archive.johnshlee

[p.97]
With the move to permanent villages... The extra hands were sorely needed in the fields. But the extra mouths quickly wiped out the food surpluses... As people began living in disease-ridden settlements, as children fed more on cereals and less on mother's milk, and as each child competed for his or her porridge with more and more siblings, child mortality soared... With time, the 'wheat bargain' became more and more burdensome... Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases.

[p.102]
It may well be that foragers switched from gathering wild wheat to intense wheat cultivation, not to increase their normal food supply, but rather to support the building and running of a temple. Göbekli Tepe suggests that the temple may have been built first, and that a village later grew up around it.

[p.203]
Set weights of precious metals eventually gave birth to coins. The first coins in history were struck around 640 BC by King Alyattes of Lydia, in western Anatolia. These coins had a standardized weight of gold or silver, and were imprinted with an identification mark. The mark testified to two things... how much precious metal the coin contained, ...the authority that issued the coin. Almost all coins in use today are descendants of the Lydian coins.

[p.226]
The Imperial Cycle:

[p.237]
The Agricultural Revolution initially had a far smaller impact on the status of other members of the animist system, such as rocks, springs, ghosts and demons... But once kingdoms and trade networks expanded, people needed to contact entities whose power and authority encompassed a whole kingdom or an entire trade basin.
The attempt to answer these needs led to the appearance of polytheistic religions...
Animism did not entirely disappear at the advent of polytheism. Demons, fairies, ghosts, holy rocks, springs, trees... These spirits were far less important than the great gods, but for the mundane needs of many ordinary people, they were good enough. While the king in his capital city sacrificed dozens of fat rams to the great war god, praying for victory over the barbarians, the peasant in his hut lit a candle to the fig-tree fairy, praying that she help cure his sick son.
Yet the greatest impact of the rise of great gods was not on sheep or demons, but upon the status of Homo sapiens... A terrible flood might wipe out billions of ants, grasshoppers, turtles, antelopes, giraffes and elephants, just because a few stupid Sapiens made the gods angry. Polytheism thereby exalted no only the status of the gods, but also that of humankind.

[p.240]
In many cases the imperial elite itself adopted the gods and rituals of subject people. The Romans happily added the Asian Cybele and the Egyptian goddess Isis to their pantheon.
The only god that the Romans long refused to tolerate was the monotheistic and evangelizing god of the Christians. The Roman Empire did not require the Christians to give up their beliefs and rituals, but it did expect them to pay respect to the empire's protector gods and to the divinity of the emperor. This was seen as a declaration of political loyalty. When the Christians vehemently refused to do so, and went on to reject all attempts at compromise, the Romans reacted by persecuting what they understood to be a politically subversive faction. And even this was done half-heartedly. In the 300 years from the crucifixion of Christ to the conversion of Emperor Constantine, polytheistic Roman emperors initiated no more than four general persecutions of Christians. Local administrators and governors incited some anti-Christian violence of their own. Still, if we combine all the victims of all these prosecutions, it turns out that in these three centuries, the polytheistic Romans killed no more than a few thousand Christians slaughtered Christians by the millions to defend slightly different interpretations of the religion of love and compassion.
The religious wars between Catholics and Protestant that swept Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are particularly notorious... Protestants believed that the divine love is so great that God was incarnated in flesh and allowed Himself to be tortured and crucified, thereby redeeming the original sin and opening the gates of heaven to all those who professed faith in Him. Catholics maintained that faith, while essential, was not enough. To enter heaven, believers had to participate in church rituals and do good deeds. Protestants refused to accept this, arguing that this quid pro quo belittles God's greatness and love. Whoever thinks that entry to heaven depends upon his or her own good deeds magnifies his own importance, and implies that Christ's suffering on the cross and God's love for humankind are not enough.
... On 24 August 1572, French Catholics... attacked communities of French Protestants... the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre... between 5000 and 10,000 Protestants were slaughtered in less than twenty-four hours. When the pope in Rome heard the news from France, he was so overcome by joy that he organised festive prayers to celebrate the occasion and commissioned Giorgio Vasari to decorate one of the Vatican's rooms with a fresco of the massacre.

