1. Seven Ages of Globalization
1. For a dazzling analysis of culture and behavior from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, see Edward O. Wilson, The Social Conquest of Earth (New York: Liveright, 2012).
2. For a riveting accounting of these late-nineteenth-century famines, see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (Brooklyn: Verso, 2001).
3. Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen, “Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1,” Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
4. Extreme poverty signifies a level of deprivation at which basic human needs (nutritious diet, safe water, sanitation, clothing, shelter, and so forth) are not ensured. The World Bank has regularly established metrics to measure extreme poverty. The World Bank’s current poverty line is per capita consumption at or below $1.90 per day measured in 2011 prices using purchasing-power parity (PPP) exchange rates. Academic studies of poverty throughout history propose their own respective poverty lines for coherence with the recent World Bank data.
5. For the scale of forager communities, see Tobias Kordsmeyer, Pádraig Mac Carron, and R. I. M. Dunbar, “Sizes of Permanent Campsite Communities Reflect Constraints on Natural Human Communities,” Current Anthropology 58, no. 2 (2017): 289–94.
6. In fact, the replacement rate is slightly above 2 children per woman to account for the slight mortality risk of the next generation.
8. David McGee and Peter B. deMenocal, “Climatic Changes and Cultural Responses During the African Humid Period Recorded in Multi-Proxy Data,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science, 2017.
9. Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development,” GGDC Research Memorandum 174, January 2018.
10. Adam Smith, An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776] (New York: Random House, 1937).
11. For further information on the sources of these data and other data used throughout the text, please see the data appendix at the end of the book.
12. Two leading economists, Ronald Findlay and Kevin O'Rourke, offer a deeply informed global history of trade, technology, and warfare during the 1000 years from 1000 AD to 2000 AD in Power and Plenty: Trade, War, and the World Economy in the Second Millennium.
2. The Paleolithic Age (70,000–10,000 BCE)
1. The Paleolithic period dates from the time that hominins first used stone tools, approximately 3.3 million years ago to the end of the last ice age at the conclusion of the Pleistocene epoch, some 11,700 years ago. The Paleolithic period is divided into three sub-periods, the lower Paleolithic (to around 200,000 year ago), the Middle Paleolithic (200,000 years ago to around 50,000 years ago), and the Upper Paleolithic (50,000 years ago to around 11,700 years ago). The timing of the emergence of anatomically modern humans is subject to considerable debate and uncertainty. A recent publication, using genetic evidence, suggests a date of 200,000 years ago for the emergence of modern humans. E. K. F. Chan, A. Timmermann, B. F. Baldi, et al. “Human Origins in a Southern African Palaeo-Wetland and First Migrations.” Nature 575 (2019).
2. Edward O. Wilson, Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies (New York: Liveright, 2019).
3. Israel Hershkovitz, Gerhard W. Weber, Rolf Quam, Mathieu Duval, Rainer Grün, Leslie Kinsley, et al., “The Earliest Modern Humans Outside Africa,” Science 359, no. 6374 (2018): 456–59.
4. B. M. Henn, L. L. Cavalli-Sforza, and M. W. Feldman, “The Great Human Expansion,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109, no. 44 (2012): 17758–64.
5. James F. O’Connell, Jim Allen, Martin A. J. Williams, Alan N. Williams, Chris S. M. Turney, Nigel A. Spooner, et al., “When Did Homo sapiens First Reach Southeast Asia and Sahul?,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115, no. 34 (2018): 8482–90.
6. For recent evidence on this debate, see Sander van der Kaars, Gifford H. Miller, Chris S. M. Turney, et al., “Humans Rather Than Climate the Primary Cause of Pleistocene Megafaunal Extinction in Australia,” Nature Communications 8, January 20, 2017.
7. Pita Kelekna, “The Politico-Economic Impact of the Horse on Old World Cultures: An Overview,” Sino-Platonic Papers, no. 190 (June 2009).
