There are no laws, no gods, no nations, no money, and no human rights outside the common imaginations of human beings. For instance, money would have zero value if no-one believed in it. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, Sapiens has been living in a dual reality. On the one hand, the objective reality of rivers, trees and lions; and on the other hand, the imagined reality of gods, nations and corporations. The imagined reality became so powerful that today the very survival of rivers, trees and lions depends on the grace of imagined entities such as the United States and Google.
History's biggest fraud
The transition to agriculture, after 2.5 million years of gathering plants and hunting animals, began around 9000 BC. Our species began to spend all their time and effort manipulating the lives of a few animal and plant species.
The life of the peasant is less secure than that of a hunter-gatherer. Hunter-gatherers relied on dozens of species to survive, unlike the farmer, who was dependent on a single crop. If rains failed, locusts arrived or a fungus infected the crop then peasants died in their thousands or millions. Ancient foragers suffered far less from infectious diseases. Most people in agricultural and industrial societies lived in dense, unhygienic permanent settlements - ideal hotbeds for disease. Foragers roamed in small bands that could not sustain epidemics.
For the average person the disadvantages probably outweighed the advantages. Wheat offered nothing for people as individuals. However, it allowed Sapiens to multiply exponentially. The essence of The Agricultural Revolution was the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions. Looking back, we regard the Agricultural Revolution as a wonderful improvement because it laid the the foundation for all that we enjoy today. However, at the time it was a trap.
Writing
The human brain cannot store all the important facts needed to run an empire. When human communities grew large, numbers became important. To run an empire you need to maintain accounts, lots of them. The authorities need to know who owns a plot of land, what taxes are owing and many other facts, mostly relating to inventory and finances. Between 3500 and 3000 BC some people in Sumer invented the first system for storing and processing information, one that was custom-built to handle large amounts of arithmetical data. The invention of a script gave humanity the capability to create cities, kingdoms and empires.
The Sumerian system had signs for numbers and other signs that represented people, animals, land etc. The script was used solely for maintaining accounts. At this early stage there was no writing of poetry, legends, laws or historical events. All this remained oral. This was a partial script, only suitable for recording quantities, payments, debts and ownership of properties.
A full script, ie a system of writing that can represent spoken language more or less completely, was developed before 2500 BC in Sumer. The Egyptians developed their hieroglyphs at about the same time. Henceforth, kings issued decrees, priests wrote oracles, people even wrote private letters. However, the principal function of writing was still to record arithmetical data.
The Arrow of History
Harari argues that human history has a direction - towards unity. Around 10,000 BC there were many thousands of separate worlds, ie cultures that were totally isolated from each other. By AD 1450, just prior to the European age of exploration, there were still many small worlds separate from each other. However, close to 90% of humans lived in the African-Asian-European world, which was connected by significant cultural, economic and political ties. Over the next 300 years, the Afro-Asian-European giant swallowed up all the other worlds. The Spanish conquered the Aztec Empire in 1521 and the Inca Empire in 1532. Today, almost all humans share the same geopolitical system, ie sovereign states, the same economic system, ie capitalism, and the same scientific system.
The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, according to which the entire human race was a single entity, governed by the same laws. The first universal order to appear was economic - the monetary order. The second universal order was political - the imperial order. The third universal order was religious - the order of universal religions, such as Christianity, Buddhism and Islam. Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first to transcend the binary division of us and them, foreseeing the potential unity of all mankind. For the merchants the entire world was one potential market. For the conquerors, the entire world was potentially a single empire. For the prophets, all humans were potential believers.
Money
The greatest unifier in history was possessed of extreme tolerance and adaptability, which managed to gain the allegiance of all people. This unifier is money. People who do not believe in the same god or obey the same king are more than willing to use the same money.
Physical money has no intrinsic value but is a psychological construct. Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. This trust is due to a very complex and long-term network of political, social and economic relations. Initially, the network of trust had not been built up, so the first form of money - Sumerian barley - had intrinsic value. The next innovation was the silver shekel ingot. The value of silver and gold is purely cultural, as they are useful only for ornaments. The first coins appeared around 640 BC in Anatolia. As long as people trusted the power and integrity of the king, they trusted his coins. Roman coins could even be used in far-away India. By the late modern era the entire world was a single monetary zone, relying first on gold and silver, and later on a few trusted currencies, such as the British pound and the American dollar.
Religion
All social orders and hierarchies are imagined and hence fragile. The larger the society the more fragile it is. The crucial historical role of religion has been to give superhuman legitimacy to those fragile structures. Religion asserts that our laws are ordained by an absolute and indisputable authority.
With time, some followers of polytheistic religions became so fond of their particular patron that they began to believe He was the supreme power of the universe. Yet crucially, they continued to believe that they could strike deals with Him. The first such religion was Atenism in Ancient Egypt. Judaism evolved out of polytheistic Canaanite religion, beginning with Yahweh, a storm-and-warrior deity. Christianity in turn, sprang out of Judaism, a local religion which was limited to one small area and only one people, the Jews. In one of history's strangest twists, the Christian sect took over the mighty Roman Empire.
