The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

This book takes interconnectedness as one of the through lines of world history but acknowledges another side to the story. Even as we grow ever more intertwined, we stay ever more resolutely distinct from one another as groups.

The shape of the narrative is what it all comes down to in the end. History deals in facts, of course, but in history, those facts fundamentally serve a narrative. When we construct our story, we are inventing ourselves.

Social constellations form intentions and set the agendas of history: countries, families, empires, nations, clans, corporations, tribes, clubs, political parties, societies, neighborhood groups, social movements, mobs, civilizations, high school cliques—they’re all constellations. They do not exist outside culture. The mighty hunter dissolves upon closer examination into random individual stars. The same is true of social constellations. Clan, country, movement, mob—get up close to any of these and all you see are individual human beings and their ideas.

What happened to chess happens to pretty much everything in human culture. We’re all one humanity, but we never stop creating whirlpools of exclusion. As we interact, ripple effects pass from one human whirlpool to another, and in the process some things change, some things don’t, and sometimes, something new comes into being—in general, something bigger.

Alone among the creatures of Earth, we humans use tools and language to deal with our environment effectively as groups. Language makes stories possible, and mythic stories are what knit human groups together. In our earliest days, our mythic narratives were spawned by geography. We formed webs of meaning with people in our immediate environment.

If history is a braid, environment is one of its three major strands. Tools are a closely related second one. There is a third strand, but it came later. Who we are and what we’ve been has, from the start, been intricately related to where we’ve been and what we’ve made and done to deal with nature in those places.

Around forty-five thousand years ago, we humans began painting pictures and playing flutes and dancing. In the race for good stuff to eat, we began beating all the other bipedal primates to the scene. Something must have happened right about that time, something that triggered the rise of human beings to dominance. What was it? The answer seems to be: true language came into being.

True language begins when words can join with other words to form an infinite variety of meaningful combinations. Language is vocabulary embedded in grammar and syntax.

We don’t “have” meanings that we send to other people through language. We “have” language that we use to create meaning with others of our network.

Language gave humans the power to work toward some single goal even when separated in space and time. Knit together by language, numerous humans could operate as if they were a single social organism.

The fact is, we humans don’t live directly in the physical universe. We live in a model of the world we have created collectively through language and which we maintain communally. That model was already in existence when we were born; we merely made our way into it as we matured. Becoming an adult meant gaining the ability to imagine the same world as everyone else.

We inhabit imaginary worlds we share with others, but we come to those worlds privately, each with our own unique constellation of information, ideas, and beliefs.

Where herders impinged on settled farmers, they might form a symbiotic relationship. One side was good at producing grains, fruits, and vegetables; the other had meat, hides, and milk products. They exploited one another’s expertise by swapping goods.

From the start, therefore, people found that they could survive on fishing just as viably as on farming and herding—wherever geography permitted.

the first major urban civilizations that we still know about germinated there: the Nile River, the Tigris-Euphrates complex, the Indus River, and the Huang He. They gave birth respectively to the Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Indian, and Chinese civilizations.

Egyptians had only to defend the mouth of their shoestring world, the delta. In the rest of the valley, they could pour their energies into building up their bounty.

The cultural homogeneity nourished by this environment enabled people to cooperate on building massive infrastructure with which to manage their river.

Individual minds are forged by society, and Egyptians needed to believe that when the pharaoh’s needs, wishes, and whims were met, the floods happened exactly as they should.

Instead of one continuous culture forming along the valley, Mesopotamia saw the emergence of many separate networks of villages associated with disparate temples and their priesthoods.

Geography provided no protection to these folks, and protection they did need, for although the farming was good near the river, the environment supported pastoral nomadism as well.

The Egyptian constellation discovered that once construction workers exist, they have to be constructing something. Mesopotamians found that once armies exist, they need to be fighting someone.

