Chapter 3 Part I The World of Isolated Regions Before 1500

Why should world history begin in 1500?Human beings and their ancestors have lived on the earth for more than two million years.Why should this small fragment of history, which accounts for only one percent of all human history, be selected and given special attention? The answer is that before 1500, humans basically lived in isolated areas.The various ethnic groups are actually dispersed in complete isolation.It was not until around 1500 that there was first direct contact between the various ethnic groups.It was only then that they finally came together, whether it was the Bushmen of South Africa, the educated Chinese bureaucrats, or the primitive Patagonians.

The year 1500 is therefore an important turning point in human history.We can compare Columbus to the astronauts: the former reached San Salvador and broke the shackles of isolation between regions; the latter went to the moon and broke the shackles of planetary isolation. In fact, world history in a strictly global sense does not begin until the voyages of Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Magellan.Before that, there were only relatively parallel histories of various nations, but no unified human history.If the monogenesis of human origin is true, then, at the beginning of human history, there was a unity or common origin.However, during the long millions of years of the Paleolithic era, humans gradually dispersed over most of the land on the earth's surface.Later, the end of the ice ages raised the levels of the oceans, separating Africa from Europe, North and South America from Northeast Asia, and Australia from Southeast Asia—to mention only a few major divisions.

Since then, humans have lived in varying degrees of regional isolation.Some people were reduced to complete isolation, such as the aborigines of Australia are a good example; from their last emigration to Australia from Southeast Asia to the arrival of Captain James Cook, they had no contact with the outside world for 3000 for many years.The inhabitants of North and South America were almost equally isolated, and their last crossings from Siberia to America occurred about 10,000 years before the voyage of Columbus.Thereafter, although Norwegian expeditions reached the northeastern coast of North America, and Polynesians may have reached South America, neither had any lasting impact on the Indian population.Sub-Saharan Africa was also largely isolated about 6,000 years ago, as the Sahara desert had become so dry that it became a huge barrier to migration.But despite this, black Africans actually had limited and intermittent connections with the outside world.It is largely because of these connections that they enjoyed certain advantages over the American Indians and the Aboriginal Australians.Voyagers from Southeast Asia brought sweet potatoes and bananas, people from the Middle East brought the technology of mining, smelting and forging iron, and the Arabs spread their civilization and religion from their strongholds in North and East Africa to black people.These and other advances enabled Negroes to exploit natural resources more efficiently and produce food in greater quantities, resulting in a corresponding increase in their population and general improvement in their literacy.

The rest of the world is made up of Europe, Asia and North Africa.North Africa has historically been more closely associated with the northern Mediterranean than with the sub-Saharan region.For convenience, this continent from Morocco to Kamchatka and from Norway to Malaya may be called Eurasia.It is Eurasia that constitutes the "heartland" of world history.It occupies two-fifths of the world's land, including nine-tenths of the world's population, and is the birthplace of the earliest and most advanced human civilization. The history of the world before 1500 was essentially the history of Eurasia as explained here.Only in Eurasia, there is a huge and continuous mutual influence between various peoples and civilizations.While Aboriginal Australians and American Indians lived in complete isolation, and sub-Saharan Africans lived in semi-isolation for thousands of years, Eurasians, on the contrary, remained It is constantly exchanging various technologies, ideas, systems and objects with each other.

Interactions within Eurasia were much smaller before 1500 than after 1500, when direct maritime links between regions were established.Prior to 1500, interactions within Eurasia varied from era to era.Generally speaking, in the early thousands of years, this kind of mutual influence is the most limited, and later, its scope gradually expands and the speed gradually accelerates.In the thousands of years BC, most of the ancient civilizations that flourished in the Nile, Tigris-Euphrates, Indus and Yellow River valleys were confined to their limited locations.Of course, they also had some intercourse with each other; indeed, the true origin of the civilizations of these regions can be explained in part by the spread of the various technologies of the Mesopotamian civilization.The fact remains, however, that these early civilizations were like oases in the desert, surrounded on all sides by great expanses of barbarism, beyond which intercourse was very limited.

Over the centuries of classical civilization, this pattern changed radically.By 100 A.D., when the classical era reached its peak, the Roman Empire expanded to the entire Mediterranean region, the Parthian Empire extended to the entire Middle East, the Kushan Empire conquered northwestern India, and the Chinese Han Empire included everything from the east to the Pacific Ocean. remaining area.Thus, the political entities of this period occupied whole regions and not just the great river basins; the civilized world stretched like a continuous belt from the Scottish Highlands to Southeast Asia.As a result, various new and large-scale exchanges have emerged between regions.During this period, various religions such as Christianity and Buddhism began to spread to most of Eurasia, exerting not only a profound religious influence on these regions, but also a wide-ranging political and cultural influence.At this time, the mixed Greco-Middle Eastern culture known as Hellenism also spread in all directions from the eastern Mediterranean—to Western Europe, North Africa, India, and to some extent China and Japan.Trade between regions also increased significantly during this period.Trade is carried out by land and sea.The goods exchanged were: linen, copper, tin and glass from the Roman Empire, cotton fabrics, spices and precious stones from India, spices from Southeast Asia and silk from China; among them, silk was the most important.

