World history

the world) is the carefully researched description of humanity's past. It is informed by a, anthropology, genetics, linguistics, and other disciplines; and, for periods since the invention of writing, by recorded history and by secondary sources and studies.

lead to Homo sapiens diverged from the lineage that would lead to chimpanzees and bonobos, the closest living relatives of modern humans, around 4.6 to 6.2 million years ago. Anatomically modern humans arose in Africa about 300,000 years ago, and reached behavioural modernity about 50,000 years ago.
Modern humans spread rapidly from Africa into the frost-free zones of Europe and Asia around 60,000 years ago. The rapid expansion of humankind to North America and Oceania took place at the climax of the most recent ice age, when temperate regions of today were extremely inhospitable. Yet, humans had colonized nearly all the ice-free parts of the globe by the end of the Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago. Other hominids such as Homo erectus had been using simple wood and stone tools for millennia, but as time progressed, tools became far more refined and complex.
Perhaps as early as 1.8 million years ago, but certainly by 500,000 years ago, humans began using fire for heat and cooking. They also developed language in the Paleolithic period and a conceptual repertoire that included systematic burial of the dead and adornment of the living. Early artistic expression can be found in the form of cave paintings and sculptures made from ivory, stone, and bone, showing a spirituality generally interpreted as animism, or even shamanism. During this period, all humans lived as hunter-gatherers, and were generally nomadic. Archaeological and genetic data suggest that the source populations of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers survived in sparsely wooded areas and dispersed through areas of high primary productivity while avoiding dense forest cover.

Cave painting, Lascaux, France, c. 15,000 BCE

"Venus of Willensdorf", Austria, c. 26,500 BCE

the development of agriculture, which fundamentally changed the human lifestyle. Farming developed around 10,000 BCE in the Middle East, around 7000 BCE in what is now China, around 6000 BCE in the Indus Valley and Europe, and around 4000 BCE in the Americas. Cultivation of cereal crops and the domestication of animals occurred around 8500 BCE in the Middle East, where wheat and barley were the first crops and sheep and goats were domesticated.[29] In the Indus Valley, crops were cultivated by 6000 BCE, along with domesticated cattle. The Yellow River valley in China cultivated millet and other cereal crops by about 7000 BCE, but the Yangtze valley domesticated rice earlier, by at least 8000 BCE. In the Americas, sunflowers were cultivated by about 4000 BCE, and maize and beans were domesticated in Central America by 3500 BCE. Potatoes were first cultivated in the Andes Mountains of South America, where the llama was also domesticated. Metal-working, starting with copper around 6000 BCE, was first used for tools and ornaments. Gold soon followed, with its main use being for ornaments. The need for metal ores stimulated trade, as many of the areas of early human settlement were lacking in ores. Bronze, an alloy of copper and tin, was first known from around 2500 BCE, but did not become widely used until much later.
Though early proto-cities appeared at Jericho and Catal Huyuk around 6000 BCE, the first civilizations did not emerge until around 3000 BCE in Egypt and Mesopotamia. These cultures gave birth to the invention of the wheel, mathematics, bronze-working, sailing boats, the pottery wheel, woven cloth, construction of monumental buildings, and writing. Scholars now recognize that writing may have independently developed in at least four ancient civilizations: Mesopotamia (between 3400 and 3100 BC), Egypt (around 3250 BC), China (2000 BC), and lowland Mesoamerica (by 650 BC).

Pyramid text, pyramid of Unas, Saqqara, Egypt, 24th century BCE

Monumental cuneiform inscription, Sumer, Mesopotamia, 26th century BCE

states. Agriculture also created food surpluses that could support people not directly engaged in food production. The development of agriculture permitted the creation of the first cities. These were centres of trade, manufacturing and political power. Cities established a symbiosis with their surrounding countrysides, absorbing agricultural products and providing, in return, manufactured goods and varying degrees of military control and protection.
The development of cities was synonymous with the rise of civilization. Early civilizations arose first in Lower Mesopotamia (3000 BCE), followed by Egyptian civilization along the Nile River (3000 BCE), the Harappan civilization in the Indus River Valley (in present-day India and Pakistan; 2500 BCE), and Chinese civilization along the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers (2200 BCE). These societies developed a number of unifying characteristics, including a central government, a complex economy and social structure, sophisticated language and writing systems, and distinct cultures and religions. Writing facilitated the administration of cities, the expression of ideas, and the preservation of information.
Entities such as the Sun, Moon, Earth, sky, and sea were often deified. Shrines developed, which evolved into temple establishments, complete with a complex hierarchy of priests and priestesses and other functionaries. Typical of the Neolithic was a tendency to worship anthropomorphic deities. Among the earliest surviving written religious scriptures are the Egyptian Pyramid Texts, the oldest of which date to between 2400 and 2300 BCE.

