History of the world

Contents 1 Prehistory 2 Antiquity 2.1 Cradles of civilization 2.1.1 Timeline 2.2 Axial Age 2.3 Regional empires 2.4 Declines and falls 3 Middle Ages 4 European Renaissance 5 Modern history 5.1 Early modern period 5.1.1 Rise of Europe 5.2 Modern period 5.2.1 Contemporary history 5.2.1.1 1900 to 1945 5.2.1.2 1945 to 2000 5.2.1.3 21st century 6 See also 6.1 History topics 6.2 History by period 6.3 History by region 7 Notes 8 References 9 Further reading 10 External links

The history of the world or human history is the history of humanity from the earliest times to the present, in all places on Earth, beginning with the Paleolithic Era. It excludes non-human natural history and geological history, except insofar as the natural world substantially affects human lives. World history encompasses the study of written records, from ancient times forward, plus additional knowledge gained from other sources, such as archaeology. Ancient recorded history^[1] begins with the invention, independently at several sites on Earth, of writing, which created the infrastructure for lasting, accurately transmitted memories and thus for the diffusion and growth of knowledge.^[2][3] However, the roots of civilization reach back to the period before writing — humanity's prehistory.

Human prehistory begins in the Paleolithic Era, or "Early Stone Age". Later, during the Neolithic Era (New Stone Age), came the Agricultural Revolution (between 8000 and 5000 BCE) in the Fertile Crescent, where humans first began the systematic husbandry of plants and animals.^[4][5][6] Agriculture spread to neighboring regions and developed independently elsewhere, until most humans lived as farmers in permanent settlements.^[7] The relative security and increased productivity provided by farming allowed these communities to expand. They grew into increasingly larger units in parallel with the evolution of ever more efficient means of transport.

Surplus food enabled the division of labor, the rise of a leisured upper class, and the development of cities and with them civilization. The growing complexity of human societies necessitated systems of accounting, which led to writing.^[8]

Civilizations developed on the banks of life-sustaining bodies of fresh water (lakes and rivers). By 3000 BCE, they had arisen in the Middle East's Mesopotamia (the "land between the Rivers" Euphrates and Tigris),^[9] on the banks of Egypt's River Nile,^[10][11][12] and in the Indus River valley.^[13][14][15] Similar civilizations probably developed along major rivers in China, but the archaeological evidence for extensive urban construction is less conclusive.

The history of the Old World (Europe in particular. but also the Near East and North Africa) is commonly divided into Antiquity, up to 476 CE; the Middle Ages,^[16][17] from the 5th through the 15th centuries, including the Islamic Golden Age (c.750 CE – c.1258 CE) and the early European Renaissance; the Early Modern period,^[18] from the 15th century to the late 18th, including the Age of Enlightenment; and the Late Modern period, from the Industrial Revolution to the present, including Contemporary History.

In Europe (and in Western histories), the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476 CE) is commonly taken as signaling the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages, during which (around the year 1300) the European Renaissance^[19][20] emerges. In the mid-15th century, Johannes Gutenberg's invention of modern printing,^[21] employing movable type, revolutionized communication, helping end the Middle Ages and usher in modern times and the Scientific Revolution.^[22] By the 18th century, the accumulation of knowledge and technology, especially in Europe, had reached a critical mass that brought about the Industrial Revolution.^[23]

In other parts of the world, such as the ancient Near East,^[24][25][26] ancient China,^[27] and ancient India, historical timelines unfolded differently. By the 18th century, however, due to extensive world trade and colonization, the histories of most world civilizations became tightly intertwined. In the last quarter-millennium, the growth of knowledge, technology, commerce, and of the potential destructiveness of war has accelerated, creating the opportunities and perils that currently confront the human communities that inhabit the planet.^[28][29]

Prehistory

Other hominids, such as Homo erectus, had been using simple tools for many millennia, but as time progressed, tools became far more refined and complex. At some point, humans began using fire for heat and for cooking. They also developed language in the Palaeolithic period and a conceptual repertoire that included systematic burial of the dead and adornment of the living. During this period, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, and were generally nomadic.

