Article#3 in a Series >>>>> Subject Area Reference Documents for Teachers and Students in the Minneapolis Public Schools >>>>> World Prehistory and History

Article #3

 

World Prehistory and History

 

The past covers all that has been, including the creation of the universe, the creation of the cosmos, the specific formation of planet Earth and all of its geological manifestations over time, the evolution of life forms, the appearance of hominids (human-like creatures), the arrival of homo sapiens (“sapient humans”:  true humans), and the cultures and civilizations that humankind have created.  In this chapter I give a brief overview of the past in all aspects, then focus on those two phases of the past during which humankind has lived:  prehistory (the past of humankind before there were written records) and history (the past of humankind since people living in those advanced societies that we call civilizations developed writing systems---  and thus gave us written records).

 

Prehistory

 

The universe banged into existence almost 14 billion years ago, expanding in those processes that created the earth almost 10 billion years later.   Simple cells took life comparatively quickly, just under a billion years after the earth formed, but not until 500 million years ago did fish swim in the sea.  Amphibians crawled onto the earth about 360 million years ago, and reptiles roamed some 60 million years after that;  then about 200 million years ago mammals moved across the surface of this planet.  Birds flew across the skies at about 150 million years ago, and flowers bloomed some 20 million years thereafter.  But not until 60 million years ago did the earth know primates, and the Great Apes did not make their terrestrial entrance until another 40 million years had transpired.  

 

About 4 million years ago, the hominid Australopithecus dwelt in East Africa;  this creature had a much smaller brain than would be the case for homo sapiens but its body featured many characteristics of the human.  Australopithecus came down from trees to roam the terrain of East Africa for long periods of time and, although it did still walk on all four limbs, it had the capacity to walk upright. 

 

Around 2.5 million years ago, the hominid homo habilis sidled up alongside Australopithecus on that same East Africa turf, representing a more highly developed form of proto-humanity;  this creature had a larger brain than did Australopithecus;  most notably, homo habilis could fashion tools from rocks and objects of wood, using crude tools to do work more easily than the use of bare hands would allow.

 

Approximately 1.5 million years ago, the hominid homo erectus lived contemporaneously with homo habilis, superseding that creature as a still more highly developed hominid:  Homo erectus walked upright and made decisions with a brain bigger than did homo habilis.  Homo erectus was the first creature to consciously enflame substances so as to cook food and to generate warmth against atmospheric chill.

 

Then, just approximately 200,000 years ago, homo sapiens appeared in places just a bit northward in the same general region of East Africa, looking physically like modern humans, manifesting abilities made possible with the same convoluted, three-pound brain that humanity possesses today.  Homo sapiens made its way out of Africa, as had homo erectus;  while the latter had headed generally on a northeastwardly trek, into Southeast, South, Central, and East Asia,  homo sapiens would initially head most notably to what we today know as Europe, encountering the creature homo neanderthalensis (Neanderthal human).  The latter did not have the facility of speech that did homo sapiens, but its brain size was actually just a bit larger, and it manifested remarkable ability to generate paintings on the walls of caves, fashion rudimentary musical instruments, and arrange burial and other sites in a way that strongly suggests sophisticated philosophical and spiritual contemplation.

 

The Neanderthals coexisted with homo sapiens but by about 75,000 years ago had been variously absorbed or competitively overwhelmed by these true humans.  Human beings then spread out with remarkable swiftness over the globe:  They ventured into most regions of Eurasia by about 150,000 B.C., boated to Australia by 100,000 B.C. (BCE),and by this time had crossed the Bering Strait into the Americas by about 12,000 B.C. (BCE).  At that point, humanity was poised to geographically and physically inhabit the entire Earth.

 

For tens of thousands of years, people grouped themselves into bands, tribes, and clans of hunter-gatherers, foraging for food and seeking or building shelter as suited their itinerant circumstances.  In time, some peoples---  first of all in the far western areas of Asia that we now call Turkey and the Middle East---   began to use the seeds of certain wild plants more dependably to grow crops.  By 10,000 years ago, people were congregating in villages in places that we now call Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Palestine;  and growing food from an ever more sophisticated use of seeds from plants cultivated for food.  Thus did these farmers create the conditions for settled agriculture, soon adding the domestication of pigs, goats, sheep, and cows to their list of achievements.   

 

In time, people in some of these villages were so agriculturally successful that they generated a surplus which they could use to trade for goods that they did not have, or which they determined would be more efficient or convenient to obtain from others.  In this manner did trade and commerce become defining aspects of human economy;  and together this dizzying array of developments created the conditions for civilization---  and for history.

 

History

 

I. The Ancient World  (3,000 – 700 B.C. [BCE]

 

The First Civilizations >>>>>                

 

1) Sumeria  (c. 4,000 B.C. [BCE])

 

2) Egypt       (c. 3,500 B.C. [BCE])

 

3) India        (c. 2,500 B.C. [BCE])

 

4) Crete       (c. 2,500 B.C. [BCE])

 

5) China       (c. 1,500 B.C. [BCE])

 

History began in Sumeria about 4,000 B.C. (BCE) and then appeared within a few hundred years in Egypt (3,500 B.C. [BCE]), the Indian subcontinent  (2,500 B.C.[BCE]), Crete (2,500 B.C. [BCE]), and China (1,500 B.C. [BCE]).  These societies all had written scripts:  Sumeria had cuneiform, Egypt had hieroglyphics, the cities (Mohenjodaro and Harappa) of the Indus Valley (actually in present-day Pakistan) had an as yet undeciphered script, the civilization of Crete had two scripts (only one of which has been deciphered), and the Shang dynasty of China inaugurated the use of Chinese characters to record military exploits and pose questions to the gods on bovine “oracle bones.”   History begins with the keeping of written records;  thus do I write that history began in these civilizations.

 

Besides the generation of a writing system, the defining aspects of civilization are occupational specialization, social stratification, and (in ancient days, minimal) urbanization:

 

Sumeria and other civilizations nestled between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia featured a priestly class, strong monarchical rulers, and a vigorous commercial life that sent traders throughout West, South, and Central Asia.  In the course of the years 3,000-1,200 B.C. (BCE), various people challenged the power of the Sumerians for dominance in Mesopotamia and in West Asia (Near East, Middle East) generally;   their states are given as follows, with dates in parentheses being those for which the given states were major factors in the history of West Asia:  Ur (3,00-2,000 B.C. (BCE);  Akkadian Empire (c. 2300 – c. 2083 B.C. (BCE);  Babylonian Empire (c. 1900 – 1595 B. C. (BCE);  Hittites (c. 1700 – c. 1200 B.C. (BCE).  

 

As the time known as the Bronze Age (3,500 – 1,000 B.C. [BCE]) came to an end, the above states declined, giving way to new powers in West Asia, including the Phoenicians (c. 1200 – 146 B.C. [BCE]---  great maritime traders and inventors of a seminal alphabet) and the people of the Assyrian Empire (c. 2000 – c. 610 B. C. [BCE]).

 

Egypt is famous for cities along the Nile, from which the pharaohs collected taxes, maintained extensive irrigation works, organized the building of the pyramids, and kept armies that variously fended off and succumbed to outsider attacks.

 

Indus Valley urban communities maintained sophisticated drainage and sewerage systems, featured mercantile as well as priestly and ruling classes, and sent traders ranging in all directions, including points of contact with their counterpart from Mesopotamia.

 

Crete (an island south of Greece, in the Mediterranean) had minimal agricultural resources, thriving on a far -flung trade throughout the Mediterranean region.  The people of this civilization are known as the Minoans;  their successors were the people of Mycenae,  who inherited the institutions of Minoan society and thrived on the basis of these in the aftermath of Minoan decline.

 

China was ruled from urban centers along the Yellow River, thriving on the basis of agricultural surpluses claimed by the rulers of the Shang Dynasty, known especially for great ceremonial works in bronze.

 

Major Faiths emerged from the years falling between 1800 B.C. and 1500 B.C. [BCE] that would give rise to others in their respective geographical areas.  Detailed in Chapter Four:  World Religions,

these seminal faiths were Judaism, originating in today’s Israel and Palestine;  and Hinduism,  evolving in today’s India. 

 

Judaism is grounded in the Old Testament accounts of patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Moses in establishing a monotheistic covenant with Yahweh (God);  the historical great kings and figures of the Hebrews;  poetic and wisdom literature; and proclamations of the prophets;  thereby informing the other two Abrahamic monotheistic faiths of Christianity (following the Messianic figure Jesus [c. 4 B.C. {CE} – 30 A.D. {CE} and his ethic of agape [universal love]) and Islam (grounded in the words of the one and only God, Allah, spoken to the prophet Muhammad [571 – 623 A.D. {CE}]). 

 

Hindu writers articulated the concepts of karma (sum of good and bad deeds determining samsara [cycle of birth and rebirth]), moksha (liberation through ethical living and meditational insight), and nirvana (perfect condition of eternal bliss, terminating rebirth and consciousness), which also appear in the religions of Buddhism (following the Four Noble Truths and Noble Eightfold Path  of Siddhartha Gautama  [563 – 483 B.C.]), Jainism (advancing the strict nonviolent ethic of Mahavira), and Sikhism (insisting on a rigorous standard of personal conduct and pristine white-turbaned appearance).

 

References to these faiths will be given in various places in the discussion b elow.

 

II.  Classical Civilizations (700 B.C. [BCE] – 600 B.C. [BCE])

 

Greece    (c. 500 B.C. [BCE])

             

From the 5^th century forward, the ancient Greeks created an astoundingly sophisticated civilization that over time featured the likes of Thucydides (historian), Socrates (philosopher), Plato (philosopher), Aristotle (philosopher), Archimedes  (scientist), Pythagoras (mathematician) and Euclid (mathematician).  The Greeks organized themselves into city states (Athens, Sparta, Thebes, Syracuse), all of them oriented toward trade in the Mediterranean.  The city state of Athens is famous for establishing the first political system of democracy and for giving world civilization splendid examples of architecture such as the Parthenon (temple to Athena).  Whereas Athenians were especially skilled in maritime activity and maintained an effective navy, people in the city state of Sparta responded to tough, authoritarian rulers with an ethic based on intense physical conditioning and highly disciplined behavior productive of a highly skilled standing army.  The Greek city states united to fight off the Persians in wars spanning the years 490-477 B.C. [BCE] fought a series of destructive battles in the internecine Peloponnesian War (432-404 B.C. [BCE] among the Greeks themselves, dominated on one side by Athens and on the other by Sparta.  Sparta emerged victorious but the heyday of the Greek city states came to an end with in the aftermath of this war.

 

In Macedonia, to the north of Greece, the monarch known to history as Phillip of Macedon oversaw the establishment of military and political institutions that his son, Alexander used to expand a base of power from which his extended his hegemony with astonishing speed and skill.   Alexander was both physically vigorous and intellectually astute;  he had trained academically under the great philosopher Aristotle.  This formed quite a historical concatenation of   

 

Alexander the Great  (c. 336 - 323 B.C. [BCE])

 

Alexander led his armies southeastward through Asia Minor and on toward Persia.  There Alexander challenged the great regional power of Persia, a state with which the Greeks had contended and which for centuries would be a rival of Rome for dominance in West Asia and the Mediterranean. 

                                                                                     

Persian power had first become a factor under the Achaemenid Empire (550 – 330 B.C. (BCE) during the reign of Cyrus the Great (r. 550 – 529 B.C. (BCE).  Administered from the palace at Susa but with Persepolis as the grand city of treasures and cultural capital of the Achaemenid rulers, Persian power under rulers such as Darius I (r. 521 – 486 B.C. [BCE]), Xerxes, and Darius III was a factor throughout the Mediterranean and West Asian areas and even at times to the borders of India.  Great successor states of Parthian Persia (247 B.C. [BCE] – 226 A.D. [CE]) and Sassanid Persia (226 – 651 A.D. [CE]) would continue as the progenitors of a major faith (Zoroastrianism, which stresses a great competitive dualism between Supreme God Ahura Mazda and Spirit of Darkness Angra Mainyu) and unique visual and literary arts in the region that we today know as Iran.  But in 333 the Achaemenid phase of Persian power came to an end with the invasion of Alexander the Great.

 

Alexander led his armies into Egypt, across West Asia, and on to northwestern India.  But in India, Alexander’s armies mutinied and he was forced to retreat---  eventually to Babylon.  In Babylon, malarial fever got the best of Alexander:  He died, his body was sent to Egypt, and his empire was divided among competing generals.  Ptolemy ruled in Egypt, Lysimachus in Thrace, Eumenes in Cappadocia, and Seleucus in Persia.   By 301 B.C. (BCE) three Alexandrian successor states had emerged:  the Antigonids in original homeland of Macedonia;  the Seleucids in Mesopotamia and Syria, and the Ptolemies in Egypt.

 

Alexander’s conquest left many other cities and clusters of cities in West Asia and North Africa in the hands of Greeks.  As always, Greek cities included features such as the agora (central marketplace) and the gymnasium, a place not only for physical exercise but also for academic training in the Greek classics (Homer, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Thucydides, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Eumenides).  The importance of this cultural phenomenon is witnessed in the continuing intellectual output of the mathematician Euclid (c. 300 B.C. [BCE]), scientist Archimedes (287 -212 B.C. [BCE]), comic playwright Menander (342 – 293 B.C. [BCE]) and historian Polybius (c.200 – 118 B.C. [BCE]).

 

And here we also witness the important phenomena of cultural preservation and transmission:  The cultural and political might of the Roman Empire developed on its own cultural premises, to be sure, but territorial and cultural absorption of Greek places and ideas proved to be intellectually and culturally energizing in the development of Roman institutions---   and Graeco-Roman traditions would for centuries interact with those of others of Eurasia and the Americas, eventually to create the modern world.       

 

Rome      (c. 500 B.C. [BCE])

 

Phase One:  The Roman Republic, 509 -  250 B.C. (BCE)

 

By tradition, the story goes that Rome was founded on 21 April 753 B.C. (BCE) by a son of the god, Mars.  The son’s name was Romulus;  he and brother Remus, the story continues, developed the first community at this site, destined to be the location of a great civilization that would rock the world with its cultural splendor and imperial rule.  This first settlement overlooked the Tiber River from Palantine Hill.  Leaders of Rome from the mid-8^th century through the 6^th century B.C. (BCE) absorbed

influences from the Etruscan and Latin peoples of the region and began a process of political centralization.  The drive on the part of aristocrats for political participation led to the ouster of tyrant Tarquinius Superbus  and establishment of governmental institutions appropriate to that non-monarchical system known as a Republic.   

 

During the years of the Republic (509 – 250 B.C. [BCE]), laws were established by the Senate, a deliberative body of patricians (landowning elite or aristocrats) led by two consuls, the dual authority of which was meant to prevent despotism.    Another body, the Tribunal, comprised of plebeians (non-aristocratic commoners) provided their own tandem of leadership, two tribunes.  Legislation typically originated in the Senate, but the Tribunal had veto power.  The first codification of Roman law was published in 445 B.C. (BCE) as the “Twelve Tables,” under which the power of the plebeians in the Tribunal increased.  This trend toward ascendance of commoner political influence was magnified in 366 B.C. (BCE), when a plebeian gained recognition as a consul, thus holding a position that previously had been the exclusive preserve of the patricians.

 

The territory of the Roman Republic expanded geographically as its institutions were developing politically.  In 496 B.C. (BCE) soldiers of Rome defeated a league of Latin neighbors, whereupon Roman citizens began to form colonies throughout central Italy.  In 396 B.C. (BCE), Romans captured the leading Etruscan city of Veii and by the early 3^rd century B.C. (BCE) had moved southward to capture cities that had been under the control of the Samnites.  Three Punic Wars, waged over the course of the years 264 – 148 B.C. (BCE), at first posed major challenges to Roman dominance in the Mediterranean region but ultimately resulted in Roman victory over the great Carthaginian general Hannibal (defeated by Roman general Scipio in 202 B.C. (BCE)) and conclusive success in the destruction of Carthage (located in today’s Tunisia (North Africa) itself in 148 B.C. (BCE).

 

The outcome of a series of struggles among powerful leaders (Sulla prevailed over Marius, 82 B.C. [BCE];  Julius Caesar defeated Pompey, 48 B.C. [BCE]) was the assassination of Caesar in 44 B.C. (BCE) by republicans under the leadership of Marcus Brutus after Caesar had maneuvered two years earlier to have himself declared “Dictator for Life.”  By 27 B.C. (BCE) Caesar’s adoptive son, Octavian, had prevailed over rival Mark Antony and took the title “Augustus.”  With the rise of Augustus Caesar to power, the period of the Roman Republic ended and that of the Roman Empire began.  Thenceforth, an emperor ruling atop the Roman government contended with the Senate and the Tribune for power.

 

Phase Two:  The Roman Empire,  27 – 476 B.C. (BCE)

 

Territorial expansion by military units known as the legions brought Iberia, Armenia, Syria, and many areas of North Africa under Roman control.  The strength of Roman governing institutions allowed the empire to survive during times of inept tyranny such as the reigns of Caligula (r. 37 – 41 A.D. [CE]) and Nero (r. 54 – 68 A.D.) until more able leaders such as Claudius (r. 41 – 54 A.D. [CE] and

Vespasian (r. 69 – 79 A.D. (CE) took the imperial throne.  The empire was most ably governed by emperors of the 69 – 180 A.D. (CE) period;  these included Trajan (98 – 117 A.D. [CE]),

Hadrian (117 – 138 A.D. [CE]). Antonius Pius (138 – 161 A.D. [CE]), and Marcus Aurelius (161 – 180 A.D. [CE]).   

 

During these years between 69 and 180 A.D. (CE), the Roman Empire matured as one of the world’s great civilizations.  Roman rule at its height reached across the continent of Europe and onward to insular Great Britain in far northern Europe, many cities of northern African, and territories across West Asia (Anatolia and today’s Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel---  to the borders of Persia). Into these areas came word and physical manifestation of the splendor of Rome.  The Romans were above all great builders, engineers, and architects known for their aqueducts, sewage and drainage systems, paved roads, and architectural marvels (Colosseum, Forum, Trajan’s column).   But they also inherited the great tradition of Greek drama and visual art, as witnessed in the work of Roman creative spirits who built upon and in some cases advanced the Greek legacy.

 

Roman creative ingenuity would continue to be manifested right up until the empire’s official demise in 476 A.D. (CE).  But with the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180 A.D., Rome entered a period of severe political and military challenges to which its leaders and citizens eventually succumbed.  During these years, Rome faced rebellions in Gaul, Syria, and many other places.  The so-called barbarians ---  such as the Franks and the Goths---  became contentious competitors in Gaul and in areas along the Danube River that Rome had previously ruled securely. 

 

In 284 A.D. (CE), the Roman emperor Diocletian fashioned an admirably humble response to the challenges faced by Rome when he offered a share of the imperial throne to three other powerful political operators, one (like himself) a senior Augusti;  the other two recognized as Caesars, a bit junior in status but joining the Augusti to form a Tetrarchy that brought significant reform and effective rule back to Rome during the years 284 – 305 A.D. (CE).  The emperor Constantine (r. 306 – 337 A.D. [CE]) proved to be similarly innovative, superintending numerous bureaucratic efficiencies and creating another administrative center---  Constantinople---   that could serve as a kind of safety valve when the city of Rome was threatened.   Constantine also sought to bolster his prestige by identifying with increasingly popular religion of Christianity, legalizing it in the year 313 A.D. (CE) in the Edict of Milan;  and increasingly embracing this faith personally, with final conversion upon his deathbed.

 

But the 4^th and 5^th centuries brought numerous incursions by barbarian peoples:  Goths at Adrianople (378 A.D. {CE);  Visigoths in Spain and Franks in Gaul (first part of 5^th century A.D. (CE);  Vandals in North Africa during 429 – 439 A.D. (CE);  Goths in Rome itself in 410 A.D. (CE);  Huns all through eastern Europe from the 430s forward;  all culminating in the dethroning of the boy emperor Romulus August in 476 A.D. (CE) by the Germanic general Odovacar.  This latter event officially ended a thousand-year period during which the leaders and citizens of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire developed and spread Graeco-Roman ideas that would thereafter be among the chief models in humankind’s quest for effective institutions of governance, civil society, and culture.

 

Itinerant Peoples  (c. 600 B.C. [BCE] – 800 A.D. [CE] )

 

Across the expanses of Eurasia during the glory days of Rome, numerous peoples swarmed energetically in contention with the Legions and institutions of that great civilization;  and in claiming regions of their own, whether permanently or (often) temporarily, that were outside the jurisdiction of the Roman Empire.  In central and western Europe rushed the Celts, who with their Druid class of priestly governors, metalworkers of great skill, and soldiers of tremendous vigor, eventually had the most impact on Scotland and Ireland.   In today’s Belgium and Holland, the Franks prepared to settle

more permanently in Gaul (France), where from 481 A.D. (CE) Clovis and his Merovingian house would rule until giving way to the Carolingian rulers Pepin (r. 747 – 768 A.D [CE]) and, most notably, Charlemagne, (768 – 814 A.D. [CE]).  The Goths split into the Visigoths, who eventually found most permanency in Spain;  and the Ostrogoths, who moved through eastern Europe to strike the moral blow in Rome.

 

Across the steppes of Central Asia from the 6^th century B.C. (BCE) through the 2^nd century A.D. (CE) road superior riders of the horse, a people who were so fierce and expert in warfare that their Scythian appellation became synonymous with the very term, “barbarian.”  At various times these people controlled vast areas of the Central Asian steppes leading into southern Russia, where the “Royal Scyths” buried exquisite gold artifacts at their gravesites.  In other burial mounds, they buried mummified bodies of rulers, the corpses of horses, and lavish eternal offerings of gold.

 

Most fearsome in reputation of all were the Huns, who during the 4^th and 5^th centuries A.D. (CE) struck fear in the hearts of those in southern Russia, central Europe, or the Balkans whom they harassed

or engaged in combat.  Especially aggressive was the leadership of Attila the Hun, under whose leadership these fierce warriors sacked a string of cities during 441 – 442 and in 447 A.D.  In 451, a diverse alliance put together by the Roman general Aetius forestalled Attila’s aspirations in Gaul, and some combination of military resistance and plague frustrated the “Scourge of God” in his plan to attack Rome.   As if symbolizing his penchant for the vigorous overreach, Attila apparently died from overeating at his wedding feast.  

 

Moving southward from the well-trodden Central Asian Steppes from the early 1^st century B.C. (BCE), the people known as the Kushans (seemingly originating in the nomadic Yuezhi of China) arrived in India and there established an empire that extended through most of northern India eastward from the Punjab and including the great urban centers of Ujjain and Pataliputra.  Under pressures from the Sassanid Persians to the west and the Guptas to the south, the Kushan empire disintegrated by the 320s A.D. (CE) but left behind elegant statues among many works of art that give evidence of both Greek influences and those exerted by Buddhist styles of the Indian subcontinent. 

 

Developments in India (c. 321 B.C. [BCE] -  570 A.D. [CE])

 

During a period roughly corresponding to the timespan including the Roman Republic and Roman Empire, India was dominated chiefly by two dynasties:   the Mauryan and the Gupta.  The Mauryan Dynasty was founded by Chandragupta Maurya with the toppling of the Nanda Dynasty based in Magadha of northern India.  The Mauryan Dynasty extended through much of northern India and at times included areas in today’s herat, Baluchistan, and Orissa.  It was in the latter area, at Kalinga, that the Emperor Ashoka led a victorious but bloody battle that turned him ever more firmly toward a Buddhist ethic of nonviolence, the creed of which was engraved on stone pillars that Ashoka had placed throughout Mauryan-held territories.

 

Despite his noble ethic, though, violence and confusion succeeded Ashoka’s own rule,

culminating in the assassination of the last Mauryan emperor in 185 B.C. (BCE).  Then, as the competing Kushans also declined in the 4^th century A.D. (CE), a ruler taking the prestigious name of Chandragupta I (r. 320 – 330 A.D. [CE]) founded the Gupta Dyanasty at the old capital of Pataliputra.  The Guptas expanded eastward into Bengal and maintained rule in northern India until incursions by the White Huns undermined the empire, which shrunk to a region around Magadha before disintegrating around 570 A.D. (CE).

               

Developments in China (c. 481 B.C. [BCE] -  220 A.D. [CE])

 

Matching the splendid cultural creativity of the Romans during a similar chronological period, the Chinese people during the years from 481 A.D. (CE) to 220 A.D. (CE) laid the groundwork of an imperial system that would endure long after the Roman heyday had passed:  The last emperor of China would not vacate the throne until 1911 A.D. (CE), so that the style of traditional Chinese governance persisted into the early 20^th century.

