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CONCLUSION 183 hand with similarities. Interlinkages, connections and similarities among human communities always existed. The interplay of the global and the local (‘the world in a grain of sand’), the ‘mainstream’ and the ‘marginal’, the general and the specific, which you would have gleaned from this book, are a fascinating aspect of the study of history. Our account began from scattered settlements in Africa, Asia and Europe. From there we moved on to city life in Mesopotamia. Early empires were created around cities in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Persia and India. Empires of greater extent followed them – the Greek (Macedonian), Roman, Arab and (from the 1200s) the Mongol. Trading operations, technology and government were often highly intricate in these empires. Very often, they were based on effective use of a written language. A new era in human history took shape as a consequence of a combination of technological and organisational changes that occurred in Western Europe in the middle of the second millennium CE (from the 1400s onwards). These were linked to the ‘Renaissance’ or ‘rebirth’ of civilisation, whose primary impact was felt in the cities of northern Italy, but whose influence spread quickly over Europe. This Renaissance was the product of the region’s city life, and of extensive interactions with Byzantium and the Muslim world of the Mediterranean. Over time, ideas and discoveries were carried to the Americas by explorers and conquerors, in the sixteenth century CE. Some of these notions were carried later to Japan, India and elsewhere as well. European pre-eminence in global trade, politics and culture did not come at this time. It was to be the feature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the Industrial Revolution took place in Britain, and spread to Europe. Britain, France and Germany were able to create systems of colonial control over parts of Africa and Asia – systems more intense and powerful than those of earlier empires. By the mid-twentieth century, the technology, economic life and culture that had once made European states powerful had been reworked in the rest of the world to create the foundations of modern life. You must have noticed passages quoted in the various chapters of the book. Many of these are extracts for what historians call ‘primary sources’. Scholars construct history from such materials, drawing their ‘facts’ from them. They critically evaluate these materials and are attentive to their ambiguities. Different historians may use a given source-material to advance vastly different, even contradictory arguments about historical phenomena. As with the other human sciences, history can be made to speak to us in varied voices. This is because of the intricate relationship between the historian’s reasoning and historical facts. In your final year at school you will be studying aspects of Indian (or South Asian) history from Harappan times to the making of modern India’s Constitution. Again, the emphasis will be on a judicious mix Reprint 2026-27