The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

by Tamim Ansary

What we know as the history of the world is actually a socially constructed somebody-centric world historical narrative. There’s a Euro-centric one, an Islamo-centric one, a Sino-centric one, and many more. How many more depends on how many collections of people on Earth think of themselves as a “we” distinct from “others.”

Social constellations form intentions and set the agendas of history: countries, families, empires, nations, clans, corporations, tribes, clubs, political parties, societies, neighborhood groups, social movements, mobs, civilizations, high school cliques—they’re all constellations. They do not exist outside culture. The mighty hunter dissolves upon closer examination into random individual stars. The same is true of social constellations. Clan, country, movement, mob—get up close to any of these and all you see are individual human beings and their ideas.

The Egyptian constellation discovered that once construction workers exist, they have to be constructing something. Mesopotamians found that once armies exist, they need to be fighting someone. If they’re idle they just make internal trouble; so when Mesopotamian rulers weren’t fighting off marauders, they were marching their armies upstream or downstream to conquer their neighbors. Egyptians built pyramids; Mesopotamians built empires. Successful conquerors ruling a network of city-states could tap a wider range of resources, which required bigger armies to defend, which led to more military campaigns. About forty-three centuries ago, Sargon of Akkad, the king of Kish, conquered most of the Mesopotamian city-states and founded history’s first real empire.

Commercial goods flowing through the Kushan world went both east and west, but Buddhism flowed only east. What could account for that? Well, travelers heading west found the cultural soil ever less hospitable to Buddhism. The master narratives of Iran and Mesopotamia cast the universe as an apocalyptic drama with a beginning and an end, featuring gods as protagonists and people as their adjuncts. Buddhists saw the universe as a featureless field within which events and materials didn’t really exist and each individual soul was moving toward an eternal, formless, impersonal nirvana. The two frameworks were incompatible, and there was no larger framework that could incorporate the ideas of both Buddha and Zoroaster, or of both Buddha and the Jewish prophets, or at least none such could easily form. Buddhism being the newcomer to this region, it was Buddhism that failed to thrive.

Today, when people say “spice” they mean one of those many substances that give distinctive flavors to food; but that’s not exactly what we’re talking about here. The ancient spice traders did deal in saffron, pepper, cinnamon, and the like, but they also dealt in myrrh, aloe wood, incense, gems, essential oils, dyes, medicines, exotic bird feathers, healing creams, cosmetics, aphrodisiacs, magical potions, mystical aids, and other things you wouldn’t put in food. Spice, in this context, is an umbrella term for trade goods that were rare, compact, light, transportable, marketable, and more or less imperishable. Even diamonds counted. Spices were generally things people wanted, not things people needed. They indulged the human urge for pleasure, luxury, recreation, ecstasy, and orgasm. Spices, in this larger sense, were a dominant factor in the global economy thousands of years ago and they still are today. (Think drug trade.)

The Africans sold into slavery were mostly captured by Arab slave traders and other Africans. The African slave traders did not see themselves as betraying their fellow Africans in some monolithic war between whites and blacks because Africa was a continent, not a culture, and on that continent lived people of many cultures and ethnicities, speaking many languages. For sub-Saharan Africans, skin color was not a marker of identity. Where they lived, pretty much everyone had dark skin.

The values fueled by the apocalyptic encounter in the Americas extended to the slaves taken from Africa. Slavery was age-old, yes, but this was slavery based explicitly on a notion of race, the notion that people were of essentially different types and some were slaves by nature. The trade was going to happen no matter what, for there was money to be made, but anyone making that money needed to feel that capturing humans and working them to death didn’t necessarily mean they were bad people. How could these be part of the same conceptual constellation? Racism provided the bridge. The race-based slave trade was the minotaur chained in the basement of the European colonization of the Americas. The people feasting upstairs did their best to ignore its muffled roars and go on with their dinner.

The Qing and their advisers didn’t particularly like this new world. They liked the cash the Europeans brought, but not their seemingly corrosive culture. They barred Europeans from setting foot in the empire proper, restricting them to a few specified trading posts along the coast. The European traders were to wait there until Chinese merchants came to take their orders. They were to pay their money and cool their heels until their purchases were brought to them. Then, they were to go away. At these haughty conditions, the European traders merely shrugged. They were here to make money, not friends. What did frustrate them was the Chinese’s refusal to buy anything. They wouldn’t buy anything at all. The Chinese only wanted to sell, sell, sell. And as payment they would accept only bullion, bullion, bullion: silver or gold. Or diamonds: diamonds were good. You get the picture. One Qing emperor explained the reason for this: China had everything good. Europeans had nothing worth coveting. Chinese products were superior to any made in Europe. What then would the Chinese buy?

The British government couldn’t simply ban tea because it was getting huge revenues from tariffs on imports, almost 10 percent of which were tea. If tea imports were to drop, government revenues would plummet. Britain had just spent a fortune beating the French in a global world war for possession of the world’s colonies. It needed more money, not less. So the government raised the tariff on tea by 100 percent, which discouraged tea sales and slowed down imports without hurting the government’s bottom line. It did hurt somebody’s bottom line, however. The British East India Company’s life depended on selling tea. What was it to do—simply take a loss and die? No way! To help this most powerful of lobbies, the British government passed laws forcing its American colonists to buy expensive company tea instead of the cheaper tea smuggled in by Dutch freebooters (who, of course, paid no taxes to the British Crown). Famously, this Tea Act irked rebellious colonial Americans to such an extent that, one night, a group of anonymous radicals sneaked onto an EEK ship and dumped the modern equivalent of a million dollars’ worth of tea into the harbor. The British government struck back with punitive laws, which fed a gathering storm, the storm that burst out finally as the American Revolution. So yes, the policies of China’s Qing government did contribute to the birth of the United States. Thank you for asking. The two were connected as two ends of the same long causal chain.