Modern humans spread rapidly from Africa into the frost-free zones of Europe and Asia. The rapid expansion of humankind to North America and Oceania took place at the climax of the most recent Ice Age, when temperate regions of today were extremely inhospitable. Yet, humans had colonised nearly all the ice-free parts of the globe by the end of the Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago.

The Agricultural Revolution, beginning about 8,000 BCE, saw the development of agriculture. Farming permitted far denser populations, which in time organised into states. Agriculture also created food surpluses that could support people not directly engaged in food production. The development of agriculture permitted the creation of the first cities. These were centres of trade, manufacturing and political power with nearly no agricultural production of their own. Cities established a symbiosis with their surrounding countrysides, absorbing agricultural products and providing, in return, manufactured goods and varying degrees of military control and protection.^[30][31][32]

The development of cities was synonymous with the rise of civilization.^[33] Early civilizations arose first in lower Mesopotamia (3500 BCE),^[34][35] followed by Egyptian civilization along the Nile (3300 BCE)^[12] and Harappan civilization in the Indus Valley (3300 BCE).^[36][37] Elaborate cities grew up, with high levels of social and economic complexity. Each of these civilizations was so different from the others that they almost certainly originated independently. Writing and extensive trade developed to meet the needs of cities.

This period also saw the apparent origins of complex religion.^[38][39][40] Religious belief in this period commonly consisted in the worship of a Mother Goddess, a Sky Father, and of the Sun and Moon as deities.^[41] (See also: Sun worship.) Shrines developed, which evolved into temple establishments, complete with a complex hierarchy of priests and priestesses and other functionaries. Typical of the Neolithic was a tendency to worship anthropomorphic deities. Some of the earliest surviving written religious scriptures are the Pyramid Texts, produced by the Egyptians, the oldest of which date to between 2400 and 2300 BCE.^[42] Some archaeologists suggest, based on ongoing excavations of a temple complex at Göbekli Tepe ("Potbelly Hill") in southern Turkey, dating from c. 11,500 years ago, that religion predated the Agricultural Revolution rather than following in its wake, as had generally been assumed.^[43]

Antiquity

Cradles of civilization

The Bronze Age is part of the three-age system (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) that for some parts of the world describes effectively the early history of civilization. During this era the most fertile areas of the world saw city states and the first civilizations develop. These were concentrated in fertile river valleys: The Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in Pakistan, and the Yangtze and Yellow River in China.

Mesopotamia saw the rise of the city-states in the 4th millennium BCE. It was in these cities that the earliest known form of writing, cuneiform script, appeared c. 3000 BCE. Cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. The pictorial representations eventually became simplified and more abstract. Cuneiform texts were written on clay tablets, on which symbols were drawn with a blunt reed used as a stylus. Writing made the administration of a large state far easier.

Transport was facilitated by waterways—by rivers and seas. The Mediterranean Sea, at the juncture of three continents, fostered the projection of military power and the exchange of goods, ideas and inventions. This era also saw new land technologies, such as horse-based cavalry and chariots, that allowed armies to move faster.

These developments led to the rise of empires. The first empire, controlling a large territory and many cities, developed in Egypt with the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt c. 3100 BCE. Over the next millennia, other river valleys would see monarchical empires rise to power. In the 24th century BCE, the Akkadian Empire arose in Mesopotamia;^[44] and c. 2200 BCE the Xia Dynasty arose in China.

