A few years ago, I wrote a post on the seven battles that changed the world. Recently, while reading that post again, I was wondering if world history is determined by kings, generals and soldiers; or by diplomats, scientists, preachers, and legislators. So this post tries to investigate the major documents that changed world history. Some of them are International Treaties and some of them were local laws that had a tremendous impact. One of them is even a letter from a scientist to a president.
1. Magna Carta (15 June 1215), or the "Great Charter" was the first documented agreement in the medieval world between a monarch and the nobility to limit the powers of the monarch. This forms the foundation of not only the constitutional monarchy of England (later, Great Britain), but also the foundation of various democratic republics all over the world, including the United States and India. This is the first document that challenged the "divine right of kings", and subjected the king to the common law of the land.
2. Martin Luther's 95 Theses (31 October 1517), or the "disputation on the power and efficacy of indulgences", started as an academic condemnation of indulgences (papal forgiveness of "sins" in return for money) tha over time, turned into a larger revolt against the Roman Catholic Church. This marks the beginning of the (Protestant) Reformation, and also the beginning of a series of wars, political and theological re-alignment in Europe. I consider this reformation distinct from the English reformation, which started when Henry VIII broke from the Roman Catholic on the issue of the annulment of his first marriage. But that's another story.
3. Peace of Westphalia (May-October 1648) is a series of treaties (Treaty of Münster, Peace of Münster, Treaty of Osnabrück) that ended the European wars of religion that were triggered by the protestant reformation. The wars of religion weren't strictly a Catholic vs. Protestant game, as Catholic France were fighting against Habsburg Austria and Spain. It ended the Thirty Year's War (1618-1648), one of the most brutal conflicts of history, until the two world wars in in the 20th century upstaged it. It also ended the Eighty Year's War (1566-1648, technically 82 years) between Spain and the Dutch Republic. It marked the beginning of a new world order, referred to as the Westphalian system which established the principle of international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty of its territory. It also established the principle of letting states (their princes) determine the religion of the state, as well as the protection of the rights of the minority religion.
4. English Bill of Rights (1689) defines the constitutional monarchy of Great Britain, guarantees the subjects their civil rights (including freedom of speech), limits the powers of the monarch, and defines the powers of the Parliament. Principles of the English Bill of Rights, like "no taxation without representation" were used by the English colonists to challenge the British rule a hundred years later. Many parts of the English Bill of rights found its way into the US Bill of Rights, including "That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law", which, reworded and re-edited, became the second amendment (see below).
5. United States Declaration of Independence (1776), United States Constitution (1787) and the US Bill of Rights (Amendments 1-10 to the US constitution).
They are three different documents, written and adopted at slightly different times by different people. But together, they not only define the United States, they define a universal vision.
In my conversation with friends, I frequently mention that there is something universal about them: they embody the hopes and aspiration of a group of people against oppression and state terror. They aren't perfect, nor have they been perfectly applied, but they define the birth and maturity of a nation built from scratch. It is this vision that the US used to fight Nazi tyranny, it is this vision that differentiated the western world from the Soviet led world order during the Cold War. One interesting thing I found while reading the the declaration of independence is that the US Declaration of Independence lists the misdeeds of George III the same way the English Bill of Rights lists the misdeeds of James II.
6. Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (August 1789), or Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen de 1789, defined individual and collective rights at the time of the French Revolution, passed by the French National Assembly. The French and American revolutions were inspired by each others' principles of universal right of man, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, separation of powers, and safeguards against arbitrary state power. The idea of limiting the monarch's power that was set in motion starting 1215, culminated in a republican form of government with the American and French revolutions. The French revolution itself turned messy, and the reign of terror that followed it didn't live up to the promises of the universal declarations. Nevertheless, this document is recognized as the "credo of the new age".
7. The Communist Manifesto (1848). The previous documents slowly built up the rights of the nobility, states, and the citizens against the arbitrary power of the monarch or the church. With the advent of the industrial revolution, the question of the rights of the workers against the arbitrary power of the owners of capital also came up. This document, written by two German philosophers questioned the then social and political order (in the middle of the revolutions of 1848), and presented the situation as a class struggle between the workers and the capitalists over the control of the means of industrial production, and envisioned an international socialist utopian state. This eventually sparked another kind of revolution (from 1917), one which on paper established a state based on equality, but in practice required the power of the gun, and the restrictions on individual freedom to maintain. Although the systems eventually collapsed in 1991, the allure of such a society and system of government still remains.
8. Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) defined the modern Middle East. I find it ironic that the principal victorious powers of the First World War: Britain and France would deny the nations of the erstwhile sick man of Europe (Ottoman Empire) the same right of self-determination that they have been fighting for centuries. It was a secret treaty between Britain and France to divide up the Arabic speaking parts of the Ottoman Empire; while encouraging the Arabs to rebel against the Turkish rule and promising them an independent state. The mistakes of the other disastrous treaty of the first world war, the treaty of Versailles, got settled by 1945. But Sykes-Picot agreement has left this region in flames and chaos for more than a century. It did define a new order, but one that is inherently unstable and violent.
9. Einstein–Szilárd letter (August 2, 1939) is the document that officially launched the atomic age. It was a "call to action" to President Franklin Roosevelt, to develop the weapons of mass destruction, before the enemy can. Roosevelt acted on it, set up an advisory committee on uranium, which was the beginning of the US effort to develop the atomic bomb. The rest, as they say, is history. But it is unclear if the destructive power unleashed through this will eventually save humanity, or terminate it.
10. RFC 791: Internet Protocol (IP): (1981). This document created the internet age! This isn't a legal document, nor is it an agreement or a treaty, but a technical specification of how packets of data should travel between computers to enable electronic communication. Almost everything we call the internet today, and the trillion dollar economy that it created, started with the IP specification.
I have left the holy books out of the list, even though I acknowledge that they have had an outsized human impact. I did keep Martin Luther's 95 Thesis, because I think it had an even more outsized impact, especially in European political history. I am still a bit ambivalent about leaving out Sir Isaac Netwon's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica from the 17th century, and al-Khwarizmi's al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wal-muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) from the 9th century. These two books, along with the 20th century research on relativity and quantum mechanics redefined science and technology for all of us.
This is still work-in-progress, this post was in the draft state for years until I decided that I should publish it first and then continue editing it.
Do let me know what you think of this post.
10. RFC 791: Internet Protocol (IP): (1981). This document created the internet age! This isn't a legal document, nor is it an agreement or a treaty, but a technical specification of how packets of data should travel between computers to enable electronic communication. Almost everything we call the internet today, and the trillion dollar economy that it created, started with the IP specification.
I have left the holy books out of the list, even though I acknowledge that they have had an outsized human impact. I did keep Martin Luther's 95 Thesis, because I think it had an even more outsized impact, especially in European political history. I am still a bit ambivalent about leaving out Sir Isaac Netwon's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica from the 17th century, and al-Khwarizmi's al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wal-muqābala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing) from the 9th century. These two books, along with the 20th century research on relativity and quantum mechanics redefined science and technology for all of us.
This is still work-in-progress, this post was in the draft state for years until I decided that I should publish it first and then continue editing it.
Do let me know what you think of this post.