system (Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age) that for some parts of the world describes effectively the early history of civilization. During this era the most fertile areas of the world saw city-states and the first civilizations develop. These were concentrated in fertile river valleys: the Tigris and Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus in the Indian subcontinent, and the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in China.
Sumer, located in Mesopotamia, is the first known complex civilization, developing the first city-states in the 4th millennium BCE. It was in these cities that the earliest known form of writing, cuneiform script, appeared around 3000 BCE. Cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. These pictorial representations eventually became simplified and more abstract. Cuneiform texts were written on clay tablets, on which symbols were drawn with a blunt reed used as a stylus. Writing made the administration of a large state far easier.
Transport was facilitated by waterways—by rivers and seas. The Mediterranean Sea, at the juncture of three continents, fostered the projection of military power and the exchange of goods, ideas, and inventions. This era also saw new land technologies, such as horse-based cavalry and chariots, that allowed armies to move faster.

Great Pyramids of Giza, Egypt

empires. In Mesopotamia there prevailed a pattern of independent warring city-states and of a loose hegemony shifting from one city to another. In Egypt, by contrast, first there was a dual division into Upper and Lower Egypt which was shortly followed by unification of all the valley around 3100 BCE, followed by permanent pacification. In Crete the Minoan civilization had entered the Bronze Age by 2700 BCE and is regarded as the first civilization in Europe. Over the next millennia, other river valleys saw monarchical empires rise to power. In the 25th – 21st centuries BCE, the empires of Akkad and Sumer arose in Mesopotamia.
Over the following millennia, civilizations developed across the world. Trade increasingly became a source of power as states with access to important resources or controlling important trade routes rose to dominance. By 1400 BCE, Mycenaean Greece began to develop. In India this era was the Vedic period, which laid the foundations of Hinduism and other cultural aspects of early Indian society, and ended in the 6th century BCE. From around 550 BCE, many independent kingdoms and republics known as the Mahajanapadas were established across the subcontinent.
As complex civilizations arose in the Eastern Hemisphere, the indigenous societies in the Americas remained relatively simple and fragmented into diverse regional cultures. During the formative stage in Mesoamerica (about 1500 BCE to 500 CE), more complex and centralized civilizations began to develop, mostly in what is now Mexico, Central America, and Peru. They included civilizations such as the Olmec, Maya, Zapotec, Moche, and Nazca. They developed agriculture, growing maize, chili peppers, cocoa, tomatoes, and potatoes, crops unique to the Americas, and creating distinct cultures and religions. These ancient indigenous societies would be greatly affected, for good and ill, by European contact during the early modern period.

Fresco, Knossos, Minoan Crete

saw the development of a set of transformative philosophical and religious ideas, mostly independently, in many different places. Chinese Confucianism, Indian Buddhism and Jainism, and Jewish monotheism are all claimed by some scholars to have developed in the 6th century BCE. (Karl Jaspers' Axial-Age theory also includes Persian Zoroastrianism, but other scholars dispute his timeline for Zoroastrianism.) In the 5th century BCE, Socrates and Plato made substantial advances in the development of ancient Greek philosophy.
In the East, three schools of thought would dominate Chinese thinking well into the 20th century. These were Taoism, Legalism, and Confucianism. The Confucian tradition, which would become particularly dominant, looked for political morality not to the force of law but to the power and example of tradition. Confucianism would later spread to the Korean Peninsula and toward Japan.
In the West, the Greek philosophical tradition, represented by Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers, along with accumulated science, technology, and culture, diffused throughout Europe, Egypt, the Middle East, and Northwest India, starting in the 4th century BCE after the conquests of Alexander III of Macedon (Alexander the Great).