[p.246]
So monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe - and He's evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief.
Dualistic religions flourished for more than a thousand years. Sometime between 1500 BC and 1000 BC a prophet named Zoroaster(Zarathustra) was active somewhere in Central Asia. His creed passed from generation to generation until it became the most important of dualistic religions - Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrians saw the world as a cosmic battle between the good god Ahura Mazda and the evil god Angra Mainyu. Humans had to help the good god in this battle. Zoroastrianism was an important religion during the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550-330 BC) and later became the official religion of the Sassanid Persian Empire (AD 224-651). It exerted a major influence on almost all subequent Middle Eastern and Central Asian religions, and it inspired a number of other dualist religion, such as Gnosticism and Manichaeism.
During the third and fourth centuries AD, the Manichaean creed spread from China to North Africa, and for a moment it appeared that it would beat Christianity to achieve dominance in the Roman Empire. Yet the Manichaeans lost the soul of Rome to the Christians, the Zoroastrian Sassanid Empire was overrun by the monotheistic Muslims, and the dualist wave subsided. Today only a handful of dualist communities survive in India and the Middle East.
Nevertheless, the rising tide of monotheism did not really wipe out dualism. Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheism absorbed numerous dualist beliefs and practices, and some of the most basic ideas of what we call 'monotheism' are, in fact, dualist in origin and spirit. Countless Christians, Muslims and Jews believe in a powerful evil force - like the one Christians call the Devil or Satan - who can act independently, fight against the good God, and wreak havoc without God's permission.
How can a omnotheist adhere to such a dualistic belief (which, by the way, is nowhere to be found in the Old Testament)? ...humans have a wonderful capacity to believe in contradictions...
Another key dualistic concept, particularly in Gnosticism and Manichaeism, was the sharp distinction between body and soul, between matter and spirit. Gnostics and Manichaeans argued that the good god created the spirit and the soul, whereas matter and bodies are the creation of the evil god. Man, according to this view, serves as a battleground between the good soul and the evil body. From a monotheistic perspective, this is nonsense - why distinguish so sharply between body and soul, or matter and spirit? ...monotheists could not help but be captivated by dualist dichotomies, precisely because they helped them address the problem of evil... Belief in heaven and hel was also dualist in origin. There is no trace of this belief in the Old Testament, which also never claims that the souls of people continue to live after the death of the body.
In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion call it syncretism.

[p.249]
...the religious history of the world does not boil down to the history of gods... The newcomers after first millennium BC, such as Jainism and Buddhism in India, Daoism and Confucianism in China, and Stoicism, Cynicism and Epicureanism in the Mediterranean basin, were characterized by their disregard of gods.
These creeds maintained that the superhuman order governing the world is the product of natural laws rather than of divine wills and whims.

[p.260]
Humanist Religions - Religions that Sanctify Humanity

[p.270]
This approach is sometimes called memetics. It assumes that, just as organic evolution is based on the replication of organic information units called 'genes', so cultural evolution is based on the replication of cultural information units called 'memes'. Successful cultures are those that excel in reproducing their memes, irrespective of the costs and benefits ot their human hosts.
Most scholars in the humanities disdain memetics, seeing it as an amateurish attempt to explain cultural processes with crude biological analogies. But many of these same scholars adhere to memetic's twin sister - postmodernism. Postmodernist thinkers speak about discourses rather than memes as the building blocks of culture. Yet they too see cultures as propagating themselves with little regard for the benefit of humankind. For example, postmodernist thinkers describe nationalism as a deadly plague that spread throughout the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, causing wars, oppression, hate and genocide. The moment people in one country were infected with it, those in neighboring countries were also likely to catch the virus. The nationalist virus presented itself as being beneficial for humans, yet it has been beneficial mainly to itself.
Similar arguments are common in the social sciences, under the aegis of game theory. Game theory explains how in multi-player systems, views, and behaviour patterns that harm all players nevertheless manage to take root and spread. Arms races are a famous example.
No matter what you call it - game theory, postmodernism or memetics - the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being. There is no basis for thinking that the most successful cultures in history are necessarily the best ones for Homo sapiens. Like evolution, history disregards the happiness of individual organisms. And individual humans, for their part, are usually far too ignorant and weak to influence the course of history to their own advantage.

