This was just one atrocity among many. “I saw…cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see,” wrote the Spanish friar Bartolomé de las Casas of his experiences in the earliest days of European settlement, in a horrified report designed to inform those back home of what was happening in the New World.

Islamic societies generally distributed wealth more evenly than their Christian counterparts, largely thanks to very detailed instructions set out in the Qurʾān about legacies—including principles that were positively enlightened by the standards of the day when it came to the share women could and should expect from the estates of their father or

Maria-Theresa’s succession in the 1740s provoked outbreaks of fighting from the Americas to the Indian subcontinent that lasted nearly a decade. The result when matters were finally settled in 1748 was that Cap Breton in Canada and Madras in India changed hands between the French and the British.

The heart of the world now gaped open.

bibulous,

It is easy to forget that the feast of Thanksgiving, first celebrated by Pilgrim Fathers to mark their safe arrival in a land of plenty, was also a commemoration of a campaign against globalisation: it was not only hailing the discovery of a new Eden, but triumphantly rejecting the paradise at home that had been destroyed.

grandiloquent,

The Puritans who settled New England did so in protest against the changes that had accompanied Europe’s rise and against the affluence that followed. They were reacting to the strange stream of new ideas and goods that made the world seem a very different place—where Chinese porcelain was appearing on household dining tables, where marriage of

As one who witnessed the carnage that followed put it, Jerusalem was soon filled with dead bodies, corpses piled up “on mounds as big as houses outside the city gates. No one has ever heard of such a slaughter.”2 “If you had been there,” wrote another author a few years later, “your feet would have been stained to the ankles with the blood of the