The Science of History and the Hope of Mankind/Chapter 4
SECTION IV
THE WORLD-FORCES IN ANCIENT AND MEDIÆVAL HISTORY
THE chief centres of ancient civilisation were India, Persia, China, Egypt, Babylon, and Greece. The contribution of each of these to the culture of humanity was greatly influenced and modified by its intercourse with the civilised and barbarous peoples of the other parts of the world. Besides being controlled by these sociological factors, the freedom and subjugation of countries, as well as the opulence and adversity of peoples in the ancient world, depended also on the climatological and agricultural conditions of the several habitable tracts, as well as the physical and natural means of defence from foreign inroads. These social and physical conditions of the surrounding universe are responsible for the wars and alliances, inter-mixtures and inter-marriages, religious rapprochements and territorial expansions, industrial developments and ethnical assimilations that make up the Drama of Ancient History.
Such inter-racial connections and mutual intercourse between peoples of various origins have left their stamp on the culture and civilisation of the Egyptians and Babylonians. So also Hellenic civilisation was not an isolated growth, but was the product of the world-influences of the classic age. The little city-states of Greece developed their peculiar type of life and thought under the conditions supplied by the states of antiquity as well as the contemporary "barbarians." Their colonial and military systems, their commercial policies, their political unions and confederations, were the direct outcome of Phoenician, Egyptian, and Persian influences. The various stages in the history of the Roman Republic were likewise influenced both in form and spirit by contact with the life and thought of the innumerable peoples who came under the sway of the Romans.
The manners and customs, religious institutions and social practices, as well as the art and literature of India, owe their special characteristics to the social, economic, political, and religious intercourse of India with the peoples of Tibet, China, and the diverse neo-Greek states, as well as the influence of multifarious aboriginal and non-Aryan rites and ceremonies. In like manner the literature and life of the kingdoms of the Hellenistic world that came into being under the movement for the expansion of Greece begun by Alexander were the outcome, in varying degrees, of the contact between the East and the West; and in politics as in philosophy, industrial as well as social life, represented the processes and products of the assimilation that was consciously at work under the altered conditions of the world.
In this way the individuality and peculiar type of social and literary life of each of the ancient nations of the world were developed simultaneously with, and even as the results of, the individuality and nationality of the other peoples. All the types of ancient culture evolved their special structural characteristics and differentiated themselves into separate sociopolitical crystals by influencing and modifying one another, and hence may be looked upon as more or less the joint-products of certain systems of world-forces.
The kaleidoscopic changes that marked the state-systems of the Middle Ages were likewise due to the stir and turmoil produced by social and political intercourse of peoples with one another. Those very barbaric races who had during the preceding epochs excited the military ambition of the established powers, whose very existence had, in fact, taxed the strategic ability of the rulers of the border-lands and frontier-provinces, were under the new conditions no longer despised as being outside the zone of civilisation, but had to be received by the civilised nations as members of the same system of life and thought.
The same influence that had led to the migration of the Aryans in primitive times were now at work in making the Teutonic tribes leave their original homes and seek new settlements and careers in unknown and untried lands. While the process of "barbarising" was going on in one quarter of the globe, a camel-driver of the Arabian deserts promulgated a new faith, and under its impulse innumerable tribes and sub-tribes started on a career of religious fanaticism. The result was that the old centres of civilisation in Europe and Asia became Teutonised and Islamised and began to be the seedbeds of new thought and culture.
The political boundaries of the states of Mediæval Asia and Europe had to undergo rapid changes. The decline and fall of the Roman Empire, formation of new independent states, the gradual establishment of autonomy in Britain, Gaul, and the Iberian peninsula, wars of religion and expansion of theocracies, rise and development of Saracenic kingdoms, fall of ancient states and creation of new state-systems in India, revolts and secessions throughout the length and breadth of the known world, destruction of liberties and loss of autonomies, origin of new principles of unity and association—in fact, all those ceaseless transformations that characterise the stirring times—received their peculiar stamp and trend by being thrown into the midst of one another, each having left its mark on the others. The explanation of each of these is to be sought in the same sets of forces that were engendered by the grand whirlpool of human affairs; and, so, all are to be regarded as members of one and the same system of world influences. Conquests and subjugations were the order of the day; and the Teutonic victories in the Romanised world as well as the Saracenic conquests in Roman and non-Roman Europe and the various parts of Asia were the outcome of the same socio-political environment. The subjugation of Britain by foreigners is the European counterpart of the same movement that led to the overthrow of the Hindus in certain parts of India by the followers of Islam. Subjection and independence, progress and degeneration, national achievement and decay were not the fruit of the activities of individual peoples, and cannot be explained solely by the. heroism or degeneracy of the nations themselves. These were not the results of isolated movements, but were the joint-products of the whole process of human affairs.