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. Areas to the north and east were held by Uzbeks and Pashtuns.
In Africa , this period saw a decline in many civilizations and an advancement in others. The Swahili Coast declined after coming under Portuguese and later Omani control. In west Africa, the Songhai Empire fell to the Moroccans in when they invaded with guns. Ethiopia suffered from the invasion from neighbouring Muslim Adal Sultanate , and in entered the Zemene Mesafint Age of Princes during which the Emperor became a figurehead and the country was ruled by warlords, though the royal line later would recover under Emperor Tewodros II.
Other civilizations in Africa advanced during this period. The Oyo Empire experienced its golden age, as did the Benin Empire. The Ashanti Empire rose to power in what is modern day Ghana in The Kingdom of Kongo also thrived during this period. European exploration of Africa reached its zenith at this time. Japan experienced its Azuchi—Momoyama period — , followed by the Edo period — The Korean Joseon Dynasty — ruled throughout this period, successfully repelling 16th- and 17th-century invasions from Japan and China.
Japan and China were significantly affected during this period by expanded maritime trade with Europe, particularly the Portuguese in Japan. During the Edo period, Japan would pursue isolationist policies, to eliminate foreign influences. On the Indian subcontinent , the Delhi Sultanate and the Deccan sultanates would give way, beginning in the 16th century, to the Mughal Empire. Against the Muslim Mughal Empire, the Hindu Maratha Empire was founded on the west coast in , gradually gaining territory—a majority of present-day India—from the Mughals over several decades, particularly in the Mughal—Maratha Wars — The Portuguese held this important trading territory and the valuable associated navigational strait until overthrown by the Dutch in The Johor Sultanate , centred on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, became the dominant trading power in the region.
Into the 19th century, European expansion would affect the whole of Southeast Asia, with the British in Myanmar and Malaysia , and the establishment of French Indochina. Only Thailand would successfully resist colonization. The Pacific islands of Oceania would also be affected by European contact, starting with the circumnavigational voyage of Ferdinand Magellan , who landed on the Marianas and other islands in Also notable were the voyages —44 of Abel Tasman to present-day Australia, New Zealand and nearby islands, and the voyages — of Captain James Cook , who made the first recorded European contact with Hawaii.
Britain would found its first colony on Australia in In the Americas , the western European powers vigorously colonized the newly discovered continents, largely displacing the indigenous populations , and destroying the advanced civilizations of the Aztecs and the Inca. Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France all made extensive territorial claims, and undertook large-scale settlement, including the importation of large numbers of African slaves.
Britain colonized the east coast of North America, and France colonized the central region of North America. Russia made incursions onto the northwest coast of North America, with a first colony in present-day Alaska in , and the outpost of Fort Ross in present-day California in Thirteen of the British colonies declared independence as the United States of America in , ratified by the Treaty of Paris in , ending the American Revolutionary War.
In Russia , Ivan the Terrible was crowned the first Tsar of Russia, and by annexing the Turkic Khanates in the east, transformed Russia into a regional power. The countries of western Europe, while expanding prodigiously through technological advancement and colonial conquest, competed with each other economically and militarily in a state of almost constant war. Often the wars had a religious dimension , either Catholic versus Protestant, or primarily in eastern Europe Christian versus Muslim. Napoleon came to power in France in , an event foreshadowing the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century.
The Scientific Revolution changed humanity's understanding of the world and led to the Industrial Revolution , a major transformation of the world's economies.
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The Scientific Revolution in the 17th century had had little immediate effect on industrial technology ; only in the second half of the 18th century did scientific advances begin to be applied substantially to practical invention. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and used new modes of production—the factory , mass production , and mechanization —to manufacture a wide array of goods faster and using less labour than previously required.
The Age of Enlightenment also led to the beginnings of modern democracy in the lateth century American and French Revolutions.
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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, imperial activities turned to the lands of Asia and Oceania. In the 19th century the European states had social and technological advantage over Eastern lands. The British also colonized Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with large numbers of British colonists emigrating to these colonies.
Russia colonized large pre-agricultural areas of Siberia. 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 Second 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.
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 midth century were two: By the late 16th century, silver from the Americas accounted for the Spanish empire's wealth. The 20th century 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.
Much of the rest of the world was influenced by heavily Europeanized nations: As the century unfolded, however, the global system dominated by rival powers was subjected to severe strains, and ultimately seemed to yield to a more fluid structure of independent nations organized on Western models.