Jewish, Christian and Muslim monotheism absorbed dualist beliefs. Countless Christians, Muslims and Jews believe in a powerful evil force, called the Devil by Christians. Dualism is logically incompatible with monotheism. However, humans have a remarkable capacity to believe in contradictions. Millions of religious Jews, Christians and Muslims simultaneously believe in an omnipotent God and in an independent Devil. Monotheism is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, the dualist Devil and polytheist saints.
The Scientific Revolution
Modern science differs from all previous traditions of knowledge in three ways. 1) The willingness to admit ignorance and that even the things we think we know could be proven wrong in the future. 2) The centrality of observation and mathematics. 3) The acquisition of new powers, ie technologies.
The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions, such as Islam, Buddhism and Confucianism, asserted that everything that was important to know about the world was already known. The gods possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ancient traditions of knowledge admitted only two kinds of ignorance. First, an individual could be ignorant of something important. All they needed to do was ask somebody wiser. There was no need to discover something that nobody yet knew. Second, an entire tradition might be ignorant of unimportant things. Whatever the great gods and the wise people of the past did not bother to tell us was unimportant. For instance, if someone wanted to know how spiders weave their webs they would not find the answer in the Bible. This was because such knowledge was unimportant. If it were important than God would have included an explanation in the Bible.
Until the Scientific Revolution most human cultures did not believe in progress. They thought the Golden Age was in the past, and that the world was stagnant, if not deteriorating. It was considered impossible that human ingenuity could overcome the world's fundamental problems.
Why Europe?
Shortly before Cook's voyage of 1770, Western Europe was but a distant backwater of the Mediterranean world. Only at the end of the 15th century did Europe become a hothouse of military, political, economic and cultural developments. Between 1500 and 1750, western Europe became master of the two Americas and of the oceans. Yet even then Europe was no match for the great powers of Asia: the Ottoman Empire, the Safavid Empire of Persia, China, and the Mughal Empire in India. Europeans managed to conquer the Americas and gain supremacy at sea mainly because the Asians showed little interest in them. In 1775 Asia accounted for 80% of the world economy. Europe was an economic dwarf. The balance of power shifted to Europe between 1750 and 1850, when Europeans humiliated the Asian powers in a series of wars and conquered large parts of Asia. By 1900, Europeans controlled the world's economy and most of its territory. In 1950 western Europe and the US together accounted for more than half of global production, whereas China's portion had shrunk to 5%. Under the European aegis a new global order and global culture emerged. They may be fiercely anti-European in their rhetoric, but almost everyone on the planet views politics, medicine, war and economics through European eyes.
Why didn't the Chinese and Persians follow suit? They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and socio-political structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly. Between 1500 and 1850 Europe did not enjoy any obvious technological, political, military or economic advantage over the Asian powers, yet the continent built up a unique potential, whose importance suddenly became obvious around 1850. The basis of Europe's superiority came down to two factors: science and capitalism.
What distinguishes European imperialism from all previous imperial projects is that the Europeans sought new knowledge as well as new territories. In the 18th and 19th centuries, almost every important military expedition that left Europe for distant lands took scientists with them. Napoleon took 165 scholars with him when he invaded Egypt in 1798. Among other things, they founded the new discipline of Egyptology. The voyage of the Beagle is even more famous and important. Europeans did not possess a major technological edge. What made them exceptional was their unparalleled and insatiable ambition to explore and conquer.
The Great Survey of all of India took the British 60 years to complete. They knew India better than any previous conqueror, and even than the native population itself. Their superior knowledge had obvious practical advantages. Without such knowledge, it is unlikely that a ridiculously small number of Britons could have governed, oppressed and exploited the Indians for two centuries. Fewer than 5,000 British officials and about 40,000 to 70,000 British soldiers were sufficient to conquer and rule 300 million Indians.
Growth
To understand modern economic history you need to understand a single word: growth.
In the USA banks are allowed to loan $10 for ever dollar they actually have. If all of the account holders withdrew their funds from the bank then it would collapse. What enables banks and the whole economy to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world. Before the modern era money could represent things that actually existed in the present. This imposed a severe limitation on growth, since it made it very hard to finance new enterprises. Economies remained frozen until the appearance of a new system in the modern era, based on trust in the future. People agreed to represent goods that do not exist in the present with a special kind of money called credit. Credit allows us to build the present at the expense of the future. It is founded on the assumption that our future resources are sure to be far more abundant than our present resources.
The Scientific Revolution instilled the idea of progress. If we admit our ignorance and invest resources in research, things can improve. Geographical discoveries, technological inventions and organisational developments increased the sum total of human production, trade and wealth. Trust in the future created credit, which brought real economic growth, which strengthened trust in the future, and so on.
The human economy has managed to keep on growing throughout the modern era, thanks only to the fact that scientists came up with another gadget or discovery every few years. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and artificial intelligence could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the governments and banks have created since 2008.