Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

by Yuval Noah Harari

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In 1568 the Dutch, who were mainly Protestant, revolted against their Catholic Spanish overlord.

within eighty years the Dutch had not only secured their independence from Spain, but had managed to replace the Spaniards and their Portuguese allies as masters of the ocean highways, build a global Dutch empire, and become the richest state in Europe. The secret of Dutch success was credit.

Secondly, their country’s judicial system enjoyed independence and protected private rights

The behaviour of the French crown was particularly notorious during what was called the Mississippi Bubble, the largest financial crisis of eighteenth-century Europe.

In 1717 the lower Mississippi valley offered few attractions besides swamps and alligators, yet the Mississippi Company spread tales of fabulous riches and boundless opportunities.

A few days later, the panic began. Some speculators realised that the share prices were totally unrealistic and unsustainable.

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 in 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 hands.

notorious example of how governments did the bidding of big money was the First Opium War, fought between Britain and China (1840–42).

the British demanded and received control of Hong Kong, which they proceeded to use as a secure base for drug trafficking

1997). In the late nineteenth century, about 40 million Chinese, a tenth of the country’s population, were opium addicts.3

They declared a unilateral abrogation of all foreign debt.

dispatched her army and navy to the Nile and Egypt remained a British protectorate until after World War

war itself could become a commodity, just like opium. In 1821 the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman Empire.

The bondholders’ interest was the national interest, so the British organised 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.

is trust in the future, and this resource is constantly threatened by thieves and charlatans. Markets by themselves offer no protection against fraud, theft and violence. It is the job of political systems to ensure trust by legislating sanctions against cheats and to establish and support police forces, courts and jails which will enforce the law.

From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, about 10 million African slaves were imported to America. About 70 per cent of them worked on the sugar plantations. Labour conditions were abominable.

The slave trade was not controlled by any state or government. It was a purely economic enterprise, organised and financed by the free market according to the laws of supply and demand. Private slave-trading companies sold shares on the Amsterdam, London and Paris stock exchanges.

Much like the Agricultural Revolution, so too the growth of the modern economy might turn out to be a colossal fraud. The human species and the global economy may well keep growing, but many more individuals may live in hunger and want.

the amounts available for our exploitation have actually increased. Whenever a shortage of either has threatened to slow economic growth, investments have flowed into scientific and technological research. These have invariably produced not only more efficient ways of exploiting existing resources, but also completely new types of energy and materials.

cacophony.

If you could burn coal in order to move textile looms, why not use the same method to move other things, such as vehicles? In 1825, a British engineer connected a steam engine to a train of mine wagons full of coal. The

the Industrial Revolution was above all else the Second Agricultural Revolution.

Machines such as tractors began to undertake tasks that were previously performed by muscle power, or not performed at all. Fields

Around the time that Homo sapiens was elevated to divine status by humanist religions, farm animals stopped being viewed as living creatures that could feel pain and distress, and instead came to be treated as machines.

The tragedy of industrial agriculture is that it takes great care of the objective needs of animals, while neglecting their subjective needs.

Without the industrialisation of agriculture the urban Industrial Revolution could never have taken place – there would not have been enough hands and brains to staff factories and offices.

Somebody must also buy the products, or industrialists and investors alike will go bust. To prevent this catastrophe and to make sure that people will always buy whatever new stuff industry produces, a new kind of ethic appeared: consumerism.

Consumerism has worked very hard, with the help of popular psychology (‘Just do it!’) to convince people that indulgence is good for you, whereas frugality is self-oppression.

The capitalist and consumerist ethics are two sides of the same coin, a merger of two commandments. The supreme commandment of the rich is ‘Invest!’ The supreme commandment of the rest of us is ‘Buy!’

Ecological degradation is not the same as resource scarcity.

The Industrial Revolution turned the timetable and the assembly line into a template for almost all human activities. Shortly after factories imposed their time frames on human behaviour, schools too adopted precise timetables, followed by hospitals, government offices and grocery stores.

In 1784 a carriage service with a published schedule began operating in Britain.

In 1847, British train companies put their heads together and agreed that henceforth all train timetables would be calibrated to Greenwich Observatory time,

humans lived in small, intimate communities, most of whose members were kin. The Cognitive Revolution and the Agricultural Revolution did not change that.

The Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, managed within little more than two centuries to break these building blocks into atoms.

most rulers did not develop mass welfare systems, health-care systems or educational systems. They left such matters in the hands of families and communities. Even on rare occasions when rulers tried to intervene more intensively in the daily lives of the peasantry (as happened, for example, in the Qin Empire in China), they did so by converting family heads and community elders into government agents.

Industrial Revolution gave the market immense new powers, provided the state with new means of communication and transportation, and placed at the government’s disposal an army of clerks, teachers, policemen and social workers.

Over time, states and markets used their growing power to weaken the traditional bonds of family and community.

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The two most important examples for the rise of such imagined communities are the nation and the consumer tribe. The nation is the imagined community of the state. The consumer tribe is the imagined community of the market. Both are imagined communities because it is impossible for all customers in a market or for all members of a nation really to know one another the way villagers knew one another in the past.

Nations existed in the distant past, but their importance was much smaller than today because the importance of the state was much smaller.

The Middle East provides ample examples. The Syrian, Lebanese, Jordanian and Iraqi nations are the product of haphazard borders drawn in the sand by French and British diplomats who ignored local history, geography and economy. These diplomats determined in 1918 that the people of Kurdistan, Baghdad and Basra would henceforth be ‘Iraqis’.

Over the last two centuries, the pace of change became so quick that the social order acquired a dynamic and malleable nature. It

foreboding

the price of war has gone up dramatically.

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.

sobering

this progressive account is unconvincing. As we have seen, new aptitudes, behaviours and skills do not necessarily make for a better life.

The transition first to agriculture and then to industry has condemned us to living unnatural lives that cannot give full expression to our inherent inclinations and instincts, and therefore cannot satisfy our deepest yearnings.