The Buddha

Socrates

a series of empires of unprecedented size develop. Well-trained professional armies, unifying ideologies, and advanced bureaucracies created the possibility for emperors to rule over large domains whose populations could attain numbers upwards of tens of millions of subjects. The great empires depended on military annexation of territory and on the formation of defended settlements to become agricultural centres. The relative peace that the empires brought encouraged international trade, most notably the massive trade routes in the Mediterranean, the maritime trade web in the Indian Ocean, and the Silk Road. In southern Europe, the Greeks (and later the Romans), in an era known as "classical antiquity," established cultures whose practices, laws, and customs are considered the foundation of contemporary Western culture.
There were a number of regional empires during this period. The kingdom of the Medes helped to destroy the Assyrian Empire in tandem with the nomadic Scythians and the Babylonians. Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, was sacked by the Medes in 612 BCE. The Median Empire gave way to successive Iranian empires, including the Achaemenid Empire (550–330 BCE), the Parthian Empire (247 BCE–224 CE), and the Sasanian Empire (224–651 CE).
Several empires began in modern-day Greece. First was the Delian League (from 477 BCE) and the succeeding Athenian Empire (454–404 BCE), centred in present-day Greece. Later, Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE), of Macedon, founded an empire of conquest, extending from present-day Greece to present-day India. The empire divided shortly after his death, but the influence of his Hellenistic successors made for an extended Hellenistic period (323–31 BCE) throughout the region.

Persepolis, Achaemenid Empire, 6th century BCE

Parthenon, Athenian Empire

India; in the 3rd century BCE, most of South Asia was united to the Maurya Empire by Chandragupta Maurya and flourished under Ashoka the Great. From the 3rd century CE, the Gupta dynasty oversaw the period referred to as ancient India's Golden Age. From the 4th to 6th centuries, northern India was ruled by the Gupta Empire. In southern India, three prominent Dravidian kingdoms emerged: the Cheras, Cholas, and Pandyas. The ensuing stability contributed to heralding in the golden age of Hindu culture in the 4th and 5th centuries.
In China, the Qin dynasty (221–206 BCE), the first imperial dynasty of China, was followed by the Han Empire (206 BCE – 220 CE). The Han Dynasty was comparable in power and influence to the Roman Empire that lay at the other end of the Silk Road. Han China developed advanced cartography, shipbuilding, and navigation. The Chinese invented blast furnaces, and created finely tuned copper instruments. As with other empires during the Classical Period, Han China advanced significantly in the areas of government, education, mathematics, astronomy, technology, and many others.
In Africa, the Kingdom of Aksum, centred in present-day Ethiopia, established itself by the 1st century CE as a major trading empire, dominating its neighbours in South Arabia and Kush and controlling the Red Sea trade. It minted its own currency and carved enormous monolithic steles such as the Obelisk of Axum to mark their emperors' graves.

Terracotta army, China, c. 210 BCE

Pillar erected by India's Maurya Dynasty Emperor Ashoka

Obelisk of Aksum, Ethiopia

from cultures established as early as 2500 BCE. In Mesoamerica, vast pre-Columbian societies were built, the most notable being the Zapotec Empire (700 BCE – 1521 CE), and the Maya civilization, which reached its highest state of development during the Mesoamerican Classic period (c. 250–900 CE), but continued throughout the Post-Classic period until the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century CE. Maya civilization arose as the Olmec mother culture gradually declined. The great Mayan city-states slowly rose in number and prominence, and Maya culture spread throughout the Yucatán and surrounding areas. The later empire of the Aztecs was built on neighbouring cultures and was influenced by conquered peoples such as the Toltecs.
Some areas experienced slow but steady technological advances, with important developments such as the stirrup and moldboard plough arriving every few centuries. There were, however, in some regions, periods of rapid technological progress. Most important, perhaps, was the Hellenistic period in the region of the Mediterranean, during which hundreds of technologies were invented. Such periods were followed by periods of technological decay, as during the Roman Empire's decline and fall and the ensuing early medieval period.

Maya observatory, Chichen Itza, Mexico

Trajan's Column, Rome

with maintaining huge armies and supporting a central bureaucracy. These costs fell most heavily on the peasantry, while land-owning magnates increasingly evaded centralized control and its costs. Barbarian pressure on the frontiers hastened internal dissolution. China's Han dynasty fell into civil war in 220 CE, beginning the Three Kingdoms period, while its Roman counterpart became increasingly decentralized and divided about the same time in what is known as the Crisis of the Third Century. The great empires of Eurasia were all located on temperate and subtropical coastal plains. From the Central Asian steppes, horse-based nomads, mainly Mongols and Turks, dominated a large part of the continent. The development of the stirrup and the breeding of horses strong enough to carry a fully armed archer made the nomads a constant threat to the more settled civilizations.
The gradual break-up of the Roman Empire, spanning several centuries after the 2nd century CE, coincided with the spread of Christianity outward from the Middle East. The Western Roman Empire fell under the domination of Germanic tribes in the 5th century, and these polities gradually developed into a number of warring states, all associated in one way or another with the Catholic Church. The remaining part of the Roman Empire, in the eastern Mediterranean, continued as what came to be called the Byzantine Empire. Centuries later, a limited unity would be restored to western Europe through the establishment in 962 of a revived "Roman Empire", later called the Holy Roman Empire, comprising a number of states in what is now Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Czech Republic, Belgium, Italy, and parts of France.
In China, dynasties would rise and fall, but, by sharp contrast to the Mediterranean-European world, dynastic unity would be restored. After the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the demise of the Three Kingdoms, nomadic tribes from the north began to invade in the 4th century, eventually conquering areas of northern China and setting up many small kingdoms. The Sui Dynasty successfully reunified the whole of China in 581, and laid the foundations for a Chinese golden age under the Tang dynasty (618–907).

