Appearance
2.3 — 1500 to 1800: The World Rearranged
Three centuries in which a peninsula on the edge of Asia became the centre of a global system, in which the method for deciding what is true changed permanently, and at the end of which two countries declared that a government exists by the consent of the governed.
The century of the split
1517 — Luther and the pamphlet war
Martin Luther, a professor of theology at Wittenberg, objected to the sale of indulgences — payments to the Church that were being marketed as reducing time in purgatory, with the proceeds funding the rebuilding of St Peter's in Rome. He set out 95 points for academic debate. Whether he nailed them to the church door is uncertain and was first reported after his death; he certainly posted them to his archbishop.
What made this different from every previous protest was the printing press. Earlier reformers — Jan Hus, John Wycliffe — had been contained and, in Hus's case, burned. Luther's theses were translated from Latin into German, printed, and were circulating across the German lands within weeks, without his involvement or permission.
He then wrote deliberately for the medium: short, angry, funny pamphlets in plain German rather than scholarly Latin. Something like a third of all books printed in Germany in the 1520s were by him. He was the first person to understand that a new communication technology changes who can win an argument, and the Church, which was organised to answer a scholar, could not answer a distribution network.
The Reformation split Western Christianity permanently and set off a century and a half of wars that killed a substantial fraction of central Europe.
1526 — Babur wins at Panipat
Babur, a Timurid prince from Ferghana who had lost his own kingdom twice, defeated the much larger army of Ibrahim Lodi on the plain of Panipat, north of Delhi, and founded the Mughal empire.
He won with two things India had not seen combined: field artillery, and a tactic borrowed from the Ottomans in which carts are chained together to make a barrier that cavalry cannot charge, with gunners firing from behind it. Lodi's war elephants panicked at the noise and broke his own lines.
The dynasty Babur started ran for over three centuries in name and about two in real power. His grandson Akbar built the administrative system that made it work, abolished the tax on non-Muslims, and held religious debates in which he invited Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jesuits and atheists to argue in front of him.
1543 — two books, and the beginning of modern science
Copernicus published On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, placing the sun rather than the Earth at the centre, and reportedly saw the printed copy on the day he died. In the same year Andreas Vesalius published On the Fabric of the Human Body, based on dissections he performed himself.
Vesalius is the more radical of the two, and the less famous. Medicine had been taught for thirteen centuries from Galen, whose anatomy was based partly on animals because Roman law had restricted human dissection. Vesalius found around two hundred places where Galen was simply wrong, and said so, with illustrations so good that they were still being copied three hundred years later. The lesson was not any one correction; it was that an authority could be checked against a body, and that the body wins.
Copernicus's system was not obviously better at first. It still used circular orbits and needed nearly as many geometric corrections as the older model to match observations, and it made a prediction — that nearby stars should appear to shift as the Earth moves — that nobody could detect. The shift is real and was finally measured in 1838; it is tiny because the stars are far further away than anyone had imagined.
Trade, empire and the sky
1600 and 1602 — two companies that behaved like states
The English East India Company was chartered on the last day of 1600 by Elizabeth I; the Dutch VOC followed in 1602. Both were granted monopolies on trade with Asia, and both were given powers no company has now: to maintain armies, wage war, sign treaties, coin money and administer justice.
The VOC also did something with permanent consequences: it issued shares to the public that could be resold, and created a place to resell them. That is the origin of the modern stock exchange and of the joint-stock corporation, and it is why a merchant could invest in a voyage without risking his house on it.
The English company's trajectory is the more startling. It arrived asking permission to trade, and by 1765 it was collecting the land revenue of Bengal, the richest province in the Mughal empire, with an army larger than Britain's. A private company governed some sixty million people for nearly a century, until the Crown took over in 1858.
1609 — Galileo points a telescope upward
The telescope was invented in the Netherlands the year before, by spectacle makers, as a novelty. Galileo heard a description, built a better one, and turned it on the sky.
Within months he had four things that could not be explained by the old model. The moon has mountains and craters, so it is a place rather than a perfect sphere. Jupiter has four moons, so not everything orbits the Earth. Venus shows a full set of phases like the moon, which is impossible in an Earth-centred system and required in a sun-centred one. And the Milky Way resolves into individual stars, so the universe holds far more than anyone could see.
His trial in 1633 is usually told as science against religion. It was messier: the Church's astronomers accepted his observations, the argument was over whether a physical claim could be asserted without proof, and a large part of the trouble was that his book put the Pope's argument in the mouth of a character called Simplicio. He spent his last nine years under house arrest, going blind, and wrote his best book on mechanics during them.
1687 — Newton's Principia
Isaac Newton set out three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation, and showed that the same rule governs a falling apple, the orbit of the moon, the tides and the path of a comet.
The word to notice is universal. Before this, the heavens and the Earth were understood to run on different principles — the sky was perfect and circular, the ground was corruptible and messy. Newton showed one equation covers both, which is the most consequential unification in the history of science and the model for every attempt since.
