W o r l d H i s t o r yT S U O c t o b e r 2 0 1 2

Contents

General information 11. Introduction 22. Course Design 23. Assessment 24. Educational Aims 2

Problems 31. Beginnings 42. The Great Leap 63. Farmers, herders, horses and wheels 84. Religion and the formation of states 105. Intellectual Attitudes 126. Population and Disease 147. War 169. Another Great Leap 2010. Banking and Finance 2211. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations 24At the end of this course 26

Readings 27

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General information

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1. IntroductionThis is a course on world history, a fairly new academic specimen, with quite a long history, dating back at least to Christian perspectives on our past and how we got to the present. World history deals with the big picture, the long term development of the globe. Some authors start with the big bang, and finish with the present day financial crisis. We skip most of the history of the universe and start where we, and some of our ancestors, come in, and then continue to the present. “World history” refers to a certain perspective. Historians working in this field are not just writing text-books about human civilization as this developed since the earliest times and spread over all continents. Most world historians are specialists in their own right, dealing with certain aspects of this process, which encompasses all and everything. One may, for instance, write the history of rice-cultivation or salt or the horse saddle, looking at these topics from a world historical perspective. What these and other specialists have in common and marks them as “world historians” is their approach, which is characterized by an interest in both long-term processes and forms of exchange between civilizations. Following this approach, “world history” has sharpened historians’ attention for certain topics, which were formerly ignored or only played a minor role in historical research. World historians, for example, have emphasized: the role of climatic and environmental factors, the importance of disease, human migration, trade, exchange of ideas and technology, and the part played by the emergence and spread of intellectual networks. Consequently, these and other subjects will form the contents of this module.

2. Course DesignThis is a brief, 2 week course to introduce students to ‘world history’. This course manual consists of a number of problems. these problem will be discussed in class, and each time some students will prepare the discussion, and lead the debate on the relevant problem. The readings have been trimmed for the brief time span that the course runs, but may still be consid-ered voluminous. For all problems there are relevant are sources in a reader. At the end of the course manual is a breakdown of the articles in the reader for each problem. Students are free to consult other resources and introduce the perspectives and data from these in the group discussions. The course manual contains a lot of pictures. These are generally as important as the text to understand what a problem is about. Take good note of these and the captions accompanying them.In order to stimulate discussion and the exchange of arguments during group meetings, each student is expected to formulate questions and comments related to the texts of corresponding assignments before the group session takes place.The course manual and the reader are must have sources. You cannot do without. Always bring your course manual to the tutorial.

3. AssessmentWill be part of the course that this module is part of. details will be presented at the first lecture.

4. Educational Aims- To familiarize students with theory, historiography and methodology of historical sociology.- To give students insight in some of the basic patterns in the history of civilization.- To trace the historical background of “globalization”, and give insight in the modern world-system;- To give insight in the development of the relationship between man and his environment.- To look at European history from an “external” perspective, i.e. as part of a wider pattern of fac-tors.