The Pantheon in Rome, Italy, originally a Roman temple, now a Catholic church

centuries (after the 2nd century AD), coincided with the spread of Christianity to the west from the Middle East. The Western Roman Empire fell under the onslaught of Germanic tribes in the 5th century. Instead, several irreconcilable states arose, one way or another connected with the Roman Catholic Church. The remainder of the Roman Empire in the eastern Mediterranean later became the Byzantine Empire. Centuries later, limited unification in Western Europe could be restored by creating the Holy Roman Empire, which included several states on the territory of modern Germany, Italy, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, and Austria. Not long before that, the Frankish-Carolingian Empire arose, which existed until the middle of the 9th century. The Crusades that began in 1096 were an unsuccessful attempt by Western Christians to regain control of the Holy Land by Muslims. In 1346 - 1353, an epidemic of plague swept across Europe, the Black Death, which claimed the lives of more than half the population.
In China, dynasties also grew and fell into decay. After the fall of the Eastern Han Dynasty and the onset of the Three Kingdoms era, the nomad tribes from the north in the 4th century BC. e. began to seize territory and, ultimately, conquered all of Northern China, forming many small kingdoms. The Sui Dynasty reunited China in 581, and during the reign of the Tang Dynasty (618–907), China entered its second “Golden Age”. The peasantry of China was free, could sell their products and actively participate in the market. Agriculture was highly productive, and Chinese society was highly urbanized. The country was technologically developed, possessing monopolies in the production of cast iron, the design of piston bellows, suspension bridges, printing technology and the manufacture of compasses. The Tang Dynasty also broke up, however, after half a century of turmoil, the Song Dynasty reunited China in 982, until the pressure of the northern nomadic empires became continuous. Northern China was lost during the Qin Dynasty in 1141, and by 1279 the Mongol Empire conquered all of China, as well as almost all of Eurasia, excluding only central and western Europe, as well as Japan.

Forbidden city

Cathedral of Paris Bogomateri

northern India. In South India, three prominent kingdoms of Dravids arose: Cherov, Chola, and the Pandev Empire. The stability that ensued then heralded the onset of the “Golden Age” of Hindu culture (4th – 5th centuries A.D.)
At the same time, in Central America, vast communities also began to develop, the most significant of which are the Mayan and Aztec civilizations in Mesoamerica. With the gradual decline of the Olmec maternal culture, the number and influence of the large Mayan city-states grew, their culture spread throughout Yucatan and the surrounding areas. The late Aztec empire was built on neighboring cultures under the influence of conquered peoples such as the Toltecs.
In South America in the 14th – 15th centuries the Incas flourished. The Inca Empire, with its capital in Cusco, extending to all the Andes, was prosperous and technologically advanced, and the Inca's excellent road system and the magnificent art of masons are known.
Islam, which arose in the 7th century in Arabia, also became one of the significant forces in history, having gone from a mass of adherents to the foundation of several empires in the vastness of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, India and modern Indonesia.
In Northeast Africa: Nubia and Ethiopia remained Christian enclaves, while the rest of Africa converted to Islam north of the equator. With Islam, new technologies came that first made reliable trade through the Sahara. Taxes from this trade brought prosperity to North Africa and allowed the development of several kingdoms in the Sahel.
This period of world history was marked by a slow but steady development of technology, such important inventions as the stirrup and dump plow, which survived several centuries. In some regions, however, there were periods of rapid technological development. Perhaps the most important is the Hellenistic period in the Mediterranean, when hundreds of new technologies were discovered. Such periods were followed by technological decline, for example, during the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent early Middle Ages.

Machu Picchu - “The Lost City of the Incas” - has become the most recognizable symbol of the Inca civilization.