Egyptians built pyramids; Mesopotamians built empires. Successful conquerors ruling a network of city-states could tap a wider range of resources, which required bigger armies to defend, which led to more military campaigns. About forty-three centuries ago, Sargon of Akkad, the king of Kish, conquered most of the Mesopotamian city-states and founded history’s first real empire.

Mesopotamia’s many little city-states spawned an entrepreneurial individualism and a competitive pluralism that came to characterize both Islamic and European civilizations—and how could it not, given the geography of its twin rivers?

In Harappan times, the Indus was actually six rivers, not five, but the biggest one vanished at some point back then. Life was good in the fertile valley, but it must also have been haunted by a deep sense of impermanence.

This river was the opposite of a highway. It had virtually no navigable stretches. Boaters putting into this rough current were risking suicide. Settlements sprouted in habitable patches, but instead of interacting continuously by river with other settlements to form a single homogenous culture, each community of farmers in this valley was somewhat on its own.

short, life along the Huang He was overshadowed by emergency. Like a bipolar parent, the river that was the source of all abundance also unleashed sudden catastrophe from time to time.

The structure of authority within the family and the central place of the family within society became defining features of a civilization whose first seeds sprouted along the Huang He.

therefore, I will borrow the term civilization to describe any cultural entity spread across a vast territory and encompassing an immense number of people who, despite myriad particular differences, share an overarching framework of cultural assumptions, aesthetics, and values.

Since the pastoral nomads didn’t settle, they didn’t form up as kingdoms or empires. Instead, they merged and clashed and came apart as fluid tribal confederations.

ideas rippled from tribe to tribe as neighbors dealt with neighbors who then dealt with farther neighbors.

Early on, some of history’s key technological breakthroughs occurred in this world. Somewhere between Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan, for example, nomads first domesticated the horse.

The nomads completed their achievement by inventing stirrups and saddles. Nomadic women meanwhile invented key items we don’t usually think of as inventions: trousers, a garment with separate sheaths for each leg, and later shirts and shirt sleeves, all of which made it possible for nomadic men to ride horses.

In urban civilizations, a growing population meant bigger, denser cities. In pastoral nomadic cultures, it meant ever wider dispersal.

Pastoral nomads came up with two more pivotal inventions, tools by anyone’s definition. One was the chariot, which is a cart with two wheels instead of four.

Which brings us to the composite bow, a weapon invented in the steppes.

The glue they used was made from horses’ hooves: one breakthrough leads to another.

People on horseback could pack them into their saddlebags and use them to fight while riding. In fact, these bows made cavalry even more dangerous than charioteers.

Geography generated a third branch of human culture as well—a third flavor of civilization, if you will. Resources were distributed unevenly around the planet, so people could create value merely by moving stuff from one place to another. The farther they moved it, the more value it gained. As soon as beasts of burden were domesticated, therefore, some people embarked on long-distance trading as a way of life.

Nomads did not wander randomly. Hunters went where they knew the game would be. Herders made their way to pastures they already knew about. Traders traveled from one hot spot of commercial opportunity to another.

Predictable webs of roads and pathways formed, therefore, wherever trading was heavy. Villages situated near the nexus of many such trade routes inevitably bloomed into towns, and some of those towns eventually grew into cities whose chief business was vending amenities to traders—

One of the busiest trade webs of ancient times emerged in what might be called the Middle World: the region stretching from Asia Minor across the Iranian highlands down through what is now Afghanistan.

This region is situated right between the two great river civilizations of the West (Egypt and Mesopotamia) and the two great river civilizations of the East (India and China).

The center of the continent—the steppes, the plains, the taiga—gets extremely cold in the winter, but most of it gets extremely hot in the summer. Cold air is heavy, so in winter it sinks, blowing wind across the land and out over the oceans. In the summer, however, the heart of the continent heats up, and hot air rises, creating a vacuum that sucks wind in from the edges. The outgoing winter winds are cool and dry; the incoming summer winds are warm and wet. These are the monsoons.