[p.285]
Only around the end of the nineteenth century did scientists come across a few observations that did not fit well with Newton's laws, and these led to the next revolutions in physics - the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics.
...scholars who attempted to reduce biology, economics and psychology to neat Newtonian equations have discovered that these fields have a level of complexity that makes such an aspiration futile... A new branch of mathematics was developed... statistics.
In 1744, two Presbyterian clergymen in Scotland, Alexander Webster and Robert Wallace, decided to set up a life-insurance fund that would provide pensions for the widows and orphans of dead clergymen. They proposed that each of their church's ministers would pay a small portion of his income into the fund, which would invest the money. If a minister died, his widow would receive dividends on the fund's profits. This would allow her to live comfortably for the rest of her life. But to determine how much the ministers had to pay in so that the fund would have enough money to live up to its obligations, Webster and Wallace had to be able to predict how many ministers would die each year, how many widows and orphans they would leave behind, and by how many years the widows would outlive their husbands.
Take note of what the two churchmen did not do. They did not pray to God to reveal the answer.
Their work was founded on several recent breakthroughs in the fields of statistics and probability. One of these was Jacob Bernoulli's Law of Large Numbers. Bernoulli had codified the principle that while it might be difficult to predict with certainty a single event, such as the death of a particular person, it was possible to predict with great accuracy the average outcome of many similar events.

[p.294]
Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the golden age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating. Strict adherence to the wisdom of the ages might perhaps bring back the good old times, and human ingenuity might conceivably improve this or that facet of daily life. However, it was considered impossible for human know-how to overcome the world's fundamental problems. If even Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha and Confucius - who knew everything there is to know - were unable to abolish famine, disease, poverty and war from the world, how could we expect to do so?
Many faiths believed that some day a messiah would appear and end all wars, famines and even death itself. But the notion that humankind could do so by discovering new knowledge and inventing new tools was worse than ludicrous - it was hubris. The story of the Tower of Babel, the story of Icarus, the story of the Golem and countless other myths taught people that any attempt to go beyond human limitations would inevitably lead to disappointment and disaster.
When modern culture admitted that there were many important things that it still did not know, and when that admission of ignorance was married to the idea that scientific discoveries could give us new powers, people began suspecting that real progress might be possible after all. As science began to solve one unsolvable problem after another, many became convinced that humankind could overcome any and every problem by acquiring and applying new knowledge. Poverty, sickness, wars, famines, old age and death itself were not the inevitable fate of humankind. They were simply the fruits of our ignorance.

[p.303]
Most scientific studies are funded because somebody believes they can help attain some political, economic or religious goal. For example, in the sixteenth century, kings and bankers channeled enormous resources to finance geographical expeditions around the world but not a penny for studying child psychology. This is because kings and bankers surmised that the discovery of new geographical knowledge would enable them to conquer new lands and set up trade empires, whereas they couldn't see any profit in understanding child psychology.
...only rarely do scientists dictate the scientific agenda.
To channel limited resources we must answer questions such as "What is more important?" and "What is good?" And these are not scientific questions... By definition, [science] has no pretensions to knowing what should be in the future. Only religions and ideologies seek to answer such questions.

