CRASH COURSE – WORLD HISTORY (1 & 2)

Crash Course 1:
1. The Agricultural Revolution
2. Indus Valley Civilization
3. Mesopotamia
4. Ancient Egypt
5. The Persians & Greeks
6. Buddha and Ashoka
7. 2,000 Years of Chinese History! The Mandate of Heaven and Confucius
8.
2 x 01 – Rethinking Civilization
John: Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course World History, and today we're going to talk about
civilization. 

John from the past: Oh! Mr. Green, Mr. Green, I have that video game. I like to play as the Assyrians.

John: Yeah, me from the past, it was a video game. In fact it still is a video game. They continue to
update it. But, you know, like actual civilization its best days are probably behind it.

(Intro Reel)

John: So those of you who watched our first series will remember that civilization is a complicated and
controversial concept. Like, to describe an individual or group as civilized is to give them a privileged
status that they maybe haven't earned, while to call someone uncivilized is an insult, right? 

And according to the usual mythology about civilizations, there are these uncivilized barbarians, often
from the hills or the forests or the steppe, and they realize the benefits of settled agriculture and give up
their barbaric ways to settle in the valleys, eventually assimilating into civilized societies.

That's a really neatly packaged story, right? Like, people all around the world come to the same
realization, and they all make progress and become civilized. But what if it's not actually true?

So today, a little something for the anarchist historians among you, we're going to look at The Art of Not
Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia by James Scott. Scott argues that our
view of hill people as primitive, tribal barbarians has it all wrong, and he calls into question much of what
we assume about civilization.

So as you know, here at Crash Course World History, we like to approach history from many different
perspectives because history isn't just about what happened, it's also about how we think about what
happened. So here you go, anarchists, we are finally going to address your burning suspicion that
civilization does not actually require a state. 

So long-time Crash Course viewers will remember that many of the earliest civilizations were founded in
river valleys, probably because the rivers brought water and made agriculture easier and more predictable.
You know, you got The Big Three: Ancient Egypt, Ancient Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley
civilization, all near river valleys. In fact, one of them is named after the Indus River. And because the
land was so fertile for agriculture, you could finally have large, concentrated populations because there
was a food surplus. 

Everything that we associate with civilization, from the idea that different people can have different jobs
to, like, this video camera, all a result of food surplus. Because if some people couldn't create enough
food for all people, then, like, all people would be very focused on getting food. 

Having a food surplus was a huge change compared to, like, the first hundred thousand years of humanity
when everyone was a hunter-gatherer. Food surplus led to population growth and population
concentration which led to states and what we tend to call "civilizations," which are characterized by
good things like writing and arts and grocery stores.
So that's the traditional narrative but I'm not sure that it's the whole story. Let's go to The Thought
Bubble.

Now we might equate civilization with high culture, but historically it's probably more accurate to equate
it with state control, like the Han Chinese, who were a pretty successful civilizing empire back in the day,
wrote of barbarians as people who were beyond state control.

Some of these so-called barbarians were pastoral nomads whose raiding posed a general threat to the
Chinese, but others were people who lived in the hills. So the opposition of civilized agricultural societies
living in the valleys and barbarian hill people is as old as, you know, like, the hills. 

And one of the earliest and most famous examples of the town versus country debate is the Epic of
Gilgamesh where Enkidu, the wild man from the hills, goes to town, spends seven days with a prostitute,
joins civilization, and becomes Gilgamesh's best friend. 

In Southeast Asia, the story that hill people were dazzled by civilization and joined up circulated as well.
Here, though, the civilizing force was the reading of religious or philosophical texts.  

But more important than either access to classical aged texts or civilizing experiences in the city was that
civilizations were based on settled agriculture and were associated with states. In a way, it can be argued
that without a state, there's no such thing as a barbarian. 

But because we live in states, we tend to think that they are, A) necessary, B) timeless, and C) overall a
pretty good thing. And almost all civilizations are associated with states, like Ancient Egypt or China in
the remote past or France if you're into western civilization.

Thanks, Thought Bubble. I mean it's telling that the Mongols were arguably the greatest conquerors of the
pre-modern world but we usually don't call them a civilization. They just weren't agriculture-y and state-
like enough. Although, of course, the Mongols being the Mongols, there's an exception to the rule. The
Mongols did settle in a recognizable state in Yuan, China.

Oh, history, even your exceptions have exceptions.