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Problems

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1. BeginningsOnce upon a time there were no humans at all. Over a period of 4 or 5 million years through various now extinct species and only quite recently Homo Sapiens came about. We now think we have a pretty reliable picture of what we descend from: Australopithecus Afarensis - ??? - Homo Erectus - Homo Heidelbergensis?? - ??? - Homo Sapiens! With hindsight one branch, but a branch in a thick bush of evolutionary experiments. For most experts the latter happened no more than 150,000 years ago. For about 140,000 years our species lived by hunting, scavenging and gathering, in small groups, moving about with the seasons, the animals and the ripening of fruits, tubers and nuts. Around 10,000 years ago our species had migrated almost all over the globe and there were possibly 4 million people on the planet. It took us about 5700 generations to get to these 4 million. And then things got going. 400 generations later there are more than 6 billion humans on the planet. Surely man is the most successful animal to walk the planet. Such figures illustrate the different paces of time, the various speeds of change and development. So it all started slowly. Very gradually homo sapiens conquered the globe. Our ancestors walked from Africa to Europe, over the Eurasian continent, onto the Americas and finally crossed to Australia. They lived as hunter-gatherers, a specific way of life, now all but extinct, and even where these old ways, now in marginal unattractive areas such as the Kalahari desert or the north-polar region, are still extant, they survive under completely different circumstances. Of course Homo sapiens did not invent this way of life. It was first developed by predecessor species, and slowly between Homo Erectus and Homo Sapiens perfected. Perfected to such an extent that humans could live all over our planet. Through archeology and paleoanthropology we know a lot about the creatures we were en from which we descend. More still escapes us. We know a lot about our ancestors and the ways in which we are different from related species from fossils unearthed by scientists. ‘Bones of contention’ someone has dubbed these, as scientists have continued to fight over the meaning and interpretation of them, an oc-casional fraud complicating things further. However, behaviour does not leave fossils, and it has always been our behaviour that made a difference. Humans out bred and out smarted everything else. And finally they could even talk about it! Our beginnings have always been of interest to mankind. Long before science started to get involved there were stories about our origins in the distant past. It is striking that to many cultures the dim past, when we first started out, is seen as a paradise lost, a golden age when we actually lived a leisurely life in....Paradise. Remember the story from Western culture: the first humans lived in the Garden of Eden. No need not work, no need to toil. Adam and Eve were hunter-gatherers. Everything was there for the taking. But they sinned by eating from the tree of knowledge and were driven from Eden by God to live their lives in misery, to give birth in pain and to toil under the heat of the sun. Their sons illustrate the transition: one was a farmer the other a herdsman. Some present day researchers agree with the bible: Before 10,000 years ago, those were the days, the days we lived in harmony with nature. Well fed, healthy, spending a few hours a day working, and the rest on playful activities. Keeping population growth within limits. People lived in small egalitarian bands, roaming from one place to another. Before we fell from grace. Or so the consensus tells us.

Homo Habilis with a kill. Meat for a bigger brain?

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Ancient mural painting of I’kung Kalahari bushmen fighting

Lucy, australopithecus afarensis. Completely human but chimp brained

Homo Heidelbergensis at Boxgrove, Southern england. Hunting or scavengingNeanderthals at Gibraltar. Seafood and fire

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2. The Great LeapIn A Green History of the World, Clive Ponting writes:

‘The most important task in all human history has been to find a way of extracting from the different ecosystems in which people have lived enough resources for maintaining life – food, clothing, shelter, energy and other material goods. Inevitably this has meant intervening in natural ecosystems. The problem for human societies has been to balance their various demands against the ability of the ecosystems to withstand the resulting pressure.’

Though mobile hunter-gatherers, it has traditionally been argued, had some effects on the environment, their impact was limited. Their way of life persisted basically unchanged for tens of thousands of years. But then in a relatively brief period, new ways of relating to the environment came into existence.About 12,000 years ago some people who had hitherto been hunter-gatherers gradually adopted a new way of life as they became sedentary and turned to agriculture. Not only was this process characterized by animal and plant domestication, it also entailed increased specialization of labour and the development of villages and cities. In 1941, the archaeologist Gordon Childe coined the term Neolithic Revolution to describe this process of change, which, according to him, constituted no less than a watershed in human history. We can now say: the watershed in human history.In view of its importance, it is understandable that scientists have been interested in the study of the nature, origins and long-term effects of this transition. Plants and animals that were once wild became domestic. After being domesticated, some animals were part of another revolution, that of the second-ary products. In the process men and animals became different creatures. Why did all of this happen? And not once, but several times in different parts of the world.The changes that mark the neolithic revolution did not occur overnight and did not happen everywhere at the same time. Some regions of the world preceded others. One area sticks out in particular: west Asia and the crescent running from what is now Israel north to present day Turkey, and then south and east through contemporary Irak. Here changes in climate contributed to new ways of life, and in the end to sedentary agriculture.This is also the area where Adam and Eve lived, and raised their sons, Cain and Abel, the farmer and the herdsman. As we know: Cain slew Abel! What more is there to say about agriculture? And civiliza-tion.

