What historical events could have happened differently to maximize current human development?

Great Debates
1

I think this is a fun alternate history question to ponder. What historical events, had they happened a little differently, would have led to the greatest amount of people living in first world conditions today? By first world I mean living in conditions where poverty is largely not a problem, being in a democracy that recognizes human rights, and in which protection of the environment is considered a good thing and something people strive for. That being clarified, what alternate history scenarios can you all come up with that would improve the current situation of humans as a whole?

My first thoughts are that if the Tsarist forces had won the Russian revolution and if Chiang Kai-Shek’s nationalist forces had defeated Mao and won control of mainland China that things would be better today. After WW2 Russia and China might have been more likely to join the rest of the western nations and things as they currently stand might be a lot better. I’m not saying that the Tsar and Chiang Kai-Shek were good rulers, but Hitler and Tojo were both evil, and look at where Germany and Japan are today. I think it’s possible that China and Russia could be much better off with that different history.

What do you all think? I don’t want to limit debate to just the one scenario I outlined, feel free to come up with any others. The only restriction is that I’m considering a world somewhat like our own. No post apocalyptic world with only a few hundred happy people.

2

I read in a book once about how if Alexander the Great had lived to cement his empire the Greeks would have unified the known world and invented the steam engine. Don’t know how realistic that is, though.

3

Interesting idea. If the steam engine had been developed that long ago who knows how much more advanced we would be by now. If Alexander’s empire had held together, a single nation stretching from Greece all the way to India would also be good for peace in a region that’s very volatile in our world. The development of a steam engine would undoubtedly have helped in keeping such an empire together. However, I have no idea how close they actually were to developing a steam engine at that time.

I think in general the further back in time you go, the bigger a deal the death of a particular leader becomes. It seems a lot of empires in the old days would crumble because they didn’t have a good way to determine the successor when the current emperor, king, caliph, khan etc. died.

4

That would have required a lot of changes, not just one. The last tsar was incompetent, and his dynasty unpopular for numerous reasons, including racism. (They were mostly ethnically German by that time.) The tsars had created a parliament, which weakened them. Removing the parliament would have made then non-democratic Russia even less democratic.

Under the tsars, a large number of Jews were massacred in pogroms (draws little attention due to the far worse Holocaust) while when the Communists took over, they stopped massacring Jews (instituting a glass ceiling instead) and then Lenin murdered many political opponents while Stalin went on to murder anyone who he thought might have been an opponent. While Stalin killed far more people than the tsar, leaving the tsarists in charge would not have stopped the massacre of Jews.

Furthermore Russia would have opposed Nazi Germany regardless of who Russia’s leader was. It’s pretty difficult to befriend someone who has written racist books about how he wants to kill you all and take over your “living space”. Stalin didn’t try to befriend the Nazis, he merely realized he was too weak to oppose them right from the start, and his delay policy didn’t quite work (he was invaded about a year earlier than he would have liked). Stalin was an incompetent military leader, but he eventually realized this and let the generals (those he hadn’t purged) fight the war for him. The last tsar took personal control of the Russian military for a stretch of World War I and screwed things up even worse than they had already been. I have a hard time believing the tsars would have been more militarily competent than Stalin. (Instead of murdering the generals, the tsars ignored them. I guess that’s better, in that fewer generals were assassinated, but either way you’re putting hundreds of thousands of troops at higher risk.)

I admit I’m biased, and may be tarring the tsars too much due to the incompetence of the last tsar. Since none of the tsar’s heirs survived, we don’t know if his replacement would have been any better. (When the heir died, he was a teenager, whose only impact on history was being “cured” of his hemophilia by Rasputin.)

I think this one is one a better footing. China rightly has a reputation for human rights abuses (see running over its own students with tanks), but Chiang Kai-Shek did not believe in democracy or human rights either. The Nationalists fled and took over Taiwan, creating the sort of ethnic strife you’d expect when you’re invaded and taken over. Finally they instituted democracy and Taiwan has had at least one native ethnic leader. So (much like South Korea) a non-democratic but capitalist leadership eventually resulted in a freer country. This would not have been obvious at the time. The only thing the Communists had that made them worse than their rivals at the time was a non-functioning economic system… which China has quietly abandoned in recent years.