Church of St. George

"modern period," the "modern era," "modern times") is the history of the period following post-classical history (in Europe known as the "Middle Ages"), spanning from about 1500 to the present. "Contemporary history" includes events from around 1945 to the present. (The definitions of both terms, "modern history" and "contemporary history", have changed over time, as more history has occurred, and so have their start dates.) Modern history can be further broken down into periods:
The early modern period began around 1500 and ended around 1815. Notable historical milestones included the continued European Renaissance (whose start is dated variously between 1200 and 1401), the Age of Exploration, the Islamic gunpowder empires, the Protestant Reformation, and the American Revolution. With the Scientific Revolution, new information about the world was discovered via empirical observation and the scientific method, by contrast with the earlier emphasis on reason and "innate knowledge". The Scientific Revolution received impetus from Johannes Gutenberg's introduction to Europe of printing, using movable type, and from the invention of the telescope and microscope. Globalization was fuelled by international trade and colonization.
The late modern period began sometime around 1750–1815, as Europe experienced the Industrial Revolution and the military-political turbulence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, which were followed by the Pax Britannica. The late modern period continues either to the end of World War II, in 1945, or to the present. Other notable historical milestones included the Great Divergence and the Russian Revolution.
Contemporary history (a period also dubbed Pax Americana in geopolitics) includes historic events from approximately 1945 that are closely relevant to the present time. Major developments include the Cold War, continual hot wars and proxy wars, the Jet Age, the DNA revolution, the Green Revolution, artificial satellites and global positioning systems (GPS), development of the supranational European Union, the Information Age, rapid economic development in India and China, increasing terrorism, and a daunting array of global ecological crises headed by the imminent existential threat of runaway global warming.
The defining features of the modern era developed predominantly in Europe, and so different periodizations are sometimes applied to other parts of the world. When the European periods are used globally, this is often in the context of contact with European culture in the Age of Discovery.
In the humanities and social sciences, the norms, attitudes, and practices arising during the modern period are known as modernity. The corresponding terms for post-World War II culture are postmodernity or late modernity.

the Middle Ages and the Industrial Revolution—roughly 1500 to 1800. The Early Modern period was characterized by the rise of science, and by increasingly rapid technological progress, secularized civic politics, and the nation state. Capitalist economies began their rise, initially in northern Italian republics such as Genoa. The Early Modern period saw the rise and dominance of mercantilist economic theory, and the decline and eventual disappearance, in much of the European sphere, of feudalism, serfdom, and the power of the Catholic Church. The period included the Protestant Reformation, the disastrous Thirty Years' War, the Age of Exploration, European colonial expansion, the peak of European witch-hunting, the Scientific revolution, and the Age of Enlightenment.
Renaissance
Europe's Renaissance – the "rebirth" of classical culture, beginning in the 14th century and extending into the 16th – comprised the rediscovery of the classical world's cultural, scientific, and technological achievements, and the economic and social rise of Europe.
The Renaissance engendered a culture of inquisitiveness which ultimately led to Humanism[122] and the Scientific Revolution.[123]
This period, which saw social and political upheavals, and revolutions in many intellectual pursuits, is also celebrated for its artistic developments and the attainments of such polymaths as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, who inspired the term "Renaissance man."

Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man (c. 1490), Renaissance Italy

of the world. Although the most developed regions of European classical civilization were more urbanized than any other region of the world, European civilization had undergone a lengthy period of gradual decline and collapse. During the Early Modern Period, Europe was able to regain its dominance; historians still debate the causes.
One theory of Europe's rise holds that Europe's geography played an important role in its success. The Middle East, India and China are all ringed by mountains and oceans but, once past these outer barriers, are nearly flat. By contrast, the Pyrenees, Alps, Apennines, Carpathians and other mountain ranges run through Europe, and the continent is also divided by several seas. This gave Europe some degree of protection from the peril of Central Asian invaders. Before the era of firearms, these nomads were militarily superior to the agricultural states on the periphery of the Eurasian continent and, as they broke out into the plains of northern India or the valleys of China, were all but unstoppable. These invasions were often devastating. The Golden Age of Islam was ended by the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. India and China were subject to periodic invasions, and Russia spent a couple of centuries under the Mongol-Tatar yoke. Central and western Europe, logistically more distant from the Central Asian heartland, proved less vulnerable to these threats.
Geography contributed to important geopolitical differences. For most of their histories, China, India, and the Middle East were each unified under a single dominant power that expanded until it reached the surrounding mountains and deserts. In 1600 the Ottoman Empire controlled almost all the Middle East, the Ming dynasty ruled China, and the Mughal Empire held sway over India. By contrast, Europe was almost always divided into a number of warring states. Pan-European empires, with the notable exception of the Roman Empire, tended to collapse soon after they arose. Another doubtless important geographic factor in the rise of Europe was the Mediterranean Sea, which, for millennia, had functioned as a maritime superhighway fostering the exchange of goods, people, ideas and inventions.
Nearly all the agricultural civilizations have been heavily constrained by their environments. Productivity remained low, and climatic changes easily instigated boom-and-bust cycles that brought about civilizations' rise and fall. By about 1500, however, there was a qualitative change in world history. Technological advance and the wealth generated by trade gradually brought about a widening of possibilities.

