History A path through The Default Library ======================================== How we know what happened, who gets to tell it, and the human story from the first cities to yesterday, on every continent. Step 1. Historical Method & Sources: How Anyone Knows What Happened ------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Sources, evidence and the historian's questions. Nobody has seen the past. What exists is a pile of leftovers: letters, coins, bones, tax lists, tree rings. The historian's craft is turning leftovers into claims you can trust, and knowing how far to trust them. Ask a grandparent when the family left the old village and you will get a confident year. Find the ship's passenger list and it says two years later. Both are real evidence. Neither is simply wrong. The grandparent may be remembering when the decision was made, or when they felt they had left, or may have been told the story by someone else. The list may have been compiled at the port, from what clerks wrote down on a busy morning. That small puzzle is the whole discipline of history in miniature. You have traces. The traces were made by people for their own reasons, some of them long dead. They disagree. They are incomplete, and the missing parts are not missing at random. A historian is someone trained to ask of each trace: who made this, when, for whom, and what could they actually have known? Then to ask what else would have to be true if the trace were right. This is the first piece in the History major, because every other history piece in the library, from the first cities to the twentieth century, leans on it. It is not a list of techniques to memorise. It is five habits of mind, each of which you can try on a small invented town below. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors in the first year, usually under a name like "Introduction to Historical Methods" or "The Historian's Craft"; the American Historical Association's Tuning project (2016) lists the use of evidence and sources among the core skills, and the UK subject benchmark for history asks the same. Archaeology, law, journalism and heritage students meet the same ideas. What it is forJudging a source, weighing sources against each other, dating things, arguing about causes, and noticing who is missing from the record. Comes afterNothing. It is the major's entry point. Leads toHistoriography (35/85), The Ancient World (35/86) and every later period piece, and onward to Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91). What this piece gives youYou will not be able to read a medieval charter or run a radiocarbon lab. You will see why a hundred newspaper stories can be worth one, why a date is a range, and why the quiet parts of an archive are part of the evidence. Easier first reads: Writing: The Invention That Made History Possible (06/10) and How to Read the News Without Losing Your Mind (06/04). Sources and provenance: who made this, and why? Historians sort evidence into primary sources (made at the time, by people who were there or close to it: a diary, a law, a coin, a building) and secondary sources (made later, by people working from other evidence: a textbook, a documentary). The line is not fixed. A 1828 anniversary speech is secondary for a flood in 1788 and primary for how people in 1828 wanted to remember it. Whether a source is primary depends on the question you are asking. The core move is provenance: where did this come from, and who has handled it since? Three questions do most of the work. Who made it, and what could they see? When, relative to the event? Why, and for what audience? A private diary, an official minute, a fundraising pamphlet and a burial register can all describe the same disaster, and each can answer one kind of question well and another badly. Marc Bloch, the French medievalist, compared the historian to a detective questioning witnesses; in The Historian's Craft (written in 1941–43 and published in French in 1949, after the Gestapo shot him in 1944) he stressed that a source says nothing until someone asks it something. Try it on Harbourton, an invented port. A flood hit it in 1788. Four sources survive. For each, pick what it is best at telling you. Interactive · The Harbourton sources This source is best for answering: Pick a use, then read the verdict. Harbourton and all four sources are invented for this exercise. The point is the questions, not the town. Without JavaScript: the diary is best for how a person experienced the night; the council minute for who was officially blamed; the 1828 newspaper for how the town later chose to remember; the burial register for roughly how many died in the week. Notice that no source in the game was "the reliable one". The register is the best guide to deaths in the week and the worst guide to why the flood happened. The diary is vivid, close in time and silent on anything its writer could not see. The newspaper is wrong about the numbers and the best evidence there is for the town's memory. This is what historians mean by reading a source for what it is. Corroboration: count the witnesses, not the copies One source is a claim. Two that agree feel like proof, but only if the two are independent. Medieval chroniclers copied each other freely, often without saying so. If six chronicles tell the same story and all six descend from one monk's notebook, you have one witness repeated six times. Ranke's early work on the Renaissance historian Guicciardini made this point in 1824: he showed that an apparently rich later account depended on earlier sources, and that where those earlier sources survived, they were the ones to use. Here is the idea as arithmetic. Suppose each independent witness is right with some probability r (say 70%). If the witnesses are independent, each additional agreeing one multiplies the odds that the event happened by r / (1 − r). If they are copies, they add nothing. The tool below uses a deliberately simple model, starting from 50/50. odds after k independent witnesses = (r / (1 − r))k × starting oddscopies of the same source count as one witness Interactive · How many accounts do you really have? Accounts that tell the story How many are independent lines of knowledge Chance each independent witness is right Six copies of one monkThree independent A toy model. Real witnesses are neither fully independent nor fully dependent, and a hostile witness who still confirms something is worth more than a friendly one. Without JavaScript: at 70% reliability and a 50/50 start, one witness gives 70%; three independent witnesses give about 93%; six copies of one account still give 70%. Two refinements matter in practice. First, enemy testimony: an admission from someone who gains nothing from it, or loses by it, is worth more. Second, convergence of kinds: a chronicle, a coin hoard and a burnt layer in the ground agreeing is stronger than three chronicles, because they could not have copied each other. Dating: how old is it, really? "When" comes from several tools, used together. Written chronologies give a framework: king lists, regnal years on coins, the lists of Assyrian annual officials, which are tied to the real sky by an eclipse recorded in 763 BCE. They can also mislead; the Sumerian King List gives early rulers reigns of tens of thousands of years. Dendrochronology counts tree rings. Wet years make wide rings, dry years narrow ones, and the pattern is a barcode that overlaps between living and old timbers; continuous European oak and pine chronologies now reach back more than twelve thousand years. Radiocarbon dating reaches objects with no writing at all. Here is how the last one works. Cosmic rays make a little radioactive carbon-14 in the air, which plants take up and animals eat. While an organism lives, it keeps replenishing it. When it dies, the supply stops and the carbon-14 decays: its half-life is about 5,730 years. Measure how much is left and you can run the clock back. The method was developed by Willard Libby in the late 1940s (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1960). age = 8033 × ln(1 / F)F = fraction of modern carbon-14 left. 8033 years is the "mean life" from the conventional half-life of 5,568 years; results are quoted in years "BP" (before 1950) Two honest complications. The amount of carbon-14 in the air has not been constant, so a raw radiocarbon age must be calibrated against a curve built from tree rings, corals, cave deposits and lake sediments; the current standard is IntCal20 (Reimer and colleagues, 2020). And tiny contamination from modern carbon makes old samples look young. Play with both. Interactive · Radiocarbon calculator True age of the sample (years before 1950) Modern carbon contamination (% of sample) Conventional-age arithmetic is exact. The calendar conversion uses a rounded, schematic curve (a handful of points, interpolated), good to a few hundred years at best. Real work uses IntCal20 in OxCal or CALIB. Measured amounts below about 0.2% of modern are in practice indistinguishable from background. Without JavaScript: after one half-life (5,730 years) half the carbon-14 is left; at about 50,000 years only about 0.2% remains, near the limit of the method. A sample 50,000 years old mixed with just 1% modern carbon reads as roughly 35,000 years. One more consequence: a radiocarbon result is a range with a probability, not a date. Between about 800 and 400 BCE the calibration curve is nearly flat (the "Hallstatt plateau"), so one measurement can map onto several centuries. That is why archaeologists combine it with tree rings, layers in the ground and written records. Causes: necessary, sufficient and contingent Why did it happen? Historians argue about this more than about anything, and the argument has a structure. A but-for test asks: would it have happened without this? A factor that fails the test is not a cause in that strict sense. But most real events have several factors, none sufficient alone. The philosopher John Mackie named the usual shape in 1965: a cause is an Insufficient but Necessary part of an Unnecessary but Sufficient condition (an INUS). A match is struck, but only because there was oxygen, dry wood and no rain. Then there is contingency: the part that could easily have gone another way. Debates about the First World War are the standard case. Fritz Fischer (1961) stressed German aims; Christopher Clark (2012) stressed a web of decisions across several capitals. Neither denies that Sarajevo was a spark; they disagree about how dry the forest was. Counterfactuals ("what if Princip had missed?") are a tool for testing that, not a game of alternate worlds. Here is a miniature in Harbourton. The flood did damage because of heavy rain and either a blocked culvert or a spring tide. Deaths were high if there was flood damage and no warning bell. Switch conditions on and off. Interactive · Remove a cause Rule used: flood = rain AND (culvert OR tide); many deaths = flood AND no bell. An invented logic for illustration; real histories have no such clean rules. Without JavaScript: with rain, a blocked culvert, a high tide and no bell, removing the culvert changes nothing (the tide still floods the town), yet the culvert is still part of a sufficient set. Removing the rain prevents everything. The lesson to carry out: "the cause" is usually a choice about which conditions to call background and which to call triggers, and that choice is often where the real disagreement hides. Silences: who left records, and what survived? The archive is not the past. It is what got written, then kept, then survived fires, floods, floods of paperwork, and being thrown out. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, in Silencing the Past (1995), said silence enters at four moments: when facts are created (who writes), assembled (what an archive keeps), retrieved (what historians choose to tell) and given significance in hindsight. His striking example was the Haitian Revolution, which many people in Europe in the 1790s found literally unthinkable and so wrote about in ways that hid what it was. Chance can preserve as well as destroy. Ashurbanipal's library at Nineveh (7th century BCE) survived because the fire that destroyed the city baked its clay tablets hard. The rubbish heaps of Oxyrhynchus in Egypt, excavated from 1896 by Grenfell and Hunt, gave hundreds of thousands of papyrus scraps: receipts, letters, school exercises. The storeroom of a Cairo synagogue, the Geniza, preserved documents of ordinary Jewish and Muslim life across centuries because the community could not bring itself to discard writing that might contain a holy name. Where writing did not carry history, other records did. Inca administrators kept accounts on knotted cords (khipu), and many West African societies preserve long, trained oral traditions; Jan Vansina's Oral Tradition as History (1985) set out how to test those against other evidence. The tool below shows how thin the surviving voice can be, even with generous assumptions. It models 1,000 invented Harbourton residents in four groups, with an invented chance of being able to write, and of the writing being kept. Interactive · Whose words survive? Survival of papers over two centuries (multiplier) Also count mentions in other people's records All numbers invented. Gentry and officials 100 people, tradespeople 300, labourers and servants 450, poor, enslaved or transient 150. "Mentions" adds tax lists, court records and registers, which name people who never wrote anything. Figures are expected values, not a simulation. Without JavaScript: in the default model the gentry are 10% of the town and about two thirds of surviving personal writing; the poorest 15% leave less than one person’s worth. Counting mentions in other people’s records lifts the poorest to about 5% of what survives, though only as seen by someone else. Historians respond in two ways. They read against the grain, using a record for what it reveals unintentionally: a court case written by a magistrate shows a servant's words, filtered. And they go looking for other kinds of evidence: archaeology, language, oral tradition, the bodies themselves. Neither closes the gap. What they do is tell you honestly where it is. Fakes: the method in reverse Forgeries are history's stress test. In 1440 the Italian humanist Lorenzo Valla showed that the Donation of Constantine, a document by which the emperor supposedly gave the pope rule over Rome, could not be a fourth-century text: its Latin used words and phrases from later centuries. In 1983 the German magazine Stern published extracts of "Hitler's diaries"; within weeks German archive laboratories found modern paper and binding, and the forger Konrad Kujau was caught. Neither case needed a confession. Each was settled by the same questions: who made this, when, and does it fit everything else we know? What a graduate just sees Every source answers some questions well and others badly; ask what it was made for. Six accounts that copy one source are one witness. A date is a range with a method behind it. Know the method. "The cause" is a choice among conditions; ask which ones would have had to change. The archive is a survivor of selection. Who is missing is part of the evidence. Be most suspicious of a source that tells you exactly what you hoped to find. Where it shows up next Historiography (35/85): the same craft applied to historians themselves. Why did Herodotus, Sima Qian and Ranke trust different things? The Ancient World (35/86) and every period piece: each ancient date in them is a range from the tools above. Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91): what the town chose to remember in 1828. In the world: journalism's verification (the same provenance questions), courts weighing evidence, genealogy, and anyone deciding whether a viral photograph is what it claims to be. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Jules Benjamin, A Student's Guide to History (Bedford/St. Martin's, many editions), and Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft (the classic, in many English editions). 📘 Gentler. Margaret MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History (2008), and John Lewis Gaddis, The Landscape of History (2002). 🌐 Free resources. The Internet History Sourcebooks Project (primary sources, free), and the Digital Inquiry Group's Reading Like a Historian lessons. 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21H.991 Theories and Methods in the Study of History (Fall 2010) is a graduate seminar, so read it as a stretch goal. The takeaway History is an argument from leftovers. A source is judged by who made it, when and why; agreement counts only between independent witnesses; dates are ranges with methods behind them; causes are a set of conditions we choose among; and the gaps in the record are part of the evidence. Try this: take one family story and find one document that touches it. Write down how each one came to exist, and whether they are independent. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Bloch, The Historian's Craft; Ranke's appendix on Guicciardini to his 1824 Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker; Mackie, "Causes and Conditions," American Philosophical Quarterly 1965; Fischer, Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961); Clark, The Sleepwalkers (2012); Trouillot, Silencing the Past (1995); Vansina, Oral Tradition as History (1985); Reimer et al., "The IntCal20 Northern Hemisphere radiocarbon age calibration curve," Radiocarbon 62 (2020); Libby's Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1960. Radiocarbon arithmetic computed in node. The Harbourton sources, rules and numbers are invented. 📘 Bloch, The Historian's Craft 📘 MacMillan, The Uses and Abuses of History 🌐 Internet History Sourcebooks Project Step 2. The Ancient World: What Survives, and What We Can Say About It ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus, China, the Americas and the Mediterranean. From the first cities to about 500 CE, on every continent: the sources are clay, bone, stone, bark and a few lucky scrolls, the dates are anchored by an eclipse and a tree ring, and every number is an estimate with an error bar. In 1899, as the story is usually told, a scholar in Beijing noticed strange scratches on a "dragon bone" that a pharmacy was selling to be ground into medicine. The marks were writing. The bones were the questions that Shang kings had put to their ancestors about 3,200 years earlier, cracked with heat and then read. Chemists had been swallowing the oldest Chinese archive for generations. That is the ancient historian's situation in one picture. We do not have "the past". We have what happened to survive, mostly by accident, in the places where it survived, and a toolkit for asking what it can and cannot tell us. A graduate of this course keeps the toolkit: where the evidence comes from, how it is dated, how many people it can really count, and which of the big arguments are still open. This piece teaches how historians of the earliest cities work and what they currently think. It leans on estimates throughout, and says so. It does not argue current politics; where ancient places are claimed by modern ones, it describes the evidence. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors, usually in year 1 or 2, as the first survey of the world before the middle centuries. In the AHA's History Discipline Core and in most world-history programmes it is taught globally, beside or instead of "Greece and Rome". Classics, archaeology and anthropology students meet it too. What it is forShowing how a historian builds a picture of societies with few or no surviving words, and what the first cities, states and empires of every continent had in common and did differently. Comes afterHistorical Method & Sources (35/84). Leads toThe Medieval World, 500–1500 (35/87), then The Early Modern World, 1450–1800 (35/88). It also feeds Historiography (35/85) and Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91). What this piece gives youYou will not be able to read cuneiform. You will know what kinds of evidence each region has, why an eclipse in 763 BCE matters so much, how to turn a site plan into a population range, and where scholars disagree. Easier first reads: The Whole Human Story in 12 Turning Points (06/01) and Writing: The Invention That Made History Possible (06/10). Sources: what survives is not what happened Every ancient historian works with a biased sample, and the bias is physical. Baked and sun-dried clay survives fires and floods, so Mesopotamia left several hundred thousand cuneiform tablets, many still unpublished. Papyrus survives only in dry air, so Egypt's desert margins give us scrolls and Greece's damp does not. Maya books were bark paper folded like screens; Spanish clergy burned them in the 16th century, and only a handful survive (three undisputed ones, the Dresden, Madrid and Paris codices, plus the Grolier Codex, which a 2018 study accepted as authentic). The Indus cities left thousands of stamp seals with a script of roughly 400 signs, usually only about five signs long. No one has deciphered it. A lost literature may have been written on cloth, wood or leaves that rotted. Add the question of who wrote. Temples and palaces kept the archives, so we know a great deal about grain and tribute and very little about how a farmer felt. Kings wrote about their victories. Later writers wrote about earlier kings with their own purposes: the Greek historians who tell the Persian side of the Persian Wars did not read Persian, and no Persian narrative of those wars survives. The craft is to match the question to the source. Try it with three invented documents. Pick a question, then pick the document you would trust for it. Interactive · Which source answers which question? A. A temple receipt on a clay tablet. Written the day of the delivery by a scribe. It lists barley issued to 30 workers and is dated "the year the king built the wall". B. A king's victory inscription on stone. Carved for the temple gate. It says the king killed "ten thousand" enemies and that the gods loved him. C. A chronicle written about 600 years later. It tells the king's life in a smooth story and cites "the old books", which are lost. The question How much barley did workers get?What did the king want people to believe?When did he reign? Your source A. ReceiptB. InscriptionC. Chronicle All three documents are made up to show the reasoning. The ratings are judgments historians would make, not a formula. Without JavaScript: the receipt is the strong source for quantities and dates because it was made at the time for bookkeeping, not for show. The inscription is the strong source for what the king wanted believed, not for how many died. The late chronicle is weak unless it quotes something older that we can check. Notice the rule underneath: a source is good or bad for a particular question. The humble receipt is the best evidence we have for ancient economies precisely because nobody was trying to impress anyone with it. A nice example is a papyrus logbook found in 2013 at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, kept by an official named Merer, which records boats hauling limestone to Giza in the reign of Khufu, about 2560 BCE. It shows the builders of the Great Pyramid as organised, paid labour crews, and it does it by accident, in a diary. Dating: how anyone knows when "The year the king built the wall" is not a date. Ancient people counted years by kings, by named years, by officials who gave their names to a year, or from some founding. Historians turn these into our calendar by chaining them. The Assyrians kept lists of officials, one per year. One list notes an eclipse of the sun in the month of Simanu. Astronomers can calculate that the eclipse was on 15 June 763 BCE, which fixes that entry, and by counting along the list in both directions, a stretch of Near Eastern history gets exact years. That single eclipse is a nail in a very large wall. Other nails: the first securely dated event in Chinese history by the traditional record is the start of a regency in 841 BCE, which the Han historian Sima Qian's chronology supports; before it, early Chinese dates are reconstructions (the state-sponsored Xia–Shang–Zhou Chronology Project of the 1990s and 2000 proposed dates and drew criticism for how it chose among sources). The Sumerian King List shows another trap: it gives kings reigns of tens of thousands of years (one is credited with 28,800), then shrinks to reasonable lengths, and lists as consecutive some rulers who reigned in different cities at the same time. Physics helps. Radiocarbon dating uses the fact that living things take in carbon-14, which then decays with a half-life of about 5,730 years. Measure how much is left and you can read off an age. Tree rings give a year-by-year check: wood from different trees is matched ring by ring into chains that now reach back about 12,000 years, and the carbon in each dated ring tells us how the atmosphere's carbon-14 changed. That is why a raw radiocarbon age must be calibrated (the standard curve is IntCal20, published in 2020), and why calibrated results come as a range, not a point. Play with the decay and the error. Interactive · Radiocarbon age from what is left Carbon-14 left in the sample, as % of a living one Measurement uncertainty (± percentage points) age = 5,730 × log2(1 ÷ fraction left)half-life 5,730 years; the raw age is not yet a calendar date Labs report conventional ages using the older Libby half-life of 5,568 years and then calibrate; this toy uses the physical half-life only to show the shape. The point: the same small measurement error is a few decades of uncertainty for a young sample and hundreds or thousands of years for an old one. Without JavaScript: half the carbon-14 left means about 5,730 years; a quarter means about 11,460; one eighth means about 17,190. Because the curve flattens, a fixed measurement error costs far more years in old samples. The Egyptian case shows the method working. Egyptologists dated the Old Kingdom from king lists and a few astronomical anchors; a 2010 radiocarbon study of short-lived plant remains from known reigns (Bronk Ramsey and colleagues, Science) largely agreed with the historical dates, with differences of a few decades. Two independent methods meeting is what confidence looks like in this field. The first cities, side by side Cities and states appeared in several places that did not know each other. That is the first thing to see, and it is why this course is not about one cradle. Uruk in southern Mesopotamia was a real city by about 3300 BCE, with the earliest known writing tablets from its temple archives. Egypt was unified under one crown around 3100 BCE. The Indus cities (Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Dholavira) were at their mature phase from about 2600 to 1900 BCE, with planned streets, drains and standard weights, and no obvious palaces. On the coast of Peru, Caral and its neighbours (the Norte Chico) built monumental platforms from roughly 3000 BCE with no pottery. In China, Erlitou (c.1900–1500 BCE) and the Shang (c.1600–1046 BCE, with the writing on the oracle bones) followed millennia of Neolithic towns like Liangzhu. In Mesoamerica the Olmec built San Lorenzo and La Venta from about 1200 BCE. In West Africa, the Nok culture made iron and astonishing terracotta figures between about 900 BCE and 300 CE. Aboriginal Australians and the voyagers of the Lapita culture in the Pacific had different, enormously successful ways to organise people. Not every society built a city, and not building one was not failing. Move the slider and read what was going on, in parallel, in eight regions. The bars show when each entry is dated to; where bars overlap, two things were happening at once. Interactive · The same year, everywhere Year Dates are conventional, rounded and sometimes disputed (the Mesopotamian ones use the "middle chronology"). Early dates in China and the Americas are approximate. AroundWest AsiaEgypt, Nubia, AfricaSouth and East AsiaMediterranean and Americas 3300 BCEUruk city, early writingEgypt unified c.3100Liangzhu towns in ChinaCaral rises, c.3000 2500 BCEEarly city-statesGiza pyramidsIndus cities matureMinoan Crete 1200 BCECollapse of old palace worldRamesses III; Nok beginsShang at AnyangOlmec San Lorenzo 300 BCEHellenistic kingdomsMeroë in NubiaMaurya; Warring StatesRome expands; Preclassic Maya 200 CEParthians, then SasaniansAksum risingHan ends; KushansRoman Empire; Teotihuacan Numbers: people, armies and the honest error bar Ancient numbers are of two kinds. Some are claims in a text: Herodotus gave Xerxes' army as over five million fighting men, which no one believes. Others are estimates built from archaeology and a few censuses. The honest ones come with a range. The world's population around 1 CE is commonly put at roughly 200 to 300 million, and published estimates run from about 170 to 400 million. The Roman Empire at its height is put at about 50 to 70 million people. A Han census of 2 CE survives and gives roughly 58 to 60 million (the figure depends on how the Book of Han is read), one of the very few real counts from the ancient world, and it counted households for tax, so it undercounts the people the state could not reach. For a city with no census, the recipe is area × density: measure the walled area from survey, then multiply by a plausible number of people per hectare taken from places where we do know. The trouble is that the plausible range is wide. Slide it. Interactive · Population from a site plan (illustrative) Built-up area in hectares People per hectare Small townBig walled cityHuge capital Illustrative numbers. Real estimates for Uruk, Mohenjo-daro or Rome rest on the same recipe, with their own debated areas and densities, and they stay uncertain by a factor of two or more. Without JavaScript: 100 hectares at 150 people per hectare is 15,000 people; the same area at 50 or 400 per hectare is 5,000 or 40,000. The density guess matters as much as the survey. Ancient people also counted with other bases. Mesopotamian scribes wrote numbers in base 60, which is why we still have 60 minutes and 360 degrees. A school tablet from about 1800–1600 BCE in Yale's collection (YBC 7289) shows a square with its diagonal marked 1;24,51,10 in base 60. The reader below turns that into decimal. Interactive · Reading a base-60 number Units 1/60 1/3600 1/216000 Load the tablet's 1;24,51,10 Without JavaScript: 1 + 24/60 + 51/3600 + 10/216000 = 1.41421296, and the true square root of 2 is 1.41421356. The scribe was right to six decimal places, about six ten-millionths too low. Why cities and states at all: the argument that is still running Why did people ever gather in cities, pay taxes and obey kings? Nobody knows the full answer, and the field has several serious theories. Karl Wittfogel (1957) argued that big irrigation works demanded bosses; the evidence for Mesopotamia and Egypt is mixed, because many early canals were local. Robert Carneiro (1970) argued that where farmland was hemmed in by mountains or desert, losers could not leave, so they submitted. James C. Scott (Against the Grain, 2017) stressed that early states were built on grain, which is visible, countable and taxable, unlike roots or herds. David Graeber and David Wengrow (The Dawn of Everything, 2021) argued that early cities often had no obvious kings and that people experimented with many ways of organising; critics replied that the evidence is thinner than the book's confidence and that some of its examples are contested. Evidence keeps moving. At Göbekli Tepe in Anatolia, monumental stone enclosures were built around 9500 BCE by people who, as far as we know, were not yet farmers, which upsets the old order of "farming, then monuments". Writing was invented independently more than once: in Mesopotamia by about 3300 BCE and Egypt soon after, in China by about 1250 BCE (oracle bones), in Mesoamerica by roughly 500 BCE. That several unconnected peoples reached the same tools is the strongest argument that cities are not a freak accident. Endings: the Bronze Age collapse and the fall of Rome The ancient world is a story of endings as much as beginnings, and historians argue about them in public. Around 1200 to 1150 BCE the palace world of the eastern Mediterranean broke: the Hittite capital was abandoned, Ugarit was destroyed, Mycenaean palaces fell, and Egypt, which survived, recorded fighting off the "Sea Peoples" in Ramesses III's temple at Medinet Habu. Eric Cline's 1177 B.C. (2014) argues for a systems collapse: earthquakes, drought, migration, rebellion and broken trade each hitting an interdependent network. Other scholars weight individual causes differently, and the climate evidence is itself argued. Why did the western Roman Empire end?disputed Edward Gibbon (1776–89) blamed moral and military decay and Christianity. Peter Brown (1971) and the "late antiquity" school saw a long transformation, not a fall. Bryan Ward-Perkins (2005) argued the end was violent and that living standards really collapsed, citing the archaeology of pottery and building. Peter Heather (2005) stressed external pressure, especially the Huns pushing others into the empire. Kyle Harper (2017) added plague and climate: the Antonine Plague (from 165), the plague of Cyprian (c.249–262) and the Justinianic plague (from 541). What is not in dispute: in 476 Odoacer removed the last western emperor, Romulus Augustulus, and the central government in the West ended; the eastern empire, which we call Byzantine, continued to 1453. And the Roman story is only one of several endings of this period. The Han state fell in 220 CE and China split into rival states for centuries; the Gupta kingdom, the Kushite kingdom of Meroë and the empire of the Parthians each ended on its own timetable. A graduate sees "the fall of Rome" as one case among many, not as the template. What a graduate just sees Every source is good for some questions and bad for others; the receipt beats the monument for the economy, the monument beats the receipt for propaganda. What survives is shaped by climate, fire, reuse and who paid scribes, not by importance. Dates are chains, anchored in a few places (an eclipse, a tree ring, a king list), and every chain has weak links. A raw radiocarbon number is a range, and the older the sample the wider it is. Ancient population numbers are products of area times density and deserve an error bar of a factor of two. Cities and states arose in several unconnected places, so there is no single cradle. "The fall of Rome" has at least four serious explanations and one agreed date. Where it shows up next The Medieval World, 500–1500 (35/87): the successors of Rome, Han and Gupta, and the chronicles and archives that replace tablets. Historiography (35/85): Herodotus, Thucydides and Sima Qian are the first historians you meet as sources and as authors. Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91): who owns Mesopotamian tablets, the Elgin marbles and the Benin bronzes is a modern argument about ancient things. Epic, Myth & the Ancient Literatures (35/30) and Western Music History (35/70): the oldest songs and epics are historical sources too. In the world: archaeology, museum curation, heritage law, and any news about a newly dated site. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Marc Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East, ca. 3000–323 BC (Wiley-Blackwell, 3rd ed. 2015), and Bentley, Ziegler and Streets-Salter, Traditions & Encounters, a widely used world-history survey (McGraw-Hill). 📘 Gentler. Eric Cline, 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (2015), for the connections. 🌐 Free text. OpenStax World History, Volume 1 is free online and covers this period globally. 🌐 Free course. Open Yale Courses, CLCV 205 Introduction to Ancient Greek History (Donald Kagan) is free with full lectures; Khan Academy's world history series covers the other regions. The takeaway The ancient world is reconstructed from a biased sample of surviving things, dated by chains with a few firm anchors, and counted with ranges. Cities and states arose independently in several places, and the big arguments, from why states formed to why Rome fell, are open in useful ways. Try this: next time you see a headline claiming a "5,000-year-old" discovery, ask which kind of dating it used and whether it gives a range. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Assyrian eponym lists and the eclipse of 15 June 763 BCE; the Sumerian King List (Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature, Oxford); radiocarbon half-life 5,730 years and IntCal20 (Reimer et al., Radiocarbon 2020); Bronk Ramsey et al., "Radiocarbon-based chronology for dynastic Egypt," Science 2010; Wadi al-Jarf papyri (Tallet 2017); the 2018 Grolier Codex study (Carter et al., Maya Archaeology); Van De Mieroop (2015); Cline (2014); Gibbon, Brown, Ward-Perkins, Heather and Harper as cited in the text; Scott (2017) and Graeber and Wengrow (2021); Göbekli Tepe (Schmidt; Dietrich et al.); census figures from the Book of Han as discussed in Scheidel and Hopkins; YBC 7289 (Yale Babylonian Collection). Population ranges are from standard compilations (McEvedy and Jones 1978; HYDE). Dates for the Shang and early Zhou are conventional. 📘 Van De Mieroop, A History of the Ancient Near East 📘 Cline, 1177 B.C. 🌐 World History Encyclopedia Step 3. Epic, Myth & the Ancient Literatures: The First Great Stories --------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: The first great stories, read as historical sources. Before there were novels, there were poems sung for hours about kings, heroes, gods and the fear of dying. They were made out loud, changed in every performance, and they still shape what we think a story is. Around 1853, workers digging in the ruins of Nineveh, in what is now northern Iraq, turned up thousands of baked clay tablets from the library of an Assyrian king. Nearly two decades later, in 1872, a museum assistant in London named George Smith read one of them and is said to have been so excited that he started undressing in the reading room. The tablet told of a man warned by a god to build a boat before a great flood, and of the birds he sent out to find dry land. It was older than the Bible by centuries, and the flood story was strikingly familiar. The tablet belongs to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest long story we can read. This piece is a tour of that world: the poems of Mesopotamia, Greece, India, Rome, West Africa, the Maya highlands and Iran that came before the novel, and the surprising discovery of how most of them were made. The course in one box Who takes itEnglish, classics and comparative-literature majors, usually in year 1. Columbia's Literature Humanities core begins with Homer, and world-literature surveys of the period before 1500 usually start with Gilgamesh. What it is forKnowing the stories every later literature argues with, and understanding that these works were performed, not read. Comes afterNarrative (35/29), for the vocabulary of plot, time and point of view. Leads toDrama & Tragedy (35/31), which grew out of Greek myth, The Novel (35/32), and Translation & World Literature (35/35). What this piece gives youYou will not have read the Mahabharata. You will know what each of these works is, where it comes from, why scholars still argue about it, and which to start with. Religious texts here are read as literature; that does not touch what they mean to believers. Poems made out loud: oral composition and the Parry–Lord discovery Why does Homer keep saying "swift-footed Achilles," even when Achilles is sitting down sulking in his tent? A young American scholar named Milman Parry, in his doctoral work at the Sorbonne in 1928, noticed that the epithets seemed to be chosen not for meaning but for sound. Each hero has several ready-made phrases of different lengths, and the poet picks whichever one fills the part of the line that is left. The stock phrases are formulae: Parry defined a formula as an expression regularly used, under the same metrical conditions, to express a given idea. Parry realised this was not a literary style but a tool for composing at speed, in public, in rhythm. To test the idea he travelled to Yugoslavia in 1933 and 1935 and recorded living singers of oral epic. His assistant Albert Lord carried on after Parry's death in 1935 (an accidental gunshot in Los Angeles) and published The Singer of Tales in 1960. The finding: these singers did not memorise a fixed text. They re-composed the song each time from formulas and story patterns, and each one swore he sang the same song he had always sung. You can feel the system with a toy. Choose a hero and the room left in the line. The page gives the real Greek phrase that fits. Interactive · Fill the gap in the line Real Homeric phrases; syllables counted in transliteration. Real Greek hexameter counts long and short syllables, not just syllables, so this is a teaching toy: the point is that the poet has a ready option for each size of gap. That is the heart of the Parry–Lord idea. A heroic phrase is a unit of rhythm as well as meaning. The poems were passed on by composition-in-performance, which is why there is no "original" in the way we imagine one. Scholars still argue how far this describes Homer: how much of the Iliad was oral, when it was written down (the standard date for its composition is the late 8th to mid 7th century BCE), and whether a single genius shaped it. And the claim that formulaic verse is a mark of oral composition is itself debated, as in the long argument over Old English poetry. What is not in doubt is that oral traditions made these works, and that to read them well you should think of a voice and a room. Gilgamesh: the oldest story, and its fear of death Gilgamesh is the king of Uruk, two-thirds god and one-third man, who oppresses his city until the gods make him an equal: Enkidu, a wild man made from clay. They become friends, kill the monster Humbaba and the Bull of Heaven, and the gods decree that one of them must die. Enkidu sickens and dies. Gilgamesh will not accept it until, as the poem says, a maggot falls from his friend's nose. Terrified, he journeys to the end of the world to find Utnapishtim, the only human given eternal life. The text has layers. Sumerian poems about Gilgamesh, some perhaps from around 2100 BCE, came first. The oldest tablets of a single connected epic are Old Babylonian, around 1800 BCE. The version we read most is the Standard Babylonian one, twelve tablets compiled by the scholar Sîn-lēqi-unninni some time between about 1300 and 1000 BCE and titled "He who saw the deep," found in the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. Utnapishtim's flood story in Tablet XI is the part Smith read in 1872. And Gilgamesh's answer to death is not immortality but a city wall: he goes home and shows the ferryman the walls of Uruk, and they are what survives. The flood story also appears, in different form, in the Mesopotamian Atra-Hasis and in Genesis. Scholars such as Andrew George argue that Genesis follows the Gilgamesh account closely and that a Mesopotamian origin is widely accepted. Compare them. Interactive · Three flood stories Simplified from standard accounts (Andrew George's edition of Gilgamesh; Atra-Hasis; Genesis 6–9). Each is a rich text with variants; this table only compares broad features. Homer: the wrath and the homecoming The Iliad (15,693 lines in the standard edition) is not the story of the Trojan War. It is the story of a few weeks near its end, set in motion by a quarrel and a sulk: Achilles withdraws from battle, his friend Patroclus dies in his place, and Achilles' rage turns on Hector. The poem ends not with Troy's fall but with Achilles, in his tent, handing Hector's body back to Hector's father Priam. The most devastating scene in Western literature is two old enemies weeping together over their dead. The Odyssey (about 12,100 lines) is its mirror: a man trying to get home, and a household hoping he will. It is full of the narrative tools from the last piece: it opens in the middle (in medias res), and Odysseus tells his own wandering from a banquet seat, so that the hero is also the narrator, and the reader may wonder how much of it to trust. A short note on a famous reading: in Mimesis (1946), the German critic Erich Auerbach contrasted the Homeric style, which brings everything into the light, with the Hebrew Bible's story of Abraham and Isaac, which gives hardly any inner life and leaves the reader to fill the silence. Many scholars have taken the contrast further, and many have disputed it. It is a good lesson in how a close reader makes a case. The Mahabharata and the Ramayana: the largest stories ever told India's two great Sanskrit epics are enormous. The Mahabharata, traditionally ascribed to the sage Vyasa, has more than 100,000 shlokas (verses of two lines each) and, with its long prose passages, some 1.8 million words, about ten times the Iliad and Odyssey put together. It tells of two sets of cousins, the Pandavas and the Kauravas, and the eighteen-day war that destroys a generation. Inside it sits the Bhagavad Gita, the conversation on a battlefield between the warrior Arjuna and Krishna about duty and action. Scholars see it as a composite work that grew over centuries: its oldest parts are not much older than about 400 BCE, and it reached roughly its present form by the early Gupta period, around the 4th century CE. The Ramayana, traditionally by the poet Valmiki, is shorter: about 24,000 shlokas in seven books. Its subject is Rama, prince of Ayodhya, exiled for fourteen years with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana; Sita is abducted by the demon king Ravana; Rama, aided by the monkey-god Hanuman, wins her back. Scholars date its original oral composition to somewhere in the mid-first millennium BCE. It has been retold all over Asia, from Kamban's Tamil version in the 12th century and Tulsidas's Hindi Ramcharitmanas in 1576 to Cambodia's Reamker and Thailand's Ramakien. For many people the question is not "what happens in the Ramayana" but "which Ramayana". How long are these things? Slide to your reading speed and see. Interactive · How long would it take? Lines you read per minute Approximate line counts: Odyssey 12,109; Aeneid 9,896; Iliad 15,693; Ramayana about 24,000 shlokas × 2; Shahnameh about 50,000 couplets × 2; Mahabharata over 100,000 shlokas × 2. A line of Greek hexameter and half a shloka are not the same length, so this compares order of magnitude, not exact reading time. The Hebrew Bible as literature The Hebrew Bible (the Christian Old Testament) is, among other things, one of the great literary works, and since the 1980s critics such as Robert Alter (The Art of Biblical Narrative, 1981) have taught readers to see its craft: sparse description, quick dialogue, repeated key words, and a way of telling a story by leaving things out. A believer reads it as scripture; a literature student can read the same page for how it works, and the two readings are not rivals. It was composed and edited over many centuries (dates are debated; much of it is placed roughly between the 8th and 2nd centuries BCE). Its poetry rests on parallelism: a line says something, and the next line says it again in other words, but pushed one step further. The King James Bible (1611) renders Psalm 19:1 as "The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork." The second half does not simply repeat the first. "Heavens" becomes "firmament," "declare" becomes "sheweth," and "glory" becomes "handywork": the declaration is moved from words to things made. Hebrew poetry thinks in pairs, as Chinese regulated verse does (see Close Reading & Poetry, 35/28), and the English reader can feel it even in translation. Virgil: an epic to make an empire The Aeneid was written in Latin between 29 and 19 BCE by Virgil, who died in 19 BCE at Brundisium, asking that the unfinished manuscript be burned. The emperor Augustus overruled him and ordered his literary executors to publish. The poem (9,896 lines) takes Homer on purpose: the first six books, Aeneas's wandering from burning Troy to Italy, are commonly compared to the Odyssey; the last six, the war against the Latins, to the Iliad. It opens "Arma virumque cano": "I sing of arms and the man." Where Homer has no nation, Virgil has one: Aeneas is a founder, obedient to fate, who gives up a lover (the Carthaginian queen Dido) to do his duty to the Rome that will come. Readers have argued for two thousand years over whether the poem celebrates Augustus's empire or mourns what it costs, and its closing scene, in which the hero kills a begging enemy in anger, is the strongest piece of evidence for either side. Three living traditions: Sundiata, the Popol Vuh and the Shahnameh Sundiata. The epic of Sundiata Keita, who founded the Mali Empire in the 13th century (his reign is dated to about 1235 to 1255), is still performed in West Africa by jeliw (singular jeli, often called griots), hereditary keepers of history and praise. It tells of a prince born lame who could not walk until he was seven, then stood, bent an iron rod, and grew into the king who defeated the sorcerer-king Sumanguru. There is no single text: the best-known written form is Djibril Tamsir Niane's French Soundjata ou l'épopée mandingue (1960), based on the telling of the jeli Mamadou Kouyaté, and translated into English by G. D. Pickett in 1965. Every performance differs, which is exactly what Parry and Lord described. The Popol Vuh. The sacred book of the K'iche' Maya of the Guatemalan highlands, probably written down in Latin letters around the 1550s (the oldest surviving manuscript is the copy made about 1701 by the Dominican priest Francisco Ximénez). It begins with the gods' failed attempts to make people: first of mud, who crumbled, then of wood, who were washed away, and finally of maize, who succeeded. Its heart is the story of the Hero Twins, Hunahpú and Xbalanqué, who go down to Xibalba, the underworld, defeat its lords at their own games and become the sun and moon. The Shahnameh. The "Book of Kings" by Ferdowsi, completed in 1010 CE in Persian, runs to about 50,000 couplets from the first mythical kings to the Arab conquest of Iran. It is often credited with helping to keep the Persian language alive. Its most-loved tragedy is Rostam and Sohrab, a father who kills his own son in battle without knowing who he is. Put them in time. Drag the year and see which of these works exist in writing by then. Interactive · What exists in writing by year X? Year Dates are the earliest figure at which the work existed in something like its known form, or when it was first written down; many are scholarly estimates, and for oral epics the tradition is older than any text. Negative years are BCE. What a graduate just sees The oldest literature was made out loud, which is why it repeats, uses stock phrases, and has no single original. A formula is a tool for rhythm as much as meaning. "Swift-footed" Achilles is swift-footed because the line needed seven syllables. Epics are about the cost of heroism: Achilles' grief, Gilgamesh's terror of death, Arjuna's doubt on the battlefield. Stories migrate and change. The flood in Genesis has Mesopotamian cousins; the Ramayana has a thousand versions. "The same story" is never quite the same: ask which version, which performance, which translation. Epic can serve a nation (the Aeneid, the Shahnameh, Sundiata) and also question it. Sacred texts can be read for craft without being read against belief. Writing is a late arrival in the history of storytelling. Where it shows up next Drama & Tragedy (35/31): Greek tragedy drew its plots from Homeric and other myths, and Aristotle's Poetics built its theory on them. The Novel (35/32): Don Quixote parodies chivalric epics; Joyce's Ulysses (1922) rebuilds the Odyssey in one Dublin day. Translation & World Literature (35/35): each epic reaches us in translations that differ, and the choice of one is an interpretation. In the world: film and games still use the hero's journey, the quest, the descent to the underworld, and the long war. Every fantasy epic is in debt to these. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. The Norton Anthology of World Literature (W. W. Norton), Volume A, assigned in many survey courses: Gilgamesh, Homer, Valmiki, Virgil in translation, with introductions. 📘 Textbook. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (Harvard University Press, 1960; later editions 2000 and 2019). The book of the oral-formulaic discovery. 📘 Gentler. Martin Puchner, The Written World: The Power of Stories to Shape People, History, and Civilization (2017), a readable tour of the first books, with chapters on Gilgamesh, Homer and the Hebrew Bible. 🌐 Free course. Harvard Online: The Ancient Greek Hero (Gregory Nagy; the page says the course has been archived), covering the Iliad and Odyssey and the tragedians; check there for what remains available. The takeaway The first great stories were composed out loud by singers who had the whole tradition in their heads, and every written text we have is a snapshot of something that kept moving. They are about the same few things: fighting, love, travel, grief and the fact that we die. Try this: this week, read the first page of one of them in a translation (Gilgamesh is the shortest) and read it aloud. Notice the repeated phrases, and imagine them being sung. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Gilgamesh dating (Sumerian poems possibly c. 2100 BCE; Old Babylonian c. 1800 BCE; Standard Babylonian by Sîn-lēqi-unninni, 1300 to 1000 BCE; Nineveh finds in the 1850s; George Smith, 1872): Wikipedia, "Epic of Gilgamesh", citing Andrew George. Atra-Hasis (noise of humankind, reed wall, sacrifice, limits on humans): Wikipedia, "Atra-Hasis" (its oldest tablets dated variously, c. 1650 BCE and earlier). Parry (thesis 1928, two Yugoslav trips 1933 to 1935, died 3 December 1935) and Lord (The Singer of Tales, 1960): Wikipedia, "Milman Parry" and "Oral-formulaic theory". Iliad 15,693 lines, late 8th to mid 7th century BCE: Wikipedia, "Iliad". Odyssey 12,109 lines: standard edition count. Aeneid dates, 9,896 lines, Augustus's order: Wikipedia, "Aeneid". Mahabharata length and dates: Wikipedia, "Mahabharata". Ramayana date range and retellings (Kamban 12th century, Tulsidas 1576): Wikipedia, "Ramayana" (citing Goldman). Shahnameh (Ferdowsi, 8 March 1010, about 50,000 couplets): Wikipedia, "Shahnameh". Popol Vuh (c. 1550s, Ximénez c. 1701; creation attempts): Wikipedia, "Popol Vuh". Sundiata (reign 1235 to 1255; Niane 1960; Pickett 1965): Wikipedia, "Epic of Sundiata". Auerbach, Mimesis, Swiss first edition 1946: Wikipedia. Psalm 19:1 is from the 1611 King James Version (public domain). Latin line from Aeneid 1.1 (public domain); translations are my own. The smith-undressing anecdote is traditional and told in the literature on Smith; treat it as a story. Interactive numbers were computed by the page and checked in a browser. 🌐 Harvard Online: The Ancient Greek Hero 📘 Martin Puchner, The Written World 📘 Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales 📘 The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Volume A Step 4. Historiography: Every History Has an Author --------------------------------------------------- Why: From Herodotus and Sima Qian to the Annales, social history and global history. The past does not come with a story attached. Each school of historians chose which questions to ask, which evidence to trust and what counts as an explanation. Learning them is learning to read history as an argument. Pick up two books on the French Revolution. One opens in the royal court, with ministers and their letters. The other opens with a hungry crowd and the price of bread. Both are accurate about what happened. They differ in what they decided mattered. That difference has a name, historiography: the history of how history has been written, and the study of the different approaches historians take. It is the subject that turns a reader of history into a critic of it. A graduate does not memorise a list of schools. They get a reflex: when someone tells you what caused something, ask what sort of historian they are, and what a different sort would have asked instead. The lineup below is a tour of ten answers, across more than two thousand years and four continents. Each has its best case and its critics, and I have tried to give both. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors, typically in year 2 or 3, often as a "theory and method" or "approaches to history" course; the American Historical Association's Tuning project and the UK subject benchmark both expect graduates to understand how interpretations differ and change. Politics, literature and anthropology students meet it in other forms. What it is forRecognising a historian's assumptions, comparing interpretations fairly, and using the right tool for the question. Comes afterHistorical Method & Sources (35/84). Leads toPublic History, Memory & Heritage (35/91), and every period piece, since each one depends on which school you read first. It sits beside Classical Social Theory (35/75), which historians argue with. What this piece gives youYou will not be able to write a historiographical essay. You will know ten approaches by their starting question, who held them, and what the best critics said. Easier first reads: The Whole Human Story in 12 Turning Points (06/01) and The Columbian Exchange (06/09). Herodotus and Thucydides: inquiry, and the search for the truest cause Western historiography begins with two Greeks who disagreed about nearly everything. Herodotus (born in Halicarnassus, about 484 BCE; his Histories date from around the 430s–420s BCE) called his work an "inquiry" (historiē, the Greek word that gives us "history"). He travelled, asked, and wrote down what he heard: Egyptian priests, Persian customs, Scythian burials, tales of the Greco-Persian wars. He was candid about method: at one point he says his job is to report what is said, not necessarily to believe it all (7.152). Cicero later called him the father of history; Plutarch called him a liar. The truth is in between, and modern debate continues: some stories have been confirmed by archaeology, and the classicist Detlev Fehling (1989) argued that some of his named sources were literary inventions. Thucydides (about 460 – about 400 BCE) was an Athenian general who failed to save a city and was exiled. He wrote of the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta (431–404 BCE), left it unfinished, and set out a different ambition. He wanted a work that would be "a possession for all time" (1.22, in Crawley's 1874 translation), strictly contemporary, tested against witnesses, and focused on power and politics. His "truest cause" of the war was the growth of Athenian power and the fear it created in Sparta (1.23). His famous speeches are reconstructions that keep to the general sense of what was said, as he admits. His account of the plague of Athens (2.47–54) describes symptoms so that future readers could recognise it. HerodotusThucydides QuestionWhat did people do, and how do they differ?Why did the war happen, and what does it show about power? EvidenceMany peoples’ reports, travel, wonderEyewitnesses, his own presence, constructed speeches Weak pointCredulity, or invented sources (Fehling)Narrow: leaves out women, religion, much of the economy LegacyEthnography, comparison, the world as the subjectPolitical history; later read as a founder of "realism" in international relations (see 35/14) Notice the pattern: the first historians already disagree about what history is for. That argument never ended. Sima Qian and Ibn Khaldun: methods outside Greece Sima Qian (born about 145 or 135 BCE, died about 86 BCE) wrote the Shiji, the Records of the Grand Historian, in 130 chapters, finishing it around 91–90 BCE. He took over the project from his father, Sima Tan, who served as court astrologer-historian. When Sima Qian defended a general in disgrace (Li Ling, in 99 BCE), the emperor had him castrated; he chose to live in order to finish the book. The structure he invented was to last: annals of rulers, chronological tables, treatises on subjects such as rites and rivers, accounts of noble houses, and a long section of biographies. These biographies include assassins, merchants and entertainers as well as ministers. Dynastic histories in China kept modelling on his form for two thousand years. He travelled, read the archives and compared accounts, and sometimes left two versions side by side when he could not decide. His critics began early. The Han historian Ban Gu complained that he placed Daoist thought over Confucian. Modern scholars debate his early chapters, and here his method has been put to the test: oracle-bone inscriptions found in 1899 and studied by Wang Guowei (1917) confirmed most of the Shang kings in his list, while the earlier Xia dynasty has no comparable confirmation and is debated. Ibn Khaldun (Tunis 1332 – Cairo 1406) wrote the Muqaddimah, an introduction to a world history, in 1377. He argued that historians keep repeating absurd reports because they never test them against how societies work: how many soldiers can a place feed, how do people behave in groups. His own theory centres on asabiyyah, "group feeling", the solidarity of tribes on the margins that lets them conquer settled states. Once in power, he said, the new dynasty softens in luxury, its solidarity fades, taxes rise, and a new hard group takes its place. He reckoned this cycle at about three generations of forty years, around 120 years. Interactive · A dynasty cycle in Ibn Khaldun's terms Founders’ group feeling (0 to 100) Loss of group feeling each generation Strength of a rising challenger A toy model of one idea, not Ibn Khaldun's full theory and not a prediction. A generation is taken as 40 years, following the Muqaddimah. Critics point out that his cycle was drawn from North African and Middle Eastern cases and does not fit every state. Without JavaScript: with founders at 100, a loss of 40% a generation and a challenger at 30, group feeling runs 100, 60, 36, 22, so the dynasty lasts three generations, about 120 years, before the challenger is stronger. Europeans in the nineteenth century celebrated him as a forerunner of sociology. Many Arabic and Islamic scholars note that he was also a working judge and a diplomat inside the system he described, and that he read the Greek and Islamic traditions together. Classical Social Theory (35/75) picks up his argument. Ranke and the archive: how it essentially was Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) is the figure textbooks use for "scientific history". In the preface to his first book (1824) he said that history was often supposed to judge the past and instruct the present, but his work would only show "how it essentially was", wie es eigentlich gewesen. (Translators have chosen "as it actually was", but eigentlich carries more of the sense "essentially", and he may have meant something more modest than the slogan suggests.) He went to the archives of Venice and Vienna, for diplomatic reports written by people who were there. He preferred these to later narrators, and at his seminar in Berlin he taught students to compare sources and judge them. In Ranke's world the main actors were states and the Great Powers, and the main evidence came from state archives. His critics have been grouped under a single question: can the historian ever just show it? E. H. Carr, in What Is History? (1961), said history is "a continuous process of interaction between the historian and his facts", and that facts speak only when the historian chooses to call on them. Hayden White, in Metahistory (1973), argued that historians give their material a story shape (romance, tragedy, comedy, satire) and that the evidence alone does not decide between shapes. Peter Novick's That Noble Dream (1988) traced how American historians repeatedly believed in objectivity and repeatedly lost it. The defenders reply that the facts still constrain: Richard Evans, in In Defence of History (1997), argued that some accounts are simply better supported, and that an interpretation which ignores evidence is not just another viewpoint. Most working historians now sit somewhere between: the evidence limits what you can say, and nobody sees without a position. Marxist and social history: the many, not only the few Karl Marx wrote that "men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please" (The Eighteenth Brumaire, 1852). His 1859 sketch of history said the way a society produces its living (the economic base) shapes its laws, politics and ideas (the superstructure). Marxist historians took this to mean that class conflict drives change. In France, Georges Lefebvre (The Coming of the French Revolution, 1939) and Albert Soboul read 1789 as a bourgeois revolution. In Britain, a group of Communist-party historians formed in 1946, including Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. In Trinidad, C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938) told the Haitian Revolution as a revolution in its own right. In the United States, Eugene Genovese wrote about the enslaved and their masters in Roll, Jordan, Roll (1974). Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963) moved the focus. He wanted to rescue weavers, croppers and artisans from what he called "the enormous condescension of posterity", and argued that class is not a thing but a relationship that people make through experience, and that culture matters. That is one of the roots of social history and "history from below", which asks about ordinary people's lives, and which also grew from the Annales (next) and from women's, labour and later gender history. The critics: that a base-and-superstructure model is too deterministic; that Soviet-era "Marxist" history was often orthodoxy with a state behind it; and that the French "revisionists" (Alfred Cobban's 1954 lecture "The Myth of the French Revolution", François Furet's 1978 Interpreting the French Revolution) said the supposed bourgeois class did not fit the evidence and the revolution was better understood through politics and language. A different criticism, from outside, is that social history can end up as a thousand local studies with no overall story. Use the tool to see how one event is questioned by each approach. Interactive · One event, six lenses: France, 1789 A summary for orientation. Each school has internal disputes and none is a single voice. The books named are representative, not exhaustive. Without JavaScript: Ranke-style political history asks what ministers decided; Marxist history asks which classes gained; revisionists ask whether those classes existed; Annales-style history asks about bread prices and structures; social history asks about the crowd; Atlantic history asks about Saint-Domingue. The Annales: three speeds of time In 1929 two French historians, Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, founded a journal in Strasbourg, Annales d'histoire économique et sociale. They wanted history that took in geography, economics, belief and daily life, not just kings and treaties. The most famous product is Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949), much of it drafted from memory while he was a prisoner of war in Germany. Braudel divided time into three speeds. The longue durée is the slow history of geography, climate and mentalities, which moves over centuries. The conjuncture is the middle tempo of economic and social cycles. And events are the quick surface: battles, treaties, assassinations, "foam on the waves". The deep currents, he argued, constrain what the foam can do. Later Annales historians turned to mentalities and to individuals: Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (1975) rebuilt a mountain village from the Inquisition register of the bishop Jacques Fournier in the early 1300s. Below is an invented series of grain prices over 240 years. It has a slow rise, a roughly 35-year swing, and four bad-harvest spikes. Change the window to see which story you tell. Interactive · Zoom through three speeds Averaging window (years) Invented, illustrative data (price index with a trend of 25 points per century, a 35-year cycle and four spikes). Real historians such as Ernest Labrousse used actual price series from archives. Without JavaScript: looking year by year you see four sharp spikes (events); averaging over about 9 to 15 years removes the spikes but keeps the 35-year swing (conjuncture); averaging over 35 or more years averages the swing away too and leaves only the slow rise (longue durée). Critics said the Annales had little room for politics, individuals and chance, and that a vision of "total history" can swallow everything. Braudel's own geographic determinism was challenged. Many of the third generation moved toward culture and away from numbers. Subaltern, postcolonial and global history: whose history, from where? "Subaltern" is a word Antonio Gramsci used for groups outside the ruling class. In 1982 the historian Ranajit Guha and others in India launched the Subaltern Studies series, aiming to write the history of peasants, tribal peoples and workers as actors in their own right, and not only as followers of the nationalist elite. Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) read colonial police and court records against their grain to find rebels' own ideas. In 1988 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?" asked the sharper question of who is heard when the archive was written by the powerful. Edward Said's Orientalism (1978) had argued that Western scholarship made "the East" an object of its own imagining. Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe (2000) asked historians to stop treating Europe as the silent standard against which other histories are measured. The critics are varied. Rosalind O'Hanlon and David Washbrook (1992) argued that the project drifted from material history toward cultural criticism and risked essentialising the people it hoped to free. Sumit Sarkar, a founding member, said in the late 1990s that it had gone away from its early aims. Of Said, Bernard Lewis and Robert Irwin argued that he misrepresented the scholars he criticised. Global history goes in a different direction: widen the frame. William McNeill's The Rise of the West (1963) tried to tell human history as one story of contact. Kenneth Pomeranz's The Great Divergence (2000) compared China's Yangzi delta and England around 1750 and argued that they looked similar in many measures of living standards and markets. What set England apart, he said, was coal close to its factories and access to the land and labour of the Americas. Critics disagree: Robert Allen stresses Britain's high wages and cheap energy; others stress institutions, science or culture, and some argue Pomeranz's comparison flatters the Chinese side. Daniel Woolf's A Global History of History (2011) and Sebastian Conrad's What Is Global History? (2016) show how many traditions there are, and note the risks: broad history depends on others' specialist work, and can slide into elegant generalisation. The Columbian Exchange (06/09) is a good example. Which school asked it? Test yourself on six lines I wrote in the manner of each approach. Interactive · Which approach is speaking? The six lines are invented examples of the way each approach talks, not quotations. Without JavaScript: line 1 is Annales; 2 is Ranke-style political history; 3 is social history from below; 4 is Marxist; 5 is subaltern; 6 is global history. What a graduate just sees Every history was written by someone with a question; ask what question it answers and what it leaves out. Herodotus and Thucydides disagreed in 430 BCE about whether history is about people or about power. It is both. "Objective" history is not the same as history with no viewpoint; evidence limits what a viewpoint can say. Different time scales give different stories: events, cycles and deep structure. Who wrote the archive decides who can be heard in it. A claim about cause is also a claim about which sort of evidence counts. Historiography changes because the present asks new questions, not because earlier historians were stupid. Where it shows up next Every period piece (35/86–90): each reports which approach has shaped its debate, from the Great Divergence to the causes of 1914. Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91): what the public hears is a historiography too, chosen by museums, states and families. Classical Social Theory (35/75), International Relations (35/14) and Literary Theory (35/34): the same debates about narrative, power and the author. In the world: textbook controversies, anniversaries, documentaries, and every time someone says "history shows". If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History (Routledge, many editions), and Georg Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century (Wesleyan University Press, 1997; revised 2005). 📘 Gentler. E. H. Carr, What Is History? (1961; the second edition has Richard Evans's introduction in later printings), and Richard J. Evans, In Defence of History (1997). For breadth beyond Europe, Daniel Woolf, A Global History of History (2011). 🌐 Free text. The Internet History Sourcebooks Project includes Herodotus and Thucydides in older public-domain translations. 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21H.991 Theories and Methods in the Study of History (Fall 2010), a graduate seminar built on exactly these approaches. The takeaway Histories differ because historians ask different questions: about power, class, deep structures, ordinary lives, the silenced, or the whole world. Each approach sees something the others miss and has critics who have a point. The skill is to name the approach, not to crown one. Try this: pick a news story about a past event this week. Ask which kind of historian would tell it that way, and what one other approach would ask. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Herodotus, Histories (7.152 on reporting what is said); Thucydides 1.22–23, 2.47–54 (Crawley translation, 1874); Fehling, Herodotus and His "Sources" (1989); Sima Qian, Shiji, and Burton Watson's English translations; Wang Guowei (1917) on oracle bones and the Shang kings; Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (trans. Franz Rosenthal, 1958); Ranke, Geschichten der romanischen und germanischen Völker (1824); Carr (1961); White (1973); Novick (1988); Evans (1997); Marx (1852, 1859); Thompson (1963); Cobban (1954); Furet (1978); Braudel (1949); Le Roy Ladurie (1975); Guha (1983); Spivak (1988); Said (1978); Chakrabarty (2000); O'Hanlon and Washbrook, Comparative Studies in Society and History (1992); McNeill (1963); Pomeranz (2000); Allen on British wages and energy. The price series, dynasty model and quotes-in-the-manner-of are invented. 📘 Tosh, The Pursuit of History 📘 Carr, What Is History? 📘 Woolf, A Global History of History Step 5. The Medieval World, 500–1500: One Thousand Years on Every Continent --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Caliphates, Tang and Song China, Byzantium, Mali, the Mongols and Christendom. "The Middle Ages" is the name one region gave to its own middle. Lay the same thousand years out across the whole planet and you get caliphs and Tang poets, Mali and Great Zimbabwe, the Mongols, Constantinople, the Inca and the Mexica, and a Latin Christendom that was one player among many. In 1324 the ruler of Mali, Mansa Musa, rode to Mecca with a retinue so large and a supply of gold so generous that, an Arab official told a visitor to Cairo some years later, the price of gold in that city stayed depressed for about twelve years. That is a good story. It is also a good lesson in medieval history: the evidence is a story told by someone else, in Arabic, about a place the teller never saw, in an archive that Mali itself did not keep in writing. A thousand years is a long time to cover in one course, and the course is hard in a particular way. For the first time on this journey the evidence explodes: chronicles, tax rolls, letters, law codes, coins, poems, ship cargoes, buildings. It is also unevenly spread. A graduate of this course keeps a map of the evidence, a feel for how big things really were, and a set of the big arguments, with their ranges. This piece describes what historians currently think and where they disagree. It mentions several faiths and empires; it does not rank them. Death-toll numbers are ranges because the sources are rhetorical or thin. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors, usually in year 2. In older programmes it was "Medieval Europe"; in current ones it is a global survey of roughly 500 to 1500 (the AHA's discipline core and the UK's benchmark statement both expect breadth beyond one region). Medievalists, Islamic-studies and Asian-studies students branch off from it. What it is forSeeing the thousand years after Rome as a connected, many-centred world, and learning to read the very different evidence each part left. Comes afterThe Ancient World (35/86). Leads toThe Early Modern World, 1450–1800 (35/88); also Historiography (35/85) and Western Music History (35/70). What this piece gives youYou will not be able to read Arabic or Latin chronicles. You will see why the label "medieval" misleads, how to date with five calendars, how big the great cities really were with error bars, and what the debates about conversion, the Mongols and the plague look like. Easier first reads: The Whole Human Story in 12 Turning Points (06/01), The Silk Roads (06/07) and Pandemics That Changed History (06/08). The label problem, and a tour in parallel Italian humanists of the 1400s, led in this by writers such as Flavio Biondo, described the centuries between Rome and their own age as a "middle". The label stuck in Europe and travelled badly. In Tang China there was no middle age; in the Abbasid caliphate there was a golden one; in West Africa the same centuries held the rise of Ghana, Mali and Songhay. Historians now use 500–1500 as a convenient span and say plainly that it is convenient, not natural. Move the slider and watch ten regions at once. Interactive · A thousand years, in parallel Year Dates are conventional and rounded; where states faded rather than ended, the dates are judgments. Overlapping bars in one lane are separate things going on at once. AroundIslamic worldByzantium and Latin ChristendomEast and South AsiaAfrica and the Americas 650Rashidun conquests; Umayyads nextByzantine losses to Arabs; Frankish kingdomsTang rising (618)Aksum; Classic Maya 800Abbasid Baghdad (founded 762)Charlemagne crowned (800)Tang; Khmer empire begins (802)Trade across the Sahara grows 1000Fatimids in Cairo; CórdobaMacedonian recovery; towns reviveSong (960); CholaGhana; Tiwanaku and Wari gone 1250Mongols at the gatesFourth Crusade (1204); universitiesSouthern Song; Delhi SultanateMali; Great Zimbabwe; Cahokia 1450Ottomans take Constantinople (1453)Plague aftermath; printing startsMing; Muromachi JapanMexica Triple Alliance; Inca expansion Sources: a different record on every continent Latin Europe has parchment charters and chronicles; the best-known single record is England's Domesday Book of 1086, a survey of landholding ordered by William I. The Islamic world has chronicles, biographical dictionaries (which matter for the conversion story below), law and scientific books, and, from a Cairo synagogue's storeroom, the Geniza: hundreds of thousands of fragments of letters, contracts and lists, mostly from the 10th to 13th centuries, in which merchants complain about prices and delays. Tang and Song China produced official dynastic histories, gazetteers and household registers, and its caves at Dunhuang preserved a library sealed around 1000 CE. West Africa has oral epics recited by hereditary performers, the jeli or griots, and the notes of Arab travellers and scholars such as Ibn Battuta, who visited Mali in 1352–53. Great Zimbabwe has stone and the finds in the ground. The Inca kept accounts on knotted cords, khipu, of which about a thousand survive and whose full range is not understood. The Mexica painted books, and after the Spanish conquest Nahua scholars worked with the friar Bernardino de Sahagún on the Florentine Codex in Nahuatl and Spanish, compiled between the 1540s and the 1570s. Pick a source and see what it is good for. Interactive · What each kind of source can tell you Scores (0 to 3) are a teaching judgment of how well that source type usually answers each kind of question, not a measurement. Without JavaScript: chronicles are best for rulers and events; merchants' letters (the Geniza) are best for trade and daily life; tax and land registers are best for numbers; oral epics carry memory and values; archaeology is the best check on everyone. The general lesson is triangulation: every source has a blind spot, and the mark of a good medievalist is to set two kinds against each other. The Great Zimbabwe case is the standard warning. European writers in the 1800s and early 1900s, and the white-minority government of Rhodesia afterwards, claimed the stone city could not have been built by Africans. Gertrude Caton-Thompson's excavation in 1929 and everything since have shown that Shona-speaking ancestors built it, in dry-stone walls reaching up to about 11 metres, between roughly the 11th and 15th centuries. Archaeology corrected a prejudice that written sources had carried for generations. Calendars: dating a world with five clocks A chronicle that says "in the year 656" could be Islamic (656 AH, the Muslim lunar calendar counted from 622), Byzantine, or something else. Medieval documents date by the Hijri calendar, by years of the Byzantine world (Anno Mundi, counting from a supposed creation, year 1 beginning in 5509 BCE, with the year starting on 1 September), by the Chinese reign-era names (Kaiyuan, Xuanhe, Hongwu), by regnal years of kings, by the Christian Anno Domini, and by the Mexica 52-year cycle. The historian's first job is conversion. The Islamic year is lunar, about 354.37 days, so the Hijri count gains on ours by about 3 years every century. The usual approximation is CE ≈ 0.970229 × AH + 621.58. Interactive · Converting a date Hijri to CECE to HijriByzantine year to CE Year (AH) Muhammad's death (11 AH)Baghdad's fall (656 AH)Constantinople's fall (857 AH) This is the standard approximation; it can be a year out at a boundary, and an exact day needs a full table. The Byzantine year starts on 1 September, so a Byzantine year corresponds to two Christian years. Without JavaScript: 656 AH is about 1258 CE (the Mongol capture of Baghdad); 857 AH is about 1453 (the fall of Constantinople); Byzantine year 6961 is 1452–53. Rule of thumb: CE is roughly 622 plus 0.97 times the Hijri year; for Byzantine years, subtract 5509 for September to December and 5508 for January to August. Cities: who was big, with the error bar The "largest city in the world" in the medieval period was nearly always Chinese or Middle Eastern; the largest in Latin Europe was Paris, around 1300, at perhaps 80,000 to 200,000. Estimates come from walled areas, grain supply and the odd tax roll, and from the 1987 compilation by Tertius Chandler and the later work of others. They are rough: the top of the table is stable, but the order in the middle shifts depending on which end of each range you believe. Choose the low, middle or high end for each and watch. Interactive · Big cities at their rough peaks (thousands of people) Low endMidpointHigh end Approximate, contested ranges after Chandler (1987) and later revisions, each city at a rough peak; the years differ, so this compares peaks, not one moment. Angkor and Hangzhou have the widest ranges. Without JavaScript: the biggest cities were Hangzhou (about 500,000 to 1.5 million around 1270), Chang'an (400,000 to 1 million around 750), Kaifeng and Baghdad; Paris, the largest in Latin Europe, had perhaps 80,000 to 200,000 around 1300, and Tenochtitlan about 150,000 to 250,000 in 1500. Notice what does not change when you move the slider: Chinese and Middle Eastern cities lead, and Cahokia, on the Mississippi near today's St Louis, at 10,000 to 20,000 around 1100, was the largest city north of Mexico. This is a thousand-year-long reminder that Europe's urban weight is a later story. Conversion and empire: how a faith spreads In about a century the Arab-led armies of the early caliphs, from 632, built an empire from Spain to the Indus valley, ruled by the Umayyads from Damascus (661–750) and then the Abbasids from Baghdad, a city founded in 762. But conquering a country is not converting it. Richard Bulliet (Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period, 1979) had an ingenious method: collect the names of people in biographical dictionaries, and track how often a person with a Muslim-style name had a father or grandfather with a non-Muslim name. Plotted over generations the share of converts follows an S-curve (a logistic curve): slow, then fast, then slow. He argued that in Iran and several other regions the majority became Muslim during the 9th and 10th centuries, well after the conquest. Critics note that names are a proxy, that biographical dictionaries over-represent scholars, and that regions differ; the shape of the curve is now widely used even where the numbers are argued. Shape your own curve. The speed is the part that is easy to misjudge: even a "fast" conversion took generations. Interactive · An S-curve of conversion (illustrative) Year the half-way point is reached Speed (higher means a faster switch) Illustrative curve, not Bulliet's data. Real regions differ, and conquest, taxes, status, marriage, trade and persuasion each mattered; how much each did is debated. Without JavaScript: a midpoint of 860 and a speed of 0.03 per year give about 10% in 787, 50% in 860 and 90% in 933: about 150 years from 10% to 90%. One more caution about labels: "feudalism" is the same kind of problem for Latin Christendom. Marc Bloch (Feudal Society, 1939–40) gave it its classic form; Elizabeth Brown (1974) and Susan Reynolds (Fiefs and Vassals, 1994) argued that the neat "system" of lord, vassal and fief was largely a later lawyers' construct and that medieval arrangements were far messier. Many medievalists now use the word with care or avoid it. The Mongols, the plague and numbers you cannot trust Temüjin was proclaimed Chinggis (Genghis) Khan in 1206. By his death in 1227 Mongol armies had destroyed the Khwarazmian empire in Central Asia; by 1258 they had taken Baghdad (10 February), ending the Abbasid caliphate in the city; by 1279 Kublai's forces had finished off the Song, and the Yuan dynasty (proclaimed 1271) ruled China. At its height the Mongol realm was the largest contiguous land empire in history, on the order of 24 million square kilometres. It also made the Eurasian road safe enough for merchants and envoys for about a century: the Venetian Marco Polo's book of the 1290s is the best-known account, and historians still debate how much of it he saw himself, though most think he did reach China. How many died?numbers disputed Medieval chroniclers wrote of hundreds of thousands killed in single cities such as Merv and Nishapur; modern historians treat those numbers as rhetoric. Totals of "tens of millions" for the conquests are common in popular books, but they rest on population comparisons. China's recorded population fell from roughly 120 million around 1200 to something like 60 to 85 million by the 1300s. Demographers dispute how much of that is death, how much migration and how much the state simply lost count. The same difficulty shows up in Tang China: the census of 754 counted about 52.9 million people and that of 764 about 16.9 million. Nobody believes 36 million died during the An Lushan rebellion; the state lost its ability to register people. The Black Death arrived in the Mediterranean in 1347 and moved through Europe, the Middle East and North Africa until about 1351. It was caused by Yersinia pestis, confirmed by ancient DNA from London burials (Bos and colleagues, 2011); a 2022 study of 14th-century graves near Lake Issyk-Kul in Kyrgyzstan (Spyrou and colleagues) points to Central Asia as an origin, which fits the picture of the Mongol-era trade network carrying it. European mortality is usually put at a third to a half of the population, with some scholars arguing for higher. Estimates of the global toll run from about 75 to 200 million and should be read as informed guesses. What follows in Europe, in labour shortages, higher wages and the end of serfdom in many regions, is itself argued; plague did not do the same thing everywhere. Empires without our kind of record: Mali, the Inca and the Mexica Three of this period's great states are in places where the main surviving record is not a library. The empire of Mali grew from the Mande heartland after a victory at Kirina in about 1235 by Sundiata Keita, whose life survives as an epic recited by the jeli, written down and published in the 20th century (D. T. Niane's version of 1960). It controlled gold and salt trade across the Sahara. The epic is a record of values and memory more than of dates, which is one reason travellers' reports matter. Mansa Musa's pilgrimage of 1324–25 is one of the best-dated events in West African history because of those Arabic reports. The claim in popular articles that he was "the richest person in history" cannot be measured and should be read as a way of saying he was very, very rich. The Inca state, Tawantinsuyu, took shape from about 1438 under Pachacuti and fell to Pizarro's small force and civil war, plague and local allies after Cajamarca in 1532. It ran a road network, labour service instead of money, and a huge storage system, with a population put at somewhere between about 6 and 12 million, and the wide range is the point. The cords of the khipu encode numbers in a decimal system; whether some also record words is argued, with Sabine Hyland's 2017 study of a village khipu's colours claiming that they spell names, which not everyone accepts. The Mexica of Tenochtitlan, founded about 1325 on an island in Lake Texcoco, formed a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan in 1428 and met Cortés in 1519; the city fell on 13 August 1521. The main narrative sources are written after the conquest, in Spanish hands, so a historian reads them for what the Nahua authors saw and what the friars wanted. A thousand years of evidence, once again, are not of one kind. What a graduate just sees "Medieval" is a European label; the same thousand years had a golden age elsewhere. Each region's evidence is of a different kind, and a good historian sets two kinds against each other. A medieval date needs converting: 656 AH is 1258 CE, and the Byzantine year starts in September. Medieval city sizes have error bars of a factor of two or more, and the top of the ranking was nearly always Chinese or Middle Eastern. Conversion to a new faith follows an S-curve over generations, not a switch. A fall in recorded population is a mix of death, flight and lost records; read census drops with care. Stone, cords and epics are evidence too; the absence of a library does not mean the absence of a state. Where it shows up next The Early Modern World, 1450–1800 (35/88): the Ottomans come out of this world, and the Atlantic crossing reaches the Inca and Mexica. Historiography (35/85): Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), Rashid al-Din and Sima Guang are historians in their own right, with theories of why states rise and fall. Epidemiology (35/58) and Public & Global Health (35/61): the Black Death is the template of a trade-route pandemic. Western Music History (35/70) and Music Traditions of the World (35/69): Gregorian chant, the Andalusi muwashshah and Chinese court music belong to this thousand years. In the world: the names of today's countries, borders and faiths, the Silk Road projects of the present, and the contested histories in Histories of Nations (32). If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Marshall Hodgson, The Venture of Islam (University of Chicago Press, 1974), is the classic; for a modern survey, Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome (Penguin, 2009), for the West, with Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000 (Scribner, 2020), for the connected world. 📘 Gentler. Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World (2020); and Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (2015). 🌐 Free text. OpenStax World History, Volume 1 covers 500–1500 globally. 🌐 Free course. Open Yale Courses, HIST 210 The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000 (Paul Freedman) is free with full lectures; Khan Academy has a world-history sequence for the other regions. The takeaway The thousand years after Rome were a connected, many-centred world whose evidence differs by region: chronicles and letters, cords and epics, stone and bone. A graduate converts dates, puts ranges on cities and deaths, and reads conversions and collapses as slow processes whose numbers are, honestly, estimates. Try this: pick a place near you and ask what it was doing in the year 1000, 1250 and 1450, using three continents' calendars as a prompt. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period (1979); Chandler, Four Thousand Years of Urban Growth (1987) and revisions; the Cairo Geniza collections (Cambridge University Library; Goitein, A Mediterranean Society); al-Umari on Mansa Musa; Ibn Battuta's Rihla; Niane, Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali (1960); Caton-Thompson, The Zimbabwe Culture (1931); Sahagún's Florentine Codex; Hyland (2017) on a khipu; Reynolds (1994), Brown (1974), Bloch (1939–40) on feudalism; Bos et al., Nature 2011 and Spyrou et al., Nature 2022 on Yersinia pestis; Tang census figures of 754 and 764 as given in the standard histories; Hijri conversion by the usual lunar approximation. Population and mortality figures are scholarly ranges, not counts. 📘 Hansen, The Year 1000 📘 Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome 🌐 OpenStax World History, Volume 1 Step 6. The Early Modern World, 1450–1800: When the Oceans Became Roads ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Empires, encounters, the Atlantic slave trade and the Columbian exchange. Three great land empires in Asia, a China with a third of the world's people, ships that knitted four continents together, a slave trade measured voyage by voyage, a death toll counted in tens of millions, and an argument about why one corner of Eurasia got rich first that is still being fought with datasets. In the 1590s a silver coin dug out of a mountain in what is now Bolivia could be carried down to a Pacific port, shipped to Mexico, loaded on a Manila galleon, and spent in Fujian. The mountain was Potosí, where Indigenous labourers were drafted to mine, the buyers were Chinese merchants who needed silver for taxes, and the ship's captain was Spanish. Three continents, one coin. That is the early modern world in a sentence: for the first time, a single economic system touched every inhabited continent, and it did so unequally, sometimes terribly. Historians of this period have the richest paper trail of any so far: ship registers, parish books, customs ledgers, tax surveys in Istanbul and Beijing, notarial archives in Seville and Amsterdam. They also have the loudest arguments. A graduate of this course keeps the map of empires in parallel, the numbers with their error bars, and the four debates worth knowing: what the "gunpowder empires" label hides, how to count a slave trade, how many people the Americas lost, and why some places grew rich before others. Atrocities in this period are told plainly. Scholarly consensus is named as consensus, and contested numbers are given as ranges with their sources. This describes how the field works and is not a position on any current political question. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors, usually in year 2. Most world-history programmes teach it as a stand-alone global survey: encounters, empires and the Atlantic. It is also where economic historians, area-studies students and Latin Americanists meet. What it is forExplaining how empires in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas grew, collided and connected, and learning to weigh the numbers and the arguments. Comes afterThe Medieval World, 500–1500 (35/87). Leads toRevolutions & Empires, 1750–1914 (35/89), Historiography (35/85) and, for the economics, Political Economy (the library's category 31). What this piece gives youYou will not be able to read Ottoman Turkish or Spanish colonial script. You will know the parallel story of the empires, how the slave-trade database is built and what it says, what the range of Americas population estimates means, and where the Great Divergence debate stands. Easier first reads: The Columbian Exchange (06/09), How the Modern World Was Made (06/02) and How Money Was Invented (06/05). Land empires in parallel: Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and the label that hides them Between about 1450 and 1550 three great Muslim-ruled states took shape across southern and western Asia. The Ottomans took Constantinople on 29 May 1453 under Mehmed II, conquered Mamluk Syria and Egypt in 1516–17 and, under Suleiman (1520–66), reached Hungary and besieged Vienna in 1529. The Safavids began with the young Shah Ismail taking Tabriz in 1501; he made Twelver Shi'ism the state religion in Iran, a choice that still shapes the region. Shah Abbas I (1588–1629) moved the capital to Isfahan around 1598. The Mughals began when Babur won at Panipat in 1526 and reached their height under Akbar (1556–1605) and his successors; Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal from about 1632. Aurangzeb ruled from 1658 to 1707, and the empire's central power faded after. Marshall Hodgson coined the phrase "gunpowder empires" for these three, and William McNeill popularised it, arguing that cannon and muskets made centralised states possible. The label is useful and contested. Critics say it makes weapons the cause when administration, cavalry, revenue systems and religion mattered at least as much; and it lumps three very different states. Each also left a different record. The Ottomans surveyed land and people in tax registers and kept the court records of local judges. Akbar's minister Abu'l-Fazl compiled the Ain-i-Akbari (c.1595), a statistical and administrative handbook of the empire. Safavid sources are thinner and rely heavily on chronicles and foreign travellers. Beside them were Ming and Qing China (next section), Tokugawa Japan (from 1603), Russia's expansion across Siberia, the Songhay empire and its Moroccan conquerors in West Africa (1591), the Kongo, Benin, Oyo, Asante and Dahomey states on the Atlantic coast, and Habsburg and French monarchies in Europe. Slide through them. Interactive · Three and a half centuries, in parallel Year Conventional dates, rounded; "decline" phases are historians' judgments and some of them (Ottoman, Mughal) are themselves argued. AroundMuslim-ruled AsiaEast AsiaEurope and AtlanticAfrica, Americas, Pacific 1500Ottomans expand; Safavids begin 1501Ming; Sengoku wars in JapanPrinting; Portuguese in Indian OceanInca, Mexica at height; Songhay 1600Akbar d. 1605; Abbas IWanli; Japan reunifiedDutch and English East India companiesSilver from Potosí; slave trade grows 1700Aurangzeb d. 1707; Safavid declineKangxi; Tokugawa peaceLouis XIV; Atlantic trade boomsSlave trade near its peak 1790Company power in BengalQianlong; population ~300 millionRevolution in FranceHaiti rises 1791; Cook in the Pacific China and the arithmetic of growth The Ming (1368–1644) and the Qing (from the Manchu conquest of 1644) ruled the world's biggest society. Under the Yongle emperor the treasure-fleet commander Zheng He led seven voyages as far as East Africa between 1405 and 1433, then they stopped; why is argued, with fiscal cost and politics both proposed. Through the 1500s Chinese demand for silver drew in American bullion by way of Manila (from 1565) and Macau, and the Ming tax system moved to silver. After the Qing took Beijing, the Kangxi (1661–1722) and Qianlong (1735–96) reigns brought peace, new lands in Central Asia and a population surge. The official count of 1794 gives about 313 million people; the figure for around 1700 is a rough 150 million, with serious scholars giving ranges from 100 to 200 million. Those two numbers are a lesson in growth. A population does not need to boom: a rate of under 1% a year, kept up for a century, more than doubles it. The new crops from the Americas (maize, sweet potato, peanut) opened hillsides that rice would not grow on, and the peace did the rest. Feel the arithmetic. Interactive · Growth and decline rates Start (millions) End (millions) Years apart China 1700–1794Americas 1492–16001% a year for a century Rates are continuous, computed from the two numbers you enter. The presets use rough estimates (China c.1700 about 150 million, the Qing count of 1794 about 313 million; the Americas about 60 million before 1492 and about 6 million around 1600, after Koch and colleagues 2019), and both are debated. Without JavaScript: 150 to 313 million over 94 years is about 0.78% a year and doubles in about 89 years. The Americas figure (60 to 6 million over 108 years) is a net fall of about 2.1% a year, halving every 32 years. The Atlantic and the slave trade, counted The Portuguese worked down the African coast in the 1400s, reached India in 1498, and founded the sugar economy of Brazil in the 1500s. Spain, after Cortés's campaign (1519–21) and Pizarro's at Cajamarca in 1532, built silver-and-labour empires in Mexico and Peru; the Dutch and English founded their East India Companies in 1602 and 1600 (the Dutch one issuing tradeable shares); the French, Dutch and English settled the Caribbean and North America. The sugar and tobacco plantations of the Americas depended on a forced migration from Africa. This is the best-counted atrocity of the premodern world, thanks to a database built by historians over decades. SlaveVoyages (the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, led by David Eltis and others) pools ship records, insurance and customs documents and newspapers from some 36,000 voyages and uses statistical methods to estimate the rest. Its estimate is about 12.5 million people embarked in Africa between the early 1500s and 1866, and about 10.7 million who arrived in the Americas, so roughly 1.8 million (about 14%) died on the Middle Passage. (Some recent summaries put the embarked total slightly higher, near 12.7 million, as the database is revised; check the site for the current figures.) The Portuguese and Brazilians carried the most people, then the British, then the French, and the Portuguese, British and French together carried about nine in ten of those taken in the 18th century. About 40% of the whole trade ended in Brazil, which was also the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, in 1888. Even after Britain banned its trade in 1807, around 3 million more were carried across the Atlantic. Interactive · The Atlantic ledger People embarked in Africa (millions) Share who died on the voyage (%) Database figures The database figures are about 12.5 million embarked and 10.7 million arrived. The voyage deaths counted here exclude those killed in the wars and raids that produced captives and on the march to the coast; Patrick Manning, Michael Gomez and Nathan Nunn estimate those as additional, very large, and uncertain. Without JavaScript: 12.5 million embarked minus about 1.8 million deaths at sea leaves about 10.7 million who arrived. Two things the database cannot do. It counts only the Atlantic; slave trades across the Sahara, the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean existed too, and their totals are far less certain (Nunn has estimated about 18 million enslaved people exported in four trades from 1400 to 1900 in all, of which the Atlantic is by far the largest). And a count of people is not their story. The voices of the enslaved survive thinly, in memoirs such as Olaudah Equiano's (1789; the question of whether he was born in Africa or South Carolina is argued), in the petitions and court cases of freedom suits, and in the work of historians like Saidiya Hartman who read the silence in the ledgers. A ledger records a cargo; a historian has to be told, and has to remember, that each entry is a person. The Columbian exchange: counting a catastrophe Crops, animals and diseases crossed the Atlantic after 1492 in both directions; The Columbian Exchange (06/09) tells that story. The most argued number in it is the first: how many people lived in the Americas in 1492? Early 20th-century scholars said 8 to 13 million (Alfred Kroeber 1939: 8.4 million; Ángel Rosenblat 1954: 13.4 million). Henry Dobyns (1966) proposed 90 to 112 million. William Denevan (1992) settled on about 54 million. A 2019 study by Alexander Koch and colleagues combined regional estimates with a dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide around 1610 in Antarctic ice cores, which they read as farmland reverting to forest; they put the pre-contact number at about 60 million and the low point at around 6 million by 1600. Critics of the high estimates (David Henige, Numbers from Nowhere, 1998) argue that they extrapolate from thin early counts. The mechanism is also debated. Smallpox, measles and other Old World diseases hit populations with no immunity and travelled ahead of the Spaniards; but war, forced labour, enslavement, famine and displacement mattered too, and they varied by region. In central Mexico, where tribute lists survive, estimates of the fall run from about 20 million (some give 25 million) to roughly a million around 1600, and not everyone accepts the starting point. Pick an estimate and a low point and see the range. Interactive · How many people lived in the Americas in 1492? Population low point around 1600 (millions) Estimates as published by the scholars named. The result is a net fall in people alive, not a count of deaths, since births continued. Low points in the older low estimates would be higher, not lower; the pairing is yours to explore. Without JavaScript: the 1492 estimates run from 8.4 million (Kroeber) through about 54 million (Denevan) and about 60 million (Koch and colleagues) to over 90 million (Dobyns). With a low point of about 6 million, the net fall in the middle estimates is on the order of 90%. On the other side of the ledger, Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian (2011) estimated that the potato accounted for about 12 to 25% of the population and urban growth of the Old World between 1700 and 1900. The Great Divergence: when did Europe pull ahead, and why? By 1800 northwestern Europe, above all Britain, was richer per person than almost anywhere else, and by 1900 the gap was huge. When did it open, and why? Kenneth Pomeranz (The Great Divergence, 2000) argued that the richest parts of Europe and China, such as the Yangzi Delta, were comparable until about 1800, and that Britain broke away because it sat on coal near its factories and drew resources from its American colonies, which freed its own land. Robert Allen emphasised high British wages and cheap energy, which made it worth inventing machines to save labour. Critics from the other side, such as David Landes, stressed culture and institutions; Joel Mokyr stressed a European "market for ideas" among rival states; Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson emphasised property rights and the Atlantic trade. Prasannan Parthasarathi argued that India was comparable and that British policy undid it. A group of economic historians (Stephen Broadberry and co-authors) place the divergence earlier, about 1700, using reconstructed national accounts. Part of the argument is about data. Compare two datasets for the same question. Interactive · Same question, two datasets (GDP per person, 1990 international dollars) Bairoch, 1800Maddison, 1820 Bairoch's 1800 figures (China about $1,007, Western Europe about $941) as quoted in the Great Divergence literature; Maddison's 1820 figures (China about $600, Western Europe about $1,204) from his 2001 tables, rounded. Newer Maddison Project releases have revised these, which is the point. Without JavaScript: Bairoch's numbers make China slightly richer than Western Europe in 1800 (ratio about 1.07). Maddison's make Western Europe about twice as rich as China in 1820 (ratio about 2.0). The same question, opposite answers, from different assumptions. That is how a field with plenty of evidence can still argue: not about whether the numbers exist but about which are right. A graduate holds the positions apart, knows who holds them, and does not mistake a debate over dates for a debate over worth. What a graduate just sees "Gunpowder empires" is a handy label with real critics; administration and revenue mattered at least as much as cannon. A growth rate under 1% a year more than doubles a population in a century. The slave trade is best counted by the voyage: about 12.5 million embarked, about 10.7 million arrived, roughly 14% died at sea, and that is the Atlantic alone. Contested numbers come in ranges: the Americas' 1492 population runs from under 10 million to over 100 million in different studies. Disease, war, labour and displacement all contributed to the Americas' collapse, and their shares differ by place. The Great Divergence is a debate about dates, causes and datasets, and no one answer has won. The unit of ledgers is a person; ask whose voice the record leaves out. Where it shows up next Revolutions & Empires, 1750–1914 (35/89): the French, Haitian and Latin American revolutions come out of this world, and industrialisation is the Great Divergence's later act. International Relations (35/14): the first state system, the first joint-stock companies and the first global trade wars begin here. Political Economy (category 31): mercantilism, silver, slavery and the debates about capitalism's origins. Epidemiology (35/58) and Genetics (35/46): why populations without prior exposure suffer so much, and what ancient DNA now adds. In the world: museum restitution, reparations debates, the names of places, and the long shadow of plantation economies, discussed in Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91). If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Jerry Bentley, Herbert Ziegler and Heather Streets-Salter, Traditions & Encounters (McGraw-Hill), or John Richards, The Unending Frontier (University of California Press, 2003), on early modern environmental history. 📘 Gentler. Charles C. Mann, 1491 (2005) and 1493 (2011); and Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created. 🌐 Free resource. SlaveVoyages lets you search the database yourself. 🌐 Free text. OpenStax World History, Volume 2 is free online and runs from about 1400. The takeaway Between 1450 and 1800 three Asian land empires, a vast China, and Atlantic empires linked the continents by silver, sugar, disease and forced migration. The best-counted piece is the Atlantic slave trade (about 12.5 million embarked, about 10.7 million arrived), while the largest uncertainty is the Americas' population; why Europe grew rich first stays contested. Try this: take one everyday object (sugar, silver, cotton, a potato) and trace which continents it crossed between 1450 and 1800 and who did the work. Sources & Further Reading Sources. SlaveVoyages / Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (Eltis and others; about 12.5 million embarked and 10.7 million disembarked, with Wikipedia's "Atlantic slave trade" for the summary; some recent summaries cite about 12.75 million); Manning on mortality in Africa; Gomez; Nunn (2008) on four trades; Population history of Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Kroeber 1939, Rosenblat 1954, Dobyns 1966, Denevan 1992, Koch et al. 2019, Henige 1998); Cook and Borah on central Mexico; Nunn and Qian, Quarterly Journal of Economics 2011; Pomeranz (2000); Allen; Landes (1998); Mokyr; Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001); Parthasarathi (2011); Broadberry and co-authors; Bairoch and Maddison (2001) for the GDP figures; Hodgson and McNeill on "gunpowder empires" with later criticism; Qing census of 1794 as in standard demographic histories. Dates for rulers are standard and rounded. 📘 Mann, 1491 and 1493 📘 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence 🌐 OpenStax World History, Volume 2 Step 7. Revolutions & Empires, 1750–1914: The Century That Rewrote the Rules ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Industrial and political revolutions, nationalism and the new empires. Between 1750 and 1914 a few countries learned to turn coal into growth, four revolutions asked who counts as a citizen, nations became the default way to draw a map, and a handful of empires took most of the planet. Historians still argue about nearly every cause. In 1820 a typical person in China, Mexico or Britain was poor by any modern standard, and the gap between the richest and the poorest of them was less than four to one. By 1950 the gap between Britain and China was almost fourteen to one. Something happened in between, and it did not happen to everyone at once. That "something" is the subject of this course, and it is really five stories braided together: an economy that learned to grow, a set of revolutions that argued about rights, the idea of the nation, two very different answers to foreign pressure in China and Japan, and an imperialism that reached its peak in Africa. A graduate keeps the dates, but what lasts is a habit: when someone offers one cause for the modern world, ask what the other regions were doing. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors, usually in year 3, as a period course inside the "modern world" sequence that programmes shaped by the American Historical Association's History Discipline Core and the UK QAA benchmark statement both expect. Economics and international-relations students meet the same ground as economic history or the origins of the state system. What it is forExplaining how industrial growth, political revolution, nationalism and empire made the world of 1914, and how to read the arguments historians have about them. Comes afterThe Early Modern World, 1450–1800 (35/88). Leads toThe Twentieth Century and After (35/90), International Relations (35/14), and Historiography (35/85), where the debates below get their schools. What this piece gives youYou will not be able to date every treaty. You will see seven big ideas, the numbers behind them (Maddison Project income data, dated), and what each side of the main arguments says. Easier first reads: How the Modern World Was Made (06/02), The Columbian Exchange (06/09), and the national histories in 32 Histories of Nations, such as A Brief History of France (32/07) and A Brief History of Japan (32/13). The Industrial Revolution: the ceiling that broke For most of history, a society could get richer only slowly, because nearly all energy came from muscle, wood, wind and water, and these were limited by land. Coal changed the arithmetic. A Newcomen engine at Dudley Castle in 1712 pumped water out of mines; James Watt's separate condenser (patented 1769) made steam far more efficient; George Stephenson's line from Liverpool to Manchester opened in 1830 and showed that stored sunlight could move people and goods faster than a horse. For the first time a society could make more per head without running out of land. The size of the change is easy to miss because it looks small each year. In Britain, income per person in the Maddison Project data rose from about $2,400 in 1700 to about $3,300 in 1800 (in 2011 international dollars), about a third of one per cent a year. From 1820 to 1913 it rose from about $3,300 to about $8,200, close to one per cent a year. Try the calculator: the point of compounding is that a rate that sounds like nothing remakes a country in three generations. Interactive · What does 1% a year do? Growth per year Years Presets use Maddison Project Database 2023 figures (GDP per head, 2011 international dollars): UK 2,412 to 3,343 (1700–1800); UK 3,306 to 8,212 (1820–1913); US 2,674 to 10,108 (1820–1913); China 1,513 to 19,238 (1973–2022). The slider is rounded to 0.1 point; the readout shows the exact rate. Without JavaScript: Britain grew at about 0.3% a year in 1700–1800 and about 1.0% a year in 1820–1913, which multiplies income by about 2.5 in 93 years. China grew about 5.3% a year from 1973 to 2022, a factor of nearly thirteen. The cost was real and visible. The Factory Act of 1833 banned work for children under nine in most textile mills, which tells you what had been normal. Robert Allen has argued that British workers' real wages stagnated for decades while output per worker grew, a stretch he calls "Engels' pause" after Friedrich Engels' Condition of the Working Class in England (1845). Cotton for the mills came largely from plantations worked by enslaved people in the American South. Historians still argue how central that was: Eric Williams (Capitalism and Slavery, 1944) put slavery near the heart of British industrialisation, and later economic historians have given it a smaller share. There is also an argument about the word "revolution": estimates by Nicholas Crafts and C. Knick Harley in the 1980s and 1990s lowered measured growth before 1830, so some historians now describe it as a long acceleration. The Great Divergence: who got rich, and why historians disagree The "Great Divergence" is the name for the widening income gap between north-west Europe (and its offshoots) and much of Asia, which the data below show opening after about 1800. The argument is about why. Use the chart to see the numbers first, then the schools. Interactive · Income per person, 1850–2022 (log scale) Year Source: Bolt and van Zanden, Maddison Project Database 2023, GDP per head in 2011 international dollars, via Our World in Data, retrieved 2 November 2026. Each tick on the vertical axis is four times the one below. Estimates before about 1870 are rough for many countries and are revised between editions; compare orders of magnitude, not decimals. Without JavaScript: in 1850 the UK was at about $4,300 and China about $860 (5.0 to 1). By 1950 the UK was at $11,100 and China $800 (13.8 to 1). By 2022 the UK was at $38,400 and China $19,200 (2.0 to 1). Pick a school and read it in its own words. Interactive · Six accounts of the Divergence Without JavaScript: Kenneth Pomeranz (coal and colonies); Robert Allen (high wages and cheap energy); Joel Mokyr and David Landes (culture and knowledge); Acemoglu and Robinson (institutions); Prasannan Parthasarathi (protected Indian cotton and global competition); Broadberry and colleagues (income was already diverging before 1800). The Atlantic revolutions: American, French and Latin American Between 1775 and 1825 an unusual number of people announced that rulers governed with their consent. The American Revolution (Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776; Treaty of Paris, 1783) made thirteen colonies into a republic with a written constitution (1787–89). The French Revolution began with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (26 August 1789), abolished the monarchy in 1792, passed through the Terror (official records show 16,594 death sentences between mid-1793 and mid-1794, plus an estimated ten to twenty thousand people killed without trial or dead in prison), and ended in Napoleon's coup of November 1799. In Spanish America, Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 left the empire without an agreed king; local juntas formed, wars of independence followed, and the last big royalist army was beaten at Ayacucho on 9 December 1824. Brazil separated from Portugal in 1822 as an empire under a Portuguese prince. All of them used the language of equal rights, and all of them had to decide who was included. In 1790 the new United States had about 700,000 enslaved people. In 1791 Olympe de Gouges published a Declaration of the Rights of Woman in France and in 1793 she was guillotined. In much of Latin America the revolutions were led by creole elites, and Indigenous and African-descended majorities got legal equality on paper long before they got it in practice. The tool below lets you test how well you know when slavery actually ended in places that had revolutions. Interactive · Guess the year slavery was abolished Reveal Year of the main abolition law in each place; several had earlier or later partial steps, noted in the readout. Without JavaScript: French Saint-Domingue 1793–94; Chile 1823; Mexico 1829; the British Empire 1833 (in force 1834); French colonies 1848; the United States 1865; Cuba 1886; Brazil 1888. How these fit together is a live argument. R. R. Palmer and Jacques Godechot proposed in the 1950s and 1960s a single "Atlantic revolution"; others, such as Alfred Cobban in 1964, attacked the older Marxist picture of the French Revolution as a bourgeois revolution, and François Furet argued that the Revolution was best read through its politics and language. Recent global historians, for example Armitage and Subrahmanyam, widen the "Age of Revolutions" to include Haiti, the Spanish world and beyond the Atlantic. Haiti: the revolution that took "all men" literally In 1789 Saint-Domingue, the French colony on the western part of Hispaniola, produced about 60% of the world's coffee and about 40% of the sugar imported by France and Britain. About 40,000 white colonists, 28,000 free people of colour and about 452,000 enslaved people lived there. In August 1791 the enslaved of the north rose. Over the next twelve years, as France, Spain and Britain intervened, the revolution turned into a war for emancipation. French commissioner Léger-Félicité Sonthonax proclaimed freedom in the north in August 1793, and the Convention in Paris extended abolition to all French colonies on 4 February 1794. Toussaint Louverture, himself formerly enslaved, became its most powerful leader. Napoleon sent an expedition in 1802 to reassert control and restore slavery, captured Toussaint (who died in a French prison in April 1803), and lost. After the battle of Vertières (18 November 1803), Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared Haiti independent on 1 January 1804. It was the only successful revolt of enslaved people that founded a state. Many historians link the failure in Saint-Domingue to Napoleon's decision to sell Louisiana to the United States in 1803. The aftermath is part of the story. In 1825 France accepted recognition only against an indemnity of 150 million francs for lost property, cut to 90 million in 1838; payments of the debt and its interest are usually dated to 1947. The United States did not recognise Haiti until 1862. Michel-Rolph Trouillot (Silencing the Past, 1995) argued that the Haitian Revolution was long treated by European and American writers as "unthinkable", and so left out of the standard story of the age. C. L. R. James's The Black Jacobins (1938) is the classic account from the other side. Nationalism: a map made of an idea In 1750 hardly anyone thought the natural unit of politics was a people who share a language and a past. By 1914 almost everyone in Europe did. Italy was proclaimed a kingdom on 17 March 1861, and the German Empire on 18 January 1871. Ernest Renan said in a Paris lecture in 1882 that a nation is "a daily plebiscite", a shared will to go on living together as well as a shared past. The scholarly argument is about whether nations are old or made. In 1983 three books landed together: Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (print and newspapers let strangers feel part of one community), Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism (industrial societies need a common, literate culture) and Hobsbawm and Ranger's The Invention of Tradition. These are "modernist" accounts. Anthony Smith answered that modern nations draw on older ethnic ties and memories, so they are not invented from nothing. Eugen Weber's Peasants into Frenchmen (1976) argued that most rural French people only became "French" in language and habit between 1870 and 1914, which is a useful warning that the map came before the people did. Interactive · How many Italians spoke Italian in 1861? Out of 100 people, your guess Reveal Estimates summarised on Wikipedia's article on the Italian language: the linguist Tullio De Mauro's 2.5% and Arrigo Castellani's 10%. They differ because "speaking Italian" is hard to define; 1861 literacy was about 25%. Without JavaScript: De Mauro put it at about 2.5% of the population and Castellani at about 10%. By 1951 De Mauro puts it at 87%. Nationalism also reached beyond Europe: the Indian National Congress (1885), Latin American creole patriotisms, and Japan's state-building below all used it. And it had a darker side, since a nation defined by ancestry makes minorities into outsiders. The next piece, 35/90, picks that up with the collapse of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires. Taiping and Meiji: two answers to the same shock The Opium War (1839–42) and the Treaty of Nanking showed Qing China that European gunboats could not be stopped. Commodore Perry's ships in Edo Bay in 1853–54 showed Japan the same. What each country did next is one of the standard comparisons in the course. Interactive · Two responses Without JavaScript: the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) was a civil war led by Hong Xiuquan that killed tens of millions; the Meiji Restoration (from 3 January 1868) replaced the shogunate and rebuilt the state with a new constitution in 1889. The comparison is tempting and easy to overdo. Japan was smaller, had a literate commercial economy under the Tokugawa and a samurai class that could be turned into officials; China was larger, more diverse and fought on several fronts. Many historians read the Meiji state as a revolution from above, others as a conservative restoration. The Taiping death toll is given as anywhere from about 20 million upwards because there was no census and whole regions were depopulated. The New Imperialism and the scramble for Africa European empires were not new in 1880; what changed was speed and reach. Britain had already ruled India for over a century and formally took over from the East India Company after the revolt of 1857. In Africa, Europeans held about ten per cent of the continent in the 1870s, mostly near the coast (Algeria, the Cape Colony, Angola and Mozambique). By 1914 only Ethiopia and Liberia were independent. The Berlin Conference (November 1884 to February 1885) is often said to have "divided Africa", but it set rules of "effective occupation" and settled disputes over the Congo; the actual borders were drawn afterwards by treaties among the European powers and by war. Interactive · The scramble, year by year Up to the year Anchor figures: about 10% of Africa under European control in the 1870s, all but Ethiopia and Liberia by 1914 (Wikipedia, "Scramble for Africa"). The events are selected, not complete. Without JavaScript: key dates were 1882 (British occupation of Egypt), 1884–85 (Berlin Conference), 1896 (Ethiopia defeats Italy at Adwa), 1898 (Omdurman and Fashoda), 1904–08 (Herero and Nama genocide), 1908 (Belgium takes over the Congo) and 1912 (Morocco and Libya). Why did it happen? Four accounts. J. A. Hobson (Imperialism, 1902) and Lenin (1916) pointed to surplus capital hunting profit abroad. Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher (1953, 1961) argued that British officials acted mainly to protect routes to India, and that crises in Africa and Egypt, not plans in London, drove the expansion. Daniel Headrick stressed technology: quinine against malaria, steamships and the Maxim gun (invented 1884). P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins pointed to the City of London's financial interests. Most historians now combine these. Africans were not passive. Ethiopia's victory over Italy at Adwa (1 March 1896), the Zulu victory at Isandlwana (1879) and the Maji Maji rising against German rule (1905–07) are the best-known examples. The costs of imperial rule were enormous and contested. The Congo Free State (1885–1908), Leopold II's personal possession, is the clearest case: there was no census, but several lines of evidence, cited by Adam Hochschild and Jan Vansina, point to a population loss of roughly half, or about ten million people, with other historians giving lower figures. In German South West Africa, the Herero and Nama war of 1904–08 is recognised by most scholars as a genocide, and Germany acknowledged it as one in 2015. What a graduate just sees A rate like one per cent a year is invisible in a year and enormous in three generations. "The West got rich" has to be explained region by region, and the main schools differ on coal, wages, institutions, knowledge and empire. Every revolution of the age made a list of who counted, and the lists differed from the speeches. Haiti belongs in the centre of the story of rights, not in a footnote. Nations are made: languages, schools, newspapers, railways and armies make them as much as ancestry. Compare China and Japan before saying why one "failed": ask about size, institutions and timing. The Scramble was fast, armed, bargained over and resisted, and Berlin drew rules, not borders. Death tolls for this period are estimates with wide ranges, and a good historian says so. Where it shows up next The Twentieth Century and After (35/90): the empires of this course collapse in 1914–18 and 1945–75, and the state borders drawn here survive. International Relations (35/14): the nineteenth-century state system is where much international relations theory comes from. Historiography (35/85): Marxist, revisionist, Atlantic and global histories are the schools of this piece. In the world: why Haiti is poor, why African borders cross peoples, why Japan industrialised early, why India and China were once the largest economies. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Blackwell, 2004), the standard global survey, and Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World (Princeton, 2014), a very large global history of the nineteenth century. 📘 Gentler. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (1938), Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost (1998), and Eric Hobsbawm's trilogy The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire (a Marxist but readable guide). 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21H.001 How to Stage a Revolution (Fall 2013), and 21H.443 European Imperialism in the 19th and 20th Centuries (Spring 2006). 🌐 Free text and data. OpenStax World History, Volume 2, and the Maddison Project Database 2023. The takeaway Between 1750 and 1914 some economies learned to grow, revolutions made rights a political language while arguing over who was included, nations became the normal shape of a state, China and Japan answered the same pressure in different ways, and a few empires took most of Africa in a generation. Each of these has a date and a number, and each has a live argument about its causes. Try this: pick one place you know and find its income per head in the Maddison data for 1820 and 1913 on Our World in Data, then ask which of this piece's stories explains the change. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Bolt and van Zanden, Maddison Project Database 2023, via Our World in Data (GDP per capita, 2011 international dollars), retrieved 2 November 2026. Wikipedia on the Haitian Revolution (1789 population and output), the Reign of Terror (16,594 sentences), the Scramble for Africa (10% in the 1870s; Ethiopia and Liberia in 1914), the Congo Free State (population loss and the Hochschild and Vansina estimates), the Taiping Rebellion (casualty range), the Meiji Restoration (3 January 1868), the Herero and Nama genocide (German acknowledgement 2015) and the Italian language (De Mauro and Castellani). Allen, "Engels' pause" (2009); Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (2000); Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009); Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy (2009); Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998); Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2001, 2002); Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not (2011); Broadberry, Guan and Li (2018); Williams (1944). Anderson, Gellner and Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983); Smith (1986); Weber (1976); Renan (1882). Hobson (1902); Lenin (1916); Robinson and Gallagher (1953, 1961); Headrick, The Tools of Empire (1981); Cain and Hopkins (1993). Trouillot (1995); James (1938). Calculations on this page (growth rates, ratios) were run in node. Numbers for slavery, deaths and populations are estimates; where sources differ, ranges are given. 📘 Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 📘 James, The Black Jacobins 🌐 Our World in Data: GDP per capita, Maddison Project Step 8. The Twentieth Century and After: Wars, Camps, Empires Ending and a Bomb ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: World wars, decolonisation, the Cold War and the world since. A person born in 1900 and living to ninety saw four great empires fall, two world wars, the United Nations grow from 51 states to 159, and the Berlin Wall built and opened. The century is easy to narrate and hard to explain, and the explanations are still argued over. The empires that fell were the Russian (1917), the German and the Austro-Hungarian (1918) and the Ottoman (the sultanate ended in 1922, the republic in 1923). In the four years of the first world war, some nine to eleven million soldiers died; in the six years of the second, the death toll, soldiers and civilians together, is usually put at 60 to 75 million. Yet in the second half of the century the same world saw the largest sustained rise in living standards in recorded history. A graduate of this course holds both facts without letting either cancel the other. This piece is long on dates and short on certainty, on purpose. For atrocities it gives the scholarly consensus plainly. For living disputes it describes what each side holds and points to the library's national histories rather than ruling. Its narrative stops in 2022; some later data points are given with their dates, as of 2 November 2026. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors, usually in year 3. Programmes shaped by the American Historical Association's History Discipline Core and the UK QAA benchmark statement normally teach the twentieth century as one or two period courses, often paired with a source-based seminar on one event; politics and IR students take it as the background to their subject. What it is forExplaining how world wars, genocide, the end of empire, the Cold War and global integration produced the world of today, and how historians argue about causes. Comes afterRevolutions & Empires, 1750–1914 (35/89). Leads toInternational Relations (35/14), Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91) and the historiography course (35/85). What this piece gives youYou will not memorise every treaty. You will have the shape of eight big stories, a dated number for each, and the main positions in each argument. Easier first reads: The Whole Human Story in 12 Turning Points (06/01), The 20 Maps That Explain the World (06/06), and the 32 Histories of Nations pieces on Russia (32/14), China (32/11) and Mexico (32/02). 1914: the causes, and the argument about them On 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb in the Young Bosnia movement, shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie. Six weeks later the great powers of Europe were at war. Step through what happened in between. Interactive · The July crisis, day by day Step Without JavaScript: 28 June assassination; 5–6 July German “blank cheque”; 23 July Austrian ultimatum; 28 July Austria declares war on Serbia; 30–31 July Russian general mobilisation; 1 August Germany declares war on Russia; 3 August on France; 4 August Germany invades Belgium and Britain declares war. Why did a regional crisis become a continental war? Pick a school; each is given in its own terms. Interactive · Four accounts of 1914 Without JavaScript: Fritz Fischer blamed Germany's leaders; Christopher Clark described shared responsibility among sleepwalking leaders; structural historians point to alliances, arms races, imperial rivalry and nationalism; Sean McMeekin emphasises Russia's ambitions. The argument has a legal after-life. Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919) made Germany accept responsibility for the losses of the war, which most Germans resented, and which later critics (from John Maynard Keynes in 1919 onward) said set up a future conflict. Others reply that the treaty was less harsh than it was remembered, and that the real failure was in not enforcing it. Two world wars: total war and its ledger The first world war (1914–18) mobilised whole economies. Its estimated deaths are 15 to 22 million, of whom nine to eleven million were soldiers. It broke four empires, brought the Russian revolutions of 1917, and left new nations and mandates in the Middle East. It also taught colonised people that the victors' language of self-determination could be used against them: Erez Manela's The Wilsonian Moment (2007) follows the hopes raised in Egypt, India, Korea and China in 1919 and what happened to them in Paris. The second world war began in China in 1937 (many Chinese historians date it from 1931 in Manchuria), in Europe with Germany's invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, and became global with Germany's attack on the Soviet Union (22 June 1941) and Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941). It ended in Europe on 8 May 1945 and, after the atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) and the Soviet declaration of war on Japan, with Japan's surrender (announced 15 August, signed 2 September 1945). Historians still argue about what ended the Pacific war: the bombs, the Soviet entry, or both, with Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's Racing the Enemy (2005) emphasising the Soviet declaration and others the bombs. Interactive · Deaths in the second world war are ranges, not numbers Ranges from Wikipedia, “World War II casualties” (retrieved 2 November 2026), which collects national estimates: the Soviet range is Zemskov's 20 million to the Russian government's 26.6 million; China is 1937–45; Poland is the 2009 Institute of National Remembrance range. The rows overlap (the Holocaust victims include many Polish and Soviet citizens), so they cannot be added. Overall estimates are 60 to 75 million. Without JavaScript: Soviet Union 20–26.6 million; China 14–20 million; Germany 6.9–7.4 million; Poland 5.6–5.8 million; Dutch East Indies 3–4 million; Japan 2.5–3.1 million; India 2.2–3.1 million. The Holocaust and other genocides: what is established The word “genocide” was coined in 1944 by the Polish-Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin. The UN Genocide Convention (adopted 9 December 1948, in force 12 January 1951) defines it as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group. Historians use the word more flexibly than courts do, which is one source of dispute; the cases below are the ones where the scholarly or judicial position is clear. The Holocaust was the murder of about six million Jews (scholarly estimates run from 5.7 to 6.2 million), roughly two thirds of Europe's Jews, by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1941 and 1945. It was done by mass shootings across eastern Europe from the invasion of the Soviet Union and in gas chambers at the extermination camps of occupied Poland: Chełmno, Bełżec, Sobibór, Treblinka and Auschwitz-Birkenau, among others. Persecution had come first: the Nuremberg Laws (1935) and the November pogrom of 9–10 November 1938. The Wannsee Conference (20 January 1942) coordinated what was already under way. Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army on 27 January 1945. The Nazis also murdered at least 250,000 and perhaps about 500,000 Roma (US Holocaust Memorial Museum), disabled people in the “T4” programme, and millions of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians. The evidence is not in doubt: German orders and reports, the perpetrators' testimony at Nuremberg (1945–46), the Eichmann trial (1961) and the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials (1963–65), the sites, and survivors' accounts. When the British historian David Irving sued Deborah Lipstadt for calling him a denier, the High Court's judgment in April 2000 found that he had distorted the evidence. What historians argue about is how and when the decision came, and why so many people took part. The “intentionalist” view stressed Hitler's plan; the “functionalist” view stressed an escalating, improvised process; most now describe a regime committed to antisemitic goals that radicalised in 1941. Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men (1992) studied one police battalion and argued that peer pressure and careerism mattered; Daniel Goldhagen's reply (1996) argued for a deep German eliminationist antisemitism, and was widely criticised. CaseWhenEstimated deathsStatus Herero and Nama (German South West Africa)1904–08Tens of thousandsRecognised by most scholars; Germany acknowledged it in 2015 and agreed a 2021 development-aid package, while denying legal liability; many Herero and Nama groups rejected the deal Armenians (Ottoman Empire)1915–17600,000 to 1.5 millionGenocide scholars' consensus; the Turkish state rejects the term and describes wartime deportations; many parliaments, and the US government in 2021, recognise it Jews, Roma and others (Europe)1941–45About 6 million JewsEstablished Cambodia (Khmer Rouge)1975–791.2 to 2.2 million deathsMass killing is established; the tribunal convicted leaders of genocide against the Vietnamese and Cham minorities (2018–19) Rwanda (Tutsi)April–July 1994About 500,000 to 800,000 (scholars' estimates; the UN often cites about 800,000); the Rwandan government's count is 1,074,017Established; the UN tribunal's Akayesu judgment (1998) was the first international genocide conviction Srebrenica (Bosnia)July 19958,372 men and boysRuled a genocide by the Yugoslavia tribunal and by the ICJ (2007) Other cases are contested, as to the word or the facts, between governments, courts and scholars: for example the Soviet famine of 1932–33 in Ukraine, where historians agree on millions of deaths and differ on whether it was aimed at Ukrainians as a group, and recent cases before international courts. This piece does not rule on them. For Ukraine see A Brief History of Russia (32/14) and Ukraine (32/15); for Israel and Palestine see 32/10 and 32/19. Decolonisation: from 51 states to 193 In 1945 most of Africa, South and Southeast Asia and much of the Caribbean were still ruled from Europe. Within thirty years nearly all of it had become independent. India and Pakistan (14–15 August 1947) were followed by Indonesia (declared 17 August 1945, recognised by the Netherlands in 1949), Ghana (6 March 1957, the first sub-Saharan colony to gain independence), and in 1960 alone 17 new UN members, 16 of them in Africa. Algeria's war (1954–62) ended with independence in July 1962. Portugal's empire ended after its own 1974 revolution, and Namibia became independent in 1990. Interactive · The UN grows Year Membership counts from the UN's “Growth in United Nations membership” page. Not every new member was a former colony: the Soviet and Yugoslav break-ups added many after 1991, and other states, such as Japan and Germany, joined for other reasons. Without JavaScript: 51 members in 1945, 99 in 1960, 127 in 1970, 154 in 1980, 159 in 1990, 184 in 1993 and 193 in 2011. Why then? Historians point to exhausted European states, the example of Japan's early victories over European powers in 1941–42, organised nationalist parties, and an American and Soviet rhetoric hostile to old empires, all pressing on Europe's own unwillingness to pay for fighting. Britain tells a story of planned transfer; critics, among them historians of Kenya's Mau Mau war (1952–60), show repression and violence behind it. The Partition of India in 1947 displaced 12 to 20 million people and killed between 200,000 and two million, a range that shows how hard the counting is. Kwame Nkrumah argued in Neo-Colonialism (1965) that political independence left economic dependence in place, and dependency theorists made the same case; others stress the choices of the new governments. The Organisation of African Unity decided in 1964 to keep the colonial borders, because redrawing them would start wars. The Cold War: two blocs, one bomb The Cold War (about 1947–91) was a standoff between the United States and its allies and the Soviet Union and its allies, which never became a direct war between them. It had a few clear points: the Truman Doctrine (March 1947), the Berlin blockade (June 1948 to May 1949), NATO (April 1949), the Soviet atomic test (29 August 1949), the Korean War (1950–53), the Berlin Wall (13 August 1961) and the Cuban missile crisis (16–28 October 1962). It ended with the Soviet Union's dissolution on 26 December 1991. Historians disagree about its origins. The “orthodox” account blames Soviet expansion; “revisionists” such as William Appleman Williams (1959) stressed American economic aims; “post-revisionists” such as John Lewis Gaddis found a mix. Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War (2005) moved the centre to the third world, where the Cold War was hot: Korea, Vietnam, Angola, Afghanistan. The bomb is its signature. Use the slider to see how large the arsenals became. Interactive · Nuclear warheads, 1945–2026 Year Estimated stockpiles of the nuclear powers, Federation of American Scientists via Our World in Data (updated 13 May 2026; retrieved 2 November 2026). “Russia” means the Soviet Union before 1992. Bars are scaled to the 1986 peak. These are estimates, since states do not publish them. Without JavaScript: the world total was about 30,900 in 1962, peaked at about 70,400 in 1986, and was about 12,200 in 2026. The United States held about 23,300 and the Soviet Union about 40,200 in 1986. The Chinese Revolution: from empire to party-state The Qing dynasty fell in the revolution of 1911 (the Wuchang uprising of 10 October) and the Republic began on 1 January 1912. Warlords and foreign powers divided the country; the Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1921. After the Nationalists turned on their Communist allies in Shanghai in April 1927, the CCP survived the Long March (1934–35) and, in the second Sino-Japanese war, grew among the peasantry. The Communists won the civil war, and Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic on 1 October 1949; the Nationalist government moved to Taiwan. The status of Taiwan is a live dispute: the PRC claims it as a province, and Taiwan's government governs it separately. See A Brief History of China (32/11). The record has two sides which both belong. Under the PRC, life expectancy in China rose from about 41 in 1949 to about 61 in 1976 (estimates collected by Our World in Data from UN and historical sources), and land reform, literacy and public health expanded. The Great Leap Forward (1958–62) also brought the worst famine in history: estimates of excess deaths range from 15 to 46 million, with newer work (Ashton and Banister, about 30 million; Cao Shuji, 32.5; Yang Jisheng, 36; Chen Yizhi, 43 to 46) clustering between 30 and 46 million. The same life-expectancy series falls to about 33 in 1960. The Cultural Revolution (1966–76) brought mass violence, with estimates of deaths up to one or two million. After Mao's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping's reforms (from December 1978) opened the economy. In Maddison data China's income per head rose from about $1,500 in 1973 to about $19,200 in 2022 (2011 international dollars), about thirteen-fold. The Communist Party and its critics, inside and outside China, interpret these decades, including the protests of 1989, differently. Latin America's century: growth, dictatorship, debt and democracy Latin American states had been independent for a century when it began. The Mexican Revolution (1910–20) was its first great upheaval. In the 1930s, after the Depression, many governments turned to import-substituting industrialisation, helped by the Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch and the UN's Economic Commission for Latin America (1948): Cárdenas nationalised Mexican oil in 1938, Vargas built Brazil's Estado Novo, and Perón came to power in Argentina in 1946. The Cuban Revolution (1 January 1959) put the Cold War in the Americas. Then came military rule: Brazil in 1964, Chile on 11 September 1973, Argentina from 1976 to 1983, backed or tolerated at times by the United States. Argentina's official commission in 1984 documented 8,961 disappeared people; human-rights groups give about 30,000. Guatemala's civil war (1960–96) killed about 200,000 people, mostly Maya, according to a UN-backed commission. The debt crisis that began in 1982 ended the “lost decade” of growth, and democracy returned across the region in the 1980s. Interactive · Income compared with the United States Maddison Project Database 2023, GDP per head in 2011 international dollars, via Our World in Data (retrieved 2 November 2026), each country divided by the US value in the same year. The last point is 2022; Venezuela's fall reflects its post-2013 collapse. Without JavaScript: Argentina was at 57% of the US level in 1900, 49% in 1970 and 31% in 2022. Brazil rose from 11% in 1900 to 25% in 2022; Mexico from 23% to 28%; Chile was 42% in 1900 and 39% in 2022. Three schools explain the region's growth record. Dependency theorists (Prebisch, Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, André Gunder Frank) argued that the structure of world trade kept the periphery poor. Market-oriented economists, including the authors of the “Washington Consensus” (John Williamson, 1989), argued that closed economies and inflation were the cause. Institutionalists such as Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff (2000) traced inequality to colonial factor endowments. Argentina, whose income per head in 1913 was above France's and Germany's in these data, is the standing puzzle. 1989, globalisation and the world since 2000 In 1989 communist rule ended across eastern Europe in months: Poland's semi-free election (4 June), Hungary's open border, the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 November), Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, and Romania in December. On the same day as Poland's vote, the Chinese government cleared Tiananmen Square (3–4 June). Germany reunited on 3 October 1990 and the Soviet Union dissolved on 26 December 1991. Why? Gorbachev's reforms, a stagnant economy, national movements and the arms race are all cited; historians disagree about the weights, and about how much credit goes to American pressure. Francis Fukuyama's essay “The End of History?” (1989) said liberal democracy had won; Samuel Huntington's “Clash of Civilizations” (1993) predicted a different pattern. The next thirty years were an age of integration: China joined the WTO on 11 December 2001, and the financial crisis spread from the United States after Lehman Brothers failed on 15 September 2008. In Maddison data, world income per head roughly doubled between 1990 and 2022 (about $8,200 to $16,700). On the World Bank's $3-a-day line (2021 prices), the share of the world's people in extreme poverty fell from about 43% in 1990 to about 11% in 2022 (World Bank via Our World in Data, 2026); China's growth accounts for much of the drop, and some economists, such as Jason Hickel, argue that the line is too low to measure a decent life. Since 2000: the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Arab uprisings that began in December 2010; the Paris climate agreement (adopted 12 December 2015); the Covid-19 pandemic, which the WHO declared on 11 March 2020 and for which it estimated 14.9 million excess deaths in 2020–21; and the world population passing eight billion on 15 November 2022 (UN). Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine began on 24 February 2022; see 32/14 and 32/15 for both countries' histories. Historians are cautious about anything later: archives are closed, memoirs are partial, and what looks decisive often is not. The honest skill is to say what is known, what is claimed, and what is still unknown. What a graduate just sees Causes come in layers: a trigger (Sarajevo), a structure (alliances, arms races) and choices (July 1914), and good historians keep them separate. Casualty figures are ranges, and the range itself is a finding. The Holocaust is among the best-documented events in history, and denial is not a position in a debate. “Genocide” is both a legal and a scholarly word, and they do not always match. Decolonisation was the biggest change in the number of states ever, and its borders were mostly inherited. The Cold War was cold only in Europe and North America. A state can raise life expectancy and cause a famine in the same decade; both facts need explaining. Recent history has no settled shape yet; ask who has the sources. Where it shows up next International Relations (35/14): deterrence, alliances and the UN come from this century. Public History, Memory & Heritage (35/91): museums, memorials and the law on denial are arguments about these events. Comparative Politics (35/13) and Political Economy (35/17): decolonised states, Latin American presidentialism and the post-1989 transitions. In the world: why borders in Africa are straight lines, why the Americas and Europe differ on remembering, why great-power politics still turns on nuclear weapons. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent (1998), on twentieth-century Europe; Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (2005); and Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes (1994), a strongly argued survey from a Marxist historian. 📘 Gentler. Margaret MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace (2013) and Paris 1919 (2001); Christopher Browning, Ordinary Men (1992). 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 21H.009 The World: 1400–Present (Spring 2014), whose later sessions cover the twentieth century. 🌐 Free text and data. OpenStax World History, Volume 2; the US Holocaust Memorial Museum Holocaust Encyclopedia; Our World in Data. The takeaway The twentieth century was the century of total war, genocide, the end of empire and the bomb, and also of the greatest rise in living standards ever recorded. For each part, a historian gives a date, a range and a debate. The causes of 1914, the choices of decolonising states and the reasons for 1989 are still argued over by serious scholars, while the Holocaust and the other genocides named above are established. Try this: take one casualty figure you have heard (for any war) and find two sources for it; note the range, and who produced each number. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Wikipedia, “World War II casualties” and “World War I casualties” (ranges, retrieved 2 November 2026), “July Crisis”, “Holocaust”, “Armenian genocide”, “Rwandan genocide”, “Cambodian genocide”, “Srebrenica massacre”, “Great Chinese Famine”, “Cultural Revolution”, “Partition of India”, “Herero and Nama genocide”, “Genocide Convention”. US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Encyclopedia (Roma victims: at least 250,000, possibly about 500,000). UN, “Growth in United Nations membership”. Federation of American Scientists estimates via Our World in Data (nuclear warheads, 2026); Bolt and van Zanden, Maddison Project Database 2023 via Our World in Data; World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform via Our World in Data (extreme poverty, $3 a day at 2021 prices, 2026); Our World in Data life expectancy (UN and historical sources). Fischer (1961); Clark (2012); MacMillan (2013); McMeekin (2011); Manela (2007); Hasegawa (2005); Browning (1992); Goldhagen (1996); Westad (2005); Williams (1959); Gaddis; Nkrumah (1965); Prebisch; Cardoso and Faletto; Engerman and Sokoloff (2000); Fukuyama (1989); Huntington (1993). Calculations on this page (shares, ratios) were run in node. Casualty figures are estimates; ranges are given where sources differ. This piece describes events and is not a verdict on any living dispute. 