So ancient peoples living anywhere upon the shores of the Indian or Pacific Oceans could put to sea in sailboats and ride the winds to Southeast Asia in winter. There they’d have to wait a few months for the winds to switch direction, which they always did. Then, the sailors could all sail home to China, India, Arabia, and Africa.

The monsoons generated a world of maritime trade rivaling those of the Mediterranean and the Middle World. This vast network linked East Africa to Arabia to India to Malaya and Indonesia and from there, indirectly, to China.

a region where elements from India, China, East Africa, and Arabia sloshed together, resulting in a complicated fusion.

The Bantu migrations were not some sudden, sweeping movement. Bantu speakers may have taken a thousand years to reach the east coast of Africa. Their migrations were slow because they were mostly a side effect of their environment. In this tropical climate, heavy rainfall impoverished the soil, and no annual flooding replenished it, so farmers employed the slash-and-burn method of growing crops: they burned brush to create a layer of ash, which enriched the soil. Once the brush was reduced to ash, however, there was no more brush to burn. The ash made the soil fertile for a few years, but after that, people had to move on to a new brush-covered area and do the slash-and-burn thing again. In any given generation, they did not think of themselves as migrating. They were just farming, but their way of farming ensured that over time they would keep moving on to the places where they had not yet been.

In East Africa, Bantu-speaking people interacted with traders coming down the coast or across the ocean. Africans became part of the monsoon network, in which Arabs played a major role.

millions of people speak Swahili, a Bantu language blended with Arabic. The name comes from the Arabic word sahel, which means “border.” Swahili emerged in areas where Bantu-speaking people interacted with Arab raiders and traders. Wherever one culture overlapped with another, ripple effects passed through.

Call it the clique effect. People living in the same environment tend to interact more frequently with one another than they do with people of other environments.

people who lived in the same river valley and worked on the same great infrastructure project were part of a network of communication that constituted, you might say, an intercommunicative zone. Stories they told tended to circulate throughout their zone.

The stories that circulated within an intercommunicative zone were continuous and self-reinforcing. They deepened into myths as each person who retold a story dropped the parts that felt unimportant and emphasized the parts they themselves found powerful.

The four ancestral river valleys were obvious examples of such intercommunicative zones, but the great trade networks were intercommunicative zones, too, because people who trekked those paths crossed paths with other folks who trekked those paths, and in the nodes of any given trade network, in cities like Hecatompylos, Petra, Minos, and Carthage, they exchanged gossip with hardened travelers from many cultures. So, the Middle World developed its own distinctive body of myths, as did the Mediterranean world. Each became a gigantic social constellation knit together by countless threads of narrative.

countless threads of narrative can weave together until they form some single greater whole—a master narrative, if you will: a complex constellation of stories and ideas that fit together to form some sort of coherent whole.

A master narrative therefore includes a sense of time and space, of who matters in history and what matters in life and of how it all started, where the universe has been and where it’s all going. By master narrative, I mean, in fact, a world model, that imagined totality we construct communally and inhabit individually, without which we could not deal with our environment as humans, given that we exist fundamentally as social constellations, not just as individuals.

The primeval master narratives of humankind grew out of the soil of particular environments. They were shaped by geography, that intractable factor.

distilled concrete belief systems out of the master narratives of their quite various social contexts.

The empire was ruled by a family dynasty, which went through a predictable cycle. At first, the dynasty had a mandate to govern, a mandate that came from a vast, impersonal, supernatural force, which the Chinese knew as Tian. When the mandate was in place, harmony prevailed and all was right with the world. But as time went on, the dynasty made mistakes and squandered its mandate, and the empire unraveled. Chaos then replaced order—until another individual received the mandate to rule “all under heaven.” He established a new ruling dynasty; whereupon, the world entered a new period of order and harmony. And so it went, on and on, round and round.

A dynasty lost its mandate because it failed to carry out the ceremonies and conduct that kept the world in harmony. In this view, the material world had an underlying order connecting all the visible facts of existence.