[p.307]
HOW FAR IS THE SUN FROM THE EARTH? ... Every few years, the planet Venus passes directly between the sun and the earth. The duration of the transit differs when seen from distant points on the earth's surface because of the tiny difference in the angle at which the observer sees it. If several observations of the same transit were made from different continents, simple trigonometry was all it would take to calculate our exact distance from the sun.
Astronomers predicted that the next Venus transits would occur in 1761 and 1769. So expeditions were sent from Europe to the four corners of the world in order to observe the transits from as many distant points as possible. In 1761 scientists observed the transit from Siberia, North America, Madagascar and South Africa... The Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge concluded that this was not enough. To obtain the most accurate results it was imperative to send an astronomer all the way to the south-western Pacific Ocean.
Captain James Cook...
The turning point came in 1747, when a British Physician James Lind, conducted a controlled experiment on sailors who suffered from the disease... we not know that it is vitamin C [deficiency].

[p.314]
Why did the military-industrial-scientific complex blossom in Europe rather than India? When Britain leaped forward, why were France, Germany and the United States quick to follow, whereas China lagged behind? When the gap between industrial and non-industrial nations became an obvious economic and political factor, why did Russia, Italy and Austria succeed in closing it, whereas Persia, Egypt and the Ottoman Empire failed? After all, the technology of the first industrial wave was relatively simple. Was it so hard for Chinese or Ottomans to engineer steam engines, manufacture machine guns and lay down railroads?
The world's first commercial railroad opened for business in 1830, in Britain. By 1850, Western nations were criss-crossed by almost 40,000 kilometers of railroads - but in the whole of Asia, Africa and Latin America there were only 4,000 kilometers of tracks. In 1880, the West boasted more than 350,000 kilometers of railroads, whereas in the rest of the world there were but 35,000 kilometers of train lines (and most of these were laid by the British in India). The first railroad in China opened only in 1876. It was twenty-five kilometers long and built by Europeans - the Chinese government destroyed it the following year. In 1880 the Chinese Empire did not operate a single railroad. The first railroad in Persia was built only in 1888, and it connected Tehran with a Muslim holy site about ten kilometers south of the capital. It was constructed and operated by a Belgian company. In 1950, the total railway network of Persia still amounted to a meagre 2,500 kilometers, in a country seven times the size of Britain.
The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalized rapidly.
This explanation shed new light on the period from 1500 to 1850. During this era Europe did not enjoy any obvious technological, political, military or economic advantage over the Asian powers, yet the continent built up a unique potential, whose importance suddenly became obvious around 1850.
What potential did Europe develop in the early modern period that enabled it to dominate the late modern world? There are two complementary answers: modern science and capitalism. Europeans were used to thinking and behaving in a scientific and capitalist way even before they enjoyed any significant technological advantages. When the technological bonanza began, Europeans could harness it far better than anybody else. So it is hardly coincidental that science and capitalism form the most important legacy that European imperialism has bequeathed the post-European world of the twenty-first century. Europe and Europeans no longer rule the world, but science and capital are growing ever stronger.

[p.333-335]
Cuneiform came to the attention of Europeans in 1618, when the Spanish ambassador in Persia went sightseeing in the ruins of ancient Persepolis, where he saw inscriptions that nobody could explain to him... In 1657 European scholars published the first transcription of a cuneiform text from Persepolis. More and more transcriptions followed, and for close to two centuries scholars in the West tried to decipher them. None succeeded.
In the 1830s, a British officer named Henry Rawlinson was sent to Persia to help the shah train his army in the European style...
Rawlinson did not rest on his laurels. As an army officer, he had military and political missions to carry out, but whenever he had a spare moment he puzzled over the secret script. He tried one method after another and finally managed to decipher the Old Persian part of the inscription... Without the efforts of modern European imperialists such as Rawlinson, we would not have known much about the fate of the ancient Middle Eastern empires.
Another notable imperialist scholar was William Jones. Jones arrived in India in September 1783 to serve as a judge in the Supreme Court of Bengal. He was so captivated by the wonders of India that within less than six months of his arrival he had founded the Asiatic Society. This academic organization was devoted to studying the cultures, histories and societies of Asia, and in particular those of India. Within two years Jones published his observations on the Sanskrit language, which pioneered the science of comparative linguistics. ...Hindu, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic, Old Persian, German, French and English... He was thus the first to identify what later came to be called the Indo-European family of languages.
Jone's study was an important milestone not merely due to his bold (and accurate) hypotheses, but also because of the orderly methodology that he developed to compare languages. It was adopted by other scholars, enabling them systematically to study the development of all the world's languages.
Linguistics received enthusiastic imperial support. The European empires believed that in order to govern effectively they must know the languages and cultures of their subjects. British officers arriving in India were supposed to spend up to three years in a Calcutta college, where they studied Hindu and Muslim law alongside English law; Sanskrit, Urdu and Persian alongside Greek and Latin; and Tamil, Bengali and Hindustani culture alongside mathematics, economics and geography. The study of linguistics provided invaluable help in understanding the structure and grammar of local languages.
Thanks to the work of people like William Jones and Henry Rawlinson, the European conquerors knew their empires very well. ...Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, fewer than 5,000 British officials, about 40,000-70,000 British soldiers, and perhaps another 100,000 British business people, hangers-on, wives and children were sufficient to conquer and rule up to 300 million Indians.