Later, in the Middle Ages, the peoples of Eurasia interacted even more than before, as there were unprecedentedly large empires across regions. Between 632 and 750, Muslims conquered vast areas and established an empire that stretched from the Pyrenees to the Indian Ocean, from Morocco to the Chinese border.In the next few centuries, Islam further expanded to Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia and the interior of Africa.Even more impressive is the 13th-century Mongol Empire, which included Korea, China, all of Central Asia, Russia, and most of the Middle East. This opened new horizons, as can be seen in the deeds of some of the famous travelers of the time, who took advantage of the peace and security within the Muslim city-states and the Mongol Empire to travel back and forth across Eurasia and to various places.The most famous traveler in the West was Marco Polo (1254-1324) of Venice.He had served Kublai Khan, the Mongol ruler, and governor of a Chinese city with a million inhabitants; and when he returned after twenty-five years of traveling, his fellow countrymen were astonished to tell of his adventures.A more extensive traveler was the Muslim Ibn Batuta (1304-1378).He set off from his hometown in Morocco to visit the holy land of Mecca, and then traveled to India via Samarkand, where he served as a judge and also went to China as an envoy.Later, he returned to Morocco and continued to travel, first crossing the sea north to Spain, then sailing south to Central Africa, and finally arrived in Timbuktu.Lesser known is the Nestorian monk Laban Ba ​​Soma, who was born in Beijing and traveled from east to west across Eurasia. He arrived at the Mongol court in Mesopotamia in 1287, and then traveled via Constantinople to Naples, Rome, Paris and London; en route he was received by King Philip IV of France and Edward I of England.

Within Eurasia, this integration and interaction did not proceed continuously.As empires rise and fall, they rise and fall; so do the channels of communication, sometimes open and sometimes blocked.The silk trade between China and the West flourished for a while, but with the collapse of the Roman and Han empires, it withered to a trickle.Likewise, European merchants could not long follow in Marco Polo's footsteps due to the premature disintegration of the Mongol Empire.The fact remains, however, that throughout the pre-1500 period Eurasia was a living, self-renewing whole compared with the scattered and isolated parts of the non-Eurasian world.

There is a fundamental difference in the degree of isolation of the various parts of the Eurasian continent compared with the rest of the world; this difference is the most important for world history.The famous anthropologist Boas once commented, pointing out the significance of this fundamental difference.He said: In other words, if other geographical factors are equal, the key to human progress lies in the accessibility and mutual influence among peoples.Only those peoples who are most accessible and have the most opportunity to interact with other peoples are most likely to develop by leaps and bounds; while those who are isolated from the world and lack external stimulation mostly stagnate.

If this hypothesis were applied globally, the least developed of all the larger groups would be the remote Aboriginal peoples of Australia, followed by the American Indians, then the blacks of sub-Saharan Africa, and finally the least developed The hindrances are the most advanced Eurasian peoples—they are in constant and increasingly extensive intercourse with one another.Of course, after 1500, European explorers discovered that the differences in cultural development were exactly the same: Australian Aboriginal people were still in the Paleolithic food gathering stage; Paleolithic tribes, with highly developed Mexican, Mesoamerican, and Peruvian civilizations; African Negroes showing similar diversity, though at a higher overall level of development; and finally, on a completely different level, the Eurasian Very advanced, complex civilizations on the mainland—Muslim civilizations in the Middle East, Hindu civilizations in South Asia, and Confucian civilizations in East Asia.

If Boas's hypothesis applied only to Eurasia, it would help explain why the Middle East came to the fore historically.The Middle East sits right at the crossroads between three continents; in fact, for most of history, the Middle East has been the region where human progress began.Along with Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, agriculture, urban life, and civilization all originated in the Middle East.In addition, it is also worth noting that civilization developed in the Middle East as early as around 3500 BC, took root in India around 2500 BC, and started to grow in China and Western Europe at the end. Around 1500 BC—because China is located at the isolated eastern end of Eurasia, and Western Europe is located at the isolated western end of Eurasia. Before 1500, Western Europe was almost always what is today called an underdeveloped region.The peoples of Western Europe were on the periphery, from which they peeped inland, fully aware of their isolation and vulnerability; a passage from the English chronicler William (of Malmesbury) in the twelfth century makes this clear .He said: How different these timid, medieval Europeans were from their confident, aggressive descendants!Their descendants set out from the besieged peninsula, won control of the ocean routes, and the besieged became the besiegers, thus determining the main trend of world history until now.This unexpected ending raises a fundamental question: why were Western Europeans so important?Why did they and not the Arabs or the Chinese link the continents of the world and thus begin the global phase of world history - especially if one considers their earlier influence on world affairs was only modest?