The Penguin History of the World

Haiti’s problems are endemic poverty and extensive social inequality. And first among the many reasons for its poverty are the lack of education and infrastructure. Political stagnation plays a role as well, but whether that is a by-product of corruption or it is the other way around is hard to say. What is clear is that all the help in the world could not alone rectify Haiti’s problems. Such a transformation there and elsewhere with similar troubles will have to come from within. But how to break the cycle of misery is a difficult question, especially in a country where poverty-induced illness is rampant and infant mortality is a staggering 90 per 1,000 live births (in Canada it is 5 per 1,000). Haiti will stagger on, now led by President Martelly, a former Kompa music star known as ‘Sweet Micky’. Its problems will not go away anytime soon. History often seems to turn most slowly when human need for change is greatest. But if history teaches us anything, it is that the capacity for change is always there, even in its darkest corners.

6 Whole World History

The story told in this book has no end. However dramatic and disrupted, a history of the world cannot pull up short and come to a halt at a neat chronological boundary. To close with the year in which the author ceases to write is merely formal; it can say little about the future of the historical processes then under way and thus severed in mid-life. As history is what one age thinks worth noting about another, recent events will acquire new meanings and present patterns will lose their clear outlines as people reflect again and again on what made the world in which they live. Even in a few months, present judgments about what is important will begin to look eccentric, so fast can events now move. Perspective is harder and harder to maintain.

This does not mean that the record is no more than a collection of facts or just a succession of events constantly reshuffled like the images of a kaleidoscope. Discernible trends and forces have operated over long periods and wide areas. In the longest run of all, three such interconnected trends stand out: the gradual acceleration of change, a growing unity of human experience, and the growth of human capacity to control the environment. In our day, for the first time, they have made visible a truly unified world history. Blatantly, the expression ‘one world’ remains little more than a cant term, for all the idealism of those who first used it. There is just too much conflict and quarrelling about, and no earlier century ever saw so much violence as the twentieth. Its politics were expensive and dangerous even when they did not break out in overt fighting, as the Cold War showed only too clearly. And now, just into a new century, new divisions are appearing still. The United Nations is still based, ironically (even if a little less firmly than fifty years ago), on the theory that the whole surface of the globe is divided into territories belonging to nearly 200 sovereign states. The bitter struggles of the Balkans or Burma or Rwanda may yet reopen and the simplicity upon which many would like to insist of an Islamic–western clash of civilizations is cut across in half a dozen ways by the ethnic divisions of even so Islamic a country as Afghanistan.

Much, much more could be said along the same lines. Yet that does not mean that humanity does not now share more than it has ever done in the past. A creeping unity has seized mankind. An originally Christian calendar is now the basis of governmental activity around most of the world. Modernization implies a growing commonality of goals. Clashes of culture are frequent, but were more evidently so in the past. What is now shared is at the humdrum level of the personal experience of millions; if society is a sharing of references, our world shares more than ever before, even if, paradoxically, people feel most acutely the distinctions between them in their daily experience. Yet when those who lived in neighbouring villages spoke significantly different dialects, when in the whole of their lives most of them would only exceptionally travel ten miles from their homes, when even their clothes and tools might provide in their shape and workmanship evidence of big differences of technology, style and custom, that experience was in important ways much more differentiated than it is now.