[p.336]
No less important was the fact that science gave the empires ideological justification.

[p.337]
In truth, neither the narrative of oppression and exploitation nor that of 'the White Man's burden' completely matches the facts. The European empires did so many different things on such a large scale, that you can find plenty of examples to support whatever you want to say about them. You think that these empires were evil monstrosities that spread death, oppression and injustice around the world? You could easily fill an encyclopedia with their crimes. You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements. Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them.
But science was also used by imperialists to more sinister ends... Biologists, anthropologists and even linguists provided scientific proof that Europeans are superior to all other races, and consequently have the right (if not perhaps the duty) to rule over them... They noticed that the earliest Sanskrit speakers, who had invaded India from Central Asia more than 3,000 years ago, had called themselves Arya.

[p.353-354]
...credit was not invented in modern Europe. It existed in almost all agricultural societies, and in early modern period the emergence of European capitalism was closely linked to economic developments in Asia. Remember, too, that until the late eighteenth century, Asia was the world's economic powerhouse, meaning that Europeans had far less capital at their disposal than the Chinese, Muslims or Indians.
However, in the sociopolitical systems of China, India and the Muslim world, credit played only a secondary role. Merchants and bankers in the markets of Istanbul, Isfahan, Delhi and Beijing may have thought along capitalist lines, but the kings and generals in the places and forts tended to despise merchants and mercantile thinking.
Most non-European empires of the early modern era were established by great conquerors such as Nurhaci and Nader Shah, or by bureaucratic and military elites as in the Qing and Ottoman empires. Financing wars through taxes and plunder (without making fine distinctions between the two), they owed little to credit systems, and they cared even less about the interests of bankers and investors.
In Europe, on the other hand, kings and generals gradually adopted the mercantile way of thinking, until merchants and bankers became the ruling elite. The European conquest of the world was increasingly financed through credit rather than taxes, and was increasingly directed by capitalists whose main ambition was to receive maximum returns on their investments. ...Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest.
Columbus took on some experienced lobbyists, and with their help he managed to convince Queen Isabella to invest. Isabella hit the jackpot.
...princes and bankers had far more trust in the potential of exploration, and were more willing to part with their money. This was the magic circle of imperial capitalism: credit financed new discoveries; discoveries led to colonies; colonies provided profits; profits built trust; and trust translated into more credit. Nurhaci and Nader Shah ran out of fuel after a few thousand kilometers. Capitalist entrepreneurs only increased their financial momentum from conquest to conquest.

[p.355]
Europeans turned to limited liability joint-stock companies. Instead of a single investor betting all his money on a single rickety ship, the joint-stock company collected money from a large number of investors, each risking only a small portion of his capital...
In 1568 the Dutch, who were mainly Protestant, revolted against their Catholic Spanish overlord.
The secret of Dutch success was credit. The Dutch burghers, who had little taste for combat on land, hired mercenary armies to fight the Spanish for them. The Dutch themselves meanwhile took to the sea in ever-larger fleets. Mercenary armies and cannon-brandishing fleets cost a fortune, but the Dutch were able to finance their military expeditions more easily than the mighty Spanish Empire because they secured the trust of the burgeoning European financial system at a time when the Spanish king was carelessly eroding its trust in him. Financiers extended the Dutch enough credit to set up armies and fleets, and these armies and fleets gave the Dutch control of world trade routes, which in turn yielded handsome profits.