Like everything on Earth, men are slaves to the sun. Heat, moisture, energy all come from the centre of our solar system. All life is at her mercy.

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Domestication of sheep and goats in West Asia

Catalhoyuk, 9000 years ago. Big city. Over 13 hectares.

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3. Farmers, herders, horses and wheelsAgriculture was developed not just once, but independently several times over a period of 6 millennia. From these points of origin it spread and settled in new areas, slowly displacing older ways of living.Migration has always been a mark of man and his immediate predecessors. Hunter gatherers colonized the world before farmers did, and the reason to go elsewhere are (and still are today) always the same: the present place no longer brings what it used to do. Hunting becomes too intensive; game disappears; trees no longer give enough fruit to feed all. With agriculture it was no different. But of course the reasons people had to move elsewhere were often different now.We know most of how this happened in West Asia, the oldest place where agriculture was invented. From there the new way of life spread westward, and north westward, slowly moving over the Mediterranean and the central European plains till it reached what is now the Netherlands. Those developments took thousands of years. They were complex, and involved old and new ways of living coexisting, compet-ing and trading. An important role was played by the area that is north and east of the black sea, where pastoralism became a partly sedentary partly mobile way of life. Important elements here were the invention of the wheel (appr. 5500 years ago), and the domestication of the horse. Horses are sturdy and meaty creatures, and the initial domestication was undoubtedly geared to food. There turned out to be other ways of using a horse. People learned how to ride them and how to harness their energy for transport. Until the invention of the steam locomotive in the 19th century, the horse was the most important means of ground transport. The wheel was wedded to the horse. In peace, but also in war: the chariot was the most awesome of weapons. So important was the domestication of the horse, that today from India to Scandinavia and to Spain men still speak languages descending from the language of the people that tamed the horse. All Indo European languages descend from the dialect spoken by the tribes that first succeeded in domesticating and then riding the horse.As indicated developments were slow and gradual. There were regular and severe setbacks. Though the earth was warming up, there were still brief cold and dry spells, lasting between 50 and several 100 years. For instance around 6000 years ago, when in south east Europe cultivated areas were abandoned, and people took to hunting and gathering again. As the agricultural way of life spread, trade increased. All over Europe we can witness the trade in goods, following them from their origins to their various destinations. When finally the stone age ended with the invention of technology for smelting, and

manufacturing bronze tools and weapons, trade rose to new levels. Social complexity increased. States had already formed earlier in the cradle of west Asian agricul-ture. Now even on the European peninsula more centrally led social organizations arose, in the end resulting in the Roman empire stretching from the Near East to the North of England, and all the way to the Atlantic coast of Spain.

A Band-Keramik village above and the pottery that gives this culture its name on the right

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The significance of the wheel. Wheel-burial in the Ukraine and a reconstructed wagon.

Above: Grave in Varna, Bulgaria. Gold and bronze in large quantities witness riches and surplus production (5000 bc)Gold plated wheel and cart from Denmark, 1000 bc

Prized possessions. Spread of polished axes over Europe from locaion of the specila stone in the South of France.

Maikop silver vase. Cows on this side, horse on the other side. The two most significant creatures in the culture. Below: early picture of a horse. Note the difference with modern horses.

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4. Religion and the formation of states ‘In all these comings and goings involving the exercise of authority, the rulers of the early civilizations were prone to invoke the approval of the gods...There was in effect a hierarchy of authority, linking men and gods in a continuous chain…The evolution of the new political forms and the emergence of the new spiritual concepts were indivisible processes, aspect almost of the same process.’Cowen, N. Global History

‘Religion and government can be as important for the structure and functioning of the economy as are the monetary institutions. The differences between the two are minimal in the ancient Near East and their functions are complimentary to the point of being indistinguishable. In Tyre, the two great political institutions, the palace and the temple, were respectively the house of the king and the house of the god, and sheltered the same symbolic entity: the king of the city or Melqart.’Aubet, M. A., The Phoenicians and the West