Over the following millennia, civilizations would develop across the world. Trade would increasingly become a source of power as states with access to important resources or controlling important trade routes would rise to dominance. In c. 2500 BCE the Kingdom of Kerma developed in Sudan, south of Egypt. In modern Turkey the Hittites controlled a large empire and by 1600 BCE, Mycenaean Greece began to develop.^[45][46] In India this era was the Vedic period, which laid the foundations of Hinduism and other cultural aspects of early Indian society, and ended in the 6th century BCE. From around 550 BCE, many independent kingdoms and republics known as the Mahajanapadas were established across the country. In the Americas, civilizations such as the Maya, Zapotec, Moche, and Nazca emerged in Mesoamerica and Peru at the end of the 1st millennium BCE.

Timeline

Dates are approximate, consult particular article for details

Axial Age

Beginning in the 7th century BCE, the so-called "Axial Age" saw a set of transformative religious and philosophical ideas develop, mostly independently, in many different locations. During the 6th century BCE, Chinese Confucianism,^[47][48] Indian Buddhism and Jainism, Persian Zoroastrianism, and Jewish Monotheism all developed. In the 5th century BCE Socrates and Plato would lay the foundations of Ancient Greek philosophy.

In the east, three schools of thought were to dominate Chinese thinking until the modern day. These were Taoism,^[49] Legalism^[50] and Confucianism.^[51] The Confucian tradition, which would attain dominance, looked for political morality not to the force of law but to the power and example of tradition. Confucianism would later spread into the Korean peninsula and toward Japan.

In the west, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by Socrates,^[52] Plato,^[53] and Aristotle,^[54][55] was diffused throughout Europe and the Middle East in the 4th century BCE by the conquests of Alexander III of Macedon, more commonly known as Alexander the Great.^[56][57][58]

Regional empires

The millennium from 500 BCE to 500 CE saw a series of empires of unprecedented size develop. Well-trained professional armies, unifying ideologies, and advanced bureaucracies created the possibility for emperors to rule over domains, whose population could attain numbers upwards of tens of millions of subjects.

This period in the history of the world was marked by slow but steady technological advances, with important developments such as the stirrup and moldboard plow arriving every few centuries. There were, however, in some regions, periods of rapid technological progress. Most important, perhaps, was the Mediterranean area during the Hellenistic period, when hundreds of technologies were invented.^[59][60][61] Such periods were followed by periods of technological decay, as during the Roman Empire's decline and fall and the ensuing early medieval period.

The great empires depended on military annexation of territory and on the formation of defended settlements to become agricultural centres.^[62] The relative peace that the empires brought encouraged international trade, most notably the massive trade routes in the Mediterranean that had been developed by the time of the Hellenistic Age, and the Silk Road.

The empires faced common problems associated with maintaining huge armies and supporting a central bureaucracy. These costs fell most heavily on the peasantry, while land-owning magnates increasingly evaded centralised control and its costs. Barbarian pressure on the frontiers hastened internal dissolution. China's Han Empire fell into civil war in 220 CE, while its Roman counterpart became increasingly decentralised and divided about the same time.

In the west, the Greeks established a civilization that is the foundational culture of modern western civilization. Some centuries later, in the 3rd century BCE, the Romans began expanding their territory through conquest and colonization. By the reign of Emperor Augustus (late 1st century BCE), Rome controlled all the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. By the reign of Emperor Trajan (early 2nd century CE), Rome controlled much of the land from England to Mesopotamia.

In the 3rd century BCE, most of South Asia was united into the Maurya Empire by Chandragupta Maurya and flourished under Ashoka the Great. From the 3rd century CE, the Gupta dynasty oversaw the period referred to as ancient India's Golden Age. Empires in Southern India included those of the Chalukyas,the Rashtrakutas, the Hoysalas, the Cholas and the Vijayanagara Empire. Science, engineering, art, literature, astronomy, and philosophy flourished under the patronage of these kings.

Meanwhile, the Han Dynasty was the classical empire of the East. Across the silk road from the Roman Empire, the Han Dynasty is often considered to be the Rome of China. While the Romans were almost unstoppable in military means, Han China was developing advanced cartography, shipbuilding, and navigation. The East developed blast furnaces, and were capable of creating finely tuned copper instruments. As with other areas during the Classical Period, Han China advanced in strides in areas of government, education, mathematics, astronomy, and technology, among others.

