A History of the World

From Prehistory to the 21st Century

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Arcturus
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789504477
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Throughout the ages, human beings have shown an astonishing capacity to adapt to their environments. Creating great cities, establishing remarkable civilizations, and developing new modes of communication, we have accomplished remarkable feats. At the same time, warfare, discrimination, and poverty reveal the darker side of human nature. From history's most remarkable men and women to bloody wars and genocides, this illustrated volume brings to life an incredible range of human experience over the millennia. Taking inspiration from the latest developments in historiography, Professor Jeremy Black sheds new light on our understanding of the past with a special emphasis on the environment, cities, science, politics, and the mechanics of everyday life.Covering the birth of agriculture in the Nile Valley, the development of empires in Mesopotamia, the fall of Rome, the advance of science in the Islamic world, the rise of international trade along the Silk Roads, and the conflagration of the world wars, among many other topics, A History of the World is an essential source of reference that is sure to both entertain and inform. A History of the World covers the key subjects of world history in eight comprehensive chapters:
• Prehistoric Humans
• The Ancient World
• Classical Civilization
• The Middle Ages
• Renaissance and Enlightenment
• Revolutions and Nationalism
• The World at War
• The Modern World

The Modern World
1945–Present

Alongside international and ideological division, warfare, and the threat of a nuclear conflict leading to the destruction of much of the species, a high rate of change took place, affecting humanity as a whole. Population growth, technological development and urbanization were key elements in the drive towards change.

The Cold War

Wartime alliances frequently do not survive peace. The ideological division between the Western powers and Soviet Union was too much to overcome. Indeed, by 1944 differences about the fate of Eastern Europe were readily apparent, especially over Poland, which Stalin was determined to dominate.

The Cold War which emerged from these differences was not a formal or frontal conflict, but a period of hostility lasting until 1989 that involved a protracted arms race, as well as numerous proxy conflicts in which the major powers intervened in other struggles. The latter sustained attitudes of animosity, exacerbated fears and contributed to a high level of military preparedness. A potent feeling of uncertainty on both sides, of the fragility of military strength, international links, political orders and ideological convictions, encouraged a strong sense of threat, and fuelled an incessant and expensive arms race that was to be central to the Cold War. Indeed, the arms race was the Cold War. Both sides claimed to be strong, but declared that they required an extra edge to be secure. Only the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) threatened by massive nuclear stockpiles eventually brought a measure of stability.

Two military alliances faced off in Europe – NATO in the West and the Warsaw Pact in the East

The Soviet Union initially lacked the atom bomb, but its army was well placed to overrun Western Europe and could only have been stopped by the West’s desperate use of nuclear weapons. The American offer of Marshall Aid, a programme of economic assistance to help recovery after World War II, was accepted by many Western European nations, but rejected by the Soviet Union as a form of economic imperialism, and this created a new boundary line between the areas in Western Europe that received such aid and those in Eastern Europe that did not. The Soviet abandonment of co-operation over occupied Germany and the imposition of one-party Communist governments in Eastern Europe, notably in Czechoslovakia, led to pressure for a Western response. Soviet actions appeared to vindicate Churchill’s 1946 claim that an ‘Iron Curtain’ was descending from the Baltic to the Adriatic. In 1949, the foundation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) created a security framework for Western Europe. The USA abandoned its tradition of isolationism, played a crucial role in the formation of the new alliance and was anchored to the defence of Western Europe. In turn, in 1955, the Soviet Union organized the Warsaw Pact, its own military alliance, in Eastern Europe.

In 1968 Soviet forces invaded Czechoslovakia when the ‘Prague Spring’ threatened liberalization

The European Union

The establishment in 1958 of the European Economic Community was part of a process in which the political structures of Western Europe were transformed after World War II. A reaction against nationalism was important to European integration. West German willingness to accept the concessions France required helped lead the latter to back the scheme.

With time, the EEC expanded geographically and became more ambitious, with the Treaty of European Union signed at Maastricht in 1992 creating the European Union, the new term an indication of the new prospectus. Moreover, the Euro, a common currency for most of the EU, was launched as a trading currency in 1999. In addition, more states joined the EU, which proved a way to consolidate post-Communist Eastern Europe in the new order.

The Korean and Vietnam Wars

The total Communist victory over the Nationalists in the Chinese Civil War (1946–49) heightened American concern to stop further Communist advances. In 1950, an American-led alliance intervened in 1950 under the auspices of the United Nations to prevent Communist North Korea from conquering South Korea, resulting in the Korean War (1950–53). Having driven back the North Koreans, the Allies invaded the North, only to be pushed back when the Chinese intervened. The conflict settled down into an impasse. An armistice was finally negotiated only after the Americans threatened the use of nuclear weaponry.

In turn, the Americans intervened in the early 1960s in South Vietnam to thwart a Communist rebellion by the Viet Cong, who were supported by Communist North Vietnam. Able to stop, but not to defeat, their opponents, and facing mounting domestic criticism, the Americans withdrew in 1973. South Vietnam fell to Communist attack in 1975. The conflict had also destabilized neighbouring Cambodia and Laos, where American-led and Communist forces competed for control. All these conflict stoked Cold War tensions, with both the Soviet Union and China backing North Vietnam, while Australia, New Zealand and South Korea sent troops to help the Americans.

The Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962

The nuclear competition between the superpowers became more urgent in the 1950s, first with the development and deployment of hydrogen bombs, far more dangerous than their nuclear predecessors, and then with the advent of intercontinental rocketry. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik I, the first satellite, into orbit, making the USA vulnerable to missile attack.

