A History of Mankind

(This piece is in response to a question by a reader. Also, the French Revolution kind of started on a distant July 14, which is also my birthday. Allons les enfants de la patrie.) France was a preexisting reality well before the Revolution of 1789, with popular heroes, from Charlemagne to Joan of Arc to Louis XI, the 12th century king popularly known as “the Saint.” That all these were associated with the dreaded Catholic Church was a problem for the revolutionaries.

The ethos of slavery was so prevalent in Islam that even regions where slavery had rarely been a substantial form of labor, like South Asia, eventually were reshaped by the imposition of enslavement1.

Medieval slaves were as a rule ranked as little more than valuable animals, at least as far as the law was concerned1, although the Christian Church and some Christian rulers did much to ameliorate their status, for example by exhorting masters to not separate families, and by freeing slaves in large numbers.

There’s this book review that caught my attention. The text being reviewed is “The Stargazers Palace: The Transformation of Science in 16th-Century Northern Europe” by Violet Moller (One World, 2024) and it starts with a very bold announcement: Of all the astronomical instruments developed before the telescope, clocks were the most significant.

Feudalism was a reality across most states of Eurasia since the slow-moving collapse of the Roman Empire started in the 4th and 5th centuries. Crucially, this collapse coincided with the decline of India’s Gupta Empire and the final phase of China’s reunification, culminating in the rise of the Sui Dynasty in the late 6th century over a landscape much changed since the times of the Han Dynasty.

The Islamic failure to conquer Constantinople with troops that included many Christian soldiers unwilling to fight for the Muslims had a massive impact on future policies in the Caliphate. First, the failure convinced newly ascended Caliph Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz (Umar II), designed as successor by his short-lived predecessor, Sulayman (r. 715-717), to order a withdrawal to the previous borders with Byzantium.

As a senior Southeast Asia correspondent for Bloomberg News, I had this horrible boss who was absolutely in love with central bankers, and always wanted me to write about how, say, Indonesia’s central banker was a GENIUS who had TAMED inflation by deploying UNCONVENTIONAL monetary tools while JAWBONING the markets at critical junctures. I hated that guy (he’s still in Bloomberg, still getting his Central Banker Boners), but I hated the cult of central bankers even more.

Under Caliph Abd al-Malik in the years either side of 700 AD, the Quran rapidly gained a central position in Islamic life. It was during his reign that the Dome of the Rock, the first significant building commissioned by a Muslim ruler, and thus the oldest Islamic monument, was erected on Judaism’s most sacred site.

Islam remained a diffused semi-religion, semi-heresy for a long time. The first real evidence of Muslim prayers oriented toward Muhammad’s Kaaba in Mecca — instead of towards Christ’s and King David’s holy city of Jerusalem as before — dates only from 705, eight decades after Muhammad’s death, and is from the Christian Jacob of Edessa.

Some weeks ago, I published an innocent Substack Note with a chart from my former employer, Bloomberg News (I was for a while their Senior Southeast Asia Eco & Gov correspondent, meaning: experienced guy who writes about the politics and economics of that particular region). The chart and my comments attached to it led to some spirited debate and, in particular, a pretty incisive question by one reader: So here I am, trying to provide a coherent draft for a response to this very complex question.