in 1501, succeeded by the Afsharid Empire in 1736, the Zand Empire in 1751, and the Qajar Empire in 1794. Areas to the north and east in Central Asia were held by Uzbeks and Pashtuns. The Ottoman Empire, after taking Constantinople in 1453, quickly gained control of the Middle East, the Balkans, and most of North Africa.
In Africa, this period saw a decline in many civilizations and an advancement in others. The Swahili Coast declined after coming under the Portuguese Empire and later the Omani Empire. In west Africa, the Songhai Empire fell to the Moroccans in 1591 when they invaded with guns. The South African Kingdom of Zimbabwe gave way to smaller kingdoms such as Mutapa, Butua, and Rozvi. Ethiopia suffered from the 1531 invasion from neighbouring Muslim Adal Sultanate, and in 1769 entered the Zemene Mesafint (Age of Princes) during which the Emperor became a figurehead and the country was ruled by warlords, though the royal line later would recover under Emperor Tewodros II. The Ajuran Sultanate, in the Horn of Africa, began to decline in the 17th century, succeeded by the Geledi Sultanate. Other civilizations in Africa advanced during this period. The Oyo Empire experienced its golden age, as did the Kingdom of Benin. The Ashanti Empire rose to power in what is modern day Ghana in 1670. The Kingdom of Kongo also thrived during this period.
In China, the Ming gave way in 1644 to the Qing, the last Chinese imperial dynasty, which would rule until 1912. Japan experienced its Azuchi–Momoyama period (1568–1603), followed by the Edo period (1603–1868). The Korean Joseon dynasty (1392–1910) ruled throughout this period, successfully repelling 16th- and 17th-century invasions from Japan and China. Japan and China were significantly affected during this period by expanded maritime trade with Europe, particularly the Portuguese in Japan. During the Edo period, Japan would pursue isolationist policies, to eliminate foreign influences.

Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (formerly Constantinople), Turkey

Ming Dynasty section, Great Wall of China

sultanates would give way, beginning in the 16th century, to the Mughal Empire. Starting in the northwest, the Mughal Empire would by the late 17th century come to rule the entire subcontinent, except for the southernmost Indian provinces, which would remain independent. Against the Muslim Mughal Empire, the Hindu Maratha Empire was founded on the west coast in 1674, gradually gaining territory—a majority of present-day India—from the Mughals over several decades, particularly in the Mughal–Maratha Wars (1681–1701). The Maratha Empire would in 1818 fall under the control of the British East India Company, with all former Maratha and Mughal authority devolving in 1858 to the British Raj.
In 1511 the Portuguese overthrew the Malacca Sultanate in present-day Malaysia and Indonesian Sumatra. The Portuguese held this important trading territory (and the valuable associated navigational strait) until overthrown by the Dutch in 1641. The Johor Sultanate, centred on the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, became the dominant trading power in the region. European colonization expanded with the Dutch in the Netherlands East Indies, the Portuguese in East Timor, and the Spanish in the Philippines. Into the 19th century, European expansion would affect the whole of Southeast Asia, with the British in Myanmar and Malaysia and the French in Indochina. Only Thailand would successfully resist colonization.
The Pacific islands of Oceania would also be affected by European contact, starting with the circumnavigational voyage of Ferdinand Magellan, who landed on the Marianas and other islands in 1521. Also notable were the voyages (1642–44) of Abel Tasman to present-day Australia, New Zealand and nearby islands, and the voyages (1768–1779) of Captain James Cook, who made the first recorded European contact with Hawaii. Britain would found its first colony on Australia in 1788.

