The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2 Read online

  The Human Journey

  * * *

  The Human Journey

  A Concise Introduction

  to World History

  KEVIN REILLY

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  http://www.rowmanlittlefield.com

  Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom

  Copyright © 2012 by Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Reilly, Kevin

  The human journey : a concise introduction to world history / Kevin Reilly.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4422-1352-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-1353-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-1-4422-1354-8 (electronic) — ISBN 978-1-4422-1384-5 (cloth v. 1 : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-1-4422-1385-2 (paper v. 1 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-1386-9 (electronic v. 1) —

  ISBN 978-1-4422-1387-6 (cloth v. 2 : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-1388-3 (paper v. 2 : alk. paper) —

  ISBN 978-1-4422-1398-0 (electronic v. 2) 1. World history—Textbooks. I. Title.

  D21.R379 2013

  909—dc23 2011030048

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  For Pearl

  Illustrations

  Figures

  Figure 1.1 Time Line of the First 14 Million Years 2

  Figure 1.2 Paleolithic Art: Cave Painting 10

  Figure 1.3 Paleolithic Art: Female Figurines 11

  Figure 1.4 Finding the Grains: Rice 22

  Figure 1.5 Catal Huyuk Room 25

  Figure 1.6 Catal Huyuk Goddess 26

  Figure 1.7 Neolithic Pottery: Banpo 28

  Figure 1.8 Banpo Pottery Markings: Almost Writing 28

  Figure 1.9 Monte Alban: Zapotec State Stage 33

  Figure 2.1 Time Line 38

  Figure 2.2 Royal Tomb of Ur 45

  Figure 2.3 Hittite Chariot 53

  Figure 2.4 Queen Hatshepsut 55

  Figure 2.5 Iron Age Assyrian Horse Archer 58

  Figure 2.6 Phoenician and Other Alphabets 60

  Figure 3.1 Time Line 74

  Figure 3.2 Buddhist Stupa at Sanchi 76

  Figure 3.3 Statue of Athena in the Parthenon 79

  Figure 3.4 Roman Capitol Temple 85

  Figure 3.5 Roman Soldiers and Prisoners 89

  Figure 3.6 Terracotta Soldiers Protecting Shi Huangdi’s Tomb 96

  Figure 3.7 Close-Up of Terracotta Soldiers Showing Individual Detail 97

  Figure 4.1 Time Line 106

  Figure 4.2 Buddha in Greek Style 112

  Figure 4.3 Indian Ocean Ship, Eighth Century 114

  Figure 4.4 Underground Ethiopian Coptic Church, Thirteenth Century 124

  Figure 4.5 Mosque at Jenne 132

  Figure 5.1 Time Line 140

  Figure 5.2 Mongols Capturing Baghdad 153

  Figure 5.3 Muslim Scholars and Books 156

  Figure 5.4 Muslim Map of the World for Europe 159

  Figure 5.5 European Heavy Plow, Twelfth Century 165

  Figure 5.6 European Windmill 166

  Figure 5.7 European Anatomy Lesson 172

  Figure 6.1 Time Line 184

  Figure 6.2 Benin Bronze King 190

  Figure 6.3 Aztec Tribute List 196

  Figure 6.4 Aztec Sacrifice 197

  Figure 6.5 Mochica Figure 200

  Figure 6.6 Quipu Reader and Official 201

  Figure 6.7 Downtown Cahokia around 1200 202

  Figure 6.8 Austronesian Ship and Mariners 209

  Figure 7.1 Time Line of Early Modern Empires 216

  Figure 7.2 Janissaries 223

  Figure 7.3 Hunting in Siberia 238

  Figure 7.4 Machu Picchu 243

  Figure 8.1 Smallpox Victims 255

  Figure 8.2 Overseer and Slave on a Brazilian Plantation 257

  Figure 8.3 European Missionaries in China 268

  Figure 8.4 Smoking Tobacco 271

  Figure 9.1 Time Line: Europe’s Modern Transformation 276

  Figure 9.2 Steam-Powered Hammer 284

  Figure 9.3 Revolutionary Parisian Market Women 291

  Figure 9.4 Socialist Cartoon 297

  Figure 9.5 Women’s Suffrage March 302

  Figure 10.1 Time Line 306

  Figure 10.2 Suez Canal 311

  Figure 10.3 Chinese Opium Smokers 314

  Figure 10.4 Battle of Omdurman 317

  Figure 10.5 Imperialism Cartoon 331

  Figure 10.6 Japanese Parliament 332

  Figure 11.1 Twentieth-Century Time Line 342

  Figure 11.2 Indians in World War I 345

