The New Penguin History of the World (221 page)

Once again, whatever view is taken of the relative waxing or waning of the state as an institution, or of the idea of nationalism, the world’s politics are for the most part organized around concepts originally European, however qualified and obscured in practice, just as the world’s intellectual life is increasingly organized around the science originating in Europe. Undeniably, cultural transfers can work unpredictably and thus have surprising consequences. Exported from the countries that first crystallized them, such notions as the individual’s right to assert himself or herself have produced effects going far beyond what was envisaged by those who first confidently encouraged the adoption of principles that they believed underlay their own success. The arrival of new machines, the building of railways and the opening of mines, the coming of banks and newspapers transformed social life in ways no one had willed or envisaged, as well as in ways they had. Television now continues the process which, once begun, was irreversible. Once European methods and goals were accepted (as they have been in greater or lesser degree, consciously or unconsciously, by élites almost everywhere), then an uncontrollable evolution had begun. Though continuing to shape it, humanity could no more than in the past determine the course of history for long. Even in the most tightly controlled essays in modernization, new and unexpected needs and demands erupt from time to time. Perhaps there now looms up the spectre that modernization’s success may have communicated to mankind goals which are materially and psychologically unachievable, limitlessly expanding and unsatisfiable in principle as they are.

This can hardly be a prospect to be lightly regarded but prophecy is not the historian’s business, even if disguised as extrapolation. Guesses, though, are permissible if they throw light on the scale of present facts or serve as pedagogic aids. Perhaps fossil fuels will go the way that the larger prehistoric mammals went at the hands of human hunters – or perhaps they will not. The historian’s subject matter remains the past. It is all he has to talk about. When it is the recent past, what he can try to do is to see consistency or inconsistency, continuity or discontinuity with what has gone before, and to face honestly the difficulties posed by the mass of facts that crowd in on us, in recent history in particular. The very confusion they present suggests a much more revolutionary period than any earlier one and all that has been said so far about the continuing acceleration of change confirms this. This does not, on the other hand, imply that these more violent and sweeping changes do not emerge from the past in a way that is explicable and for the most part understandable.

Awareness of such problems is part of the reason why there now seem to be so many fewer plausible ways of seeing the world than in former times. For centuries, the Chinese could think untroubledly and unquestioningly in terms of a world order normally centred on a universal monarchy in Peking, sustained by divine mandate. Muslims did not, and still do not, find much place in their thinking for the abstract idea of the state; for them, the distinction of believer and non-believer is more significant. Many millions of Africans long found no difficulty in doing without any conception of science. Meanwhile, those who lived in ‘western’ countries could divide the world in their minds into ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, just as Englishmen could once distinguish ‘Gentlemen’ from ‘Players’ on the cricket field.

That such sharp disparities are now so much eroded marks the degree to which we are ‘one world’ at last. The Chinese intellectual now speaks the language of liberalism or Marxism. Even in Jeddah and Tehran, thoughtful Muslims have to confront a tension between the pull of tradition and the need to have at least some intellectual acquaintance with the dangerous temptations of an alien modernism. India at times seems schizophrenically torn between the values of the secular democracy its leaders envisaged in 1947 and the pull of its past. But the past is with all of us, for good and ill. History, we must recognize, still clutters up our present and there is no sign that will come to an end.

Index

Note: subentries are principally in chronological order. Names of individual Acts of Parliament, battles, treaties and wars can be found under these entries

Aachen

Charlemagne’s court at,
400

Ottonian use of,
403

Abbasid caliphate,
329

seizure of power,
336

nature of rule,
336
–8

achievements of civilization,
338
–42

Charlemagne and,
341
,
398

end of rule,
342
,
372
,
379

Abbas ‘the Great’ (
c.
1557–1628/9), shah of Persia (1587–1628)

built Isfahan,
391

religious intolerance,
391

English employees,
392

Abdul Hamid II (1842–1918), sultan of Turkey (1876–1909),
935

Abgar VIII or IX, Christian king of Osrhoene (179–214),
260

aborigines, Australian,
668
,
810

Abraham, Hebrew patriarch,
109
–10,
340

Abu-al-Abbas, first Abbasid caliph (749–754),
336

Abu-Bakr (573–634), first Arab caliph,
330

Abu Simbel,
68
,
159

Abyssinia
see
Ethiopia

Academy of Athens, first university,
205
,
220

abolished,
308

Achaean peoples,
100

Achaemenid dynasty of Persia,
118
,
161
,
162
–4,
185

evoked by Sassanids,
280
,
317

Scythians and,
322

Achilles, Greek hero,
176
,
216

Acts of Parliament (British)