Taj Mahal, Mughal Empire, India

newly discovered continents, largely displacing the indigenous populations, and destroying the advanced civilizations of the Aztecs and the Incas. Spain, Portugal, Britain, and France all made extensive territorial claims, and undertook large-scale settlement, including the importation of large numbers of African slaves. Portugal claimed Brazil. Spain claimed the rest of South America, Mesoamerica, and southern North America. Britain colonized the east coast of North America, and France colonized the central region of North America. Russia made incursions onto the northwest coast of North America, with a first colony in present-day Alaska in 1784, and the outpost of Fort Ross in present-day California in 1812. In 1762, in the midst of the Seven Years' War, France secretly ceded most of its North American claims to Spain in the Treaty of Fontainebleau. Thirteen of the British colonies declared independence as the United States of America in 1776, ratified by the Treaty of Paris in 1783, ending the American Revolutionary War. Napoleon Bonaparte won France's claims back from Spain in the Napoleonic Wars in 1800, but sold them to the United States in 1803 as the Louisiana Purchase.
In Russia, Ivan the Terrible was crowned in 1547 as the first Tsar of Russia, and by annexing the Turkic khanates in the east, transformed Russia into a regional power. The countries of western Europe, while expanding prodigiously through technological advancement and colonial conquest, competed with each other economically and militarily in a state of almost constant war. Often the wars had a religious dimension, either Catholic versus Protestant, or (primarily in eastern Europe) Christian versus Muslim. Wars of particular note include the Thirty Years War, the War of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Years' War, and the French Revolutionary Wars. Napoleon came to power in France in 1799, an event foreshadowing the Napoleonic Wars of the early 19th century.

American Revolutionary War

Contemporary painting showing the Battle of White Mountain (1620), where Imperial-Spanish forces under Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly won a decisive victory.

world and led to the Industrial Revolution, a major transformation of the world's economies. The Scientific Revolution in the 17th century had had little immediate effect on industrial technology; only in the second half of the 18th century did scientific advances begin to be applied substantially to practical invention. The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain and used new modes of production—the factory, mass production, and mechanization—to manufacture a wide array of goods faster and using less labour than previously required. The Age of Enlightenment also led to the beginnings of modern democracy in the late-18th century American and French Revolutions. Democracy and republicanism would grow to have a profound effect on world events and on quality of life.
After Europeans had achieved influence and control over the Americas, imperial activities turned to the lands of Asia and Oceania Britain gained control of the Indian subcontinent, Egypt and the Malay Peninsula; the French took Indochina; while the Dutch cemented their control over the Dutch East Indies. The British also colonized Australia, New Zealand and South Africa with large numbers of British colonists emigrating to these colonies. Russia colonized large pre-agricultural areas of Siberia. In the late 19th century, the European powers divided the remaining areas of Africa. Within Europe, economic and military challenges created a system of nation states, and ethno-linguistic groupings began to identify themselves as distinctive nations with aspirations for cultural and political autonomy. The advantages that Europe had developed by the mid-18th century were two: an entrepreneurial culture, and the wealth generated by the Atlantic trade (including the African slave trade). By the late 16th century, silver from the Americas accounted for the Spanish empire's wealth. The profits of the slave trade and of West Indian plantations amounted to 5% of the British economy at the time of the Industrial Revolution. While some historians conclude that, in 1750, labour productivity in the most developed regions of China was still on a par with that of Europe's Atlantic economy, other historians such as Angus Maddison hold that the per-capita productivity of western Europe had by the late Middle Ages surpassed that of all other regions.

The Wright Brothers built and flew the first airplane, the Wright Flyer, in 1903

Watt's steam engine powered the Industrial Revolution.

wealth and power, and with much of the world under its direct colonial control or its indirect domination. Much of the rest of the world was influenced by heavily Europeanized nations: the United States and Japan.
As the century unfolded, however, the global system dominated by rival powers was subjected to severe strains, and ultimately yielded to a more fluid structure of independent nations organized on Western models.
This transformation was catalyzed by wars of unparalleled scope and devastation. World War I led to the collapse of four empires – Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Russian Empire – and weakened Great Britain and France.
In the war's aftermath, powerful ideologies rose to prominence. The Russian Revolution of 1917 created the first communist state, while the 1920s and 1930s saw militaristic fascist dictatorships gain control in Italy, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere.
Ongoing national rivalries, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, helped precipitate World War II. The militaristic dictatorships of Europe and Japan pursued an ultimately doomed course of imperialist expansionism, in the course of which Nazi Germany orchestrated the murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust and of millions of Poles, Russians, and other Slavs, while Imperial Japan murdered millions of Chinese. An earlier model of genocide had been provided by Turkey's World War I mass murder of Armenians.
The World War II defeat of the Axis Powers opened the way for the advance of communism into Central Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, China, North Vietnam, and North Korea.