 

By 481 B.C. (BCE), the Zhou Dynasty had reached a crisis stage at which the ruler of the central government at Luoyang (in today’s Henan Province) no longer held much control over local aristocratic feudal lords.  The government had in fact already been in decline for three centuries, during which the great sage Confucius (551-479 B.C [BCE]) offered advice to those lords who sought his counsel, offering them wisdom with highly practical applications to humane governance and maintenance of social harmony.  Also appearing during this era of Zhou decline was the philosopher known as Laozi, who offered reflections on the nature of the Tao (also romanized as Dao), the mystical force of nature that moves according to the alternate waxing and waning of yin (gentle quietude) and yang (vigorous action), wherein people should find cues for humankind’s own moments of inaction and action.  

 

Then, as seven competing states only officially allied to the Zhou intensified their warfare by the 3^rd century B.C. (BCE), the doctrine of Legalism (governance according to laws with clearly stated rewards for obedience and punishments for disobedience) took hold in the state of Qin (Ch’in).  The latter dominated battles among the seven regional powers until one by one these states succumbed to the military might of the Qin.  Thus it was that the First Emperor Qin Shi Huang founded the first dynasty to rule in centralized fashion throughout much of today’s China;  this was the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C. [BCE]), short-lived but enormously influential on the imperial system that would endure into the 20^th century.

 

During a period lasting from 202 B.C. (BCE) until 220 A.D. (CE), the rulers of the Han Dynasty built upon the foundations of Qin, combining elements of Legalism with an official promulgation of Confucianism as official state doctrine.  Han emperors sent forth armies that expanded centralized Chinese authority from the capital at Chang-an throughout an empire that at times stretched southwestward to Vietnam, westward to the Central Asian steppes, northward into Mongolia and northeastward toward Manchuria.  During the latter centuries of the Han, innovations  pertinent to the development of paper, printing, and the compass gave humankind three of its greatest inventions;  gunpowder would eventually be added as another example of Chinese technological  creativity with worldwide implications.  Also emerging during the Han was a scholarly and cultural elite that prided itself in mastery of landscape painting, a form of chess, poetic expression, and numerous musical instruments as the “arts of the scholar.”

 

Developments in the Americas (c. 500 B.C. [BCE] -  c. 900 A.D. [CE])

 

In the Americas of the Classical World, particularly notable civilizations were located in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru.

 

In the valley of Oaxaca near Mexico’s Gulf coast, over a 14-century period lasting from c. 500 B.C. (BCE) to 900 A.D. CE, there flourished the Zap otecs, based for most of this period at the leveled hilltop city of Monte Alban.  This civilization is especially notable for a sophisticated calendar, unique writing system, and ambitious public works such as a grand main plaza at Monte Alban and the city’s Temple of Danzantes, which contained hundreds of stone carvings representing defeated rivals).

 

In central Mexico the urban center of Teotihuacan thrived from the 2^nd through the 7^th century A.D. (CE) on control of the agricultural resources of the Valley of Mexico, and on domination of trade routes extending to the Gulf and Pacific Coasts of Mexico, and as far as the city of Kaminaljuyu, a Mayan center in Guatemala.  Teotihuacan was an enormous city for its day, rising by the 4^th century A.D. (CE) to a population of 200,000 spread over an major axis called ”Avenue of the Dead” running three and one-half miles from north to south.  At the northern extreme of the axis was the great Pyramid of the Moon;  at the southern extreme was the Pyramid of the Suns (especially impressive with its 42 million cubic feet (1.2 million cubic meters) of sun-dried bricks and stone;  and at the center was a large palace complex.

             

Classic Maya culture (c. 300 – c. 900 A.D. [CE]) flourished especially in the Yucatan Peninsula and in today’s Guatemala.   Numerous city-states graced Maya territory, frequently featuring huge pyramidal stone temples (such as that found at Tikal in Guatemala);  carved stone and stucco (plaster) relief statuary (notable at Palenque in Mexico);  and palaces, open plazas, terraces, and ball courts (for playing a game that had both recreational and sacred ritual purposes).  The Maya developed a sophisticated writing system of 800 glyphs (characters) and a complex calendrical system that included both a solar year of 365 days and a sacred year of 260 days.  On those sacred days, the Maya might be especially found slitting their bodies for the release of blood as offering to gods identified with warfare, commerce, important life events, and natural forces important to agricultural success and community survival. 

 

Succeeding the seminal Chavin Culture (c. 1250 – c. 200 A.D. [CE]) in southern coastal Peru was the Paracas culture (c.  500 B.C. [BCE] – 200 A.D. [CE]), known for adaptations of Chavin iconography (notably feline images carved into pots), splendid textiles (sumptuously decorated with animals, both real and mythical); and the production of gold ornaments.  The dry climate helped preserve artifacts of such works, and to encourage the Paracas practice of mummification of rulers and nobles (a large cache of which is found at Wari Kayan, dating from 400 A.D. [CE]).

 

In another area of southern Peru, the village-dwelling people of the Nazca culture flourished from 200 B.C. (BCE) until 500 A.D. (CE).   Despite living typically in humble homes, the Nazca produced impressive temple complexes, such as that at Cahuachi 9dating from about 100 A.D. (CE).  They also left artifacts demonstrating skill in textiles, metalwork, and pottery.  But they are especially known for their stunning animal pictures and abstract drawings in the desert, created by clearing stones and desert surface, exposing the subsoil to create lines;  images and patterns are visible today from the air, with attention especially drawn toward drawings featuring plants, a hummingbird sucking nectar, and a monkey with a spiral tail.

 

In the northern valley of Peru from about 100 A.D. (CE) through the late 6^th century there flourished the Moche people, especially known as talented artisans in textiles, metalwork, potter and wood cups carved in the form of images such as a fox-headed human with a handle or spout reminiscent of a stirrup.  The Moche society featured large flat-topped pyramids known as huacas, constructed at such centers as Huaca del Sol.  Moche rulers presided over a large agricultural society, rich enough to support southward military expansion from around 300 A.D. (CE), continuing until late 6^th century  environmental disaster (alternating  periods of drought and flooding) presented economic challenges inducing cultural decline.

 

III.  Medieval Period (600-1450 A.D. [CE])

 

The term, “medieval” refers to the time period between the years spanning the classical civilizations of Greece, Rome, India, China, and the Americas;  and the rise of those geopolitical powers and institutions that we identify with modernity.  The term first gained usage among historians of Europe, t, hen it was employed more broadly to include all of those regions during the designated period.  I begin here with a consideration of events in Europe and then proceed to explore the histories of Asia, Africa, and the Americas;  a number of civilizations within these geographical spheres, especially in West Asia, were developing more dynamically than the states of Europe, often times preserving and moving creatively forward on the strength the cultural legacy of Greece and Rome. 

 

Medieval Europe, 500 – 1500 A.D. (CE)

 

Upon the fall of the Roman Empire at the end of the 5^th century A.D, (CE), the Ostrogoths tried to establish credible power on the strength of Roman institutions in the region of the great city, but internecine struggles and the might of Justinian’s Byzantine imperial military forces ended the brief historical moment of the Ostrogoths in Rome.  The Lombards held onto a kingdom that they established in northern Italy for a much longer period but succumbed to the forces of the Frankish Carolingian Charlemagne in 774.  The Visigoths conceded Gaul (France) to the Frankish rulers to focus on Spain, but in that part of Iberia faced competition with the much stronger Byzantines and Muslims;  they lost out to invading forces of the Muslim Umayyad Caliphate in 711. 

 

With the transpiration of these events, the Merovingian and Carolingian Houses of the Franks established a style of rule centered on Gaul that would define many characteristics of medieval llife.

 

The Frankish Dynasties of the Merovingian and Carolingians

 

From an original power base in Belgium and Holland, the Frankish leader Clovis (r. 481-511) moved with his forces into Gaul, there establishing  control continued by his four sons, who as the leaders of the Merovingian Dynasty secured Gaul and brought much of northern Italy under their control.   Merovingian power waned in the 7^th century, though, opening the way for a now more vigorous Frankish house, the Carolingians, to take power.  Seeking and gaining approval from the pope, the Carolingian ruler Pepin III (“Pepin the Short, ” r. 747-768)) officially deposed the last Merovingian ruler in 747 and inaugurated the Carolingian Dynasty.

 

Under Pepin’s son, Charlemagne (“Charles the Great,” r. 768-814), the Carolingians conquered

Saxony, annexed the Lombard kingdom in Italy, and moved eastward as far as the Danube in today’s Hungary.  Charlemagne gained recognition as Holy Roman Emperor from the pope in 800, increasing an already prestigious reign that witnessed this dynamic ruler reforming the Frankish church in accord with the formalities of Roman liturgy and law, sponsoring a splendid cultural life at a new capital in Aachen, Germany, and ordering the minting of a common coinage on which he himself appeared wearing the military cloak and laurel crown of a Roman emperor.  

 

Upon Charlemagne’s death, though, his three sons quarreled and divided the empire.  Tenth century incursions by the Vikings from the north and Magyars from the east further weakened Carolingian authority.  In 967 the Frankish aristocrat Hugh Capet deposed the Carolingian Louis V and founded the Capetian dynasty.

 

The Heyday of European Feudalism, 500-1500 A.D. (CE)

 

The eras of Merovingian, Carolingian, and Capetian rule at the heart of Europe represented the heyday of European feudalism.

 

Power arrangements among the Germanic tribes featured certain proto-feudalistic practices.  The tendency of the rulers during the last decades of the Roman Empire to give barbarian allies land in exchange for military service also set precedents for feudalistic arrangements.  Such arrangements could vary from region to region, and in detail were extremely complex, but common and essential features of feudalism were widespread. 

 

At the apex of the feudal system, a monarch would parcel out land to key aristocrats, who in turn pledged military service to the king for a set number of days per year.  A powerful aristocrat (noble) with a great deal of land might sublet his land and secure the same pledge of fealty from his own tenant that he himself had sworn to the king.  These sorts of relationships might extend to other land divisions, so that a hierarchy of obligations might extend throughout the kingdom, forming bonds of loyalty that bolstered the power of landholding nobles, particularly those at or near the top of the hierarchy.  The king, meanwhile, was dependent upon his own most direct bonds of mutual obligations holding firm;  his authority at the central level could be very tenuous, not nearly so great as the monarchical power that would be exercised with the rise of the nation-state from the 16^th century.

 

Each feudal lord holding land and superintending a system of mutual obligations commanded the support of knights, heavy cavalry who by the 11^th century emerged as prestigious practitioners of the military arts.  These knights were dubbed “vassals,” invested with symbols of their status in such ceremonies as the “accolade,” whereby the king or presiding aristocratic lord touched the vassal on his shoulders with a sword, thus conferring knighthood.  Knights became “retainers” feeling an intense loyalty to the lord by whom knighthood was conferred and to whom service was owed.

 

The Power of the Roman Catholic Church

 

Secular rule in the city of Rome continued to be in dispute throughout the medieval era, but under the institution of the papacy ecclesiastical power emanating from that great city grew into a major force of the Middle Ages.  Charlemagne had seen the advantages of recognition by the pope for his imperial rule, the sort of approval that others would seek as Holy Roman Emperors.  Such secular rulers invested with religious approval tended to be monarchs of greater central authority than was typical for the medieval era, authority that extended over great amounts of land.  Over the centuries,

monarchs in Germany, Austria, and Austro-Hungary with landholdings extending at times to Iberia, the Balkans, and into the Italian peninsula itself claimed authority as Holy Roman Emperors that ranged over territory and according to an imperial status far beyond that connoted by the feudal system.

                                                                                     

Secular authority and religious authority frequently clashed during the medieval era.  In Germany of the late 11^th century, for example, the German emperor Henry IV clashed with Pope Gregory VII over investiture, the right to appoint bishops.  These battles saw numerous shifts as to who was getting the better of the situation.  At one juncture in 1077, Henry IV agreed to do four days of penance to receive absolution (papal forgiveness);  but the tide shifted in 1084, when the forces of Henry IV occupied Rome and sent Gregory VII into exile.

 

The prestige and influence of the church is witnessed also in the practice of monasticism, whereby monks submitted themselves to lives of seclusion in a monastery, each having particular codes of conduct, such as the famous “Rule of St. Benedict” of Nursia (c. 480 – 550).  Despite a tendency for the rules to involve vows of poverty, over time many of the monasteries grew wealthy, at least in terms of total resources commanded, so that monasteries became targets for raiders, including the Vikings. 

 

Two of the most famous orders attempted at the genesis of their formation to commit to higher standards of discipline.  Franciscan friars followed the simple life of poverty and service modeled by St. Francis of Assissi in the early 13^th century;  and Dominican friars valued disciplined academic study, even as they posed themselves against those labeled as heretics for their challenges to Roman Catholic Church practice.  Indeed, these orders did much good work, but they also in time became wealthy, and the religious zealotry of the Dominicans promoted intolerance and clashed with the claims of scientists in a manner seemingly at cross-purposes for a religious order placing such a high value on education.  

 

The religious imperative to spread the Gospel may also be seen in the remarkable era of the Crusades (1095-1291).  When in 1095 Pope Urban II called for a military expedition to wrest Jerusalem for the Muslim grip of the Seljuk Turks, an era extending for nearly two centuries began as Christians faced off against Muslims in contention for control of the Holy Lands.  The first Crusade was the most successful for the Christians, hard-fought and resulting in victory and control of coastal Palestine inland into Syria for a half century.  These lands were defended by military orders of knights such as the Templars and Hospitallers, who took monastic-type vows but utilized the sword.  But from the time of a Muslim victory at Edessa in 1144, the Christians had only limited success.  The second official Crusade, in which the German emperor Frederick Barbarossa, English King Richard the Lionhearted, and French King Philip Augustus all participated had some success in checking the progress of Saladin, sultan of Egypt;  but even this heralded group could not regain Jerusalem itself.  The Crusades came to a conclusion in 1291, when the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Kalil defeated the Crusaders at Acre.  

               

End of the Feudal Era in Europe:  Black Death and the Hundred Years War

 

From 1346 until 1351, fleas carried on rodents brought the bacterium Yersinis pestis into numerous cities of Europe.  The bacterial infection spread to humans by the parasitic fleas, took the three forms of plague:  bubonic (swelling of neck, groin and armpits;  pneumonic (infection of the lungs); and septicemic (blood poisoning).  About 35 million people, roughly a third of the European population at the time, died in the plague.     

 

Death in the 14^th century in what would also come in the form of a conflict that would become protracted:  the Hundred Years’ War.  Possessors of territory in France since the 12^th century, English monarchs harbored further ambitions on the continent.  English forces invaded France at the behest of King Edward III in 1337;  by 1360, much of northern and eastern France was under English control.  The forces of England lost much of this territory in battles of the late 14^th century and the early 15^th century, regained substantial territory again under the personal leadership of King Henry V at Agincourt in 1415, but by 1453 endured successful French campaigns that left them almost no territorial holdings in France.  The religious visionary Joan of Arc inspired the French in a stout defense of the city of Orleans in 1429 but then was captured and burned at the stake as a heretic by the English.

 

Contenders for Control of the Mediterranean , 395 – 1453 A.D. (CE)

 

The Byzantine Empire (395-1453)

 

The mystique of the Roman Empire can be seen in the efforts of secular European rulers to secure papal blessings as Holy Roman Emperors, but the Byzantine rulers based in Constantinople more genuinely laid claim on the Roman Empire’s territories around the Mediterranean.

 

In the year 313 A.D. the Roman Emperor Constantine, beset by barbarian threats, oversaw the construction of an alternative capital at Constantinople;  by 395 this had become an independent seat of power and the locus of a new empire that would endure until 1453.  For about two centuries, Byzantine forces commanded many Mediterranean lands, including Jerusalem, Alexandria (Egypt), and Carthage (Tunisia).  But these were lost in the early 7^th century, a time at which the continued existence of the Byzantine Empire seemed tenuous.  But reinvigoration came with victories during the 9^th century through the early 11^th century, with North Africa permanently lost but Anatolia (Asia Minor), the Balkans, and large parts of Syria secure under the leadership of Byzantine officials.

 

Defeat at Manzikert in 1071, though, resulted in loss of Asia Minor;  and another defeat in Constantinople itself brought the Byzantine Empire to an end.  Both losses came to Turkish Muslims, the first known as the Seljuks, the second known as the Ottomans.

 

The Rise and Spread of Islam, 630 – 1453 A.D. (CE)

 

Islam is the faith inspired by the revelations of Allah (God) as perceived by the prophet Muhammad, who in 630 led a reentry into Mecca after an eight-year exile in Medina.  Upon Muhammad’s death those who would become known as Sunnis squabbled with those who would gain recognition as Shi’ites over who should be the leader as caliph (“successor” to the prophet Muhammad).  Moving forcefully as proselytizers and soldiers, Shi’ites became prominent in Persia, while the Sunnis spread Islam through most of West Asia and North Africa. 

 

During 661-750, Mu’awiyah, the governor of Syria and a distant relative of Muhammad, set up the Umayyad Dynasty with Baghdad as capital, then proceed to sponsor military campaigns all across North Africa and into Spain.  From the beginning, other clusters of Sunnis ranged themselves as factions in common opposition to Umayyad rule.  A figure known to history as ‘Abbas united these factions in revolt against the Umayyads in 750, successfully displacing them and founding his own Abbasid Caliphate.  “Abbas himself presided over a Muslim golden age featuring splendid works of art and architecture and seminal contributions to the fields of science and law.

 

But the Abbasids, though long-lived, were not consistently powerful throughout their domains.  Rebels were successful in Spain in 756, a rival Fatimid Caliphate took power in Egypt on 969, and similar revolts spread throughout West Asia and North Africa until the Abbasids controlled little but Baghdad and immediate vicinity by the 11^th century.  By this time, the Seljuk Turks dominated the titular abbasid caliphs, and in 1258 the Mongols stormed into Baghdad, bringing the Abbasid Caliphate to an end.  

 

Back in Central Asia, through which the Mongols would later ride their horses through the Khyber Pass, roamed many Turkish-speaking nomads, some of whom made their way southward into Persia.  One such group, the Seljuks, served Persian emirs until a leader by the name of Tugrul declared himself sultan in the northeastern Persian city of Nishapur.  From that base of power, Tugrul forth to militarily assist the Abbasids of Baghdad against Fatimid opponents from Egypt in 1860, reduced the Abbasids to figureheads, and another base strong enough for his successors to engage in a sweeping ecpansion of Seljuk power.  In 1071, Seljuk armies defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert after having taken control of Georgia and Armenia.  In the ensuing years, Persian officials advised the Seljuks on matters of governmental administration, stabilizing their rule across Anatolia (Asia Minor).

 

Then in the 12^th century a rival group led by figure known as Osman positioned itself to take many Byzantine cities in western Anatolia.  Osman, his son Orhan (r. 1324-1362), and successor rulers  established the city of Pursa as capital and proceeded to take control of Gallipoli, the Balkans, and eastern Thrace;  within the latter, the Ottomans established a new capital at Adrianople (Edirne).  Encountering a devastating attack at Ankara from Mongols under the leadership of Tamerlane in 1402, the Ottomans recovered only very slowly until regaing Anatolia and the Balkans under the rules of Mehmet I (r. 1413-1421) and Mehmet II (r. 1421-1451.)  In 1453, the Ottomans took Constantinople, tus ending Byzantine rule.  Eventually Constantinople would be renamed as Istanbul, and the Ottoman Empire became the dominant new power in the Mediterranean.

 

India, too, was affected by the global sweep of Islam during the medieval era.   Until the early 13^th century, rulers identifying with the Hindu tradition exercised power in India.  With the exception of an empire established by a ruler known as harsh Harsha throughout much of northern India in the early 7^th century A.D.,  the North was divided into small kingdoms until the early 12^th century. 

In southern India, the Pallava and Chalukya kingdoms competed for territory during the 7^th, 8^th, and into the 9^th centuries until both gave way to the Chola Dynasty (c. 850-1279), which extended power to Sri Lanka, exercised influence over the Srivijaya empire in today’s Indonesia, and controlled the state of Kadaram near what is now the city of Penang. 

 

But by the early 13^th century, an era of Muslim dynasties began in India, first with the Delhi Sultanate during 1206-1526, later with the Mughals (1526- 1739/ 1858).  The power of the Delhi sultans

is traceable to the energetic armies of Muhammad of Ghur (r. 997-1030), who created a huge empire based originally in Afghanistan (near today’s Ghazna) and extending over much of Iran, Pakistan, and northwestern India.   In 1193 armies from this empire stormed forth to sack Delhi and take control

over northern Indian territory that had been ruled as principalities by Hindu rulers known as Rajputs.  In 1206, the Delhi Sultanate was formally established by Qutb-ud-din Aibek (r. 1206-1211), who had risen from slavery through the military ranks to lead these armies.

 

The Delhi sultanate was strongest through the late 13^th and early 14^th centuries, when Sultan Alauddin Khilji (r. 1299-1307) kept tight administrative control over much of the North while also appointing many governors south of Delhi.  But competition with the Hindu Vijayanagar kingdom from the 1330s diminished the influence of the Delhi Sultanate in central India, and in general the power of the Delhi Sultanate waned until giving way to the Mughals in 1526.   

 

Sub-Saharan Africa during the Medieval Period

 

At a time when European feudalism was in its heyday;  and as Muslim empires spread Islamic civilization throughout northern Africa, West Asia, Central Asia, and into India;  succeeding empires of West Africa grew powerful on the strength of trade in goods that moved along routes extending from the Mediterranean region across the Sahara Desert and into the savanna (grassy plains) region known as the Sahel.  Trade in gold was especially important, often obtained by the West African empires in exchange for salt mined in the desert.  The empire of Ghana dominated the governmental and economic life of West Africa from the 8^th through the 11th century;  then from the early 13^th century until the early 16^th century the empire of Mali took control in the Sahel, expanding from the same essential area wherein the rulers of Ghana had been so strong.     

 

The Mali empire was founded by Sundiata Keita and became particularly renown under the rule of his grand-nephew, Mansa Musa.  These rulers were Muslims with firm connections to the power centers and mercantile economies of Islamic North Africa and West Asia.  Mansa Musa (r. 1312-1337) superintended an empire of enormous wealth, vigorously sponsoring construction in the capital at Timbuktu;  a huge library and other cultural institutions of international renown attracted an ethnically diverse congregation of scholars who gave to this imperial center great intellectual vitality.  So wealthy was Mansa Musa himself that his volume of purchases and habits of generosity on a trip to Mecca during 1324-1325 caused a greatly enhanced circulation of gold, inducing inflation that raged in North Africa for a decade thereafter.  In the early 15^th century, the state of Songhai (with capital at Gao, 250 miles [450 kilometers] downriver from Timbuktu) broke away, flourished independently, then in the 16^th century inflicted a decisive military defeat on the Mali empire---   emerging as the new imperial power of West Asia.    

 

Elsewhere south of the Sahara, the Yoruba people of southwestern Nigeria established the kingdom of Ife during the years 700-1200.  The people of Ife were adroitly governed, economically vital, and artistically creative.  Ife culture is particularly well known in the world of art for exquisite bronze sculptures, often featuring naturalistic heads signaling an intensity of spirit and dignity on the part of the subject.  As the 14^th century came to a close, the empire of Benin supplanted the Ife as the dominant power in the region centered on today’s Nigeria.  Located west of Ife, Benin grew territorially to encompass 31,000 square miles (80,000 square kilometers).  Sculptors producing both superb bronze and terracotta heads rivaled the Ife in artistry.  Merchants and traders grew wealthy on the strength of monopolies on exchanges with European commercial interests.  Trade with the Portuguese in the 15^th century brought great profits from exchanges of ivory, palm oil, gold, pepper, and slaves.

 

To the east and then southward through much of the southern part of Africa, the Mwenemutapa empire flourished from the 11^th through 15^th centuries.  The center of the empire was the Great Zimbabwe, a settlement stretching three square miles (seven square kilometers).  The settlement had over 300 buildings typically enveloped in stone enclosures.   Traders working out of this commercial and political center were able to access gold resources from the interior and make great fortunes in the international trade that flourished on the east coast of Africa.  

 

Developments at the European Periphery

 

On the periphery of Europe during the medieval period, vigorous peoples were shaking things up in ways portentous for the future.

