Tamim Ansary - The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection

T his book was born some years ago when I happened to be reading three seemingly unrelated works of history at the same time. One was about the First Emperor of China, who put a million peasants to work building that Great Wall. Another was about Central Asian nomadic life in the centuries before the Mongol conquests. The third one was about barbarian warriors such as Attila the Hun attacking Rome in its later days.

Because I was reading all three books concurrently, I noticed something that probably would not have occurred to me otherwise. The Great Wall of China going up had something to do with the Roman Empire coming down. A provocative thought. China and Rome were two entirely different worlds and knew almost nothing of each other back then, but between them stretched the Central Asian grasslands of the nomads whence the Huns came riding out. When something big happened in Chinalike the construction of a wall that blocked invading nomadsit sent ripple effects through the nomadic world, which eventually reached Rome. And, of course, big events in Rome sent ripple effects the other way.

What intrigued me was not the Rome-China connection per se but interconnectedness itself as an aspect of human history. I went looking for other examples, and they werent hard to find. The religious practices prescribed by the Prophet Muhammad, it turned out, had something to do with Europeans acquiring the magnetic compass. The twelfth-century conquest of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks had subtle roots going back to crop failures in Scandinavia centuries earlier. The policies of the Ming dynasty in China contributed to the American Revolution. The nineteenth-century invention of the cotton gin in the United States devastated family life in sub-Saharan Africathe list goes on endlessly.

Even tens of thousands of years ago, it seems, when we were isolated bands of hunter-gatherers ignorant of the many other bands of humans roaming Earth, we were, somehow, some single far-flung network of interconnected peoples. The globalized tangle that we are today is only the latest chapter of a story that goes back at least forty thousand years and perhaps as many as sixty thousand.

This book takes interconnectedness as one of the through lines of world history but acknowledges another side to the story. Even as we grow ever more intertwined, we stay ever more resolutely distinct from one another as groups. We live on the same planet but in many different worlds. What any of us humans see as the whole world is just the world as we see it, whoever we might be. What we know as the history of the world is actually a socially constructed somebody-centric world historical narrative. Theres a Euro-centric one, an Islamo-centric one, a Sino-centric one, and many more. How many more depends on how many collections of people on Earth think of themselves as a we distinct from others. Any two world historical narratives might have the same events and yet be different stories because the shape of the narrative depends on the teller of the tale. To say that one of the many possible somebody-centric world histories is the