So when we talked about states, we need to remember that it's pretty common that the creation of states to
involve some form of coercion, like in ancient - and sometimes not ancient - societies, the power of the
state rested primarily on two things: the army and taxes. And if you want to create an army or raise taxes
or both, it's helpful to have a sedentary population that spends most of its time producing food because
food is very valuable to a state. I mean, while gold and palaces are beautiful, you can't feed them to your
army.

Anyway, agricultural production and the creation of states are deeply intertwined. Agricultural surplus
and control over it leads to other aspects of civilization like property rights and patriarchy. Well, I guess it
doesn't have to lead to patriarchy but it usually has.

So as states rely on the exploitation of agricultural labor and the subjugation of their citizens, then the
civilization narratives that barbarians were drawn to civilizations by their obvious superiority is kind of
problematic.

There's a big downside to all that state control and taxes and conscription and servitude, and this leads us
to James Scott's big idea that rather than primitive hill tribes being attracted to the glamour and stability
of valley settlements, hill cultures are formed by people running away from civilization. Basically, Scott
argues that people flee to the hills because it makes it hard for states to find and conquer them.

The Arab historian Ibn Khaldun remarked that Arabs can gain control over flat territory and do not pursue
tribes that hide in the mountains. 

Then you have the Franco-Hungarian military officer Baron de Tott poetically exclaiming that, "The
steepest places have always been the asylum of liberty." But the great French historian Fernand Braudel
probably summed it up best when he wrote, "The mountains as a rule are a world apart from civilizations
which are an urban and lowland achievement. Their history is to have none, to remain always on the
fringes of the great waves of civilization..." And you may have noticed from the mountainous tribal areas
of Pakistan to people in Colorado with their legal marijuana, it's still kind of difficult for states to control
hill people. 

This idea turns the civilization narrative on its head. Hill people are not barbarians waiting to become
civilized - they're refugees from civilization itself. And this brings up the possibility that life in the hills is
actually better than settled agricultural states with their wars and taxes and forced labor. Furthermore,
cities and settlements breed epidemic diseases, and when the next Spanish flu comes for all of us, it's
gonna be good to be in the mountains.

That said, I'm not a hundred percent sold on the argument, which is why I'm living in very flat, very
civilized Indianapolis. 

I mean, as I said earlier, without agricultural surpluses, we wouldn't have the Internet, which I'm fond of.
Also, I have tried the hunter-gatherer Paleo diet, and it did not suit me. I like Doritos.

Stan just told me that the Paleo diet is not in fact the diet the people of the hills have. Apparently the kind
of agriculture they used was called swiddening. It means shifting cultivation and apparently it's great
because it provides a more varying diet with less effort. Score another one for the hill people.

Maybe I'll try to popularize the swidden diet... Oh! Time for the Open Letter. 

Oh my god, the new globe opens and food comes out of it. Is it my birthday? Man, I love our new globe.
Anyway, an Open Letter to fad diets: 

Dear Fad Diets,

You know what doesn't work? Eating unhealthily. You know what does work? Eating healthily. 

Your noble prehistoric heritage as a scavenger has prepared you to eat anything - anything that is food.

So the idea of eating only one kind of food is just sort of inherently ludicrous. I mean, the average freegan
is literally healthier than I am, and they just eat whatever is in the dumpster.

In short, Fad Diets, eating discarded foods is much more in line with most of human history than the
Paleo diet. 

Best wishes,
John Green

Alright, so far much of what I've said can be applied to hill people from all over the world at various
times, but the focus of Scott's book is the region of upland Southeast Asia and Southern China that he
calls, "Zomia." Zomia is mountainous and jungle-y and home to between eighty and a hundred million
people. It's a little hard to conceptualize because we're so used to thinking of history in terms of states,
and this region is, to quote him, "relatively stateless." 

Zomia was at least partially created by slavery, actually, because flight from slavery is one of the main
reasons that people head for the hills. According to Scott, "Southeast Asian states were slaving states,
without exception, some of them until well into the twentieth century. Wars in pre-colonial Southeast
Asia were less about territory than about the seizure of as many captives as possible who were then
resettled at the core of the winner's territory." 

I can just hear all of you Crash Course viewers saying, "Wait, is there any evidence that any of that is
true?" ...Kinda.

But, like, if one of the main reasons people create hill cultures like Zomia is to avoid civilizations, and
one of the hallmarks of civilizations is writing, then it stands to reason that there won't be much written
evidence from Zomia, as writing is kind of like the bread and butter of traditional history.
Off topic, but bread and butter is really no longer the staple of any diet. We should really change that
phrase to like the Doritos Locos Tacos and Chipotle burritos of traditional history.