  Figure 11.3 Cold War Conflicts: Vietnam 356

  Figure 11.4 Independence Comes to India 360

  Figure 11.5 Economic Globalization 369

  Figure 12.1 Poster Advertising China’s One-Child Family Rule 380

  Figure 12.2 Working on Computers in Nigeria 383

  Figure 12.3 The Slums of Rio de Janeiro 386

  Figure 12.4 Democracy in South Africa 398

  Figure 12.5 The Women’s Movement in France 402

  Maps

  Map 1.1 Human Migrations, 100,000 to 12,000 Years Ago 8

  Map 1.2 The Spread of Agriculture, 10,000 to 3,000 Years Ago 21

  Map 2.1 Ancient Civilizations 39

  Map 2.2 The Chariot Revolution 52

  Map 2.3 Persia under Cyrus the Great 64

  Map 3.1 Classical India 74

  Map 3.2 Classical Greece 78

  Map 3.3 Roman Empire 84

  Map 3.4 China Han Empire 91

  Map 4.1 Trade Routes between Roman and Asian Empires, around 1 CE 108

  Map 4.2 Spread of Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism 117

  Map 4.3 Spread of Islam, 634–1250 131

  Map 5.1 Spread of Paper from China 143

  Map 5.2 Mongol Empire 152

  Map 5.3 Europe, 1000–1300 165

  Map 5.4 Travels of Ibn Batutta and Marco Polo 179

  Map 6.1 Bantu Migrations 188

  Map 6.2 Polynesian Migrations 208

  Map 7.1 Muslim Empires in the Early Modern Era 222

  Map 7.2 Chinese Expansion 229

  Map 7.3 Russian Expansion 236

  Map 8.1 European Expansion and Global Integration, 1450–1750 250

  Map 8.2 Destination of African Slaves 261

  Map 9.1 Industrializing Europe 283

  Map 9.2 Napoleon’s European Empire 293

  Map 10.1 Europe’s World Domination, 1914 309

  Map 10.2 Global Migration in the Nineteenth Century 323

  Map 11.1 Europe Divided: 1914 344

  Map 11.2 World War II 347

  Map 11.3 The World of the Cold War 354

  Tables

  Table 8.1 Chronology of the Slave Trade 262

  Table 9.1 World Population Changes in the Modern Era 285

&n
bsp; Table 12.1 Global Inequality and Global Progress in the 1990s 385

  Table 12.2 An Environmental Snapshot of the Twentieth Century 389

  Preface

  OVER THE years that I have been teaching world history, I have frequently been asked, “How are you able to cover everything?” My answer—after “of course you can’t cover everything”—is that you have to broaden your focus. Just as a photographer switches to a wide-angle lens to capture a landscape, we must survey larger patterns of change to understand the history of the world. This means rethinking what is important, rather than cutting parts of the old story. When I was a college student and the course was “Western Civilization,” instructors solved the problem of coverage, as each passing year made their subject longer and larger, by calving off much of ancient and recent history. Thus, we began with the Roman Empire and barely got to World War II. More recently, those who designed the first Advanced Placement world history course decided to view everything before the year 1000 as prelude. These are arbitrary cuts, not solutions to the problem of understanding the human story. In fact, that problem requires us to dig deeper into the past than we are used to, so that we can understand the formative stage of human development. And it also requires that we try to understand the recent past not only as a chain of important events, but also as the continuation of long-term processes. Thus, while twelve chapters might seem a spare space to describe The Human Journey, I have devoted the first chapter to what historians have often dismissed as “prehistory” and used the last two chapters to locate the present—on the surface and in depth. Consequently, the remaining nine chapters—the centerpiece of the story—take on greater meaning: the rise of states and empires as a consequence of the Agricultural Revolution, the classical age that shapes even our own, the development and spread of the universal religions that dominate our world, the stages of globalization from “southernization” to westernization, and the impact of industrialization and democratization.

