World History For Dummies. Peter Haugen
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The results were good for Europeans but disastrous for the Indians, Chinese, and Native Americans.
Also in the 21st century, the world faces new challenges that may be more immediately dangerous than stockpiles of nuclear weapons. The changing climate — hotter summers, melting glaciers, worse and more-frequent storms, and rising sea levels — will in the not-too-distant future, challenge us all.
Appreciating History’s Tapestry
A standard analogy is that human events over the centuries are a “rich tapestry.” But many readers and students aren’t all that familiar with tapestries, which are decorative fabrics usually hung on a wall to show off their craftsmanship. Made from weaving threads together in such a way that the colors of the thread form recognizable shapes and scenes, tapestries may be called “rich” because people have to be rich to own them. Classic tapestry is hand-woven, taking a lot of time and skill to produce, which makes it expensive. Also, the process is complex. Each thread contributes a tiny percentage of the finished image.
History is like that, even if the threads interweave somewhat randomly and the picture is often hard to figure out. Yet with history, you can follow a thread and see where it crisscrosses and crosscrisses (if you will) other threads to see how the picture formed into what you recognize as the historical present.
Threading backward
History often gets told in chronological order, which makes sense. Much of the content of this book is presented in chronological order, but not all of it. I thought it would be a good idea to break out some of the big influences on how people behave — things like philosophy and religion, styles of warfare, and even individual personalities. Giving these developments their own parts of the book (3, 4, and 5) allows you to come at the same events and eras from different perspectives.
Even when I tell you things in the order in which they happened, though, I sometimes refer to latter-day developments that resulted from long-ago events, or I use modern examples of how things today can work pretty much as they did then (whenever then was).
When studying history, it helps to start by thinking about where humanity is now and work backward, asking the questions that the journalists, pundits, and podcasters did when talking about the COVID-19 pandemic: How did we get here? Why are we here now, and not later or before? You don’t have to start with now, though. You can work backward from an interesting event that began in, for example, 2003.
Earlier in this chapter I mentioned such an event, the war in Iraq. It started when U.S. planes bombed a bunker where Iraqi President Saddam Hussein was thought to be meeting with top staff. (The raids didn’t get him then but were followed up with an invasion that led to his eventual capture and execution.) To trace every thread of that war through time would be too ambitious, but you can follow a few threads. Warm up the WABAC Machine, Sherman.
Among the reasons that U.S. President George W. Bush and his advisers cited for invading Iraq was the need to remove a brutal dictator. Saddam came to power in 1979, when his cousin and predecessor, Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, stepped down, or (as many people believe) was forced out of office. Al-Bakr’s career included ousting two previous military dictators and helping with the overthrow of Iraq’s monarchy in 1958.
The monarchy dated to the 1920s, when the United Kingdom (Britain), which ruled Iraq as a colony, installed Faisal I as king. A descendant of the family of the Prophet Mohammed, Faisal was not from Iraq, but from Saudi Arabia, and the British expected him to answer to London. Yet he helped secure Iraq’s independence before he died.
The League of Nations, a short-lived predecessor to the United Nations, had cobbled Iraq together after WWI. The body put Britain in charge of Baghdad and Basra, two adjacent parts of the old Ottoman Empire (which fell apart in WWI), and a few years later threw in Mosul to the north.
The Ottomans first conquered that territory in 1535. Baghdad (later Iraq’s capital) had been a center of the Islamic world since Arabs conquered the region in the seventh century; before that, it was a province of the Persian Empire. Alexander the Great conquered the region in the fourth century BC. (The designation BC can be confusing. It means before the time of Jesus — in this case, 400 years before. I explain BC, along with AD, BCE and CE, in more detail in Chapter 3.)
In fact, when Alexander died in 323 BC, he was just south of the city of Baghdad, in Babylon, one of the most famous places in the ancient world and one of those early cities that arose in the Fertile Crescent after agriculture took hold. Babylon had been the capital of a kingdom established by a people called the Amorites in the 19th century BC. Archaeologists think it was a much older town that grew to city size by 2400 BC, more than 4,400 years ago.
Crossing threads
Okay, the preceding section has a highly superficial tracing of a thread I’ll call “What was Iraq before, and who ruled it?” This discussion is so superficial that I skipped parts in which different conquerors fought over the territory and rule shifted back and forth. The famous Turkish-Mongol conqueror Timur, for example, took over for a while in the 14th century. His thread would take you back to his ancestor Genghis Khan, a great Mongol warrior and ruler. And his thread could take you forward (it works both ways) to Genghis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, a 13th-century emperor of China.
But in tracing that one thread back from 21st-century Iraq, I crossed other threads. At one intersection was WWI, which was triggered by a Serbian nationalist rebellion against Austrian rule of Bosnia. That war redrew the map of Europe and brought down not just the Ottoman Empire, but also the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian empires.
The overthrow of the Russian Empire led to the establishment of the Soviet Union — a military superpower and archrival to the United States through much of the 20th century. Then there’s the fact that WWI ended with the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh terms imposed upon Germany have been blamed in part for the rise of Adolf Hitler and WWII. The war also led to the establishment of the League of Nations, which lumped together the group of territories we know as Iraq.
Weaving home
The German Empire was a successor to the Holy Roman Empire. Not to be confused with the earlier Roman Empire, the Holy Roman Empire was a union of Central European territories dating back to Otto the Great in 962 AD. It was considered to be a continuation of the Frankish Empire, established in 800 AD, when Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne Emperor of the West — essentially naming him the successor to the Roman emperors going back to Augustus, whose rule began in 27 BC.
Follow Leo’s popish thread, and you’ll get to Pope Urban II, who in 1095 called upon Europe’s Christians to make war against the Turks, especially the Seljuk Dynasty, who controlled the city of Jerusalem and the land surrounding it, considered to be the Christian Holy Land.
Urban’s war became the First Crusade, followed by at least nine more crusades over several centuries in which Christians from Europe traveled east to conquer territory in western Asia. Not surprisingly, these incursions contributed to enduring hard feelings on the part of many Muslims toward Christians and the West.
You may trace a thread between the Crusades and latter-day anti-U.S. sentiments, such as those held by the notorious terrorist organization called ISIS, for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. (Confusingly, it’s also called IS, ISIL [for Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant], and Daesh.) That thread also crosses the one in which the United Nations partitioned what had been British Palestine (another post-WWI territory) into Arab and Jewish areas to make way for the modern nation of Israel.
Before the rise of ISIS, another terrorist group, al-Qaeda, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. The American response was a War on Terror(ism) that included the invasion of Afghanistan, where the leaders of al-Qaeda were supposedly hiding, and then the invasion of Iraq, whose leader was thought to be hiding banned weapons and aiding terrorist groups. That second invasion and war destabilized