So the evidence that we can look at is flawed because it's mainly what other people have written about
Zomians and their hill dwelling brethren. Like this Portuguese friar Father Sangermano wrote around
1800 that the people of the area quote, "Unable any longer to bear witness to the heavy oppressions and
continual levies of men and money made upon them have withdrawn themselves from their native
soil, with all their families..."

So basically, he thought, at least, that they were leaving because of conscription and taxes - you know,
hallmarks of civilization. 

And then there are also later colonialists like Sir Stamford Raffles who, despite his name, was not a
clown. He was the founder of British Singapore. Here's what he said about colonial rule in Indonesia,
"Here I am the advocate of despotism. The strong arm of power is necessary to bring men together and to
concentrate them into societies... Sumatra is, in great measure, peopled by innumerable petty tribes,
subject to no central government...At present, people are as wandering in their habits as birds of the air,
and until they are congregated and organized under something like authority, nothing can be done with
them." Raffles there makes an accidental but pretty damning indictment of civilization to say that the
reason people exist is so that something can be done with them.

Now admittedly this isn't something particularly strong evidence, and it doesn't touch on pre-modern
history or the state formation activities of Southeast Asian rulers. But if Europeans' attitudes and activities
drove some people to the mountains, it's possible that earlier rulers - especially if they founded their states
on war and slavery, and we know that in many cases they did - that they might have had a similar effect.

So can we finally conclude that hill people as well as nomads and other cultures that attempt to live
outside the state structure are not primitive people left behind by civilization, but those who have made a
conscious choice to avoid it? Well, in the absence of extensive written records we call history...
anthropology - that's a joke for all the anthropology majors out there.

And a number of anthropologists have suggested that people who live separate from our ideas of
civilization did indeed make that choice consciously in a wide variety of situations. 

Like in his book Society Against the State, Pierre Clastres argues that the so-called primitive Amerindian
societies of South America were not in fact ancient societies that had failed to invent settled agriculture or
state forms, but previously sedentary cultivators who abandoned agriculture and fixed villages in response
to the effects of conquest.

So are all these stateless, social orders finally a response to civilization or just people who haven't realized
the bounty of civilization yet? 

I don't know, and studying history isn't really about providing answers. It's about providing context. The
question of what's the best and most just way to organize our social orders is a big question and a very old
one. But it's something we still need to be asking because we're all still making choices about how we're
going to organize ourselves into communities.

Scott's idea of Zomia introduces us to a different way of thinking about things and equating civilization
with coercive state control calls into question the idea of what it even means to be civilized. But I'm not
enough of an anarchist to let this episode go without acknowledging the extraordinary accomplishments
of civilization, not just agriculture but everything from antibiotics to the ability to be connected to people
who live half a world away from you.  

The deep and growing interconnectedness among humans has its risks for sure, but it also provides
tremendous opportunities. We can collaborate, we can play each other in FIFA and we can also do "this"
together. But then again, there's an extraordinary freedom to Zomian-style social orders and vitally, their
way of life is far more sustainable than ours. 

Thanks for watching. I'll see you next week.

Crash Course is made with the help of all of "these" nice people and it exists because of your support
at subbable.com. Subbable is a voluntary subscription service that allows you to directly support Crash
Course, so we want to say thank you to all of our Subbable subscribers, and thanks to everyone who
watches Crash Course. I hope that you enjoy our World History series. And as we say in my hometown,
don't forget to be awesome. 

2 x 02 – Money & Debt

Hi, I'm John Green. This is Crash Course World History and today we're going to make it rain. We're
going to talk about money, the stuff that makes the world go 'round. I'm not very good at making it rain.  
  
MFTP: Mr. Green! Mr. Green. I'm sorry, but money doesn't make the world go round. It's actually
conservation of angular momentum. It's the same thing that allows, like, figure skaters to turn in circles.  
  
John: Look, me from the past.  I know you came in fourth for physics, among all "C" students in the
entire state of Alabama in the 1994 state academic decathlon tournament, but that doesn't actually make
you good at science.  
  
(Intro)
  
So, here is what economic textbooks say about money. In general it has three functions: medium of
exchange, unit of account, and store of value. And its first function is by far the most important.  
  