‘More bluntly put, to what degree did the process of state-making depend in no small part upon re-defining the boundaries of legal competence of the state, the privileges of local communities, and the personal religious convictions of persons at the expense of the ancient and medieval Christian church? Conventional histories of this complex process traditionally suggest gradual redefinition, celebrating a successful “liberation” of the law from explicitly religious objectives and assumptions governing the law’s nature and purpose. In short, this is the crowning achievement and hallmark of “modernity.” The present essay suggests that on balance, this conventional narrative now lacks cohesion and suasive power. All three books under review here, each a heavily documented summary of predominantly secondary sources rather than archive-based arguments, struggle with the inadequacy of this inherited narrative.’‘It is impossible to understand the long history of state-making apart from the legal changes that un-questionably flowed from religious conviction and motivations, whether on the grand scale Berman tries to recapitulate, or in Witte’s labor to illuminate Lutheran jurisprudence, or upon the more modest canvas where Gorski illuminates the nexus between biblical law and social discipline.’Roeber, G. The Law, Religion, and State Making in the Early Modern World: Protestant Revolutions in the Works.

Gods, kings, king-gods around the world Mayan maize god

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Top to bottoom: the spread of Buddhism, Christianity and Islam.

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5. Intellectual Attitudes

Is there a “world history” of ideas? Can we discern any patterns in the way in which human beings think about themselves and their place in the world? Ideas are not fixed entities like bricks of stone. The same idea (e.g. the idea of God or nature) may change over time, vary from place to place, and may in the final analysis even have different meanings for different individuals. Moreover, ideas are in a constant flux; they travel and mix with other ideas in sometimes unexpected ways. From its earliest beginnings, human history has been characterized by the exchange of ideas between different civilizations. Bud-dhism spread from India to China and from there to Japan, adapting to local circumstances as it moved forward. The same is true for Christianity that only became triumphant on account of its great ability to absorb pagan ideas (like Stoicism) and beliefs of rivalling religions (like the cult of Mithras). But that is also to say that, elusive and malleable as ideas may be, they do not constitute a platonic reality of their own. Ideas do not beget ideas all by themselves, nor do they pop up in the head of some solitary genius. Although they may have a momentum of their own, they are also social constructs: part of the society in which they fulfil their role. To explain their emergence, specific form and success thus means to take into account this interdependency between ideas and society. And given this fact it may be pos-sible to abstract from individual differences concerning meaning and interpretation in order to arrive at a more structural perspective on the relation between types of ideas –i.e. world views- and types of society. Different types of society relate to different types of world view, i.e. different ideas about God, nature, man and his place in this world; and –at an even more fundamental level- different perceptions of the basic categories of reality itself like time, space and causality.This social aspect of the history of ideas has to be taken into account, when studying man’s intellectual attitude towards nature. Doing that, it is only logical to expect that man’s ideas about nature have varied. Modern society is undoubtedly characterized by its specific attitude towards its natural environment. But how did this attitude emerge? Why? What are its basic components, helping us to define it and to mark the difference with other ideas about the relation between man and nature? And is this modern attitude inherently better because it is “modern”? Does it contain more truth than so-called primitive world views? But then again, how does the “savage mind” perceive the natural world? And finally: who is the real savage? We or “them”? Precisely because they have a social impact, ideas are never innocent.

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Twilight of the primitive world. Nuer herdsmen milking a cow in the early 20th century.

The great divide. Frontispiece of Bacon’s great instauration. Ships sailing onto the sea of the unknown to gather knowledge that they will then take home. On the right: science, always only visiting, never staying to become local. Bringing knowledge back home to create the great asymmetry between modern and primitive.

The mechanization of the world. Man is a machine.