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This transformation was catalysed by wars of unparalleled scope and devastation. In its aftermath, powerful ideologies arose. The Russian Revolution of created the first communist state, while the s and s saw militaristic fascist dictatorships gain control in Italy, Germany, Spain and elsewhere. Ongoing national rivalries, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression , helped precipitate World War II. The militaristic dictatorships of Europe and Japan pursued an ultimately doomed course of imperialist expansionism , in the course of which Nazi Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust and of millions of Poles , Russians , and other Slavs , while Imperial Japan murdered millions of Chinese.
This led to the Cold War , a forty-five-year stand-off and arms race between the United States and its allies, on one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other. Such war being viewed as impractical , the superpowers instead waged proxy wars in non-nuclear-armed Third World countries. In China, Mao Zedong implemented industrialization and collectivization reforms as part of the Great Leap Forward —62 , leading to the starvation deaths —61 of tens of millions of people.
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The Cold War ended in , when the Soviet Union disintegrated , in part due to inability to compete economically with the United States and western Europe. However, the United States likewise began to show signs of slippage in its geopolitical influence, [] [d] even as its private sector , now less inhibited by the claims of the public sector , increasingly sought private advantage to the prejudice of the public weal. In the early postwar decades, the colonies in Asia and Africa of the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and other west European empires won their formal independence.
Most Western European and Central European countries gradually formed a political and economic community, the European Union , which expanded eastward to include former Soviet-satellite countries. Constitution that came into force in Asian, African, and South American countries followed suit and began taking tentative steps toward forming their own respective continental associations.
Cold War preparations to deter or to fight a third world war accelerated advances in technologies that, though conceptualized before World War II, had been implemented for that war's exigencies, such as jet aircraft , rocketry , and electronic computers. In the decades after World War II, these advances led to jet travel, artificial satellites with innumerable applications including global positioning systems GPS , and the Internet —inventions that have revolutionized the movement of people, ideas, and information.
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However, not all scientific and technological advances in the second half of the 20th century required an initial military impetus. That period also saw ground-breaking developments such as the discovery of the structure of DNA , [] the consequent sequencing of the human genome , the worldwide eradication of smallpox , the discovery of plate tectonics , manned and unmanned exploration of space and of previously inaccessible parts of Earth , and foundational discoveries in physics phenomena ranging from the smallest entities particle physics to the greatest entity physical cosmology.
The century saw many global threats emerge or become more serious or more widely recognized, including nuclear proliferation , global climate change , [] [] [] air pollution , deforestation , ocean acidification and pollution , overpopulation , deadly epidemics of microbial diseases, near-Earth asteroids and comets , [] supervolcano eruptions, lethal gamma-ray bursts , geomagnetic storms , and the dwindling of global natural resources particularly fossil fuels. The 21st century has been marked by growing economic globalization and integration, with consequent increased risk to interlinked economies; and by the expansion of communications with mobile phones and the Internet , which have caused fundamental societal changes in business, politics, and individuals' personal lives, including the advent of social-media platforms such as Facebook.
The early 21st century saw escalating intra- and international strife in the Near East and Afghanistan, stimulated by vast economic disparities, by dissatisfaction with governments dominated by Western interests, by inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian feuds, and by the longest war in the history of the United States, the proximate cause for which was Osama bin Laden 's provocative destruction of New York City 's World Trade Center.
Worldwide competition for resources has risen due to growing populations and industrialization, especially in India, China, and Brazil. That, and a need for safe, reliable energy supplies independent of politically volatile regions, has spurred the development of renewable sources of energy , chiefly solar and wind energy , in place of carbon -based energy petroleum , coal , natural gas and nuclear energy.
International tensions were heightened in connection with the efforts of some nuclear-armed states to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons , and to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. This article is about the history of humanity. For the entire history of Earth, see History of Earth. For a field of historical study, see World history. For other uses, see History of the world disambiguation.
For humanity's evolutionary history, see Human evolution. Oceania East Asia South Asia. Southeast Asia Middle East. Early modern Late modern. Prehistory and Human evolution. Cradle of civilization , Bronze Age , and Iron Age. Axial Age , History of philosophy , Timeline of religion , and History of religions.
History of Europe and Middle Ages. History of East Asia. History of Southeast Asia. History of Europe , Age of Discovery , Colonialism , 16th century , and 17th century. Interwar period , Roaring Twenties , and Great Depression. Economic history of the world Historic recurrence Historiography History of science History of technology List of archaeological periods List of millennia List of time periods.
Historians also include the late 17th century, which is typically known as the Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism , as part of the Enlightenment; however, contemporary historians have considered the Age of Reason distinct to the ideas developed in the Enlightenment.