Like, this is a quote from my actual, physical high school econ text book: "In primitive economies, food
might be traded for clothing, or help in building a house might be exchanged for help in clearing a field.
But exchange today in all economies -- market as well as command -- takes place through the medium of
money." 
  
A couple things about that quote, first off, primitive is a cringe-y word. Secondly, a market economy is
basically all economies these days, and a command economy is what we called the Soviet Union's
economy back in the eighties.  
  
Anyway, money is very important to history--like, our old friend Adam Smith thought that, quote:
"property money and markets not only existed before political institutions, but were the very foundation
of human society." Ehh, he was pretty into economies, so he was probably a little biased toward money,
but it is important. 
  
Smith also thought that before there was money, there was barter, but barter could be cumbersome; like if
I make cheese and you make shoes, and you're lactose intolerant, then barter breaks down because I need
shoes, but you don't need cheese. Then I have to live like a hobbit and get this very powerful ring, it's
like, really stressful, I end up having to go to Mordor, it's just very complicated. 
  
So, Smith's ideas that rather than adapt to shoelessness, humans created a commodity that they would
agree upon ahead of time could be used in exchange, and that commodity is money. Yes, these are all
ones. 
  
Stan, I forgot to mention this, but you are buying lunch today. 
  
Now, we generally think of money as like coins, or later, bills, but the material of money is arbitrary.
Smith wrote: "In all countries, however, men seem at last to have been determined by irresistible reasons
to give the preference, for this employment, to metals above all other commodity." A sentence that shows
you why we didn't teach him in Crash Course Literature. 
  
But of course, it's really inconvenient to like, weigh and measure metals every time you wanna buy or sell
something, so people hit upon the idea of making coins with a standard size and weight. Now, Smith is
probably right that coins are much more convenient than bartering, right? Like, especially if the main
store of value in your community is something like cattle. I mean, let's say you still need a pair of shoes,
well, they aren't worth an entire cow; trading in partial cows... fairly messy. It's also very bad for the
cow's health, and the cow loses a lot of its value, because, you know, it's no longer living. 
  
So that all makes sense, but it's problematic when Smith universalizes that observation by claiming that as
a matter of convenience, every prudent man in every period of society must naturally have endeavored to
create money. 
  
Smith -- man of the enlightenment that he was -- is positing that the creation of money is part of human
nature. Like, in the second chapter of Wealth of Nations, Smith explicitly says that the division of labor is
the, quote: "consequence of a certain propensity in human nature ... to truck, barter, and exchange one
thing for another." 
  
But yet, no! Like, what made sense for eighteenth century city and town dwellers like Adam Smith
doesn't necessarily apply to like, all human beings over the course of many millennia. And if you don't
believe me, you can just ask anthropologists. They love to talk about this stuff. 
  
So, here's the fascinating thing to me: when you look at places where the social order is not based on
money, we find that people actually don't barter at all. So David Graeber's book "Debt: The First 5,000
Years" surveys the literature of anthropology and discovers that in societies without money, people don't
actually barter, but they do find ways to exchange. He quotes an anthropologist named Caroline
Humphrey, who concluded: "No example of a barter economy, pure and simple, has ever been described,
let alone the emergence from it of money; all available ethnography suggests that there has never been
such a thing." 
  
Now, that's not to say that barter doesn't exist or that it never has, I mean, I just traded Stan two copies of
my book Paper Towns for the candy left in this pinata. Big money, no whammies. Two things of Sweet
Tarts?! Stan! That's not fair. 
  
Alright, let's go to the Thought Bubble. 
  
So, according to Graeber, barter was reserved for trade between strangers, even enemies. For most of
human history, humans lived in small communities, and in those small communities, most exchange took
place using forms of credit. Basically, when people know each other well, they're willing to trade with the
future expectation that what one gives today will be repaid at some future date with something of roughly
equivalent value. So in small, localized communities, everyone is in debt to everyone else, and there's no
real need of physical money, like coins, as a way of keeping a count, because, you know, you remember
when someone owes you forty barrels of beer, or whatever. 
  
We see this historically in the early civilizations of the Fertile Crescent, where the basic monetary unit
was the shekel, and one shekel's weight in silver was the equivalent of a bushel of barley. Money in
Ancient Sumer was actually created by bureaucrats in order to keep track of resources and move things
back and forth between departments. But that doesn't mean that silver actually circulated freely. Graeber
writes: "While debts were calculated in silver, they didn't have to be paid in silver." 
  
