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The journey of the first humans to Australia is one of the most important events in history, at least as important as Columbus’ journey to America or the Apollo 11 expedition to the moon.
We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of biology.
One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.
This discrepancy between evolutionary success and individual suffering is perhaps the most important lesson we can draw from the Agricultural Revolution.
The agricultural revolution is one of the most controversial events in history.
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
The French Revolution was spearheaded by affluent lawyers, not by famished peasants.
Around 8500 BC the largest settlements in the world were villages such as Jericho, which contained a few hundred individuals. By 7000 BC the town of Çatalhöyük in Anatolia numbered between 5,000 and 10,000 individuals. It may well have been the world’s biggest settlement at the time.
In 1776 BC Babylon was the world’s biggest city.
The Babylonian king most famous today is Hammurabi.
About 3,500 years after Hammurabi’s death, the inhabitants of thirteen British colonies in North America felt that the king of Great Britain was treating them unjustly. Their representatives gathered in the city of Philadelphia, and on 4 July 1776 the colonies declared that their inhabitants were no longer subjects of the British Crown.
money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.
The standard imperial toolkit included wars, enslavement, deportation and genocide.
Americans nowadays maintain that their government has a moral imperative to bring Third World countries the benefits of democracy and human rights, even if these goods are delivered by cruise missiles and F-16s.
