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. The nineteenth-century invention of the cotton gin in the United States devastated family life in sub-Saharan Africa-the list goes on endlessly.Įven 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 policies of the Ming dynasty in China contributed to the American Revolution. The twelfth-century conquest of Jerusalem by the Seljuk Turks had subtle roots going back to crop failures in Scandinavia centuries earlier. The religious practices prescribed by the Prophet Muhammad, it turned out, had something to do with Europeans acquiring the magnetic compass. I went looking for other examples, and they weren’t hard to find. What intrigued me was not the Rome-China connection per se but interconnectedness itself as an aspect of human history. And, of course, big events in Rome sent ripple effects the other way. When something big happened in China-like the construction of a wall that blocked invading nomads-it sent ripple effects through the nomadic world, which eventually reached Rome. 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.

The Great Wall of China going up had something to do with the Roman Empire coming down.

The third one was about barbarian warriors such as Attila the Hun attacking Rome in its later days.īecause I was reading all three books concurrently, I noticed something that probably would not have occurred to me otherwise.

Another was about Central Asian nomadic life in the centuries before the Mongol conquests. One was about the First Emperor of China, who put a million peasants to work building that Great Wall. This book was born some years ago when I happened to be reading three seemingly unrelated works of history at the same time.

Ansary destiny disrupted