CHAPTER 1 Ozymandias (Rameses II) 1279–C.1213 BC
CHAPTER 2 Alexander the Great 356–323 BC
CHAPTER 3 The Sack of Rome 410 AD
CHAPTER 4 The Coronation of Charlemagne 800 AD
CHAPTER 5 Chinggis Khan Becomes Sole Ruler of the Mongol People 1206
CHAPTER 6 The Fall of Constantinople 1453
CHAPTER 7 The Conquest of Mexico 1521
CHAPTER 8 The Exile of Napoleon Bonaparte to St Helena 1815
CHAPTER 9 The Indian Mutiny 1857
CHAPTER 1 Archimedes of Syracuse 287–212 BC
CHAPTER 2 The Chinese Invention of Printing, seventh century AD
CHAPTER 3 Leonardo da Vinci 1452–1519
CHAPTER 4 Vasco da Gama Discovers a Sea Route to India 1498
CHAPTER 5 Sir Isaac Newton Publishes the Principia 1687
CHAPTER 6 Australia’s First Colony 1788
CHAPTER 7 John Logie Baird Demonstrates the First Moving Television Images 1926
CHAPTER 8 The Discovery of the Structure of DNA Helix 1953
CHAPTER 9 Apollo 11 Lands on the Moon 1969
CHAPTER 10 The Creation of the Worldwide Web 1990
The world in which we live is growing smaller, and shrinking. There is hardly a corner of it that has not at some time or another appeared on television in our homes. The activities of African, Asian and Middle Eastern politicians are often as familiar to us as those in our own country. The world is a bubble into which, thanks to the internet and other forms of mass communication, we peer at will. But where do we fit into the seething mass we see? What do we have in common with other people, places, cultures and ideas? What do they share with us?
One book cannot possibly answer all those questions but, with the help of history, it can provide a guide. History is one of the most important things that we possess: knowing about the past helps us manage the present and plan the future. And today we need a knowledge of history more than we have ever done before. Our world may be smaller but it is also more complex. We have become participants in even its most extreme activities. We watch the progress of wars on CNN or the BBC and, if we want, travel to its most dangerous places. I read a newspaper report recently about an elderly British pensioner who spends his time visiting Afghanistan, Iraq and North Pakistan. ‘You don’t think about roadside bombs, or being kidnapped,’ he said. ‘You know it happens, but you’re just too busy taking it all in.’ Exactly what he was taking in, the newspaper did not go on to say–presumably it was the experience of being there, of doing something unusual and rather dangerous. While we might admire the pluck and energy of someone taking his holidays in war zones, the fact that it happens at all is rather mystifying and confusing. Man was once an explorer: now he is just a tourist.
These extraordinary developments have helped create a world that is easy to see but difficult to understand. Discussions about world problems and their possible solutions are commonplace. People of influence think globally, in politics and economics, the environment and entertainment. At the same time we sometimes feel that our national identity is slipping away from us to be replaced by forces that are unfamiliar and uncertain. We would probably quite like to become citizens of the world, if only we knew what that meant. How should we balance national interests against global requirements? Where does our country end and the world begin?
The upheavals that surround us become inexplicable unless we can put them into some sort of context. That is one of the uses of history: to create a shape that helps make sense of the confusion in which we live. In 1919, H. G. Wells published The Outline of History in which he used his skill as a novelist to trace the history of mankind from prehistoric times to the present day. It was hugely popular. ‘The need for a common knowledge of the general facts of human history throughout the world,’ he wrote in the Introduction to a later edition, ‘has become very evident during the tragic happenings of the last few years.’ He might well have written exactly the same sentence were he to publish his book today. The world moves on and its glories and disasters move with it. We will always need help in understanding its history.
But, people will say, the history of the world is so big and so long that to take fifty things from it is impossible. It cannot be reduced to such a formula without becoming ridiculously oversimplified. That is always a danger. In history it is always easier to complicate than simplify. The fifty things described in this book are not the only fifty things you need to know about world history, to make that claim would be absurd, but they are fifty very important things each of which provides a vantage point from which to survey large historical trends. Some of them are huge, others comparatively small. Each is unique and made an important contribution to the way in which world civilisations changed and grew. Taken together they provide a structure, a framework, on which to hang the great events of history.
There is another obvious and fundamental question relating to the selection of events from world history. Where do you begin? And once you have decided on your starting place, where do you end? I am writing this in a house on the