[p.362]
The Mississippi Bubble was one of history's most spectacular financial crashes. The royal French financial system never recuperated fully from the blow. The way in which the Mississippi Company used its political clout to manipulate share prices and fuel the buying frenzy caused the public to lose faith in the French banking system and the financial wisdom of the French king. Louis XV found it more and more difficult to raise credit. This became one of the chief reasons that the overseas French Empire fell into British bands. While the British could borrow money easily and at low interest rates, France had difficulties securing loans, and had to pay high interest on them. In order to finance his growing debts, the king of France borrowed more and more money at higher and higher interest rates. Eventually, in the 1780s, Louis XVI, who had ascended to the throne on his grandfather's death, realized that half his annual budget was tied to servicing the interest on his loans, and that he was heading towards bankruptcy. Reluctantly, in 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates General, the French parliament that had not met for a century and a half, in order to find a solution to the crisis. Thus began the French Revolution.

[p.364]
In 1840 Britain duly declared war on China in the name of 'free trade'. It was a walkover... Under the subsequent peace treaty, China agreed not to constrain the activities of British drug merchants and to compensate them for damages inflicted by the Chinese police.
Egypt, too, leaned to respect the long arm of British capitalism. During the nineteenth century, French and British investors lent huge sums to the rulers of Egypt, first in order to finance the Suez Canal project, and later to fund far less successful enterprises. Egyptian debt swelled and European creditors increasingly meddled in Egyptian affairs. In 1881 Egyptian nationalists had had enough and rebelled. They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt. Queen Victoria was not amused. A year later she dispatched her army and navy to the Nile, and Egypt remained a British protectorate until after the Second World War.
In 1821 the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. The uprising aroused great sympathy in liberal and Romantic circles in Britain - Lord Byron, the poet, even went to Greece to fight alongside the insurgents. But London financiers saw an opportunity as well. They proposed to the rebel leaders the issue of tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. The Greeks would promise to repay the bonds, plus interest, if and when they won their independence. Private investors bought bonds to make a profit, or out of sympathy for the Greek cause, or both. The value of Greek Rebellion Bonds rose and fell on the London stock exchange in tempo with military successes and failures on the battlefields of Hellas. The Turks gradually gained the upper hand. With a rebel defeat imminent, the bondholders faced the prospect of losing their trousers. The bondholders' interest was the national interest, so the British organized an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come.
After the Battle of Navarino, British capitalists were more willing to invest their money in risky overseas deals. They had seen that if a foreign debtor refused to repay loans, the British army would get their money back.
This is why today a country's credit rating is far more important to its economic well-being than are its natural resources. Credit ratings indicate the probability that a country will pay its debts. In addition to purely economic data, they take into account political, social and even cultural factors. An oil-rich country cursed with a despotic government, endemic warfare and a corrupt judicial system will usually receive a low credit rating. As a result, it is likely to remain relatively poor since it will not be able to raise the necessary capital to make the most of its oil bounty. A country devoid of natural resources, but which enjoys peace, a fair judicial system and a free government is likely to receive a high credit rating. As such, it may be able to raise enough cheap capital to support a good education system and foster a flourishing high-tech industry.

