Central Characters of History

Stephen Davies wrote a thought-provoking article on how history is written and taught. History, he says, focuses on one kind of events – the political ones.

“(It) implies that the driving force in history, the thing that shapes and determines the world we are in and that is crucial for our future, is politics and political power. The dates given are all about political power: Who has it, who contests it, and who wins it.”

 

An unintended side-effect of this is that it influences us, consciously or unconsciously, into “what we should see as important here and now”:

“This story is of the growth and development of government, the forms it has taken, and in particular the historical evolution of particular states or political entities.”

 

As an alternative, he says, consider these events. The publication of Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species:

“These are all landmarks in a quite different kind of story, one in which the driving force is not politics but intellectual inquiry and discovery. This story’s main figures are scientists and philosophers and thinkers, not politicians and generals. The story is about the gradual growth and deepening of human knowledge, and with it understanding and mastery over the physical world.”

 

If that got you thinking, Davies has even more food for thought. Yes, technological innovations. Take the first commercial flight of the Boeing 747:

“The jumbo jet transformed air travel from a luxury good to a mass-consumer one. In doing so, tourism, migration, trade, and the exchange of ideas have all been transformed. The world we live in is now far more interconnected and integrated because of this breakthrough.”

How about the invention of the container ship?

“Containerization transformed the world economy and made possible the massive wave of globalization that reshaped the world.”

Or Henry Ford’s mass market car, the Model T. It led to cheap and affordable cars. In turn that influenced the growth of suburbs and how cities were designed. It led to the fossil fuel explosion and all its consequences. And even more:

“The process that Ford introduced to make the Model T also brought about the phenomenon of mass production, and mass consumption.”

The telegraph. Antibiotics. The Internet. The smartphone. You get the idea.

 

One could argue, says Davies that tech drives politics:

“Politics is, in a sense, downstream of these technological breakthroughs, as politics is determined and driven by the changes in material circumstances and lived experiences that those events brought.”

One could argue the Industrial Revolution created a certain kind of life for the workforce, which in turn led to the rise of communism and socialism.

 

If you see merit in all this, then as Davies says:

“The important figures (of history) would no longer be rulers, generals, prelates, and revolutionaries but scientists, entrepreneurs, and businessmen and -women.”

And a change in the central actors would have other effects:

“If our alternative, technology-focused way of thinking about history became the default mode of understanding the past and how our world came to be, rather than the first, many things may change. We might pay less attention to politics and more to technology, science, and business. We would think more about trade and innovation. We might think of technological solutions to social and environmental problems.”