Declines and falls

The great empires of Eurasia were all located on temperate coastal plains. From the Central Asian steppes, horse-based nomads (Mongols, Turks) dominated a large part of the continent. The development of the stirrup, and the breeding of horses strong enough to carry a fully armed archer, made the nomads a constant threat to the more settled civilizations.

The gradual break-up of the Roman Empire,^[63][64] spanning several centuries after the 2nd century CE, coincided with the spread of Christianity westward from the Middle East. The Western Roman Empire fell^[65] under the domination of Germanic tribes in the 5th century, and these polities gradually developed into a number of warring states, all associated in one way or another with the Roman Catholic Church. The remaining part of the Roman Empire, in the eastern Mediterranean, would henceforth be the Byzantine Empire.^[66] Centuries later, a limited unity would be restored to western Europe through the establishment of the Holy Roman Empire^[67] in 962, comprising a number of states in what is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Belgium, Italy, and parts of France.

In China, dynasties would similarly rise and fall.^[68][69] After the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty^[70] and the demise of the Three Kingdoms, nomadic tribes from the north began to invade in the 4th century CE, eventually conquering areas of Northern China and setting up many small kingdoms. The Sui Dynasty reunified China in 581, and under the succeeding Tang Dynasty (618–907) China entered a second golden age. The Tang Dynasty also splintered, however, and after half a century of turmoil the Northern Song Dynasty reunified China in 982. Yet pressure from nomadic empires to the north became increasingly urgent. North China was lost to the Jurchens in 1141, and the Mongol Empire^[71][72] conquered all of China in 1279, as well as almost all of Eurasia's landmass, missing only central and western Europe, and most of Southeast Asia and Japan.

In these times, northern India was ruled by the Guptas. In southern India, three prominent Dravidian kingdoms emerged: Cheras, Cholas and Pandyas. The ensuing stability contributed to heralding in the golden age of Hindu culture in the 4th and 5th centuries CE.

Also at this time in Central America,^[73] vast societies were being built, the most notable being the Maya and Aztecs of Mesoamerica. As the mother culture of the Olmecs^[74] gradually declined, the great Mayan city-states slowly rose in number and prominence, and Maya culture spread throughout Yucatán and surrounding areas. The later empire of the Aztecs was built on neighboring cultures and was influenced by conquered peoples such as the Toltecs.

In South America, the 14th and 15th centuries saw the rise of the Inca. The Inca Empire of Tawantinsuyu, with its capital at Cusco, spanned the entire Andes Mountain Range.^[75][76] The Inca were prosperous and advanced, known for an excellent road system and unrivaled masonry.

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages are commonly dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century. The period corresponds to the Islamic conquests,^[77] subsequent Islamic golden age,^[78][79] and commencement and expansion of the Islamic/Arab Slave Trade followed by the Mongol invasions in the Middle East and Central Asia. South Asia saw a series of middle kingdoms of India followed by the establishment of Islamic empires in India. The Chinese Empire saw the succession of the Sui, Tang, Liao, Yuan and Ming Dynasties. During this period, Middle Eastern trade routes along the Indian Ocean and the Silk Road through the Gobi Desert provided limited economic and cultural contact between Asian and European civilizations.

The knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece and of Persia were learned by Muslims in the Middle Ages. Muslims added new and important innovations from outside, such as the manufacture of paper from China and decimal positional numbering from India. Much of this learning and development can be linked to geography. Even prior to Islam's presence the city of Mecca had served as a center of trade in Arabia, and Muhammad was a merchant. With the new tradition of the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the city became even more a center for exchanging goods and ideas. The influence held by Muslim merchants over African-Arabian and Arabian-Asian trade routes was tremendous. As a result, Islamic civilization grew and expanded on the basis of its merchant economy, in contrast to the Christians, Indians and Chinese who based their societies on an agricultural landholding nobility. Merchants brought goods and their faith to China (resulting in a present-day population of some 37 million Chinese Muslims, mainly ethnic Turkic Uyghurs, whose territory was annexed to China), India, southeast Asia, and the kingdoms of western Africa and returned with new discoveries and inventions.