 

In England, from the 5^th through early 11^th centuries, people moved into the isles and posed themselves against the Celtic population , which by that time had intermingled with peoples descended from the Roman legions.  Jutes, Angles, and Saxons settled and displaced the Romano-Celtic population and formed as many as seven states that by convention are termed the Heptarchy.  Among these, three vied most competitively for supremacy, with Wessex (southwest England) eventually emerging victorious over Mercia (Midlands) and Northumbria (north).  Alfred the Great (r. 871-899) proved to be a very effective leader of Wessex. preventing invading Danish forces from achieving their territorial aims, revising the legal systems, and sponsoring translations of numerous books into Anglo-Sazon.   Edward the Elder (r. 899-924) provided apt leadership in succeeding Alfred, uniting most of England a centralized Anglo-Saxon kingdom.   

 

From the late 8^th century, the Vikings ventured forth from their European homelands, first striking terror in the hearts of those whom they encountered in raids through northwestern Europe.

They struck the Midlands and for a while ruled a territory known as Danelaw.  Skilled on land and sea, they sailed to and settled Iceland (870) and Greenland (late 10^th century), and they were the first Europeans to land in North America (at points now in Nova Scotia and in borderlands between the United States and Canada---   near the very end of the 10^th century). 

 

During this same general time period, another group of Vikings set up bases on the Volga and Dneiper rivers.  They moved into through and associated territories, in 879 seizing Kiev in the Ukraine.  This became the focal point for an enduring principality;  in 988 the ruler Vladimir was baptized, setting a precedent for influence of the Greek Orthodox Church, which would in this vast land become known as the Russian Orthodox Church.   

 

In 911, the leader Rollo led one Viking band in that part of France known as Normandy, first serving one Carolingian contingent against its rivals.  The Vikings held territories in Normandy bequeathed to them for their military assistance, and here they build a powerful domain grounded heavily in French culture and language.  In 1066 of the leader of the dukedom of Orange led an audaciously successful invasion of England, thereby earning for himself the appellation,  William the Conqueror.  Wiliam used French and Norman administrative practices to build the strongest monarchy in Europe, and in succeeding centuries these would be integrated with the English common law and practice to create an increasingly centralized and powerful monarchy. 

 

And far to the south, at the southern extreme of the Italian peninsula and on Sicily, the Norman Robert Guiscard founded a kingdom that would endure from the 1040s until 1194, when the German emperor Henry VI brought these lands under his authority.

 

Originating much farther away, but also appearing on the European periphery during the medieval era, were the most vigorous people of all, the Mongols.  The breadth of their roaming and impact is astounding.  In 1203 the Mongol leader Temujin united previously contending and fiercely independent tribes into an extraordinarily well-organized and coherent military social and military force.  These forces road on horseback---  highly mobile, foot in stirrup, with more skillful rapidity than any such mounted juggernaut in history---   across northern and northwestern China, then in 1218 road southward to demolish the Kara Khitan khanate in Central Asia.  Temujin, having taken the name Genghis Khan, then led his ever more effective warriors in a six-year czmpaign against the Khwarezmid empire that had included much of today’s Iran and Afghanistan.  The Mongols sacked the Silk Road cities of Samarkand and Bukhara and wiped out everyone in any town who dared to resist.  So formidable were the Mongols that even sophisticated and well-governed states fell to their terrorizing assaults.  The Golden Horde contingent of Mongol forces overran Russia and took Kiev under Ogedei;  another Mongol force led by Mongol challenged the Abbasisd caliphate;  another force took control of Baghdad in 1279but a foray into Egypt did not go as well, and by 1258 but faced stiff resistance and rare defeat with a foray into Egypt.  By the 1279, Kublai Khan had established control over China that proved to be the most successful experience in prolonged governance by a Mongol group;  from 1279 until 1368, the Mongols would rule in China as the Yuan Dynasty.

 

East and Southeast Asia during the Medieval Era

 

China

 

Prior to the arrival of the Mongols as an outside ruling force, three native Chinese dynasties made a major impact on this most influential civilization in East Asia.   Following the collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 A.D. (CE) China entered a long period in which numerous regional military leaders divided the Chinese landscape into several competing kingdoms.  Then in 577 A.D. (CE) a leader who would rule under the name Wendi was able to establish control throughout northern China;  in 588 he maneuvered his forces so as to defeat rivals in the South, and in 589 he unified North and South under his newly founded Sui Dynasty.  Emperor Wendi and his successor, Emperor Yangdi, were successful centralizers and vigorous builders:  They superintended construction of a Grand Canal (linking North and South for swift shipments of grain and other goods) and oversaw elongation of the Great Wall.   But these emperors exhausted the population by frequently conscripting soldiers, impressing labor, and taxing heavily.   The third Emperor Yongdi (r. 617-618) lost control of the empire to rebellious frontier general Li Yuan, who saw an opportunity when Sui rule was weakened by an ill-fated invasion of Korea.

 

Li Yuan formally replaced Sui rule when he founded the Tang Dynasty in 618 and, now ruling as Emperor Gaozu, secured control over all of China by 624.  The Tang Dynasty is known for administrative effectiveness, intellectual vitality, and cultural cosmopolitanism.  Emperor Taizong (r. 626-649) set up state schools and colleges and reintroduced Han Dynasty-style examinations for testing prospective civil servants.  Tang armies went forth into Central Asia, advanced to the borders of Persia, and dominated the vast territory of China proper.  Across the Old Silk Road came traders and people who were the masters of many fields.  Arriving at the terminus of that great trade route at the Tang capital of Chang’an, they invigorated that great city with their painting, sculpture, scholarship, and religious ideas;  Buddhism flourished and languages of many origins could be heard spoken along the city’s thoroughfares. 

 

Late in the rule of Tang Emperor Xuanzong, the rebel An Lushan led his supporters against other contending aristocrats and the central government.  The military leadership around Emperor Xuanzong prevailed with the assistance of powerful local figures, but the Tang never quite recovered its former centralized authority.  When a rebellious general killed Emperor Ai in 906, the Tang Dynasty fell and a half-century of disorder ensued.  In 960, a general (Zhao Kuangyin) from one of ten contending kingdoms in South China established himself as paramount leader and founded the new Song Dynasty (960-1279).

 

The Song Dynasty was not as centrally powerful or as territorially extensive as previous dynasties and those to come, but the years of the dynasty’s duration were enormously vital and of huge significance for China specifically and for world civilization.  Song innovators introduced paper currency in 1024.  During the years of the Song, wise field rotation, new irrigation works, and adept applications of natural fertilizers doubled rice production.  Those of inventive spirit experimented with gunpowder, developing simple flamethrowers and missiles that were the precursors of much more powerful weapons of later centuries, the latter developed not in China but on the European continent.  And the rationalist tendency in bureaucratic leadership led to refinements in the examination system that made for the most merit-based civil service in the world during the medieval era.  Also of great importance in the cultural realm, Song scholars responded to Buddhist and Daoist ideas by incorporating many of these into mainstream , philosophy as Neo-Confucianism.  From the Song Dynasty forward, the ideas of Confucian thinkers dominated Chinese governance and culture:  Buddhism and Daoism remained important belief systems that continued to influence the realms of religion, art, and poetry;  but Confucian political and ethical concepts took ever firmer hold on Chinese society, with implications for all of East Asia.

The Mongols moved aggressively into northern China during the 1260s and by 1279 had occupied all of Song Dynasty territory, inaugurating in Beijing their own Yuan Dynasty.  The Mongols famously stormed on through the Korean peninsula and attempted to cross the East China Sea to Japan,

once in 1274 and again in 1281;  each time, though strong tempests foiled their but their plans.  In Japanese characterization and lore, their natural benefactors became known as kamikaze:  “divine winds.”

 

Japan

 

The Japanese by this time had evolved as a society heavily influenced by China but very much a land of its own identity and traditions.  The first Japanese cultures to leave significant physical remains were known as the Jomon and Yayoi.  The Jomon people were predominately hunters and fishers whose settlements developed entirely according to indigenous ideas and traditions;  the Yayoi, though,  were stimulated by Chinese ideas, the practical and symbolic implications  of which played a part in Yayoi dominance of the Jomon by the 5^th century B.C. (BCE).  External influence increased as Korean refugees fleeing Chinese invaders in 369 A.D. (CE) crossed into Japan;  by 552, Mahayana Buddhism and Chinese ideas in government, art, and literature were all having an impact.

 

From the 4^th century A.D. (CE), politically powerful occupants of the Yamato plain (the area enveloping Nara and Kyoto) emerged dominant.  They established a Chinese-style capital at Nara in 710, then in 794 moved the imperial court to Kyoto.  In Kyoto, from 794 until 1185 (known as the Heian period), a dynasty of emperors came under the dominance of the Fujiwara family, women from which  frequently married men of the imperial house.  The period became known for a refined aesthetic that represented an aristocratic synthesis of Chinese and indigenous ideas into forms uniquely Japanese.  Court nobles valued poetry, visual art, and music, spending much of their lives in creative expression inspired both by nature and by interactions among fellow aesthetes.  In this context, Lady Murasaki Shikubu wrote The Tale of Genji, often recognized as the first novel, which elegantly described the court life of the Heian.

 

During 1180-1185 warring clans fought the Gempei Wars, with Minamoto Yoritomo leading his clan to dominance.  Under the Minamoto, the institution of the shogunate (with its own power base at Kamakura) developed, whereby military forces of great physical vigor and highly defined ritual replaced the Fujiwara family as the power behind the throne.  By 1392, another military clan, the Ashikaga, successfully challenged the Kamakura Shogunate and until 1573 dominated a government (Ashikaga Shogunate) in which both this clan’s military institutions of government and the imperial house were located in Kyoto.

 

Korea

 

Long under Chinese influence, Korea was conquered in 108 B.C. (BCE) and held for two centuries by the forces of the Han Dynasty.  But by the second century A.D. (CE) the Kaya city-states at the southeast of the peninsula functioned independently of Chinese control, as did three larger states northward and westward in Korea.   In 57 A.D. (CE), the state of Silla (impinging on Kaya centers to the southeast) emerged as the most frequently dominant power over rivals Baekje (to the southwest) and

Koguryo (to the north).  After centuries of struggle, Silla forces in 660 defeated those of Baekje, sending the nobility of the latter in flight as far as Japan, where some of these led ancestral houses that gave rise to Japanese warlords known as the daimyo.  Silla military units then defeated those of Koguryo in 668.

 

But efforts on the part of the Silla leadership to establish an imperial government of the centralized Chinese type foundered;  by the 9^th century, the peninsula was rent by civil war.  In 935,

Wang Geon founded the Goryeo Dynasty, prosperous but continually dealing with local aristocratic assertions until falling to the Yuan Dynasty Mongol forces in the late 13^th century.  Goryeo endured in reduced territory and power, though, until rebellious general Yi Songgye ended the dynasty for good in 1392.

 

Yi Songye thus founded the Yi Dynasty (also known as the Choson Dynasty) in 1392.  Yi Sejong (son of Yi Songye) adopted both the Neo-Confucian philosophy (in pursuit of social harmony) and the exam-based civil service system of China;  he also superintended the creation of a new phonetic alphabet (hang’ul) for the Korean language.  Multi-intellectual in his pursuits, Yi Sejong also patronized scientists, overseeing advances in astronomy, meteorology, and agriculture;  practical improvements in the latter greatly improved crop yields.  People in Korea suffered greatly during two Japanese invasions during the 1590s, but the Yi Dynasty proved to be enormously resilient, surviving and then thriving again by the 17^th century.  Two centuries of general peace ensued until Koreans were subject to the imperialist rivalries of China, Russia, and Japan in the 19^th century;  not until the latter imperialist power took control of Korea in 1910 did the Yi Dynasty come to end.

 

Korea is a fascinating land, with a civilization that has absorbed abundant influences from both China and Japan.  Accordingly, both Chinese and Japanese schools of Buddhism flourish in Korea, and the Confucian ethic has long been internalized, driving Koreans forward in pursuit of scholarship, entrepreneurial innovation, and a success ethic motivated by the desire to honor the family broadly construed:  ancestors and descendants, as well as the currently abiding family.  Well-educated Koreans historically were skilled in reading classical Chinese texts, and many knew Japanese, as well.  And yet the hang’ul language was an ingenious invention, a much more efficient way of representing the atonal Korean language than is the unwieldy Japanese forms, which employ Chinese characters along with two finds of Japanese writing systems.  Buddhist temples in Korea effectively symbolize the spirit of the peninsula’s people and their capacity to absorb influences while making their own unique statement:  these places of religious observance feature architecture that falls midway between the spare minimalism of Japanese temples and shrines and the colorful, even garish architecture witnessed at most Chinese counterparts.

 

Southeast Asia

 

The culturally syncretic yet independent impulse may be witnessed in the lands of Southeast Asia, as well.  Situated between the great civilizations of India and China, the people of Southeast Asia absorbed and abundance of cultural influences from both.  

 

Around 800 A.D. (CE), the forces of King Jayavarman II (r. 802-855) dominated competing states, establishing the state of Kambujadesa, which expanded as the Khmer empire.  In 889, Emperor

 

Indravarman est,ablished the Khmer capital at Angor, at which the Emperor Suryavarman II (r.113-1145) oversaw the construction of the astonishing temple complex, Angkor Wat.  Temples at the complex were of both Hindu and Buddhist inspiration.  The Khmer empire’s greatest ruler, Jayavarman VII, sent armies of conquest into Thailand and Vietnam, even as he promoted his Buddhist faith.  Upon his death in 1215, a Hindu reaction set in that resulted in the defacing of numerous Buddhist images at Angkor Wat, and internecine competition of the military sort provided the context for decline of Khmer power.  A Thai invasion of 1431 brought the Cambodian empire to an end.

 

Chronicles in Burma attest to the founding of the city of Pagan by King Pynibya in 849 A.D. (CE).  Under King Anawrahta (r. 1044-1077), and empire expanded from Pagan that came to envelop the Indian settlements of Thaton and Arakan.  Forces from Pagan also brought the Nan-chao people into the empire.  The religious impulse in Burma proved so strong that energetic construction efforts resulted in the establishment of a large Hindu-Buddhist temple complex east of Pagan.  But a concomitant inclination to expand militarily brought Burmese forces into contention with magnificent Mongol warriors, who sacked Pagan in 1287, sending Emperor Marathihapate fleeing for his life and the empire into permanent decline.  

 

In Vietnam, Ngo Quen established the Dai Viet (“Great Viet”) state after a successful revolt against the Chinese.  The rulers of Dai Viet’s Tran dynasty fended off the Mongols about the same time that the latter were doing damage to Pagan.  By 1471, forces of the northern-based Dai Viet brought the southern kingdom of Champa under control, thus uniting most of Vietnam.  Ironically, having successfully fought off the Mongols and conquered their Vietnamese rivals, the rulers of Dai Viet squabbled in the context of internecine rivalries, precipitating a decline that resulted in the end of the state in the aftermath of particularly damaging conflicts in 1528.

 

Meanwhile, in Indonesia, enterprising commercial folk from Sumatra and Java established important mercantile settlements on the Southeast Asian mainland.  By the 7^th century A.D. (CE), the Javanese state of Srivijaya controlled most of Sumatra and the Malay peninsula.   Vigorous rulers of the competing Sailendra kingdom of central Java superintended the construction of the splendid Buddhist temple complex at Borobodur.  Conflicts with Sailendra and other Indonesia rivals weakened the Srvijaya kingdom, so that by 1400 new maritime powers dominated the Malacca straits and exerted great influence throughout Southeast Asia.  Chief among these was the Majapahit empire on the Malay peninsula.

 

Developments in the Americas and Polynesia during the Medieval Era

 

On the periphery of the great interacting world of Afro-Eurasia, splendid cultures and civilizations thrived in the Americas and Polynesia in ways that would eventually add mightily to the historical inheritance of humankind.

 

The Americas

 

In the Americas, the Toltecs and Aztecs of Mexico, the Maya of Mexico and Central America, the Incas of South America, and various North American cultures put intriguing ideas and physical creativity into the storehouse of humanity’s treasured past.

 

The Toltecs flourished in central Mexico from c. 900 A.D. until c. A.D.  Under their ruler Tolpitzin Quetzalcoatl, the Toltecs established a regional power that dominated the Mexico, Puebla, and Morelos valleys from their capital at Tollan (today’s Tula).   The Toltecs were fierce militarists whose monumental columns known as Atlantes featured exquisite stone carvings of figures whose faces and bearing expressed fearless dedication to the arts of the warrior.  The Toltecs declined, though, after invaders beat them at their own preoccupation about 1180. 

 

Toltec demise in the Valley of Mexico opened the way for the similarly fierce Aztecs;  byt the 15^th century, the latter were the most powerful force in Mesoamerica. Aztec lore records their beginnings about 1168 in a land to the north called, “Aztlan.”  In 1375 members of the Aztec nobility appointed their first king (tlatoani), possibly from a family of Toltec origins.  The Aztecs were technologically innovative, building dams to trap fresh water that flowed into the shallow lake surrounding the capital of Tenochtitlan;  they also created artificial islands in the lake.  The ruler Itzecoatl (r. 1428-1440) leveraged an alliance with those governing the cities of Texcoco and Tlacopan to the benefit of the Aztecs, expanding quickly over all of Mexico and even securing tribute from fro power-holders in Guatemala and El Salvador.

 

Religion connected to the warrior creed was of great importance to the Aztecs, whose gods were intimately connected to the vastness of the cosmos and to the forces and occurences of life and nature:  the sun, fertility, death, war.  The two main temples in Tenochtitlan featured Huitzilopochtli (god of war) and Tlaloc (god of rain);  also particularly important in the Aztec pantheon was the feathered serpent god Quetzalcoatl, the divine power behind wind, creativity, and fertility.  The Aztecs included in their sacrifices to the gods those whom they had captured in war, or who had offended the society in some way;  such offerings provided the sacrificial blood thought important to power the sun across the sky.

 

The Aztecs would endure as the most powerful people in Mexico until the arrival of Hernando Cortez in 1517, after which the diseases and the weaponry of Spaniards demolished the Aztec people and their vast empire.

 

In southern Mexico and in Guatemala, the Maya developed one of the world’s most creative and intriguing societies.  A certain mystery surrounds the collapse of lowland Maya states during the 9^th century A.D. (CE), from which time all important Maya settlements were located in the Yucatan peninsula.  Of these settlements, Chichen Itza was led and occupied by highly innovative people.  The occupants of Chichen Itza experimented with new rituals and forms of shared government, adapted Toltec forms of architecture with strikingly independent flourishes, painted vivid murals, understood

and applied the concept of zero, and created one of the world’s most accurate calendars.  The maya held out much longer against the Spaniard onslaught than did the Aztecs, only succumbing in 1697, when the final Itza capital of Nojpeten (Tayasal) fell.

 

Early cultures of South American created cultural pathways along which the Incas would travel.  By about 500 A.D. (CE), on the high altiplano of Bolivia, the Tiwanaku people dominated the southern Andes;  their namesake city grew to 50,000 inhabitants, who could marvel at this great urban center’s huge monolithic portals dedicated to a solar “gateway god.”  Rulers of Tiwanaku superintended the construction of terraced agricultural field complexes and a lively trade in textiles, pottery, and gold.  Around 435 miles (700 km) to the south of Tiwanku, the Wari people emerged as a culture at about the same time.  The Wari elite lived in high-walled enclosures scattered throughout Peru, from which they dominated local populations and forged alliances with fellow nobles;  these alliances became tenuous by the 9^th century, causing a decline of the Wari empire by 900.  Very close to that very years, the Chimu people living along the coast of Peru established a capital at Chan Chan, which at its height covered about 5,000 acres (20 sq. km.) and contained 35,000 inhabitants.  The Wari elite lived in palace compounds known as ciudaleles, secure redoubts from which to launch successful military ventures along the northern Peruvian coast.  About 1370 such forays brought them into conflict with the Inca, who in the course of the next 100 years ended Chimu power.

 

Around 1300 A.D. (CE), the Incas began to establish settlements at the high altitudes in the Andes Mountains near today’s Cuzco;  by 1438, their ruler Pachacuti (“transformer of the earth”) oversaw military initiatives that led to domination over an area the Inca called Tawantinsuyu that  covered much of today’s Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia.  With the absorption of its most dangerous rival, the Chimu, the Inca had a clear path to regional dominance;  by 1493, the empire extended northward to Quito in Ecuador and southward to Sucre in Bolivia.  Pachacuti probably oversaw the construction Machu Picchu, located at towering elevation in the Andes.  Imperial governing structure defined four provinces (each overseen by a governor) and a complex centralized bureaucracy, at the top of which was the Sapa Inca (emperor).  A network of roads (many of which were paved) led from the provinces to Cuzco, the capital;  the buildings of the latter were arranged to form the shape of a puma.  The Inca built numerous large temples honoring especially the sun god, Inti;  one of these, Qorikancha (located close to the central plaza), would catch the attention of the Spaniards when they arrived in the 1530s for a replica garden that included a representation of corn featuring stems of silver and ears of gold.  Inti was honored with casts from the largesse of gold with which the empire was endowed, including  intricately designed gold discs.                  

 

Early North American cultures of what is now the Southwest had by about 700 A.D. organized themselves into three main groups:  Hohokam, Mogollon, and Anasazi.  By 900 A.D. the Hohokam had built canals that stretched as long as nine miles (15 km.) and irrigation networks that allowed them to harvest corn twice a year.  In settlements at Snaketown and Pueblo Grande ball courts and platform temples strongly indicated modeling on Mesoamerican styles.  The Mongollon people were skilled potters who lived in pueblos (large adobe complexes).  The Anasazi people flourished especially vigorously during the years 900-1100;  originally living in pueblos, they eventually became famous for constructing settlements on sheer cliffs surrounded by canyon walls.  By the 8^th century in the Middle Mississippi Valley, a separate group of cultures built sizable towns featuring large, rectangular mounds;  these were administrative and ceremonial centers for the Adena and Hopewell peoples.  Cahokia was the largest of these towns;  by the 13^th century, this settlement had 30,000 residents and more than 100 low-lying mounds where excavations revealed luxury items suggestive of a social class of considerable wealth.

 

From about 200 B.C. (BCE) the progenitors of the those who would settle Polynesia were on the move, sailing originally from Southeast Asia across the vast ocean distances to the South Pacific Islands.  The first major Polynesian culture was the Lapita, a people who used stone adzes;  cultivated yam, taro, coconut, breadfruit, and bananas;  and domesticated pigs and chickens.  They built highly sophisticated double-hulled outrigger canoes that proved stable and durable over long distances.  Highly adept navigators, Polynesian sailors became enormously skilled in using stars, birds, winds, currents, and tides to guide them;  they probably fashioned charts from sticks as an innovation that utilized the information that they gleaned from these natural signs.  These oceanic travelers reached the Marquesas Islands about 200 B.C. (BCE);  Easter Island, Tahiti, and Hawaii around 400 A.D. (CE);  and New Zealand about 1000 A.D. (CE).  In each of these locales, chieftains led hierarchical societies. 

 

The Maori people of New Zealand had to rely more exclusively on fishing, hunting, and gathering than on agriculture, since of the typical Polynesian mix, only the sweet potato took hold;  and in any case, much of South Island is not suitable for agriculture.  By 1300, though, the Maori did clear more land for agriculture in the context of depleted game for the hunt;  and in the meantime the population on North Island grew rapidly.  After 1350, the Maori of North Island built sizable earthwork burial sites, and forts of similar material that grew into larger and larger complexes with terraces and ditches---  giving evidence of the political disunity that worked to their disadvantage when faced with European invaders in the 19^th century.

 

Easter Island (Rapa Nui) lies 1,290 miles (2000 km.) from the closest South Pacific island.  The people occupying the island around 400 A.D. (CE), eventually gave great labor to the construction of moai statues in honor of ancestors, expending tremendous reserves of energy in moving heavy stone (formed of compressed volcanic ash) from quarries to areas for sculpting and display.  The energetic sculptors depleted trees and thus denuded the soil with this activity, causing a crisis in the ecosystem and the economy by 1600:  land was leeched of nutrients and no wood was available to construct boats.  Only slowly did this insular society recover from ensuing social turmoil that included the toppling of moai statuary no longer seeming to bring blessings from the ancestors.

 

IV.  First-Stage Modern Period (1450-1750)

 

Europe

 

Just as an astonishing array of seminal thinkers exploded onto the scene in 4^th abd 5^th century Greece, so would creative spirits of like magnitude power their way into the intellectual life of Italy in the 14^th and 15^th centuries.  Italy was a logical place for the new explosion to happen, serving as it had as the base for the Roman Empire and for the Roman Catholic Church, the latter itself an entirely original institution that had held much sway in the life of medieval Europe.

