Once upon a time, humans lived with much less interpersonal violence, without harsh patriarchal domination of women, and without systemic social inequities in general. Life wasn’t easy, but social exploitation and inequity figured much less than in later, civilized societies. That is the “Eden” of this book’s title. Our penchant for regular, organized interpersonal violence, the real worm in this apple, started after Eden, when we settled down, and our populations grew much larger.
After Eden: A Short History of the World is exactly the sort of thing I like: A thoroughly accessible trip through human history, reframing the events I was aware of through the added context of those things I had not known or considered. For example: I had heard before of Spaniards working conquered indigenous people of the Americas to death in silver mines, but I never knew that that was to satisfy Ming China’s need for portable currency in their booming domestic economy; Europe wanted silks and porcelain, but the only thing China wanted in return was silver (until, eventually, England appeared in Chinese ports with their war ships and said, “We don’t care for this trade deficit, old chaps, so we’re going to have to insist you start buying this opium we’re growing in India.”) Author (and professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) John Charles Chasteen makes countless such connections in this book, illustrating how farms led to cities and empires, and eventually, the global market economy of a handful of winners and billions of losers that we see today. Chasteen proves that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the systems we have in place today, making the incredibly urgent point that only by understanding human history can we see a different path forward: one that prioritises the well-being of everyone and the planet we live on. So whether one is interested in seeing a different way forward or simply reading a holistic story of our shared past, After Eden is stuffed with fascinating information, and I loved it all. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
What spark of genius prompted the world’s first civilizations? Seemingly, none. Little about them suggests a higher form of human life. Essentially, there occurred a confluence and concentration of earlier innovations. Only the aggregate itself was strictly new. Pottery and basketry, woven and dyed clothing, horses and carts, oxen and plows, beer and bread, oil and wine, kingship and state religion — these came together with synergy in urban life. Urban environments exacerbated social inequality but also unleashed cultural dynamism.
I think it would be impossible to summarise what is already a “short history of the world”, but I do want to note some things that I found particularly fascinating/eye-opening. I don’t think I have ever before read that what we call the Agricultural Revolution was a 10 000 year-long “diffuse and accidental” process (No one who lived during this “revolution” experienced rapid change because of it, or even knew that it was happening.) And I've never really considered that from the long ago days of the Persian Empire through the Roman and Ottoman and British, empires formed “the basic model of civilization until only two hundred years ago. It comprises most of what we usually regard as world history.” And this notion of “empire” is primarily what Chasteen is writing about here: stratified, warrior-led, focused on cities but predominantly rural, and founded on the productive power of downtrodden agricultural peasantries. Basically: Everywhere a rolling war machine discovered settled foreigners, they defeated their warriors and said, “You work for us now. Keep on farming and send a portion to our king.” But where the rolling war machine discovered foragers (a way of life no less organised, specialised, or culturally significant than what went on in settlements), the empire-builders would appropriate the land, enslave, scare off, or kill the locals, and feel good about spreading “civilisation” to the dark reaches of the earth.
I see that Chasteen has written several histories of Latin America, and from what he shares here, I would be very interested in reading more on the history of Brazil: From its accidental “discovery” by Portuguese sailors who were blown off course of the weird Atlantic “gyre” that they would employ to slingshot themselves around the southern end of Africa en route to the Silk and Spice Roads, to its transformation into the largest plantation state in the Americas (overseen, again, by the Portuguese — who, it turns out, were the biggest players in the transatlantic slave trade, enslaving half of all people stolen from Africa on their Brazilian sugar and coffee farms), to its more recent history of independence, and flirtations with socialism, monarchy, and military rule (usually with American interference trying to get their preferred guy in).
I have also never read or considered that the Industrial Revolution was initially a very localised event — centred in Northwest England and spreading barely into Scotland (due to the availability of coal, iron, and existing export infrastructure) — and was only copied abroad in Germany, slightly in Belgium and the Netherlands, and overseas, in New England. And it was the Industrial Revolution — and its need to open up new markets — that saw the spread of new empires: England colonised India not just for the resources, but to end their home-spun cotton industry and force the huge Indian market to buy British-made textiles. (This was also the point at which England outlawed slavery because, as Chasteen writes, As British industries saturated market after market in the Americas, slavery had begun to limit profits rather than guarantee them. Free workers would presumably consume more British imports.) Meanwhile, the United States built the Panama Canal in order to open up the Pacific market (“freeing” and then occupying the Philippines; sailing into Japanese ports to insist they join global markets [an idea they took to gladly as the Japanese then built their own warships and spread their own empire into Korea and China]), and as for continental Europe, this initiated the “Scramble for Africa” as newly industrialised Germany and Belgium attempted to spread empires of their own in the “Dark Continent”. (It’s no coincidence that thwarted empires at this stage led to German and Japanese aggression in the ensuing world wars.)
Random interesting facts:
- Many empires employed court eunuchs, but they have never been found in a culture that didn’t descend from herders
- “Homer”, “Confucius”, and the “Buddha” may all be collective creations, where one name stands in for an entire oral tradition
- Swahili was a lingua franca for East African traders, combining Bantu grammatical structures with Arabic vocabulary (and maybe everyone knows that, but it was interesting news to me).
- While bombing North Vietnamese cities, the Americans “used more tonnage than all of World War II’s myriad bombing campaigns put together yet failed to defeat the Vietnamese revolutionaries”
- And a line I admired: Voilà, World War One. Imperialism set it up, nationalism triggered it, industrialism made in hell on Earth.
An enormous part of world history is the raw mistreatment of half of humanity by the other half. Obviously, making common cause with the whole world is going to be hard, but we have to try. What if we teach that all our fates are absolutely intertwined, that no Earthling is an outsider on this blue marble floating in the limitless void, that we do share a common history, and a common destiny, too?
And, of course, this is the point of reading (and writing) a book like After Eden: Humans made society work the way it does today, and we have the ability to change it. The first step is to look back along the path we’ve made and see where we’ve gone wrong; I wish that history read like this in school.