The Black Death was one of the deadliest pandemics in human history. Starting in Asia, the disease reached Mediterranean and western Europe during the late 1340s,^[80] and killed tens of millions of Europeans in six years; between a third and a half of the population.^[81]

The Middle Ages^[82] witnessed the first sustained urbanization of northern and western Europe. Many modern European states owe their origins to events unfolding in the Middle Ages; present European political boundaries are, in many regards, the result of the military and dynastic achievements during this tumultuous period.^[83] The Middle Ages lasted until the beginning of the Early Modern Period^[18] in the 16th century, marked by the rise of nation-states, the division of Western Christianity in the Reformation,^[84] the rise of humanism in the Italian Renaissance,^[85] and the beginnings of European overseas expansion which allowed for the Columbian Exchange.^[86]

European Renaissance

Europe's Renaissance, beginning in the 14th century,^[87] consisted of the rediscovery of the classical world's scientific contributions, and in the economic and social rise of Europe. But the Renaissance also engendered a culture of inquisitiveness which ultimately led to Humanism^[88] and the Scientific Revolution.^[89] Although it saw social and political upheaval and revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, the Renaissance is perhaps known best for its artistic developments and the contributions of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man".^[90][91]

Modern history

Modern history (the "modern period," the "modern era," "modern times") is history of the period following the Middle Ages. "Contemporary history" encompasses historic events that are immediately relevant to the present. Its intentionally loose scope includes major events such as World War II, but not those whose immediate effects have dissipated.

Early modern period

"Early modern period"^[92] is a term used by historians to refer to the period in Western Europe and its first colonies that spans the centuries between the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution – roughly 1500 to 1800. The early modern period is characterized by the rise to importance of science and by increasingly rapid technological progress, secularized civic politics, and the nation-state. Capitalist economies began their rise, initially in northern Italian republics such as Genoa. The early modern period also saw the rise and dominance of the mercantilist economic theory. As such, the early modern period represents the decline and eventual disappearance, in much of the European sphere, of feudalism, serfdom and the power of the Catholic Church. The period includes the late decades of the Protestant Reformation, the disastrous Thirty Years' War, the Age of Discovery, the European colonization of the Americas, and the peak of European witch-hunting.

Rise of Europe

During this period, European powers came to dominate most of the world. One theory of why that happened holds that Europe's geography played an important role in its success. The Middle East, India and China are all ringed by mountains and oceans but, once past these outer barriers, are nearly flat. By contrast, the Pyrenees, Alps, Apennines, Carpathians and other mountain ranges run through Europe, and the continent is also divided by several seas. This gave Europe some degree of protection from the peril of Central Asian invaders. Before the era of firearms, these nomads were militarily superior to the agricultural states on the periphery of the Eurasian continent and, if they broke out into the plains of northern India or the valleys of China, were all but unstoppable. These invasions were often devastating. The Golden Age of Islam^[93] was ended by the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. India and China were subject to periodic invasions, and Russia spent a couple of centuries under the Mongol-Tatar yoke. Central and western Europe, logistically more distant from the Central Asian heartland, proved less vulnerable to these threats.

Geography contributed to important geopolitical differences. For most of their histories, China, India and the Middle East were each unified under a single dominant power that expanded until it reached the surrounding mountains and deserts. In 1600 the Ottoman Empire^[94] controlled almost all the Middle East, the Ming Dynasty ruled China,^[95][96] and the Mughal Empire held sway over India. By contrast, Europe was almost always divided into a number of warring states. Pan-European empires, with the notable exception of the Roman Empire, tended to collapse soon after they arose. Another doubtless important geographic factor in the rise of Europe was the Mediterranean Sea, which, for millennia, had functioned as a maritime superhighway fostering the exchange of goods, people, ideas and inventions.

