History of the World in 10 Movements
A Ten-Point Big-Picture
Most of history’s really big deals happened relatively early in our species’ existence. Bear in mind that we’re talking some 200,000 years since Homo Sapiens evolved, and five to six million years since hominids evolved. In this top ten list below, seven items happened before the eighteenth century.
I’m not looking, here, at dynastic struggles, or historic battles or political revolutions. All of that, all of the “stuff” usually thought of as “history,” I consider to be the details of one story from one period of the human career, that is to say the Agrarian period, starting with the “birth” of agriculture, and ending with the Industrial Revolution.
In this period the human energy profile remained relatively constant because technology did not develop dramatically, and population growth was slow and steady. People lived and died, dynasties and empires fought using relatively similar weapons, the mass of people existed in poverty, without much individual agency, died from disease, violence or hunger–if not in childbirth or childhood–until a “J curve” moment shows up–The Industrial Revolution, and we begin to overturn everything about how we lived.
The really big things, then — the turning points — happened before and after the Agrarian period, either in the first 190,000 years, or…