📘 Westad, The Global Cold War 📘 MacMillan, The War That Ended Peace 🌐 US Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia Step 9. International Relations: Why Fear Needs No Villain ---------------------------------------------------------- Why: How states fight, trade and make peace. There is no government above governments. From that one fact, scholars derive arms races, deterrence, alliances and the long argument over whether trade, institutions or shared values can buy peace. A country announces a new missile-defence system. It is, its government says, purely defensive. The neighbour reads the same news and sees a shield that could let the first country strike without fearing the reply. So it orders more missiles. The first country sees those and orders more of its own interceptors. Nobody in this story needs to be aggressive. Everyone is trying to be safe, and everyone ends up less safe and poorer. That pattern is so common that international relations (IR) scholars gave it a name, and built a discipline around the conditions that produce or soften it. This piece lays out the ideas a graduate keeps: why anarchy matters, what the main schools say in their own best terms, how deterrence works and fails, why wars happen even though they are costly, and where the democratic-peace argument stands today. This describes how scholars explain relations between states. It does not tell you which country is right in any current conflict, and each school is given at its strongest. The course in one box Who takes itEvery political science major, usually in year 2, and students of international studies, economics, history and law. Programmes such as MIT's Course 17, Harvard Government, Sciences Po and the London School of Economics teach it as a core subject, often split into theory and a second course on security or political economy. What it is forExplaining why states fight, cooperate, trade and build institutions, and what changes the odds. Comes afterComparative Politics (35/13) and Game Theory (34/45). Leads toInternational Law & Human Rights (35/10) and the international side of Political Economy (35/17). What this piece gives youYou will not be able to advise a foreign ministry. You will be able to read a crisis and say which kind of explanation is at work: fear, interest, ideas or power. Easier first reads: The International Institutions: What They Can and Can't Do (18/10) and Game Theory (34/45). This one goes further into the theories and puts small models in your hands. Anarchy: no one above the states Inside a country, if someone steals your car you can call the police, and the police answer to a government that holds a monopoly of force (see 35/13). Between countries there is no police force that can arrest a government. In IR the word for that is anarchy. It does not mean chaos. It means the absence of a ruler above the units. States still make treaties and often keep them; they just cannot be certain a treaty will be kept, and no one can be forced to keep it except by other states. Kenneth Waltz's Theory of International Politics (1979) turned this into a full theory: leave aside what particular leaders or governments are like, and look only at the structure: anarchy, plus the way power is spread among states. Even without any villain, he argued, that structure pushes states to look after their own security. The older tradition, from Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War (fifth century BCE) through Hans Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations (1948), said much the same thing in different terms: the strong do what they can, and the weak accept what they must. Other traditions noticed the same problem long before. The Arthashastra, a text of statecraft from India attributed to Kautilya (its dating is debated, but it belongs to the centuries around the turn of the era), describes a "circle of states" in which a neighbour is a natural enemy and a neighbour's neighbour a natural friend. The Chinese Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE) produced similar thinking. IR theory was largely written in Europe and North America after 1945, and scholars such as Amitav Acharya and Barry Buzan have argued since 2010 for a more global account that draws on these older sources too. The security dilemma: fear without villains John Herz named it in 1950, and Herbert Butterfield described the same trap at about the same time: steps a state takes to make itself safer make others less safe, so they respond, and the first state ends up less safe than before. Robert Jervis's 1978 article "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma" showed that how bad it gets depends on technology: if offensive and defensive weapons can be told apart, and defence has the advantage, states can protect themselves without threatening anyone. If offence has the advantage, whoever moves first wins, and every state is tempted to strike or to arm. A game theorist reads that as a payoff table, and you can see the point on a small model. Two states each choose to Hold or Arm. If both hold, each gets 3. If both arm, each gets 1 (costly and no safer). If one arms and the other holds, the armer gets 2 + 1.5o and the holder gets 3 − 4.5o, where o is the offence advantage from 0 to 1. Slide o and watch which game appears. Interactive · How offence advantage changes the game Offence advantage (0 = defence wins, 1 = offence wins) Payoffs are illustrative, symmetric, and written as (row, column). Equilibria are computed by checking every cell for a profitable deviation. Three worlds appear. When defence is strong (o below about 0.44), arming does not pay, and Hold is the best reply to everything: safe peace. In the middle band (from about 0.44 to two-thirds) there are two stable outcomes, mutual holding and mutual arming, and which one you get depends on whether each side trusts the other. This is the "stag hunt" that Rousseau described. Above two-thirds, arming is best whatever the other does, and both end up in the worse outcome: the prisoner's dilemma. That is the security dilemma at its sharpest. Historians still argue how much of the naval race between Britain and Germany before 1914 was this spiral and how much was German ambition (the Fischer debate), which is a reminder that the model describes one pattern, not every war. Four lenses: realism, liberalism, constructivism and the critics Schools of IR are best understood as answers to one question: what drives state behaviour? Here is each in its strongest form. Realism. Power and security drive states. Defensive realists such as Waltz say states should seek enough power to be safe; offensive realists such as John Mearsheimer (The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 2001) say anarchy pushes great powers to maximise power because they can never be sure of others' intentions. Cooperation is possible but fragile. Liberalism. Interests are not fixed by anarchy, and three things change them: trade and interdependence, international institutions, and the kind of government a state has. Its roots go back to Kant's Perpetual Peace (1795); a modern version is Robert Keohane's After Hegemony (1984), which argues that institutions lower the cost of making and checking agreements. Constructivism. Ideas and identities are part of the structure. Alexander Wendt's 1992 article "Anarchy Is What States Make of It" argues anarchy does not by itself force self-help: if states see each other as friends, rivals or enemies, they behave accordingly, and these roles are built by practice and can change. The same number of missiles means different things in the hands of a friend and of an enemy. Critical theories. Marxist and dependency approaches (Immanuel Wallerstein, Robert Cox) say the key units are classes and the capitalist world economy, not only states. Feminist IR (Cynthia Enloe, J. Ann Tickner) asks whose security is being counted and how gender shapes who counts as a "state actor". Postcolonial writers ask why the field's founding stories are mostly European ones. These are not four teams in a league table. Scholars blend them, and a single event can be read through each. Pick one and compare. Interactive · One event, four lenses A neighbour doubles its army Two rivals trade heavily A new international court is set up Realism Liberalism Constructivism Critical Deterrence: making a threat believable Deterrence is persuading someone not to do something by threatening a cost that outweighs the gain. Thomas Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict (1960) and Arms and Influence (1966) made it a core part of the field. The point most people miss is that deterrence is not about how big the threat is. It is about whether the other side believes you will carry it out. A threat you would regret carrying out is a weak threat. Put numbers on it. An attacker gains G if the attack goes unanswered, and pays a cost C if the defender retaliates. The attacker thinks the defender will retaliate with probability p. The attacker's expected value is (1 − p)G − pC. It is deterred when that is below zero, i.e. when p exceeds G ÷ (G + C). With G = 10 and C = 30, the defender only needs to be believed 25% of the time. Interactive · How believable must the threat be? Attacker's gain if unanswered (G) Cost to attacker if retaliated against (C) Attacker's belief that the defender will retaliate (p) This is why bigger is not always better. A threat so terrible that carrying it out would also destroy the defender is a bluff everyone can see through, which is why states build things that make the threat credible: tripwire troops that guarantee a response, treaty commitments, second-strike forces that survive a first blow. Cold War strategists called the mutual version "mutual assured destruction". It is a standing argument among scholars how much nuclear deterrence in fact kept the peace between 1945 and 1991 and how much was luck: the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962 is cited by both sides of that argument. Why costly wars still happen: the bargaining puzzle War destroys wealth and lives. If both sides can foresee that, they should be able to agree on a deal that gives each what it would have won, minus the costs. James Fearon (1995) called this the puzzle: war should be avoidable, yet it happens. His answer: it takes one of a few conditions to break the bargain: private information and the incentive to bluff, commitment problems (a rising power cannot promise not to exploit its strength later), or issues that cannot be divided. The model is tiny. Say the prize is worth 1. State A thinks it would win with probability pA; State B thinks A would win with probability qB. War costs A cA and B cB. A will accept a deal giving it at least pA − cA; B will offer up to qB + cB. A deal exists unless pA − qB is greater than the combined costs. Interactive · Is there a deal? Agree on odds, ordinary costs Both think they would win Same, but trade makes war costly A's belief that A wins (%) B's belief that A wins (%) War cost to A (% of prize) War cost to B (% of prize) This also frames the old claim that trade prevents war. Norman Angell argued in The Great Illusion (1910) that war could not pay for modern industrial economies; war came in 1914 anyway. Liberals reply that trade raises the cost of war (the sliders' third preset) and defenders of the claim point to later evidence. Realists answer that interdependence also creates dependence that states try to escape or use as a weapon (Albert Hirschman, 1945), and that what matters is whether leaders expect a short, cheap war. Institutions are the second liberal answer: the UN (1945), NATO (1949), the EU's predecessors (1951 and 1957) and the WTO (1995) can share information and make commitments harder to break. Mearsheimer's 1994 article "The False Promise of International Institutions" replies that institutions mostly reflect the interests of powerful states. Both sides cite evidence, and the debate is not settled. The democratic-peace debate One of the most studied patterns in the field is that democracies hardly ever fight each other. The idea goes back to Kant (1795); the modern statistical case starts with Melvin Small and J. David Singer in 1976 and Michael Doyle's 1983 articles, and was strengthened by Maoz and Russett in 1993. Notice what it claims and does not claim: dyadic peace (between two democracies), not that democracies are peaceful in general. Democracies fight non-democracies, and have fought many wars of conquest and colonial wars. Why might it be true? Two main explanations. Institutions: leaders who answer to voters pay a price for failure, so they pick fights more carefully and are more transparent. Norms: democracies expect each other to settle disputes by compromise. Scholars like Sebastian Rosato (2003) reject both, arguing the mechanisms do not work as claimed. Others say the pattern comes from something else: shared alliances during the Cold War, trade, or US dominance. A "territorial peace" argument reverses the arrow: settled borders produce both peace and democracy. A statistical point decides how much weight to give the claim. The absence of war between two groups means little if there were few pairs to fight. Try it: of the 179 countries V-Dem counted for 2025, it classified 87 as democracies. How many country pairs are democracy-democracy? And if wars fell on pairs at random, how likely is it that none hit a democratic pair? Interactive · The base-rate test Democracies among 179 countries Number of wars (invented, for the demo) Simplified: wars land on pairs at random, which real wars do not (neighbours fight more). Democracy count for 2025 from the V-Dem Democracy Report 2026, as reported; other indices count differently, and long ago there were far fewer democracies. At 87 democracies, about a quarter of all pairs are democratic, so 30 random wars would all miss them only about once in thousands of trials. With 5 democracies it would happen about 98% of the time. So the finding is informative only for the periods when democracies were numerous, and critics point out that the post-1945 sample is small and entangled with the Cold War. Supporters reply that controlling for contiguity, alliances, wealth and trade still leaves the effect. The status of the claim: widely accepted as a pattern, still disputed as a cause. What a graduate just sees Between states there is no police. Many outcomes that look like malice are fear plus uncertainty. The security dilemma is worst when offence has the advantage and when attack and defence look alike. A threat works by being believed, not by being big. Ask what makes it credible. If war is costly and both sides know it, a deal usually exists. When war comes, ask which condition broke the deal: bluffing, a commitment problem or optimism. Every big theory is a lens. Realism, liberalism, constructivism and the critics each highlight different things, and a single crisis needs more than one. "Democracies don't fight each other" is a claim about pairs, and its force depends on how many pairs there were. Interdependence can restrain states or be used as a lever against them. Both happen. Much of the standard theory grew in a few countries. Check whose history it is drawn from. Where it shows up next International Law & Human Rights (35/10): the rules states make for themselves, and the puzzle of why they are mostly obeyed without enforcement. Political Economy (35/17): trade, sanctions and finance as tools of statecraft and sources of dependence. Game Theory (34/45): the stag hunt, prisoner's dilemma and bargaining models used here come straight from it. In the world: foreign ministries, intelligence analysis, defence and arms control, the UN and regional bodies (African Union, ASEAN, OAS, EU), journalists and think tanks, and every business that must price geopolitical risk. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Jeffry Frieden, David Lake and Kenneth Schultz, World Politics: Interests, Interactions, Institutions (W. W. Norton). Built around bargaining and incentives, and the required text for the MIT course below. 📘 Textbook. John Baylis, Steve Smith and Patricia Owens, The Globalization of World Politics (Oxford University Press, many editions). Strong on the full range of theories, including critical ones. 📘 Gentler. John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (W. W. Norton, 2001; updated edition 2014), for the realist view in its starkest form, and Joseph Nye, Soft Power (PublicAffairs, 2004), for a liberal counterweight. Both are written for general readers. 🌐 Free course. MIT OpenCourseWare 17.41 Introduction to International Relations (Spring 2023, Richard Nielsen): causes of conflict and cooperation, crisis bargaining, nuclear strategy, economic relations, law and human rights. The takeaway With no ruler above the states, safety has to be built by the states themselves, and the steps one takes can look like threats to another. Realists stress power, liberals trade, institutions and regimes, constructivists ideas and identity, and critics ask whose order this is. A threat deters only if it is believed, wars happen when bargaining breaks down, and the democratic peace is a real pattern whose cause is still argued. Try this: next time a government says a military step is "purely defensive", write down how it looks from the other side of the border, then ask what each lens would say. If the two answers differ, you have found the security dilemma. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Waltz, Theory of International Politics (1979); Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (1948); Herz (1950) and Butterfield (1951) on the security dilemma; Jervis, "Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma", World Politics 30(2), 1978; Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (Norton, 2001; updated edition 2014); Kant, Perpetual Peace (1795); Keohane, After Hegemony (1984); Wendt, "Anarchy Is What States Make of It", International Organization 46(2), 1992; Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960); Fearon, "Rationalist Explanations for War", International Organization 49(3), 1995; Angell, The Great Illusion (1910); Hirschman, National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade (1945); Mearsheimer, "The False Promise of International Institutions", International Security 19(3), 1994/95; Small and Singer (1976), Doyle (1983), Maoz and Russett (1993) and Rosato (2003) on the democratic peace; Acharya and Buzan, Non-Western International Relations Theory (2010). Democracy count: V-Dem Democracy Report 2026 (87 democracies out of 179 countries, 2025), as reported in coverage of the report. Course contents: MIT OCW 17.41 syllabus. Every number an interactive shows was computed in node: equilibrium bands at offence advantage 4/9 and 2/3; deterrence threshold G/(G+C) = 25% at G = 10, C = 30; bargaining ranges; C(87,2) ÷ C(179,2) = 23.5%; (1 − 0.235)30 = 0.03%. 🌐 MIT OCW 17.41 Introduction to International Relations 📘 Frieden, Lake & Schultz, World Politics 📘 Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics 📘 Baylis, Smith & Owens, The Globalization of World Politics Step 10. Public History, Memory & Heritage: Who Owns the Past ------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Museums, monuments, memory and who owns the past. Museums, monuments, apologies and laws about what may be said all treat the past as something a society holds in common. The questions are who decides what is kept, shown, returned or forgotten, and what the evidence cannot settle. On 7 June 2020, in Bristol, a crowd pulled down the bronze statue of Edward Colston, a merchant and philanthropist of the late seventeenth century whose firm shipped enslaved Africans, and rolled it into the harbour. The council fished it out four days later. In June 2021 it went on show in a city museum, lying on its back, graffiti intact, among protest placards. In January 2022 a jury acquitted four people charged with criminal damage. Every part of that story is a historical argument. Was the statue evidence of what the city once honoured, or an honour still being paid? Does a museum preserve it or neutralise it? Should the crowd, a court or a council decide? Historians of Bristol knew the facts of Colston's life for decades. What changed was the public's relationship to them. That is the territory of public history: the past as it is used, taught, shown and fought over outside universities. The course in one box Who takes itHistory majors in the final year; also museum studies, heritage and conservation, and law and international relations students. It is offered as "public history", "memory studies" or "heritage studies", often with a placement at a museum or archive; the National Council on Public History in the US and the UK's museum and heritage programmes shape it. What it is forUnderstanding how societies use, display, contest and legislate the past, and how to judge a claim about who owns it. Comes afterHistoriography (35/85), which is where you learn that every history has an author. Leads toIt is the major's capstone; it feeds heritage and museum careers, journalism (Reporting & Interviewing, 35/92), law and International Law and Human Rights (35/10), and civic life. What this piece gives youYou will not be able to curate an exhibition or draft a restitution treaty. You will see the arguments on each side of the hardest cases, what actually happened in them, and which questions the facts do and do not answer. Easier first reads: The Silk Roads (06/07), The Columbian Exchange (06/09), and the long national histories in the library's 32 folder, such as A Brief History of Spain (32/06) and A Brief History of Argentina (32/16). History, memory and heritage are three different things The same past is held in three ways, and mixing them up causes most arguments. History is a disciplined account built from evidence, open to correction (see Historical Method & Sources, 35/84). Memory is what a living group carries about its own past, passed on in stories, rituals and anniversaries. The French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs argued in the 1920s that memory is always collective, shaped by the groups we belong to; he died in Buchenwald in 1945. Pierre Nora's seven-volume Lieux de mémoire (1984–92) studied the "sites of memory" through which France remembered itself. Jan Assmann added a distinction: communicative memory, shared by living generations and fading after roughly eighty to a hundred years, and cultural memory, fixed in texts, monuments and rituals that outlast the people who lived it. Heritage is the past selected and packaged for present use: the restored castle, the listed old town, the national day. David Lowenthal, in The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (1998), argued that heritage differs from history because it clarifies the past to give it present purposes, rather than testing it. That is neither good nor bad. It is why heritage can bind a community and why it can mislead. Not everyone accepts the contrast; some scholars argue that all history is shaped by present concerns. Interactive · History, memory or heritage? The categories overlap in real life: a restored castle can rest on good history, and a testimony is memory that historians use as a source. The sorter picks the best fit for the main purpose of each item. Without JavaScript: the article with footnotes and the radiocarbon report are history; the family ceremony, the survivors’ testimony and the mayor’s founding speech are memory; the costumed castle, the World Heritage listing and the proud-chapters trail are heritage. Museums: who collects, who is shown, for whom The museum is a recent invention. The British Museum was founded by Act of Parliament in 1753, from the collections of the physician Hans Sloane, and opened to the public in 1759. The Louvre became a public museum in 1793 in revolutionary France. Many great collections grew in the same centuries as European empires, and parts of them came from conquest, excavation under colonial rule, purchase on unequal terms and gifts. Alongside them, other museums were built to tell a nation's story from the inside: the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City (opened 1964) set the Indigenous past at the centre of the national one, though some critics say it presents living Indigenous peoples as part of the past. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington in 2016. The District Six Museum in Cape Town (1994) and the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago (2010) are community and state memorials to recent violence. The profession is arguing about its own definition. In August 2022 the International Council of Museums, meeting in Prague, adopted a new one: a museum is a permanent, not-for-profit institution in the service of society, and the new text added that museums should operate and communicate ethically, professionally and with the participation of communities. The previous definition dated from 2007. A 2019 proposal using words such as "democratising" and "polyphonic" was postponed at the Kyoto conference after fierce argument, and the Prague text followed three years later. The debate was about whether museums should be neutral guardians or active participants in social questions. Defenders of neutrality say a museum that takes sides loses public trust; defenders of engagement say neutrality is itself a stance, usually of the people who built the museum. Other sites are not museums at all. UNESCO's World Heritage Convention (1972) lists places of "outstanding universal value". The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp (listed 1979), Robben Island (1999) and the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (1996) are sites of conscience whose preservation is itself a statement. Hiroshima's listing was welcomed by Japan and questioned by the United States and China. Monuments: keep, explain, move or remove A statue is not a history lesson; it is an honour, paid by one generation and inherited by the next. That is why it is contested when values change. Cities have done almost everything with such monuments. In Cape Town in 2015 students campaigning as "Rhodes Must Fall" got the University of Cape Town to remove its Cecil Rhodes statue (April 2015). In Richmond, Virginia, the large monument to Robert E. Lee was taken down in September 2021 after years of litigation. In 2003 US forces and Iraqis pulled down Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad's Firdos Square (9 April), an image broadcast worldwide and later argued over for how staged it was. In Ukraine, the "decommunisation" laws of 2015 prompted the removal of Soviet statues. Budapest chose another route in 1993: Memento Park, outside the city, where communist-era statues stand together, taken from their old plinths. Oxford's Oriel College decided in 2021 not to remove its Rhodes statue, citing cost, planning rules and likely legal challenge, a decision criticised by campaigners. Destruction is not only political reform. The Taliban dynamited the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001, and Islamic State fighters destroyed temples in Palmyra in 2015. Those acts show why heritage matters: people destroy what they know others hold dear. Artists have invented another answer, the counter-monument. In 1986 Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz installed a twelve-metre lead column in Hamburg-Harburg, inscribed by passers-by, and lowered it into the ground a stage at a time until it vanished in 1993. The memorial made the viewers do the remembering. Below is an invented case, with no right answer marked. Interactive · A statue in Marlow Square The town’s founder paid for the harbour and the school. Records also show he used forced labour on both. The statue has stood for 140 years. What are the options? Marlow and the founder are invented. The examples are real cases; they show what has been tried, not which option is right. That is a choice about values and law, and communities and courts have chosen differently. Without JavaScript: the options are keep as it is, add context, move to a museum, remove and store, replace, or add a counter-monument. Each has a best case and a strongest objection, and each has been tried somewhere. Restitution: whose is it, and where should it live? Restitution means returning cultural objects to the people or places they came from. Two cases carry most of the argument. The Benin Bronzes. In 1897 a British force took Benin City, capital of the Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria, and removed royal brass, bronze and ivory works. Estimates of the numbers are uncertain: from three to five thousand pieces to as many as ten thousand objects in all. The British Museum holds about nine hundred. Museums in Germany, the United States and elsewhere hold many more. In July 2022 Germany signed a declaration to return its Benin holdings, announcing transfer of ownership of about 1,100 objects, and the first group of twenty was handed over in Abuja on 20 December 2022. The Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art transferred ownership of twenty-nine bronzes in October 2022. Then the question changed from whether to to whom: in March 2023 Nigeria's outgoing president decreed that returned objects belong to the Oba of Benin's royal family, which was welcomed in Benin City and criticised by others, including those who wanted a public museum to hold them. (Do not confuse the Kingdom of Benin, in today's Nigeria, with the Republic of Benin next door. In 2021 France returned twenty-six objects looted from the kingdom of Dahomey, which are part of the Republic of Benin's history.) The Parthenon marbles. Between 1801 and 1812 Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, took sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens. He said an Ottoman permit (a firman) allowed it; no original of the document has been found in the Turkish archives, and scholars argue about what it covered. Parliament bought the collection for £35,000 in 1816 and gave it to the British Museum. About seventy-five metres of the frieze are in London; the rest is in Athens, much of it in the Acropolis Museum, opened in 2009. Greece has asked since the nineteenth century, and made a formal request for all the Acropolis sculptures in 1983. The British Museum cites the legal purchase, the 1963 British Museum Act that limits its ability to dispose of objects, and the argument that a "universal museum" lets people everywhere see the work in a world context, as set out in a 2002 declaration by major museums. Greece argues that the sculptures are parts of one monument that was cut up, and should be seen together at the site. In 2021 UNESCO's intergovernmental committee on return of cultural property recommended that the UK return them; the UK did not accept. Beyond the two cases, there is law, politics and varied practice: the UNESCO convention against illicit trade (1970), US legislation for the return of Native American remains and sacred objects (NAGPRA, 1990), France's 2017 turn after President Macron's speech in Ouagadougou and the Sarr-Savoy report (2018), and increasing use of long loans, shared custody and digital access as middle routes. Interactive · What does each fact do to the argument? An invented ceremonial mask, held in a museum abroad. Switch on facts about it and see which arguments each fact feeds. Nothing here decides the case. A logic toy: each fact adds arguments that real claimants and real museums have made. It cannot weigh them. How much each weighs is the actual dispute, and it is decided by law, negotiation and values. Without JavaScript: facts like “taken in a military expedition” or “used by a living community” feed the claimant’s case; “bought in a recorded sale” or “legally barred from disposal” feed the holder’s; “fragile” and “split between places” feed both sides in different ways. Truth commissions: telling the record after violence After dictatorships and civil wars, societies face a hard choice about the past: prosecute, forgive, forget or document. A truth commission, in the definition scholar Priscilla Hayner uses, is an official, temporary body set up to investigate a pattern of past abuses over a period and to report publicly. It does not convict anyone. Argentina's CONADEP (set up in December 1983) published Nunca Más in September 1984; its documentation of about 9,000 cases fed the 1985 Trial of the Juntas, though human-rights groups put the number of the disappeared at 30,000. The later "Full Stop" and "Due Obedience" laws of 1986–87 limited prosecutions, and they were annulled in 2003–05. Truth and trials, in that case, were not alternatives but a sequence. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created by a 1995 Act and hearing witnesses from 1996, could grant amnesty to individuals who made full disclosure of politically motivated crimes. About 7,100 people applied and 849 were granted amnesty. Supporters say it made a peaceful transition possible and brought the details of apartheid-era violence into public view. Critics, including the family of Steve Biko, objected to amnesty without trial; others argued its mandate on gross violations left out the everyday system of apartheid, such as forced removals and pass laws. Interactive · Six commissions Headline figures are each commission's own estimates or counts, as reported in the cited sources, and are not comparable across cases: they measure different periods, kinds of harm and methods. Some are contested. Without JavaScript: Argentina 1984, about 9,000 cases documented; Chile 1991 and 2004, about 2,300 deaths and disappearances and about 28,000 survivors of imprisonment and torture; South Africa 1998, 849 amnesties; Guatemala 1999, over 200,000 killed or disappeared; Peru 2003, about 69,000 estimated; Canada 2015, 94 Calls to Action. Memory laws: when the state writes the past into statute Some states go further and legislate. The laws are of different kinds. Some ban the denial of a specific crime; some declare a historical judgement; some set up commemoration or exhumation; some punish speech the state regards as defaming the nation. Here is a small sample, with dates. PlaceWhat the law does GermanyCriminal Code §130 punishes public denial or trivialisation of the Nazi genocide; part of the post-war settlement. FranceThe Gayssot Act (1990) made contesting crimes against humanity as defined at Nuremberg an offence. The Taubira Act (2001) recognised the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity. A 2005 law told teachers to recognise the "positive role" of colonisation; the clause was withdrawn in 2006 after historians protested. In 2012 the Constitutional Council struck down a bill to punish denial of recognised genocides. SpainLaw 52/2007 on "historical memory" and Law 20/2022 on "democratic memory" support exhumations from Civil War graves and annul Franco-era sentences. Franco's remains were moved from the Valley of the Fallen in October 2019. Supporters speak of victims' rights; opponents say it reopens a settled pact. PolandA 2018 amendment to the Institute of National Remembrance Act criminalised attributing Nazi crimes to the Polish nation; after protest it was changed in June 2018 to remove criminal penalties. RussiaA 2014 criminal provision on "rehabilitation of Nazism" covers spreading "knowingly false" information about the Soviet Union in the Second World War; critics say the wording limits historians. See A Brief History of Russia (32/14). TurkeyArticle 301 of the Penal Code (2005, amended 2008) has been used against writers who discussed the Armenian killings, including Orhan Pamuk and, earlier, the journalist Hrant Dink. The arguments. Defenders say a denial law protects the dignity of victims and their descendants, and in societies where denial is a continuation of the persecution, it is a safeguard. Critics say the state has no business deciding historical truth, that a law may chill research, and that the tool is easily taken up by governments with less honourable aims. In 2005 a group of French historians led by Pierre Nora launched Liberté pour l'histoire to press that last point. The European Court of Human Rights has treated the cases separately: in Perinçek v. Switzerland (Grand Chamber, 2015) it found that convicting a Turkish politician for calling the Armenian genocide an "international lie" breached freedom of expression, while its case law accepts restrictions on Holocaust denial because of its context and history. Living disputes such as the recognition of the Armenian genocide are not settled here. Genocide scholars' association resolutions describe the 1915 events as genocide; the Turkish state rejects that word and describes a wartime tragedy with losses on several sides. Read both accounts, and the library's national histories for context. What a graduate just sees History, memory and heritage are three ways of holding the past; ask which one an item is. A monument tells you what a past generation chose to honour, which is a fact, even if the honour is now disputed. Every museum has an author, a founding story and a theory of what the public needs. Restitution has two questions: should it move, and to whom? The second can be harder than the first. A truth commission offers a record, not a verdict; whether trials follow is a separate choice. When a state legislates about the past, ask what it protects and what it risks. Empirical questions ("what happened?") and normative questions ("what should we do about it?") need different evidence. Do not let one slip in as the other. Where it shows up next International Law and Human Rights (35/10): the 1970 UNESCO convention, genocide and crimes against humanity, and what international courts can decide. Reporting & Interviewing (35/92): journalists are public historians, and every anniversary story picks a version. Political Theory (35/12): justice, reparation and legitimacy; which of these claims a state can ever repay. In the world: curators, archivists, heritage officers, foundations, legal advisers, and every town council that has voted on a plaque. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (Routledge, 2nd edition 2022), and Priscilla Hayner, Unspeakable Truths (Routledge, 2nd edition 2011) for truth commissions. 📘 Gentler. Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation (2014), and David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (1985). On restitution, read both Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums (2020) and Tiffany Jenkins, Keeping Their Marbles (2016); they disagree, and that is the point. 🌐 Free text. The National Council on Public History publishes introductions to the field, and the Internet History Sourcebooks Project has primary texts. 🌐 Free course. I could not confirm a free open course dedicated to this subject; for the theory behind it, the MIT OpenCourseWare 21H.991 Theories and Methods in the Study of History syllabus (Fall 2010) lists readings on memory and historiography. The takeaway Societies hold the past through history, memory and heritage, and fight over it through museums, monuments, returns, commissions and laws. The facts of what happened constrain the argument, but the decisions about what to honour, return or forbid are about values, and different communities and courts have decided differently. Try this: find one monument, plaque or museum label near you. Write down who put it there, when, and what a person not in that story would want added. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Wikipedia, "Statue of Edward Colston" (toppled 7 June 2020, recovered 11 June, displayed 4 June to 5 September 2021, acquittal 5 January 2022); Wikipedia, "Benin Bronzes" (the 1897 expedition; estimates; Germany July 2022; handover 20 December 2022; Smithsonian October 2022; Buhari decree 23 March 2023) and "Elgin Marbles" (1801–12; £35,000 in 1816; British Museum Act 1963; Acropolis Museum 2009; Greece's 1983 request; UNESCO committee 2021); Wikipedia, "Truth and Reconciliation Commission (South Africa)" (Act No. 34 of 1995; 849 amnesties), "Historical Clarification Commission" (Guatemala), "Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission" and "List of truth and reconciliation commissions" (CONADEP, Rettig, Valech); the ICOM museum definition adopted 24 August 2022 in Prague; Halbwachs; Nora; Assmann; Lowenthal; Hayner. Examples about Rhodes, Lee, Saddam, Memento Park, Oriel, Gerz, Bamiyan and Palmyra, and the memory-law table, come from general reference knowledge and are marked in the fact-check log as not individually verified. Marlow Square and the mask are invented. 📘 Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice 📘 Hayner, Unspeakable Truths 📘 Hicks, The Brutish Museums and Jenkins, Keeping Their Marbles Step 11. Classical Social Theory: What Holds a Society Together, and What Pulls It Apart ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Why: The social theory historians argue with. Seven thinkers, from fourteenth-century Tunis to Atlanta in 1903, asked the questions every sociologist still starts from. The useful way to read them is not as saints or villains, but as seven lenses, each with a blind spot. Two strangers join a club on the same day. One is a founder's nephew with a spare room and a good surname; the other is a new hire with a skill the club needs and no connections. Within a year the club has a rule book, two cliques, a treasurer nobody trusts and a leader whom some members would follow anywhere. Nobody planned any of it. Social theory begins with the feeling that such patterns are real, that they push on individuals who did not choose them, and that they can be explained. The founders of the discipline disagreed about almost everything else: what holds a group together, whether conflict is the engine or the disease, whether to explain people from the outside or the inside. They did not all come from Paris and Berlin, and the canon that leaves out Ibn Khaldun, Harriet Martineau and W. E. B. Du Bois is one that sociologists themselves now call incomplete. This piece takes them in their own terms and then lets their critics answer. The course in one box Who takes itSociology majors, usually in year 1 or 2; theory is a required strand in programmes shaped by the American Sociological Association's guidance and the UK's QAA benchmark for sociology. History, politics and anthropology students often take a version. Theory courses differ in who they include: some stop at Marx, Durkheim and Weber, and more now add the thinkers here. What it is forGiving you the questions and vocabulary (class, solidarity, authority, alienation, the colour line) that every later sociology course assumes. Comes afterNothing: this is the major's entry point. Leads toContemporary Social Theory (35/77), Stratification & Inequality (35/78) and Deviance, Crime & Social Control (35/83); it also feeds Sociological Research Methods (35/76), which asks how anyone checks these claims. History majors meet it as The social theory historians argue with. What this piece gives youYou will not have read the primary texts, which are long and hard. You will know what each thinker asked, the one idea that carries their name, one thing it explains and one thing it misses. Easier first reads: The Pecking Order: Why Every Society Has Hierarchy (30/01) and Class, Status and Power: Marx, Weber and Bourdieu (30/02), which covers class in depth; this piece goes elsewhere in each thinker. Ibn Khaldun: why strong groups rise and soft ones fall Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406) was born in Tunis and worked as a judge, diplomat and adviser across North Africa, Andalusia and Egypt, in a world of rising and falling dynasties. In 1377, in a remote fortress in what is now Algeria, he finished the Muqaddimah, the introduction to a world history, and argued that history needed a new science: the study of umran, human social organisation, with its own regularities that explain events better than the character of kings. His central concept is asabiyyah, group feeling or solidarity: the bond that makes people defend and follow one another without being paid. He saw it strongest in groups living hard lives together, such as desert and mountain peoples, who can conquer a rich, settled city. But rule brings comfort, taxes and delegation. The conquerors' grandchildren grow used to luxury and hire others to fight, solidarity thins, and a new hardy group takes over. As usually summarised, he held that a dynasty rarely lasts beyond three generations of about forty years, around 120 years. Interactive · How long does a dynasty last? Group feeling at the founding (0–100) Softening per generation (comfort, hired help) Group feeling of the hardy challenger A toy model: each generation (about 40 years) keeps a fixed share of the last one's group feeling, and the dynasty falls in the first generation where it drops below the challenger's. These are invented numbers for the idea, not Ibn Khaldun's own equations. Without JavaScript: with group feeling 90, losing 30% per generation, against a challenger at 60, the dynasty runs 90, 63, then 44 and falls in the third generation, about 120 years in. Ibn Khaldun also wrote about taxes (rates that are too high shrink the tax base), the division of labour and why cities concentrate skills. The critics' main points: his cycle fits the Maghrib he knew better than centralised bureaucratic states such as the Ottoman or Chinese empires; "dynasty in three generations" is a pattern and not a law; and calling him the "first sociologist" can say more about European habits of naming founders than about his work. Many historians prefer to read him as a thinker in the Islamic tradition of history and jurisprudence who asked a sociological question six centuries before the word existed. Marx: a society is organised around who makes and who owns Karl Marx (1818–1883) saw that what a society produces, and who controls the means of producing it, shapes its laws, its beliefs and its conflicts. This is the "materialist" part: ideas matter, but they grow in conditions. In Capital (vol. 1, 1867) he asked where profit comes from if goods trade at their value. His answer is that a worker sells her labour power, and a day's work produces more value than her wage replaces. The unpaid part is surplus value; the ratio of surplus to paid labour he called the rate of surplus value (Capital vol. 1, chapters 9–10). The employer's drive to lengthen or intensify the working day is, in this account, built into the system, not a matter of bad character. Class and the three-way contrast with Weber and Bourdieu are in Class, Status and Power (30/02); here is the arithmetic. Interactive · The working day, divided Length of the working day (hours) Hours of work that produce the wage's worth Marx's accounting with invented numbers, to show the idea. Whether value is created by labour at all is disputed (see below), so treat this as a statement of his claim, not a measurement. Without JavaScript: in a 10-hour day where 4 hours produce the worth of the wage, 6 hours are surplus, the rate of surplus value is 150%, and 60% of the day is unpaid in Marx's terms. Marx's critics are many and from every direction. The marginalist economists, led by Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk in the 1890s, rejected the labour theory of value and the logic of the "transformation" from values to prices. Predictions of a steadily shrinking middle and a revolution in the most industrialised countries did not happen, and revolutions came in largely agrarian ones. In the twentieth century, states ruling in his name raised hard questions about how far his ideas answer for them, which his defenders and opponents argue about to this day. Others say he treated colonies as footnotes; recent scholars, such as Kevin Anderson, point to his later writing on India, Ireland and Russia as a more complex view. What survived in sociology is the habit of asking who owns, who decides and whose interests an arrangement serves. Durkheim: social facts and the bonds that regulate us Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) wanted sociology to be a science with its own subject matter: social facts, ways of acting and thinking that exist outside any one individual and press on them, like a language, a legal code or a custom of mourning (The Rules of Sociological Method, 1895). In The Division of Labour in Society (1893) he argued that small, similar communities hold together by resemblance (mechanical solidarity) and complex ones by interdependence (organic solidarity), as in a body whose organs differ. His test case was Suicide (1897). Using official statistics from European countries, he showed that the rate of suicide was steady within a society and differed between groups: for example, it was higher in Protestant than in Catholic populations. He argued that this is a social fact and needs a social explanation. He proposed two dimensions: how strongly people are tied to a group (integration) and how firmly norms guide their wants (regulation). Too little integration gives egoistic suicide; too much gives altruistic; too little regulation, as in sudden boom or bust, gives anomic; too much gives fatalistic. The tool below is a map of the four, a concept diagram and not a risk calculator. It describes societies and groups, not any person. Interactive · Durkheim's two dials Integration: how tightly people belong Regulation: how firmly norms guide wants A teaching diagram. Durkheim's hypothesis is that social pressure toward each type is lowest in the middle of both dials; the scores here are the distance past the midpoint, scaled 0–100, with no data behind them. If you or someone you know is struggling, findahelpline.com lists services by country. Without JavaScript: low integration points to egoistic pressure, very high to altruistic; low regulation to anomic, very high to fatalistic; the middle of each dial is the least pressured. The critique is long and instructive. Maurice Halbwachs (1930) reworked the statistics and found the picture more complicated. Jack Douglas (1967) argued that official suicide figures record how coroners, families and churches label deaths, so differences between groups may reflect differences in labelling. And Durkheim compared whole populations, then reasoned about individuals; the later name for that slip is the ecological fallacy (see Sociological Research Methods, 35/76). He also wrote of "primitive" societies from secondhand reports that anthropologists would not accept today. What lasts is the claim that rates, not just cases, deserve explaining, and that belonging and rules both matter. Weber: authority, meaning and the cage of rules Max Weber (1864–1920) answered Marx differently: material interests matter, but so do ideas, and sociology must understand (Verstehen) what actions mean to the people doing them. His tool was the ideal type, a deliberately pure, exaggerated model (the bureaucrat, the prophet) that helps you see how real cases depart from it. In Politics as a Vocation, a lecture in Munich in January 1919, he defined the state as the body that successfully claims the monopoly of legitimate physical force within a territory. And he asked why people obey. His three pure types of legitimate authority are traditional (it has always been so), charismatic (devotion to an exceptional person) and legal-rational (rules, offices and procedures that bind even the holder). Interactive · Which kind of authority? Traditional Charismatic Legal-rational Pick a type. Next case Without JavaScript: a headman's son inheriting by custom is traditional; a preacher followed for her extraordinary gifts is charismatic; an official obeyed because a written rule says her office may demand payment is legal-rational. Weber's best-known book argument, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), said that an ascetic, work-as-calling outlook in certain Protestant traditions helped create the disciplined spirit modern capitalism needed. Modern bureaucracy, he feared, would then trap its members in an "iron cage" (Talcott Parsons's 1930 phrase for his image; a recent translation says "shell as hard as steel"). The thesis has been contested ever since. Historians such as R. H. Tawney said capitalism was already growing in Catholic cities; in 2009 Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann argued that in nineteenth-century Prussia, Protestant regions' advantage came through literacy and schooling, which Protestant reformers promoted, rather than through an ethic of work. Weber's studies of China and India are also criticised for treating them as the West's opposite. What stays is the idea that authority is a belief people hold, and that the same office can rest on very different foundations. Simmel: the shape of a group changes what happens in it Georg Simmel (1858–1918) asked a different question: not what society is made of, but what forms social life takes, whatever the content: competition, exchange, secrecy, conflict, the stranger. His essay "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) argued that city dwellers cope with the flood of stimuli with reserve and calculation. He is best known to students for the effect of number. A pair (a dyad) is fragile: if one leaves, the group is gone, and each member holds a veto over its life. Add a third person and everything changes: the group can survive a loss, a mediator can calm a quarrel, two can ally against one, and a third can profit from a conflict between the others. Interactive · What a bigger group adds People in the group Counts are arithmetic: pairs n(n−1)/2, three-person subgroups n(n−1)(n−2)/6, all possible subgroups of two or more 2n−n−1. Lines are drawn up to 12 people. Without JavaScript: 2 people have 1 relationship; 3 have 3 pairs and 1 three-person subgroup; 10 have 45 pairs and 120 triads; 30 have 435 pairs. His second idea is the intersection of social circles: modern individuals belong to many groups (a family, an occupation, a faith, a club), and what makes each person distinct is the particular combination. The critics: his essays are brilliant and unsystematic, with few data; Durkheim and Weber built schools, and Simmel, who was long kept off a full professorship in Germany, built readers. His influence went through the Chicago School of urban sociology in the United States, and into network analysis, which counts and maps exactly those ties. Martineau and Du Bois: look first, count, and listen Martineau first. Harriet Martineau (1802–1876), from Norwich in England, was a journalist and novelist who lost most of her hearing in youth and wrote her way to financial independence. In 1834–36 she travelled through the United States and published Society in America (1837) and, a year later, How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), a guide to studying a society you do not belong to. In 1853 she translated and condensed Auguste Comte's Positive Philosophy (Comte, who coined the word "sociology", approved her version), and it made his work readable in English. Her method, in plain terms: look at institutions and everyday life, not only at laws and leaders; talk to people of every rank; and judge a society against the principles it claims for itself. Applied to America, it turned the nation's creed of equality into a ruler, and measured slavery and the legal position of women against it. The tests are still taught as good practice: compare what people profess with what they do; do not trust only your hosts; know your own prejudices. The critics say she often relied on the people she was introduced to and on a moral sense she took for granted, and that her stage-by-stage view of civilisation, common in her century, ranked other societies in ways sociologists now reject. For a century the discipline mostly forgot her; since the late twentieth century, sociologists have returned her to the founders' list. Then Du Bois. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) was the first Black American to earn a Harvard doctorate, and the author of what is often called the first sociological case study of a Black community in the United States. Commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, he and his assistant Isabel Eaton spent about sixteen months, from August 1896 to December 1897, going door to door in Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, and they conducted more than 5,000 interviews. The Philadelphia Negro (1899) set out employment, housing, crime, education and social class in the ward, and argued that the conditions it found came from discrimination and history, not from any inborn difference. He then ran the Atlanta University studies from the late 1890s and made data graphics for the 1900 Paris Exposition. The sociologist Aldon Morris, in The Scholar Denied (2015), argues that Du Bois and his Atlanta colleagues founded a rigorous scientific sociology which the white-led discipline sidelined. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he named a lived experience, double consciousness: "this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others." He also wrote that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line." Theory and measurement went together: the same man who wanted to count the line wanted to describe how it felt to cross it. His critics, including later Du Bois himself, pointed to the elitism of the "Talented Tenth" idea of 1903, which put hope in an educated few. Scholars debate what "double consciousness" fully means and how far it travels beyond the American case; later thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, drew on related ideas in a colonial setting. Seven lenses side by side ThinkerCore questionCarries the nameThe usual objection Ibn KhaldunWhy do dynasties rise and fall?AsabiyyahFits the Maghrib better than other states MartineauDoes a society live by its own principles?Observe morals and mannersRelied on hosts and a stage view of progress MarxWho owns, and who works for whom?Surplus valueLabour theory of value; failed predictions DurkheimWhat binds individuals into a society?Social fact, anomieEcological fallacy; official statistics WeberWhy do people obey, and what do actions mean?Ideal type, three authoritiesThe Protestant ethic thesis is contested SimmelWhat forms does social life take?Dyad and triadBrilliant but unsystematic Du BoisWhat is the colour line, measured and lived?Double consciousnessThe Talented Tenth; scope of the concept One thing to notice: most of the entries are about how people are classed (by property, by status, by group size, by race) and about whether the classing is natural or made. Later courses, Stratification & Inequality (35/78) and Race, Ethnicity & Migration (35/79), are that question pursued with data. What a graduate just sees Groups have a life of their own: rates, rules and cycles that no member chose. Solidarity is strongest when a group is hard-pressed, and it erodes with comfort: ask what a rising group has that a settled one has lost. Ask who owns, who decides, and who gains from an arrangement that is described as natural. Authority is a belief: the same order is obeyed for tradition, devotion to a person, or rules, and each fails differently. Add a third person and the dynamics change; in large groups the number of possible relationships outruns anyone's attention. A rate is not the story of any one person: do not slide from "this group has more" to "this person is". The canon was chosen by people; ask who was left out and who gets to count as a founder. Where it shows up next Contemporary Social Theory (35/77): Goffman, Bourdieu, Foucault and others who answer, correct or reject these seven. Stratification & Inequality (35/78): Marx's class, Weber's status and Du Bois's colour line, measured with the tools of Sociological Research Methods (35/76). Deviance, Crime & Social Control (35/83): Durkheim's claim that a society needs rules, and what happens when they weaken. In the world: an HR manager reading a bureaucracy; a founder thinking about when a start-up stops being a movement; a journalist explaining why a protest group fell apart; a historian choosing which social theory to argue with. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. George Ritzer and Jeffrey Stepnisky, Classical Sociological Theory (McGraw-Hill, many editions), and Craig Calhoun and others, Classical Sociological Theory (Wiley-Blackwell, several editions). Both are standard course texts with extracts and commentary; check for a recent edition and for how many non-European thinkers each includes. 📘 Gentler. Aldon Morris, The Scholar Denied (University of California Press, 2015), on Du Bois and the Atlanta school. The primary texts also reward a taster: Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is in the public domain, and the abridged Muqaddimah (translated by N. J. Dawood, Princeton University Press) is an accessible way into Ibn Khaldun. 🌐 Free course. Open Yale Courses, SOCY 151, Foundations of Modern Social Theory (Iván Szelényi, 2009). It runs through Marx, Weber and Durkheim, with lectures on earlier political thinkers first. It leaves out the other four in this piece. 🌐 Free text. OpenStax, Introduction to Sociology 3e, whose early chapters introduce the main theoretical perspectives. The takeaway Classical social theory is a set of lenses, not a set of answers. Ibn Khaldun saw solidarity rise and fade, Martineau tested a nation against its own creed, Marx followed ownership, Durkheim followed belonging, Weber followed meaning and obedience, Simmel followed the shape of the group, and Du Bois measured the colour line and described how it feels. Each lens shows something the others miss, and each has a critic worth reading. Try this: pick a group you belong to (a team, a family, a club) and describe it in one sentence each through Marx, Durkheim and Weber. Note which sentence was the hardest to write; that is the lens you use least. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah (1377), trans. Franz Rosenthal (Princeton, 1958); the "three generations of about forty years" summary as given in the standard reference literature (Wikipedia, "Asabiyyah"); the model on this page is invented. Martineau, Society in America (1837), How to Observe Morals and Manners (1838), The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte (1853). Marx, Capital vol. 1 (1867), chapters 9–10; Böhm-Bawerk, Karl Marx and the Close of His System (1896); Kevin Anderson, Marx at the Margins (2010). Durkheim, The Division of Labour in Society (1893), The Rules of Sociological Method (1895), Suicide (1897); Halbwachs, Les causes du suicide (1930); Douglas, The Social Meanings of Suicide (1967). Weber, Politics as a Vocation (lecture of 28 January 1919), The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), Economy and Society (1922); Becker and Woessmann, "Was Weber Wrong? A Human Capital Theory of Protestant Economic History," Quarterly Journal of Economics 2009. Simmel, "The Metropolis and Mental Life" (1903) and Sociology (1908). Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro (1899: about sixteen months of fieldwork from August 1896 to December 1897 and more than 5,000 interviews, as stated on Wikipedia, "The Philadelphia Negro"), The Souls of Black Folk (1903); Morris 2015. The counts and the toy models on this page were run in node. This piece describes schools of thought and is not advice; the suicide discussion is about statistics on societies, and findahelpline.com lists support by country. 