Who were the most geopolitically significant individuals in world history? Columbus is the first obvious example, given the holiday. He served as the catalyst for the Western migration to the Americas. Who else ranks up there? The first three names that come to mind are Jesus, Mohammed, and Karl Marx, the founders of Western civilization, Islamic civilization, and world Communism, respectively. Communism is relatively new compared too many past civilizations, but the scale of its global impact far exceeds that of the greatest individual empires. Any other nominations?
13 thoughts on “Not-Quite-Random Columbus Day Musings”
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Man what a great post.
I like your top three, though I would pick Karl Marx not just for Communism per se but also how his critique of society will cause the suicide of the West and close out the era begun by Columbus. Accordingly I like your addition of Columbus.
Who else? Thirty years you could make a case for the “End of History” with Thomas Jefferson or Adam Smith but not now, the best you can say is about their global impact is the jury still out.
I cannot think of a single person to embody the development of modernity.
What about James Watt? His refinement of the steam engine led to the steam ship and train which began the process of tightly tying the world together. I know there were global empires before that, but nothing to the scale of after.
Moses, Genghis Khan
Jesus or Paul?
Martin Luther, Calvin, Elizabeth 1
Gavrilo Princip
Many others. . .
I’ll add Johannes Gutenberg – the printing press encouraged growth of literacy and allowed the private sector to reach mass audiences on an unprecedented scale. Include pioneers of other forms of mass communication: Guglielmo Marconi (radio), Philo Farnsworth (television), Tim Berners-Lee (World Wide Web, which made Internet accessible to non-programmers).
My nominations don’t have names we know or possibly names as such or are even singular individuals but rather are individuals scattered over space and time.
The discovery that some animals could be herded instead of hunted.
That some animals could be trained to do work or carry burdens.
That seeds could be scattered over the ground and would, in time, make more food.
That if the ground was first cleared, even more food would result.
That breaking up the soil of the cleared ground produced yet more food.
That water moving from higher to lower could do work.
That steam could be manipulated to do work.
The whole succession of individuals that discovered and harnessed electricity over more than a century.
I’m not at all sure there were any. Newton is probably the most important individual in the history of science, but Leibnitz was developing calculus at about the same time, no doubt Newton’s laws of motion would soon have been discovered by someone else if he hadn;t done it. Similarly, what we call Bayes’ Theorem is the most important, perhaps the only important, development in epistemology, but I understand it’s actually a special case of a more general result which had already been proven by LaPlace. Marx didn’t invent communism, Columbus wasn’t the first to “discover” the Americas, and it’s fairly plausible that Mohammed never existed at all and the stories about him are all retcon. Certainly most of the stories about Jesus were retconned.
My strongest candidate for an individual without which history would actually have been different (rather than just a different name being stuck on stuff) would be Julius Ceasar. But of course any ideas as to how history might have progressed without him must be pure speculation.
I agree with Alan that the four individuals he mentions belong in what you might call the “top tier,” especially if we’re talking about their role as catalysts for dramatic events in geopolitical history. The other individuals mentioned in the comments also played important roles, but I would put them in “tier two.” I would add Martin Luther in that tier for his role in teaching people that they could think for themselves, along with Albert Einstein and, perhaps, Max Planck.
Prince Henry “the Navigator” of Portugal (1394-1460).He was the great patron of the development of deep-ocean sailing ships. When these appeared in the late 1400s, Portugal, Spain, and ultimately, France, England, and the Netherlands very soon became great powers with globe-girdling empires.
Western Europe’s political, economic, and cultural domination of the world is thus traceable to him. I don’t think you can get bigger than that.
Chuck Berry – rock and roll conquered the world!
When I was in high school, consensus was that the greatest influencers on current thought were Darwin, Marx, and Freud. This was before the discrediting of Freud by, for example, cognitive behavioral therapy, and before the fall of the Soviet Union. (I worked for a year as an aide in a private psychiatric hospital. In figuring out how to get patients functioning and back into society– before the insurance ran out– I noticed that psychiatrists and psychologists rarely phrased the issue in Freudian terms.)
Regarding choosing the three most influential in world history, my immediate response is to notice how little I know. So, I stay out of the argument.
I like MCS’s pointing out advances that have anonymous contributors.
As one consequence of the spread of literacy, Gutenberg’s invention facilitated the Reformation. First, the dissemination of all those protesting pamphlets. Later the dissemination of Bibles to the “masses.” Before 1500, very few people read the Bible, or had access to the Bible. After Gutenberg, Bibles were found in many households, at least in Protestant households. It was said that most houses in the American frontier had one book- the Bible.
Regarding Watt and the steam engine, I am reminded of a point from Darlington’s The Evolution of Man and Society. Darlington points out that the vast majority of the scientific and engineering advances in Great Britain in the 17th-19th centuries came from religious Dissidents– dissidents from the Anglican church– the Puritans, Methodists, etc. From Newton to Faraday.
Columbus Day reminds me of recent Mexican Presidential attempts, from both AMLO and his pure white successor, to get Spain to apologize for its colonial misdeeds. Misdeeds there were. But how many think that Spain should apologize for putting an end to the Aztec practice of human sacrifice? Cortes had only ~300 Spanish troops and thousands- tens of thousands?- of Indian/indigenous allies. Those allies of the Spaniards, for some odd reason, didn’t like, among other things, members of their tribes being delivered for human sacrifice to their Aztec overlords. The Spanish victory over the Aztecs was a Civil War in addition to being a Conquest.
Watt’s engine which is properly called an atmospheric engine was an improvement on the earlier Newcomen engine rather than a steam engine. The steam was at atmospheric pressure and was condensed to create a vacuum that caused the atmospheric pressure to displace the piston. Thus, atmospheric engine.
Watt was perfectly aware, as were many others, that an engine using pressurized steam would be far superior to an atmospheric engine in every way, yet he did everything in his power to discourage anyone from building such engines to the end of his life. This, not to stifle competition but because the state of metallurgy made any boiler operating at positive pressure a all but certain explosion waiting to happen. And usually, not waiting long.
This is merely the umpteenth instance of progress being contingent on what has gone before. Edison wouldn’t have invented the incandescent light bulb if someone hadn’t developed the electric dynamo.
Gutenberg is credited with inventing moveable type. Actually, moveable type is a concept so trivial that it must have occurred to every printer of an latinate laguage that ever lived before him. What he invented was the whole technology train to produce usable type. I’m not aware of any bottleneck that divided him from all the previous attempts but I wouldn’t be surprised if there more than one. What’s even more remarkable is that the type I hand set, very slowly, fifty years ago was very close to the type Gutenberg would have made and produced in an almost identical way. Very few technologies last 500 years with so little change. I find via Wikipedia, that he is also credited with the invention of the screw drive platen press and oil base printing ink. All necessary to print using metal type.
There were gathered in the ninth decade of the 18th century in Philadelphia a group of man that invented a completely new form of government. The question, then as now is how long may it endure.
Along with Berners-Lee and the Web, I nominate Bill Gates, who put a computer in every home, and Steve Jobs, who put one in every pocket.
Someone that I didn’t think of but should have is Henry Bessemer and the large scale availability of high quality steel. Here’s a very good video that manages to hit most of the important points in a half hour:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9unwEUmt7pM
It’s impossible to exaggerate how important steel is to the shape of the world today. Another important point that is well brought out in the video is that it was very much, not a case of a single invention but a whole series of inventions by different people over decades. The Bessemer converter was just the start of a process that’s still ongoing.