several similarities. In each case a small region
(Serbia and Cuba, respectively) was the subject of
controversy between major powers. In each case
an ultimatum was presented, and in each case
weapons of mass destruction (machine guns in
1914, nuclear weapons in 1962) were available.
Why did war break out in one case but not the
other? The answer must involve the differences,
one of which is that in 1914 no fast means of com-
munication between the big powers was available
as the first international phone call was not made
until 1915. However, in 1962, the Americans and
Soviets could communicate rapidly, which de-
creased the likelihood that a misunderstanding
could lead to hostilities.II. H.G. Wells not only wrote science fiction, he
should be considered the founder of world his-
tory.Wells’ 1920The Outline of History is the first
true “world history” because the Americas are in-
cluded in the narrative. In about 1,000 pages of
text, Wells attempts to “explain it all,” and in the
process he wrote World History’s equivalent of
Darwin’s Origin of Species. The Outline of Historyis
not just a foundational text, but a great work of
skepticism. Wells dismisses the racist pseudo-
sciences of his time and analyzes the source works
of history with a critical eye. His one-volume ap-
proach is often march-across-the-desert boring
but reaches sublime heights often enough to make
for compulsive reading; it encapsulates everything
about the subject almost perfectly.
III. The subject of world history is too big to fit a
traditional historical approach.The traditional
process of history asks a research question with
specific boundaries and then exhausts the evi-
dence in pursuit of answering that question.
Arnold J. Toynbee (1889-1975) first tried the ex-
haustive approach, but Will and Ariel Durant
popularized it with their eleven-volume Story of
Civilizationbetween 1935 and 1975. The Durants
seemed to be possessed by graphomania, and
after several decades of writing they died with
their narrative stuck in the Napoleonic era. Cur-
rently, Susan Wise Bauer is three-volumes into a
work of scholarly genius, but her narrative has
just arrived at the era of the printing press (when
modern history really begins), and its not clear
that she can finish in her lifetime.
IV. We should not let political correctness nor
respect for religion cloud our historical judg-
ment. In 1928, the Soviets commissioned the di-
rector Sergei Eisenstein to make the movie Octo-
berfor the purpose of telling the history of the
Russian Revolution. The history as presented in
that movie fits the needs of the current power
structure, and even though 1928 was just a few
years removed from the Revolution, Octoberis
rife with distortions and fabrications. The Lenin
of Octoberis a cinematic, not a historical, charac-
ter. In the same way, historians must view Jesus,
Mohammed, and Genghis Khan as literary char-
acters who were created at a specific time by a
ruling class that needed an origin narrative.
In the case of Islam, the Arabian Peninsula
must have pulsed with military potential for cen-
turies before the Arabs marched across North
Africa and the Middle East in the 630’s. When the
conquests began, Mohammed was not there and
the Qu’ranwas not written. Only after two
decades of conquest was the Qu’rancomposed,
and Mohammed’s biography was not created for
over a century after these conquests. World histo-
rians often cite “Islamic tradition” when writing
about the life and times of Mohammed, but Is-
lamic tradition is less verifiable as history than
the movie October was.
Clearly, something happened in the seventh
century that caused the Arabs to conquer outside
of their peninsula. However, it is more likely that
the Bedouins had raided north many times before
the 630s but had bumped into the Byzantine and
Persian Empires at a time when those empires
possessed real military strength. The Arabic con-
quests of the early 7th century occurred at pre-
cisely the moment when the Byzantines and
Persians found their societies and militaries ex-
hausted from decades of warfare with each other.
This, more than a unifying religion, is probably
the main cause of Arabic military success. Then,
when the Arabs conquered and found themselves
in contact with monotheisms, Mohammed and
Islam were born as a literary tradition and as a
legal code for governing an empire. Those reli-
gious traditions reflect the needs of rulers from
the late 7th and early 8th centuries, not the actual
events of the early 7th century.
The Genghis Khan we all think we know,
too, is not a poor child of the steppes who killed
his brother as a child and then won a civil war to
unite the clans. Rather, this Genghis Khan was in-
vented by later and literate Mongol rulers in the
late 13th and early 14th centuries, and through a
document titled The Secret History of the Mongols,volume 25 number 1 2020 W W W. S K E P T I C. C O M 4 9