The use of the term here includes both Ages under a single all-inclusive time-frame. But it soon became evident, writes Allison, that "the end of the Cold War [had] produced a unipolar moment, not a unipolar era. For a nation whose core strategy has been to overwhelm challenges with resources, this decline calls into question the terms of U. Since the s, businesses across the developed world have been cutting their wage bills not only through labor-saving technological innovations but also by pushing for regulatory changes and developing new forms of employment.
These include just-in-time contracts, which shift risks to workers; noncompete clauses , which reduce bargaining power; and freelance arrangements, which exempt businesses from providing employees with benefits such as health insurance. The result has been that since the beginning of the twenty-first century, labor's share of GDP has fallen steadily in many developed economies The challenge today is to identify Since the s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply.
Stiglitz writes in Scientific American , in part: Since the mids the rules of the economic game have been rewritten Technological changes have concentrated market power in the hands of a few global players A concerted attack on unions has almost halved the fraction of unionized workers in the [U.
Proper nutrition and stimulation in utero and during early childhood improve physical and mental well-being later in life. Human capital doesn't materialize on its own; it must be nurtured by the state. Thus the dethronement of western Europe from its brief mastery of the globe coincided with and was caused by an unprecedented, rapid Westernization of all the peoples of the earth.
One possible explanation for the resilience of the terrorist threat is that an overly militarized approach aggravates the very conditions on which terrorist recruitment thrives. The destruction of entire cities and the unintentional killing of civilians, in addition to being tragic, serve as powerful propaganda tools for jihadists. Such incidents feed resentment, grievances, and anti-Americanism. Bacevich urges "a fundamental reassessment of US national-security policy in those parts of the Islamic world [at a time when US] political elites US troops in [over] countries around the world, a massive military budget The proposals' purposes and prospects are discussed in Benjamin M.
UBI would create, for many persons, life choices not now available to them, and might reduce criminality spawned by desperate living conditions. Bush , Donald Rumsfeld , and Dick Cheney. The greenhouse effect is a natural mechanism that becomes dangerous if the atmosphere 's greenhouse-gas concentrations exceed environmentally safe levels, as they have gradually been doing since the start of the Industrial Revolution. As predicted, this is already increasing the frequency and severity of floods and droughts due to accelerated melting of icecaps , glaciers , and snowpacks ; flooding of low-lying coasts ; storms ; agricultural disruption and famines ; ecological displacements; ocean acidification with havoc to marine life; release, from thawing Arctic permafrost , of methane , a greenhouse gas more powerful than carbon dioxide ; and intra- and intersocietal conflicts , with increased crime and warfare.
The multifarious, irreversible damage from global warming will accelerate as environmental tipping points are reached. The late physicist — cosmologist Stephen Hawking on 2 July , belatedly celebrating his 75th birthday, warned that planet Earth is rapidly approaching an irreversible tipping point that will leave the planet with an uninhabitable environment like that of Venus , with a temperature of degrees and sulfuric-acid rain. And if our planet is so special, it becomes all the more important to preserve this unique world for ourselves, our descendants and the many creatures that call Earth home.
By the time our star, the Sun , came into being 4. The Sun resides within a fairly narrow "galactic habitable zone" that is at reduced risk from destructive supernovae and gamma-ray bursts. An orderly arrangement of planets in nearly circular orbits providing long-term stability — as in our solar system — is uncommon. Earth also has a large metallic core that, coupled with Earth's rapid rotation, produces a strong magnetic field that shields Earth from harmful cosmic radiation ; without this screen, "our atomosphere would probably erode, and any living thing on the surface would get fried.
Without that impact, Earth would lack its crucial magnetic field and plate tectonics. The presence of such a large Moon stabilizes Earth, preventing it from toppling far from the vertical, as happened with Mars. Once the Earth-Moon system settled down, "life emerged with almost indecent rapidity": But it was only about 1. DNA analysis , showing extremely close similarities among the most diverse human populations, indicates that all humans are descended from a tiny population, possibly survivors of some catastrophe or catastrophes.
DNA evidence pinpoints two evolutionary bottlenecks: Is another technological civilization likely to exist today? Almost certainly no, given the chain of circumstances that led to our existence. Browning concludes an article on "The Suffocation of Democracy": Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria.
No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events Battery storage technology has progressed too; the fact that the sun goes down at night is no longer the obstacle to solar power many once presumed California , the planet's fifth-largest economy, promise[s] to be carbon-neutral by In October [] the [New York State] attorney general In January [] New York City joined the growing fossil fuel divestment campaign Mayor Bill de Blasio is working with London's mayor, Sadiq Khan , to convince their colleagues around the world to do likewise.
