by Andrew Marr
36. The Enlightenment was dominated by the French and British: Voltaire and his mistress are bathed in the light of Isaac Newton’s Reason.
37. Jethro Tull’s seed drill was one of the gadgets that turned the British into the world’s most successful farmers, and so prepared the soil for the industrial revolution.
38. But what did they drink? Rebel Bostonians, emptying taxed tea into the sea, drank herbal teas and smuggled tea during their protest against the British empire.
39. The Australian Aborigine Bennelong, kidnapped by the British to be a translator: he became a kind of time traveller, moving between the Stone Age and the industrial age.
40. Toussaint L’Ouverture: the ex-slave idealist whose dream republic was crushed by Napoleon.
41. Promoted, not invented by Dr Guillotin, this was the ultimate democratic killing-machine, treating kings, aristocrats and commoners alike.
42. Napoleon’s 1804 coronation as emperor marked the end of the French revolutionary era: Beethoven was so disgusted that he scratched the Corsican’s name off the dedication page of his third symphony.
43. The young Tolstoy would turn from being a wastrel, gambling landowner into a passionate friend to Russia’s serfs . . . while writing some books on the side.
44. A Russian Revolution in 1825; but the Decembrists, who wanted to make Russia more European, failed and were executed or sent to Siberia.
45. The bombardment of Fort Henry, Tennessee: the American Civil War, creating the colossus of the modern US, was the most important conflict of the nineteenth century.
46. John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was soon caught: but in the South this failed actor became a hero for killing ‘the tyrant’.
47. The Chinese view: during the Second Opium War of 1856–8, the Chinese had no chance against British gunboats and infantry.
48. King Leopold II had nothing but contempt for the Belgians – ‘small people, small country’ – and built a personal empire in Africa, with tragic results.
49. No nation drove the second industrial revolution with quite the verve of the Germans: Karl Benz demonstrates his 1886 motorized tricycle.
50. The founder of Soviet power; but Lenin was brought to power, quite literally, by the Germans who sent him by sealed train to Russia.
51. Hitler told the world just what he intended to do: the world refused to believe him.
52. Mao, five years before he became the most lethal leader China – and the world – has ever seen.
53. Arm in arm: but Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s rejection of a single successor state to the British Raj meant his Pakistan and Gandhi’s India would become sworn enemies.
54. Robert Oppenheimer, the cultured liberal scientist who ended up calculating the exact height at which his bomb would burn to death the maximum number of civilian men, women and children.
55. Margaret Sanger: the working-class radical who did more for twentieth-century women than any politician, male or female.
56. Castro’s successful crushing of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was part of the prelude to the missile crisis which brought the world to the edge of annihilation.
57. Protestors in Boston, 1970: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’. American and European students who turned against their parents’ generation found new heroes in the Marxist revolutionaries of the East.
58. The blithe Western assumption that history would lead inevitably to liberalism was given a rough jolt when Iran turned to a militant Islamic theocracy in 1979.
59. Prague, 1989: the collapse of the Soviet empire was remarkably fast and mostly remarkably peaceful too.
60. A statue of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein being torn down after the US-led invasion: but what followed this liberation was also horrific.
61. In 1997 Garry Kasparov, perhaps the world’s greatest ever chess-player, played an IBM supercomputer in a match billed as ‘the brain’s last stand’.
1. Sumerian fertility goddess: until the evolution of single-God monotheism among the Hebrews, families of gods, usually including a female fertility goddess, were near-universal.
2. Inscription from Ugarit, in today’s Syria. Modern alphabetic writing – what you are reading now – developed among the trading and sea-going people of Canaan, called Phoenicians by the Greeks.
3. Shang axe-head: the Shang were China’s first historically certain dynasty, a chariot-riding and warrior culture accused by later Chinese of incest, cannibalism and a liking for pornographic songs.
4. In the hero Gilgamesh, we have the first named character in world literature.
5. Hugging couple found at Catalhoyuk, in Turkey: this was among the first towns in the world, where people lived in a state of relative equality for thousands of years.
6. The Minoan civilization of Crete practiced bull-jumping and made beautiful art but was much bloodier and more violent than its first archaeologists thought.
