Book Information
Title : The Invention of Yesterday
Author : Tamim Ansary
Publication Date : October 1, 2019
Genres : Nonfiction, Cultural anthropology, History
Pages : 448
ISBN-10 : 1610397967
ISBN-13 : 978-1610397964
How I met this book
I don’t know how I found this book, but as far as I remember, it was on the bookshelf that showed recommended books. This is because I usually find books from the bookshelf that are recommended by people or staff who work in the bookstore, especially when I don’t know what I would like to read. I just look for books randomly. At that point when I took this book, I think that I was interested in the history of the world. The inspiration comes from the realization of the fact that I do not really know the past incidents of the world. When I was a kid, I studied and learned the history (mainly Japanese history) because I was supposed to. The reason why I studied the history a lot was for an exam, so I did not store the information in my brain in the long term. At some point, I was like ” I don’t really know the history of the world. I need to know and learn from it”. I did not have any specific category of the history book that I would like to know, instead, I wanted to see the big picture of the world history. When I saw the subtitle “A 50,000 – YEAR HISTORY of HUMAN CULTURE, CONFLICT, and CONNECTION”, I looked over the introduction on the first page and contents outline. And then, I found out that this book covers the history of the world in chronological orders divided by the 6 chapters. It made me think that I would like to read this book right off the bat because that is the kind of the book that I wanted to read.
Summary of this book
Short Summary
Since we, human beings, were born, we started creating tools and language, affected by the environment. The inventions made us separate from other creatures. They started having their own cultures, narratives, and constellations. The environmental factors made them have different perspectives on understanding the world. When the different narratives are overlapped, the world was moved and changed. And we have different our own contexts creating our thoughts and ways to live. Technology is not the solutions for us to operate as a single, integrated human community. We need to consider and take context seriously to connect with each other.
Key Points
- When different social constellations overlap, some events or transitions occur.
- Tools and Language were big advantages that human beings invented to deal with their environment. Among them, language enabled them to be able to imagine the same world even if they were separated in different time and places.
- In 30,000 to 1500 BCE, civilizations were created by different geographical rivers: The Nile, The Tigris and Euphrates, The Indus, and The Huang He. On the other hand, there was another civilization Pastoral Nomadic civilization that kept moving and invented a lot of useful tools such as chariot, trousers and composite bow. Using horses, they could travel from from India to Europe.
- In 1500 to 500 BCE, there were 4 worlds that had different networks affected by the geographic factors: Middle World, Mediterranean World, Monsoon World, and Sub-Saharan Africa.
- The belief system was born from 1000 to 350 BCE in each social constellation, such as China, India, and Persia. The author prefers the belief system as a term instead of religion. This is because Religion is so specific to most of us that we tend to understand other religions within the framework of our own.
- Money brings value into existence as a substance separate from all material things, just as mathematical marks bring quantity into existence as an element separate from all things quantified.
- The Persian Empire, from 500 to 100 BCE, had two systems to collect money from people: tribute and taxation. Tribute is a method to enrich the conqueror by the conquered people and to tamp them down. Taxation is a method that works well when taxpayers do well economically.
- 5 M’s were the factors that enabled the Persians to be a successful empire: Management, Math, Money, Messaging, and Military.
- Christianity started out as the religion of slaves and poor people in a powerful empire. On the other hand, Muslims started out as a religion of small but independent groups.
- From 650 CE to 1100 CE, everyone in Europe was connected locally. They rarely went outside to have trades or relationships with other, which led to dark period where technology, infrastructure, reading, and writing declined)
- In 1167, Temugin, aka Genghis Khan (“lord of the universe”), was born, and he and his successors conquered vast regions, China, Russia, Vietnam, and Korea. However, they couldn’t expand anymore because of the limitations of administration.
- In 1346, a vast population (at least one third of the people) in Europe died because of a disease caused of the interconnectedness that the Mongols created, which is called the black death. As a result, wage went up because of the short of labor, and the women’s status was more valued because of their husbands.
- From 1100 to 1500 CE, Europeans invented significant tools, gunpower, military system, a clock, a book, and a compass.