So while some people seem to think that money is naturally backed by precious metals, usually gold or
silver, that doesn't seem to have been the case. It was enough to establish that something was worth a
shekel or a fraction thereof, and then trade for something of equivalent value -- meat, or whatever else,
without actually having to have the shekels change hands. 
  
And this was especially helpful in economies where taxes and payments to workers were both in grain,
rather than money. 
  
Thanks, Thought Bubble. So, first, Graeber blows our minds by telling us that Adam Smith was all wrong
about money evolving from barter societies, but what about credit as the precursor to money? 
  
I mean, it's basically saying that credit cards aren't an advancement so much as they're a return to the
glorious past, except instead of trust, there are like, large, faceless corporations with the power to sue
you. 
  
So the essence of credit is debt, and at least according to Graeber, that's the glue that holds social orders
together, at least, if you consider debt at its heart, to be about obligation. At least one of the things that
binds us together as a community is the recognition that we owe our neighbors something and that they
owe something to us in return. It's like keeping your lawn mowed so that you can keep your neighbor's
property value high. It doesn't make sense to have a lawn -- they're expensive and time consuming, and
you can't eat grass. But you take care of your lawn for the same reason your neighbors take care of theirs.
Out of the sense of mutual obligation. 
  
But money changes our understanding of those obligations, right? Because once we're able to put a price
on our obligations, we can make them transferable, which wouldn't be possible without money. Like, for
instance, it allows you to hire someone to mow your lawn for you, but Graeber argues that money,
especially in the form of coinage, also may chattel slavery, possibly.  
  
So in West African social orders before the arrival of Europeans, money was used, but only for weddings,
funerals, and other activities that like, cemented human relationships. And the money largely had
symbolic value. But when Europeans arrived, they introduced monetized trade into the system, and in the
process, transformed that system. Money was no longer about transferring value to solidify relationships
between individuals and families; it was about quantifying debt and also making it transferable. 
  
So, Graeber's theory links money as we know it to slavery and war, like, coins began to be used in India,
China, and the soon to be Persian province of Lydia, almost simultaneously, all around 600 BCE. And in
Graeber's view, this happened because this was a period of time that saw a shift from earlier forms of
honor-based warfare, like, what is described in the Iliad, to a new, more state-based warfare. 
  
Armies started fighting over things like territory and resources, rather than, like, kidnapped wives. So in
a-- oh, it's time for the open letter! 
  
But first, let's see what's inside my globe today. Oh, look, it's a molten core of nickel and iron! Can--can
you turn into coins? Oh! Stan! Look how rich I am! Virtually. 
  
Thought Bubble's clearly much better at making it rain than I am. An open letter to honor-based warfare. 
  
Dear Honor-Based Warfare, um, I guess now is the time in the video that I have to tell you that I don't
entirely agree with Mr. Graeber. Like, with the Iliad we were telling ourselves a story about why we went
to war, right? We went to war not for resources, but for glory. Honor. Now, I don't want to sound cynical
and disbelieving, but we still tell ourselves those stories. These days, the President rarely goes on TV and
says, "You know why we're going to go to war? We need resources." No, we still say it's about honor and
ideas and standing up for the defenseless, and et cetera, which is all about as historically convincing as
the Iliad. In short, honor-based warfare, I'm not entirely convinced that you, you know, exist. Best wishes,
John Green. 
  
Anyway, so in all three of these governments in India, China, and Lydia, they were pretty small scale,
especially compared to the empires that would soon come, but they built their power on professional
armies that needed to be paid, and coins were a great way to pay them. It just works much better than like,
trying to split up the plunder among everybody. The plundering method of payment is just like a garage
sale. The people who get there early get all the good plunder, and then the rest of the people, they're just
left dividing up, you know, old clothes. 
  
Also, in Graeber's view, states began to encourage the use of coins because of the uncertainty of war --
like, violence creates uncertainty for merchants, and decreases the likelihood that they will accept
payment in the form of some kind of trust-based credit arrangement. And soldiers aren't known for
accepting credit as payment, either, because, you know, soldiers are keenly aware that they might die
soon. So, according to Graeber, this combination of war and state-building led to the rise of coinage. And
then in order to keep paying soldiers, rulers, like, say, Alexander the Great, needed to continue their
conquests. So you need an army in order to have an empire, and your army only likes to be paid in coins. 
  
Now, you can seize some sweet, sweet metal plunder and then melt it down and make coins, but with an
empire-sized army, that's not gonna cut it. You need more silver. Where are you gonna get new silver?
Mining. Nope, Stan, not miming, I said "mining", don't ever put mimes in Crash Course again. 
  
