wealth generated by trade, rise of nation states, capitalist economies, Reformation, Secular civic politics, decline of feudalism, serfdom and power of Catholic church

- Rediscovery of classical world’s scientific contributions, culture of inquisitiveness, led to humanism

-scientific revolution (derivative or revolution?): heliocentric solar system, matter is atomistic, phys laws of motion/ gravity, medical: vein and artery circulation is one system, pulmonary circulation, surgery, anatomy, Galileo: math is language of science/ scientific method, chemistry, smelting iron, blast furnace/ metallurgy/ materials advances. steam engine, botany, Linnaeus/ taxonomy, Darwin/ evolution, biology, geology/ fossils, microscope, telescope, astronomy

-Copernicus 1473- 1543, Galileo 1564-1642, Kepler 1571- 1630, Newton 1643-1727, Mendeleev 1869/ periodic table,

-eastern/ western medicine, monism/ atomism

-Protestant Reformation 1517 – 1648/ protest against corruption of Catholic Church/ ends with Peace of Westphalia: culture of Renaissance humanism/ academic ferment

-William of Ockham 1288-1348/ Apostolic poverty, John Wycliffe 1320-1384/ Lollards/ translation of Bibole to vulgate/ moveable type/ personal Bible reading/ spread of ideas, Jan Hus 1372- 1415/ reformed Brethren 100 years before Luther, Magesterial Reformation, state supported (Luther 1483-1546/ Zwingli/ Calvin), Radical Reformation, not state supported: (Anabaptists, Erasmus)

-Calvin: split to Reformed and Presbyterian, Presbyterian combined with Anglican/ Puritan (Quakers 1650s) to produce Congregational/ synergy with work ethic/ economy/ industrial revolution

-upshot: struggle to control ideas/ the Truth, persecution/ accusations of heresy, centuries of religious conflict, parallel track with democratic developments of political freedom, religious freedom/ able to practice faith in public

-need to consider development of legal, economic, medical, technological and transportation fields along with everything else

Rise of Europe: -entrepreneurial culture, slave trade, silver, Protestant work ethic, Jared Diamond, water wheels, mills, spinners, looms, steam, shipping, property rights, free market stuff

-geography/trade: the Mediterranean Sea, which, for millennia, had functioned as a maritime superhighway fostering the exchange of goods, people, ideas and inventions.

--Geography of Europe/ isolated by mountains from invasion,

-India and China were subject to periodic invasions, and Russia spent a couple of centuries under the Mongol-Tatar Yoke. Central and western Europe, logistically more distant from the Central Asian heartland, proved less vulnerable to these threats.

- Geography also contributed to important geopolitical differences. For most of their histories, China, India and the Middle East were each unified under a single dominant power that expanded until it reached the surrounding mountains and deserts. In 1600 the Ottoman Empire[141] controlled almost all the Middle East, the Ming Dynasty ruled China,[142][143] and the Mughal Empire held sway over India. By contrast, Europe was almost always divided into a number of warring states. Pan-European empires, with the notable exception of the Roman Empire, tended to collapse soon after they arose.

--sails: caravel (Nina, Pinta, Santa Maria) fusion of lateen sail and square rigging, able to sail oceans, plus navigation advances, guns, germs and steel,

-Political/ democratic dimensions: The Act of Abjuration signed on July 26, 1581, formal declaration of independence of the Dutch Low Countries from the Spanish king, Philip II. This act followed the Union of Utrecht. The Union of Utrecht: treaty signed on 23 January 1579 unifying the northern provinces of the Netherlands, until then under the control of Habsburg Spain. Protestant north/ Catholic south in Belgium. After 80 Years War or Dutch war of Independence/ 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which formally separated the Dutch Republic from the Holy Roman Empire. In the course of the conflict, and as a consequence of its fiscal-military-maratime innovations, the Dutch Republic emerged as a Great Power, whereas the Spanish Empire lost its European hegemonic status.

-Europe's maritime expansion unsurprisingly — given that continent's geography — was largely the work of its Atlantic states: Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands. The Portuguese and Spanish Empires were the predominant conquerors and source of influence, and their union resulted in the Iberian Union,[154] the first global empire, on which the "sun never set". Soon the more northern English, French and Dutch began to dominate the Atlantic. In a series of wars fought in the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating with the Napoleonic Wars, Britain emerged as the new world power.- Meanwhile the voyages of Admiral Zheng He were halted by China's Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), established after the expulsion of the Mongols. A Chinese commercial revolution, sometimes described as "incipient capitalism", was also abortive.

-modern: 1750 to present: Enlightenment, industrial revolution (knowledge/ technology critical mass)

-First Industrial revolution: coal/ iron/ steam/ rail

-colonization/ seeds of nationalism, world economy, European hegemony, mass production, mechanization

-age or reason/ led to modern democracy/ American Revolution (Dutch independence from Spanish)/ quality of life for little guy

-coal/ pollution/ 1850, transport/canal/ rail/ steamship/ shrank the world,

-1880s: commercial electricity, telegraph 1840-60

-Second Industrial Revolution: steel/ electricity/ chemicals, batteries, electronics

-advances in arms, rifling

-medicine: germ theory, microscopes, allopathic approach

20^th Century

-radio, TV, telephone, airplane, rickets, communication technology, automobile, juggernaught really gets going,

Europe at apex of its power and wealth, much of world under control or dominion, WW1 destroyed empires and monarchies, weakened Britain and France, Treaty of Versailles divides up colonial world, sows sees of conflict, Russian revolution 1917, Great Depression, WW2, Cold War, nuclear arms race, space exploration, moon, exponential progress of science and technology, DNA/ genome/ manipulate life itself, switch from coal to petroleum-based economy, Information Age/ internet, globalization, industrial food production, nuke proliferation, global warming, deforestation, overpopulation, dwindling resources/ fossil fuel/ over fishing, continuing concentration of wealth

21^st Century

rise of rapidly industrializing India and China, competing for petrol, population movement looking for prosperity/ jobs, armed conflicts

LESSONS

-According to Klinghoffer, the borders between nations tend to reflect histories of antagonism and conflict: not surprisingly, for those borders have largely been shaped by conflicts.[214]

Another notable phenomenon is the recurrence of the concept of "exceptionalism", whereby successive civilizations see their own ascendance as an exceptional event in history—perhaps the final event.^{[citation needed]} Yet if history demonstrates anything, it is that history stands still for no community—that there are no final events. This has been expressed poetically in the following 1807 quotation from British author William Playfair, known as the "Playfair cycle":

:...wealth and power have never been long permanent in any place.

...they travel over the face of the earth,

something like a caravan of merchants.

On their arrival, every thing is found green and fresh;

while they remain all is bustle and abundance,

and, when gone, all is left trampled down, barren, and bare.[215]