 

Thinkers of the Renaissance (the name given to this new cultural explosion) were both dedicated to that institution and willing to think outside of its strictures.  The scholar Erasmus (c. 1466-1526), working from the Netherlands as the Renaissance spread northward from Italy, was an ordained priest who in his classic, In Praise of Folly, nevertheless lambasted the Roman Catholic Church for having fallen into corruption, pointing to the materialistic and secular ambitions of members of the Church hierarchy;  the sale of offices within that hierarchy;  and the offering of “indulgences” (redemption from sin for monetary purchase).  Filippo Brunelleschi worked his innovations upon the legacy of Roman architecture in his design for the cathedral of Florence, topped by a striking dome.  Sandro Botticelli’s painting, The Birth of Venus, drew from classical mythology rather than the Bible.  Michelangelo Buonarroti did stick to intensely biblical themes but with a manifest interest in the human form,  abundantly evident in his masterwork :  the painted ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, finished in 1512 (four years after the commission from Pope Julius I), giving evidence of astonishing skill in representing biblical figures as flesh and blood creatures.  This interest in humanity could be seen abundantly in the work of the painter Raphael (e.g., The Coronation of the

Virgin [1503]) and the astonishingly diverse talent of Leonardo da Vinci.  Best known for painting The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, Da Vinci was the very definition of the “Renaissance Man”:  He was at once engineer, painter, sketch artist, sculptor, and futurist who contemplated flying machines and many other ideas and devices that were centuries ahead of their times.

 

The focus of Renaissance creative spirits on the potential of humankind led them to seek an authentic spirituality in which ethics and church practice were in harmony.  Erasmus and other critics of the Church were intensely religious people who sought this reconciliation of ethics with practice.  This was true, too of Martin Luther, John Calvin, and Huldrych Zwingli;  but these thinkers and activists in what became known as the Reformation lost hope in the capacity of the leaders of the Roman Catholic Church to mend their ways.   On 31 October 1517, Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg (Germany) Cathedral;  this document particularly focused on the corrupt practice of selling indulgences;  he would go on to pose himself against some church doctrines (e.g., transubstantiation, the transformation of bread and wine into the actual physical manifestation of Christ’s body and blood), and even to deny the religious infallibility and authority of the pope.  After a failed attempt at reconciliation with authorities in 1521, Luther broke away from the Roman Catholic Church, setting a precedent for Calvin in France and Zwingli in Switzerland.  Most dramatically, if not for religious reasons, King Henry VIII (r. 1509-1547) of England took his entire nation out of the spiritual sway of Rome, launching what would become the Church of England (Anglican Church) in essence because Church authorities would not annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.  Churches formed in opposition to the church are, quite logically, known as Protestant .

 

The Roman Catholic Church mounted a multi-faceted rebuttal known as the Counter-Reformation, centered on a series of meetings collectively known as the Council of Trent during 1545-1563.  Members of the Council agreed to end corrupt practices while holding fast to Church doctrine. Roman Catholic authorities terminated religious orders deemed too inflexible to change practices, while creating vigorous new orders, most notably the Dominicans and the Jesuits, the latter under the leadership of the brilliant scholar Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556).  

 

Under the impetus of a desire to spread ideas of the Renaissance and Reformation, and to offer Bibles more cheaply to the faithful of the now competitive Protestants and Roman Catholics, disseminators of ideas made widespread use of printing presses by the early 16^th century.  Printing via reusable and moveable blocks was one of the many innovations of the Chinese people during the Song Dynasty;  such a process was in use as early as 1040.  But moveable metal type using oil-based ink was a European invention;  Johannes Gutenberg was the first to produce a lengthy work (a Bible, printed in 1455) with the process and is generally given credit for the invention.  This process made books, many of them classics of Greek and Latin but also works in vernacular languages, much more widely available.

 

As if new ideas had disturbed the existing order so much as to impel people beyond ideational to military conflict, the European landscape featured violent conflicts in many places during the years from 1450 through 1650, essentially the last two centuries of the Renaissance: 

 

A series of wars were fought in Italy during 1494-1559, with France, Spain, England, the Habsburg Empire (the incarnation of the Holy Roman Empire, then encompassing many lands in Germany, Austria, Eastern Europe, and Iberia), and the Papacy all staking claim on territory on the Italian peninsula;  ultimately, the dignity of the Papacy proved resilient, but Spain emerged most territorially influential. 

 

In France, conflicts between Protestants and Roman Catholics led the King Henri IV (r. 1589-1610, from the Bourbon line and originally supportive of the Huguenots [French Protestants]) to lower tensions by converting to Catholicism while granting Protestant rights in the Edict of Nantes (1598).  The Spaniards overplayed their hand in challenging the might of the British navy with their own formidable Spanish Armada, losing the contest in the English Channel in 1588. 

 

Fought mainly on German turf but originating in Dutch unwillingness to be subsumed under the Holy Roman Empire based at the time in Spain, the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) drew activity from Bohemia (in today’s Czech Republic), Spain, the Dutch Republic, and Sweden;  in the end, the territorial integrity of the Dutch Republic gained recognition and European borders stabilized in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), with the reach of the Habsburg-led Holy Roman Empire curtailed and the power of Spain further diminished. 

 

The emergence of a powerful new force in Europe also led to violent confrontations and sharper territorial definition;  expanding from the principality of Muscovy, a more united and territorially expansive Russia took form during the reigns of Ivan III (1462-1505) and Ivan IV (“the Terrible,” r. 1533-1584).  After a period of famine, civil war, and external invasion, a new line (the Romanovs) took power in 1613.  The most dynamic and effective leader from this house was Peter the Great (r. 1682-1725).  Peter superintended economic and political transformations in Russia with the adaptation of European Renaissance and Enlightenment ideas, which along with improving weaponry had invigorated monarchical rule, backed by stronger armies and more centralized governmental bureaucracies.  With imperial power on the rise in Russia, Peter secured territory in Poland and Lithuania (already gained in 1667 after a long series of disputes between Poland and Russia), and he  oversaw military victory against the Swedes in 1719, also after years of conflict (Great Northern War, 1700-1719).

 

By this time, a new intellectual trend deserving of its own appellation---  the Enlightenment---  had gained force.  The Renaissance had represented the tendency of intellectuals and creative spirits, especially in art and literature, to focus on human beings as physically beautiful and possessing enormous potential to think through the dogmas and assumptions that they had inherited from the medieval world, using the works of the Greeks and Romans as referents.  The Reformation had opened a still overwhelmingly Christian people to the possibilities of applying rational thought processes to religious dogma;  leaders of the Reformation in fact created their own dogmatic theologies and pressured their supporters to accept them, but the appeal of interpreting religious texts independently, without institutional mediation, had been put into play on a great field of humanity.               

 

Hordes of great thinkers ran onto that field during the Enlightenment, also known as the Age of Reason, tied to and running concurrently with a Scientific Revolution:

 

In 1453, Nicolaus Copernicus published his tome, On the Rotation of the Celestial Spheres, depicting a heliocentric universe with the Earth and five other planets revolving around the sun. 

In 1543, the Flemish scholar Vesalius published his De Humanis Corpus Fabrica, with detailed pictorials and commentary on human anatomy.  In 1608, Johannes Kepler (informed by the work of Copernicus) showed that planets orbited the sun in elliptical (rather than circular) patterns.  In 1610, Copernicus’s challenge to a strictly biblical geocentric universe (with all celestial bodies revolving around the Earth), gained much elevated backing when Galileo Galilei spied four moons revolving around Jupiter with his telescope.  In 1628, William Harvey (personal physician to King Charles I of England) gave an accurate description of blood circulation, and in 1661 observation through the recently invented microscope gave views of capillaries and other circulatory structures that substantiated Harvey’s work.  And in 1687, Isaac Newton published his Principia Mathematica, detailing the operation of gravity as a force affecting the motion of all objects, celestial and terrestrial.  

 

The scientific method, with observation and experiment in pursuit of factual truth, guided the great intellects of the age.  Denis Diderot, with his 28-volume Encyclopedia assembling in clear prose most fundamental knowledge available in the 17^th century, contained essays by most of he major scholars of the time and symbolized a passion for facts.  Renes Descartes (1596-1650), the “father of modern philosophy,” argued that logical deduction should be trusted over sensory perception and asserted that only through reason could mathematical and universal truth be discovered.  The

philosophes sought to apply reason and the values of tolerance and equality to challenge the way people thought about government and society, and in so doing put an end to superstition, injustice, and tyranny.  Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) maintained that the meaning of freedom was “to reason correctly and know the rights of man.”  Jean-Jacque Rousseau derided moral decadence and inequality, warned that material progress could mean moral peril, and stated that, although people are born with the right and the potential for freedom, the human condition of his day found them “everywhere in chains”;  in his Social Contract, Rousseau argued that “The consent of the people is the sole basis for a government’s authority.”  Montesquieu in his Spirit of Laws (1748) sought to limit absolute monarchical power with a three-way division among the executive (king), legislature (parliament), and the judiciary (high court).

                                                               

And indeed two counter-tendencies prevailing in the early modern world were reshaping Europe and the globe.  There was indeed the tendency for monarchs to gather more and more power into their own hands, backed by weaponry that made the old aristocratic knight on horseback obsolete;  but there were competing notions of natural rights shared by all people:

 

By the 14^th and 15^th centuries, military units of the Ming Dynasty in China were deploying mounted gunners using more advanced applications of gunpowder than had been the case with the flamethrowers of the Song Dynasty;  by the 16^th century, Ming innovators were even using a primitive machine gun.  But the most rapid advances were in Europe, where rather erratic cannon firing stone balls were used by the English at the battle of Crecy in 1346;  faster-burning gunpowder impelling iron

balls from smaller and more mobile artillery were employed by the French against the English at Castillon in 1453;  and at the battles of Ravenna (1512) and Pavia (1525) improved artillery and arquebusiers (hand-held muzzle-loaded weapons with matchlock mechanisms) were utilized to successful effect by Habsburg forces during the Italian Wars (1494-1559).  By the end of the 16^th century, muskets added force and range to artillery fire.  By the 17^th century, castles were no longer impervious to the siege, knightly swords were of limited use against guns, and humble foot-soldiers firing improved handheld weapons relegated the mounted aristocratic warrior to the status as relic to a bygone era.  

 

The demise of the feudal aristocracy strengthened the hands of centralizing monarchs.  King Louis IV (r. 1643-1715) of France was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, centralizing power with the help of a succession of astute advisers:  Richelieu, Mazarin, and Colbert;  and symbolizing his power by commissioning the Palace of Versailles, which became home to the French court in 1682.  But lavish spending during the era of this “Sun King” would eventually lead to economic problems, just one of the precipitants of the French Revolution that would break out 74 years after Louis’s death.

 

This was the tension of the times:  monarchical centralism vs. humankind’s natural right to liberty.  The English Civil War (1641-1651) put England on an irreversible long course toward the greater participation of people outside the nobility.  Charles I lost his head to the forces of parliamentary opposition in 1649    and his son Charles II went down to defeat at Worchester in 1651.  A period of republican rule under Oliver Cromwell ensued before the era’s excesses opened an opportunity for monarchical resurgence.  But in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, dual monarchs William and Mary accepted the legislative power of parliament as limitation on their own executive power, so that prime ministers, parties, and parliament now carried more day to day sway than did any king or queen of Great Britain.

 

Asia

 

China

 

During the 1350s, a series of revolts against Mongol (Yuan Dynasty) rule in China signaled

dissatisfaction with a style of rule that, despite generous adaptation of formal Chinese court traditions

and administrative structures, had always retained a foreign character.  One of the groups in revolt was known as the Red Turbans, and up through the ranks of this army came a wily commoner by the name of Zhu Yuanzhang who outmaneuvered his rivals, entered Beijing at the helm of a large, well-trained, and highly motivated soldiery to seize Beijing, ensconce himself in a new capital at Nanjing, and take the title Hongwu as the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644).  Hongwu created an imperial army that evidenced the martial vigor and discipline of the troops that had swept him into power;  he also instituted a system of secret agents to root out lingering aspirants to the throne, and similarly sent well-paid and tightly controlled tax agents to improve collections and shore up finances that had languished during the latter years of Mongol rule.

 

Hongwu’s  rule (1368-1398) was followed by the brief reign of Jianwen (1399-1402), and then by the imperial administration of the energetic and ambitious Yongle.  Yongle transferred the capital back to Beijing, where he superintended construction of the vast palace complex of the Forbidden City.  From that august position, he dispatched troops northward to quell remaining Yuan enthusiasts and southward to annex Vietnam as a province.  He also famously commissioned palace eunuch Zheng He to lead seven oceangoing voyages during 1405-1433 to Java, Sumatra, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the southern India coast, the Arabian peninsula, and the east coast of Africa;  for the only time in history, China was the unrivaled power of the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean.

 

Oddly, Hongwu’s outward looking spirit gave way to the conservative insularity of later emperors such as the long-ruling Jiajing (r. 1531-1567) and Wanli (1572-1620).  These emperors became increasingly isolated from the people over whom they ruled and to declining economic conditions in the provinces that led to a series of revolts in April 1644.  Peasant leader Lizheng opportunistically seized Beijing but was betrayed by rival Wu Sangui, who invited contending Manchu forces through the frontier passes and into the capital---  where they proved unwilling to relinquish their own opportunity:  For the second time in dynastic history, all of China came under foreign rule as these invaders from the Northeast established the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

 

Qing rulers proved more adept at ruling in the Chinese style than had the Mongols.  They proved to be enthusiastic sponsors of scholarship and art, and became skilled in the arts of the gentleman:  painting, chess, calligraphy, and music.  Under Qing rule, China looked outward again, advancing under emperors Sunzi (r. 1644-1661), Kangxi (1661-1722), Yongzheng (r. 1722-1735), and Qianlong (1736-1995) to absorb Outer Mongolia, to claim Tibet as a protectorate (1750), aggressively expand toward Central Asia, and establish a rather tenuous hold on Taiwan.  But the Manchus retained certain practices that they insisted the Chinese themselves adopt, mandating, for example, that all men wear a long, braided ponytail with forehead completely shaven;  and they developed a style of governing the provinces that featured a Chinese provincial governor who answered to a Manchu viceroy who wielded authority in two or three provinces.  Such irritants would loom larger in the Chinese consciousness when the arrival of European forces in the 19^th century undermined Qing authority and created doubts abut the very viability of the long-lived dynastic system of governance. 

 

Japan

 

In Japan, the Ashikaga Shogunate had evolved as a decentralized state in which authorities in Kyoto depended on daimyo powerful leaders large domains (han).  In 1560, one of these daimyo aspired to the leadership in the capital of Kyoto itself but was precluded in his advance by the forces of the ferocious Oda Nobunaga.  By 1577, the forces of Nobunaga had conquered central Japan and then moved outward toward the more remotely located daimyo.  When Nobunaga was assassinated in 1582, his chief general, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, took up the drive for unification;  by 1590 he had conquered five of the six most stubbornly resistant daimyo, and in the course of several months then finally forced the Hojo daimyo of Odowara to capitulate.  After Hideyoshi died in 1598, Tokugawa Ieyasu resolved an intense power struggle with a resounding victory at Sekigahara in 1600. 

 

Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, the imperial court enjoyed reverential prestige, its power was of the ceremonial type only:  The shoguns ruled with unprecedented central authority from Edo (today’s Tokyo).  Callas structure under the Tokugawa followed an adaptation of the idealized Confucian social order of Qing China, featuring farmers, artisans, and merchants in descending order at the last three of four identified groups;  but rather than put the gentleman scholar atop the scheme in Chinese fashion, the Japanize placed the samurai, who did have a propensity for disciplined study but were foremost a privileged military class.  Increasingly the Tokugawa turned inward:  In 1612, the shogun Tokugawa Hidetada (r. 1605-1623) cemented a policy of national seclusion (sakoku), and in 1614 he deemed that foreign trade should thenceforth be restricted to the cities of Kirado and Nagasaki in southern Kyushu;  Hidetada’s successors expelled the Portuguese (1639) and relegated the Dutch to a small island off the coast near Nagasaki.  

 

Such caution did bring the Japanese two centuries of peace and the opportunity to refine their culture to include enduring arts:  haiku poetry, flower arranging, tea ceremony (chanoyu), Noh theater, and prints featuring Ikiyo-e “pictures of the floating world”).  But the Japanese peace would be interrupted with the arrival of militarily aggressive Europeans in the 19^th century, armed with more massive weapons of destruction;  at that time, the very protectiveness regarding European influences that had allowed for calm and assured development of Japanese culture would become a liability in an age when adroit engagement with contenders for international power would be a prerequisite for retention of the established domestic political order.

 

The Ottoman Empire

 

 

The impact of Islam as a dynamic force in Asia is seen clearly in the events and political formations in the early modern world.  That influence stretched to the Central Asian holdings of the Mind and Qing dynasties, where Turkish peoples such as the Uighers lived as adherents of Islam.  And the leadership of three great empires---  those of the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Mughals---   were all oriented toward the religion, ethics, administrative techniques, and cultural heritage of Islam.

 

After their victory over the Byzantines in 1453, the Ottomans under Mehmet II made forays into eastern Europe but failed to achieve results that at that point seemed likely to provide much additional territory.  So the Ottomans turned eastward, concentrating on expansion in Asia rather than Europe.  In 1514, soldiers sent at the behest of Sultan Selim I (r. 1512-1520) defeated the Safavids of Persia in the Battle of Chaldiran.  Within three years, the Ottomans captured both Jerusalem and Cairo, thereby controlling the holy sites in the former and ending Mamluk rule in the latter.  In 1523, Ottoman forces captured the island of Rhodes, where the military order Knights of St. John had been powerful since playing an important role in the Crusades.  With these Asiatic and Mediterranean holdings secured, soldiers of the Ottoman Empire once again entered eastern Europe, taking control of part of Hungary but failing in an attempt to conquer troops defending Vienna, capital of the Habsburg Empire.

 

Suleyman’s potential heirs proved to be variously impatient and alcoholic.  Sons Mustafa and Bayezid drew suspicion as conspirators among key advisers to their father, who ordered that Mustafa be executed in 1553 and like fate for Bayezid in 1562.  When Suleyman died on a final Hungarian campaign in 1566, his son Sulim, known as “the drunkard,” occupied the throne.  To that point, what training Selim had came in the arts of the harem, dwelling decadently in Istanbul’s Topkapi Palace.  Real power  devolved to the occupants of key positions within the sultanate, especially the Diwan (supreme court), Gran Vizier (chief minister) and the Janisaries (formerly Christian young men who had been captured, raised in the palace, and given intense education in administrative and military matters.  One Grand Vizier, Mehmet Koprulu (in the service of Sultan Mehmet IV [r. 1648-1687]) initiated a campaign to root our corruption and to resume wars of conquest, but when he died in 1661 those plans languished.  Mehmet’s brother-in-law, Kara Mustafa did sent forces forth once again to besiege Vienna, but the initiative failed and elicited a Habsburg counteroffensive that resulted in a diminution of Ottoman-held territory on the European continent.  While having to settle for maintenance of Asiatic and Mediterranean holdings, the Ottomans also experienced a great cultural flowering of a refined life at court, often labeled the “Tulip Age.”  

 

Safavid Persia

 

The Mongols ruled Persia from the 1250s until 1335, then in the 1370s Tamerlane (Timur the Lame) held Persia within the domains of his vast Central Asian empire.  When Tamerlane died in 1405, his successors held firm in the eastern part of Persia, while the Turkish Aq Qoyunlu and Kara-Qoynlu

dynasties ruled in the western part.  In 1501, a new group, originally identified with a Sufi order  

known as the Safavids, began a series of military campaigns that ended Aq Qoyunlu power, brought all of western Persia under control by 1507, and turned with designs on eastern Anatolia.  In the latter, though, the Safavids went down to defeat by Ottoman force in the 1514 Battle of Chaldiran.  By that time, though, the Safavids asserted control over the eastern part of Persia, securing the border against Uzbek aspirants to the same territory.  Ismail also created an effective bureaucracy and imposed a variety of Shia Islam as the new official faith of Persia, an initiative that had made occupants of the Iranian plateau a predominately Shi’ite people from the 16^th century until today.

 

Shah Abbas I (r. 1587-1629) brought Safavid Persia to its peak of power and cultural glory.  He moved the capital from Qazvin to Isfahan, where he oversaw the construction of a dazzling array of new buildings facing Maydan Square.  Safavid power held generally firm, despite the loss of Baghdad to the Ottomans in 1638, during the decades following immediately upon the death of Shah Abbas I.  Able Minister Saru Taqi made wise fiscal decisions in behalf of Shah Safi I (r. 1629-1642), creating the conditions for Safi’s son Shah Abbas II (r. 1642-1666) to reign during a period of notable peace and prosperity.  But the next shah, Sulayman, retreated into the pleasures of the harem, and the Safavid court was in general more inclined during the late 17^th century and early 18^th century to pursue high court culture and to exert physical vigor in the hunt, rather than in military expansionism or even defense.  By 1720s the Safavids faced numerous revolts, then in 1722 the Iranian plateau was occupied by the rebel Afghan leader, Mahmud Ghilzai, who dominated the area for just three years. 

 

During 1725-1747, another Afghan tribal leader, Nadir Shah, ruled Persia first through Safavid puppets;  but in 1736, he made explicit claim to power in Persia, ending Safavid rule.  Nadir Shah was ambitious, successfully sending forth troops to sack the Mughal capital of Delhi in 1739;  but his cruelty and greediness in tax collections created the atmosphere in which he was assassinated in 1747.  Thereafter, while Persian culture (miniature paintings, elegant poetic verse, and distinctive musical composition) flourished, the land was unsettled politically and militarily for many decades.

 

                 

Mughal India

 

In 1526, the ambitious Babur of Afghanistan led his forces (having followed a route from Kabul [captured 1504] through the Khyber Pass toward India) in the conquest of both Delhi and Agra;  by the time of his death in 1530, Babur had secured control of all the wealthy cities of northern India.   Babur’s son, Humayun, underwent a period of exile at the Safavid court after losing his father’s realm to the Afghan competitor Sher Shah.  But in 1555, Humayun returned, seized control from the successors of Sher Shah, and left a restored empire to his son Akbar (r. 1556-1605).  Just twelve years-old at the time, Akbar underwent a period of tutelage under the talented regent Bairam Khan, then went on to become the greatest of these Muslim rulers known as the Mughals.

 

Akbar expanded Mughal holdings from Kashmir in the north and Afghanistan to the northwest, to Bengal in the east and the Deccan plateau of southern India.  Akbar was an able administrator who paid warrior-aristocrats (mansabars) in land grants (jagirs), the tax collections from which went in part to these locally powerful officials and in part to the central administration in the lavish new capital of Fatehpur Sikri.  Akbar sought to secure the support of Hindus and those of other faiths, reducing the influence of Muslim scholars (ulama) on matters of government, abolishing taxes on non-Muslims (jizna), and deeming that a solar calendar, rather than the Muslim calendar, would prevail in matters of Indian state and society.  His reign was culturally splendid, with the patronage of Akbar abetting composition in a new musical style of northern India and painting in a unique synthesis of Persian and Indian styles.  

 

The reign of Akbar’s son Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) was turbulent ;  he faced numerous challenges from his sons, one of whom emerged dominant to rule as Shah Jehan (r. 1628-1658).  The prosperity of India at the time, flourishing on the strength of agriculture and trade, made possible the fulfillment of tremendous ambitions in architectural design and construction.  Shah Jehan superintended the construction of India’s greatest monuments from the Mughal era:  the Red Fort and Jama Masjid in Delhi (which Shah Jehan called Shahjahanabad);  and the brilliant Taj Mahal (inspired as an expression of devotion to Shah Jehan’s wife Mumtai) in Agra. 

 

Shah Aurangzeb (r. 1660-1707) took advantage of his father’s illness to prevail over the other sons of Shah Jehan and establish himself in power.  He was ambitious and vigorous, personally leading expeditions in northern India that expanded the empire.  But he offended those non-Muslims that Akbar had wisely mollified:  Shah Jehan revived tax collections from Hindu pilgrims, reinstated the

jizna, and otherwise emphasized the paramountcy of Islam---  all of which undermined support for Mughal rule.  Aurangzeb also ran into opposition in southern India from the Marathi confederacy, which frustrated his attempts to unite the subcontinent.  The Mughal rulers who succeeded Aurangzeb were ineffective, their weakness further undermining Mughal power;  after Nadir Khan led Persian forces in a sack of Delhi in 1739, the Mughal Dynasty was left in the innervated condition that representatives of the British Empire would observe upon their arrival a few decades thereafter.

