Richard Overy - The Times history of the World

EDITORS:

Geoffrey Barraclough

Late President, Historical
Association

Chichele Professor of Modern
History

University of Oxford

Norman Stone

Professor of History

Bilkent University, Ankara

Geoffrey Parker FBA

Andreas Dorpalen

Distinguished Professor of History

The Ohio State University

Richard Overy

Professor in History

University of Exeter

CONSULTANTS:

David Abulafia

Daud Ali

F R Allchin

R W Van Alstyne

David Arnold

John Barber

James R Barrett

Iris Barry

Peter Bauer

Christopher Bayly

W G Beasley

Ralph Bennett

Amira K Bennison

A D H Bivar

Brian Bond

Hugh Borton

Hugh Bowden

David Brading

Warwick Bray

John Breen

Carl Bridge

F R Bridge

Michael G Broers

Hugh Brogan

Tom Brooking

Ian Brown

Anthony Bryer

Muriel E Chamberlain

David G Chandler

John Cannon

Eric Christiansen

Colin Coates

Peter Coates

Frank Cogliano

Irene Collins

Michael Crawford

James Cronin

Douglas Dakin

John Darwin

Ralph Davis

Kent Deng

Robin Dunbar

I E S Edwards

Robert Evans

John Ferguson

Felipe Fernndo-Armesto

Stefan Fisch

David H Fischer

John R Fisher

Kate Fleet

Michael Flinn

Timothy Fox

Alan Frost

Robert I Frost

Clive Gamble

W J Gardner

Carol Geldart

John Gillingham

Ian Glover

Martin Goodman

Graham Gould

D G E Hall

Norman Hammond

John D Hargreaves

Tim Harper

David R Harris

Jonathan Haslam

Ragnhild Hatton

M Havinden

Harry Hearder

W O Henderson

Colin J Heywood

Sinclair Hood

Albert Hourani

Henry Hurst

Jonathan Israel

Edward James

Nicholas James

Richard H Jones

Ulrich Kemper

Hugh Kennedy

David Killingray

George Lane

Mark H Leff

Karl Leyser

Colin Lewis

James B Lewis

Wolfgang Liebeschuetz

D Anthony Low

David Luscombe

John Lynch

Rosamond McKitterick

James M McPherson

Isabel de Madriaga

J P Mallory

P J Marshall

A R Michell

Christopher D Morris

A E Musson

Thomas Nelson

Linda A Newson

F S Northedge

Joan Oates

David Ormrod

Caroline Orwin

J H Parry

Thomas M Perry

David Phillipson

Sidney Pollard

Andrew Porter

Avril Powell

T G E Powell

John Poynter

Benjamin Ravid

Tapan Raychaudhuri

B H Reid

Michael Roaf

Francis Robinson

A N Ryan

Gren Rystad

H W F Saggs

S B Saul

Peter Sawyer

Chris Scarre

Roger Schofield

D J Schove

H M Scott

H H Scullard

Andrew Sharf

Stephen Shennan

Andrew Sherratt

Peter Sluglett

R B Smith

Frank C Spooner

Jocelyn Statler

L S Stavrianos

Zara Steiner

Sarah Stockwell

Melvyn Stokes

W C Sturtevant

Julian Swann

Alan Sykes

Martin Thomas

E A Thompson

Hugh Tinker

Malcolm Todd

R C Trebilcock

Hugh R Trevor-Roper

Denis C Twitchett

Frans von der Dunk

F R von der Mehden

Ernst Wangermann

Geoffrey Warner

Anne Waswo

D Cameron Watt

Bodo Wiethoff

D S M Williams

Glyn Williams

H P Willmott

David M Wilson

Jon E Wilson

Peter Wilson

George D Winius

The choice of Beijing, capital of China, as the host city for the 2008 Olympic Games has produced an extraordinary, if brief, historic marriage of East and West. The games symbolize the world of classical Greece, whose legacy has played such an exceptional part in the development of the Western world. Greek civilization gave the West professional medicine, geometry, ethical speculation, democracy, an ideal of participatory citizenship, codified law, the first history, a science of politics and an artistic heritage imitated again and again down the ages. Many of our common terms todayfrom economics to psychiatryare Greek in origin.

China, on the other hand, is seat of the most ancient and continuous of civilizations. Always the site of the largest fraction of the worlds population, China for thousands of years, despite waves of invasions, sustained a way of life and a social structure which proved remarkably enduring. Chinese values and intellectual life were not, unlike Greek civilization, diffused widely outside the frontiers of what was loosely defined as China. Western critics in the 19th century regarded China as a stagnant culture, unmoved for centuries, but the artistic, scientific and intellectual life of China, though very different from that of the West, was rich and diverse. A good case can be made for arguing that China has been a fixed point throughout the period of recorded history, where Greek culture has been anything but continuous, relying for much of its survival on the intercession of the Arab cultures of the Middle East that succeeded the Roman Empire, in which aspects of Greek thought were kept alive and then re-exported to late medieval Europe.

The China of the 2008 Olympics is still a central part of the world story, but it has come part way to meet the West. From the late 19th century traditional Chinese society crumbled under Western impact. A nationalist revolution overthrew the emperors and the old way of life after 1911. A second communist revolution transformed China into a more modern industrial state after 1949. Over the past 25 years China has undergone a third revolutionary wave by embracing the fruits of modern global capitalism and becoming one of the worlds major economic players. China has not become an Asian West, but has adapted what the West has had to offer and has turned China into a world superpower. The relationship between East and West has come full circle. For centuries the West pushed outwards into the world exporting, usually violently, a version of Western civilization. China was long resistant to this pressure; now China can exert pressure of its own, challenging the monopoly hitherto enjoyed by the remorseless march of Western economics, political models, consumerism and popular culture.

The meeting of Greece and China weaves together two of the central threads of world history. But the Olympics are also a symbolic fusion of ancient and modern. Although the original games are far removed from the glossy, commercialized, technically sophisticated and ruinously expensive modern version, their revival is a reminder that there are easily understood reference points back to the Europe of more than 2,000 years ago. Boxing, wrestling, javelin-throwing and running are simply what they are, the same for a modern audience as they were for the Greeks. Even the marathon, the icon of the current Western obsession with keeping fit, describes a Greek legend, when a soldier runner covered 26 miles non-stop under a gruelling sun from the Battle of Marathon to Athens to warn of the approaching Persian fleet, only to drop dead from the effort on his arrival. Distant though the ancient world seems, the span of recorded human history is remarkably short in relation to the long history of prehistoric man and the infinitely longer history of the earth. The span can be covered by just a hundred human lives of 60 years, stretched out one after the other. Only 50 human lives will take you back to those first Olympic Games.