The connections and correspondences woven through material life added up to a pattern that experts could discern.

Around 500 BCE, a man known as Kongfuzi (more familiarly, Confucius) distilled the rituals and observances of Chinese culture into a belief system that served as both an explanation of life and a manual for conduct.

Meanwhile, from Asia Minor and the eastern highlands, people speaking various non-Semitic languages kept coming into the crowded field: Hittites, Hurrians, Mittani, Kassites, Elamites. New empires were always forming, each one bigger than the last, but they were not the same empire forming and unraveling again and again as in China, or at least, no one thought that way.

The people of the Nile saw a world populated by an array of gods associated with different forces and ideas, but these deities were all related to one another: the gods formed one big (dysfunctional) family.

bigger. Wheels, chariots, roads, written language, and the like let ever-greater numbers of us intercommunicate across ever-greater distances.

Civilizations are clouds of ideas without centers or borders; they’re too big and too vague to form intentions and carry out plans.

The increasing size of empires correlated to the increasing speed at which messages could be transmitted, which in turn reflected the development of technology and infrastructure.

for money is not, in fact, an invention. Like language, it’s a spontaneous by-product of human interaction. Money is also not a thing; it’s an abstraction.

Money is just a way of translating cow to wagon. It brings value into existence as a substance separate from all material things that have value, in the same way that mathematical marks bring quantity into existence as an element separate from all things quantified.

If messaging can be compared to the nervous system of a social organism, money can be compared to its circulatory system: it creates a network of links through which value can flow from place to place.

How did the Persians do it? The answer goes back to all those M’s: management, messaging, money, and military might.

Rome was a supermilitarized society: all eligible men served in the armed forces. Their armies were disciplined groups of soldiers operating as single units, like chess pieces moved by their commanders.

They invented concrete, which hardens best when wet.

The Romans surrounded the Mediterranean with an unparalleled network of highways built on beds of stone, far better than those of the Persians, some thirty thousand miles of the best roads anyone had ever built (or would build for more than a millennium), and their roads enabled them to get to trouble spots before rebels got their boots on.

Political states have borders demarcating one “interior” from another. Civilizations have frontier zones, where the coherence of one master narrative gradually dissolves and the power of another fades in. Borders are porous, however, and frontiers are nebulous. All through history, people have moved from one world civilization to another through the spaces in between. Merchants, tourists, adventurers, bandits, armies, migrants, criminals on the lam—all have carried with them trinkets, goods, games, jokes, recipes, riddles, songs, stories, judgments, rumors, opinions, and countless other sorts of artifacts, ideas, impulses, and habits. Human cultures may clot into constellations, but connections have threaded among them forever.

The Han Chinese couldn’t expand their empire into the steppes because the nomads were too well adapted to that environment; there the nomads would win any all-out battle. But the Chinese could and did build a chain of garrisons snaking west from the Great Wall. They built these forts to protect traders flowing to and from China. Eventually this panhandle of the Chinese empire touched up against another protected zone: the empire of the Kushans. And goods that made it that far could flow on safely to India in the southeast or to Persia in the west. From Persian territory, traders could take the goods into kingdoms along the Mediterranean, ruled by heirs of Alexander’s generals. And from there the goods could get to Rome. This network of routes across the central Eurasian steppes was later called the Silk Road

The central figure in the Mithraic mysteries was born from a virgin mother named Anahid, a human who had given birth to a god. The birth took place around the winter solstice, which is to say, on or about December 25. During his career on Earth, Mithra was attended by followers corresponding to the signs of the zodiac, of which there are twelve. Virgin birth, savior of humanity, born on December 25, twelve apostles—is any of this starting to sound familiar?

Spice, in this context, is an umbrella term for trade goods that were rare, compact, light, transportable, marketable, and more or less imperishable.