So now you need a steady supply of miners; fortunately, you've conquered a bunch of people, so you have
lots of prisoners of war, and now you have slavery. 
  
This military-coinage slavery complex was described explicitly in the Arthashastra, a political guidebook
written by Minister Kautilya for the Mauryan dynasty, that made it clear that coins and markets sprung
up, above all, to feed the machinery of war. He wrote: "The treasury is based upon mining, the army upon
the treasury; he who has the army and the treasury may conquer the earth." 
  
And Graeber says that China followed a similar pattern: he writes, "The same fractured political
landscape, the same rise of trained, professional armies, and the creation of coined money largely in order
to pay them." So, if money is a creation of the state and its military, then it follows that when the state
fails, as it did in Europe after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, coinage largely disappears. And
that's exactly what happened, actually, but of course, that doesn't mean that transactions failed to take
place or that trade completely disappears, but it did decline a lot. And in situations like that, people often
revert to the virtual credit systems that we talked about earlier: the ones that rely more on personal
connections than on like, state enforcement. 
  
So Adam Smith's origin myth of money -- that it derives from people's natural desire to make barter more
convenient through the creation of a medium of exchange -- really doesn't hold up to scrutiny. I mean,
there are clearly examples of an alternate history where production and exchange work okay without
actual coins or bills changing hands. It's kind of like today, actually -- money works as long as there is
some form of trust and a way to make people meet their obligations. People used to feel obligated because
failure to meet their obligations would hurt their standing in their small, localized communities, and now
we meet our obligations because otherwise, like, people take our houses or whatever. 
  
But while we have evidence that money, as we conceive of it today, isn't necessary for exchange, it IS
necessary, or, at least, very useful, for states, and I think states are probably good. 
  
Oh, maybe not, I'm not positive. I just like the internet so much; I don't think we would have the internet
without states. 
  
So I wanna be clear that I don't entirely buy Graeber's version of history. I might be wrong, of course, but
I'm not convinced that coins necessarily lead to slavery. And I don't think that ancient slavery is really
comparable to the chattel slavery that we saw in the Americas. But I do think that it's important to look at
alternative points of view when it comes to history, even when you don't agree with them. It's helpful to
understand that there's more than one well-argued point of view in the world. And I do think Graeber very
effectively challenges the idea that human beings are like natural, rational, economic actors who wouldn't
be possible without money. And in the face of overwhelming anthropological evidence, at least this much
is true: money is not the product of human nature; it's the product of human actions, like the formation of
governments and markets. 
  
In short, and I know this will disappoint some of the economics majors out there: ultimately, I think my
mom was right. We aren't made of money. Thanks for watching, I'll see you next week. 
  
Crash Course is made with the help of all of these nice people. I didn't want to do the credits without my
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2 x 03 – Disease!
Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course World History, and today we're going to talk about a subject that
makes me profoundly uncomfortable — disease. 
This is a tough subject for me personally because I'm a bit of a hypochondriac, but, to be fair, my fears
are kind of rational. I am afraid that my existence will be ended by a soulless microscopic organism, and
to be fair they have killed a lot of people. You're not paranoid if germs are actually out to get you, and, as
we'll see today, they are.
Fortunately, we live in the twenty-first century, when communicable disease does not play such a massive
role in human history, unless of course you count Bird Flu or SARS or HIV AIDS or antibiotic-resistant
bacteria. 
All right, Stan, let's just go to the intro. 

(Intro)

Okay, so long time viewers of Crash Course will remember the sixteenth century Great Dying in the
Americas not only as an example of historian's total inability to name things, but also as perhaps the most
important and wide-ranging effect that disease has had on human cultures in millennia. But traditionally
the study of history hasn't focused much on diseases, partly because they're mysterious and terrifying and
partly because they don't fit in very well with our ideas about history being the result of human
agency. We like to imagine that things happen because we did good things or because we did bad things
or at least because we did some kind of thing. But, in fact, history often happens because lots of people
got smallpox. 
There's also the fact that diseases were often seen to be the result of divine will or else divine wrath. Plus,
because people didn't know that much about disease they didn't write about it very often and when they
did write about it they didn't always write about it particularly well. So when you read primary sources
often they're like, "Why'd they die? Well, too much of that miasma." That's not particularly helpful to us. 
So given all that, we are going to have to engage in a bit of speculation here.  