Enclosure,
554
,
705

Navigation (1651),
663

Corn Laws,
717
–18,
783

Quebec (1774),
722
–3

Stamp (1765),
721
–2

Reform (1832),
782

Factory (1801),
785

Union (with Ireland, 1801),
787

Government of India (1935),
981

Aden

Turks in,
390

British naval base,
814

British withdrawal,
1121

Aegean

early civilized life in,
95
–105

islands,
171
–2,
361
,
384

Dark Ages,
101
–4,
106

Aeschylus (525–456
BC
), Greek tragedian,
208

Aesop (mid-6th cent.
BC
), Greek slave,
176

Afghanistan

Alexander and,
216

revolt from Persia,
392

USSR and,
1125
,
1126
,
1130
,
1135
,
1140

Taliban regime,
1171
,
1175

Africa

prehistory,
7
–11,
18
–20,
24
,
148
–51

Roman province,
236
,
279
,
290

Christianity in,
284
,
287
,
296
–7;
see also
missionary activity

Vandal invasion,
293
,
306

Islam and,
341
,
343

early native cultures,
477
–82

European trade bases,
633
–4

slave trade in,
669
,
1076

imperialism in,
824
–7

World War I and,
893

World War II and
962
,
1073

négritude
,
1037

economic deterioration,
1072
–7

Cold War and,
1058
–9

see also
individual areas

Agni, Aryan god,
124

agriculture

in America, prehistoric,
33
,
36
,
152

invention,
31
–2

social effects,
32
–3

in Middle East,
342

in Egypt,
67
,
71

Mediterranean,
96

in India,
121
,
1000

in China,
133
–4,
135
,
1054
,
1115

in Africa,
150
–1,
478
,
1073
–4

in western Europe,
154
–5,
1109

Greece,
172
,
192
–3

basis of Roman economy,
231
,
257
,
278

of early medieval economy,
417
–18

in Japan,
475
–6

Indian,
482

productivity increases,
513
–14,
516
,
552
–6,
704
–7

setbacks,
517

in market economy,
555
–6,
705
,
708

in Russia,
622
,
707
,
765
,
884
,
908
,
1096

Caribbean,
647

crop and animal transplants,
671

worldwide productivity increases,
708
–9,
1003
–6

large-scale northern,
781

in Japan,
845

and Common Agricultural Policy,
1109
,
1155

eastern European,
1137

see also
animals; crops; plough

Ahura Mazda, Persian god,
318

air travel and warfare

aeroplanes,
808
,
1010

airships,
895
,
1010

in World War II,
959
,
962
,
965

Akbar (1542–1605), Moghul emperor of India (1556–1605),
436
–9

Akhnaton (Amenhotep IV), king of Egypt (
c.
1375–1358
BC
),
85
,
110

Akkad, Akkadians,
58
–9,
60

Alaska, sold to US,
814

Albania

Ottoman conquest,
388

state,
872

Chinese affiliations,
1106

Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819–61), prince consort of UK,
787

Albertus Magnus (1193 or 1206–80), scholastic philosopher,
537

Albigensian heretics, persecuted,
496
–7

alchemy,
678

alcohol

etymology,
52

in Mesopotamia,
58

in Egypt,
80

early medieval beer,
417

Indian abstention,
423

trading commodity,
515
,
671

Alcuin (735–804), English scholar,
399

Alembert, Jean le Rond d’ (1717–83), French encyclopaedist,
689

Alexander ‘the Great’ (356–323
BC
), king of Macedon (336–323
BC
) and conqueror in East,
214
–17,
422

Alexander I (1777–1825), tsar of Russia (1801–25),
762

Alexander II (1818–81), tsar of Russia (1855–81),
766
,
884

Alexandria

Egypt, founded,
216

culture at,
220
,
257

Jews in,
263

falls to Arabs,
353

French community,
932

Alfred ‘the Great’ (849–99), king of Wessex (871–99) and England (886–899),
409
–10

Algeria

French imperialism,
820
–1,
824
,
825

nationalism in,
987

independence of,
1069
,
1109

Islamic fundamentalism and,
1124
,
1131

Al-Khwarizmi (d. 835), Islamic astronomer,
339

Al-Kindi (d.
c.
870), Islamic philosopher,
339

Alliance for Progress, in S. America,
1087
–8

Al-Mansur (939–1002), Arab conqueror of Spain,
410

Alva, Ferdinand, duke of (1508–82), Spanish general,
584