A History of the World (103 page)

Authors: Andrew Marr

BOOK: A History of the World

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39. The Australian Aborigine Bennelong, kidnapped by the British to be a translator: he became a kind of time traveller, moving between the Stone Age and the industrial age.

40. Toussaint L’Ouverture: the ex-slave idealist whose dream republic was crushed by Napoleon.

41. Promoted, not invented by Dr Guillotin, this was the ultimate democratic killing-machine, treating kings, aristocrats and commoners alike.

42. Napoleon’s 1804 coronation as emperor marked the end of the French revolutionary era: Beethoven was so disgusted that he scratched the Corsican’s name off the dedication page of his third symphony.

43. The young Tolstoy would turn from being a wastrel, gambling landowner into a passionate friend to Russia’s serfs . . . while writing some books on the side.

44. A Russian Revolution in 1825; but the Decembrists, who wanted to make Russia more European, failed and were executed or sent to Siberia.

45. The bombardment of Fort Henry, Tennessee: the American Civil War, creating the colossus of the modern US, was the most important conflict of the nineteenth century.

46. John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, was soon caught: but in the South this failed actor became a hero for killing ‘the tyrant’.

47. The Chinese view: during the Second Opium War of 1856–8, the Chinese had no chance against British gunboats and infantry.

48. King Leopold II had nothing but contempt for the Belgians – ‘small people, small country’ – and built a personal empire in Africa, with tragic results.

49. No nation drove the second industrial revolution with quite the verve of the Germans: Karl Benz demonstrates his 1886 motorized tricycle.

50. The founder of Soviet power; but Lenin was brought to power, quite literally, by the Germans who sent him by sealed train to Russia.

51. Hitler told the world just what he intended to do: the world refused to believe him.

52. Mao, five years before he became the most lethal leader China – and the world – has ever seen.

53. Arm in arm: but Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s rejection of a single successor state to the British Raj meant his Pakistan and Gandhi’s India would become sworn enemies.

54. Robert Oppenheimer, the cultured liberal scientist who ended up calculating the exact height at which his bomb would burn to death the maximum number of civilian men, women and children.

55. Margaret Sanger: the working-class radical who did more for twentieth-century women than any politician, male or female.

56. Castro’s successful crushing of the US-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba was part of the prelude to the missile crisis which brought the world to the edge of annihilation.

57. Protestors in Boston, 1970: ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’. American and European students who turned against their parents’ generation found new heroes in the Marxist revolutionaries of the East.

58. The blithe Western assumption that history would lead inevitably to liberalism was given a rough jolt when Iran turned to a militant Islamic theocracy in 1979.

59. Prague, 1989: the collapse of the Soviet empire was remarkably fast and mostly remarkably peaceful too.

60. A statue of the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein being torn down after the US-led invasion: but what followed this liberation was also horrific.

61. In 1997 Garry Kasparov, perhaps the world’s greatest ever chess-player, played an IBM supercomputer in a match billed as ‘the brain’s last stand’.

1. Sumerian fertility goddess: until the evolution of single-God monotheism among the Hebrews, families of gods, usually including a female fertility goddess, were near-universal.

2. Inscription from Ugarit, in today’s Syria. Modern alphabetic writing – what you are reading now – developed among the trading and sea-going people of Canaan, called Phoenicians by the Greeks.

3. Shang axe-head: the Shang were China’s first historically certain dynasty, a chariot-riding and warrior culture accused by later Chinese of incest, cannibalism and a liking for pornographic songs.

4. In the hero Gilgamesh, we have the first named character in world literature.

5. Hugging couple found at Catalhoyuk, in Turkey: this was among the first towns in the world, where people lived in a state of relative equality for thousands of years.

6. The Minoan civilization of Crete practiced bull-jumping and made beautiful art but was much bloodier and more violent than its first archaeologists thought.

7. Around 3000 BC, Orkney was one of the most advanced societies in Britain: the uncovered stone homes at Skara Brae are clean, cosy and seem ready to move back into today.

8. A gold drinking cup from Troy: this was not really owned by Homer’s King Priam but Troy was a real city, and the Trojan war was almost certainly an historical event.

9. A head-dress from Ur, 2600 BC: the Mesopotamian cultures produced famous cities, empires and religions; but too much of their art has disappeared.

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