For thousands of years, people have been growing more and more interconnected, but this has never been a smooth and steady process like sugar mixing into sand. Historically, it’s been a case of fits and starts and stops and stutters, a case of social constellations forming and expanding and eventually overlapping, and those overlaps generating friction and trauma and confusion until enough threads and themes from each cluster have interwoven to form a single larger whole,

It asserted a covenant between God and the descendants of Abraham. If you weren’t descended from Abraham, you weren’t part of the covenant.

According to Paul, what Jesus offered was not a covenant between God and any particular tribe but between God and all humanity.

Christianity emerged right where these two apparently contradictory narratives overlapped.

Christianity, by contrast, spread like kudzu and could do so for two reasons. First, it fit in well enough with the Greco-Roman idea that the secular and the divine both existed but were separate spheres. Second, Christianity spoke to a vast audience, for it addressed the life most of the empire’s inhabitants were really living.

In this empire, slaves were not just servants and sexual chattel but the engines of production. They mined the salt, broke the rocks, rowed the galleys, and tilled the earth on vast farming estates. A free Roman who had fewer than four slaves was considered to be living below the poverty line.

By the time Christ was crucified, over 25 percent of the empire’s population were slaves.

What’s more, if you were a free Roman trying to make a living, what wages could you command, given that whatever you were offering to do for money, most employers could have done by slaves for free? It all added up to an empire in which most people were either slaves, wretchedly poor peasants, or huddled masses of unemployed slum dwellers whom the state kept quiescent with free entertainment and just enough bread to stay alive.

Not so for all those slaves and beggars. For them, by the start of the Common Era, the pagan narrative described a world without meaning. Then Christianity came along and said: this world was a mere test for what would happen after death. The poorest, meekest, and most oppressed were passing the test; they would live on forever in the kingdom of bliss.

Ratcheting up the horror only made this Christian coda more memorable. The very steps the Roman state took to erase Christianity instead fueled its growth.

As Roman society grew ever more bloated on slavery and inequity, its bureaucratic apparatus lost coherence. Meanwhile, the Christian network kept developing.

By the fourth century, Christianity had become something like a shadow state mirroring the secular Roman state visible to the public.

It was fourth century Roman emperor Constantine the Great who finally gave into reality and admitted he could govern his far-flung empire more effectively with the administrative apparatus built by the Christians than with the rusting machinery left over from ancient Rome. In 320, on the eve of a crucial battle, he claimed to have seen a cross in the sky. Inspired by that sign, he entered the battle waving the Christian banner. After victory, he declared Christianity legal, moved his capital to Constantinople, and began transforming the empire into a Christian empire.

In converting to Christianity, Constantine not only turned the Christian network into his own Roman bureaucracy, he also made himself, in effect, the head of the Christian church.

the Nicene Creed, which established the doctrine of the trinity. Roman Christians embraced the core belief that God was a single deity but also a trinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ the son, and a spiritual force called the Holy Ghost. All three were of the same essence, were the single God, were three, were one.

Wherever Germans overlapped with Romans, two incompatible world historical narratives were rubbing against each other. The Germans had no cities, knew nothing of town life. Their society featured war chiefs who ruled small areas from wooden hilltop forts in which lived not just their kinfolk but also their retainers: bands of men bound to them by oaths of mutual loyalty. The Germans took these oaths very seriously.

The Germans saw a world built on personal connections and networking, personal bargains and promises.

About two centuries into the Common Era, the German migrations picked up pace. Tribes on the frontier pushed aggressively into Roman territory. They pushed because they were being pushed. New waves of migrants were coming out of Central Asia. The Romans called the new migrants Scythians,

The Scythians were the westernmost edge of migrations that had begun in the Far East. Their roots went back to the nomadic Xiongnu who had been raiding China

Once the Great Wall was built and the mighty Han dynasty had congealed, the Chinese were able to stop these tribes from raiding their world. But pastoral steppe nomads lived almost as much by raiding as herding. If they couldn’t raid China, they’d raid someone else. But who?