Nearly all the agricultural civilizations have been heavily constrained by their environments. Productivity remained low, and climatic changes easily instigated boom-and-bust cycles that brought about civilizations' rise and fall. By about 1500, however, there was a qualitative change in world history. Technological advance and the wealth generated by trade gradually brought about a widening of possibilities.^{[97][98][99][100][101][102][103][104][105][106][107]}

Many have also argued that Europe's institutions allowed it to expand,^[108][109] that property rights and free-market economics were stronger than elsewhere due to an ideal of freedom peculiar to Europe. In recent years, however, scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz have challenged this view, although the revisionist approach to world history has been met with criticism for systematically "downplaying" European achievements.^[110]

Europe's maritime expansion unsurprisingly — given the continent's geography — was largely the work of its Atlantic states: Portugal, Spain, England, France, and the Netherlands. Initially the Portuguese and Spanish Empires were the predominant conquerors and source of influence, and their union resulted in the Iberian Union,^[111] the first global empire, on which the "sun never set". Soon the more northern English, French and Dutch began to dominate the Atlantic. In a series of wars fought in the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating with the Napoleonic Wars, Britain emerged as the new world power.

This era in European culture saw the Age of Enlightenment^[112] which led to the Scientific Revolution.^[113]

Modern period

The Scientific Revolution changed humanity's understanding of the world and led to the Industrial Revolution, a major transformation of the world's economies.^[113][114] The Scientific Revolution in the 17th century had made little immediate impact on industrial technology; only in the second half of the 18th century did scientific advances begin to be applied significantly to practical invention. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and used new modes of production — the factory, mass production, and mechanisation — to manufacture a wide array of goods faster and using less labour than previously. The Age of Enlightenment also led to the beginnings of modern democracy in the late-18th century American and French Revolutions. Democracy and republicanism would grow to have a profound effect on world events and on quality of life.

After Europeans had achieved influence and control over the Americas, the imperial activities of the West turned to the lands of the East and Asia.^[115][116] In the 19th century the European states had social and technological advantage over Eastern lands.^[117] Britain gained control of the Indian subcontinent, Egypt and the Malay Peninsula;^[118] the French took Indochina; while the Dutch cemented their control over the Dutch East Indies. The British also colonized Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with large numbers of British colonists emigrating to these colonies.^[118] Russia colonised large pre-agricultural areas of Siberia.^[119][120] In the late 19th century, the European powers divided the remaining areas of Africa. Within Europe, economic and military challenges created a system of nation states, and ethno-linguistic groupings began to identify themselves as distinctive nations with aspirations for cultural and political autonomy. This nationalism would become important to peoples across the world in the 20th century.

During the Industrial Revolution, the world economy became reliant on coal as a fuel, as new methods of transport, such as railways and steamships, effectively shrank the world.^[114] Meanwhile, industrial pollution and environmental damage, present since the discovery of fire and the beginning of civilization, accelerated drastically.

The advantages that Europe had developed by the mid-18th century were two: an entrepreneurial culture,^[117][121] and the wealth generated by the Atlantic trade^[117] (including the African slave trade). By the late 16th century, silver from the Americas accounted for the Spanish empire's wealth.^[122] The profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution.^[123] While some historians conclude that, in 1750, labour productivity in the most developed regions of China was still on a par with that of Europe's Atlantic economy (see the NBER Publications by Carol H. Shiue and Wolfgang Keller^[124]), other historians like Angus Maddison hold that the per-capita productivity of western Europe had by the late Middle Ages surpassed that of all other regions.^[125]

Contemporary history

1900 to 1945

The 20th century^{[126][127][128]} opened with Europe at an apex of wealth and power, and with much of the world under its direct colonial control or its indirect domination.^[129] Much of the rest of the world was influenced by heavily Europeanized nations: the United States and Japan.^[130] As the century unfolded, however, the global system dominated by rival powers was subjected to severe strains, and ultimately yielded to a more fluid structure of independent nations organized on Western models.