7. Around 3000 BC, Orkney was one of the most advanced societies in Britain: the uncovered stone homes at Skara Brae are clean, cosy and seem ready to move back into today.
8. A gold drinking cup from Troy: this was not really owned by Homer’s King Priam but Troy was a real city, and the Trojan war was almost certainly an historical event.
9. A head-dress from Ur, 2600 BC: the Mesopotamian cultures produced famous cities, empires and religions; but too much of their art has disappeared.
10. Dice from Mohenjo-Daro in today’s Pakistan: an ancient river civilization on the Indus which may be the origin of much of today’s Indian culture.
11. Painting from the workers’ village near Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. Craftsmen as well as Pharaohs had their own decorated tombs; and we know their gossip too.
12. Siddhartha, who renamed himself the Buddha, was among the most radical thinkers in history; the product of India going through a time of tumultuous change.
13. Erlitou wine cup: the earliest Chinese objects already look like nothing that could have been made in the West.
14. Babylon, with its glorious enameled buildings and hanging gardens, must have awed as well as terrified the Hebrews taken there in captivity.
15. A gold necklace belonging to King Croesus from Lydia: his royal mint produced reliable, pure coinage that spread across Asia, which is why we say ‘rich as Croesus’ today.
16. The Cyrus cylinder: not quite the first international declaration of human rights, but Cyrus the Great was an empire builder of a new kind.
17. Socrates died by drinking poison – a martyr to free speech but also a genuine threat to Athenian democracy. We still have not untangled the challenge he laid down to open societies.
18. Confucius, or Kongzi, was the most influential conservative thinker in world history: his influence on Chinese political culture is as great as that of Ancient Greece on the West’s.
19. The Assyrian capital Persepolis was decorated with vast stone murals, some recording ordinary life, others disgustingly sadistic.
20. A gold coin of Alexander III, ‘Alexander the Great’, who turned himself into a bloody cultural whisk, whirling together Greeks and Asians.
21. By taking the Christian message to non-Jews, including in Rome itself, Paul was the real founder of Christianity as a global religion.
22. The Nazca people of southern Peru were brilliant artists and excellent engineers. But they made one mistake, which proved fatal.
23. The Byzantine emperor Justinian: he could fight the barbarians but he could not fight famine and plague, nor rebuild the glory that was Rome.
24. An Emir of Cordoba consults with his advisers: Muslim al-Andalus was a centre of learning and urban sophistication, which put Christendom to shame.
25. The Mongol leader Genghis Khan has a good claim to be the single most influential figure in world history; but history would have been happier had he never been born.
26. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 shows Mansa Musa, the king of Mali, as a European-style monarch on his throne: in fact he was rather g
rander than that.
27. Ivan the Terrible – whose name also translates as Ivan the Great – was the ruler who spread Russia deep into Siberia but also gave her the tradition of ruthless, centralist autocracy she still suffers from today.
28. Hideyoshi was the great founder of Tokugawa Japan, who ruled at the same time as England’s Queen Elizabeth I and is in many ways comparable.
29. The Inca emperor Atahualpa, murdered by the Spanish: but his gold then helped ruin Spain’s economy.
30. The Dutch tulip mania was a financial bubble which made all Europe laugh. The Dutch learned and prospered again, however – unlike some of their critics.
31. The arrival of tobacco from the New World and the smoking craze of the 1600s horrified rulers from London to Japan.
32. ‘Yet it moves.’ Rough and garrulous Galileo of Pisa, born at the right time to understand the solar system; born in the wrong place to explain how it works.
33. Timur hands his crown to Babur, 1630: Babur was the real founder of the Mughal empire, which produced radical thinking and glorious buildings, but was eventually brought down by the cost of war driven by religious intolerance.
34. Louis XIV, the ‘Sun King’, was the model of the absolutist ruler – a dull theory decorated with fine palaces and flamboyant individuals.
35. William and Mary, the Dutch king and his wife who turned themselves into British monarchs after invading in 1688 – but only after accepting the supremacy of Parliament.