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6. Population and DiseaseEven today the course of history is usually explained in terms of political power, military genius, and the impact of ideas and technology. The Roman Empire, it is argued, declined due to the corruption of its elite or the rise of Christianity or the invasion of barbarian tribes. That may have been so. Yet, there may have been other factors at work too. Between 165 and 180 A.D., the Roman Empire was struck by outbreaks of epidemic diseases. A second wave of outbreaks followed in the years between 251 and 266. In both cases these outbreaks probably concerned smallpox and measles. Their effects were all the more devastating, since the Roman population had not been confronted with such diseases before. Henceforth, outbreaks of epidemic diseases have become a recurring phenomenon. Around the middle of the sixth century, the bubonic plague arrived in Europe, reaching Constantinople in 542 where it killed about 10.000 people every day at its peak. From there it spread to the West. In 576 the last Roman emperor was killed, marking the end of an empire that had lasted for more than a thousand years.Yet, Rome was not an isolated case. From about 200 A.D. onwards, other parts of the Eurasian con-tinent suffered similar setbacks. The Chinese empire of the Han dynasty was disunited and invaded by nomadic tribes. In India the so-called Kushan state and the Gupta empire disappeared. Generally speaking, between 200 and 600 A.D. the Eurasian world experienced a situation of general crisis. This crisis, occurring simultaneously in different parts of the Eurasian continent, seems to suggest that these great empires were all victims of the first “world-wide” outbreaks of epidemic diseases. It suggests the impact of disease on history, which could easily be corroborated with other examples as well (for in-stance, the European conquest of the Americas). It can also be considered as evidence for the fact that these different parts of the Eurasian continent were by that time well connected through trade-routes, facilitating the exchange of people, goods, …and germs.The historical impact of disease varies from society to society. It depends on the kind and degree of hu-man settlement, population growth, migration patterns, ecological circumstances, and the domesticated livestock. What then exactly is this nexus between population (numbers, concentration, migration), type of society (nomadic or settled), food production (kind of crops and animals) and the historical role of disease? We should consider this complex of questions from the point of view of historical sociology, looking for structural patterns.

Disease and climate. Malaria gradients rising towards the equator.

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Victim of the black death Spread of the plague in Europe. The price of trade and exchange

Right: surgery around 1900. the rise of interventionist medicine on the wings of science.Below: Seattle policemen trying to prevent contracting the Spanis flu in 1919. What’s new?

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7. WarWar, huh, yeahWhat is it good forAbsolutely nothingUh-huhWar, huh, yeahWhat is it good forAbsolutely nothingSay it again, y’all

War, huh, good GodWhat is it good forAbsolutely nothingListen to me

Ohhh, war, I despiseBecause it means destructionOf innocent livesWar means tearsTo thousands of mothers eyesWhen their sons go to fightAnd lose their lives

Who wouldn’t agree with Edwin Starr who made ‘War’ a Motown hit around 19701? Who does not loath war. At least nowadays. At least most people. Whatever sensitivities and political correctness war has been a major pastime for mankind. Rare have been the times with peace all around. Borderlines, languages, religions all have changed through war. It must be good for some-thing.It has been a major if not the impetus for technological innovation. From the dawn of mankind till today a major part of human ingenuity has gone into the development of weaponry and its deployment. This can be documented from the chariot or the stirrup to the tank or the nuclear missile.Does this mean war is inevitable? Is it in us? Are we violently aggressive by na-ture? Biology tells us that almost all young social animals play fighting games, just as herbivores play flight games and predators hunting games.In the context of a course on world history, a course on large scale changes taking place in the course of time, it is the general characteristics of war that will interest us. The rise and fall of the offensive or the defensive; the price of war, and how to pay for it; the specialist warrior or the mobilized group member etc. etc. And of course: how such characteristics tend to change over time. As usual one change will evoke a response, which will…and so on till the end of mankind.

1 On youtube there are many version of the song. The original Edwin Starr: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-2pNCZiNk&feature=player_embedded#. And a clip with the Vietnam protest very much in focus: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d8C4AIFgUg&feature=related.

This male chimp was killed by a raiding party during the war in the 1970ies between two groups of chimps in Gombe. Map on the right.

Lethal beauty; battle axe adorned with a boar

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Offensive mobility; Assyrian cavalry. Note the lack of spurs

Siege of a medieval city. Defense has the upper hand.

Left: Heyday of the defensive. Machine guns and barbed wire during world war 1.