World War I. Trench warfare

Atomic bombings: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, 1945

Nations was founded in the hope of preventing future wars, as the League of Nations had been formed following World War I. The war had left two countries, the United States and the Soviet Union, with principal power to influence international affairs.[136] Each was suspicious of the other and feared a global spread of the other's, respectively capitalist and communist, political-economic model. This led to the Cold War, a forty-five-year stand-off and arms race between the United States and its allies, on one hand, and the Soviet Union and its allies on the other.
With the development of nuclear weapons during World War II, and with their subsequent proliferation, all of humanity were put at risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers, as demonstrated by many incidents, most prominently the October 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Such war being viewed as impractical, the superpowers instead waged proxy wars in non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.
In China, Mao Zedong implemented industrialization and collectivization reforms as part of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962), leading to the starvation deaths (1959–1961) of tens of millions of people.
Between 1969 and 1972, as part of the Cold War space race, twelve men landed on the Moon and safely returned to Earth.
The Cold War ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union disintegrated, in part due to inability to compete economically with the United States and western Europe. However, the United States likewise began to show signs of slippage in its geopolitical influence, even as its private sector, now less inhibited by the claims of the public sector, increasingly sought private advantage to the prejudice of the public weal.

Civilians (here, Mỹ Lai, Việt Nam, 1968) suffered greatly in 20th-century wars.

Africa of the Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and other west European empires won their formal independence. However, these newly independent countries often faced challenges in the form of neocolonialism, sociopolitical disarray, poverty, illiteracy, and endemic tropical diseases.
Most Western European and Central European countries gradually formed a political and economic community, the European Union, which expanded eastward to include former Soviet-satellite countries. The European Union's effectiveness was handicapped by the immaturity of its common economic and political institutions, somewhat comparable to the inadequacy of United States institutions under the Articles of Confederation prior to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution that came into force in 1789. Asian, African, and South American countries followed suit and began taking tentative steps toward forming their own respective continental associations.
Cold War preparations to deter or to fight a third world war accelerated advances in technologies that, though conceptualized before World War II, had been implemented for that war's exigencies, such as jet aircraft, rocketry, and electronic computers. In the decades after World War II, these advances led to jet travel, artificial satellites with innumerable applications including global positioning systems (GPS), and the Internet—inventions that have revolutionized the movement of people, ideas, and information.
However, not all scientific and technological advances in the second half of the 20th century required an initial military impetus. That period also saw ground-breaking developments such as the discovery of the structure of DNA, the consequent sequencing of the human genome, the worldwide eradication of smallpox, the discovery of plate tectonics, manned and unmanned exploration of space and of previously inaccessible parts of Earth, and foundational discoveries in physics phenomena ranging from the smallest entities (particle physics) to the greatest entity (physical cosmology).

Last Moon landing: Apollo 17 (1972)

and integration, with consequent increased risk to interlinked economies, as exemplified by the Great Recession of the late 2000s and early 2010s. This period has also seen the expansion of communications with mobile phones and the Internet, which have caused fundamental societal changes in business, politics, and individuals' personal lives.
Worldwide competition for resources has risen due to growing populations and industrialization, especially in India, China, and Brazil. The increased demands are contributing to increased environmental degradation and to global warming.
The early 21st century saw escalating intra- and international strife in the Near East and Afghanistan, stimulated by vast economic disparities, by dissatisfaction with governments dominated by Western interests, by inter-ethnic and inter-sectarian feuds, and by the longest war in the history of the United States, the proximate cause for which was Osama bin Laden's provocative 2001 destruction of New York City's World Trade Center. The Arab Spring, a revolutionary wave of uprisings in North Africa and the Near East in the early 2010s, produced power vacuums that led to a resurgence of authoritarianism and the advent of reactionary groups like the Islamic State.
U.S. military involvements in the Near East and Afghanistan, along with a financial crisis and resultant recession, have drained U.S. economic resources at a time when the U.S. and other Western countries are experiencing mounting socioeconomic dislocations aggravated by the robotization of work and the export of industries to cheaper-workforce countries. Meanwhile, ancient and populous Asian civilizations – India and especially China – have been emerging from centuries of relative scientific, technological, and economic dormancy to become potential economic and political rivals for Western powers.
International tensions were heightened in connection with the efforts of some nuclear-armed states to induce North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons, and to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.

Al Qaeda's 11 September 2001 attacks influenced US foreign policy.

China has urbanized rapidly in the 21st century (Shanghai pictured).