In July [] Ireland became the first nation to join the campaign This kind of pressure on [fossil-fuel] investors needs to continue Retrieved November 15, Retrieved 21 May Journal of World Prehistory. What Makes a Modern Human". Global Ecology and Biogeography. Retrieved November 18, Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. Metropolitan Museum of Art. A History of India 4th ed. A History of South India. Zapotec civilization ended in according to the five archaeological stages presented in Whitecotton, Joseph W.
Princes, Priests, and Peasants. University of Oklahoma Press. Ancient Athenian building methods. Excavations of the Athenian Agora. American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. Archived from the original on 10 July Retrieved 18 April Ancient Egypt and the Nile River Valley.
The Hittite Empire and the Battle of Kadesh. The Hittites and Ancient Anatolia.
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The Egyptians kept written records using a writing system known as hieroglyphics. Some writing was preserved on stone or clay, and some was preserved on papyrus, a paper-like product made from reed fiber. Papyrus is very fragile, but due to the hot and dry climate of Egypt, a few papyrus documents have survived.
Repeated struggles for political control of Egypt showed the importance of the region in terms of its agricultural production and the economic resources that its highly complex social organization produced. Egyptian rulers used the idea of divine kingship and constructed monumental architecture to demonstrate and maintain power. Map of Ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean and Red seas. Land is beige and the habitable regions of Egypt are highlighted in Green all along the Nile River and the delta that opens out to the Mediterranean Sea in the north. Lower Egypt is the northern region and Upper Egypt is the southern region of this map.
The areas in green show the habitable regions of Egypt.
Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons. Even before the Old Kingdom period, the foundations of Egyptian civilization were being laid for thousands of years as people living near the Nile increasingly focused on sedentary agriculture, which led to urbanization and specialized, non-agricultural economic activity. Evidence of human habitation in Egypt stretches back tens of thousands of years. However, it was only in about BCE that widespread settlement began in the region.
Around this time, the Sahara Desert expanded. Some scientists think this expansion was caused by a slight shift in the tilt of the Earth.
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Others have explored changing rainfall patterns, but the specific causes are not entirely clear. The most important result of this expansion of the Sahara for human civilization was that it pushed humans closer to the Nile River in search of reliable water sources.
Apart from the delta region, where the river spreads out as it flows into the sea, most settlement in the Nile Valley was confined to within a few miles of the river itself, see map above. The Nile River flooded annually; this flooding was so regular that the ancient Egyptians set their three seasons— Inundation , or flooding, Growth, and Harvest—around it. This annual flooding was vital to agriculture because it deposited a new layer of nutrient-rich soil each year.
In years when the Nile did not flood, the nutrient level in the soil was seriously depleted, and the chance of food shortages increased greatly. Food supplies had political effects, as well, and periods of drought probably contributed to the decline of Egyptian political unity at the ends of both the Old and Middle Kingdoms. Although we do not know the specific dates and events, most scholars who study this period believe that sometime around the year BCE, a leader named either Narmer or Menes—sources are unclear on whether these were the same person!
Somewhat confusingly, when you look at a map of this area, Lower Egypt is the delta region in the north, and Upper Egypt refers to the southern portion of the country, which is upriver from the delta. You may encounter this terminology when reading about rivers in history, so a good trick is to remember that rivers flow downhill, so the river is lower toward its end at the sea and higher closer to its source!
After political unification, divine kingship , or the idea that a political ruler held his power by favor of a god or gods—or that he was a living incarnation of a god—became firmly established in Egypt. For example, in the mythology that developed around unification, Narmer was portrayed as Horus, a god of Lower Egypt, where Narmer originally ruled. He conquered Set, a god of Upper Egypt. Setting up two colonies—a larger Eastern Settlement and a smaller Western Settlement—these Vikings herded goats, sheep and cattle, built stone churches that can still be seen today, and hunted caribou and seals.
Thriving, or at least surviving, for hundreds of years, their population grew to roughly 5, Yet when a missionary expedition arrived in , intent on converting them to Protestantism, it found nothing but ruins. Archeologists have since determined that the Western Settlement failed around A. The onset of the Little Ice Age in the 14th century was almost certainly a contributing factor, as it clogged the route in and out of Greenland with sea ice and shortened growing seasons on what were already highly marginal lands. No one knows, however, what delivered the final deathblow. Some experts believe they simply packed up and returned to Iceland or Scandinavia, whereas others think they starved to death, succumbed to the Black Plague or were exterminated by the Inuit, which had arrived in Greenland from Canada around A.
At any rate, the Vikings were far from alone in their failure. At least three other societies have likewise perished on Greenland, including the Dorset, which for a brief time cohabited the island with both the Vikings and the Inuit. We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you.
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