>John Green from the past interrupts.<

"Mr. Green, Mr. Green, I love speculation. It's way more fun than history. Like, what would have
happened if the South won the Civil War?"

>John Green from the present answers, shaking head.<

"Nooo, me-from-the-past, not that kind of speculation. The kind of speculation where you guess what did
happen, not what would have happened."

>Lecture format resumes.<

So, diseases have been with humans as long as there have been, like, humans. And humans first appeared
in tropical regions in Africa which are home to a wide variety of micro-parasites so it's probably a good
bet that those parasites played a role in keeping human populations really low for a long, long time. 
It's only after we see migration out of Africa and into regions less amenable to diseases about 64,000
years ago that we start to see the growth of human populations necessary to create what we
problematically call civilizations. 
So humans migrated in to river valleys that became the cradles of civilization with agriculture and
surpluses, etc. This allowed us to escape those population-limiting tropical diseases but it created all kinds
of new disease problems.
The communities and river valleys had more people and more population density, which allowed for
epidemics. I mean one of the great things about hunting and gathering is diseases cannot wipe out a city if
you don't have cities.
Also, River Valleys can be breeding grounds for disease, especially were cultures developed irrigation
which often relied on slow moving or standing water. If you ever had to clean a bird bath, you'll know
that standing water is the perfect environment for disease carriers and nasty microorganisms.
For example, schistosomiasis was recorded in Egypt as early as 1200 B.C.E. What is...what is, that Stan?
Oh, apparently, it's a parasitic flatworm...do we still have that? Yeah do, we do. Awesome. Anyway, lots
of diseases come from domesticated animals. But, you can't have bacon without swine flu. So, you know,
it's come-see come-some. That's gonna be a hilarious joke when we all die of swine flu. Just kidding!
We're all gonna die from bird flu. But from, like, a macro historical perspective, it's not like disease is all
downside. I mean, sometimes it's helped populations shielded themselves from conquest. That was the
case in Africa until the 19th century. OK, so we like to say that one of the Hallmark's of civilization is
writing, and pandemic diseases were the type of events that people tended to write about in early
civilizations because they were a big deal. Like pestilence appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh, early
Chinese historians describe the increase in disease as populations spread from the Northern Yellow River
region to the more tropical Yangtze River region. Ancient Greece was relatively disease-free because of
it's climate and also the isolated-nature of city-states; but the more the cities became involved in trade, the
more susceptible to epidemics they were. The best example of this was the Plague that struck Athens in
430 and 429 B.C.E. during the Peloponnesian War. At that leads us to a very important point, which is
there is a decent correlation between war and disease. Armies tended to carry it along with them and food
shortages and displacements made civilians more likely to get sick. That is still very much the case and
the weird symbiotic relationship between war and disease is something we will look a lot at in the next
several weeks. 

But nothing spreads disease quite like trade. Trade is so good for economies and so bad at keeping
individual human beings not dead. Like Ancient Rome's immigration into trans-continental trade
networks like the silk road may explain why the historian Livy reported at least eleven pestilential
disasters and it is very likely that disease and the accompanying decline in population contributed to the
fall of the Roman Empire.

But of course you can't talk about the history of disease without mentioning the most famous epidemic of
all time - The Black Death. I mean if the black death were a soccer team it would be Liverpool Football
Club; if the black death were a band it would be The Beetles; if the black death were and industry it
would be 18th century textile processing, in Liverpool.

The plague, which struck Europe in the mid 14th century, originated in fleas that came from rats, and
Bubonic plague can be found throughout the world, even in the western US today (although it is more
treatable now, thankfully). But anyway the black death started in China and spread westward over the
caravan routes, really picking up steam when plague-carrying rats jumped onto Mediterranean trading
ships. So the death rate from this plague was incredibly high, perhaps a third of people living in Europe
died.

Oh it must be time for the Open Letter. Oh look it's the Grim Reaper - stay away from me. An open letter
to the black death. Dear black death, I don't want to compliment you but that term "black death" is just
some fantastic branding. Such a scary term. It's a shame that people in the actual 14th century didn't use
it. It was first coined in 1832 by a German doctor and professor of the history of medicine, JFK Hecker.
And the term became popular in English after it was used in A History of England by Elizabeth
Cartwright Penrose so great job JFK Hecker. It took a historian who was also a doctor to come up with a
name as catchy as "The Black Death" but for once, historians, you did it. The terrifying things got the
terrifying name it deserved. Best Wishes, John Green.