8. Tibetan gene variants that are adaptive for high altitude seem to be from Denisovans. See Emilia Huerta-Sanchez, Xin Jin, Rasmus Nielsen, et al., “Altitude Adaptation in Tibetans Caused by Introgression of Denisovan-like DNA,” Nature 512 (2014), 194–197.
9. For a survey of the debate, see Ofer Bar-Yosef, “The Upper Paleolithic Revolution,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31, no. 1 (2002): 363–93.
10. A recent study suggesting that the structure of the human brain continued to evolve during the transition from the Middle Paleolithic to the Upper Paleolithic is Simon Neubauer, Jean-Jacques Hublin, and Philipp Gunz, “The Evolution of Modern Human Brain Shape,” Science Advances 4, no. 1 (2018).
11. There remains considerable uncertainty and heated debate about the timing and methods of the earliest migrations from Asia to North America. The uncertainties include the timing, the number of waves of migration, and now even the question of whether the new arrivals came over a land corridor, as long surmised, or perhaps instead by boat along the coastline. Recent evidence that early migrants came by coastal waters is presented in Loren G. Davis et al., “Late Upper Paleolithic occupation at Cooper’s Ferry, Idaho, USA, ~16,000 years ago,” Science 365, no. 6456 (2019): 891–897.
12. Martin Sikora, Andaine Seguin-Orlando, Vitor C. Sousa, Anders Albrechtsen, Thorfinn Korneliussen, Amy Ko, et al., “Ancient Genomes Show Social and Reproductive Behavior of Early Upper Paleolithic Foragers,” Science 358, no. 6363 (2017): 659–62.
13. H. Gintis, C. van Schaik, and C. Boehm, “Zoon Politikon: The Evolutionary Origins of Human Socio-Political Systems,” Behavioural Processes 161 (2019): 17–30.
3. The Neolithic Age (10,000–3000 BCE)
1. Dolores R. Piperno, “A Model of Agricultural Origins,” Nature Human Behaviour 2, no. 7 (2018): 446–47.
2. An excellent recent study of the change in living standards and health during the transition to farming may be found in Alison A Macintosh, Ron Pinhasi, and Jay T Stock. “Early Life Conditions and Physiological Stress Following the Transition to Farming in Central/Southeast Europe: Skeletal Growth Impairment and 6000 Years of Gradual Recovery,” PloS one 11, no. 2 (2016): e0148468.
3. Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen, “Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1,” Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
4. David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here (New York: Random House, 2018), 100.
5. Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here, 113.
6. Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel (New York: Norton, 1997), xx.
7. A famous and influential account of the distinctive geographical, political, and social features of these early alluvial societies is Karl S. Wittfogel’s Oriental Despotism: a Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). Wittfogel argued that the need for major public works to control river flooding and irrigation gave rise to strong, indeed despotic, states. The thesis garnered many followers and also considerable criticism for making hasty over-generalizations.
8. For a fascinating account of the long-term patterns of river flow and their implications, see Mark G. Macklin and John Lewin, “The Rivers of Civilization,” Quaternary Science Reviews 114 (2015): 228–44.
9. See Ian Morris, Why the West Rules—For Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (New York: Picador, 2011).
10. The total land area of Old World Lucky Latitudes is 23.4 million km2. The shares of this land area by continent are as follows: Africa, 18.1 percent; Asia, 66.2 percent; CIS, 9.4 percent; and Europe, 6.4 percent. For further data on climate and population in the Lucky Latitudes, see the data appendix.