- In 1368, the Mongol Empire, the Yuan dynasty, was beaten by Zhu Yuanzhang, and the Ming dynasty (“the brilliant”) was born. China is back. After the Hongnu Emperor (“vast military”) died, the Yongle Emperor (“perpetual happiness”) was born.
- In the Middle World (1300-1600 CE), there were three gunpower empires: the Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal. The keyword is the framework for Muslim life, sharia “path”. Unwritten rules or values are powerful in the community.
- In 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail from Cadiz to Cuba and Venezuela, which he thought at first were Japan and the Garden of Eden, respectively.
- After Columbus’ journey from Europe to America, the pigs that they carried caused Influenza that killed people and decreased the population from 112 million to 6 million in 1650. Mongol Holocaust, the Black Death, the pandemic triggered by Columbus’ journey, and the world wars of the twentieth century were called Great Dying.
- From 1500 to 1800 CE, sugar, cotton, and tobacco were the main products, which fueled the European colonization of the Americas.
- in 19s, sugar produced in the Caribbean was transformed into Alcohol in North America, and then it was traded with guns in Europe. The guns were traded with African slaves.
- In 1500 – 1900 CE, Qing dynasty (pure dynasty), the biggest China ever, was born. They did not have enough silver, so they exported a lot of tea to Europe (36 million in 19s) and America.
- In 18s, Adam Smith found that chasing wealth is actually a form of philanthropy, defined as giving gifts of time, talent, and treasure to help make life better for other people. If people are free to make money in their own ways, it works because they know what they can do to make money.
- Opium war (1st: 1839 – 1842, 2nd: 1856 – 1860) occurred between India conquered by the British and China. China was trying to ban the shipment of opium by them. As a result, the British won and were allowed to do all the business in China.
- In 1850-1864, in China, a war happened between Qin Dynasty and the Taiping Rebellion where Chinese people who lived in the south and failed some exams, which resulted in 20 – 60 million people dead. It was the most disastrous war you’ve never heard of.
- The Muslim and Chinese worlds had a restoration narrative, where preserving and protecting were the main people’s intentions. In the West, however, they had the progress narrative, where inventing new things was the main point of their view. As a result, invention exploded in the West in 1750 – 1950 CE.
- Guns, messages, telephones, printers, newspapers, reporters, and factory work systems were among the inventions that occurred in Europe.
- In the machine age (1750 – 1900 CE), the middle class was created, individuals were valued in companies, and the ideology (liberty, fraternity, and equality) led to the French Revolution and gender equality.
- Nationalism where only one currency, the same law, and different languages, but one official one is applied, was created in 1800 1925 CE. What made people belong to a specific nationalism was ideology. For example, in America, they defined a citizen of the nation state as any person who accepted governance under the American Constitution. On the other hand, ethnicity and blood origins were more valued in the West.
- in 1800 – 1925, Europeans who moved to North America took advantage of the nature that it already had possessed. They were interested in only replacing native people to look for an opportunity to live new lives.
- After war of the World War (1914 – 1945 CE), every country wanted to be a sovereign state as their own nation state where they have borders, currency, passports, and their own identity.
- The Cold War occurred because of two different views of the world: capitalism and communism.
- There is a thought of singularity: a moment when nanotechnology, biotechnology, and artificial intelligence come together and the boundary between humans and machines vanishes. If the brains can be restored in the electronic circuit, and physical body is replaced, human beings will be immortal.
- Progress narrative causes an environmental crisis because of the sacrifice of nature for what we need. Universal basic income can be a solution for stopping this situation where we try to produce for profit and money.
- Technology cannot be a bridge to connect everyone with everyone. This is because the big picture is that they have strengthen the connection between each other, rather than with others.
Fun Facts
- Chess was invented in India and played only in India in the sixth century. There was a king who wanted a game in which players can control their destiny, and a servant and mathematician named Sissa invented a Chess that depended entirely on strategic thinking.
- Homo sapiens that had some bipedal primates in the worlds were on Earth 100,000 years ago. Sapiens in Latin means wise.
- The glue pastoral nomadic people used was made from horses’ hooves.
- In East Africa, Swahili, a Bantu language blended with Arabic, was spoken by millions of people. Swahili comes from Arabic word sahel, which means “border”.
