Preface

History is the essence of being human; humanity and our origins are expressed in all religions, written and unwritten. It is an elemental part of ourselves that we need to know where we have come from, how we are part of our complex world. Humanity down the ages has been expressed in religious history; Adam and Eve are common stories in the Abrahamic tradition.

At a micro level, village historians across the world have a similar purpose: to research and tell the stories of local families, fields and houses; to express the innate humanity of each village.

Over the last 500 years, we have secularised our historical thinking about our origins and humanity. Who we are and where we have come is expressed through written history books, based on concrete evidence. Religious and secular history has one purpose: to examine our past and express what is our special humanity. History is about how we see ourselves in the past, to make sense of our humanity today, and to provide a platform from which to see the future. Wealth and Power is a part of this tradition and hopes to be a distinctive addition.

Wealth and Power is a book for young and old alike, written intentionally in straightforward language. The book has one major assumption: that our present world is unlike any before it. We have produced a unique world at every point of our existence, both materially and ideologically: not least in our belief that we can control our future by what we do today. Until recently, it was widely believed that our children's future would be an improvement of our own. Many people are not so sure any more.

Our world is not ‘normal’ in any sense. A tiny number of people are richer than anyone could imagine wealth in the past; differences in wealth within countries and between countries are equally skewed. The entire world has moved, or is in the process of moving, from a predominantly agricultural way of living to an urban mode of life. Medicine, as part of the world of science, has altered demography so that most peoples have the chance of a long life. Life as a whole is being transformed. How did we arrive at this state of nature? This is the essence of the question taken up by this work.

There are many scholarly global history books – you can find relevant titles listed in the appendices - but none written specially from the slant of this work, with such a strong focus on the colonial world. Global histories have become a special part of the historian’s landscape. Many recent titles have been designed to illustrate the importance and greatness of Empire. Empire historians wish to illustrate the glories of their country’s recent past. Some global histories go back millennia, but all choose to focus on some particular aspect of our past, as the ultimate purpose is making a mark about the present.

Wealth and Power has chosen specifically to examine the last 500 years, starting in 1492 when the Portuguese and Spaniards invaded the American continent, destroyed the Inca civilisation and stole their gold and silver. The 1492 invasion was the beginning of what made our world what it is today. We take the story forward from this date and illustrate the processes that followed: which by the 19th century had created a unique world of industrial urban capitalism, a key theme that runs through this book. By the 19th century this system of society had become the norm in many parts of western Europe:

• 'Industrial' reflects large production factories, rather than small village producers.

• ‘Urban’ reflects people living in large conglomerates, rather than rural villages.

• ‘Capitalism’ is a system where the aim of any privately owned activity is to make a profit.

We know from the writings of Marcus Polo that there were large cities in China in the 11th century. But they never became generalised; China remained predominately a rural village society until the second half of the 20th century. Rural industry had become common in both India and China for several hundreds of years earlier, but large scale production in factories only became characteristic of western Europe soon after the 1820s.

Capitalism defined in this manner has a long history; traders, banks and manufacturers did not suddenly appear in 19th century Europe. All ancient civilisations include some activity which appears to be capitalistic, but trade and production in earlier times was encased in religious and moral axioms which held back human greed for profit. 19th century urban industrial capitalism was not hindered by such religious prescriptions. Thus the core theme that runs through Wealth and Power is that urban industrial capitalism is unique in human history, and has created a world unlike any other.

The majority of people today live in very large urban cities; we think primarily in a secular fashion, our political leaders are either democratically elected or have seized power by military means. We can communicate across the world at the touch of a button. Our families are typically two adults and two children. These are just some of many historically unique characteristics. Our world is unrecognisable, in terms of its physical characteristics or moral values, compared with 100 years ago, and even more so 500 years ago. Yet it is our 'normal'. And for most historians it is a "better" world than the past, expressed with concepts like Modern or Modernisation, indicating that the past or the pre-modern, is less desirable.

Yet the historical record illustrates clearly that many people were willing to fight and die to maintain their ancient worlds. Part three of this blog focuses on the difficulties and struggles that peoples had in transforming their societies from ancient ways of running social life to industrial capitalism. Some people struggled to create dramatic change, and others struggled to resist transformation, as these blogs will illustrate.

This work takes a contrary view to much historical writing. We would argue that we cannot accurately assess whether our world is better or not, only that it is distinctly different: sufficiently different to be regarded as unique. Our central theme is that between the year 1492 and today, the world has been turned violently upside down. The core of the book argues that wealth was removed from Africa, India, China and the Americas, and into Europe. This involved forcibly colonising, invading, and ruling large parts of the globe. In so doing we laid waste to ancient civilisations, and created holocausts and enslavement, in order to move wealth to Europe from other societies.

New forms of poverty and inequality were created and on a new scale. At the same time, we kept reinventing technology, time and again. We provided the means to expand populations and food production on previously unthinkable scales. We created vast wealth, deprivation and death, at the same time.

We know from our own experience how difficult it is to alter patterns of wealth and poverty in any given community. What occurred on a global scale over these 500 years was a movement of wealth from all sides of the world, first to Europe and then to America and Japan.

In the struggles over wealth and power, we created the wars unlike any that came before - wars that used the most technologically advanced techniques of destruction on a global scale. Europeans who began this 500 year process fought each other twice on a monumental scale, in the First and Second World Wars. At the end of these, and for the first time in 500 years, the Europeans united themselves in a political and economic union so that they might never fight each other again.

Now, as the 21st century proceeds, the British are unsure of their identity and cannot seem to decide whether they do not need to be part of this European system of security. Who knows what effect such a departure might have on the whole European and indeed world power structure?

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