 

 

European Voyages of Exploration and Discovery

 

By the 15^th century, the people of Afro-Eurasia were interacting in many ways, so that the world was full of ideas transported, shared, and 35adapted by people from one land to another.  This trend was soon to accelerate as Europeans, motivated especially by a desire to find an oceangoing route to the  Spice Islands (today’s Indonesia), sent forth explorers around the coast of Africa to the lands of Asia, and eventually across the Atlantic to the Americas. 

 

At the time of the first voyages, Arab traders had control of most of the overland routes along which the valuable spices and other items of Asia were transported.  Seeking to avoid the costly fees demanded by Arab middlepersons, Europeans sought to circumvent ther Arab positions by finding the route by sea.  The Portuguese led the way:  Bartholomew Dias rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1588;  Vasco da Gama traversed the Indian Ocean to Calicut (southern Indian port) in 1498;  and Ferdinand Magellan’s crew would complete a circumnavigation of the globe during 1517-1521.  In the meantime, Christopher Columbus was the first European since the Vikings (10^th century) to land in North America, and this time prevailing international circumstances made the impact much more dramatic:  during 1492-1502, Columbus made in all four voyages across the Atlantic under the banner of Spain, never finding the all-water route to Asia that he sought, but pioneering an avid interest in the Americas that he had by happenstance rediscovered.  

 

Following Columbus to North America, John Cabot, sailing for Great Britain and seeking a northerly route to Asia in 1497, found his way to Newfoundland.  During 1519-1521, the Spaniard Hernando Cortes utilized 15 mounted soldiers and 400 infantry to subdue the proud Aztecs, led at the time by the powerful Montezuma.  The French explorer Jacque Cartiers reached the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534.  During 1527-1533, Francisco Pizarro similarly subdued the ruler Atahualpa and the Inca people.  Meanwhile, North American explorations continued, notably with the arrival of the French explorer Jacques Cartier at the Gulf of St. Lawrence in 1534. 

 

During the 16^th century, the government of Spain sent representatives at the behest of its Council of the Indies to govern holdings in Mexico, Central America, and South America.  But the resulting efficiency of government was not high, so that in the 16^th century viceroys replaced the former capatains-general (governors).  The two viceroyalties were New Spain, consisting of territories to the north of Panama;  and Peru, consisting of territories to the south of Panama.  Under this system, landowning Spaniards held encomiendas that made Native Americans their personal possessions, with the latter having the obligation to pay costly tribute to their overlords.  As Aztec,

Inca, and other Native American populations were massively depleted due to small pox and other diseases to which they were highly vulnerable, the per capita tribute obligation became onerous in the extreme.  But the overwhelmingly most valuable source of wealth for the Spaniards was the huge mountain of silver ore discovered at Potosi in Bolivia in 1545;  from that date until 1660, this single source of revenue yielded some 17,600 tons (16,000 tonnes) of silver, sent to Seville in Spain, enriching the government of King Phillip II and tempting the latter into aggressive military action that ironically undermined the power and sapped the wealth of this beneficiary of Native American wealth and labor.

 

The weakened position of Spain left openings for the ambitions of the Dutch, French, and English.  After a failed “Lost Colony” episode during 1584-1590, the British had more success in Jamestown from 1607.  In 1620, the British ship Mayflower arrived with its Puritan “Pilgrims.”  Soon the British had settglements in Maryland (1634), Rhode Island (1636), Caroliinas (1665), Pennsylvania (1682),.  The Dutch laid claim to a territory around today’s Albany in New York (1623), establishing Fort Orange on the Hudson River.  Swedes, overall a minor participant in world exploration at this stage, nevertheless were the first to found a colony in Delaware (1638).  But by the late 17^th century, the British had taken control over the areas claimed by the Dutch and Swedes, occupying the expanse along the Atlantic coast from Georgia to New England.  The Spaniards held Florida (and lands to the American Southwest, including California);  and France (having founded Quebec in 1608) controlled a vast area from eastern Canada to the Rocky Mountains and southward to Lousiana).   The French benefited from a thriving fur trade, especially beaver;  but as a matter of public policy, they regarded overseas empire in strategic rather than commercial terms, using their occupation of territory to thwart British ambitions especially.

 

The Portuguese had led the way on voyages of exploration and discovery, and they did lay claim to Brazil in the Americas;   but in the Americas, the people and governments of Spain, Britain, and France would emerge as the key contestants.  Internationally, though Portugal continued to play a role, establishing forts at Goa (on the coast of India, 1510), Malacca (at the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, 1511), and Ormuz (island in the Indian Ocean, 1515), and Macau (in China, 1517);  by the 1560s, the Portuguese were importing half the spice and three-quarters of the pepper traded in Europe.

  

The prime interest of the English and the Dutch in matters of oceangoing empire was mercantile in nature.  The Dutch East India Company was established in 1602, with its first outpost at Java founded in 1604;  soon, similar Dutch “factories” would be soon be established in Sri Lanka, southern india, Bengal, Malacca, Taiwan, and Nagasaki.  The British formed with their own East India Company, founded actually a bit early than the Dutch counterpart, in 1600.  Territory in India was at least as important to the British as their holdings in North America;  on the subcontinent, they established bases in Bengal (1615) and at Bombay (1668) and Calcutta (1690).

 

The impetus for British and Dutch imperialist activity lay in the surge in capitalist spirit and methods of organization during the 17^th century.  Funds for oceangoing ventures and trade became more flexible and abundant with the advent of stocks, shares in ownership that spread both risk and profits.  In Amsterdam, the Dutch established the Amsterdamsche Wisselbank (Amsterdam Exchange Bank) in 1609 as headquarters for the sale and exchange of stocks.  In London, the British first published a list of the values of shares in various ventures, and the commodity prices that motivated the trade, in 1698.

 

Human beings were considered commodities if they had value for labor potential.  In surveying the globe, Europeans (overwhelmingly dominated by the British) identified Africa, especially West Africa, as the prime source of slaves.  Dealing with African slave trading empires such as the Ashanti and the Dahomey, European trades offered weaponry, metal goods, rum, and woven items in exchange for human commodities.  Across the Middle Passage came 78,000 per year during the 1780s, with up to 600 slaves transported per ship.  Chained together ankle to ankle and wrist to wrist between the deck and hold of ships, a high percentage of the human cargo did not survive---  a sustainable loss, given the profits for ship captains and investors.   By the time the slave trade mostly subsided with the passage of abolitionist legislation in Great Britain in 1807, more than 12 million human beings had been transported across the Atlantic for the purposes of human bondage.

 

              The crudeness of thought and action evident in the slave trade, coming as it did during a period of intellectual enlightenment and ferment in the realms of philosophy and science, is deeply ironic and one of the tawdriest episodes in the great scope of prehistory and history that contains the human past. Although the slave trade was mostly at an end by the early 19^th century, the next span of 150 years would hold similar ironies with respect to the great mix of intellectual advance and human cruelty.  The quest for and exploitation evident in empire would, for all of the perceived economic benefit, prove costly:   Violent confrontations occurring on many global landscapes, and eventually causing great wars to be waged across the entire expanse of the globe, would tear at the fabric of humanity as a consequence of the European quest for empire.

                                                        

V.  Second-Stage Modern Period (1750-1945)

 

From 1750 until 1945 (second-stage modern period) world civilization underwent dramatic change.  All of the major ideas still in force in our own time were put into play during those years.  In many ways, the period after 1945 that includes our own time has been an era in which we have tried to come to terms with the implications of the ideas and events that defined the second-stage modern period.

 

The second-stage modern period that commenced around 1750 found Europeans initially in a position to dictate political and military terms to other occupants of the globe, including those of the venerable old civilizations of China, India, and the Ottomans. Three forces animated European society:  nationalism, imperialism, and industrialism.  The assertion of the European form of these at the outset enabled Europeans to impose ideas and actions upon other states and societies.  In time, though, those very ideas and the ability of Europeans to control other peoples in other places served

to undermine European authority as the peoples of Asia, Africa, and the Americas embraced nationalism and industrialism;  and whether opposing imperialism or becoming imperialistic powers themselves, the states of non-European peoples also came to terms with this idea, ultimately in the context of two great world wars.

 

European Imperialism

 

Rivalry between Great Britain and France sparked many important global events during the late 18^th century.  These two powers as of 1750 were contesting for territory in many global areas, most especially in India and in North America (the part of this continent that today constitutes border regions of the United States and Canada).  In both places, the British emerged the dominant imperial power, achieving victories in India at Madras (1759), Wandiwash (1760), Pondicherry (1761), and the Battle of Plassey (1763);  and in North America at Quebec (1760).  The latter victory came only after the British had suffered numerous defeats inflicted south of today’s border by the French and their Native American Allies (the American phase of this French-British global struggle is often termed the “French and Indian War”), but in the end the victories of the British relegated France to an inferior imperialist position in both India and the Americas. 

 

For Great Britain, these victories outside Europe were fortuitous, because its ambitions for territory on the European continent were thwarted in the Seven Years’ War, of which these other French-British conflicts became a part.  In Europe, France linked up with Austria to prevent the British from taking control of Hanover, a region of today’s Germany for which the powerful Prussians as a strategic matter had recognized the British claim.  Russia also had initially been a French ally but later switched, typical in this big-power conflict replete with diplomatic shifts and regime changes.  The bottom line was that in the 1763 Treaty of Paris a status quo that had described the territorial borders of Europe in 1756 was for the most part reestablished, which meant no Hanover or any other territory on the European continent for Great Britain.

 

Although the British Empire would prove enormously durable, one of the first strong assertions of that modern phenomenon known as nationalism came from the thirteen British colonies running along the Atlantic seaboard and cost the empire those holdings.  Especially in the area of Boston, there were those such as Samuel and John Adams who were identifying as Americans rather than as British subjects, and they took umbrage at being taxed without having a voice in the British Parliament.   They objected specifically to taxes on paper goods (Stamp Act, 1765) and other goods such as glass, lead, paint, and tea (Townshend Acts, 1767).  These acts of Parliament caused a great deal of discontent in colonial legislatures (advisory bodies that served, especially in the cases of Massachusetts and Virginia, as training institutes for future leaders).  Tensions between British officials and Bostonians were dramatized in 1770 when a group of soldiers panicked at the gathering of protesters outside the customs office, firing and killing five while wounding six;  this came to be described as the “Boston Massacre.”  Then in 1773 a group of Bostonians in Native American dress threw crates of British tea off the loading docks as a protest on taxes that they were forced to pay on this and other goods.  This event became famous as the “Boston Tea Party.”

 

British officials double downed rather than make concessions.  Parliament pressed on with what became known as the Intolerable Acts (1774), which closed the port of Boston and curtailed activity in the Massachusetts colonial legislature and courts.  A First Continental Congress met in Philadelphia on 5 September 1774 to register objection to the offensive acts imposing taxes and the measures forced on Bostonians.  The conflict took on dimensions of war when at Lexington, Massachusetts, on 19 April 1775 the “shot that was heard around the world” rang forth from a weapon from the rifle of one of the Minute Men militia formed in opposition to British colonial rule;  a second confrontation between the colonists and British soldiers occurred at nearby Concord.  The Second Continental Congress met shortly thereafter, demanding renunciation of the offending British legislation and actions taken by British General Thomas Gage in retaliation for the confrontations at Lexington and Concord.  In January 1776, Thomas Paine published his pamphlet, Common Sense, which urged a American colonial break with the British government;  then on 4 July 1776 Thomas Jefferson issued his Declaration of Independence as the documented colonial challenge for which Paine had argued:  The American Revolution had now formally commenced.

 

The colonial army was a rather motley organization, despite the skills of leader George Washington.  The army got the worst of most battles in the immediate aftermath of the declaration for independence and was forced to endure a terrible winter at Valley Forge during 1776-1777.  Only after an alliance with France was signed did colonial fortunes improve, leading to a series of better outcomes in battle until victory at Yorktown on 19 October 1781 signaled defeat for the British.  In the Treaty of Paris (1783), American independence was affirmed:  The British were still in control of today’s Canada, but they had lost what now became the United States of America.

 

American independence signaled a trend whereby classes of people long left out of the halls of government demanded entry, and whereby people identifying in new national formations demanded release from imperial rule.  In France, the peasantry was burdened with taxes beyond their ability to pay under conditions of unfavorable weather and low yields;  and the French middle classes grew restless with the rule of the French monarchy and aristocracy.  Such discontent led to the formation of a National Assembly (consisting largely of “commoners” [non-aristocrats]) in May 1789;  and the storming of the Bastille prison in July 1789.  By 1792, a more radical assembly (the Convention) declared France to be a Republic and ordered the execution of King Louis XVI (carried out in January 1793).  By  June 1793, a group known as the Jacobins (led by the sincere and honest but fanatical Maximilien Robespierre) gained control of the Convention and began to conduct a “Reign of Terror” against all of those considered threats to the revolutionary republican regime.  This caused a backlash and the instalment of a five-man Directory as decision-making force in the French Republic.

 

Widespread dissatisfaction with the Directory and France’s two-chamber national parliament led to an appeal to Napoleon Bonaparte to come back to France from his military campaigns in Italy and Palestine to lead the nation.  In the Coup of 18 Brumaire (9 November 1799), Napoleon and his backers overthrew the Directory, then set up a new government in which Napoleon was First Consul;  in a quick move to capitalize on his popularity and his efforts to court favor with the Roman Catholic Church,, Napoleon in 1802 declared himself First Consul for Life, then in 1804 prevailed upon Pope

 

Pius VII to crown him Emperor.  Napoleon took interest in matters of governmental administration, as well as military maneuvering:  He oversaw the founding of a new Bank of France, issued a new currency that included the napoleon gold coin, rationalized the departments of the central bureaucracy, oversaw the introduction of a new educational curriculum (greatly informed by new discoveries in math and science during the Enlightenment), and in 1804 established the Napoleonic Code that would endure to dominate the French legal system to this day.

 

The French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1802) initially represented a policy of border defense against foreign opponents of the revolution and all that it portended for the monarchies and empires of Europe.  But as Napoleon and others scored numerous battlefield victories in Italy, Austria, and Prussia, the hunger for land and the opportunity to export revolutionary ideas fanned the French militaristic spirit.  Thwarted by British Admiral Nelson and his navy at Trafalgar (off the southwest coast of Spain), Napoleon abandoned a plan to invade Great Britain but lead further victories against Prussia (october 1806) and secured a peace agreement with Tsar Alexander I of Russia (at Tilsit, 1807).  But Napoleon’s invasion of Portugal in 1808 forced the French army into a tough fight against guerrilla forces in the Peninsular Wars;  and his decision to invade Russia in 1812 was enormously ill-advised:  Here, the Grande Arme did take Moscow in the September, but the Russians withdrew into their ample eastern domains, forcing the French into an embarrassing and brutal winter retreat.  Then the Coalition of European forces ranged against Napoleon gave him his first battlefield loss in 1813 in the Battle of Leipzig (Austria).  Defections in his army and waning enthusiasm back in France for his costly campaigns led to Napoleon’s abdication and exile to the island of Elba;  after his escape and brief comeback as Emperor, defeat at the hands of Prussia and Britain at the Battle of Waterloo (Belgium) brought permanent exile on the Atlantic Ocean island of Saint Helena.

 

The Napoleonic Wars had the ironic dual effect of spreading the ideas of the French Revolution while stimulating nationalistic resistance inspired by the very ideas of liberty and equality.   Prince Metternich of Austria led the Congress of Vienna that attempted to maintain the monarchical and imperial status quo in Europe, but that status quo was disrupted in the events that followed.  During 1821-1832, nationalists in Greece forced the Ottomans to recognize Greek independence, a trend that at the Congress of Berlin (1878) would see the Ottomans also recognize the independence of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania;  with a commitment to chart a course also for the independence of Bulgaria.  The nationalistic maneuvering of Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck elicited French resistance, but in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), Bismarck was able to assert Prussian dominance in a unified German confederacy.  And building on the efforts of nationalists Giuseppe Mazzini (formed the “Young Italy’ movement in 1831), and Camillo Cavour (established Piedmont as a base for his leadership of a unified northern Italy [1859]), Giuseppe Cavaldi during 1860-1861 expanded these holdings by invading southern Italy, Sicily, and Naples;  and declaring a “Kingdom of Italy” under Victor Emmanuel of Piedmont.    

 

In Latin America, Jose de San Martin led victories against Spaniard overlords in Argentina and Chile (1817);  from the North, Simon Bolivar had begun revolutionary actions in 1813 that culminated

in his presidency of Gran Colombia, a union of Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador that from1819 functioned independently from Spain.  By 1821, forces in New Granada and Venezuela also declared independence from Spain;  and in 1822 revolutionary activities and declarations culminated in governments in Mexico and Brazil that also threw off the rule of the Spaniards.

 

The imperialist activity of the major European powers also stirred sentiments of nationalism in Asia and Africa, but in most cases independence would have to wait until the 20^th century.  After several campaigns in southern India during 1766-1818, in the Punjab during 1845-1849, and in meeting the circumstances of mutiny among Indian soldiers of the British colonial army in 1857, the British brought all of India under their control;  in the very important year of 1858, the British government claimed all of the former commercial and administrative rights held by the East India Company, officially terminated the Mughal Dynasty, and launched the colonial India into a new phase under direct British governmental rule known as the British Raj.  Thirty years later, the British reached the logical result of a similar trend in Burma, whereby steady territorial gains first under the banner of the British East India Company, then under the direct leadership of the British government, ended with the latter taking direct control in 1885.

 

In that very year, the Indian National Congress, beginning as an advisory body but eventually serving as training ground for such leaders as Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohandas K. Gandhi, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah;  the road to independence would be long, thought, not coming until 1947, and tough roads leading to independence would also have to be trod elsewhere in Asia, and Africa. 

 

Qing Dynasty rulers proudly resisted British, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and Russian advances until the Opium Wars (1839-1842) with Great Britain forced major concessions in the Treaty of Nanjing;  another conflict in 1856-1860 between the Chinese and the British resulted in another British victory and more concessions in the Treaty of Beijing (1860).  In the aftermath of these events, a total of 16 ports were open to European trade, and the contending European powers divided China up into spheres of influence.  By 1898, Macau was under Portuguese control, and Hong Kong was governed by the British.      

 

Throughout the 19^th century, Europeans also explored the vast continent of Africa and staked imperialist claims.  By 1914, only Liberia and Ethiopia remained independent.  The French were dominant throughout most of northern African, giving way mainly in Egypt, where the British exerted overwhelming influence from 1882;  the French also laid claim to West African areas that today include Sierra Leon and Ivory Coast.  The British controlled today’s Nigeria, Tanzania, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and South Africa (after ousting the Dutch in the Boer Wars [1899-1902]).  Belgium controlled the Congo.  Portugal dominated Mozambique and Angola.

 

In Oceania, the British took the lead in staking imperialist claims, following up on explorer James Cook’s sighting of Australia in 1770 with the shipping of a cargo of 750 convicts to that island continent in 1787 and expansion over the Australian land mass by 1861  By 1864, the British had also

fought several wars against tough Maori opponents to prevail in New Zealand, as well.  Norwegian Roald Amundsen beat a British group led by Robert Scott to the South Pole in Antarctica by five weeks, landing on 14 December 1911.  The exertions of both groups (all of whom in Scott’s assemblage died on the return trip) established a European presence over most of the globe.

 

Very seldom were people in Asia and Africa able to resist the 19^th century European advance.  In Southeast Asia, the Dutch took today’s Indonesia, the French established control over the territorial expanses of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam (known collectively as Indochina), and (in addition to Burma) the British governed Malaysia.  Thailand maintained formal independence but experienced significant influence from Great Britain and France.

 

The case of Japan is unique.  There, a group of former daimyo known as the “oligarchs” superintended what became known as the Meiji Restoration (1868), whereby the emperor retained power but the Tokugawa Shogunate came to an end.  The Japanese set about head-spinning modernization during the last decades of the 19^th century, until Japan itself became an imperial power, annexing Korea and Taiwan in 1910;  seizing control of Manchuria in 1932;  controlling the east China coastal cities by 1937;  and then expanding over Southeast Asia and many islands of the Pacific over the course of the 1930s in actions that would be among the reasons for the great global conflict known as World War II.  

 

Industrial Revolution

 

The European interest in the Americas, Asia, and Africa began in the search for an all-water route to the Spice Islands (Indonesia) and quickly involved the incongruent trade in human beings (the slave trade) and the spread of Christianity.  But slavery ended in Great Britain in 1805, in the United States in 1865, and for the most part had ended with the independence movements of South America as of the 1820s;  and while missionaries continued to be driven by the dictates of their theology to save souls worldwide, this was by the 19^th century a minor motivation on the part of any of the governments and commercial enterprises involved in the quest for empire.  By the mid-19^th century, Europe was undergoing an astonishingly quick industrial transformation, necessitating raw materials that for the most part lay outside the bounds of the continent of Europe.

 

The Industrial Revolution unfolded with a series of inventions, given with inventor in parentheses as follows:  the steam engine (James Watt, 1770s), the spinning jenny, the flying shuttle, the cotton gin (Eli Whitney, 1790), steam engine driven railroad car, and the many machines necessary to the production of  textiles and other goods in factory production.  The factory was itself an innovation that grew out of the “putting out” system of homebound spinners and weavers under the authority of a given boss;  and then the gathering of laborers into single workshops for the manufacture of certain goods.  The factory was a much bigger undertaking, eventually run by companies and corporations under the authority of office managers (white collar workers) who gave

their orders to foremen on the floor with the (blue collar) workers doing the actual labor.  Those

providing the labor were for the most part rural folk, including many former serfs now free with the waning of the feudal system;  and many denied their livelihood because of tough times on the farm, including the fall-out from the Enclosure Movement in Great Britain (depriving yeomen farmers use of lands that until that movement could be used in common to graze animals).

 

The British led the way in the First Wave (1770-1820) of the Industrial Revolution that featured textile factories;  the building of railroads in Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States precipitated the Second Wave (1820-1890);  and the Third Wave occurred in Russia, Sweden, France, Italy, and Japan (1890-1914).  The invention of a new process for turning iron into steel (Henry Bessemer, 1855) gave makers of railroads, ships, and armaments a much stronger and more versatile metal.  The invention of the automobile in the late 19^th century, and especially mass production of these motorized vehicles on assembly lines for which Henry Ford was the pioneer, greatly increase the quest for iron for conversion into steel and for rubber needed to make tires.  Raw materials of many kinds were s wrought globally to make goods for expanding consumer bases throughout North America and Europe.

 

Work on the factory line brought steadier and sometimes better income than had been earned by those newly arrived from the countryside.  But the labor was tedious, the hours long, and the conditions frequently numbing in winter and stifling in summer.  Children as young as six or seven years old toiled alongside adults in confines wherein the air was poisonous, the floors dirty, and germs ubiquitous.

 

Under these circumstances, workers began to get the idea of organizing to improve their working conditions.  British spinners of cloth formed a union in 1829, and other trades initiatied efforts to the same during the 1830s.  Revolutionary movements of 1848 within the Austro-Hungarian empire failed in their nationalistic aims, but radicalized populations pressed forward with labor unionizing efforts.   In 1868, the forerunner of today’s Trades Union Congress was established, and subsequent efforts in the United States faced great difficulty until 20^th century breakthroughs occurred with the formation of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO); the latter eventually amalgamated as today’s AFL-CIO.

 

German philosopher and economic historian Karl Marx deemed trade unionism a partial step toward a revolution.  Marc steeped himself in history, arriving at the conclusion that most of the human past had featured class struggle.  At the primitive communism stage of hunters and gatherers people had known essential equality of circumstances and status;  but thereafter, historical stages evolved that successively featured a struggle between dominator and dominated:  master versus slave and then aristocrat vs. serf;  until the industrial era produced the fundamental struggle between bourgeoisie (the middle class, centered on factory owners and managers) vs. proletariat (factory workers and other wage laborers). Marx predicted that the proletariat would eventually rise up in a proletarian revolution, ceding for a time power to a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would scuttle the bourgeoisie aside and rule in behalf of the working people.  Under the dictatorship of the proletariat each person would give his or her labor for just compensation.  Since in industrial nations ;  and this

would involve the masses of people, Marx predicted that fair treatment for the masses would instill a new spirit of cooperation and egalitarianism in which there would eventually be a “withering away of the state” and work given on the basis of ability, for the good of all, with all needs met accordingly---  without the necessity of wages.  On the political continuum both of these stages would fall to the far left:  the proletarian dictatorship stage would be described by radical socialism;  at the fading away of the state, society would move even farther to the left under communism.     