  Too many people to name have made this book possible. In addition to the scholars I have read, only a small fraction of whom are cited here, there were dozens of others who advised me or reviewed parts of this work, many anonymously. I am extraordinarily lucky to count many of them as good friends. It is regrettably impossible to thank the late Jerry Bentley, but Ross Dunn was also an early supporter. Steve Gosch, Sue Gronewold, Marilyn Hitchens, David Kalivas, Lauren Ristvet, and George Sussman also read all or parts of the manuscript. Discussions with David Christian, Marc Gilbert, Craig Lockard, Heather Streets-Salter, John McNeill, and Adam McKeown helped me as well. Finally, my good friend Bob Strayer played a far greater role than he would allow, from first suggesting the project to contributing at every stage.

  At Rowman & Littlefield I am enormously grateful to my editor Susan McEachern. In addition, I’d like to thank Carrie Broadwell-Tkach, Grace Baumgartner, and Karie Simpson in Acquisitions and Alden Perkins in Production.

  The Long Prologue

  FROM 14 BILLION YEARS AGO

  Peopling the Planet:

  The Earth as a Global Frontier

  A Little Big History

  First Life on Earth

  Three Explosions of Life

  Changing Surfaces

  Changes in Climate

  Human Origins

  Natural Selection

  Hominids Stand Tall

  Hominids to Humans

  Culture Trumps Nature

  Global Migration

  Humans as Travelers

  The First Modern Humans

  Cave Paintings and Female Figurines

  Cultural Adaptation

  Human Differences: Race and Culture

  Do Numbers Count? Patterns of Population Growth

  Most of Human History: Foraging Societies

  Lifestyles of Foragers

  Sexual Division of Labor

  Relative Social Equality

  Leisure Time

  Merging Old and New

  Subduing the Earth: The Consequences of Domestication

  The First Breakthrough: Origins of Agricultural/Pastoral Economies

  Control over Food Supply

  Why Agriculture Developed

  Selecting Crops to Grow

  Reducing Variety

  Globalization and Continental Variety

  Geography as Destiny

  East–West Transmission Advantages

  Agriculture and Language

  The Long Agricultural Age: Places and Processes

  Jericho

  Catal Huyuk

  Banpo

  Ibo Culture

  The Taino

  Neolithic Continuity and Change

  Changes in a Mexican Valley

  Conclusion

  Peopling the Planet:

  The Earth as a Global Frontier

  A Little Big History

  WORLD HISTORY comes in many different sizes. “Small” is the story of the past 5,000 years, the period of written records. “Medium” is human history since the agricultural revolution, about 10.000 years ago. “Large” is the story of the human species, Homo sapiens sapiens, going back 150.000 to 200,000 years, sometimes including our protohuman ancestors over 5 million years ago. “X Large” is the story of the earth, its changing geology, climate, and life forms, beginning about 5 billion years ago. “XX Large” is the history of the entire universe, a tale of 14 billion years.

  Most of this book is “small” history, the story of humanity’s past 5,000 years. But to put that story in proper perspective, this chapter will begin with the history of the universe, Earth, and life; then it looks at the long history of humans as foragers (mainly hunters and gatherers); finally, it explores the impact of the agricultural revolution beginning about 10.000 years ago. We call it a “little Big History”1 because most of the past 14 billion years will fly by quickly. Fourteen billion years is an almost incomprehensibly long background to the human story. The astronomer Carl Sagan expressed this dramatically when he plotted all 14 billion years on a single calendar year. On such a scale, the first humans would not appear until December 31 at 10:30 p.m., and all written history—the past 5,000 years—would occur in the 10-second countdown to midnight.