A reconnaissance photo shows the locations of the Soviet missiles at Mariel Naval Port in Cuba, 8 November 1962

In the early 1960s, mutual anxieties about achieving an edge in the growing nuclear arms race encouraged John F. Kennedy (US President 1961–63) to aim for a strategic superiority over the Soviet Union, and Nikita Khrushchev (First Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party, 1953–64) to decide in 1962 to deploy missiles in Cuba, where the anti-American Fidel Castro had recently seized power and survived an American-backed attempt in 1961 to overthrow him, in the controversial Bay of Pigs episode. Soviet missiles so close to its shores would pose a serious threat to the United States.

In response to this deployment, the Americans considered an attack on Cuba, and imposed an air and naval quarantine to prevent the shipping of further Soviet supplies. Kennedy also threatened a full retaliatory nuclear strike. In complicated bargaining, the Soviets agreed to remove the missiles, but the gap between decision, use and strike by nuclear weaponry had been shown to be perilously small. For the first time, the world had for a while teetered on the edge of a nuclear holocaust.

Reagan

After a measure of détente or peaceful co-existence in the mid-1970s, the Cold War heated-up in the late 1970s with conflicts between American and Soviet protégés in Angola and Somalia/Ethiopia, and then in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Under Ronald Reagan (US President 1981–89), there was a marked intensification of the American commitment to fighting the Cold War. The United States armed anti-Communist forces in Afghanistan, Central America, and sub-Saharan Africa, and there was a major build-up in the American military. The resilience of the American economy, combined with the ability of the Reagan government in the 1980s to use the state’s capacity to raise money in the bond market, helped the US government mobilize American resources for a military build-up that the Soviets, lacking the money against which to raise credit, could not match. The Americans were greatly helped by a strategic alignment with China against the Soviet Union. As a result, the costs to them of waging the Cold War fell. The Soviet Union had, too, to be mindful of the opposition of China which, indeed, fought Vietnam, a Soviet protégé. While the Soviet Union’s economy stagnated, the USA experienced significant economic growth and no recurrence of the ‘stagflation’ of the 1970s, a combination of stagnation and inflation which had led to a sense of uncertainty and malaise. The American economy, more focused on the skills and investment required for increasingly complex manufacturing processes than on the raw materials needed for basic processes, was better adapted for growth. Capital invested per worker remained high, and the openness of the American internal economy and market, accentuated by deregulation, encouraged the speedy diffusion of most efficient economic practices and of capital flow to whatever seemed profitable.

Ronald Reagan intensified American competition with the Soviet Union

The Fall of Soviet Communism

The collapse of the Soviet Union and of its area of control in Eastern Europe was unexpected. Mikhail Gorbachev, who became Soviet leader in 1985, sought to modernize Communism by introducing reforms, rather than to overthrow it. The centralized command economics of the Soviet Union were experiencing serious problems by the mid-1980s, and earlier attempts to reform them proved flawed. Economic difficulties limited the funds available for social investment and consumer spending, and this increasingly compromised popular support for the non-democratic system.

Gorbachev’s attempts to push through modernization left the pro-Soviet Eastern European Communist governments weak in the face of growing popular demands for reform. This led to the successive collapse of Communist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989, and to the emergence of multi-party politics and free elections. In 1990, East and West Germany were reunited. In 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved, as its former constituent republics, such as Ukraine, gained independence. From the 2000s, however, Russia under Vladimir Putin sought to claw back its loss of power, intervening militarily in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine from 2014.

Decolonization

The Partition of India

Change in Europe was matched by changes in Europe’s overseas empires. In 1947, exhausted after World War II, and no longer so committed to imperialism, the British renounced control over India. In discussion with the Jawaharlal Nehru, the main Hindu political figure, and the Muslim League’s leader, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the British Viceroy Lord Mountbatten devised the partition of India into two units – a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim Pakistan. This hasty and ill-planned division led to an upsurge in communal violence between Hindus and Muslims, with approximately one and a half million killed and another 14 million fleeing as refugees. Pakistan’s borders essentially fell where Islam was dominant, although India imposed control over part of Muslim Kashmir.

More populous and wealthier, India acted as a regional power, fighting Pakistan in 1965, and in 1971 defeating it while helping East Pakistan become the new state of Bangladesh. India also occupied the Portuguese possessions in India in 1961, sent troops into Sri Lanka to help against insurgents, and confronted China in the Himalayas. Albeit with a period of ‘Emergency’ authoritarianism in the 1970s, India remained under civilian rule, but in Pakistan the military alternated in power with civilian governments.

The Middle East

Britain withdrew, too, from its UN-mandated control over Palestine in 1948, weary of acting as arbiter between Muslims and the growing Jewish population. The Middle East was of particular economic significance due to its role in oil production, and the foundation in 1948 of the state of Israel, largely by Jewish refugees from Europe, led to an attempt by Israel’s Muslim Arab neighbours to destroy the new country. In the resulting war from 1948 to 1949, Israel won and a flood of Arab refugees fled from the new state. Victory over Egypt in 1956 was followed in 1967 by the Six-Day War, in which Israel conquered territory from Egypt, Jordan and Syria. Part of this was eventually returned, but Israel was left in control of the West Bank of the River Jordan and, with that, of a large Palestinian population that challenged its stability.

Leaving Africa

Decolonization in Afric...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• The Ancient World: 12,500 BCE–1000 BCE
• Prehistoric Humans: 10 Million Years Ago–10,000 BCE
• Classical Civilizations: 1000 BCE–500 CE
• The Middle Ages: 500–1500
• Renaissance and Enlightenment: 1500–1750
• Revolution and Nationalism: 1750–1914
• The World At War: 1914–1945
• The Modern World: 1945–Present
• Conclusions
• List of Illustrations
• Copyright