4: The Equestrian Age (3000–1000 BCE)
1. On the domestication of the donkey, see Stine Rossel, Fiona Marshall, Joris Peters, Tom Pilgram, Matthew D. Adams, and David O’Connor, “Domestication of the Donkey: Timing, Processes, and Indicators,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 10 (2008): 3715–20
On the domestication of the dromedarey, see Ludovic Orlando, “Back to the Roots and Routes of Dromedary Domestication,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 24 (2016): 6588–90; Faisal Almathen, Pauline Charruau, Elmira Mohandesan, Joram M. Mwacharo, Pablo Orozco-terWengel, Daniel Pitt, Abdussamad M. Abdussamad, et al., “Ancient and Modern DNA Reveal Dynamics of Domestication and Cross-Continental Dispersal of the Dromedary,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 24 (2016): 6707–12; Barat ali Zarei Yam and Morteza Khomeiri, “Introduction to Camel Origin, History, Raising, Characteristics, and Wool, Hair and Skin: A Review,” Research Journal of Agriculture and Environmental Management 4, no. 11 (2015): 496–508.
For the South American camelids, see Juan C. Marín Romina Rivera, Valeria Varas, Jorge Cortés, Ana Agapito, Ana Chero, et. al., “Genetic Variation in Coat Colour Genes MC1R and ASIP Provides Insights Into Domestication and Management of South American Camelids,” Frontiers in Genetics 9 (2018): 487.
2. Peter Mitchell, “Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus Asinus into Southern Africa,” African Archaeological Review 34, no. 1 (2017): 21–41.
3. Jack M. Broughton and Elic M. Weitzel, “Population Reconstructions for Humans and Megafauna Suggest Mixed Causes for North American Pleistocene Extinctions,” Nature Communications 9, no. 1 (2018): 5441.
4. Rossel et al., “Domestication of the Donkey.”
5. Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), xx.
6. Ralph W. Brauer, “The Camel and Its Role in Shaping Mideastern Nomad Societies,” Comparative Civilizations Review 28, no. 28 (1993): 47.
7. Kelekna, The Horse in Human History, 45–49.
8. David Reich, Who We Are and How We Got Here (New York: Random House, 2018), 120.
9. Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma, and Karen C. Seto, “Spatializing 6,000 Years of Global Urbanization from 3700 BC to AD 2000,” Scientific Data 3 (2016): 160034.
5. The Classical Age (1000 BCE–1500 CE)
1. Karl Jaspers, The Origin and Goal of History (London: Routledge, 1953).
2. Violet Moller, The Map of Knowledge: A Thousand-Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 61.
3. L. Carrington Goodrich, A Short History of the Chinese People (New York: Courier, 2002), 31.
4. Pita Kelekna, The Horse in Human History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 390.
5. Dieter Kuhn, The Age of Confucian Rule (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 29.
6. Neil Pederson, Amy E. Hessl, Nachin Baatarbileg, Kevin J. Anchukaitis, and Nicola Di Cosmo, “Pluvials, Droughts, the Mongol Empire, and Modern Mongolia,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 12 (2014): 4375–79.
7. Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen, “Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1,” The Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
6. The Ocean Age (1500–1800)
1. For a wonderful account of the voyages, see Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994).
2. Adam Smith, An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [1776] (New York: Random House, 1937).
3. Alfred W. Crosby, Germs, Seeds and Animals: Studies in Ecological History (New York: Routledge, 2015).
4. For a recent discussion, see Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian, “The Columbian Exchange: A History of Disease, Food, and Ideas,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 24, no. 2 (2010): 163–88.
5. Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon L. Lewis, “Earth System Impacts of the European Arrival and Great Dying in the Americas After 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews 207 (2019): 13–36, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quascirev.2018.12.004.
6. For an informative recent history, see John W. O’Malley, The Jesuits: A History from Ignatius to the Present (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014).
7. A recent critical history of the East India Company carries a descriptive title, see William Dalrymple, The Anarchy:The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (New York: Bloomsbury, 2019).
8. Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890).
10. Kees Klein Goldewijk, Arthur Beusen, and Peter Janssen, “Long-Term Dynamic Modeling of Global Population and Built-up Area in a Spatially Explicit Way: HYDE 3.1,” Holocene 20, no. 4 (2010): 565–73.
11. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014), 85.
12. Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 105.
