Trade

The words algebra and algorithm both trace to one Baghdad scholar, yet almost nothing about his personal life survives beyond a bibliographer's secondhand book list.

-331

Every figure attached to Mansa Musa's fortune, eighty camels, thousands of slaves, a specific weight of gold dust, traces back to the same handful of Arabic chroniclers, which is why historians now treat his rank as history's richest man as unverifiable rather than false.

-800

European sailors called it an age of discovery for lands that were, in every case, already inhabited, and historians now argue the word itself was doing political work.

1600

1602

Only one of the five ships that set out made it all the way around the world, and only eighteen of roughly two hundred and seventy men were aboard it when it finally arrived.

1358

After Alexander's empire broke into rival kingdoms, three centuries of Greek-speaking dynasties in Egypt, Asia and Macedon produced much of the science and philosophy later credited to a cleaner idea of classical Greece.

A caliph-funded translation project in Baghdad is credited with sparking centuries of Islamic scholarship, but the historian who named it a 'House of Wisdom' may have mistranslated what the place actually was.

1206

China spent over a century trying to ban a drug its trading partners insisted on selling, and lost the legal argument twice before losing it by force.

Britain went to war in 1839 partly to force China to keep buying a drug its own commissioner had just burned twenty thousand chests of, and historians still argue over whether opium was really the cause or just the convenient pretext for a wider fight over market access.

China's own eighteenth-century tea and silk exports so far outstripped British demand for anything in return that Britain turned to selling a drug just to balance the books.

France's canal effort killed an estimated 22,000 workers and bankrupted 800,000 investors before America even began digging its own version of the same idea.

Japan's two-century closure was never as closed as the word suggests, and the historians who study it now prefer a different term for what actually happened.

A name coined by a German geographer in 1877 for a network no ancient traveller, including Marco Polo, ever actually called by that word.

1492

1603

Twelve million people loaded onto ships across four centuries, in a trade historians still argue over calling a partnership rather than simply naming who held the power in it.

1842

1957

1498

Dante put the Venetian Arsenal in Hell as a picture of ceaseless, specialised labour, and three centuries later the yard could still turn out nearly a ship a day using techniques that would not look out of place on a modern production line.

A city whose scholars once taught twenty-five thousand students collapsed within years of a foreign invasion that executed or scattered the people who had built it.

Multiple independent chroniclers, not just a single hostile source, describe da Gama burning a ship of pilgrims and mutilating a captured messenger, which leaves little room to treat these as later exaggeration.

421

The claim that Zheng He's largest ships stretched over 400 feet traces to a 1597 novel that has the vessels built with help from an immortal carpenter god, and archaeological digs at the actual shipyard suggest something closer to half that length.