I’m basically picturing China being run the way Taiwan is now, but that might not have happened had the Nationalists won. Furthermore the Nationalists did a much worse job fighting the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War whose latter part coincided with World War II. Since this civil war occurred at the same time as the Japanese invasion, each side had at least two enemies (I’m a little confused about the Chinese warlords, a group of factions that opposed each other too).

5

I’d think that once the possibility of practically moving things on wheels by burning stuff to turn things, then new inventions would follow–new fuels to burn, smaller wheeled vehicles, sooner or later figuring out the propeller–in other words, trains would lead to automobiles, planes, and the Greek versions of Steve Martin and John Candy. Global conquests would happen, global wars would happen, global warming would happen…right now, we would probably be as screwed as future generations will be from the same results.

6

If China had industrialized faster, that would have made a huge difference. Their economic growth didn’t start to take off in earnest until 1978 or so. However I’m not sure what event could have made it occur faster. Like the OP, had Chiang Kai-Shek won and started China’s 10% a year GDP growth decades earlier, then China would have probably helped lift Africa out of poverty via trade agreements.

Going back further, I have no idea. Human GDP was pretty much flat until the industrial revoultion.

The industrial revolution occurred for multiple reasons, I’m not sure how to replicate those reasons 1000 years earlier. For one thing, the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th century created the math and physics necessary for industry. Also the agricultural revolution in the UK in the 17th century created a food surplus which created a labor surplus. But there were other factors too like Britain having easy access to coal.

7

What if we game this out further? As you say, Russia would still have opposed Germany during WWII. But what if Hitler had defeated a Tsarist Russia due to it being weaker than Stalin’s Russia, only to still eventually lose to the Americans and British? Maybe in such a scenario Russia might be better off today than it actually is. Or it could have gone worse, with Hitler being able to hold onto Europe due to not having an eastern front. It’s an interesting scenario to contemplate.

8

Maybe changes at an earlier point might also have made a bigger difference in Chinese history. The Ming dynasty was doing well in the early 15th century, even sending out the treasure ships under Zheng He, whose fleet put Columbus to shame.

In the end, however, problems with succession when the emperor passed and trouble with Mongol raiders led to China turning back inward. With a bit more luck China might have kicked off the colonial era that Columbus started a few decades later. I think the Native Americans were destined to lose most of there population to disease, whether they had been reached first by Zheng He or Columbus. It’s possible that overall, however, the Chinese might have been less brutal to the Native Americans. I of course don’t know if 2016 would be better or worse if things had happened that way.

9

Either that or if the Persians won. You know, as they already were that empire.

10

Better fire prevention in the Library of Alexandria: huge improvements in culture, politics, technology, medicine, etc.

11

You can argue almost anything with counter-factuals and a good imagination. You could argue the Mongol destruction of the Khwarezmia Empire or the sack of Baghdad set humanity back, or maybe it helped. Maybe China colonizing the New World sets up a destructive war with the European powers that doesn’t do anyone a bit of good. Or maybe it pushes technological progress, just as there was many inventions during WWII. Maybe such destruction is like burning out the dead wood. Or maybe it kills even greater geniuses.

I tend to think inventions and ideas come about when the environment is ready for them, which is why ideas so often seem to pop into the zeitgeist from multiple directions. A feudal state wouldn’t work in a 21st century liberal democracy, nor would a liberal democracy work in the era of the feudal states. You would need big changes to seriously alter macro-historical progress. Like the ice age ending earlier.

12

Given the state of the world around 1918, it’s inevitable that some sort of nasty authoritarian governments take over Russia and Germany. In both cases you had weak interim governments but the Communists took over in Russia and the Nazis took over in Germany.

But did the particular governments have to be so horrible? I mean, Franco wasn’t exactly a prize, but at least he didn’t start World War II. It’s possible to imagine a Fascist but not Nazi Germany that caused a lot of trouble and strife and killed a lot of internal political opponents yet still wasn’t nearly as bad as Nazi Germany. It’s possible to imagine a charismatic leader taking over Russia that still wasn’t as bad as Lenin and Stalin. Even Mussolini doesn’t look so horrible in retrospect.

But wishing for a weaker state control over the problem countries of Germany, Russia, Japan and China doesn’t solve the problem, since as we saw in real life weak governments spawn authoritarian movements which supplant the weak state and replace it with a strong centralized state, which then proceeds to use that strong control to proceed with all sorts of ill-advised actions.