The return of the offensive. German tanks and infantry supported from the air practice for the conquest of Europe

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8. The modern world-system: trade, slavery and colonialism

Civilizations have always exchanged goods, slaves, ideas, technologies, genes and germs. Nevertheless, the discovery of the Americas gave rise to a global system of exchange that has been described by Wil-liam McNeill as “the first world-wide web”. This system may have been crucial in the rise of Europe as a political and economic world-power. The new system of exchange has been called “the Atlantic triangle”, because it linked together Europe, Africa and the Americas. Since the native population of the Americas had rapidly declined because of diseases that Europeans had brought with them, European colonialists started to buy slaves on the African shores in exchange for cotton clothes and weapons. African slaves were transported to the New World in order to replace the native population working on sugar and coffee plantations and in the gold and silver mines. Sugar, coffee, gold, silver and other items were traded to Europe in exchange for food supplies and manufactured products. The slave-based colonial system was vital to the Atlantic triangle. Between 1500 and the early nineteenth century European traders deported about 10 million Africans to the Americas.There have been debates about the role of the slave-based colonial system in the rise of Europe as a world-power. It has been argued that the so-called “European miracle” could not have taken place without it. This was the view propounded by Adam Smith, writing at the end of the eighteenth century. Following Smith’ lead modern historians have made an attempt to calculate the profits of slavery and colonialism, trying to demonstrate that the Industrial Revolution was paid for with slave money. Oth-ers have produced counter-arguments: as reprehensive as this system was from a moral point of view, it certainly was not a necessary condition for the Industrial Revolution. Barbara Solow and Stanley Engerman, for example, argue: “It would be hard to claim that [widening of the market owing to plantation profits was] either necessary or sufficient for an Industrial Revolution, and equally hard to deny that [it] affected its magnitude and timing….” And: “that Europe needed these acquisitions for capitalism’s sake, is simply nonsense.” However, others argue that the conquest of the Americas gave the Europeans the gold and silver needed to buy themselves in on the rich Asian market where the real profits were to be made. And after these profits had helped to finance the Industrial Revolution, European colonialism became instrumental in the de-industrialization of non-European countries, thus creating a Third World.

African slave traders bringing their goods to market Typical layout of a slave ship in the 18th century

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The Atlantic triangle

Essential to successful long distance seafaring was a solution to the problem of longitude. Harrison’s watch was the first accurate enough to solve this problem in the 18th century

The other side of the Atlantic triangle. The hope for trade with China

Slaves at work on a sugar plantation in the Americas

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9. Another Great Leap

Britain, it is argued by many historians, was the first country to industrialize from the midst of the eighteenth century onwards. They have held both internal (properly British) and external factors (for example, those connected with the rise of the Atlantic economy like slave-holding) accountable for what has arguably been a crucial process of change with far-reaching consequences.From the outset, contemporaries also sought to analyze both the reasons for the industrial transformation and the (dis)advantages of the new social and economic regime. The question why it was Britain rather than another country that took the lead also loomed large in their treatises. As early as 1835, Edward Baines (1800-1890), for example, published The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain in which he examined the manifold – geographical, political, anthropological, and moral – advantages which, according to him, accounted for British preeminence.Nevertheless, industrialization (sometimes referred to as the “Industrial Revolution”) was not an exclu-sively British phenomenon. ‘From the perspective of world history,’ Clive Ponting in his Green history of the world points out, ‘the phenomenon of industrialization should be seen as at first a regional one in western Europe but, in an only slightly longer timescale, it was global in scope (...) The question then rises whether the causes held accountable for industrialization in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain also apply to non-European countries faced with imperialist policies like Japan, which experi-enced a similar process of change from the mid-nineteenth-century onwards.

Compact high pressure steam engine that revolutionized industrial production and transport

City slum in the 19th century

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Above: Preceding the industrial revolution there was an agricultural revolution in the 18th century. Only with a rising population could the mills attract workers.To the right and below: model 19th century factories. Machine produced textiles conquered the world and made the manufacturers rich.