- Spices were generally rare, compact, light, transportable, and marketable things people wanted, not things people needed.
- In 395, Emperor Theodosius made Christianity the Roman Empire’s official religion, the only religion endorsed by the state.
- Many English words that start with the syllable al derive from muslim intellectuals. For example, algebra derives from the combination of jabr (Arabic word for necessity) and the Persian mathematician Al-Khwarizmi who codified a system for calculating to reduce a range of possible values to a single necessary value. Other examples are Alcohol (al-kuhul) and Algorithm(al-khwarizms).
- In the year 800, 3 % of the world’s population lived in the Americas.
- In 800 – 1300, Venetian goldsmiths found a way to make profits by selling coins they received from travelers in exchange for silver or gold. They needed a transaction calculation of coins, slivers, and gold. Since Venetians set up benches outside to do their business, they were called banquers (the Italian word for bench is banque), and today, we call them bankers.
- Credit comes from a Latin root that means “belief”.
Favorite Quotes
“History keeps happening because of that fact: we’re not one group” (p.25)
“‘Where we lived was who we were. ” (p.11)
“The tension between staying connected to one another and staying relevant to the outside world was coded into human life from the moment language was born”(p.5)
“environment begets lifestyle.” (p.28)
“In urban civilizations, a growing population meant bigger, denser cities. In pastoral nomadic cultures, it meant ever wider dispersal.” (p.39)
“Wherever one culture overlapped with another, ripple effects passed through” (p.52)
“The increasing size of empires correlated to the increasing speed a which messages could be transmitted, which in trun reflected the development of technology and infrastructure.” (p.78)
“Whatever the king accepted as payment of taxes became currency, but the power of money to enable transactions extended beyond any kinship cluster, language cluster, or worldview” (p.83)
“Muslim philosophers were more interested in digging out the underlying principles that animated material reality.” (p.160)
“If everyone behaved as they should – and there were ways to know how they should – the social world could take final form, and disruptive change could blessedly stop” (p.245)
After Columbus made his seminal voyage, bankrolling an expedition to the west was no longer a roll of the dice: it was a business decision. Something was over there. (p.260)
“Those who get richest were those who most successfully helped meet the greatest needs of the greatest number.” (p.300)
“Most inventions are improvements of improvements of improvements.” (p.314)
“Every development, innovation, and departure just adds some jot to the confluence of many currents” (p.327)
“When it comes to history, instead of talking about causality, we’re better off thinking in terms of ripple effects” (p.327)
“In fact, with the rise of the machine, there was not biological reason to favor men over women in almost any human endeavor (nor vice versa, for that matter).” (p.330)
“We’ll set to work rebuilding the remembered tools of the past and devising new ones. We’re humans: it’s what we do. (p.344)
“if the singularity were to happen today, only the rich would live forever. The poor would straggle on in diminishing numbers, surviving for a while because the immortal rich will want servants but become dispensable once technology has progressed far enough o make robots indistinguishable from humans emotionally, sensually, sexually.” (p.388)
“Making connections across cultural borders requires that we take context seriously” (p.406)
How I felt about this book
First of all, I did not think that I was going to enjoy this book so much that I read it twice. One of the reasons was that I could see the transition of the world as I dug into each chapter, and I can compare it to the current stage of the history. The second reason might be that each chapter has different important topics or keywords, such as Tools, Language, and Environment in the first chapter. This helped me find the common points in each chapter that I can take away from this book. The author does not introduce the specific history incidents deeply but a big picture reflected on the key words in each chapter. Of course, there are some parts that I was not really into such as religion, but overall, I was into this book in almost every chapter. Also, this book helped me which part of the history I am interested in more than others. It was very interesting to see how the world changed and developed and get to the current situation where we live. I highly recommend this book to people who do not really enjoy learning history. As a person whose second language is English, it sometimes was difficult to understand what the author was saying because the terminologies that the author use are not common words. Even so, I could enjoy this book, so even if your first language is not English or you lean English as second language, I recommend this book.
Whom I recommend to read
- Those who would like to learn the history of the world
- Those who would like to see the transition of the world
- Those who would like to grasp the big picture in world history
