Barking at shovels

A real millenial retrospective

For all the recent hullabaloo about the millenium, for all you could tell from the celebrations or the media coverage, it might have been any old turn-of-the-century. That is, any history that happened longer ago than living memory might as well not exist; certainly the news media didn't have either the guts or the understanding to offer a real millenial retrospective. I have found one and only one heroic exception: The Economist devoted an entire issue to The World This Millenium, and it is I think the best single issue of any magazine I have ever read.

Much of it is available on the web:

http://www.economist.com/editorial/freeforall/19991225mill/index_the_world_this_millennium.html.

The page I cite gives a truly impressive one-page summary of 1000 years, starting with China issuing the first paper money in 1024, and ending with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The issue includes articles on the obvious and mandatory topics, like Hitler, Stalin, the American revolution, and the Crusades, but also comments on a lot of less well-known dates. Among the better articles from the rest of the issue:

• 11th century, The Song dynasty
• c1045, The printing press
• 1180, The magnetic compass
• 1242, The Mongols look east
• 1348, The Black Death
• 15th century, The Medici bankers
• 1453, Constantinople falls
• 1516, Ottomans smash the Mamluks
• 1519, The conquest of America
• 1556, Akbar and the Mughal empire
• 1614, The East India companies
• 1639, Japanese isolation
• 1684, The calculus
• 1765, The steam engine
• 1789, The slave trade
• 19th century, European empires: They came, they went away
• 1811, The key to industrial capitalism
• 1822, Bolivar and the liberation of America
• 1860, Garibaldi's Thousand
• 1860, Europeans sack Beijing
• 1879, Electrification
• 1884, The scramble for Africa
• 20th century, Revolution in literacy
• 1914, Ford and the motor car
• 1930, Gandhi's salt march
• 1956, The pill: women freed
• 1999, The strange Pax Americana

I love this stuff.

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