When they began pushing into Europe, they aggravated the migrations of people already in place—the Germans. This is how, by blocking out the raiders of the steppes, the Great Wall of China contributed to the hammering of Rome.

The Germans gravitated more to this Arian creed than to the Nicene, perhaps because in their world, when a son’s stature matched his father’s, a power struggle was coming and chaos loomed.

Still, conversions to Christianity of whatever creed helped to further blur the distinction between German and Roman. Their clashing idea systems became two different stars in the larger constellation that was Christianity.

And with the capital so far away, it sometimes made sense for the government to appoint generals on the frontier as civil authorities and have them administer Roman order in their locale. These were called comes, which evolved into the title of count. Sometimes, when a German chieftain entered Roman territory and managed to grab some land, it made sense to simply call him the governor of the area he was already controlling and label the tribute he was demanding his salary. These mini-kings were duces, from which derives the title of duke.

The Roman and German worlds were getting shuffled together. The ever-more Romanized Germans were becoming the human capital of the ever-more Germanized Roman world. The Germans weren’t trying to destroy Rome. They were trying to become Romans.

The fact is, Rome never fell. It started out as a Latin world. It soaked up Greek themes as it expanded. The Greco-Latin blend then got Christianized. And eventually, the Christianized Greco-Roman world got Germanized. People who lived through the fall of Rome didn’t know Rome was falling; they just thought Rome was changing.

Way back in the fourth century, the Roman emperor Diocletian had ruled that free peasants could not leave their land or change the work they did. Laws like this turned European peasants into serfs. Serfs were not slaves. They were assets, inseparable from the land, like the trees and streams, the minerals and wild game. A person who acquired a piece of land acquired the serfs too. Germans didn’t introduce serfdom to Europe; they inherited it from the Roman past, but they took to it gladly, for it fit right into the world they were making, of self-sufficient agrarian units ruled by lords. All this was happening within an overarching Christian framework that harked back to the political structure of ancient Rome.

In 590 CE, a man named Gregory became the pope. He was the son of a Roman senator. (Yes, deep into the seventh century, the Roman world still had senators.) Pope Gregory declared that he outranked all the other bishops. He was not first among equals; he was head of the whole Christian body.

Judaism and Christianity were like parent and child, for Christianity had branched out of Judaism. Judaism and Islam, on the other hand, were more like cousins; neither had branched out of the other. Both traced their ancestry back to the same root: Abrahamic monotheism.

Christianity had started out as the religion of slaves and poor people in a powerful empire. Islam started out as the religion of small but independent groups ruled by no one but themselves. Christianity achieved political power by taking over the apparatus of the state within which it was born. Islam achieved political power by conquering its neighbors and its neighbors’ neighbors.

Nor was there much resistance to Arab cultural hegemony. Many people had swept across North Africa over the centuries, leaving it something of a cultural mishmash. Ancient Phoenician, Roman, and Hellenic traces were still sloshing around alongside Germanic, Roman Catholic, and Byzantine ones. When the Arab Muslims came along, they quickly absorbed this hodgepodge into their single coherent story of the world.

The Muslims rode across the desert on camels, looking for gold, but the camels that brought them across the desert could not get down into the equatorial jungle where the gold mines were. To get the gold, the Arabs had to trade for it with the local people. Fortunately, they had something to trade that was just as precious as gold, at least to the people of the sweltering south: they had salt.

The gold-salt exchange drew the Africans of these empires into a global trading network dominated by Muslims, which opened them up to Islam.

What Iranians sniffed at was the culture of the rude desert dwellers from the western wastelands. They bristled at any notion of Arab cultural superiority. Islam OK, Arabism no.

Iranians secured themselves a place in the Islamic world by embracing their own version of Islam. In their version, known as Shiism, Muhammad’s divine mission had been hijacked immediately after his death by opponents of the Prophet’s divinely ordained successor, his son-in-law Ali.