Steam power drove most of the 19th century. It revolutionized shipping and transport and also made inroads into the industrial practice of agriculture

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10. Banking and Finance

‘Supported by the state, temples were centres of trade, banking and warehousing where priests notarised transactions and regulated weights, prices and measures. What merchant would wish to defraud the representatives of a god who might withhold the rain or destroy a galleon with a windstorm?” The temple of Melkart was the cornerstone of Itobaal’s commercial strategy. When a guild of Phoenician merchants settled in a foreign country, their first project was to erect a temple in the supreme Baal’s honour. As Tyrian settlements multiplied in other countries, the temple hierarchy also grew in size and prestige, itself taking on the structure of a multinational enterprise as the head shrines in Tyre acquired ‘branch temples in several cities’.Moore. K. J. and Lewis.

‘In order to evaluate the sophistication of the Roman financial market, we need to know if there were credit intermediaries, that is, institutions that mediate between borrowers and lenders, obviating direct contact between them. The most popular credit intermediaries in many societies are banks, and we are fortunate that ancient historians and modern economists employ the same definition of a bank. Edward Cohen opened his discussion of Athenian banking by quoting the legal definition in use in the United States today. This same definition can be found in a recent textbook on financial markets and institutions, which states: “Banks are financial institutions that accept deposits and make loans.” The text explains that, “Banks obtain funds by borrowing and by issuing other liabilities as deposits. They then use these funds to acquire assets such as securities and loans.”3 Deposits are bank borrowing for which banks furnish services in place of paying interest, either in part or in full. Demand deposits, which are totally liquid, typically do not pay any interest today. Savings deposits, which are available only with a delay, pay a low interest rate, and time deposits, available at a predetermined time, typically pay more.’ P. Temin.

‘The medieval banks of continental Europe facilitated trade by serving as payment intermediaries. Depositors commonly would pay one another by transferring bank balances with the aid of overdraft credit. We model this process in an environment of intermediate good exchange with incomplete con-tract enforcement…Banks, by standing between buyer and seller on a centralized basis, can internalize the offsetting nature of the whole set of trades. This original role of banks is still a vital one.’ McAndrews J and Roberds W

‘The issue of contagion, the spread of financial turbulence from the crisis center to its trading partners, is confronted with historical and statistical evidence on the causes and consequences of well-known crises. In general, contagion seems often confused with prior interdependence, and crises are less wide-spread and shorter in duration than anecdotal evidence would indicate. Special attention is given to the gold standard period of 1880-1913, which we find useful to divide into the initial period of deflation, 1880-1896, and the following period of mild inflation, 1897- 1913. We find evidence of changes in the pattern of “contagion” from core to periphery countries between the two periods, but in both periods apparent contagions can more readily be interpreted as responses to common shocks. Lessons for the present period can only be tentative, but the similarities in learning experiences are striking.’ Neal. L. and Weidenmier M

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The banker and his bench, 1515

1725, one of the first cheques

The Amsterdam stock market early 17th century. The end of virtue and the beginning of virtuality?

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11. The Wealth and Poverty of NationsIf one thing about the overall trend of the world historical process can be maintained for sure, it must be that the average wealth of the inhabitants of our planet has increased continuously, especially during the last century. By now, the affluent society seems to have become the true goal of human history - or at least, that is what many western people, and perhaps even more so, many people outside the western world believe. However, averages hide the highs and lows of reality. Clearly, some areas of the world have not profited as much as others from the overall increase in wealth, and the same can be said about different groups of people living in the same region of the world. Landes at the end of ‘The wealth and poverty of na-tions’ talks about ‘winners’ and ‘losers’; and in his way, Ponting in ‘A new green history of the world’ does the same. At this point, however, serious differences of opinion arise. One of these concerns the question who in fact can be counted among the ‘winners’? Will the whole world, in the end, profit from the enormous economic growth in the last century? Or only the inhabitants of specific parts of the world? Or is it more convincing to identify specific groups or classes of people as the true ‘winners’? And what about the non-human inhabitants of the earth?Furthermore, there is another, related point of discussion: when we talk about global ‘winners’ and ‘los-ers’, what is the common game both groups are participating in? Is there something systematic in the world’s inequality? And if so, what is the nature of this global system? What, indeed, does globalization mean? One thing at least seems to be obvious: more than ever in world history people and countries are connected on a global level. More than ever, the history of today can only be global history.