13. Smith, Wealth of Nations.
7. The Industrial Age: (1800–2000)
2. For a captivating history of the British industrial revolution with a strong focus on technological advances, including the steam engine, see the classic study by David Landes, Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
3. Jutta Bolt, Robert Inklaar, Herman de Jong, and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Rebasing ‘Maddison’: New Income Comparisons and the Shape of Long-Run Economic Development,” GGDC Research Memorandum 174, January 2018.
4. E. A. Wrigley, Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2010).
5. For pioneering theoretical investigations of GPTs and economic growth, see Bresnahan and Trajtenberg (1995) and Helpman (1998).
6. Martin Weitzman, “Recombinant Growth,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 113, no. 2, (May 1998): 331–60.
7. Markku Wilenius and Sofi Kurki, “Surfing the Sixth Wave: Exploring the Next 40 Years of Global Change,” in 6th Wave and Systemic Innovation for Finland: Success Factor for the Years 2010–2050 Project. University of Turku: Finland Futures Research Centre, 2012.
8. Klaus Schwab, The Fourth Industrial Revolution (Geneva: World Economic Forum, 2016).
9. Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 131.
11. See John Iliffe, Africans: The History of a Continent, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 198–99.
12. Bolt et al., “Rebasing ‘Maddison.’”
13. John Maynard Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace [1919] (Jersey City, N.J.: Start Kindle Edition, 2014).
14. Keynes, The Economic Consequences of the Peace.
16. Defense Manpower Data Center, “DoD Personnel, Workforce Reports & Publications,” DMDC.osd.mil: USA.gov, 2019.
8. The Digital Age (Twenty-First Century)
2. Data as of November 20, 2019, from the following sources: Facebook log-ons, “The Top 20 Valuable Facebook Statistics—Updated November 2019,” https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/; Google searches, https://www.internetlivestats.com/google-search-statistics/; YouTube videos, Omnicore, “YouTube by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts,” September 5, 2019, https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/; Internet users, Internet World Stats, “Top 20 Countries in Internet Users vs. Rest of the World—June 30, 2019,” https://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm; Swift settlements, swift.com, “The SWIFT-CLS Partnership in FX Reduces Risk and Adds Liquidity,” April 4, 2019, https://www.swift.com/news-events/news/the-swift-cls-partnership-in-fx-reduces-risk-and-adds-liquidity.
3. See David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Matthew Lai, and Arthur Guez, et. al., “Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm,” arXiv.org (2017).
4. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time (New York: Penguin, 2006).
6. The World Bank reports that China is on track to end poverty according to the national definition of rural poverty (per capita rural net income of RMB 2,300 per year in 2010 constant prices). See https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview, accessed November 15, 2019.
7. The data are for China’s GDP at constant prices from the IMF World Economic Outlook database, October 2019.
10. For the intellectual history of this equation, see Marian R. Chertow, “The IPAT Equation and Its Variants,” Journal of Industrial Ecology 4, no. 4 (2000), 13–29.
11. See Graham Allison, Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap? (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017).
9. Guiding Globalization in the Twenty-First Century
1. World Commission on Environment and Development, Our Common Future (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987).
2. The SDG rankings are available in the UN report by Jeffrey Sachs, Guido Schmidt-Traub, Christian Kroll, Guillaume Lafortune, and Grayson Fuller, Sustainable Development Report 2019: Transformations to Achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (New York: Bertelsmann Stiftung and Sustainable Development Solutions Network [SDSN], 2019).
3. The life satisfaction rankings can be cound in the 2019 world happiness report: John F. Helliwell, Richard Layard, and Jeffrey D. Sachs, The UN World Happiness Report 2019. (New York: SDSN, 2019).
4. In 2019, President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement but not from the UNFCCC.
5. Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present (New York: Penguin, 2013).
6. Pope Francis, Laudato si’ (Vatican City: Vatican Press, 2015), sec. 23.
7. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch [1795] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970).
8. G. M. Gilbert, interview with Hermann Goering, April 18, 1946, in Nuremberg Diary (New York: Farrar, Strauss, 1947), 278.