It might be difficult to believe when reading the news but the Britain we live in is not entirely shaped by the whim of the government and the decisions of ministers blessed with varying degrees of wisdom, but very often by tiny, apparently insignificant events. The wars the nation has fought, the great advances made in science, the food we eat, the music we listen to and the politics that shape our daily life – all of these have been governed to a certain extent by incidents or events that may have appeared completely inconsequential at the time.
For example, there’s the split-second decision that could just as easily have gone another way, with completely different consequences; the small gesture of defiance carried out by an ordinary man or woman that sparked a movement or even a revolution; the chance meeting of two people whose subsequent work together far exceeded the sum of its parts; the moment of carelessness that resulted in a catastrophic defeat or disaster or, alternatively, brought about some extraordinary discovery that would not otherwise have been made; or the idea nurtured in obscurity that blossomed into something astonishing.
In Tiny Histories we go behind the scenes to look upon a host of fascinating and extraordinary stories of seemingly trivial events that have had enormous repercussions, in many cases moulding both the society we live in today and the people we are. It’s a surprisingly little-known fact, for example, that we owe the existence of the greatest scientific manual ever written to a wager in a coffee house that didn’t even involve the book’s author. The signing of the document that laid out for the first time the rights and freedoms that all Britons should enjoy came about as a consequence of a previous king’s fatal desire to eat a large number of an eel-like fish. Much of British politics in the 1960s and ’70s was determined by the shifting in the schedules of a television show, and an interview on a sports programme. The reason why it’s easier to make jokes in English rather than in German is all down to a disastrous decision taken by an obscure local leader in Essex in 991. Meanwhile, science fiction was invented because a duchess liked to tag on little extras to the books she wrote on natural philosophy.
I should perhaps emphasise that this is not a book of ‘what ifs’ – those speculations on what might have happened if only some event had turned out differently (yes, OK, we get it – had Hitler conquered Britain, life would have been a bit rubbish). The examples contained within these pages are arguably even more extraordinary than their counter-factual cousins because we can see for ourselves what effect they’ve had on the nation (and often the world beyond) without indulging in a moment’s conjecture.
Finally, I hope that the events in Tiny Histories are an inspiration to us all. If nothing else, they show that any one of us – however insignificant we may feel – may yet come to have an impact on the world that is far greater than we might possibly imagine.
Dixé Wills