 

The 19^th century was thus a time of tremendous economic, political, intellectual ferment.  Big changes come, too, with a fic advances that rivaled the Enlightenment (Age of Science or Age of Reason).  Michael Faraday (1830s) observed that moving a magnet through a coil produced electric current and Samuel B. Morse invented the Morse Code (1837) making use of telegraph technology viable.  Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone (1876).  Guglielmo Marconi built on the work of Heinrich Hertz to produce the first wireless radio transmission via airwaves.  Marl Benz gave life to the automobile with his invention of the internal combustion engine in 1906, by which time brothers Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright had produced the first heavier than air flying machine.

 

Science also launched humankind on a new path for understanding its own origins and relationship to other living things.  In 1859, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of the Species, having observed finches and other animals on the island of Galapagos for their adaptations to natural environment.  Through the ages, Darwin argued, those species that were most adaptable to change were those that survived to pass on their genes.  In his The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin presented the case for humankind’s descent from on originally ape-like ancestor.  Drawing furor that has not quite subsided in our own time, the essential notion is today embraced as fact among evolutionary biologists.

 

World War I

 

Nationalism and imperialism were on a crash course of global dimensions.  The Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires had for centuries competed for territory in Eastern Europe, but in the course of the 19^th century the Ottomans became less and less a factor.  The Ottoman Empire lost its control of territory in Serbia and Hungary early in the 19^th century, and after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) had little power on the European continent.  The Austro-Hungarian Empire sought to include Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, and Montenegro;  the empire’s leaders were able to annex Bosnia in 1908, but the Serbians had fought hard  to throw off Ottoman attempts at re-conquest and proved formidable;  neither did they like Austro-Hungary’s control of Bosnia, because a large population of Serbians lived in Bosnia.  A young Serbian, Gavrilo Princip, showed his contempt for Austro-Hungarian policy by assassinating the empire’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand as he was riding a motorized vehicle through the streets of Sarajevo on 28 June 1914.

 

This was the precipitating event of World War I, setting into motion the latest alliances (Triple Alliance:  Germany, Austro-Hungary, Italy;  and Triple Entente: France, Russia, Great Britain) formed in an era of global competition and suspicion.  On 28 July 1914, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia when the leaders of the latter refused annexation.  Russia mobilized against Austro-Hungary, Germany declared war on Russia (1 August 1914) and then on France (3 August 1914), motivating Great Britain to declare war on Germany (4 August 1914).  In wartime, the Germans, Austro-Hungarians, and the Italians were known as the Central Powers, while France, Great Britain, and Russia were known as the Allied Powers, or Allies;  with Russia’s inaction from 1917 forward, the United States would effectively replace that country in affiliation with the Allies upon entry into the war as of 1917.

 

War is regrettable and stupid.  World War I was enormously regrettable and abominably stupid. 

 

The British and French halted a German advance just 45 miles outside of Paris.  By late autumn 1914, the French and German opponents had dug a system of trenches stretching from the North Sea almost to Switzerland, forming the Western Front of the war.  Trenches moved by inches if they moved at all, day after day.  Soldiers died from multiple epidemics, including “trench foot” (with damp and infected flesh rotting away).  When soldiers did manage to break out of the trenches, they often became entangled in barbed wire and took deadly fire from recently invented machine guns.  Germans were the first to use poison gas (chlorine) in battle at Ypres in April 1915.  From February into December 2015, fighting at the highly strategic fortress city of Verdun cost 700,000 casualties, and a battle along the Somme cost 300,000 lives.  Very little had changed in terms of alignments along the trenches, but so delighted were military decision-makers on both sides that they planned more of the same sorts of contests for the months ahead.

 

On the much longer Eastern Front, digging trenches was blessedly impractical, so that Germany and Russia fought more mobile battles that were bloody but not quite as strategically and tactically stupid.  War on the eastern front, though, was also largely inconclusive, with a Russian victory at Tannenburg and the Massurian Lakes in August-September 1914;  German victory in the Gorlice-Tarnow Offensive of May 1915;  and Russian recapturing of much lost ground in the Brusilov Offensive in June 1916.  But by June 1917, Russians were swiftly traveling down the road to the Bolshevik (Communist) Revolution in Russia, and many of their units were refusing to fight.  This allowed the Germans to refocus attention and commit more resources to the Western Front.

 

The war at sea involved mostly German and British fleets and was also generally indecisive, as in the Battle for Jutland (off Denmark, 31 May-1 June 1916).  The British did destroy the German East Asia  Squadron in December 1914, leading the Germans to resort to “unrestricted warfare” with submarine attacks.  But the sinking of the passenger liner Lusitania with United States citizens aboard in 1915 contributed to American entry into the war that year.

 

At great human cost, the maneuvering and machinations of World War I were changing the terms of life on earth forever.  Deadly weapons portended a future in which war would be too horrific to contemplate if people just stopped to think---  which they generally would continue not to do.  Nationalism was now a major force in the consciousness of people everywhere on the planet, a force which for all of its rational historical dialectic was dubious in its moral implications and potential for perversion (as would be the case with Nazi Germany). 

 

And as nationalism rose on the tide of human need for affiliation, old empires that were conglomerations of nationalities who were all asked to revere a common emperor found that their entreaties were falling on unsympathetic folk no longer willing to identify as imperial subjects.  There was considerable irony that the forces of a relatively new empire, that of Great Britain, took the lead in demolishing the morale of those superintending administration in the old empire of the Ottomans, with British soldiers entering Jerusalem in December 1917 to deliver a crushing defeat in Palestine that pushed the tottering Ottomans into terminal disequilibrium.  The British were only thirty years away from having the foundations of their own empire destroyed by nationalist in India.

 

Then, in that very year of 1917, here came fresh troops from the United States, on the cusp of its own surge toward international prominence.  Blessedly spared the worst of the trenches, four complete American divisions had arrived by 1918, contributing mightily to Allied victories along the Marne River in July, around Amiens in August, and at the last German fortifications running along the Hindenburg line in September and October.   The German Kaiser, facing a potential revolution, signaled that German understood defeat:  his agents signed an armistice on 11 November 1918 that brought this astoundingly foolish  to polandbut historically huge event to an end.  

 

At the Paris Peace Conference that convened on 18 January 1919, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and U. S. President Woodrow Wilson substantially relented to the desire of French Prime Minister George Clemenceau to inflict a punitive treaty on Germany.  By the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, signed by the German representatives on 28 June 1919, Germany acknowledged guilt for waging the war, agreed to pay onerous reparations, and relented to the demand that the Kaiser be put on trial.  Then nation’s army was to be reduced to less than 100,000 troops and no tanks, its navy relegated to a token existence, and its aircraft grounded.  Hugely aggravating to the Germans, territorial concessions and losses included Alsace-Lorraine (a long-disputed French-German border region) to France, the area of Schlesswig to Denmark, many square miles (kilometers) in Prussia and Silesia to Poland, and the Saarland region to an international force of occupation. 

 

Officials in Great Britain and France soon signed and ratified the treaty;  officials of the United States signed in Paris, but the two-thirds vote for ratification in United States Senate could not be secured.  Ironically, those Senators who refused to vote for ratification objected to the Treaty of Versailles not on the basis of overwrought punishment of German, but rather on the provision a League of Nations.   The idea for such an international convention originated in the Fourteen Points of Woodrow Wilson, part of his plan to “make the world safe for democracy” and to recognize the nationalist aspirations of people former living under empires.

 

Most of the root causes of the second great global confrontation known as World War II (1939-1945) lay embedded in the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, especially in the way that the treaty provided an environment in which a particularly virulent form of nationalism could grow on the reduced territory of a defeated and chagrined German people to inflict a corporal and moral Holocaust on humankind.

 

Between the Two World Wars

 

Among the many startling happenings that shook the world in the period between the two wars, one with enormous portent for the geopolitical framework of the 20^th century was the transformation of Russia from a tsarist-led government that had never quite realized the modernizing ambitions of Peter the Great into a communist regime testing the theories of Karl Marx in action.

 

Political and Economic Transformation in Russia

                                                   

Russian government had been in most ways a work without progress during the 19^th century.  The Russian economy and infrastructure was an embarrassment by comparison with the most advanced nations of the Europe and even the young United States.  No all-weather road linked Moscow and Petrograd (St. Petersburg until 1830, and only in 1851 did the first railroad linking the two important urban centers commence service.  Rural society continued to evidence a feudalistic character:  Not until the reign of Alexander II (r. 1855-1881) did serfs gain the freedom for which they had clamored all through the first half of the century.   But peasant (former serfs, now humble [mostly tenant] farmers) remained discontented with economic conditions, and intellectuals opposed the tsarist system as an anachronistic purveyor of tyranny;  members of a group known as “People’s Will” that harbored such anti-tsarist sentiments orchestrated the assassination of Alexander II in March 1881.  Marxists organized a party in 1898.

 

The backwardness of Russia by comparison with the advanced economies and political structures of western Europe seemed manifest in the Russo-Japanese War (1904-1905).  The Japanese gave powerful evidence of their rapid progress into industrial modernity by defeating Russia which, shook to the foundations with this outcome, then underwent a classic revolutionary transformation by stages.  Tsar Nicholas II sought to maintain the traditional system by coopting moderate opponents with the formation of a Duma (parliament in 1905, then turning violently on leftist revolutionaries.  Nicholas then dissolved Dumas in 1906 and 1907 when he could not make meaningful accommodations for measures sought by moderates, and he was in perpetual conflict with duma that met during 1907-1912 and 1912-1917.  Inflationary economic conditions engendered via participation in World War I provoked strikes by industrial workers.  The turbulent year of 1917 then featured cessation of efforts in the war as violence on the streets of Petrograd and Moscow created pressures for the February Revolution and abdication of Nicholas II.

 

A Provisional Government under Prince Lvov tried vainly to maintain the option of moderate government, but the revolutionary Petrograd Soviet agitated for and and secured the prince’s removal.  The old guard then installed the moderate socialist Alexander Kerensky, but the latter also flailed vainly in the effort to forestall revolutionary forces from taking power.  Kerensky superintended a crackdown in July 1917, forcing the Bolshevik (revolutionary Communist) leader V. I. Lenin to flee to Finland.  But Kerensky then acted with a certain logic that showed how desperate was his position.  Faced with the insubordination of General Lvar Kornilov, he sought Bolshevik assistance.  The Bolsheviks gleefully complied, then seized the opportunity to plot Kerensky’s demise:  Leon Trotsky organized pro-Bolshevik units for the seizure of railroad stations and telephone exchanges, superintending a near-bloodless coup, resulting in Kerensky’s surrender and the Bolshevik ascension to power in the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) or Soviet Union.   

 

During 1918-1920, the Bolsheviks fought a civil war against the disparate forces ranged against them.   Socialist-Revolutionaries (SR) established an alternative government at Samara (on the Volga River).  Representatives of the military from the tsarist regime (the “White Army,” as opposed to the “Red Army” of the Bolsheviks) fought for power:   General Kornilov went southward, Admiral  Kolchak to Siberia, General Yudenich to the northwest.  Early in the struggle for power, the Bolsheviks faced severe difficulty:  Kolchak pushed far into the Ural Mountains;  and General Denikin took over the forces of Kornilov after the latter’s death, drawing close to Moscow.  But the Red Army fought back effectively against these two major contingents in 1919, and in 1920 they defeated General Wrangel when the latter attempted to take Crimean peninsula.  With this latter victory, serious opposition to the Bolsheviks was at an end, but efforts still had to be expended to meet resistance from various anarchists, nationalists, and Islamic militia.     

 

V. I. Lenin oversaw the establishment of a highly centralized government and firmly enforced the Communist Party line.  His government issued targets to key industrial and commercial enterprises for the production of goods, and emphasis on workplace safety and wages made for much improved conditions for the working people (proletariat).  Such policy seemed in accord with a communist regime.  But his New Economic Policy represented a flexible approach to the economics of rural life, giving peasants themselves more decision-making power than centralizing Bolshevik purists would have liked.

 

When Lenin died in 1922, Politburo (powerful decision-making directorate) member Joseph Stalin quickly maneuvered past his rivals, ousted Leon Trotsky from the Party in 1926, and beginning in 1928 instituted the first of several Five-Year Plans designed to speed the transformation of the Soviet Union into a highly industrialized state.  He also ordered a program by which the land of kulaks (prosperous peasants)  was expropriated and transferred to collective farms.  These policies caused numerous economic and social dislocations, including massive famine in the Ukraine during 1932-1933;  and shortage of food and many consumer goods in the cities, given the imbalanced emphasis on production in heavy industry (steel, machinery, tools, munitions, tanks, aircraft, automobiles, locomotives, and construction materials).       

 

With many segments of the new Russian (Soviet) society in misery, opposition was widespread but ultimately intimidated through the “Great Terror” of 1936-1938, during which secret police purged many in the party elite and army;  690,000 people were executed;  and many consigned to the gulag (network of prison camps).  Stalin proved adroit at rewarding those who supported his ruthless policies, keeping a firm body of support until his death in 1953.  He succeeded in the transformation of heavy industry that he sought, as Soviet factories churned out weighty producer goods;  but food and consumer shortages had left many suffering, and the political atmosphere in the nation had been oppressive, murderous, stifling.      

                                                                   

Thus had the first major experience with the implementation of Marxism on a broad scale had gone terribly wrong.  Karl Marx had forecast that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” would replace governments that had represented the interests of the bourgeoisie, governing the masses of people in industrial nations in such a way as to inculcate a cooperative ethic that would eliminate the need for any sort of government.  In Marx’s terms, there would be a “withering away of the state’ as people learned to contribute their labor for the common good, rather than for personal profit.  Succeeding, therefore, the stage of radical socialism led by the dictatorship of the proletariat would be the permanent social and political formulation of pure communism, in which there was no need for government, and everyone received what she or he needed materially, “according to (her or his) need.”

 

There two key problems with aspiring to Marxist revolution in Russia. 

 

First, Russia was not advanced enough industrially for the masses of people to be of the proletariat (urban working class, especially factory laborers):  T an urban the masses of people in Russia were still humble peasants.  Peasants have different characteristics from the proletariat:  They represent the masses of traditional society and have not undergone the wrenching and atomizing experience of moving to setting for the purpose of laboring for a wage, rather than some portion of a crop yield.  Peasants are culturally conservative, not likely to form the basis for a new political and social system.

 

Second, neither Lenin nor Stalin had been members of the proletariat.  Karl Marx did not fully explain his idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” leaving much for interpretation.  Logically, such a dictatorship would be run by members of the proletariat;  at the very least, such a government would be run by people with firm ties to the masses of working people and a deep understanding of their capacity for transforming themselves into cooperative laborers striving for the common good.  Lenin seemed to have some feel for the masses, and his New Economic Policy was framed with a realistic assessment of how far and how fast peasants might be persuaded to collectivize.  But Stalin demonstrated a poor understanding of the nature of the peasantry, little affinity for the proletariat, callous disregard for the masses of people, a shallow understanding of Marxist theory, and brutality in in the creation of a state concerning which Marx would have been horrified.  Under Stalin’s leadership, “dictatorship of the proletariat” became “dictatorship of that segment of the Communist Party membership that will do the will of Joseph Stalin.”  More briefly, “dictatorship of the proletariat” became simply “dictatorship.

 

The Great Depression

 

Optimism of spirit characterized life in the United States during “The Roaring 1920s.”  American soldiers had contributed greatly to victory in World War I, with relatively few deaths among U. S. soldiers by comparison with their European counterparts.   Women in the United States gained legal recognition as voting citizens with the passage of the 19^th Amendment in 1920.  Women felt freer in matters of dress and public presence, dancing to the Charleston and visiting ‘speak easies” at which owners of saloons found ways to disregard the 18^th Amendment banning the production and sale of alcoholic beverages.  Even many middle class people owned automobiles with the appearance of the Model T and other mass-produced vehicles.  And businesses seemed to be thriving as indicated particular by values listed on the stock exchanges.  

 

But those high prices on stock exchanges were a problem.  By 1927, factories were churning out goods for which the market was limited, business enterprise officials were overstating company profit levels, and investors kept on paying the inflated stock share prices.  By October 1929, some investors were realizing their mistake, pulling selling shares and scaling down the level of their investment.  Then, after several days of precipitous declines, panic reached a peak on 28 and 29 October 1929, with stock market share prices declining 25% across the two days.  The panic became general:  Businesses laid off workers, banks called in loans, customers claimed their bank deposits in full, bankruptcies and mortgage foreclosures became endemic. 

 

At the international level, investors from the United States withdrew foreign loans and in eross Europe, where economics were still recovering from the ravages of war, and the network of loans that had been set up to facilitate Germany’s payment of reparations .  The ascending crisis severely damaged international trade, further damaging commodity prices, which by 1932 had fallen to 45% of their 1929 value.  A harmful trend of economic protectionism set in, with the President Herbert Hoover administration in the United States ill-advisedly leading the way, imposing via the Smoot-Hawley Tariff (1930) taxes on imports in the 42%-50% range.

 

Discontented masses in Europe sought answers in the promises of brutal dictators.  Benito Mussolini, backed by his informal militia (“Black Shirts”), induced King Victor Emmanuel III to request that his Fascists form a government in 1926.  In the same year the authoritarian Marshal Pilsudski took power in Poland.  In 1933, Adolf Hitler used his position as chancellor to persuade the Diet (parliament) in Germany to designate the years 1933-1936 for his exercise of near-dictatorial powers. 

And in 1936 General Francisco Franco led armies under his control from Morocco into Madrid, from which he political authority in Spain.  Forced to defend his claim by Republican forces in what became the Spanish Civil War, Franco’s Nationalists fought through the stout challenge to prevail by 27 March 1939.

                                                                                                                  

These seizures of power by rightists were in part a reaction to the threat of communists on the left.  Communism promised proletarian revolution that would expropriate the bourgeoisie and the politicians doing their bidding.  Fascism vowed to unite all classes for the glorification of a militarized nation-state strong enough to expand the nation’s territorial borders.  Adolf Hitler opportunely took advantage of low spirits, high unemployment, and outrageous inflation in Germany to call people to a movement that promised paramount international power as a counter to the shame of Versailles. 

 

Extolling the Germans as first among an Aryan race of blond-haired and physically robust people, the Nazi (National Socialist) version of fascism branded Slavs, Catholics, homosexuals, the handicapped, dark-skinned people, and---  especially---  Jews as unfit for citizenship and candidates for extermination.  In death camps such as Auschwitz, an abominable tally of 6,000,000 Jews went to their deaths in gas chambers constructed by the Nazis at the death camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmino, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.  These death camps were labeled the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Question,” with reference to the people many Germans accused of using their acumen to manipulate German economy and society for their own gain.            

 

World War II

 

During 1933-1936, Adolf Hitler contravened the Treaty of Versailles by conscripting soldiers again in the manner of the early decades of the 20^th century;  a substantial number of these troops were stationed in the Rhineland region so often contested with France.  Referencing close historical bonds with the German-speaking Austrian people, he sent troops into Austria (the land of Hitler’s birth) in March 1936, proclaiming a “union” of that nation with Germany.  At a 1938 conference at Munich, Hitler secured permission from the leaders of Great Britain, France, and Italy for German occupation of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia.  Concluding that the leadership of these European rivals had the spine of “little worms,” Hitler was emboldened to invade Poland on 1 September 1939.  This stiffened the spine of the those leaders whom Hitler identified with the policy of appeasement, so that this evetn precipitated World War II.

 

But the Allies (as German opponents were once again called) dithered, building up their stocks of weapons, giving Hitler plenty of time to get his troops moving and the air force (Luftwaffe) that had ordered rebuilt flying.   His military commanders utilized a heighted mass attack known as Blitzkrieg, employing huge contingents of soldiers and tanks in a devastating show of power.  Denmark and Norway fell in April 1940, followed by the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg in May.  German forces marched on to Paris, entering on 19 June;  by 22 June, the leadership in France felt compelled to sign an armistice with Germany.

 

Hitler’s next major move was on Great Britain.  He ordered an air attack first in order to achieve superiority of the skies.  Aerial combat raged from August through October 1940.  But German plans to overwhelm Great Britain’s Royal Air Force with the aim of capturing all main airfields failed, as the latter acquired new Spitfire and Hurricane fighter aircraft, forcing the Germans to focus their greatest air power on London.  The bombing of London was intense, but new British Prime Minister Winston Churchill rallied his people to the resistance.  This last phase of the Battle for Britain began on 7 September 1940 and lasted into October;  by the end of that month, the Luftwaffe ceased the bombing:  the tenacity of the British people had outlasted German willingness to continue steady losses of its finest aircraft without any clear indication that victory was possible.

 

Seeking Lebensraum (“living space”) for Germany’s growing population and seeking to eliminate the strongest viable ally of the British, Hitler invaded the USSR in June 1941.  German victories were swift until December, at which point the Germans were driven back after having mounted a serious threat to Moscow.  Foiled at their attempt to capture Moscow, and with temperatures turning so frigid that the lubricant froze in their tanks, the Germans had to wait through spring to mount an attack on Stalingrad, where they hope to control that city’s Volga river and railroad routes carrying oil supplies to the arms factories of central Russia.  But here, too, Germans initial success proved nondurable, as forces in Stalingrad held on tenaciously and then launched a vigorous counterattack.  Tough fighting continued until February 1943, at which point the remnants of the 6^th army had to surrender, counting 170,000 of their troops dead.

 

A major motivation of Hitler in conducting this ultimately failed campaign was to neutralize Russia so as to concentrate on Great Britain as the Nazi’s most formidable adversary.  But the time the Russian campaign had come and gone not so well, Hitler should have been recognizing another telling moment:  The United States had entered the war on 8 December after the bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese.  Japanese society had been militarized in the course of the early 1930s, and rapid industrial development had created the need for raw materials not found on nation’s islands.  Japanese naval leaders and their supporters lobbied for a quick strike against the United States naval base of Pearl Harbor on Hawaii to stymie any response that the Roosevelt administration might decide to make in response to the planned Japanese advance in Asia and the Pacific.  Thus came the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the “date which will live in infamy” according to President Roosevelt in a speech that he gave as Congress declared war on Japan the next day.  Japanese Admiral Nagumo had sent forth two waves of bombers in an attack that had sunk 18 naval vessels (including eight battleships) and 400 aircraft---  compared with the loss of only 29 Japanese planes,   

 

By the time of the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the entrance of the United States into World War II in late in 1941, the Nazis were in the midst of another campaign that they hoped would allow them to regain the momentum that they had enjoyed in the early Blitzkrieg assaults on the more vulnerable nations of northern Europe.  Thus, from January 1941 through May 1943, German and Italian forces waged a campaign in North Africa that was countered by British soldiers.  The Italians actually took the initiative in the early stages of the North Africa campaign, but swings in fortune were not trending favorably for Italian General Graziani late in 1940.  He was aiming ultimately for control of Egypt but was forced back as far as Tripolitania in Libya as of December 1940.  Then, within a few weeks there came news that the British had taken the strategic city of Tobruk on 22 January 1941. 

 

Shortly thereafter, German General Rommel took leadership of the Axis effort in North Africa, fighting tough battles to advance successfully for recapture of Tobruk in June 1942.  But the “Desert Fox” (as Rommel was called for his slyness as a tactician) lost the battle of armaments and wits at the 12-day battle for El Alamein in October 1942.  Forced to retreat into Tunisia, Rommel there encountered United States troops, fresh from landings in Morocco and Algeria.  Rommel’s forces resisted vigorously but were ultimately overwhelmed.  Rommel flew out to Germany in March 1943, and the last Axis holdouts in Tunisia surrendered in May 13.   

 

By this time, the Japanese were rolling from victory to victory in the Asia-Pacific theater.  Even before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Japanese had built an empire that included Korea, Manchuria, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the major cities of eastern China.  During January and February 1942, Japanese troops swept through Malaysia and Singapore.  The latter was a major blow to British pride and strategic stance.  Singapore was heavily fortified, considered by the British to be their bastion in Southeast Asia.  When British General Percival surrendered the 100,000 troops under his command, it was the largest capitulation in British history.

 

From bases on Taiwan, the Japanese launched an effort in the Philippines that would become their fulcrum for success in the South Pacific.  Having held these islands since 1898, the United States had intensified their presence in the Philippines after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.  But with the Japanese landing, United States General Douglass MacArthur ordered a retreat to the island of Corregidor.  There American forces put up a stout but ultimately futile defense, forced by the Japanese to complete evacuation by 5 May 1942.  By this time, Burma had also fallen to Japanese attacks, forcing another British retreat in March and April 1942.  At about this same time, having already (27 February 1942) won a major naval victory in the Battle of the Java Sea, the Japanese successively took New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).  With these victories, especially with Japanese air force, navy, and amphibious units well-positioned after the victory in the Java Sea, Japan seemed poised to make a move on Australia.  But the Java Sea victory in fact would prove to be the pinnacle of Japanese success in the Asia-Pacific. 