  It is difficult to imagine what happened at that first instant 14 billion years ago. That first millisecond of time was also the first millisecond of all matter and energy. Everything our world contains came from that explosion that scientists call the “Big Bang”: not only suns and planets but also space and time and even light (though not for another half billion years). Today, that explosion still continues. Astronomers recently trained their telescopes on the edge of that first light, still rocketing out into space, leaving our world in its twilight.

  First Life on Earth . On the scale of 14 billion years, our Earth is breaking news. Along with our sun and solar system, it originated about 5 billion years ago in the debris of some earlier stars. After a cooling process of about a billion years, the bubbling mixture of chemicals on our Earth did something we see as miraculous: it created life. Among the necessary ingredients were a moderate temperature, sunlight, water, and carbon. Somehow, some of the carbon in water reproduced itself. Scientists describe the first life as a kind of pond scum that looked like blue-green foam or algae. By the process of photosynthesis, these cells absorbed sunlight and released oxygen into the atmosphere. Two billion years later, some single cells clustered together to form multicellular organisms. The rest of our story is the tale of life these past billion years.

  Three Explosions of Life . We tend to think of most long-term historical processes as gradual, or following an even pace, and perhaps they are. But the growth of life was a series of expansions and extinctions—the multiplication of new life forms followed by five major extinctions and many smaller ones. In broad terms we can distinguish three major explosions of life over the last 550 million years. Scientists call these three stages “Old Life,” or “Paleozoic” (570 million to 250 million years ago); “Middle Life,” or “Mesoz
oic” (250 million to 65 million years ago); and “Recent Life,” or “Cenozoic” (65 million years ago to the present). The first stage, the Paleozoic, began with a wild explosion of natural forms, possibly thanks to the oxygen-charged atmosphere. Within 40 million years, nature shot out almost all possible life forms—the basic structures of everything that exists today but all under the sea. First came worms and other invertebrates, then vertebrates, fish, and vascular plants (with roots, stems, and leaves). Then some dug roots or crawled on to the land. After a brief rest came the conquest of land: first by plants and then insects, trees, and amphibians. By about 300 million years ago, the first winged insects and reptiles appeared.

  Then, about 250 million years ago, something like 90 percent of all species suddenly disappeared. Some scientists believe that a meteor may have caused the extinctions;2 others point to massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia and the dark global winter that followed.

  The next era of growth, the Mesozoic, beginning just after 250 million years ago, brought the first dinosaurs and mammals. The first birds appeared 200 million years ago and the first flowers 150 million years ago. The Mesozoic profusion of life ended in another mass extinction about 65 million years ago. Sixty percent of all the earth’s species disappeared, including the dinosaurs. The cause this time may have been a large asteroid, six miles in diameter, that plowed a huge trench under what is today the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.3 The dust and debris from the explosion may have spread all over the earth, causing months of darkness. If life was not a one-time invention on planet Earth, it was certainly a vulnerable creation.

  After a long darkness and acid rain 65 million years ago, life revived. North American ferns led the revival of plant life at the beginning of the Cenozoic era. Eventually, larger plants and trees spread their seeds and took root. With a new forest canopy came the first primates, squirrel-like mammals that took to the trees about 60 million years ago, and the first apes, 57 million years ago. The Cenozoic is sometimes called the “age of mammals” since so many mammals replaced the dinosaurs as the largest creatures on the planet, but it could just as well be called the age of flowers or insects or fish or birds. In fact, we would recognize most of today’s animals in early Cenozoic fossils. Some would surprise us, like birds that stood seven feet high and sloths as big as elephants. The Cenozoic is our own era, even if we might not recognize all of its inhabitants.