The Shias originated in Arabia, but they were a dissident religious minority within the Muslim community, and Persians were a dissident cultural group within the burgeoning Islamic empire, and so the two currents interwove to form another distinct thread in the Islamic fabric:

In searching for potions to confer magical powers, they compiled a pharmacopeia identifying over eight hundred medicinal herbs. Ironically, in seeking methods for achieving immortality, Taoist monks accidentally invented gunpowder.

“Open,” however, did not mean “outgoing.” China was open to the world but remained an inward-looking civilization. Arab ships docked at Chinese ports; Chinese ships didn’t dock at Arab ports. That would have struck the Chinese as inappropriate. Tributaries and barbarians came to the emperor, not the other way around.

Muslim intellectuals were the first ones in a position to make direct comparisons among the ideas of the great Chinese, Indian, Greek, and Persian thinkers. They were uniquely situated, therefore, to start asking the question: How could all of these things be true?

Exposure to many systems of thought drew Muslim philosophers into an obsession with encyclopedic compilation. “Let’s get everything anyone knows about this subject into a single book so we can compare” was the impulse.

The Catholic Church was not a state. It was Western Europe’s alternative to a state. The coherence of its constellation of ideas gave it a dominion rivaling that of any government.

Most citizens of this monad lived and died no more than a few miles from wherever they were born.

Shortly after Islam was born, Western Europe had fallen into a defensive posture that reinforced its closure. In the west, European Christians faced Muslim armies coming out of Africa. In the east, they had to fend off wave after wave of new invaders from the Eurasian steppes: Avars, Magyars, Pechenegs—the list goes on and on. In the north loomed the frightening and ferocious Norse people. Historians used to speak of this period as the Dark Ages.

The level of technology declined, maintenance lapsed, and infrastructure crumbled. Ever fewer people learned to read and write. Ever fewer books were written.

Urban civilizations formed later in the Americas than in the global East. Perhaps the human population has to hit a critical mass before cities can form,

But the great collective projects of the Americas were not about managing precious water to irrigate alluvial soil. In the Americas, people collaborated to cope with too much water (and too little level land).

Once a kernel forms, new kernels adhere to it, because once a framework has coalesced, it shapes the judgments and values of people living within it: once “beautiful” has been established, people strive to make what “everyone knows” to be beautiful, not what “everybody knows” to be ugly, even though beautiful and ugly have no objective existence separate from the humans doing the “knowing.”

The reason is simple: North America had no animals that could be domesticated. It had no sheep, no goats, no cows, nothing that could be herded.

Why did this happen? What made the table tilt? No single answer will do; history is never about single answers,

The Rus who came down the rivers of eastern Europe were mostly men, and you can bet they kept some of the captured Slavic women for themselves. So the children of the Rus were often born of Slavic mothers and grew up connected to their mothers’ culture, speaking Slavic languages. Within a few generations, the Rus had vanished into a Slavic-speaking local aristocracy without much connection to their distant cousins in Scandinavia. These Slavic aristocrats called themselves Russians, and they were no longer subsistence farmers but well-armed and aggressive warriors.

The rise of Russia compressed the Central Asian grasslands, setting off ripple effects that were felt across thousands of miles of territory.

The humbling of the Song, the Turkification of the Islamic world, the Afghan expansion into northern India, the Crusades—these dramas loom large in the world historical narratives of China, India, the Islamic world, and Europe. From the panoramic point of view, however, they look like a single interwoven drama that began in northern Europe, rippled through the Asian steppes, created disruptions in the urban civilizations along the whole perimeter of that region, and resulted finally in that great tilting of the table that shifted the balance of cultural power from the Eurasian east to the Eurasian west.

hundreds of consequential ideas, inventions, innovations, and technologies trickled into Western Europe. We’ve already spoken of banking, business practices, and Indian mathematics, but there was so much more: gunpowder, firearms, paper, printing and publishing, medical knowledge, chemical laboratory equipment, distilling technology, mechanical clocks, geared machine works, the magnetic compass, the astrolabe, the sextant, the bowsprit rudder, the lateen sail—all these technologies had germinated in the east and now came west.