 

Mussolini fell from power in Italy on 25 July 1943, fifteen days after the Allied forces made a move on the Italian peninsula.  The Italian campaign, though, did not go as smoothly or conclusively as the campaign in North Africa.  Fighting was tough, though, as German reinforcements landed and the American troops had to attempt to breach sturdy lines of defense.  Troops in an Allied amphibious landing at Anzio in December 1943 got bogged down and faced five months of difficult battles before finally forcing evacuation of German troops around Mount Cassino in May 1944.  Allied troops entered Rome on 4 June 1944 but did not secure German surrender in Italy until 2 May 1945, just six days before the official end of war in the European theater.

 

On 6 June 1944 (just two days after the entry into Rome), the Allies launched “Operation Overlord,” one of the most audacious and successful military efforts in history.   This was an amphibious landing on the northern European coast.  The Germans expected such a landed but thought that it would come near Calais.  When the landing in fact came at Normandy, the Germans were caught off-guard.  Heavy Allied air and naval bombardment at four landing points had the Germans reeling.  But a fifth bombardment, at Omaha Beach, did not have the same impact.  Here, the German positions were exceptionally well fortified;  the Allies did ultimately prevail in the course of that very same day (known as “D-Day”), but at the cost of 3,000 casualties.

 

Landing 130,000 troops by nightfall, the Allies linked the five beachheads into a front that allowed entry for armored vehicles, heavy artillery, and steadily arriving troops.  The Germans fought tenaciously, tough, so that victory at the city of Caen (a major objective) took until 18 July 1944.  But the German resistance was costly in terms troops and materiel, including the loss of 2,000 tanks.  The Germans had no hope of holding Normandy or forestalling allied victory in the European theater at this point, but Hitler ordered that his troops make no tactical withdrawals and defend every inch of ground.  In that context, the Allies faced a tough fight for the final victory, hampered also by very uneven terrain and lousy weather.                                                      

 

Allied troops marched southward from Normandy toward Paris from late July 1944, troops from another landing on the southern Riviera captured Toulon and Marseilles by the end of August.  This put the Allies in a position to trap German forces in a pincer movement as these arrivals from the Riviera  trekked northward toward Lyons while those from Normandy continued their southern advance.  Paris fell on 24 August 1944, and German troops in the Belgian port of Antwerp succumbed to Allied forces on 4 September, but from that temporal point the Allies faced eight months of strenuous fighting.  Tenacious German troops trapped 6,000 British Soldiers at Arnhem on 21 September.  During December 1944-January 1945, Hitler ordered an all-out, last-ditch attempt to put the momentum of the European theater back on the German side.  Over 500,000 German troops advanced in the maneuver called the “Battle of the Bulge,” at first stunning Allied soldiers with the ferocity and the numbers that they faced in the German onslaught.  But Americans survived such an advance on their positions at Bastogne, Belgium, and even were able to counterattack to reduce the “bulge” in the German formation.  The Germans suffered 100,000 casualties and saw 1,000 aircraft downed.  The allies crossed the Rhine River on 24 March 1944, faced only occasional resistance at the Elbe;  there, they linked up with the westward advancing Red Army of the Soviets.   

 

In the months after the critical February 1943 victory at Stalingrad, the Red Army went on the offensive in an effort to drive the Germans out of the Soviet Union.  Struggles to do so were huge, often involving heartening advances followed by forced retreats;  but in the course of 12-13 July 1943, the Soviets won the largest tank battle in history (involving more than 6,000 tanks) at Kursk, and by 6 December 1943 the Red Army had taken Kiev.  Fighting waned during a another harsh winter, but in late June 1944 the Soviets surrounded and then entered Minsk, moving the next month into Poland.  Polish insurgents failed in an uprising during autumn 1944, necessitating a substantial effort on the part of the Red Army, which did control Warsaw on 17 January 1945.  With the major German contingent in Warsaw no longer a factor, the Soviets moved toward Berlin, knowing that the British, American, and Free French forces were doing the same.  Along the way, one million German troops, many of them young boys, put up a fanatical resistance to the two million Belorussian troops commanded by General Zhukov.  But the showdowns of April presaged an imminent German defeat:  On April 30 April 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide;  on 1 May 1945, the Berlin garrison surrendered;  and on 7 May 1945, official of the German successor government at Flensburg (northwest Germany) signed documents of surrender.  The Allies signaled that the next day, 8 May 1945, would be designated Victory in Europe

(V-E) Day).     

 

But the war with Japan was not over.  After Japanese victory in the Battle of the Java Sea (February 1942), the Japanese faced much tougher circumstances in the Asia-Pacific.  With the United States fully supplied and ready for the war in the Pacific by May 1942, the United States navy registered a major victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea, inflicting great damage on the Japanese fleet.  Then, in early June 1942, a Japanese attempt to take the Midway Islands from the Americans failed miserably, at a cost of four air carriers and 70% of the pilots in the Japanese navy.  Then in February 1943, the Japanese began to lose islands that they had held, as United States amphibious forces ousted them from Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.  By November of that year, the Americans went on with their “island hopping” maneuvers, wresting the Gilbert Islands and the Marianas from Japanese control.

 

Victory at Leyte Gulf in October 1944 cleared sea lanes for United States reoccupation of the Philippines, which occurred in March 1945. 

 

About the same time, in a multiple-week struggle that cost 23,000 United States Marine casualties, the Americans took Iwo Jima.  From there, United States air raids on Tokyo caused great damage, totaling 100,000 in the firestorm created by such raids on 9 and 10 March.  Still, the Japanese committed 120,000 troops in defense of Okinawa (26 March-June 30 1945), losing all but 7,500 of these troops, who collectively and individually recorded ferocious and fanatical feats of supra-nationalistic spirit.   

 

Such rabid resistance convinced U. S. President Harry Truman that advisers urging use of the atomic bomb were correct in seeking to avoid the enormous United States casualties likely to be sustained with an invasion of the Japanese home islands.  Truman authorized dropping bombs on Hiroshima (6 August 1945) and Nagasaki (9 August 1945).  On 14 August 1945, Japanese Emperor Hirohito issued a proclamation ending Japanese resistance, and on 2 September 1945 Japanese officials signed the official document of surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

 

With the signing of this document, all theaters were quiet and World War II was at an end.  

 

 

VI.  Third-Stage Modern Period (1946-2015)

 

Life changed in many ways for people in the aftermath of World War II. 

 

While armed conflict continued to be a major factor in human existence, the dominant conflict for much of the post-world War II period was a cold, not hot, war:  the struggle for global influence that raged between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR, or Soviet Union).  The United States succeeded Great Britain as the Western world’s more powerful and influential nation.  There was a decided trend for colonial empires to crumble and for new nations to emerge, some of them awkwardly so, geographically defined as they were by old colonial boundaries.  Television became a major force, superseding radio as the dominant form of mass media.  While the United States continued to be essentially a center-right liberal democratic republic, the central government had a greater role to play in that nation than had been the case before the Depression and World War II.  Meanwhile, the democratic socialist strand ran ever stronger through the Scandinavian nations, Canada, and much of Western Europe;  and authoritarian republican (non-monarchical) governmental systems could be observed in much of Latin America, Africa, and Asia.  Muslim movements in many places and of many ideological strands surged in aversion to unwanted Western influence.  Computers and other electronic devices became routine factors in third-stage modernity.

 

The Emergence of the United States as Leader of the Western World

 

The United States contributed mightily to Allied victories in both World War I and World War II, while having no battles from either war fought on American soil.   Two centuries into its existence, the United States was leveraging it its size and natural resource wealth to increasing advantage in asserting its international economic and military power.  Median household income rose in each of the three decades immediately succeeding World War II, creating a greatly expanded consumer market.  Eighty-five percent (85%) of homes in the United States had a television by 1958. Children in the United States were two to three inches (five to eight centimeters) taller in 1950 than their counterparts had been in 1900.  Life expectancy increased from 51 to 71 years old.  Housing construction boomed and migration to the suburbs became a major trend in American life;  but those left at the urban core lived at an economic level and in conditions far more violent and gang-infested than was the case for those who had moved out.

 

On the strength of general prosperity, the United States assumed a position of leadership in the Western World that became counterpoised to the leadership of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe.

 

At the Yalta (on the Crimean peninsula) and Potsdam (in Germany) conferences of 1945 Josef Stalin made clear that in the aftermath of World War II he intended to assert the leadership of the Soviet Union over the Baltic states, Poland, and Eastern Europe in general.   Concerned that the Soviets would also make inroads in Western Europe if the tattered economies in those nations were not repaired from the devastation of war, in 1948 President Truman gave Secretary of State George C. Marshall the go-ahead to announce his “Marshall Plan” of ultimately $12 billion in economic aid to 16 nations of Western and Southern Europe, to be dispensed through 1952.  The recipient nations were mostly those who in 1950 had formed the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and in 1957 would form the European Economic Community (EEC) to facilitate greater economic integration and free movement of goods, services, and labor.

 

 

The Cold War

 

Early in 1948, the Western Allies (the United States, British, and French forces) decided to unite their areas of Berlin, which had been divided into four parts by the terms of an agreement at Yalta.  Each of the three Allies dominated a part, with the fourth occupied by the Soviet Union.  The situation was awkward, since the city itself was enveloped by the eastern part of Germany that was controlled by Soviet troops.  The Soviets opposed the plan to unite the three Western-held parts of Berlin, so that, as an expression of disapproval, Stalin ordered the closing of all land routes into Berlin.  The Allies then countered by airlifting food and other supplies into the city, thereby feeding two million people. In the atmosphere of what came to be known as the “Cold War,” the Allies in April 1949 signed  a mutual security pact calling for the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).  Soon after Stalin’s death in 1953, new Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev  claimed to support “peaceful coexistence” with the West;  but in 1955 he countered the formation of NATO with the establishment of the Warsaw Pact for the mutual security of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations under Soviet domination.  The Soviets were also quickly establishing what Winston Churchill

had dubbed an “Iron Curtain” across Europe, dividing East and West.  The Soviets demonstrated that they would tolerate no dissidence against their influence, most dramatically crushing a 1956 revolt led by Imre Nagy, who announced his intention to withdraw Hungary from the Warsaw Pact.  And the Soviets consistently manifested their commitment to keeping the leadership in Czechoslovakia to their liking:  Anti-Soviet dissidence dissipated with the mysterious disappearance of two anti-Soviet ministers in 1948; and, twenty years later (August 1968), Soviet troops invaded, putting an end to the “Warsaw Spring” reforms of Alexander Dubcek, whose government was replaced with one in sync with Soviet policy preferences.     

 

From the late 1940s through the late 1980s, most of the world’s great conflicts were waged with implications for the Cold War.  In the aftermath of World War II, war broke out between contenders for power in Korea, with the North led by communist Kim Il Sung and the South led by conservative strongman, Syngman Rhee.  The Soviets had at the end of World War II occupied the Korea north of the 38^th parallel, while the United States stationed troops south of that line.  Both nations withdrew their troops in 1949, but after Sung sent troops into the South on 25 June 1950, United States troops returned as part of United Nations contingents sent to prevent the South from being overrun.  In September 1950, troops under the command of General Douglass MacArthur landed at Inchon, by October had crossed the 38^th parallel, and then pressed on to the Chinese border.  But at that point, Chinese troops came pouring over the border, pressing the attack to force United Nations troops back over the 38^th parallel. 

 

General MacArthur would have liked to have mounted a more aggressive response against Chinese forces, but President Truman considered the potential loss of life that would occur with a more intense and potentially protracted effort and settled for a stalemate.  MacArthur went public with his objections, prompting Truman to dismiss him from command.  MacArthur then issued the famous statement that “Old soldiers never die:  They just slowly fade away.”  The war did not officially come to a conclusion until both sides an armistice in July 1953.  The two sides confirmed their positions as divided at the 18^th parallel.  That is still the armed border in 2015.  North of the border, people are governed as the People’s Republic of Korea;  south of the border is the Democratic Republic of Korea.  The former is a repressive, totalitarian regime claiming to follow a communist ideology.  The latter for many decades was an authoritarian rightist regime but eventually evolved into an economically successful government of the liberal democratic republic type. 

 

The Chinese troops that had crossed the border to push back United Nations forces were those of the newly established (1 October 1949) People’s Republic of China, led by Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung).  Mao had led his Chinese Communist Party triumphantly over the Guomindang (Kuomintang) of Chiang Kai-shek in the Chinese Civil War of 1945-1949.  This was a blow to the United States, which had supported Chiang’s government (Republic of China) as it retreated to city of Chongqing in Sichuan Province and endeavored to retake the Chinese eastern seaboard from the Japanese in World War II. 

 

Chiang had seemed to be the heir apparent to Sun Yat-sen, who emerged as the most important revolutionary figure when the Qing Dynasty had fallen in 1912.  Sun established the Republic of China in that year, but during the 1912-1927 period most of China was actually dominated by warlords who sectioned China off into separately governed areas.  Chiang Kai-shek during 1927-

1928 moved from his then-capital of Nanjing on a Northern Expedition to rout major warlord forces.  Largely successful in that effort, he then turned on the Chinese Communists, forcing them to leave headquarters in Jiangxi Province to head westward and then northward on the famous Long March (1934-1936) to the caves of Yan’an in Shaanxi (Shensi) Province.  There Mao wrote, thought, oversaw strikes against the Japanese in northern China, and constructed the strategy of peasant-based revolution that brought him eventual victory in 1949.  Chiang Kai-shek’s government, armed forces, and supporters retreated to the island of Taiwan;  although Chiang claimed that he and the Guomindang would return to power on the mainland, Chiang died in 1975 still ensconced on Taiwan.

 

Leaders in the United States were very unsettled in facing the reality of two huge nations now being under communist control.  Any real association of communism with the thoughtful dialectic and the cooperative ethic advanced by Karl Marx had little presence in the assessments of leaders and citizens of the United States.  Most Americans viewed communism in terms of its appropriation by Stalin’s totalitarian regime, the struggle with fellow the “superpower” in post-Stalinist Soviet Union, and the revolutionary, anti-capitalist spirit of Mao and other Chinese Communists.

 

Then Fidel Castro gave United States leaders another transformation about which to worry.   Castro was originally an ideologically vague, leftist revolutionary focused specifically on the overthrow of the rightist dictator Fulgencio Batista (in power since 1933), who was friendly to United States capitalist interests.  Batista’s forces proved inept at ousting Castro’s soldiers from the Sierra Maestro hills.  Given such ineptitude, and after the orthodox Communist Party of Cuba threw its support to Castro’ guerrilla movement in 1958, Castro felt emboldened to go on the offensive.  His troops moved through the strategic central city of Santa Clara in 31 December 1958 with very little resistance;  they moved swiftly  on to Havana, entering on 8 January 1959.  Batista had fled in panic after Santa Clara fell to Castro’s troops, so that Fidel easily slipped into the power vacuum at the capital.

 

The administration of U. S. President John Kennedy was so concerned over these events that it sent an ill-fated contingent to the shores of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs.  In the aftermath of this disastrous attempt to oust him from power, Castro accepted economic assistance from, and an alliance with, the Soviet Union.  In 1962, Russian leader Khrushchev dispatched missiles to bases in Cuba, prompting Kennedy and his advisers to consider a military response that in the nuclear age they knew might produce catastrophic consequences.  The nuclear threat loomed in any case from those Soviet missiles pointed at the United States.  In the end, though, disaster was avoided via negotiations conducted via telephonic and telegraphic communications:  The Soviets ultimately agreed to American demands for withdrawal of the missiles.

 

From that point on, such direct military standoffs gave way to competition for global influence, the possibilities for which could be maximized in shows of industrial production and technological progress.  In this context, the “Space Race” accelerated in competitive ferocity.  The Soviets had been  impressive at the early stages, launching the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, into Earth orbit on 4 October 1957;  the United States countered with the launching of its own satellite, Explorer, in January 1958, but the Soviets trumped that accomplishment on 12 April 1961 by launching the first human being (Yuri Gagarin) into space.  From that point forward, though, the momentum shifted to the United States: 

 

Alan Shepard matched Gagarin’s feat on 5 May 1961;  Kennedy announced an acceleration of the space program, with the aim of a lunar landing within a decade;  and, indeed, U. S. astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped on to the moon on 20 July 1960.    

 

Another hot conflict with implications for the Cold War was the war in Indochina.  Since the middle 19^th century, the French had invested much imperial interest in the region of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam that they called Indochina.  But with the rising nationalist spirit among people around the globe, animating a people long steeled for struggle against a powerful outsider (for most of history, China), the Vietnamese agitated for independence in the aftermath of World War II.  They ousted their French overlords in 1954, then fought among themselves. 

 

On 21 July 1954, a Geneva Conference was held to formalize the French exit and to fix (at the 17^th parallel) the line dividing northern Vietnamese under the revolutionary guerrilla leader Ho Chi Minh (who increasingly identified as communist) from southern Vietnamese under anti-communist right dictator Ngo Dinh Diem.  But Ho urged the formation of a southern revolutionary group, the Vietcong, to oppose Diem;  the latter was assassinated in 1963, to be replaced after a few months of political jousting and jostling by Nguyen Van Thieu, who led South Vietnam  during 1965-1969. 

 

The Vietminh forces of the North and their Vietcong allies in the South were much more disciplined and ideologically committed than were their counterparts among the regular forces backing Thieu.  To bolster the latter, President Lyndon Johnson elevated the United States commitment in Vietnam by sending ground troops in 1965;  over the years, the monetary and bodily investment increased greatly, so that by the end of the war in 1973, approximately 57,000 United States troops and hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese lives had been lost---  without the claim of victory.  In fact, the morale of the northern forces had become bolder with the “Tet Offensive” of 1968 that precipitated a drawdown of American troops, and that sort of organization and vigor led to a victory of the soldiers of the North (now the People’s Republic of Vietnam) in 1975.

 

All of this was unnerving in the context of the Cold War.  In China, the turbulent Cultural Revolution had raged through the late 1960s and still was a force in the 1970s.  The situation in Korea was unsettled, communist governments presided over Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.   Revolutionary groups identifying as Marxist contended with established, often rightist authoritarian regimes in many areas of Africa, Asia and the Pacific, South and Central America.  The United States seemed insecure in its ability to stem the tide of communism, and in this insecurity often allied with governments that showed little regard for personal liberty and human rights;  this was true, for example, in the association of the United States government with leadership in South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Chile, and Zaire.

 

The United States also at best simply observed as major nationalist movements overturned one colonial regime after another.

 

Anti-Colonial Revolts    

 

India

 

At the end of world War II, the British, French, Portuguese, and Dutch all still held numerous territories overseas; but the nationalist impulse was strong and the days of colonial emopire were numbered.

 

Great Britain lost the biggest colonial prize of all with the concession of India’s independence in 1947.  The quest for independence had been a theme on the subcontinent ever since the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885.  By the early decades of the 20^th century, leadership of the Indian independence movement was largely in the hands of Mohandas K. Gandhi, and advocate for nonviolent resistance in a movement that he called satyagraha. 

 

Literally meaning, “holding fast to the truth,” in leading the satyagraha movement Gandhi stressed the importance of the means, as well as the end, of victory.  A deeply thoughtful and religious person (Hindu but with a decidedly pluralistic outlook), Gandhi insisted that no human being has the power of God to know Truth (with upper-case “T”).  The best that a human being can know is the truth (with lower-case “T”) as one perceives it to be at any point in time.  For Gandhi, truth must be tested in the field of action against the one viewed as an opponent---  never the enemy.  If one’s opponent can prove one wrong, then one must change viewpoint;  but if not, the opponent should change. 

 

Gandhi was of the conviction that there should be an exchange in ideas, so that human beings move closer to the truth, with the goal of converting, rather than vanquishing, one’s opponent in the struggle. This, noted could sometimes mean enduring the violent opposition of one’s opponent, but Gandhi said that willingness to suffer was an indication of sincerity that could ultimately deepen human understanding, impel one closer to Truth, and in the process move one and one’s fellows in a movement closer to the practical goals sought.  Gandhi called his supporters (satyagrahis) to many courageous actions, such as the Salt March of 1930, in which they contested the British salt monopoly while enduring the brutal clubs of British soldiers.

 

On the strength of Gandhi’s efforts, and those of other independence leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru, the British were compelled to grant independence.  But Indian independence was messy.  Gandhi had sought reconciliation between Hindus and Muslims in a unified state, but when independence came in 1947, it came on the basis of a division into the predominately Hindu state of India and the predominately Muslim state of Pakistan.  Even Pakistan was divided into segments, West Pakistan and East Pakistan (the latter of which became Bangladesh in 1971 after still more bloodshed) that were far-flung across hundreds of miles.  And in the violence and confusion that suffused Hindu-Muslim disputes in 1947, Gandhi lost his life:  The proponent of nonviolence and unity was struck down by a fellow Hindu who seethed at Gandhi’s empathy for Muslims and advocacy for their rights within a unified state.

 

Elsewhere in Asia

 

The imperialist era was also coming to a conclusion elsewhere in Asia.  Japanese invasion and occupation of Indonesia during 1942-1945 signaled the end of Dutch rule in the islands that had first (15^th century) intrigued the West as chief source of spices;  and by the time (17^th century) that the Dutch claimed control of what we today know as Indonesia were also prized for their strategic location as gateway to Southeast and East Asia).   The Dutch tried to reestablish control in the aftermath of world War II but lost a bitter armed and diplomatic struggle to the backers of nationalist leader Sukarno:  The Dutch formally recognized Indonesian Independence in December 1949.

 

Marxist rebels attempted a coup in 1965 but in the counterattack by General Suharto’s forces suffered 500,000 deaths;  Suharto used his position to political advantage in ousting Sukarno from power.  Suharto cultivated favor with the United States and other Western powers due to his pro-capitalist policies and the three decades of economic growth that he was able to superintend.  But in the late 1990s the Asian Financial Crisis hit Indonesia hard, prompting Suharto’s resignation on 21 May 1998.  There followed an era of democratic reform that produced Indonesia’s first direct presidential elections in 2004.  Indonesia is an unwieldy island nation of many religious and ethnic groups;  for the most part relations among these groups are cordial, but tensions in some regions have led to considerable discord, as with the secession of East Timor in 1999.  Now officially the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste, the nation on 20 May 2002 became the first sovereign state of the 21^st century, duly entering the United Nations.   

 

The late 1990s was an important time for the fading vestiges of colonial control in Asia.  The British relinquished control of Hong Kong in 1997 to the People’s Republic of China;  the Portuguese did the same with Macau in in 1999.  Arguably the Chinese themselves held people such as the Tibetans and the Uighers in an imperialist grip, but the European era of imperialist power had ended.

     

         Africa

                                                                                                                 

Most British-held colonies in Africa became independent in the course of the late 1950s and 1960s, with the following nations emerging from British colonial control:  Ghana (1957), Tanganyika (now Tanzania, 1961), Uganda (1962), Kenya (1963), Zambia (1964).  In North Africa, the French mostly gave up colonial control in 1960 but held on to Algeria, where a large French minority had settled, until 1962;  liberation of Algeria came against stubborn French efforts to retain control and to guide political outcomes.  The struggle against Portuguese colonial rule in Angola and Mozambique was also protracted, featuring a vanguard of rebels who identified as Marxist;  independence for both nations came in 1973.

 

In Rhodesia, black African nationalists faced a long and difficult struggle against the obdurate white minority government of Ian Smith, who on 11 September 1965 issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI).  His government faced especially fierce opposition from the Zimbabwe African

Nationalist Union (ZANU), which forced a new constitution upon the government in 1978.  The moderate Bishop Abel Muzorewa took power in 1979, but ZANU leader Robert Mugabe won election as president in 1980 and in 2015 still holds power in the nation known since liberation as Zimbabwe.

                                                                                

In South Africa, the equivalent of colonial rule was not as of the 1950s imposed from outside the continent, but rather was broadly similar to the white minority dominance that had prevailed in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) until Mugabe’s victory in 1980.  South Africa’s president from 1958 through 1969, Henrik Verwoerd, devised the Apartheid system of formal racial segregation that endured until 1994.  In 1961, Nelson Mandela led fellow members of the African Nationalist Congress (ANC) in a campaign against government communications and transportation systems;  although venerated by the black populace for their courage, Mandela and others were arrested and confined to long prison terms in 1963---  in Mandela’s case, until 11 February 1990.  By that time, black Africans in the nation had been subjected to the system of Bantustans, enclaves to which Blacks had been relocated and denied rights of citizenship.  Police and army contingents made opposition difficult, but from June 1976 until November 1977 riots were common among the angry residents of the Soweto district. 