New York, Times square. Winners?

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Morumbi in Sao Paulo. Favelas and high rises, Losers and winners of the new Brazil

Losers and winners. Chongquing before and after China’s rise as an economic power. Chongquing with more than 30 million people is now the largest urban conglomeration on earth.

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At the end of this courseThe picture above was taken 5 years ago from the Bund in Shanghai looking to the other side of the river. Only 15 years ago the other side was nothing but a swamp. Some authors have dubbed this cen-tury the century of the East. Does this picture represent the rise of the East? But the picture could have been taken in the US, or in Malaysia. It could be anywhere. Does the picture bear witness to a global culture? But then the rise of the East seems to be a repeat show of the rise of the West: cars, expressways, skyscrapers, information technology, fast food. Material affluence. The American dream globalized. In the end the West seems to have the upper hand with a vengeance: it is Western affluence that everybody strives for. Or is going for affluence simply the human way? What will be the consequences of all that? A global Easter island? Is there the beginning of a new culture, a new type of society? What are our and the world’s prospects? What do we need? More science and technology? Fewer people? Different ways of life? Our life and ways of living are the offspring of the end of the last ice age and the ensuing warming up of the earth. Will we now become the victims of what has given us life: a planetary hot plate? Of course if we wait long enough there will be another ice age. That is simply inevitable.

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ReadingsProblems 1 & 2David Christian, Maps of Time. An introduction to big history, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005, chaps. 7-10Problem 3Anthony, David. The horse, the wheel and language. Princeton 2007. Chapters 8 and 11 (part of)Problem 4Cowen, N. Global History,2001, PolityProblem 5C. Ponting (1991) A New Green History of the World, ch. 7: Ways of thoughtD. Landes (2002) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, ch. 4: The invention of inventionProblem 6C. Ponting (1991) A New Green History of the World. ch. 10Problem 7McNeill, W.H., ch. 1. Arms and society in antiquity; ch. 3. The business of war in Europe, 1000-1600. In McNeill, W.H., The Pursuit of Power. Technology, Armed Force, and Society since A.D. 1000, Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press 1982Problem 8D. Landes (2002) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, ch. 8 & 25C. Ponting (1991) A New Green History of the World. ch. 9Problem 9E. Baines (1835) The History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain, in: M. Perry, J. Peden, and Th. von Laue (1991), eds., Sources of the Western Tradition, vol. II: From the Renaissance to the Present (Boston, etc.: Houghton Mifflin Company), p. 137-139W.J. Macpherson (1987) The Economic Development of Japan c.1868-1941 (Basingstoke: Macmillan), p. 9-14 and 24-42P.K. O’Brien (2000) ‘The reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconfiguration of he British industrial revolution as a conjuncture in global history,’ in: Itinerario, 3/4, p. 117-134P. Stearns et al. (2004) World Civilizations. The Global Experience (New York, etc: Pearson Education), p. 784-792Problem 10Temin. P Financial Intermediation in the Early Roman Empire (2004) The Journal of Economic His-tory, Vol. 64, No. 3 (September 2004). http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayFulltext?type=1&fid=245094&jid=JEH&volumeId=64&issueId=03&aid=245092Payson A The Origins of Banking: The Primitive Bank of Deposit, 1200-1600 Author(s): Abbott Payson Usher Source: The Economic History Review, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Apr., 1934), pp. 399-428 Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of the Economic History Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2589849Problem 11D. Landes (2002) The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. ch. 27 & 28C. Ponting (1991) A New Green History of the World, ch. 14L. Sklair (2002), pp. 35-58. Globalization. Capitalism and its alternatives. Oxford [etc.]: Oxford UP.