The experience of triumphing over the weak state by armed violence teaches the leaders of these countries that political violence works as a tool, but of course they can’t just sit back and tend their garden, since the only way these movements cant take control is because they were totalitarian movements.

13

With regards to Germany in particular, the post WWI government of the Weimar Republic wasn’t particularly evil, but it was ineffective. Was a post 1933 Germany rules by Hitler inevitable? Probably not, but a not quite as expansionist but still anti Semitic Germany might have been worse in long run. A Germany that was taken over by someone else, maybe Goring for example, might not have been expansionist enough to cause the response of WWII. If a hypothetical Goring leadership in Germany had happened and avoided WWII, Germany would still be ruled by his successors. We might have a Germany that currently looks more like a totalitarian dictatorship than the current democracy we have. Instead of hearing about what needs to be done to prevent the Iranian Ayatollah from developing a nuclear weapon, we might be talking about what we need to do to prevent the German Fuhrer from getting nukes.

14

At least one classic historian has said that the Battle of Tours changed world history. Had Islam conquered Europe, there would have been no “dark ages” and we would be a thousand years further ahead in cultural and scientific development.

15

At their closest approach, during the reign of Marcus Aurelius, the Roman and Chinese empires had outposts only a few days apart. The Persians / Parthians deliberately kept them apart. Had Rome and China met then India and Persia would have been significantly weakened by the loss of trade and the Roman Empire would not have been so weakened on its eastern border. This might have prevented the rise of Islam entirely.

16

If Russia were weaker, it’s hard to see Hitler losing World War II. Russia was just strong enough to slow down the invading Germans, with the help of a lot of Western aid, and intelligence operations designed to slow down Hitler’s invasion. (For instance, Tito’s well-timed uprising in Yugoslavia. Many Yugoslavians died to delay the Germans, which ended up stranding them in the Russian winter. Of course, Tito went on to be the Communist dictator of Yugoslavia…)

According to some theories of the war, Russia was Germany’s main target. I don’t just mean due to Hitler’s racism; in World War I the main target was also Russia. In both cases, France was attacked to prevent British reinforcements from landing and attacking Germany’s western frontier so the Germans could attack Russia.

In WWI, the Germans stalemated in the west and forced a Russian surrender (after the Communist takeover). Then they rushed westward, hoping to drive the British and French back, but at this point the Americans poured a lot of troops into the war. In WWII, the Germans successfully defeated France (but stupidly let the British escape) and went on to invade Russia again, only this time the Russians fought back rather than surrender, and the western comeback came late (but in spectacular fashion).

I’ve read reports about the sheer number of errors Hitler had to make to lose against Russia… and he almost won anyway. One error he made was murdering Ukrainians who wanted to team up with him to beat Stalin (who had treated them miserably), and yet even committing another genocide against potential allies would not have lost the war for Hitler by itself.

That’s one way of looking at it. But the Middle East eventually declined. Many civilizations (eg Middle East, China) were at one point clearly ahead of the west in most areas only to fall behind in many areas. (China is in fact rising again, along with the BRIICS, supposedly anyway.)

17

S M Stirling’s **Conquistador **posits a world where Europeans never traveled to North America because Alexander lived long enough to let the Greeks unify the known world, and therefore the scientific impetus that wars engender never existed, and the need for expansion and exploration stagnated.

18

It’s not just war that engenders scientific leaps forward. It’s mostly people that have time on their hands, that are free to think and tinker. Combined with people that think they can make money by investing in those ideas.

A unified and reasonably peaceful empire, like the Persian one (or one combined with the Greeks) certainly would have had both these ingredients.

Also this empire would not have lived in total isolation, there’s still the Celts to the west and the Chinese to the east. I would think there would still have been quite a few wars fought.

19

That entirely depends, i can think of scenarios the fullfill those requirements perfectly
but would completely eradicate anything you think of as civilization or society, and the words couch computer automobile road store etc would be unheard of.

How far back am i allowed to change something?

20

But some people believe that it’s the competition between small states (and the possibility for innovators to knock at another door if rejected at the first one) that resulted in Europe entering the modern era. And that it didn’t and wouldn’t happen in a large united empire.