[p.376]
A partial breakthrough in converting heat into movement followed the invention of gunpowder in 9th C. China. At first, the idea of using gunpowder to propel projectiles was so counter-intuitive that for centuries gunpowder was used primarily to produce fire bombs... About 600 years passed...
...The new technology was born in British coal mines. As the British population swelled, forests were cut down to fuel the growing economy and make way for houses and fields. Britain suffered from an increasing shortage of firewood. It began burning coal as a substitute. Many coal seams were located in waterlogged areas, and flooding prevented miners from accessing the lower strata of the mines.
...In 18th C. British coal mines, the piston was connected to a pump that extracted water from the bottom of the mineshafts. (steam engine)

[p.396]
A crucial link in the spreading timetable system was public transportation... In 1784 a carriage service with a published schedule began operating in Britain. Its timetable specified only the hour of departure, not arrival. Back then, each British city and town had its own local time, which could differ from London time by up to half an hour...
The first commercial train service began operating between Liverpool and Manchester in 1830. Ten years later, the first train timetable was issued. The trains were much faster than the old carriages, so the quirky differences in local hours became a severe nuisance. In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time, rather than the local times of Liverpool, Manchester, or Glasgow.

[p.415]
Since 1945, no independent country recognized by the UN has been conquered and wiped off the map. Limited international wars still occur from time to time, and millions still die in wars, but wars are no longer the norm.
Many people believe that the disappearance of international war is unique to the rich democracies of western Europe. In fact, peace reached Europe after it prevailed in other parts of the world. Thus the last serious international wars between South American countries were the Peru-Ecuador War of 1941 and the Bolivia-Paraguay War of 1932-5. And before that there hadn't been a serious war between South American countries since 1879-84, with Chile on one side and Bolivia and Peru on the other.
We seldom think of the Arab world as particularly peaceful. Yet only once since the Arab countries won their independence has one of them mounted a full-scale invasion of another (the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990). There have been quite a few border clashes (e.g. Syria vs Jordan in 1970), many armed interventions of one in the affairs of another (e.g. Syria in Lebanon), numerous civil wars (Algeria, Yemen, Libya) and an abundance of coups and revolts. Yet there have been no full-scale international wars among the Arab states except the Gulf War. Even widening the scope to include the entire Muslim world adds only one more example, the Iran-Iraq War. There was no Turkey-Iran War, Pakistan-Afghanistan War, or Indonesia-Malaysia War.
In Africa things are far less rosy. But even there, most conflicts are civil wars and coups. Since African states won their independence in the 1960s and 1970s, very few countries have invaded one another in the hope of conquest.

[p.416]
Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms.
Secondly, while the price of war soared, its profits declined. For most of history, polities could enrich themselves by looting or annexing enemy territories. Most wealth consisted of material things like fields, cattle, slaves and gold, so it was easy to loot it or occupy it. Today, wealth consists mainly of human capital and organizational know-how. Consequently it is difficult to carry it off or conquer it by military force.
...There are no silicon mines in Silicon Valley. The wealth resides in the minds of Google engineers and Hollywood script doctors, directors and special-effects wizards, who would be on the first plane to Bangalore or Mumbai long before the Chinese tanks rolled into Sunset Boulevard.
...There is a positive feedback loop... The tightening web of international connections erodes the independence of most countries, lessening the chance that any one of them might single-handedly let slip the dogs of war.

[p.439]
Liberal politics is based on the idea that the voters know best, and there is no need for Big Brother to tell us what is good for us. Liberal economics is based on the idea that the customer is always right. Liberal art declares that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Students in liberal schools and universities are taught to think for themselves. Commercials urge us to 'Just do it.' Action films, stage dramas, soap operas, novels, and catchy pop songs indoctrinate us constantly: 'Be true to yourself', 'Listen to yourself', 'Follow your heart.' Jean-Jacques Rousseau stated this view most classically: 'What I feel to be good - is good. What I feel to be bad - is bad.'

[p.440]
According to the selfish gene theory, natural selection makes people, like other organisms, choose what is good for the reproudction of their genes, even if it is bad for them as individuals.