The book exists because Edmond Halley asked Newton what shape an orbit would be under an inverse-square force, and Newton replied that he had worked it out years earlier and mislaid the paper. Halley then coaxed the whole book out of him, edited it, and paid the printing costs personally after the Royal Society spent its publication budget on a lavishly illustrated History of Fishes that did not sell.
The apple story is probably true in outline — Newton told it to several people in old age — but nothing fell on his head. The point he made was that the apple falls straight down towards the centre of the Earth, and the same pull, extended far enough, could hold the moon.
The eighteenth century
1707 — Aurangzeb dies and the Mughal empire begins to unravel
He had ruled for forty-nine years, extended the empire to its greatest extent, and spent his last twenty-six years in near-continuous war in the Deccan trying to hold it.
The expansion is what broke it. The campaigns drained the treasury, the reimposition of the tax on non-Muslims alienated the Hindu nobility whose cooperation had made Akbar's system work, and provincial governors far from Delhi accumulated armies of their own. Within four decades the emperor in Delhi was a figurehead, Bengal, Awadh and Hyderabad were effectively independent, the Marathas held much of the west and centre, and in 1739 Nadir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi and took the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor.
That fragmentation is what the East India Company walked into. It did not defeat a functioning empire. It arrived as one of several armed players in a multi-sided contest and won it.
1757 — Plassey
Robert Clive defeated Siraj-ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, near the village of Palashi. It is usually called the battle that began British rule in India, and it was barely a battle: it was decided by a bribe. Mir Jafar, the Nawab's commander, had agreed in advance to hold his troops back in exchange for the throne. Fighting lasted a few hours, and a rainstorm that soaked the Nawab's powder and not the Company's did the rest.
What followed matters more than the fighting. The Company gained the right to collect Bengal's land revenue, which meant it could buy Indian goods with Indian tax money and ship them to Britain — trade financed by the taxes of the people traded with. The Bengal famine of 1770, in which perhaps ten million people died, followed within thirteen years, with revenue collection maintained through it.
1769 — Watt's separate condenser
James Watt did not invent the steam engine. Thomas Newcomen's engine had been pumping water out of mines since 1712. Watt was repairing a model of one at Glasgow University when he saw why it wasted so much fuel.
Newcomen's design admitted steam to a cylinder, then sprayed cold water in to condense it and create the vacuum that drove the piston. So the cylinder had to be reheated from cold on every single stroke, and almost all the fuel went into warming metal rather than doing work. Watt's insight was to condense the steam in a separate vessel connected by a valve, leaving the working cylinder permanently hot. The same engine did the same job on roughly a quarter of the coal.
That efficiency is what took the steam engine out of the coal mine — where fuel was free because it was underfoot — and made it economic anywhere. Everything called the Industrial Revolution runs through this one modification, and the unit of power is named after him.
1776 — two documents, one argument
The American Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations appeared in the same year, and they are two halves of a single change in thinking: that order can arise from individuals pursuing their own ends, without a sovereign directing it.
The Declaration's famous claim that all men are created equal was written by a man who owned six hundred people over his lifetime, and the contradiction was pointed out at the time. It took a civil war, and then another century, before the words were made to mean what they say.
Smith's book is misremembered almost as badly. The "invisible hand" appears exactly once in over nine hundred pages. He was not an advocate for business interests — he warned repeatedly that merchants conspire against the public and that any regulation proposed by them should be examined with suspicion. His argument was against monopoly and state-granted privilege, of which the East India Company was his standing example.
1789 — the French Revolution
The Estates-General met for the first time since 1614 because the French state was bankrupt, in part from funding the American revolution. Within months the third estate had declared itself a National Assembly, a crowd had taken the Bastille — where they found seven prisoners — and the Declaration of the Rights of Man had been written.
Then came the Terror, in which the revolution executed its own leaders, and then Napoleon, and by 1804 France had an emperor again. The cycle from absolute monarchy to republic to dictatorship to empire took fifteen years, and every subsequent revolution has been read against it.
What survived is enormous even so. The metric system. Legal equality and the abolition of hereditary privilege. The Napoleonic Code, which is the basis of civil law in much of Europe, Latin America and beyond. And the political vocabulary itself — left and right come from where the radicals and the conservatives happened to sit in the Assembly chamber.
1796 — Jenner, and the first vaccine
Edward Jenner, a country doctor in Gloucestershire, acted on a piece of rural folk knowledge: milkmaids who had caught cowpox, a mild disease, seemed not to get smallpox, which killed around a third of those it infected and disfigured most of the rest.
He took material from a cowpox sore on a milkmaid's hand, scratched it into the arm of an eight-year-old boy, James Phipps, and six weeks later deliberately exposed him to smallpox. The boy did not fall ill. The experiment would not pass any modern ethics committee, and it was the beginning of immunology.
The word comes from Latin vacca, a cow. And the story has a proper ending: smallpox was declared eradicated in 1980, the only human disease ever eliminated, after a global campaign that traced and ring-vaccinated around every remaining case. The last natural case was Ali Maow Maalin, a hospital cook in Somalia, in 1977.
What comes next
The nineteenth century is next: the century in which distance stopped mattering, in which biology got its organising idea, in which India rose against the Company and was handed to the Crown, and in which the first office worker sat down at a typewriter.