Over the millennia, any civilization or cluster of cultures will have had its ups and downs. But when you overlap the world’s major ones on a single timeline like this:
or
Was there a particular century (or thereabouts) where multiple civilizations across the world were simultaneously experiencing major events? Even better if they were somehow intertwined, with multiple events that started independently culminating in a perfect storm that stretched across borders.
Of course, there’s a lot more of that once we approach the modern era, especially after the world wars. But what about before?
Did the major empires ever cross paths unexpectedly? Could a wayward merchant have carried news from one part of the world to another, “Did you know that in ______, X is happening right now?!” Or even if the two cultures weren’t familiar with each other at the time, were there any periods that later historians would identify as especially important to both?
If you’re asking for centuries, then it must be the twentieth. Two world wars plus a cold war plus first increasing colonization and then the decolonization that has already been mentioned. Plus technological and economic progress hitherto unseen. Affected the entire globe very profoundly.
I don’t see how there’s any debate about this. The 20th century changed the world more than all previous centuries combined. Perhaps to be surpassed by the 21st century which may end before the world wide collapse of all prior achievements.
One overlap of misery was when the Mongols burst out of the Steppes and impacted the lives of everyone from Vietnam to Hungary. The Ottomans rose in their wake, closing the Eastern trade routes the Europeans, who’d sail the Atlantic as a recourse; impacting the lives of the Western Hemisphere.
Because, IIRC, a Byzantine princess was Ivan the Terrible’s grandmother, the Czars claimed a direct line to the Roman Empire. The Russians colonization of bits of Alaska made that, technically a world-wide empire. (Or, if the Holy Roman Empire was a more legitimate heir, Spain’s holdings under Charles V in all over the place too)
Another fascinating overlay (though more in terms of connecting seemingly unrelated things, not in terms of importance in the greater scheme of things) is that Charlemagne, the first emperor of the Franks (a realm that later evolved into the HRR) exchanged envoys and gifts with Caliph Harun ar-Rashid, of Arabian Nights fame.
An overlay that has had a profound impact on global history is the fact that it was the conclusion of the Christian Reconquista of Spain that enabled the Spanish kings to fund Columbus’ first voyage.
If we aren’t limited to starting and ending on even hundreds, I’d suggest 1860 - 1960, which had the U.S. civil war, two world wars, the unification of Germany and Italy, the collapse of the Ottomans, the industrial revolution, the fall of Qing dyansty and various wars and famines in China, and decolonization. We went from horse-drawn wagons and steam engines to manned space flight.
Well Yuri Gagarin didn’t orbit till 1961 and the US Civil War started in 1861 so maybe 1861-1961 instead of 1860-1960. And 1860-1960 is 101 years as is 1861-1961.
I’ve long been interested in the period 1890-1914 or thereabouts.
The last days of unfettered imperialism, kings/kaiser/czar influence, anarchists (I almost typed arachnids), the rise of labor and other social movements, the world moving towards inevitable major conflict. Barbara Tuchman’s “The Proud Tower” captures it well.
If you restrict it to Russia, the period of about 1900-1945 has a lot of changes.
A world war, a civil war, a second civil war, the spanish flu, the fall of the czar, stalin, the purges, famines, WW2. All in a ~40 year period.
As far as OP, the issue is that civilizations were not really interconnected until the 19th century. So what happened in one region didn’t affect another.
The only pre-20th century events I can think of are the bronze age collapse and the black plague.
The 7th-century rise of Islam and its rapid expansion into the Levant, North Africa, Transcaucasia, Central Asia, and South Asia, within its first 100 years reaching from France and Portugal and Morocco to Ethiopia, India, and Transoxiana. That’s got quite a bit of “overlap.”
In terms of global impact, the Age of Discovery has to be up there.
In 1470, the world as accessible to Europeans consisted of Europe, the Levant, and the coastal areas of North and West Africa. The Equator had not been crossed, the maps to the South and West were a blank and while Europeans were aware that Persia, India and China existed any serious trade or exchange had to go through multiple intermediaries.
The next century would see the voyages of Diaz, Columbus, Cabot, da Gama, Cabral and numerous others, the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and Incas, the Portuguese colonisation of Brazil, the the Portuguese conquest of Goa, Malacca and Macau and the establishment of a chain of trading posts all the way to the Moluccas and Japan, and the founding of the first European settlements in North America and the Philippines. Quite apart from everything else, the world was now connected in a way it had never been before.
The same century also saw the height of the Italian Renaissance, the Reformation, the printing press, the Copernican theory, Ivan the Terrible’s conquest of Kazan and Astrakhan to begin Russia’s expansion East, the Ottoman conquests of Egypt and Hungary and the founding of the Safavid and Mughal Empires.
I agree that technological progress keeps accelerating, thus the last decades are the most interesting, because that is when most novel things have happened.
But a compelling argument can also be made for the time around 1177 BC, as described in the book 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilazation Collapsed, by Erich H. Cline. It is an interesting thesis about the cause(s) of the Bronze Age final collapse, it is just that the documentary evidence is very scarce. But it must have been a very interesting time to be alive, albeit for most people probably only for a short time.
Not only the Jews, but the Arabs too, which the Spaniards called not Arabs but Moors (moros). Both were offered the option to convert to catholicism, which gave rise to the Spanish Inquisition (ha! you did not expect that one here, did you?) who was set up to check whether those conversions were real or just pretend (very, very short summary).
Well, the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) is commonly said to have been the first global conflict, with European powers battling each other on several continents. Its North American component was the French and Indian War.
Also, the American and French Revolutions have their roots in the same social and philosophical developments, namely 18th century Englightenment, which was happening in Europe and North America simultaneously.
