Maps of Time Quotes

“As an anonymous wit is supposed to have put it: "Hydrogen is a light, odorless gas which, given enough time, changes into people.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History

“For the first time there appeared on earth kings, dictators, high priests, emperors, prime ministers, presidents, governors, mayors, generals, admirals, police chiefs, judges, lawyers, and jailers, along with dungeons, jails, penitentiaries, and concentration camps. Under the tutelage of the state, human beings learned for the first time how to bow, grovel, kneel, and kowtow. In many ways the rise of the state was the descent of the world from freedom to slavery.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“All knowledge systems, from modern science to those embedded in the most ancient of creation myths, can be thought of as maps of reality. They are never just true or false. Perfect descriptions of reality are unattainable, unnecessary, and too costly for learning organisms, including humans.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Quantum physics shows that it is in the nature of reality to be unpredictable.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“So, as networks expand in size, their potential intellectual synergy increases much faster: “larger and denser populations equal faster technological advance.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“As A. J. McMichael writes: “Each species is an experiment of Nature. Only one such experiment, Homo sapiens, has evolved in a way that has enabled its biological adaptation to be complemented by a capacity for cumulative cultural adaptation. This unprecedented combination of the usual biologically-based drive for short-term gain (food, territory and sexual consummation) with an intellectual capacity to satisfy that drive via increasingly complex cultural practices is what distinguishes the human ‘experiment.’”6”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“About 250 million years ago, most of the continental plates were joined into a supercontinent, which Wegener had christened “Pangaea.” It was surrounded by a single, large sea, known as Panthalassa.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Human knowledge, by its nature, has limits, so some questions must remain mysteries. Some religions treat such mysteries as secrets that the gods choose to hide from humans; others, such as Buddhism, treat them as ultimate riddles that are not worth pursuing.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Both animal and human slaves could be controlled best if kept economically and psychically dependent on their owners.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Unlike water, which prefers to lie flat as it accumulates, material wealth in complex societies likes to pile itself up into huge pyramids.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Trying to look at the whole of the past is, it seems to me, like using a map of the world. No geographer would try to teach exclusively from street maps. Yet most historians teach about the past of particular nations, or even of agrarian civilizations, without ever asking what the whole of the past looks like.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“the basic rules of serious futurology are (a) look for the large trends and analyze how they work, (b) construct models to suggest how different trends may interact, and (c) be alert for countertrends or other factors that might falsify or cut across the predictions suggested by long trends and simple modeling.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Choices whose outcomes matter even though they are neither deterministic nor completely random surround us all the time. So it is not surprising that in all human societies, entire professions have been based on the making of such predictions—think of astrologers, stockbrokers, professional gamblers, weather forecasters, or . . . politicians.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“In the 1990s, global military expenditures declined by perhaps 40 percent, and stocks of weapons of all kinds fell.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“It was possible to borrow British technology, and increasingly governments began to promote development. By the end of the nineteenth century, governments and large banks were actively managing industrial change.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“The modern world is ruled by larger and more impersonal forces, from faceless bureaucracies to abstractions such as “inflation,” or “the rule of law.” Where abstract forces take over the work of coercion from the landlord, the executioner, and the overseer, it is not surprising that there should emerge cosmologies ruled by equally abstract forces.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“The explosive properties of gunpowder were first used in war by the Jin, the northern rivals of the Song, in 1221.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Robert de Balsac, ended a study on warfare with the remark that “most important of all, success in war depends on having enough money to provide whatever the enterprise needs.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“If modernity is, as I will argue, a global phenomenon, a Eurocentric approach is bound to mislead us. More recently, historians interested in world history have tried to see modernity as a global problem that requires a global explanation.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“though they are on the whole less violent, personal relations in modern urban communities also lack the intimacy and continuity of those in most traditional societies. Increasingly, they are casual, anonymous, and fleeting.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“new forms of contraception, new methods of child rearing, and new forms of education and public welfare have provoked a fundamental renegotiation of gender roles.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“typical modern households live in urban environments where they earn incomes through some form of wage work and buy food produced by others. In the more industrialized economies, ca. 65 percent of populations lived in towns in 1980, and globally, ca. 38 percent; it is probable that even global levels of urbanization will cross the symbolic threshold of 50 percent early in the twenty-first century.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“John McNeill suggests that “we have probably deployed more energy since 1900 than in all of human history before 1900”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“There were African slaves in China from at least the seventh century CE, and, Wolf reports, “by 1119 most of the wealthy people of Canton were said to have possessed Black slaves.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“But even peasants within agrarian states were likely to take more interest in raising productivity when they had secure access to land and were not taxed too heavily. The surprisingly high yields of peasant farming in China in the centuries before the modern era almost certainly had something to do with the fact that tax levels were usually modest (because Chinese governments did not usually spend as much on warfare as did contemporary European states) and that the proportion of peasants who owned their land was high.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“the conquests of the Achaemenid and Hellenistic dynasties encouraged commercial and intellectual exchanges reaching from central Asia to India to the western Mediterranean. In the East, the expansion under the Han and Tang dynasties had similar catalytic impacts within China. The intellectual residue left by these exchanges shaped the cultural traditions of the Persian, Indian, Chinese, and Mediterranean worlds.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“as Joel Mokyr has argued, technological innovation is unlikely to happen quickly where those who work lack wealth, education, and prestige, and those who are wealthy, educated, and have prestige know nothing about productive work.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Machiavelli’s descriptions of the strategic and tactical rules of this world are valuable despite an element of caricature: A Prince, therefore, should have no other object or thought, nor acquire skill in anything, except war, its organization, and its discipline. The art of war is all that is expected of a ruler; and it is so useful that besides enabling hereditary princes to maintain their rule it frequently enables ordinary citizens to become rulers. . . . The first way to lose your state is to neglect the art of war; the first way to win a state is to be skilled in the art of war.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“Moses Finley has argued, with only slight exaggeration, that “what passed for economic growth in antiquity was always achieved only by external expansion”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)

“an eleventh-century CE Muslim prince from Tabaristan wrote in a book for his son, “Make it your constant endeavor to improve cultivation and to govern well; for understand this truth: the kingdom can be held by the army, and the army by gold; and gold is acquired through agricultural development and agricultural development through justice and equity. Therefore be just and equitable.”
― David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (California World History Library Book 2)