While these developments were underway in the Islamic Middle World, Qing China was still busy sending porcelain and tea to Europe. As the eighteenth century proceeded, authorities in Britain fell into a panic about the quantities of silver they were hemorrhaging to China. By then, however, Great Britain was tightening its grip on India. Once they had reduced the subcontinent to a fully controlled colony, they saw a neat solution to their China problem. India’s climate and soil were, as it happened, well suited for growing opium. In China, opium had long been used as a medicine, but recently, American tobacco having reached this part of the world, people had begun mixing opium with tobacco and smoking it as a recreational drug. India had a product, and China offered a market: how perfect was that? In 1729, English merchants shipped two hundred boxes of Indian opium into China and refused to accept any form of payment except cash, preferably silver: turnabout was fair play. The Qing administration disapproved and banned opium imports, but the Honourable East India Company and its various private associates—which is to say, its subcontractors—ignored the ban. In 1799, Chinese authorities renewed their ban in stronger terms, but the British believed in free trade on principle, and in this spirit went right on with their business. In 1800, Anglo-Indian traders sold 4,500 boxes of Indian opium to the Chinese. By 1834, they had pumped this figure up to 45,000 boxes, which amounte...

The Taiping rebels carved out their own Kingdom of Heavenly Peace in southern China and fought bitter battles with Qing forces. “Rebellion” is a misnomer for this conflict. The battles raged from 1850 to 1864. The American Civil War took place in that same period, and it claimed some six hundred thousand lives, a staggering loss: no wonder it ranks as one of the most savage conflicts in human history. The Taiping Rebellion gets little coverage in the world histories I’ve seen, yet this conflict claimed—well, no one knows how many people died in the course of this conflict, but if deaths by starvation and disease are included, the number is somewhere between twenty and sixty million. On the scale of world conflicts, then, it ranks somewhere between the First and Second World Wars; in short, it was the most calamitous war you never heard of. If you consider this the closing chapter of the Opium War, then the conflict as a whole matches the historical impact of an epic clash between two giant galaxies of civilization. This was the war in which China discovered, to its shock, dismay, and bewilderment, that far from being the world’s central power, it was not even a local power. It was scarcely more than real estate.

In 1833, Benjamin Day launched the New York Sun, a mass-produced daily newspaper that he sold for a penny a copy, which almost anyone could afford. Soon Day was selling fifteen thousand papers a day and making his money back on volume. Others saw him getting rich and jumped into the action. Papers that sold for a penny sprang up like mushrooms. Readers of these papers lived rough lives, they weren’t deep intellectuals of the leisure classes, so publishers filled their pages with news of murders, fires, suicides, and other sensational events.

Every ideology runs into contradictions in practice.

But then, as the machine proliferated, the material necessities that had once tied women to hearth and home no longer applied. Women who went to work in the public arena were not threatening the safety of the children or the survival of the kinship cluster. No one had to keep the home fire burning because the first one home could simply turn on the heat. In the past, physical strength had played a key role in shaping the relationships among people. When heavy things had to be moved, the strong were called upon to move them. When conflicts arose, those with physical strength tended to prevail. Generals had to have brains, but the brainiest ones filled their front lines with brawn, and men were generally bigger and stronger than women. But once the machine permeated human affairs, physical strength lost much of its relevance except in professional sports and street crime. In fact, with the rise of the machine, there was no biological reason to favor men over women in almost any human endeavor (nor vice versa, for that matter). Thereupon, narratives related to gender began to change, adjusting to the new material reality.

As nation-states emerged, so did one of the nineteenth century’s most passionate ideologies. Nationalism was a cluster of emotionally resonant propositions. It held that every person was part of some nation, and every nation had a right to a sovereign state of its own. Nationalism declared that birds of a feather should flock together. No one should be stranded outside their own people’s nation-state, and everyone within a state should be part of the same “we the people.” This of course raised a question. What defined a bunch of people as a “we the people”? What attributes made a person part of one nation and not another—one of us-guys and not one of them-guys? What was “a people”? No one, for example, argued that height was a defining factor: no one was arguing for a tall people’s nation-state or a short people’s nation-state. Was it language, then? Or shared experiences, perhaps? Or religious beliefs? Was it, at some extenuated level, lineage? Was a nation a group of people descended from a common ancestor? Was such a connection visible? Was skin color a marker?

The westward expansion of the United States went hand in hand with the reduction and sometimes elimination of the indigenous people. No sugarcoating it. This was not the sort of ideological hate-fueled genocide the Nazis tried to carry out against the Jews. For the Europeans, the natives were simply in the way. They feared and hated the natives until they had swept them away, and then mythologized them as noble savages and eventually named sports teams after them.

China may seem to present something of an alternative model because it is not so much a nation-state as a civilization-state; but it does have corporations equivalent to those of the Western multinationals, some of which are private though others are state owned. In China, however, whether privately owned or state-owned, corporations operate as segments of a centrally governed world-scale society. The Chinese constellation of a thousand years ago never died. It has changed, but it still exists.