The Islamic world played a key role in the transmission of nautical innovations from China to Europe because Islamic traders took a particular interest in navigation.

Upon completing this preliminary course, students were issued a certificate called a baccalaureate, which is Latin for “beginner.” It meant that now they could begin their studies. The baccalaureate still exists. Today, it’s called the bachelor of arts degree or BA: the standard generic college degree.

the questions people ask shape the kinds of answers they come up with.

Teutonic Knights went on a crusade against pagan tribes near the Baltic Sea and, in cleansing Europe of those heathens, carved a new kingdom for themselves: the state of Prussia.

English monarchs exploited this situation by actually cultivating Jewish moneylenders. A growing economy needs credit, and if Jews were lending money, Christians didn’t have to. Then when kings needed money, they could wring it out of the (Jewish) moneylenders as fines for usury. To meet the king’s demands, the moneylenders had to call in their loans. In effect, then, English kings were using Jewish moneylenders as an indirect way of taxing their subjects, which channeled the inevitable resentments raised by taxation away from the king and toward a minority conspicuous for its otherness.

But the Spanish Inquisition was all about this Spanish Catholic constellation consolidating its unity and identity.

Scholars derive their authority from their mastery of the known, not their explorations of the unknown.

Europe’s religious civil war thus ended up watering the seeds of a new social form that would mature over the next few centuries: the nation-state.

The Long Crusades had opened European eyes to a class of products abundant in east Asia, products that spoke to human longings for pleasure, luxury, recreation, and ecstasy. In short, Europe had begun to fixate on spices, and European adventurers were ready to face hardships and dangers to secure some of those wonderful products. It was the hunger for spices that led to one of history’s watershed moments.

Every world historical narrative organizes time around some pivotal event that separates after from before.

The Spaniards and Portuguese explicitly framed their American conquests as crusading. They were serving God by extending the dominion of His church.

Warriors and missionaries spearheaded European penetration of the Americas, but in their wake came businessmen who saw opportunities to get rich by producing certain crops on an industrial scale. Two such crops led the way: tobacco and sugarcane. Later came cotton.

Not all the sugar made from sugarcanes ended up being marketed as sugar. An offshoot industry of equal importance emerged when molasses, a by-product of sugar refining, was used to make rum. Building a huge, dependable market for this product was easy because rum is alcohol and alcohol is—well, it’s a drug. So there you have it: three drugs, along with gold, silver, and cotton—these were the goods that fueled the European colonization of the Americas.

Wherever the influx of silver fueled more energetic production and commerce, society absorbed the silver and grew more powerful from it. The first countries to loot the Americas got temporarily rich, like people who had won a jackpot, but then they became what they long remained: Western Europe’s two poorest countries.

In this post-Columbus era, long-distance traders in Europe developed a new way of doing business. Instead of buying what they found and looking for markets, they found markets, took orders, and contracted to have the products manufactured by farm families doing well enough to support some sideline of handicrafts.

In roiled circumstances, unscrupulous individuals can harness social turmoil to their own ambitions.

Some say the growing sophistication of technologies such as gene editing, molecular manipulation of matter, and machine intelligence will converge to a tipping point, which they call the singularity: a moment when humans and machines merge into one. Some see this as the moment when humans will achieve immortality, others as the moment when the human era ends and the machine age begins. Even if we’re racing toward the singularity, however, our history remains braided of three strands: the environment, whatever it be; the tools we craft, whatever those be; and the peculiarly human function enabled by language—the intercommunication wherewith we bring conceptual worlds into being, worlds we inhabit communally and experience individually, worlds that mediate between ourselves and a real world immense and complex beyond our capacity to imagine.