2nd millennium

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The 2nd millennium began on the 1st of January, 1001, in a world of roughly 310 million people, and it ended on the 31st of December, 2000, with a population approaching 6 billion. That nearly twentyfold increase is perhaps the single most striking fact about this span of a thousand years. It raises an immediate question: what changed? Not one thing, but a cascade of things, arriving century by century, each building pressure on the next. How did a world of medieval kingdoms, seasonal harvests, and hand-copied manuscripts become the world of satellites, nuclear weapons, and the internet? That is what this documentary sets out to trace.

  9

• 2. Population and Growth

  ›

  World population stood at about 310 million when the millennium opened. By 1700 it had roughly doubled, reaching around 600 million. Then the pace accelerated. That figure doubled again and again and again, more than three more times over the final three centuries. By the close of the 20th century, the annual growth rate had climbed to about 1.8 percent. No comparable run of sustained population increase had occurred in any prior millennium of recorded history. The drivers were many and intertwined: agricultural expansion, improved food storage, the eradication and prevention of diseases through vaccination, and the spread of sanitation. The expansion was uneven across the globe, but the direction was uniform.

  9

• 3. The Medieval World

  ›

  At the start of the millennium, power in the Old World was organized around a dense web of competing kingdoms, caliphates, and empires. The Byzantine Empire, which had already endured since 330, pressed on until 1453. The Abbasid Caliphate, rooted in Baghdad, ran until 1517. In West Africa, the Mali Empire rose around 1230 and persisted into the 1600s. The Mongol Empire, born in 1206, briefly became the largest contiguous land empire in history before fracturing. The Islamic Golden Age flourished during this era, producing advances that flowed into later European thought. The Crusades, launched from Western Europe toward the Near East, generated a network of short-lived Crusader states, including the Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted from 1099 to 1291. Each of these structures shaped the political geography the Renaissance would inherit.

  9

• 4. The Great Divergence

  ›

  Historians coined the phrase "Great Divergence" to describe what happened in the second half of the millennium: the unprecedented cultural and political ascent of the Western world. By the 18th century, Western Europe had emerged as the most powerful and wealthy civilization on earth, having outpaced Qing China, Edo Japan, the Islamic world, and India. The reasons remain debated, but the consequences were concrete. Spain established an empire stretching from 1492 to 1976. Portugal's empire ran from 1415 to 2002. The British Empire extended from 1583 to 1997. Together these colonial ventures brought the Americas, Africa, Oceania, and South and Southeast Asia under European control for varying lengths of time. The printing press, dated to around 1450, had already accelerated the spread of ideas across Europe in ways no prior technology had managed.

  6

• 5. A Century of Invention

  ›

  Firearms appeared around 1100. Rockets followed in the 1200s. The longbow entered military use around 1386. Probability theory was formalized around 1549. Calculus emerged around 1680. The steam engine dates to 1712. Vaccination arrived in 1796. Then the 19th century compressed centuries of prior change into decades: the telegraph in 1832, photography in 1837, the telephone in 1860, the automobile in 1886. Natural selection was published in 1858; genetics followed in 1866. The 20th century added the airplane in 1903, television in 1932, the computer in 1939, the transistor in 1947, the satellite in 1957, the internet in 1969. The moon landing came in 1969. Reusable launch vehicles arrived in 1981. The pace of invention was not constant; it accelerated, each tool making the next one easier to conceive.

  23456

• 6. The Twentieth Century's Weight

  ›

  The 20th century brought industrialization to its full scale, the rise of nation states, and a rapid expansion of both science and universal education. It also brought the two World Wars, which reshaped every major political boundary on earth and led directly to the formation of the United Nations. The Soviet Union ran from 1922 to 1991. Nazi Germany existed from 1933 to 1945. The nuclear weapon, dating to 1945, introduced a category of destruction with no precedent. Globalization, meanwhile, knitted economies and cultures together in ways the 1001 world could not have imagined. The partition of India in 1947 alone displaced millions. The period from 1949 onward saw the People's Republic of China take shape, a state that would end the millennium as one of the planet's most consequential powers.

  23456

• 7. The Calendar Dispute

  ›

  The Julian calendar governed Europe at the start of the millennium. By the end, every country that had once used it had shifted to the Gregorian calendar. That shift created a quiet complication: the millennium's start date is calculated on the Julian calendar, while its end date is calculated on the Gregorian one. In the late 1990s a genuine public dispute broke out over when exactly the millennium ended. The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould argued that there was no objective way to settle the question. The Associated Press reported that the third millennium officially began on the 1st of January, 2001, but also noted that celebrations in the United States were more subdued that night compared to the festivities of the year before. Most people marked the transition on the 31st of December, 1999, though some held their observances a full year later. A millennium is a human category, and humans, it turns out, do not always agree on where to put its edges.

  198