So we are not 100% sure that the "Black Death" was Bubonic Plague. Its virulence suggested in some
places it might have been pneumonic, but we have descriptions of it that match Bubonic Plague, like this
one from Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani "it was a plague that touched people of every condition,
age and sex. They began to spit blood and then they died--some immediately some in two or three days,
and some in a longer time...." "most has swellings in the groin, and many had them in the left and right
armpits and in other places; one could almost always find an unusual swelling somewhere on the victim's
body."

Stan I appreciate you doing that in text and not pictures because it sounds truly horrible.Thank goodness
that was the last we saw of outbreaks of Bubonic Plague. Whats that? there was an outbreak in 1904 in
San Francisco? Oh boy. And India in 1994?

Obviously the Plague affected a lot of individuals lives, but it also affected world history. Like, Plague
probably contributed to the fall of the Wan Dynasty in China in the 14th century, but its greatest effects
where felt in western Europe.

Okay, lets go to the thought bubble. There's was some debate about whether the black death kick-started
Europe's economy, and ended the middle ages. It probably did create some opportunity, like guilds were
forced to admit new members to replace the many workers who had died in persistent European inflation
until the end of the 14th century suggests both a shortage of products and higher wages.

Again, Matteo Villani provides us with some evidence in the effect of the plague on Italy's  economy.
"Nurses and minor Artisans working with their hands want three times or nearly the usual pay, and
laborers on the land all want oxen and all seed, and want to work the best lands, and to abandon all
others."
So the Plague may have actually been good for workers, at least those who survived.

The plague also probably changed European Christianity. When faced with seemingly random and
widespread death some people abandoned piety for hedonism, and ineffectiveness of priests in dealing
with the crisis may have led to an increase in anti-clericalism and a greater receptiveness to the ideas of
the Protestant reformation. 

And attempts to combat the plague changed the way that Europeans lived too, for example there where
new construction techniques such as building out of brick instead of wood, and in many places tile
roofing replaced thatched roofs, where rats liked to live. These new shelters created more barriers
between humans and disease carrying rodents, and plus there where fewer Plague infested rats falling out
of the ceiling, so that's nice.

Thanks thought bubble, so the Black Death looms larger in our Eurocentric imaginations, but in terms of
devastation and human suffering it pales in comparison to the great dying that accompanied the
Columbian exchange. The pre-Columbian Americas where certainly no paradise but the records we have
suggest that Amerindian cultures were largely free of disease until the arrival of Europeans. They did
have syphilis, but that's preventable.

Not to be redundant, but the most obvious, and often most overlooked aspect of the Great Dying, is the
dying. I mean, perhaps 90% of native populations of the Americas may have perished destroying
communities, and families, and entire cultures. And at the same time that diseases where destroying
indigenous orders, Europe's population was growing, thus creating more pressure to colonize the
Americas, Asia, Africa, and eventually Australia. And so its fair to say, as historian Jared Diamond has,
that disease was, if not the decisive factor, a crucial determinant of Europe's dominance in the modern
era. 

So while not exactly the last hurrah of epidemics, the world has not seen anything remotely like the
devastation brought by the Colombian exchange since. Some of that is due to our new shared
immunological profiles, but much of it can be chalked up to massive improvement in science and
medicine.

The most significant medical advance the battle against viral epidemic diseases like small pox was
inoculation, which was probably actually invented in Asia but came into wide use in England after 1721
and in continental Europe a century later. And then the development of antibiotics in the 20th century
proved  extremely effective against bacterial diseases like Bubonic Plague and tuberculosis.

Some of these advantages have had tremendous results  like small pox has been eliminated from the
human population; But infectious disease continues to be a leading killer of humans and we still see
deadly epidemics of diseases like cholera around the world, and even though antibiotics have been in
wide use for less than 100 years, many drug resistant bacteria have already emerged and terrifying
diseases like tuberculosis have started to make a bit of a comeback.

Then you have modern endemic diseases HIV/AIDS along with the lurking threat of new and terrifying
epidemics like the various flus we often hear about. All of that reminds us that disease is still shaping
human history, and has the potential to be the most powerful force in human history. Like the one that
ends it.

We like to think that the human story is both told by and made by humans, but in fact it's a lot more
complicated than that because we share this planet with countless creatures. I know we all like to think of
ourselves as individuals but we cannot separate ourselves, not only from other people, but also from the
larger biosphere; that whole story is the story of history.

Thanks for watching; I'll see you next week.

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