INTRODUCTION
A society that has ceased to concern itself with the progress of the past will soon lose belief in its capacity to progress in the future.
JOEL MOKYR1
To every nation a term; when their term comes they shall not put it back by a single hour nor put it forward.
THE QURAN, 7:34
The feeling will be familiar to many who have visited the great cities of history: I had come to Athens for the first time and made a pilgrimage to its democratic Assembly, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. And it left me with a sense of profound sadness. Here were the scenes of some of the most extraordinary moments in human history, and all that was left was rubble, garbage and dog waste. Instead of bustling creativity, there was silence, interrupted only by the odd intoxicated passer-by.
To be sure, I also experienced spectacular beauty in Athens, like the grand monuments on the Acropolis. But even that was a museum to bygone glory. This used to be the place around which the world revolved, and now it’s a collection of patched-together columns, stone blocks and shards with plaques telling us that it used to be impressive.
This must be what Shelley – a great admirer of ancient Greece – reflected upon when he wrote about the crumbled monument to Ozymandias, king of kings, ‘Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! / Nothing beside remains. … / The lone and level sands stretch far away.’
This encounter with the transience of great civilizations set my mind racing. What made it possible for them to rise so spectacularly, and how could they decline so thoroughly that they left little trace? It forced me to consider whether travellers will one day visit our proud landmarks and plazas and think about how our civilization lost its way and became so sluggish and stationary.
This is a precarious time to write about history’s golden ages. Ours is an era of authoritarian and populist revival, with savage dictators trying to extinguish neighbouring democracies, when the fear of inevitable decline seems more prevalent than belief in progress. This may invite speculation that my motive resembles that of the American legal scholar Harold Berman when he wrote his great history of the rise of Western law: it is said that a drowning man may see his whole life flash before him, perhaps in an unconscious effort to find something within his own experiences to escape his impending doom.2
I wouldn’t go that far. We are not yet drowning. But drawing on historical human experience can be a useful way to avoid ending up in a bad situation: it might even help us to keep our vessels seaworthy. It is said that we should study history to avoid repeating its mistakes, and that is all very well. But our ancestors were not just capable of mistakes.
Human history is a long list of depravations and horrors, but it is also the source of the knowledge, institutions and technologies that have set most of humanity free from such horrors for the first time. The historical record shows what mankind is capable of, in terms of exploration, imagination and innovation. This in itself is an important reason to study it, to broaden our mental horizon of what is possible.
This book is about seven of the world’s great civilizations: ancient Athens, the Roman Republic and early empire, the Abbasid Caliphate, Song China, Renaissance Italy, the Dutch Republic and the Anglosphere. Why did I pick those? Because each of them exemplifies, in my understanding, what I think of as a golden age: a period with a large number of innovations that revolutionize many fields and sectors in a short period of time. A golden age is associated with a culture of optimism, which en