This transformation was catalysed by wars of unparalleled scope and devastation. World War I^[131] destroyed many of Europe's empires and monarchies, and weakened Britain and France.^[132] In its aftermath, powerful ideologies arose. The Russian Revolution^{[133][134][135]} of 1917 created the first communist state, while the 1920s and 1930s saw militaristic fascist dictatorships gain control in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere.^[136]

Ongoing national rivalries, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, helped precipitate World War II.^[137][138] The militaristic dictatorships of Europe and Japan pursued an ultimately doomed course of imperialist expansionism. Their defeat opened the way for the advance of communism into Central Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, China, North Vietnam and North Korea.

1945 to 2000

After World War II ended in 1945, the United Nations was founded in the hope of allaying conflicts among nations and preventing future wars.^[139][140] The war had, however, left two nations, the United States^[141] and the Soviet Union, with principal power to guide international affairs.^[142] Each was suspicious of the other and feared a global spread of the other's political-economic model. This led to the Cold War, a forty-year stand-off between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. With the development of nuclear weapons^[143] and the subsequent arms race, all of humanity were put at risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers.^[144] Such war being viewed as impractical, proxy wars were instead waged, at the expense of non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.

The Cold War lasted to the 1990s, when the Soviet Union's communist system began to collapse, unable to compete economically with the United States and western Europe; the Soviets' Central European "satellites" reasserted their national sovereignty, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself disintegrated.^{[145][146][147]} The United States for the time being was left as the "sole remaining superpower".^{[148][149][150]}

In the early postwar decades, the African and Asian colonies of the Belgian, British, Dutch, French and other west European empires won their formal independence.^[151][152] These nations faced challenges in the form of neocolonialism, poverty, illiteracy and endemic tropical diseases.^[153][154] Many of the Western and Central European nations gradually formed a political and economic community, the European Union, which later expanded eastward to include former Soviet satellites.^{[155][156][157][158]}

The 20th century saw exponential progress in science and technology, and increased life expectancy and standard of living for much of humanity. As the developed world shifted from a coal-based to a petroleum-based economy, new transport technologies, along with the dawn of the Information Age,^[159] led to increased globalization.^{[160][161][162]} Space exploration reached throughout the solar system. The structure of DNA, the template of life, was discovered,^{[163][164][165]} and the human genome was sequenced, a major milestone in the understanding of human biology and the treatment of disease.^{[166][167][168][169][170]} Global literacy rates continued to rise, and the percentage of the world's labor pool needed to produce humankind's food supply continued to drop.

The technologies of sound recordings, motion pictures, and radio and television broadcasting produced a focus on popular culture and entertainment. Television spots sold both commercial products and political candidates. Then, in the last decade of this century, a rapid increase took place in the use of personal computers. A global communication network emerged in the Internet. One-way mass media gave way to individual communication in what has been called a shift from the fourth to a fifth civilization.^[171]

The century saw the development of man-made global threats, such as nuclear proliferation, global climate change,^[172][173] massive deforestation, overpopulation, and the dwindling of global resources (particularly fossil fuels).^[174]

21st century

The 21st century has been marked by growth of economic globalization, with consequent risk to interlinked economies, and by the expansion of communications with mobile phones and the Internet.

