Clive Ponting

Clive Ponting's bestselling study of man's despoliation of the planet - now completely revised and updated.

How has the world changed in the last century? As we look back across a hundred years of turbulence, Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of what the twentieth century hgas meant to people throughout the world. THE PIMLICO HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY analyses the fundamental forces of population, industry and their consequences for the environment. it traces the rise and full of empires, the impact of nationalism, examines domestic politics from all political persepctives, and considers the darker side of history in the growing repressive power of states across the world and the most terrible of twentieth-century crimes - genocide. THE PIMLICO HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY is a provocative and challenging analysis of the whole world in the twentieth century, combining a global sweep with an eye for detail and individual experiences.

For many, gunpowder is associated with Guy Fawkes and the attempt to blow up parliament on 5 November 1605. Fewer people know that the formula for gunpowder was in fact discovered more than 1,000 years ago - in China - and by accident - and was initially a medicine.This fascinating book tells the story of the huge impact of gunpowder on every state and empire in the world. For 400 years the Chinese kept it to themselves, until a Mongol soldier leaked the secret to the Islamic world, where gunpowder played a crucial role in the rise of the great empires of the Ottomans and the Mughals: the spectacular capture of Constantinople in 1453 was accomplished through new siege tactics, while India was conquered with muskets and artillery mounted on 700 carts held together with ox harnesses.Even more important was the impact of gunpowder on Europe, where new weapons created new states and helped Europeans go on to dominate the rest of the world. Packed with unexpected and interesting facts, Gunpowder is an exciting, devastating and important story.

How has the world changed in the last century? As we look back across a hundred years of turbulence, Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of what the twentieth century has meant to people throughout the world. Progress and Barbarism analyses the fundamental forces of population, industry and their consequences for the environment. It traces the rise and fall of empires, the impact of nationalism, examines domestic politics from all political perspectives, and considers the darker side of history in the growing repressive power of states across the world and the most terrible of twentieth-century crimes - genocide. Progress and Barbarism is a provocative and challenging interpretation of twentieth-century history, combining a global sweep and an eye for detail and individual experiences.

The Crimean War is full of resonance - not least, the Charge of the Light Brigade, the Siege of Sevastopol and Florence Nightingale at Scutari with her lamp. In this fascinating book, Clive Ponting separates the myths from the reality, and tells the true story of the heroism of the ordinary soldiers, often through eye-witness accounts of the men who fought and those who survived the terrible winter of 1854-55. To contemporaries, it was The Great War with Russia - fought not only in the Black Sea and the Crimea but in the Baltic, the Arctic, the Pacific and the Caucasus. Ironically, Britains allies were France, her traditional enemy, ably commanded (from home) by Napoleon III himself, and the Muslim Ottoman Empire, widely seen as an infidel corrupt power. It was the first of the modern wars, using rifles, artillery, trench systems, steam battleships, telegraph and railways; yet the British soldiers wore their old highly coloured uniforms and took part in their last cavalry charge in Europe. There were over 650,000 casualties. Britain was unable fully to deploy her greatest strength, her Navy, while her Army was led by incompetent aristocrats. The views of ordinary soldiers about Raglan, Cardigan and Lucan make painful reading.

Like Jared Diamonds Guns, Germs and Steel, Clive Pontings book studies the relationship between the environment and human history. It examines world civilisations from Sumeria to ancient Egypt, from Easter Island to the Roman Empire and it argues that human beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered by exploiting the Earths resources, only to expand to the point where those resources could no longer sustain the societies populations and cause subsequent collapse. This new edition of Clive Pontings international bestseller has been revised, expanded and updated. It provides not only a compelling story of how we have damaged the environment for thousands of years but also an up-to-the-minute assessment of the crisis facing the world today - and the problems that have to be addressed in the search for solutions.

Conventional accounts of world history tend to focus on the rise of Western civilisation and concentrate on the story of ancient Greece, the Roman empire and the expansion of Europe. The histories of the great civilisations of China, India and Japan, and therefore the experience of the majority of the worlds people, have been relegated to a minor place. World History adopts a radically different approach. Starting from the assumption that the human story has to be seen in the round, it examines the evolution of humans, their lives as hunters and gatherers and their eventual adoption of agriculture, before looking at the emergence of civilisation across the globe; in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus Valley, Mesoamerica and Peru. It goes on to tell the story of the earliest empires, emphasising not just their differences but also their similarities. It explains how contacts were established between them and how technologies, ideas and the worlds great religions travelled from one to another. It describes the great empires of Islam, of China and of the Mongols. Only towards the end of the story does Europe come slowly to dominate the world, against the background of technical innovations and social and economic change.

At the end of WWI, Germany was demonised. The Treaty of Versailles contained a war guilt clause pinning the blame on the aggression of Germany and accusing her of supreme offence against international morality. Thirteen Days rejects this verdict. Clive Ponting has made a thorough study of the incredibly complex diplomatic documents. His interpretation also rejects the thesis that Europe in 1914 had reached such a boiling point that war was bound to erupt and the theory that the origins of the War lay in a mighty arms race. He argues that the War occurred primarily because of the situation in the Balkans, while he gives full weight to Austria-Hungarys desire to cripple Serbia instead of negotiating, and to Russias militaristic programme of expansion. Clive Ponting begins with a dramatic recreation of the assassination in Sarajevo on 28 June. He then examines how things spiralled out of control during the weeks that led to war. The tension builds as his story criss-crosses the capital cities of Europe and describes developments day by day, and, latterly, hour by hour. The First World War destroyed the old Europe. During four years of fighting nearly nine million soldiers were killed and twenty-one million wounded; over ten million civilians died. By the end of the War, three great European empires - Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia - had disintegrated. Why did the War happen? In 1914, the states of Europe had been at peace for forty years, and every diplomatic dispute had been resolved peacefully.Thirteen Days describes failures of communication, fateful decisions and escalating military moves; it is an extraordinary narrative of personalities and diplomacy in the dying weeks of an era in which telephone networks were in their infancy and governments relied on telegrams in code and face-to-face meetings of ambassadors.

Fifty years after the end of World War II Clive Ponting provides a major reassessment of the most destructive conflict in human history - one in which 85 million people died.Armageddon avoids conventional chronological accounts in order to concentrate on the deeper forces shaping the origins, course and outcome of the war across the globe. It analyses how and why the war spread from being a limited European conflict to the only global war, why countries were dragged into the fighting and how only a small number of neutral states escaped. It compares the two alliances, how they mobilized their resources and their strategies for victory. It avoids a detailed description of how commanders maneuvered on the battlefield and concentrates instead on the impact the war had on individual soldiers, sailors and airmen. Equally important is the fate of hundreds of millions of civilians. How did they survive occupation and what did resistance, collaboration and liberation really involve, and what happened at the end of the war?Armageddon has a truly global sweep, combined with an eye for detail, and provides fascinating comparisons from a multi-faceted war. It contains new facts, asks provocative questions and challenges many of the common assumptions about the war. It is a compelling new inquiry.

¿Son exclusivamente contemporáneos los gravísimos problemas a los que se enfrenta el mundo de hoy? Para responder a esta pregunta, Clive Ponting ofrece un enfoque distinto de la historia: en lugar de centrarse en los acontecimientos politicos se ocupa de las fuerzas fundamentales que han cambiado el mundo que nos rodea y en las consecuencias que han ejercido nuestras acciones. Este libro constituye una cronica de como los hombres han destruido gran parte del mundo natural y tambien una interpretacion fascinante de la historia mundial desde una perspectiva global y "verde".