📘 Morris, The Scholar Denied 📘 Ritzer and Stepnisky, Classical Sociological Theory 🌐 Open Yale SOCY 151 Step 12. History of Architecture: Five Thousand Years of Answers ---------------------------------------------------------------- Why: Five thousand years of buildings, on every continent. Every building in history was somebody's answer to the same few questions: what is there to build with, how do I cover the gap, how do I stay cool, and what must this place say? In the twelfth century, masons began raising Notre-Dame de Paris (1163), Khmer builders were finishing Angkor Wat, Ethiopian stonecutters were chiselling churches downward out of a hillside at Lalibela, and builders on Pohnpei, in Micronesia, were stacking basalt logs into the walls of Nan Madol on artificial islets. Nobody in any of those places had heard of the others. That is the first thing a history of architecture teaches, and the first thing most schools used to get wrong: the story is not one road from Egypt to Greece to Rome to Paris to New York. It is many roads, some of which never met, and the same problems turned up on all of them. This piece takes the problems as its spine. It covers the whole world from the first monuments to about 1900; Modern & Contemporary Architecture (34/92) takes over from the Bauhaus. The course in one box Who takes it: every architecture student, usually in year 1 or 2, often as a two-semester survey. Programmes shaped by studio schools (the Bartlett, ETH Zurich, MIT) and by the NAAB conditions treat it as the course that gives them a vocabulary and a set of precedents to argue with. Newer courses, such as MIT's 4.605, teach it as a global history from prehistory. What it's for: knowing what has already been tried, so you can recognise it in a new building and argue with it. Comes after: nothing; it needs only curiosity. Leads to: Modern & Contemporary Architecture (34/92), then Urban Design & Planning (34/95) and the studio, The Design Studio (34/96); it links to the library's 06 History pieces and How to Read a Building (08/10). Honest line: you will not memorise five thousand years from one page, and a few dozen buildings cannot stand for the world. You will see five recurring questions, test two of them with real numbers, and be able to place a building you meet on a trip. Every culture started with what was at hand Early builders did not choose a style; they used the nearest thing. Mud where there was mud, timber where there were forests, stone where it came out of the ground in blocks. The material pushed the form: mud brick (adobe) slumps unless it is thick and sheltered from rain, which gives the thick, rounded, plastered shapes of the Sahel. Timber is light and good in tension, and makes the great frames of East Asia. Stone is strong in compression, brittle in tension and heavy, and makes walls, columns and arches. The Great Pyramid at Giza (c. 2560 BCE), Stonehenge's sarsen circle (c. 2500 BCE), the planned drains of Mohenjo-daro in the Indus valley (mature phase c. 2600 to 1900 BCE) and the temple mounds at Caral in Peru (c. 2600 BCE) all stand within a few centuries of each other, on four continents. Drag the year below to see what was being raised, around the world, at any moment. It shows only a short list of 34 famous buildings, so treat the empty rows as a gap in the list, not in history. Interactive · What was being built around the world in year X? Year The list is short and chosen for range. Dates are the usual start or completion dates and are approximate for the early and rock-cut sites (see the sources). "Latest" means the most recent building in the list that had begun by that year. Span: the arch turns a push into a squeeze The hardest problem in building is covering a gap. A flat stone beam over a gap bends, and stone is weak when pulled. The arch's trick is to make the stone press on itself: each block leans on its neighbours, and the whole curve is in compression, which stone loves. The price is that the arch pushes outward as well as down. That sideways push, the thrust, has to be caught by a buttress, a thick wall, a tie or the next arch. The history of masonry is the history of managing it. The Romans learned to make vaults and domes from concrete. The Pantheon in Rome, dedicated around 126 CE, has a dome 43.3 m across inside, and it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. Constantinople's Hagia Sophia (537 CE) set a dome on pendentives over a vast nave. Gothic builders in twelfth-century France pointed the arch and moved the buttress outside the wall as a flying buttress, letting the walls become glass. The Florentine dome (1436) closed a span of roughly the Pantheon's size with two shells and a brick pattern that let it rise with little wooden centring. In Istanbul, Sinan answered Hagia Sophia with the Süleymaniye Mosque (1557). Elsewhere the same problem got different answers: the Khmer and Maya corbelled stone inward course by course, and the Ellora builders carved the Kailasa temple out of a hillside (8th century) so there was no span to cover at all. For a uniform load on a parabolic arch of span L and rise f, statics gives the thrust at each foot in one line: H = wL² ÷ (8f), so H ÷ W = L ÷ (8f), where W = wL is the total load The sideways push is the span divided by eight times the rise. Make the arch flatter and the thrust climbs. Try it. Interactive · The thrust of an arch Span Rise The arrows are drawn to scale for the load shown: green up for the vertical reaction, orange sideways for the thrust. The model is a parabolic arch under uniform load, a textbook simplification; real masonry arches are checked against a line of thrust that must stay inside the stone. A semicircle (rise half the span) gives a thrust of a quarter of the load; flatten it to a fifth of the span and it is 0.625 of the load (L ÷ 8f, with f = L/5). This is why Roman arches are round, why a nearly flat arch needs huge abutments, and why a pointed arch, which pushes outward less than a round one of the same span, let Gothic builders put up such tall thin walls. It is also exactly the situation in Statics (34/10): a push and a reaction that must balance. A module is a shared language A mason's apprentice in Greece, a carpenter in Song China and a tatami maker in Kyoto all solved the same coordination problem: how do dozens of people, working at different times, make parts that fit? The answer was a module: pick one dimension and make everything a multiple of it. The Greek and Roman orders (Doric, Ionic, Corinthian) are a module system as much as a style: the column's diameter sets its height, its capital and the beam it carries. The Roman writer Vitruvius, whose De architectura is the only architectural treatise to survive from antiquity, recorded such rules, and Vignola's Regola delli cinque ordini d'architettura (1562) turned them into a handbook, based on a module of half a column diameter. In that Renaissance canon a Doric column is eight diameters tall, an Ionic nine and a Corinthian ten, though ancient Greek Doric columns were stouter, from four to eight diameters depending on the building. China wrote the module into law. The Yingzao Fashi (1103), compiled by the Song official Li Jie, sorted timber sections into eight standard grades, with every other dimension of a timber hall derived from the grade chosen. The size of the chosen grade set the scale of the whole building, so a larger hall simply used a bigger grade. The values of the eight grades are still debated by scholars; the idea is not. Interactive · One number sets the whole column Column base diameter Ratios of height to lower diameter: Doric 8, Ionic 9, Corinthian 10 in the Renaissance canon; the stout Doric is an illustrative 5.5 inside the range of 4 to 8 reported for Greek temples. The standing person is 1.7 m. The same logic runs through the Japanese tatami room, which you met in Form, Space & Order (34/89), and through Islamic geometric design, where a pattern is generated from a circle and a compass. The module is why a medieval cathedral built over a century by different crews still holds together. It is also why a modern shipping container, a standard brick (which fits a hand) and a sheet of plywood (1.22 × 2.44 m, or 4 × 8 feet) all shape the buildings around them. Climate was the first engineer Before air conditioning, a building had to keep its occupants alive using only its shape and its material. Builders found different answers in different climates, and none of them needed a machine. Courtyard houses, from Chinese siheyuan to the Roman atrium house, pull cool night air into a shaded well. The wind-catchers (badgir) of desert cities such as Yazd in Iran funnel breezes down into the house. Stilted timber houses in the humid tropics catch the air under the floor. Thick earthen walls in the Sahel, like those of the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali (rebuilt in 1907 on the site of earlier mosques, and replastered by the community every year), do something subtler. A thick wall acts like a battery for heat. When the sun beats on its outside face, the warmth soaks inward slowly, and by the time it arrives on the inside it is weaker and later. In the simple textbook model of a solid wall driven by a daily temperature swing, the swing shrinks by a factor of e−x/δ and arrives (x/δ) ÷ 2π of a day late, where x is the thickness and δ = √(αP ÷ π) is the distance over which the daily wave fades, α is the material's thermal diffusivity and P is 24 hours. A 40 cm adobe wall can leave the inside barely warmer by day and keep it from chilling at night. Set the material and thickness below. Interactive · How a thick wall delays the heat Wall thickness Textbook model: a very thick (semi-infinite) uniform solid with a sinusoidal outside temperature (15 to 40 °C, peaking at 15:00) and no air films. The material values are typical figures (diffusivity about 4.6 × 10⁻⁷ m²/s for adobe) and vary widely in practice. Real walls with air films, insulation and sun on both faces behave less ideally, so use this to see the trend, not to design. A caution against a lazy reading: vernacular does not always mean wise. Many traditional buildings were uncomfortable, and many modern ones in hot places copy glass boxes from cold ones and then cool them at huge cost. The lesson is narrower: where the materials, the climate and the way of life were matched over generations, the result often performs very well, and it is worth understanding before it is replaced. Environmental Systems in Buildings (34/94) puts numbers on exactly this. Buildings as power, belief and memory The tallest and most durable buildings are almost never houses. They are what a society wanted to last: temples, tombs, palaces, forts. The materials are an economic statement, and the form a political one. Angkor Wat, begun by King Suryavarman II in the early twelfth century, was dedicated to Vishnu and later became a Buddhist site, in use to this day. Great Zimbabwe's Great Enclosure, built mainly in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by the ancestors of the Shona, has dry-stone walls up to about 11 m high with no mortar. Colonial-era writers refused for decades to believe that Africans had built it; archaeologists settled the matter in the twentieth century. Machu Picchu, a royal estate from the time of the emperor Pachacuti (mid-fifteenth century), is built of precisely cut stone laid without mortar, in a land of earthquakes. The Taj Mahal (1632 to about 1653), the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan's tomb for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, shows a power that could command marble, craftsmen and a whole garden plan. Ise Shrine in Japan answers the permanence question in the opposite way: the main buildings are dismantled and rebuilt to the same design on an adjacent site every twenty years, a ritual followed since the seventh century (the 62nd rebuilding was in 2013). What lasts is not the timber but the knowledge of how to build it. All of these dates are from standard sources and several are approximate: scholars argue about when Lalibela's churches were carved (most put it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries), when work on the Pantheon began, and who built what at many early sites. Test your sense of the order with the game below. Nearly everyone guesses wrong at least once. Interactive · Which came first? Next pair Pairs are drawn at random from the same 34 buildings, always from different regions and at least 60 years apart. Dates are the usual approximate start or completion years. Iron, glass and the end of masonry's monopoly For five thousand years a tall or wide building meant thick walls. Between about 1780 and 1890, that rule broke. Cast and then wrought iron, and from the 1850s mass-produced steel, let builders carry load on a slim frame. The Ditherington Flax Mill in Shrewsbury (1797) had an iron frame inside brick walls, in order to resist fire. Joseph Paxton's Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition in London was an iron and glass hall assembled from standard parts in months. The Eiffel Tower (1889) showed that an iron lattice could reach 300 m. In Chicago, William Le Baron Jenney's Home Insurance Building (completed 1885) carried much of its weight on a metal skeleton and is often called the first skyscraper, though that title is disputed and earlier iron-framed buildings exist. Along with Elisha Otis's safe elevator, which made the upper floors worth renting, the frame turned the wall from a structure into a skin. That is the doorway to the next piece in the series. Whose history? How the story got told The way a subject is taught is itself history. The standard English textbook for over a century, Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method (1896), opened with a "Tree of Architecture" in which European styles formed the strong trunk and branches, and non-Western traditions were drawn as stunted lower branches. Later editions were criticised for this and the book was eventually retitled as a global history, though scholars still debate how far it was corrected. Newer textbooks, such as Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash's A Global History of Architecture (3rd edition, 2017), organise their chapters along a common timeline across regions, which is exactly what the slider above does. The lesson for a student is practical. When a textbook says "primitive" or "vernacular" it is usually describing its own distance from the building, not the building. And when you stand in a mud-brick mosque, a rock-cut church or a timber shrine, you are looking at a mature answer to a real problem, with a century of refinement behind it. What a graduate just sees Architecture history is many roads, not one; the same problems recur on every continent. Material decides form: mud, timber and stone each want a different building. An arch is in compression, and it pushes sideways; the flatter the arch, the bigger the thrust (H = wL² ÷ 8f). A module (a column diameter, a timber grade, a tatami mat) is how many hands make parts that fit. A thick, heavy wall delays and flattens the daily heat wave; builders used this long before the equation. Monuments are statements: power, belief, memory; a building can last by being rebuilt. Iron, glass and steel turned the wall from structure into skin only in the last 150 years. Every textbook chooses its trunk and its branches; check whose history you are reading. Where it shows up next Modern & Contemporary Architecture (34/92): starts where this piece stops, with the Bauhaus and the steel frame's consequences. Statics (34/10) and Structural Analysis (34/64): the arch thrust and the line of force are the first lesson of both. Materials Science & Manufacturing (34/13): adobe, timber, stone and cast iron each had their own failure, which that course explains. Environmental Systems in Buildings (34/94) and Heat Transfer (34/16): the thick-wall delay is conduction in a wall, solved properly. In the real world: heritage conservation, a restoration architect deciding which repair is honest, and anyone designing in a climate with a vernacular they should learn from first. If you want to go deeper 📘 Standard texts: Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash, A Global History of Architecture (Wiley, 3rd edition, 2017), the survey many schools assign for its global range. Sir Banister Fletcher's A History of Architecture, now a global history (its recent editions are published by Routledge and Bloomsbury), is the classic reference, best used as a dictionary. 📘 Gentler: the library's How to Read a Building (08/10) and Art Beyond the West (08/09), for how to look before you read. 🌐 Free course: MIT OpenCourseWare 4.605, Introduction to the History and Theory of Architecture (Prof. Mark Jarzombek, Spring 2012, covering world architecture from prehistory to the sixteenth century). The takeaway Five thousand years of buildings are best read as five recurring questions: what to build with, how to cover a gap, how to keep a hundred hands consistent, how to stay comfortable without machines, and what the place must say. Every continent answered them, mostly in parallel, and the answers are still the vocabulary that architects use. The arch's thrust and the thick wall's delay are two you can calculate. Try this: pick a building near you that is more than a hundred years old and identify its material, how it spans its openings, and whether its walls are thick or thin. Then guess the climate it was built for. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Dates and facts checked on Wikipedia (as leads) for the Pantheon, Parthenon, Great Zimbabwe, Nan Madol, Lalibela, Kailasa, Foguang, Angkor Wat, Pyramid of the Sun, Machu Picchu, Djenné, Home Insurance Building (title disputed) and the classical orders (Vignola 1562). Yingzao Fashi (1103; eight grades, values debated): Wikipedia and a 2025 Journal of Architectural History study. Ise rebuilt every 20 years, 62nd in 2013: Smithsonian, World Economic Forum and Nippon.com. Fletcher's Tree: Wikipedia, Baydar (1998) and McKean (2006). The other dates are standard reference dates, not re-checked. Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash (Wiley, 3rd ed., 2017); MIT OCW 4.605 page. Computed in node: arch thrust ratios (0.25, 0.625, 1.25) and the wall model (adobe 40 cm: swing factor 0.0283, delay 13.6 h), using typical handbook material values. 📘 Ching, Jarzombek and Prakash, A Global History of Architecture 📘 Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture 🌐 MIT OpenCourseWare 4.605 Step 13. Western Music History: A Thousand Years of Choices ----------------------------------------------------------- Why: A thousand years of music, as history. From unaccompanied chant to a film score that adapts to what a player does: a thousand years of European-rooted music, told as a series of choices about what to write down, what to combine and what to break. Play a monk's chant from the 11th century, then a few seconds of a modern video-game soundtrack. They share almost nothing in sound, and yet one grows from the other by a chain of choices, each a reply to the last: write the tune down, add a second voice, make the voices follow chords, stretch the chords until they snap, then rebuild with something else. Music history is the story of those replies. The aim here is the graduate's version: not every name and date, but the handful of turning points that make the rest hang together, and honest notes on who is usually left out. Each card plays sound if you tap Play (generated in your browser, no files) and also shows the notes and numbers, so it works silently. Sound is not available in this reader, so the cards show notes and numbers only. The course in one box Who takes itEvery music major, usually in year 3, as a two- or three-term survey (the US accrediting body NASM, the UK subject benchmark for music and Berklee's core all require history and analysis), and any reader who wants the tradition's backbone. What it is forPlacing any piece of European-rooted music in its time, and seeing why it sounds the way it does. Comes afterHarmony & Voice Leading (35/65), because the story is largely about how harmony came to be and changed. Leads toMusic Traditions of the World (35/69) as a comparison, and Jazz, Popular Music & the Recording Age (35/71), which picks up where this one runs out. What this piece gives youYou will not be able to place every symphony. You will hold the arc, hear the same tune in four textures, see where the Tristan chord and the twelve-tone row came from, and get an even-handed account of the canon debate. Easier first reads: The Family Tree of Musical Genres (09/03) and How Recording Changed Music (09/10). A map of a thousand years, and why the labels lie History books divide the story into Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic and so on. These are filing cabinets. Most were named after the fact, boundaries differ by author and country, and no one in 1700 knew they lived in "the Baroque". Use them as rough shelves. The card shows the conventional label for any year and who was alive then, in a sample of 25 composers chosen to include women and Latin American and Caribbean composers. It is a sample, not a ranking. Interactive · Slide through the years Year Orange lines are women composers in the sample; blue lines are men. Dates are birth and death years; "c." dates are approximate (Josquin's birth year is uncertain). Period names and boundaries are conventional and vary by writer. Writing it down: chant, the staff and Guido For centuries the Western church sang plainchant: one line, sung unaccompanied. Tradition credits Pope Gregory I (c. 600) with it, hence "Gregorian chant", but scholars think the repertory took shape in Frankish lands around the 8th to 10th centuries from Roman and local traditions. At first singers learned it by ear. From about the 9th century, small signs called neumes hovered above the words to show the shape of the tune, a memory aid but not exact pitches. The decisive step is the staff. Guido of Arezzo (c. 991/2 to after 1033), a monk and teacher in Italy, is credited as the inventor, or by some the developer, of staff notation; his Micrologus (c. 1025–26) explains how to learn a chant without a teacher. He is also credited with the syllables ut re mi fa sol la, taken from the first notes of each phrase of the hymn Ut queant laxis, whose text is attributed to Paul the Deacon. Later singers renamed ut as do (the Italian theorist Doni, 17th century), and si was added; English speakers say ti. Whether Guido himself built the full hexachord system is doubtful, but his ladder of six notes is the root of the do-re-mi you know. hexachord = whole · whole · half · whole · wholeut–re–mi–fa–sol–la: the single semitone always sits between mi and fa Interactive · Three hexachords Natural (C)Hard (G)Soft (F) Sing it (play)Stop Medieval singers moved between three overlapping hexachords to cover their range: natural (starting on C), hard (on G, with B natural) and soft (on F, with B♭). Fixed-do solfège instead names notes (do = C) and is used across much of Latin America and Europe; movable-do keeps do on the key's tonic. The "G" at the start of the staff is a letter on purpose: the clef signs began as letters. The women of this period existed too. Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), abbess in the Rhineland, wrote a large body of chant and the sung play Ordo Virtutum, and is one of the first composers whose name and substantial music survive. Most chant is anonymous; for most of this era the idea of a named composer barely existed. Many voices at once: from organum to the Renaissance Sometime before 900 singers began adding a second line. The oldest description is a treatise called Musica enchiriadis (9th century), which describes organum: a second voice shadowing the chant, in strict parallel, a fifth or a fourth away. Notice what this is: parallel fifths, the thing the previous course teaches you to avoid, was the first harmony. By the late 12th century the Notre-Dame school in Paris (known through the names Léonin and Pérotin) wrote organum in several voices with measured rhythm. In the 14th century Guillaume de Machaut (c. 1300–1377) wrote songs and a polyphonic Mass setting. By Josquin (c. 1450–1521) and Palestrina (c. 1525–1594) the voices entered in turn, each imitating the last, with smooth lines and consonant harmony. Ottaviano Petrucci's printed collection of polyphony (Venice, 1501) made such music a thing you could buy. Interactive · One tune, four textures PlayStop An original eight-note tune in D Dorian, written for this page. Parallel organum here is strictly parallel; real practice varied. Imitation was chosen by a small search so every overlapping beat is consonant; the Alberti pattern is low, high, middle, high over a hand-chosen chord for each note. Tonality takes shape: Baroque to Classical Around 1600 a new idea took over: a bass line plus chords. In the Baroque (roughly 1600–1750) a keyboard and a cello played a basso continuo, a bass with figures telling the player which chords to add, and above it a singer or violin could do something expressive. Opera began in Italy at the turn of the 1600s; Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643) wrote Orfeo for Mantua in 1607, and public opera houses spread from Venice. Barbara Strozzi (1619–1677), a Venetian singer-composer, published eight volumes of her own music from 1644 and was in the mid-17th century one of the most prolific printed composers of secular vocal music in the city. In 1722 Rameau's Traité gave harmony a theory, and Bach completed Book I of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The Classical period (roughly 1750–1820) wanted balance and clarity. A tune over a light accompaniment was the norm, in short, regular phrases; the sonata form of 35/67 became the large plan; the piano, invented around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristofori in Italy, grew into the era's instrument. Music increasingly moved from the court and church to ticket buyers: Haydn's London concerts of the 1790s were public. Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745–1799), born in Guadeloupe and active in Paris, wrote concertos and quartets and led a leading orchestra there, a reminder that the 18th-century tradition was not only white or only born in Europe. Mozart and Beethoven, a generation apart, carried it to Vienna's peak. Stretching the system: Romantic chromaticism and the Tristan chord The Romantic era (roughly 1820–1900) wanted feeling, the individual, the nation, the piano and the song. Harmony gave way to chromaticism: more notes from outside the key, longer delays before the arrival. Women composers worked inside and against the structures. Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel (1805–1847) wrote hundreds of works, mostly songs and piano pieces; her family encouraged her music as an accomplishment but discouraged publishing, and some of her songs appeared under her brother Felix's name. Scholars now debate how far the "suppressed genius" story fits the record. Clara Schumann (1819–1896) was one of the great pianists of her century and a composer whose piano concerto was written in her teens. In Brazil Chiquinha Gonzaga (1847–1935) wrote for stage and salon. The most-analysed chord of the century opens Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (composed 1857–59, first performed in Munich in 1865): F, B, D♯, G♯. It holds its tension; in the prelude it moves to an E dominant seventh, which is itself unresolved. The same four pitch classes make an F half-diminished seventh, and analysts have offered many readings. Wagner's technique of delaying the arrival would mark the next hundred years. Interactive · The Tristan chord and where it goes The chordIts resolution Play chord, then resolveStop Close-position voicing, not Wagner's orchestration. The tritone is F to B. Two notes stay and two move down by a semitone to reach E7 (E, G♯, B, D). Breaking and rebuilding: the twentieth century By 1900 the key was straining. Debussy used whole-tone and modal scales for colour (the orchestral Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune, 1894). Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in Paris on 29 May 1913; the famous uproar is told in many versions, but the rhythmic force was new. Arnold Schoenberg left the key altogether around 1908 and by about 1921–23 had devised the twelve-tone method: put all twelve pitch classes in a fixed order, a row, and use only that row and its transformations (inversion, retrograde, retrograde-inversion). Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959) developed a comparable system independently around the same time, and credit is contested. The tradition's reach into the Americas is a story of its own. Heitor Villa-Lobos (1887–1959) of Brazil joined Bach's manner to Brazilian material in his Bachianas Brasileiras. Silvestre Revueltas (1899–1940) of Mexico wrote Sensemayá, composed in 1937 and orchestrated in 1938, on a poem by the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén. Alberto Ginastera (1916–1983) of Argentina fused Argentine rhythms with an avant-garde language. In the United States Florence Price (1887–1953), born in Little Rock, Arkansas, saw her Symphony No. 1 in E minor played by the Chicago Symphony under Frederick Stock in 1933, noted as the first by a Black woman to be played by a major US orchestra. After her death a trove of her scores was found in an abandoned house in St. Anne, Illinois, in 2009. The Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho (1952–2023) combined spectral technique and electronics, and her opera L'Amour de loin dates from 2000. Other voices of the century run through Jazz, Popular Music & the Recording Age (35/71). Interactive · A twelve-tone row and its matrix New random rowPlay the formStop PrimeInversionRetrogradeRetro-inversion Transpose up (semitones) The matrix has the prime row across the top, its inversion down the left side, and every transposition in between. Each row and each column contains all twelve notes once: the page checks this for every row you make. The highlighted line is the chosen form. Music for pictures and play: film and game scores Wagner's operas tied short musical ideas to characters, objects and feelings, which commentators called leitmotifs (guiding motifs), and when sound film arrived in the late 1920s, composers carried the method into cinema. Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) is a landmark of the full orchestral film score; Erich Korngold and later John Williams built whole careers on themes that return changed. A leitmotif is a plain idea, and the card shows what changes its meaning: the scale, the tempo, the register and the timbre. Interactive · One motif, four moods Tempo (beats per minute) Play the motifStop An original six-note motif, written as scale degrees (1 5 3 4 2 1) so that only the scale changes. The presets are illustrations of common film-music habits (bright and fast for heroic, dark and slow for threat), not rules. Games add a new problem: nobody knows how long the player will stay. In 1985 Koji Kondo's music for Super Mario Bros. showed how a short loop can carry a whole game. In 1991 LucasArts' iMUSE system, built by composers Michael Land and Peter McConnell and first used in Monkey Island 2, let the music shift smoothly as the action changed. Today's games commonly use vertical layering: instruments are added or removed in sync as the player moves from calm to danger to a fight. Interactive · Adaptive layers Start the loopStop A four-bar loop (Am–F–C–G) at 100 beats per minute, four layers in sync. Changes take effect at the next bar, the way a real engine waits for a musical boundary. Tap Stop to end it. Who is in the canon? The debate The "canon" is the repertoire a tradition treats as essential: the works that are played, taught and written about again and again. It is also the most argued-over thing in music teaching, and the arguments are worth stating in their own best terms. The case for a canon. Time is limited, and a shared core lets people talk to each other. Works that have lasted for centuries have been tested against many audiences; later composers actually learned from them, so knowing them explains the music that followed. A core is not closed: each generation can add. The critique. Who got into the canon depended on who could train, publish and be performed, and who wrote the histories. Women, composers of colour and composers outside Europe and North America were limited by access, not by talent, and later left out of the telling. Critics such as Marcia Citron (Gender and the Musical Canon, 1993) argue that "greatness" is partly a story told about works. Joseph Kerman's Contemplating Music (1985) asked musicology to look at its own habits, and Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music (2005) tried to tell the story with more of its context. Many programmes now call this "decolonising the curriculum". The middle ground. Most working teachers do both: keep the core and widen it, ask what the works did in their world, and teach the stories of Hildegard, Strozzi, Hensel, Price, Saariaho and others as part of the main line, not a sidebar. Where they disagree is how much to widen, and whether "quality" can be measured apart from the structures that shaped it. The field has not settled that, and this piece does not pretend to. What a graduate just sees Period names are filing cabinets: later labels on a continuous story. Writing music down on a staff is what made a tradition of composers, not just performers, possible. The first harmony was parallel fifths; the rules a student learns are what came after. Around 1600 the bass-plus-chords idea took over, and by 1722 it had a theory. The Classical period balances phrases; the Romantic period delays arrival; the Tristan chord is the poster child. The twelve-tone row is a way to treat all twelve notes as equals, and its matrix proves the rows work. Film and game scores carry the leitmotif forward; games add the question of music that responds. The canon is a contested list, and women and Latin American composers have always been part of the story. Where it shows up next Music Traditions of the World (35/69) sets this tradition beside raga, maqam, gamelan and West African ensembles, each in its own terms. Jazz, Popular Music & the Recording Age (35/71) takes the harmony and the forms into the 20th-century studio. Composition, Arranging & Orchestration (35/72) uses these textures as a palette. In the world: a conductor choosing a programme, a film composer building a theme, a teacher deciding what to include, a game audio designer using layers. If you want to go deeper 📘 Textbook. J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music (W. W. Norton). The most widely assigned survey, with an anthology and recordings. 📘 Reference. Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford University Press, 2005). Opinionated and deeply contextual. 📘 Gentler. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (2007). A story-driven tour of the century. 🌐 Free course. Open Yale Courses, MUSI 112 Listening to Music (Craig Wright), a free lecture series. 🌐 IMSLP, the free library of public-domain scores: browse Bach, Fanny Hensel and Clara Schumann side by side. The takeaway European-rooted music is a thousand years of replies: write it down, add voices, build on a bass, stretch the harmony, break the key, rebuild with new tools. The labels are shelves, the story always included women and people outside Europe, and who gets to stand in the canon is a live argument, not a settled list. Try this: this week, listen to one short piece from any era you do not know, and guess, before looking it up, whether it is one line, two lines, or a tune over chords. Then look at the date. You are placing it on the map. Sources & Further Reading Sources. Guido of Arezzo, solmization and the Micrologus date, Barbara Strozzi, Fanny Hensel, Florence Price, Kaija Saariaho, Sensemayá, iMUSE and the Tristan chord were checked against encyclopaedia summaries. Other dates (Hildegard 1098–1179, Machaut, Josquin, Palestrina, Monteverdi's Orfeo 1607, Rameau 1722, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner's Tristan 1865, Debussy 1894, The Rite of Spring 1913, Villa-Lobos, Ginastera, King Kong 1933, Petrucci 1501, Saint-Georges, Chiquinha Gonzaga) are standard references and were not individually re-fetched. Hauer's independent system is a commonly stated claim. The performance history of Musica enchiriadis is simplified. Citron (1993), Kerman (1985) and Taruskin (2005) are cited as the debate's landmarks. Not every composer of note could be named: the sample is deliberately broad, not exhaustive. All interactive numbers were computed in node. 🌐 Open Yale Courses MUSI 112 🌐 IMSLP 📘 Burkholder, Grout and Palisca, A History of Western Music 📘 Ross, The Rest Is Noise