Worldwide demand and competition for resources has risen due to growing populations and industrialization, mainly in India, China and Brazil. This demand is causing increased levels of environmental degradation and a growing threat of global warming.^[175] That in turn has spurred the development of alternate or renewable sources of energy (notably solar energy and wind energy), proposals for cleaner fossil-fuel technologies, and consideration of expanded use of nuclear energy (somewhat dampened by nuclear-plant accidents).^{[176][177][178]}

See also

Human history and prehistory
↑ before Homo (Pliocene)
Three-age system prehistory
Stone Age Lower Paleolithic: Homo, Homo erectus, Middle Paleolithic: early Homo sapiens Upper Paleolithic: behavioral modernity Neolithic: civilization Bronze Age Near East • India • Europe • China • Korea Iron Age Bronze Age collapse • Ancient Near East • India • Europe • China • Japan • Korea • Nigeria
Recorded History
Ancient history Earliest records Middle Ages Early - High - Late Modern history Early - Late - Contemporary
see also: Modernity, Futurology
↓Future

History topics

• Economic history of the world
• Civilization
• Historical powers
• Medieval demography
• History of science
• History of technology
• Technological singularity
• Historiography
• Development criticism
• Deluge (mythology)

History by period

• List of archaeological periods
• List of time periods

History by region

• History of Africa
• History of Asia
  • History of Central Asia
  • History of East Asia
  • History of South Asia
  • History of Southeast Asia
• History of Europe
• History of the Middle East
• History of Oceania
  • History of Australia
  • History of New Zealand
  • History of the Pacific Islands
• History of the Americas
  • History of Central America
  • History of South America
  • History of North America
  • History of the Caribbean
• History of Antarctica

Notes

References

• Williams, H. S. (1904). The historians' history of the world; a comprehensive narrative of the rise and development of nations as recorded by over two thousand of the great writers of all ages. New York: The Outlook Company; [etc.].
• Blainey, Geoffery (2000). A Short History Of The World. Penguin Books, Victoria. ISBN 0-670-88036-1
• Gombrich, Ernst H. A Little History of the World. Yale. UK and USA, 2005.
• H.G. Wells (1920), The Outline of History Volume One, New York, MacMillan.
• H. Spodek (2001), The World's History: combined volume, Upper Saddle River, NJ, Prentice Hall.
• G. Parker (1997), The Times Atlas of World History, London, Times Books.
• The Biosphere (A Scientific American Book), San Francisco, W.H. Freeman and Co., 1970, ISBN 0-7167-0945-7. This seminal book, originally a 1970 Scientific American magazine issue, covered virtually every major concern and concept that has since been debated regarding materials and energy resources, population trends and environmental degradation.
• Energy and Power (A Scientific American Book), San Francisco, W.H. Freeman and Co., 1971, ISBN 0-7167-0938-4.
• Jared Diamond (1996). Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies.. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 0-393-03891-2. 
• Fernand Braudel (1996). The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-20308-9. 
• Fernand Braudel (1973). Capitalism and Material Life, 1400–1800. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-06-010454-6. 
• Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, Free Press, 1992, ISBN 0-02-910975-2.
• Marshall Hodgson, Rethinking World History: Essays on Europe, Islam, and World History, Cambridge, 1993.
• Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Princeton, 2000.
• Clive Ponting, World History: a New Perspective, London, 2000.
• Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress, Toronto, Anansi, 2004, ISBN 0-88784-706-4.
• Guy Ankerl, Coexisting Contemporary Civilizations: Arabo-Muslim, Bharati, Chinese, and Western, Geneva, INUPRESS, 2000, ISBN 2-88155-004-5.

Further reading

• David Landes, "The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor", New York, W. W. Norton & Company (1999) ISBN 978-0-393-31888-3
• David Landes, "Why Europe and the West? Why Not China?", Journal of Economic Perspectives, 20:2, 3, 2006.
• Ricardo Duchesne, "Asia First?", The Journal of the Historical Society, Vol. 6, Issue 1 (March 2006), pp. 69–91 (PDF)
• William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1963.
• Larry Gonick, The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volume One, Main Street Books, 1997, ISBN 978-0-385-26520-1, Volume Two, Main Street Books, 1994, ISBN 978-0-385-42093-8, Volume Three, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, ISBN 978-0-393-32403-7.

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