Big History Quotes

“Don’t rely on authority at all but subject every idea to experimentation and reason. This attitude, known as scientific, flourished in Europe, where universities served as supportive communities for those practicing science.”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“corn yielded more calories per acre than did rice, wheat, or barley,”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“gunpowder, made from saltpeter (potassium nitrate), sulfur, and carbon.”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“In Europe, however, the standard of living has not been reversed, except temporarily in time of war, since the late 1600s. No one knows the causes for this, although much analysis has been made, the best known being that of Adam Smith who argued, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), that societies can promote economic growth by establishing peace, low taxes, and impartially implemented laws to protect property and investments.3”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“During the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, Muslim slave traders took an estimated 2.1 million enslaved Africans from the east coast to Arabian and Indian ports. Overall, the Muslim slave trade lasted twelve centuries and shipped approximately 14 to 15 million people. Possibly as many people were enslaved within Africa as were shipped west and east.”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“Europeans usually did not have to capture their own African slaves; African rulers and slave merchants were willing to do it. During the 350 years of the Atlantic slave trade, an estimated 12 to 25 million enslaved people were shipped from Africa for the Americas, of whom some 85 percent survived the terrible six-to-ten-week voyage. About 40 percent went to Brazil, 40 percent to the Caribbean, 5 percent to what would become the United States, and the balance to the rest of Spanish America.”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“The rising prosperity of the Muslim elites was accompanied by a growth in slavery. Military campaigns in India reduced thousands of Hindus to slavery. In sub-Saharan Africa, local elites enslaved other Africans for sale and, as Muslim customs gained influence, for their own use. By modern estimates, sub-Saharan and Red Sea traders sold about 2.5 million enslaved Africans to Muslim buyers in northern Africa and the rest of the Muslim world between 1200 and 1500, though no figures are reliable. African slaves reached China by at least the seventh century, and by the twelfth century some wealthy people of Canton had black slaves. Some wealthy Muslim men aspired to having a concubine from every part of the known world. One Indian noble reportedly kept 2,000 harem slaves, including women from Turkey and China.15”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“Muslims did not force religious conversion and, except for Egypt, expanded into areas with sparse populations.”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“Women scholars have conducted research over the past forty years hoping to find evidence of some societies in which women controlled political power. They have not found evidence for any such matriarchies.”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“The flooding continued. In about 5600 BCE the Mediterranean Sea rose so high that it crashed with great violence through the land bridge joining Turkey to Bulgaria, creating the Bosphorus Strait. The seawater from the Mediterranean Sea transformed a small freshwater lake, Lake Euxine, into the vast saltwater Black Sea. Displaced people appeared in various places—Hungary, Slovakia, and Iraq—as evidenced by linguistic analysis. This astonishing flood became seared into the memory of its survivors as the myth of the world flood; accounts of floods are included in about 500 of the world’s mythologies.17”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present

“The atmosphere is only about .035 percent carbon dioxide,”
― Cynthia Stokes Brown, Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present