 

Pressure steadily mounted on the South African regime:  Rhodesian allies lost their grip in the events of 1979-1980;  and the international community that had long tacitly acquiesced to the travesty of Apartheid finally imposed economic sanctions in 1986.  F. W. De Klerk became president in 1989, lifted bans on the ANC and other opposition groups, commenced discussions with Mandela upon the latter’s release from prison in 1990, and in March 1992 held a referendum on the end of Apartheid and a new system of racially equitable governance.  The vote went 68% in favor of the referendum, signaling the imminent termination of Apartheid.  The first elections on the basis of universal suffrage were held during 26-28 April 1994.  Then, on 10 May 1994, Mandela became the first black president of South Africa;  his tenure lasted until 1999. 

 

Momentous Events from 1980 through 2015

 

The Fall of the Soviet Union

 

By the 1980s, the economy and political framework of the Soviet Union were in trouble.  Chronic shortages of food and consumer goods cause discontent among the people, who as an abiding matter resented the suppression of dissent by the KGB security forces.  When Mikhail Gorbachev assumed leadership of the Soviet Union in 1985, he acknowledge faults in the system while maintaining paramountcy of Communist Party.  He said, rather, that the system needed perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (‘opening”) so as to become more efficient and responsive to the Soviet people.

 

But in 1989 the communist regimes of Eastern Europe all fell from power, creating a momentum that overtook Gorbachev in 1991.  He was pressured out of office by opposition leader Boris Yeltsin, who served as president from 1991 until 1999.  He was succeeded in the presidency by Vladimir Putin, who has been the leading political figure in the Soviet Union from 2000 until 2015, remaining the power

behind the presidency of Dmitry Medvedev during 2008-2012.  In the aftermath of the demise of the 

Soviet Union in 1991, the nations of Central Asia and the Baltic region that had been included in the

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics gained independence.  The leaders of Russia put together an entity

that became known as the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), consisting of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Moldova, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Russia itself,

with the aims of economic cooperation and mutual security.  From the 1990s forward, the leaders and people of Russia have sought to promote greater democracy and to advance the economy on the basis of capitalist enterprise.  But Russia has borne the wait of centuries of authoritarianism under the tsars and the Soviets.  Economic dislocations have accompanied the struggle toward free enterprise, and Vladimir Putin has a penchant for authoritarian stances and actions.

  

                                        The Nature of Conflict During the Post-Cold War Era

 

There was an aura of euphoria in the United States and other economically advanced democracies when the government of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc nations fell during 1989-1991.  Seemingly the United States had won the Cold War and capitalist economic organization had proved its merit.  But new struggles of at least as dangerous portent soon showed that the world was full of anger and resentment, and that violence was the means for advancing the ideological and territorial claims of those harboring such sentiments.

 

With the fall of communist government in Yugoslavia in 1990, the six socialist republics (Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Basnia-Herzgovina, Montenegro, and Macedonia) that longtime Yugoslav dictator Josip Tito had assembled into a tenuous unity each clamored for independence.  When leaders and the public of Croatia and Slovenia demanded independence, Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic bristled. Intervention in Slovenia (June 1991) failed, and a two-year assault on independence forces in Croatia resulted in great loss of life; a United Nations-brokered ceasefire brought tenuous peace in 1992.  Then Milosevic threw his support behind Serbs in a Bosnian civil war (1992-1995) wherein contending forces of a diverse population (43% Muslim, 31% Serb, 17% Croat) fought the bloodiest battles since World War II.  The Bosnian government massacred thousands of refugees at the supposed “safe haven” at Srebrenica.  A United Nations bombing campaign pressured Milosevic into withdrawing support for the Bosnian Serbs and signing a peace accord in December 1995.  Meanwhile, ethnic strife in Kosovo left that region in legal limbo, neither officially independent nor effectively part of Serbia.

 

Among the reasons for discontent among the public that led to the fall of the Soviet Union was a misadventure in Afghanistan.  In 1973 Marxists in that nation deposed King Muhammad Zahir Shah and then instituted a new government superintended by the People’s Democratic Party of

Afghanistan (PDPA).  But this government was in turn opposed by an Islamic resistance group, which termed their movement a jihad (holy war) against the PDPA and their backers from the Soviet Union, which sent in an increasingly elevated quantity of troops.  But the latter faced tough fighting against highly motivated mujahideen guerrilla units, who picked off Soviet troops across terrain that they knew much better---  and then began to down Soviet aircraft.  The war grew too costly and was overwhelmingly unpopular:  The Soviets withdrew.  The mujahideen and PDPA continued hostilities but essentially were at the time in a stalemate.

 

This episode was one of many involving Muslims actively promoting their version of Islam.  The participants from one region to another might not agree on basic principles, and many ideas were at odds with the sacred precepts communicated to Jibrahil (Gabriel) to Muhammad in the Qur’an, but Muslims were on the move in the world, and they proceeded at a high level of ideological motivation.

 

In Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in 1979 with great popular backing.  An oddly constituted coalition (including leftists and middle class moderates, as well as conservative Shi’ite Muslims) had pressured Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi into fleeing the country.  A popular referendum favored an Islamic republic, and a new constitution named Khomeini the Supreme Leader of Iran.  The Shah, who had led Iran’s monarchical and Western-friendly government, since 1941, eventually landed in the United States for cancer treatment in October 1979.  Angered by the U. S. refusal to return the Shah to Iran for trial, student activists penetrated the U. S. embassy in Teheran, took 63 hostages, and held these citizens of the United States for over a year.  The Khomeini died in 1989 and was succeeded by Ali Hosseini Khamenei, who in 2015 was still Supreme Leader of Iran.  The foundations of the Shi’ite theocracy are still firm;  the premier of Iran has a great deal of power, but the Islamic Supreme Leader has great prestige and a large following, allowing him to object to any policy not to his liking.  Tensions remain high between Iran and the United States, but there has been some favorable movement in negotiations regarding a reduction of Iran’s nuclear capability.

 

The Iranian revolution caused concern in neighboring Iraq, where in the very year that Ayatollah Khomeini came to power, Saddam Hussein outmaneuvered rivals in the Sunni Muslim Ba’ath Party to become president in Iran.  Saddam ruled as a secular rather than religious Sunni Muslim, but he feared that the Shi’ite revolution in Iran would stir resentment of the Shi’ite majority in his own country.  Saddam seized what he thought was an opportune moment to invade Iran on 22 September 1980, with the aim of seizing part of Iranian territory and asserting Iraq’s preeminence as the major power of the Persian Gulf region.  The Iranians proved tough opponents, however:  By March 1981, the Iraqi offensive had stalled, and by June 1982 the Iranians had recovered almost all lost territory.  The war went on, causing 1.5 million casualties, but when the two sides agreed to a ceasefire in August 1988, Saddam’s quest for territory and assertion of preeminent power had gone unfulfilled.

 

Still seeking a showcase for manifestation of Iraqi military superiority, Sadam sent his forces into Kuwait in August 1990, claiming the nation as a province of Iraq and thereby asserting control

over the nation’s oil reserves;  the latter would have helped mightily in covering the $100 billion cost of the 1980-1988 war with Iran.  But United States President George Bush put together a coalition that included many Arab states and in a one-two blow of air offensive (Operation Desert Storm, 15-16 January 1991) and massive land assault (24 February 1991), pressured the forces of Saddam back across the Kuwait border.  Some counseled Bush to pursue Saddam to Baghdad with the aim of removing him from power, but after moving through part of southern Iraq, the coalition forces pulled out, with Saddam still in power.

 

This tussle with Saddam, however, proved to be prelude to much greater confrontation with the Iraqi president, one that occurred due to a convoluted set of circumstances and, to many, rather convoluted logic:

 

On 11 September 2001, in the set of events that collectively came to be known as “9-11,” came four air attacks across the eastern United States:  High-jacked American Airlines Flight 11 crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center in New York City at 8:68 A. M. Eastern Standard Time (EST), then at 9:02 A. M. EST United Airlines Flight 175 hit the complex’s south tower; there then followed a 9:37 A. M. EST American Airlines Flight 77 crash into the Pentagon (Washington, D. C.), and at 10:03 A. M. EST United Airlines Flight 93 (probably redirected by hijackers toward the Capitol Building or the White House in Washington, D. C.) descended into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania.    

 

Seeking to make a forceful show against these acts, and on the intelligence that the Sunni Muslim terrorist group Al-Qaeda had planned and implemented the attacks on 9-11, the Bush administration formed two dramatic military responses:

 

First, knowing that Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden organized his followers in Afghanistan with the cooperation of the Taliban regime (another terrorist organization with a skewed interpretation of Islam, in power since August 1994), bombers from the United States Air Force struck Afghan cities on 7 October 2011.  As bombing continued, Kabul fell on 13 November 2011.  The United States went on to send advisers and ground troops into Afghanistan, maintaining a presence during both the George Bush (2001-2008) and Barack Obama (2009-2016) administrations in the effort to find Osama and to either rout the Taliban or prevent the return of the Taliban to power.  On 2 May 2001, Special Forces of the United States did eventually hunt down and kill Osama, not in Afghanistan but in neighboring Pakistan.  Meanwhile, the Obama administration sought to stabilize minimally competent and not very popular regimes in Afghanistan, while having to settle for keeping the Taliban away from Kabul and on the defensive.

 

Second, the George W. Bush administration launched airstrikes against Baghdad on 20 March 2003.  Thus, the son of George H. W. Bush was attempting to finish what his father had started, making an effort to destabilize the government of Saddam Hussein and remove him from power.  The pretext was the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD), given Saddam’s aversion to having plants thought capable of producing nuclear, biological, and chemical weaponry inspected by representatives from the United Nations---  as he had agreed to do in 1993.   No such weapons were

ever found, but the Americans pressed on, landing ground forces (officially from an international coalition but mostly formed of United States soldiers) on 22 March 2003.  On  9 April 2003, these forces took Baghdad, and the last major city (Tikrit) fell on 13 April 2003.  With Saddam on the run and Baghdad in chaos, United States forces occupied the city and fanned out over the country, staying until December 2011.  In the meantime,  Saddam Hussein was eventually hunted down on 13 December 2003;  he languished in prison before trial and  execution, the latter occurring on 30 December 2006.

 

In all 6,677 United States troops have died in Iraq and Afghanistan;  4,448 U. S. soldiers have died in Iraq, 2,229 in Afghanistan.  United States troops are still harm’s way in Afghanistan, and reentry to Baghdad is under consideration as the city and nation continue to be unsettled, and as the Sunni Muslim group, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria[ISIS]), vows to expand over West Asia and North Africa. 

 

The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988 and the current aggressiveness of ISIS in Syria, Iraq, and North Africa show clearly that Muslims are often as divided against themselves (as has been historically true of the Christian world, of course) as against others against the Western world against which some Muslims harbor such abiding resentment.  But in the Arab-Israeli dispute, one does find Muslims and Jews frequently in conflict.  This has been true since a Zionist (determined Jewish relocation to Israel) movement began in earnest during the first couple of decades of the 19^th century.  Given the Jewish diaspora dating to the first two centuries A.D. (CE), when oppressive policies of Roman administrators in Palestine resulted in the scattering of Jews to Europe and places across the globe, the large-scale return to the land known variously as Palestine or Israel was a startling development.  There, Arab populations had dominated for centuries. 

 

Great Britain was the imperialist power of note in Palestine and Jordan.  The British tried many times to work out some settlement, but they evidence make conflicting promises to both sides.  This was notably true in the claim to respect Arab Palestinian interests in the British “White Paper” of 1916, while recognizing the Zionist aim of a Jewish homeland in the Balfour Declaration of 1917.  With the Holocaust taking six million Jewish lives during World War II, the intensity of desire for a Jewish state intensified.  Neither British nor United Nations effort brought reconciliation between the Jews and the Palestinians.  After the British announced that they would pull troops from the area on 15 May 1948, Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion declared the formation of the State of Israel.

 

The establishment of Israel as a Jewish state led to four wars---  1948, 1956, 1968, and 1973---  in which Israel faced off against the Arab states Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq ;  and steady conflict between Palestinian and Jew that still abided in 2015.  The Israelis generally got the best of these armed conflicts, but the struggle was more difficult in 1973.  As the Arabs leveraged their wealth in petroleum to cut back on oil supplies during the 1970s, with the resulting economic pain felt in many places, United States President Jimmy Carter coaxed Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat and Israel’s Menachim Begin to the negotiating table in 1979, a historic deal resulted in territorial claims acceptable to both sides.  But the fundamental problem of counterclaims by Arabs and Jews on

territory in Israel remains.  The Palestinians are restive in an small area designated for them as an autonomous zone;  and Israelis are ever vigilant against occasional Palestinian attacks on their territory and against the hostility that they perceive still abides among the leaders of Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia for their right to exist in a state avowedly Jewish.  So far, no two-state solution (acceptable division of Israel’s territory between Palestinians and Jews) has materialized, nor did it seem imminent in 2015.       

 

Conflicts having to with the struggles of states formerly in the Soviet sphere;   or involving  Muslim groups working from frameworks for action based on contorted versions of Islam;   or the  claims by victims of the Holocaust on land that has religious meaning and historical associations for Palestinians, as well;  have loomed large over the course of the last quarter of a century.   But many other conflicts with deep historical roots continue to vex humankind and carry huge implications for regional and world security.

 

The Historical Connection to Current World Conflicts

 

 

Somalia

 

Historically, Somalia was a crossroads of international trade, positioned as it is on the horn of Africa, along with Ethiopia and Eritrea.  The ancient kingdom of Meroe, a powerful state in east Africa that competed for territories against the might of the Egyptian pharaohs, held territories in today’s Ethiopia and Somalia.

                                                                                     

Northern Somalia was controlled by Great Britain from the 19^th century until 1960;  Italy controlled the southern half of Somalia until the end of World War II in 1945.  In 1960, when Great Britain gave up control of the northern part of the region, the northern and southern regions of Somalia were joined as the Somali Republic.  In March 1969, Muhammad Siad Barre came to power and in 1970 presided over the renaming of the nation as the Somali Democratic Republic.

 

During the years 1977-1988, Somalia and Ethiopia went to war over counterclaims to the huge eastern section of Ethiopia known as Ogaden, where many ethnic Somalis live.  Cuba sent troops to aid Ethiopia in 1978, but the war drug on until a peace agreement was reached.  By this time, 1.5 million ethnic Somali refugees had fled into Somalia, exacerbating economic and political problems.  Mounting pressures forced President Barre to flee.  Thereafter, the nation was torn by civil war, which raged until a peace deal was reached in January 2004.

 

Somalia, though, is a land in which power is divided among warlords operating outside control of the official government in Mogadishu.  People in the various regions of Somalia speak different dialects and feel little mutual political affinity.  Various militias are constantly fighting each other, so that people in the country feel under relentless siege, impelling many to seek refuge in the United States and elsewhere.      

 

Rwanda

 

Historically, the territory in central Africa that includes Rwanda was occupied by the Tutsi and Hutu ethnic groups.  The Tutsis comprise just 10% of the Rwandan population but have historically been the most politically dominant.  Rwanda was held from the 19^th century by Belgium, the imperial administrations of which favored the Tutsis.  But when Belgium relinquished control in 1959, the Hutus emerged as the most powerful political force, reversing the course of history.  Tutsis struck back frequently, including a major coup attempt in 1963, but for three decades could not wrest control from the Hutus.

 

Juvenal Habyarimana ruled as President from 1973 until 1994, when he died in a plane crash.  This created a power vacuum into which the Tutsi-led Rwandan Patriotic Front RPF) and other groups

rushed in their competition for power.  Civil war of massive proportions then broke out, leaving a million dead and impelling two million refugees of both Hutu and Tutsi ethnicities to flee into Zaire (Democratic Republic of Congo) and Tanzania.  The international community was slow to react to the disastrous events in Rwanda;  only belatedly did French troops enter the nation under a United Nations mandate.

 

In late 1996 a peace accord was signed;  while many refugees remained in Zaire, a total of a million of those who had fled did return from Zaire and Tanzania.   In September 1998, Paul Kagame, a Tutsi and leader of the RPF became president, gaining reelection in 2003.

 

Democratic Republic of Congo (Zaire)

 

The nation that since the 1960s has been known variously as the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zaire, was ruled under the ironic name, Congo Free State, from 1884 until 1908;  it was controlled by a private group dominated by King Leopold II of Belgium.  In 1908 the government of Belgium took control from the private group and ruled until 1960.  Power struggles ensued, from which Joseph D. Mubut (Mobutu Sese Keko) emerged victorious in 1965;  Mubutu changed the nation’s name from the DRC to Zaire and ruled as President until 1996.  Laurent Kabila ruled as president from 1996 until he was assassinated in 2001;  his son, Joseph Kabila, assumed the presidency and rules in that capacity still, in 2015.

 

But the DRC, now known under that name again, is rent by competing militias in the eastern region of the nation.   The national government in Kinshasha does maintain a presence in the region but competes there with various militia forces, some of them formed from various DRC populations, some of them comprised of Rwandans (especially Hutus) in opposition to their own government.  The DRC is the most mineral-rich nation in the world, with gold, silver, cobalt, coal, and various minerals used in the making of cell phones and other electronic devices.  These minerals bring high prices on the world market, the main motivation for the ferocity of competition over the eastern region of the nation.  To intimidate the local populace, militia forces have murdered male villagers and heaped atrocities on

females, some of whom have been raped repeatedly.  A United Nations peacekeeping force has maintained a presence in the nation since 1999;  disturbing reports, backed by corroborating evidence, reveal that these putative peacekeepers have also engaged in rape of women from the villagers of this ravaged eastern part of the DNC.    

 

Ireland

 

During 1968-1997, the northern part of Ireland was the focal point for an intense and violent struggle between Catholics and Protestants.  After Irish violent expressions of opposition to British dominance in 1916, the British recognized Irish Free State (which became the Irish Republic) but excluded the heavily Protestant areas of northern Ireland, which remained in the United Kingdom.  During 1968-1969 violence intensified as the Catholic minority in northern island agitated for union with the Irish Republic, pitting the Irish Republican Army (IRA, asserting northern Catholic views) against Protestant paramilitary groups such as the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF).   On 30 January 1972 there occurred the “Bloody Sunday” episode in which British soldiers shot 13 Catholic protesters;  and on 21 November 1974 came a violent retort from the IRA, which launched bombs on a pub in the city of Birmingham that killed 21 people.  Violent incidents continued over the course of two decades, only abating in 1997 when the IRA negotiated a power-sharing arrangement with the Protestant Unionists.  The protracted violence in all had left 3,000 people dead.

 

Basque Region of Spain

 

Nationalist in the Basque region of Spain have long considered themselves a group apart, and in the 19^th century maintained a great deal of independence from Spain.  But Franco governed the region firmly and with repression as he deemed necessary.  In 1959 the armed group Euskadi ta Askatana (ETA, “Homeland and Liberty”) began persistent agitations for independence, attacking the local infrastructure, killing a police chief (August 1968) as one of a bevy of terrorist attacks, and even assassinating Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (1973), the designated successor to Franco.  Tempers cooled a bit when at Franco’s death in 1975 the successor government granted a degree of autonomy to the provinces, with broad powers extended to the government of the Basque region.  But the ETA still insists on full independence, alternating between evanescent ceasefires and renewed violence.

 

Tibet and Xinzhang---  and Taiwan

 

Within the realm of the Peoples’ Republic of China there are those who view the government as an imperialist imposition in areas wherein people feel themselves culturally distinct from Han Chinese. 

 

In Tibet there are people who heavily identify with the very particular school of Tantric Buddhism and who look for leadership of the Dalai Lama, rather similarly to the manner in which the

Roman Catholics look to the Pope.  But Tibetan Buddhism suffuse the society and affects all manner of practices:  artistic, culinary (vegetarian), meditative.  A revolt in 1959 was brutally suppressed by the government of the People’s Republic, and a tight hold has been maintained ever since.  The Dalai Lama fled in the 1959 episode and has resided in India ever since, along with a large community of fellow Tibetan refugees.  There are other Tibetan communities far-flung across the globe, everywhere expressing the desire for and the right to independence.  Meanwhile, the Han Chinese population in Tibet has grown rapidly, and the government has overseen major infrastructural development as part of an effort to “modernize” Tibetan society.  

 

In the province of Xinzhang live a mostly Muslim people who do not in any sense identify as Chinese.  They are historically and culturally connected to groups that for centuries trekked the Old Silk Road through Central Asia.  These people would prefer to be independent, and occasionally they formally protest in demonstration of that sentiment.  But, as in the case of Tibet, the government of the People’s Republic of China rules Xinzhang firmly, invests considerable public money in infrastructure, and oversees migration of Han Chinese into the province.

 

Leaders of the People’s Republic of China actively promote policies designed to keep Tibet and Xinzhang in what is effectively the latest incarnation of the Chinese empire.  They assert that the island of Taiwan should also be governed by China.  The Qing dynasty did, at its territorially most extensive, and when the dynasty was militarily at its height, hold Tibet and Xinzhang within the empire.  This was true of Taiwan, too, although the society on that island has undergone phases of Dutch rule (17^th century) and Japanese rule (1895-1945),  Under the Qing, Taiwan until the 19^th century was a loosely governed frontier territory (administratively part of Fujian province).  At no time from 1895 forward has Taiwan been controlled by a government based centrally in China.  Today the majority of Taiwanese people are satisfied with their own government, based in Taipei (Taibei), still ruling formally under the banner of the Republic of China, a semantic vestige of the Chiang Kai-shek era.  But most citizens on the island, which underwent democratic transformation during the 1990s, consider themselves part of a geopolitical entity separate from the nation on the mainland;  and a sizable minority of the island’s citizenry would much prefer outright independence as the Republic of Taiwan.  With the leadership of the People’s Republic of China maintaining that Taiwan should be, and some day will be, formally governed from the mainland, the situation is potentially explosive;  but at present and for some time to come a military clash would be so destructive as to make such an event unlikely. 

 

Looking Toward the Midpoint of the 21^st Century

 

Despite the propensity of human beings to beat up on each other, there are numerous favorable developments as we peer from the year 2015 toward the midpoint of the 21^st century: 

 

The Green Revolution that ensued upon research from the International Rice Institute in the has greatly improved the world’s food supply and has the potential to feed many more hungry

people.  Genetic Modification (GM) has made crops more resistant to pests and disease;  although controversial or potential unfavorable health effects, if these prove insubstantial , GM could also abet expansion of the world’s food supply.

 

The middle to late 20^th century was replete with medical advances that are now more broadly accessed to the benefit of people across the globe:   Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin (1928); the development of other antibiotics for the treatment of killer diseases such as syphilis and tuberculosis (1950s);  the first successful human heart transplant (1967);  the successful international program for worldwide eradication of small pox (1969-1977);  the increasingly effective treatment of cancer;  and research auguring effective treatment for, and vaccination against, the HIV virus that causes AIDS;  all have improved the prospects for decreasing disease-related deaths. 

 

Establishment of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in 1944 and the World Trade Organization (WTO) have abetted economic linkage among nations with favorable results for the standard of living in many developing nations.  The successful economic surge of Taiwan and South Korea to join other “Little Tigers,” Hong Kong and Singapore (all following the lead of “Big Tiger” Japan), provided examples for those arguing for the benefits of globalization. 

 

But the environmental impact of rapid development in China (witness the cake-like smog of Beijing) provides a counterexample for those who see in globalization prospects for environmental degradation.  The concern over environment has increased as the reality of global warming  has gained more widespread recognition, spawning a Green Movement promoting recycling and reduced dependence on fuels and processes that produce greenhouse gases.  Wind turbines and solar panels promise a future in which renewable sources of energy are much more widely used for homes and industry.

 

If we think back to the scientific advances of the last several decades, we might hope that we stand at the entryway to a new Enlightenment, that magnificent era in the 17^th century when reason and science seemed to promise an immediately better world.  If we think back to the abominably stupidly tactics and strategies of World War I, and the stark ignorance of the actual tenets underpinning religions in the name of which wars are now being fought, we might despair at the prospects for creating that better world.

 

And yet here we have two lessons from history to ponder:

 

Humankind has spent far too much energy and too many financial resources on violent episodes that destroy life.

 

But human beings also possesses magnificent brains that, if properly used, are capable of applying the power of reason and the discoveries of science to improve the quality of the life for everyone traversing the globe on this one earthly sojourn.