— that is, think about the ways that yesterday’s events shaped today. You can ponder how what happened a decade ago shapes this year and how a single change somewhere in the past could have made today different. Historians scoff at the “what if” game, but it’s a tool for getting your head into history.
What if incumbent Donald Trump had won the 2020 U.S. presidential election instead of challenger Joe Biden? Would an angry mob have attacked the U.S. Capitol the following January? How different would American politics have been? How about if voters in the United Kingdom had not chosen, in a 2016 referendum, to withdraw that nation from the European Union? Would that nation’s banks or fishing industry be better off or worse today? What about its people?
For that matter, what if Japan had not attacked the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor in 1941? Or what if the terrorists who crashed airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, had been stopped before they could board the planes? Think about the lives that would have been saved and the grief that would have been averted. Imagine the years since. What would have been different?
In the case of the World Trade Center, U.S. troops wouldn’t have been sent to Afghanistan, for one thing. That invasion turned into a two-decades-long conflict, the United States’ longest war. And if the Trade Center had not fallen, would there have been that other U.S. war in the Middle East — the one in Iraq? We can’t know for sure, but we know that many lives changed because of that tragic 2001 attack.
Footpath to Expressway: Building on Humble Beginnings
Human beings used to be hunter-gatherers. There may be a slim chance that you’re still living that way, getting all your food from the natural world around you. I doubt it, though. Instead, you’re a student, an office worker, or perhaps a truck driver. Maybe you write code, or you’re an IT specialist. You perform any of thousands of occupations unimagined by early humankind. You use tools like cellphones and GPS navigation — things hardly dreamed of even when I was born in the middle of the 20th century, let alone at the dawn of civilization. Yet here I am, clacking away on a computer keyboard, checking my meager investments online, and listening to my streaming playlist just like a modern human being.
In a way, here too are the people of 30,000 years ago, my ancestors and yours. They may have thought a lot about berries, seeds, insects and grubs, shellfish, and calorie-rich bone marrow from fresh or scavenged kills. But they were endowed with the same basic biological equipment we have today. They were big-brained, tool-using bipeds with opposable thumbs, and after tens of thousands of years living hand to mouth from what they could find or kill, some of them spread across the world.
Either pushed by circumstance (climate change, for example) or inspired by new opportunities, they traveled from the lush forests, savannahs, and seacoasts of Africa to face the harsh challenges of virtually every environment on Earth, including mountains, deserts, frozen steppes, and remote islands. Eventually, they traded in stone spearheads and scrapers for tools and weapons made of copper, then of bronze, and then of iron … and ultimately built things like microcircuits and Mars rovers. Those people traveled and adapted and innovated all the way to today. They are you and me. In a weird way, then is now.
Around 12,000 years ago, not very long after the last Ice Age ended, some people whose technology consisted largely of sticks and rocks settled down. They were discovering that if they put seeds in the ground, plants would come up, and that this process worked best if they stuck around to tend the plants. This realization eventually led to farming.
Scholars point to an area they call the Fertile Crescent (see Figure 1-1), as a hotbed of early farming. Shaped like a mangled croissant, the Fertile Crescent stretched from what is now western Iran and the Persian Gulf through the river valleys of today’s Iraq and into western Turkey. Then it hooked south along the Mediterranean coast and the Jordan River through Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into northern Africa and the Nile Valley of Egypt. The crescent is where archaeologists have found some of the oldest cities in the world.
The chain reaction that starts civilizations goes something like this: Agriculture leads people to stay put in exchange for more food, and ample food enables population growth. When a group’s population reaches a certain size, there’s little chance of going back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, because there wouldn’t be enough food for so many people. Ample food also gives the growing population commodities to trade. Trade leads to more trade, which leads to more goods and wealth. Not everybody works in the fields. Some folks can specialize in hauling goods; others can construct buildings or perhaps concentrate on making weapons, used either to protect their own wealth or to take wealth away from others. Artisans create jewelry and turn mundane objects (arrowheads, pots, baskets) into aesthetic statements. Society gets multilayered. Buildings rise. Villages become towns. Cities rise. Trade necessitates keeping track of quantities and values, which necessitates a way to record information. Number systems get invented. Writing follows. Prehistory becomes history.
Nafsadh / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY SA 4.0
FIGURE 1-1: The Fertile Crescent extended from the Persian Gulf through Iraq and into Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Palestine, and into the Nile Valley of Egypt.
Next thing you know, an English-speaking woman in Florida, whose various ancestors spoke Spanish, Irish Celtic, and Japanese, is sitting in her South Korean car, stuck in traffic on the expressway, a style of limited-access road invented in Germany. She’s sipping a cup of coffee harvested in El Salvador, brewed in the Italian style in a machine manufactured in China to Swiss specifications. On her car’s satellite radio, a voice beamed from London is introducing news stories about outbreaks of disease, raging wildfires, floods, and a new tropical storm. The reports come from Greece, Canada, China, and Haiti. She reaches over and switches to a station that features a style of music invented in Jamaica by English-speaking people of African descent.
War! What Is It Good For? Material for History Books, That’s What
A view of history that sees only progress — this advance leads to that terrific advance, which leads to another incredible breakthrough, and so on — doesn’t account for the fact that people can be awful. Some are ruthless, some are destructive, some are stupid, and many are hateful. More often, people are simply thoughtless and careless. Not you, of course. You’re full of compassion and understanding, and capable of doing great things. And we all know or at least know about somebody whose ability to make this world better is off the charts. But the human race also produces bad characters and bad results.
Much of this book deals with war. I wish that weren’t so, but for reasons that anthropologists, psychologists, historians, politicians, economists, and many more have never been able to untangle, there’s always been somebody who’s eager to bash, skewer, shoot, blast, or vaporize somebody else. History is too often an account of how one group of people, under the banner of Persia, Genghis Khan, William of Normandy, imperial Japan, or whatever decided to overrun another group. Many such efforts succeeded, if success can be defined as killing other people and stealing their land, resources, wealth, wives, children, and so on.