36. The Enlightenment was dominated by the French and British: Voltaire and his mistress are bathed in the light of Isaac Newton’s Reason.
37. Jethro Tull’s seed drill was one of the gadgets that turned the British into the world’s most successful farmers, and so prepared the soil for the industrial revolution.
38. But what did they drink? Rebel Bostonians, emptying taxed tea into the sea, drank herbal teas and smuggled tea during their protest against the British empire.
39. The Australian Aborigine Bennelong, kidnapped by the British to be a translator: he became a kind of time traveller, moving between the Stone Age and the industrial age.
40. Toussaint L’Ouverture: the ex-slave idealist whose dream republic was crushed by Napoleon.
41. Promoted, not invented by Dr Guillotin, this was the ultimate democratic killing-machine, treating kings, aristocrats and commoners alike.
42. Napoleon’s 1804 coronation as emperor marked the end of the French revolutionary era: Beethoven was so disgusted that he scratched the Corsican’s name off the dedication page of his third symphony.
43. The young Tolstoy would turn from being a wastrel, gambling landowner into a passionate friend to Russia’s serfs . . . while writing some books on the side.
44. A Russian Revolution in 1825; but the Decembrists, who wanted to make Russia more European, failed and were executed or sent to Siberia.
45. The bombardment of Fort Henry, Tennessee: the American Civil War, creating the colossus of the modern US, was the most important conflict of the nineteenth century.
46. John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was soon caught: but in the South this failed actor became a hero for killing ‘the tyrant’.
47. The Chinese view: during the Second Opium War of 1856–8, the Chinese had no chance against British gunboats and infantry.
48. King Leopold II had nothing but contempt for the Belgians – ‘small people, small country’ – and built a personal empire in Africa, with tragic results.
49. No nation drove the second industrial revolution with quite the verve of the Germans: Karl Benz demonstrates his 1886 motorized tricycle.
50. The founder of Soviet power; but Lenin was brought to power, quite literally, by the Germans who sent him by sealed train to Russia.
51. Hitler told the world just what he intended to do: the world refused to believe him.
52. Mao, five years before he became the most lethal leader China – and the world – has ever seen.
53. Arm in arm: but Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s rejection of a single successor state to the British Raj meant his Pakistan and Gandhi’s India would become sworn enemies.
54. Robert Oppenheimer, the cultured liberal scientist who ended up calculating the exact height at which his bomb would burn to death the maximum number of civilian men, women and children.
55. Margaret Sanger: the working-class radical who did more for twentieth-century women than any politician, male or female.
56. Castro’s successful crushing of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was part of the prelude to the missile crisis which brought the world to the edge of annihilation.
57. Protestors in Boston, 1970: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’. American and European students who turned against their parents’ generation found new heroes in the Marxist revolutionaries of the East.
58. The blithe Western assumption that history would lead inevitably to liberalism was given a rough jolt when Iran turned to a militant Islamic theocracy in 1979.
59. Prague, 1989: the collapse of the Soviet empire was remarkably fast and mostly remarkably peaceful too.
60. A statue of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein being torn down after the US-led invasion: but what followed this liberation was also horrific.
61. In 1997 Garry Kasparov, perhaps the world’s greatest ever chess-player, played an IBM supercomputer in a match billed as ‘the brain’s last stand’.
Also by Andrew Marr
MY TRADE
A HISTORY OF MODERN BRITAIN
THE MAKING OF MODERN BRITAIN
THE DIAMOND QUEEN
First published 2012 by Macmillan
This electronic edition published 2012 by Macmillan
an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR
Basingstoke and Oxford
Associated companies throughout the world
www.panmacmillan.com
ISBN 978-0-2307-6753-9 EPUB
Copyright © Andrew Marr 2012
The right of Andrew Marr to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
The picture acknowledgements on this page constitute an extension of this copyright page.
You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Part One
OUT OF THE HEAT, TOWARDS THE ICE
Part Two
THE CASE FOR WAR
Part Three
THE SWORD AND THE WORD
Part Four
BEYOND THE MUDDY MELTING POT
Part Five
THE WORLD BLOWS OPEN
Part Six
DREAMS OF FREEDOM