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Davies - History
These are lecture notes to one of Dr. Stephen Davies's lectures at the
John Locke Junior Summer School in 2023.
There will be four lectures in this series. Each focuses on one type of
historical writing. We'll be taking a look at the history of the world,
dates in history and their importance, cultural history, and social
history. This lecture is about the history of the world.
The Georgian calender is a very Eurpoean way of thinking about the past.
We look at the past from "that European perspective", separating the
past into the time periods of the ancient, the medevil, and the modern.
This is based on the historical dominance of the world by Europe...
except that it hasn't always been like this.
The tradition of writing history books, or teaching history, in the
context of the entirety of human history, fell out of fashion in the
1800s. Pepole started focusing on national history, and history of a
particular timeframe.
We are at the end of this specific Eurocentric historical experience, as
for 90+% of human history, the Indian Ocean was the bulk of civilization
and economy. In fact, until 1820 there was no time when China did not
dominate >50% of the world's manufactering production. Europeans,
however, got their power in shaping the historical perspective during
the industrial revolution, where there was consistent, sustained,
widespread innovation and economic growth, completely changing the
everyday experience of being a human being.
(When Columbus arrived in the New World, the Eurpoeans brought America
smallpox, measels, the flu, etc., which eradicated 90% of the native
American population. These were basically unintentional bioweapons, but
they still worked in the favor of the Europeans.)
There are about three levels of understanding (?) when we're looking at
history. On the surface, we have current events and politics that are
rapidly changing. Deeper there are culture, religion and intellectual
states of affairs, which do undergo some change but generally stay
constant. At the deepest we have structural history, the general
experience of living as a human, which usually stay constant and are
surprisingly similar across the entire world.
Actually, there were three episodes for our experience as a species when
the most basic level changed.
1. When Homo sapiens started using tools and eradicated most large
mammals, and developed speech to articulate complex sounds in order to
communicate.
2. When Homo sapiens discovered farming.
3. The industrial revolution, explained previously.
Also, the life expectancy of 30 years old or so was generally because
1/4 to 1/3 of children died before their first birthday. If a person
survives childhood, their life expectancy could be approximately 60
years old. It's not that horrible. And the death rate of pregnancy was
25%. During and after the industrial revolution there was extremely
rapid cultural change. Japan actually had an independent industrial
revolution at approximately the time of the European one, but that
stayed in Japan beacuse of its policy of isolationism, and Japan lacked
natural resources anyways.
"We are in some sense controlled by the past"
History is generally recursive. It's not completely cyclic, nor is it
linear. Most things social-political repeat, except really big changes
(which in my (Runxi's) opinion includes the change to democracy).
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