[p.442]
This idea is so alien to modern liberal culture that when Western New Age movements encountered Buddhist insights, they translated them into liberal terms, thereby turning them on their head. New Age cults frequently argue: 'Happiness does not depend on external conditions. It depends only on what we feel inside. People should stop pursuing external achievements such as wealth and status, and connect instead with their inner feelings.' Or more succinctly, 'Happiness begins within.' This is exactly what biologists argue, but more or less the opposite of what Buddha said.
Buddha agreed with modern biology and New Age movements that happiness is independent of external conditions. Yet his more important and far more profound insight was that true happiness is also independent of our inner feelings. Indeed, the more significance we give our feelings, the more we crave them, and the more we suffer. Buddha's recommendation was to stop not only the pursuit of external achievements, but also the pursuit of inner feelings.
...for many traditional philosophies and religions, such as Buddhism, the key to happiness is to know the truth about yourself - to understand who, or what, you really are. Most people wrongly identify themselves with their feelings, thoughts, likes and dislikes... They never realize that they are not their feelings, and that the relentless pursuit of particular feelings just traps them in misery.
If this is so, then our entire understanding of the history of happiness might be misguided. Maybe it isn't so important whether people's expectations are fulfilled and whether they enjoy pleasant feelings. The main question is whether people know the truth about themselves. What evidence do we have that people today understand this truth any better than ancient foragers or medieval peasants?

[p.444]
Most history books focus on the ideas of great thinkers, the bravery of warriors, the charity of saints and the creativity of artists. They have much to tell about the weaving and unraveling of social structures, about the rise and fall of empires, about the discovery and spread of technologies. Yet they say nothing about how all this influenced the happiness and suffering of individuals. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history. We had better start filling it.

[p.450]
...lines of E. coli, a bacterium that lives symbiotically in the human gut (and which makes headlines when it gets out of the gut and causes deadly infections), have been genetically engineered to produce biofuel. E. coli and several species of fungi have also been engineered to produce insulin, thereby lowering the cost of diabetes treatment. A gene extracted from an Arctic fish has been inserted into potatoes, making the plants more frost-resistant.

[p.456]
What if such interfaces are used to directly link a brain to the Internet, or to directly link several brains to each other, thereby creating a sort of Inter-brain-net? What might happen to human memory, consciousness and identity?

[p.458]
...suppose you could back up your brain to a portable hard drive and then run it on your laptop. Would your laptop be able to think and feel just like a Sapiens? If so, would it be you or someone else? What if computer programmers could create an entirely new but digital mind, composed of computer code, complete with a sense of self, consciousness, and memory? If you ran the program on your computer, would it be a person? If you deleted it could you be charged with murder?
We might soon have the answer to such questions. The Human Brain Project, founded in 2005, hopes to recreate a complete human brain inside a computer, with electronic circuits in the computer emulating neural networks in the brain.

[p.460]
Our late modern world prides itself on recognizing, for the first time in history, the basic equality of all humans, yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of all societies. Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves. A baby born to a poor peasant family was likely to be as intelligent as the Crown prince. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality.
...Indeed, the future masters of the world will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals. Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.
Physicists define the Big Bang as a singularity. It is a point at which all the known laws of nature did not exist. Time too did not exist. It is thus meaningless to say that anything existed 'before' the Big Bang. We may be fast approaching a new singularity, when all the concepts that give meaning to our world - me, you, men, women, love and hate - will become irrelevant. Anything happening beyond that point is meaningless to us.

[p.463]
If the curtain is indeed about to drop on Sapiens history, we members of one of its final generations should devote some time to answering one last question: what do we want to become? This question, sometimes know as he Human Enhancement question, dwarfs the debates that currently preoccupy politicians, philosophers, scholars and ordinary people. After all, today's debate between today's religions, ideologies, nations and classes will in all likelihood disappear along with Homo sapiens. If our successors indeed function on a different level of consciousness (or perhaps possess something beyond consciousness that we cannot even conceive), it seems doubtful that Christianity or Islam will be of interest to them, that their social organization could be Communist or capitalist, or that their genders could be male or female.
And yet the great debates of history are important because at least the first generation of these gods would be shaped by the cultural ideas of their human designers. Would they be created in the image of capitalism, of Islam, or of feminism? The answer to this question might send them careening in entirely different directions.