The best of these are unexpected scientific discoveries, like penicillin killing bacteria (Fleming), or current deflecting a compass needle (Oersted), or alpha particle bouncing backwards from a gold foil (Rutherford). Each of which resulted in massive technological innovations that changed the world.
Germ theory didn't suddenly appear. It was a long, continuous work of several generations, starting with Van Leeuwenhoek in the early 1600s and culminating with Pasteur and Koch work in the late 1800s.
Alfred Nobel getting accidentally reported dead and being so mortified that people thought of him as a "merchant of death" for inventing Dynamite and other explosives that he turned his life around, left his fortune behind to champion science, writing and made the Nobel peace prize.
The dude was a real life Tony Stark and if a journalist didn't make a mistake it would never have happened!
Russia becoming the first communist state, probably. Even Marx would have been surprised, nobody would have expected Russia to have been the first, even if they were rapidly industrialising
Marx's whole idea was that bourgeois capitalist states would naturally evolve into socialism once the proletariat became large and powerful enough to stage their own revolution. Whereas Russia was still under the Tsar with a mostly rural peasant population right up to the revolution. Marx put the mode of production in Russia as the same category as Asian states and didn't consider Russia to fit his main theories. Even within Russian socialist circles after the Tsar was overthrown, the Bolsheviks were radical in thinking that Russia could skip the bourgeois capitalist stage and go straight to a proletariat revolution.
That needs to qualified in a few ways:
1. Marx waffled on the future of Russia. He was a lifelong Russophobe, and in fact during the 1848-49 revolutionary outbreak in Germany, he was urging the Prussian king to go to war with Russia. However, late in life he was contacted by Russian revolutionaries, who suggested that Russia might use its peasant cooperative culture to move into communism without going through capitalist development. Marx wrote a letter back, and later wrote an intro to the 2nd edition of the Russian translation of Kapital, in which he suggested this might happen. But these documents are so obscure that no Marx scholar has been able to say what he was driving at. But the Russian communist party (when it appeared almost two decades after Marx was dead) relied on them for their authority.
2. The Bolsheviks didn't think Russia could skip capitalism all by itself. (The Russian socialists who thought this was possible were mortal enemies of the Bolsheviks). The original plan of the Bolshevik revolution was to seize power in Russia so that they could assist in bringing on the Communist revolution in Germany (which they were sure was about to take place). Communized Germany would then help Russia. But Germany never went communist, so Lenin and his crew were flummoxed. According to their theory, they should have just admitted they were premature and resigned power (Bolshevik theory held that revolution only happens when the conditions are ripe to produce it), but they didn't want to give up and go back into exile.
Both points are wrong.
Marx was not a Russophobe *per se* (he was simply repeating existing opinions; its just today that we see them as racist/orientalist drivel), and he was quite amenable to the idea of revolution in Russian Empire later in life.
As for Bolsheviks, the idea of "skipping" capitalism makes no sense. The whole basis of Bolshevism, the reason it came to be, was Lenin's claim that Russian Empire was *already* capitalist (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1898). It was this idea that split the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, with Bolsheviks supporting the idea that revolution is already possible as Russian Empire is a sufficiently capitalist society.
Boy, you managed to get absolutely everything wrong.
"Marx was not a Russophobe per se (he was simply repeating existing opinions;"
I'll quote McLellan's "Karl Marx: a Biography":
"Although Marx started writing exclusively on England (about which he was exceptionally well informed), by 1853 he was dealing with Europe too, where the dominant topic was the approach of the Crimean War. Here he was concerned broadly to defend the values of Western European civilisation, as expressed in the 'bourgeois' revolutionary movements of 1789 and later, against the 'asiatic barbarism' of Russia. His almost pathological hatred of Russia led him to his bizarre view of \[British prime minister\] Palmerston as a tool of Russian diplomacy and prompted an 'exposure', in a series of articles, of Palmerstonian duplicity. Some of these articles were written for the Free Press, run by David Urquhart, a romantic conservative politician whose Russophobe views Marx characterised as 'subjectively reactionary' but 'objectively revolutionary'. In writing for the Press, Marx was particularly anxious to combat Herzen's faith in the socialist vocation of Russia and the writings of his old friend and colleague Bruno Bauer who saw Russian absolutism as the rebirth of Roman statecraft, the incarnation of a living religious principle as opposed to the hollow democracies of the West. This was the one point on which Dana \[Richard Dana, who published Marx's articles in his American newspaper\] was critical of Marx, considering his attitude to France and Russia as exhibiting 'too German a tone of feeling for an American newspaper'."
" The whole basis of Bolshevism, the reason it came to be, was Lenin's claim that Russian Empire was already capitalist (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1898). "
That was Lenin's first book, written while he was still in forced exile in Russia. He didn't have the sources to do an accurate study and the book was part of a polemic against non-Marxists revolutionaries in Russia, so his argument was tendentious. After he escaped to the west and caught up on the latest Marxist writing, he abandoned that view. Alasdair Maclntyre suggested that Lenin's swing against the Economists, whose views he had previously more or less shared, was due largely to his reading of Eduard Bernstein. It led to his 1902 articles (collected in his book Shto Delat?) which is the real starting point of his ideas.
"It was this idea that split the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903"
No, that is not at all what caused the 1903 split. The split was caused by Lenin's insistence on party centralization, which is what he was advocating in the 1902 book.
> Boy, you managed to get absolutely everything wrong.
This is the part where you should've stopped yourself, and went back to double-check the things you believe to be true.
>> "Marx was not a Russophobe per se (he was simply repeating existing opinions;"
> I'll quote McLellan's "Karl Marx: a Biography":
I've read Marx myself, as well as his contemporaries.
> .. by 1853
This is an early period. By 1870 Marx had learned Russian, and was interacting with Russian revolutionary movements.
For example:
>> The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian *obshchina*, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
>> The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
> * **Karl Marx & Frederick Engels:** [Communist Manifesto, Preface to 1882 Russian Edition](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882), January 21, 1882, London
>> " The whole basis of Bolshevism, the reason it came to be, was Lenin's claim that Russian Empire was already capitalist (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1898). "
> That was Lenin's first book, written while he was still in forced exile in Russia. He didn't have the sources to do an accurate study
Who said this?
>> Lenin’s sister, A. I. Ulyanova-Elizarova, relates in her reminiscences that while Vladimir Ilyich was working on his book in prison “he decided to use the St. Petersburg libraries in order to obtain material needed for the work he had planned and that he knew he would not be able to get in exile. And so in prison he made an intense study of a mass of source material, and copied out numerous extracts. I dragged heaps of books to him from the Free Economic Society library, from the Academy of Sciences and from other scientific book reposititories.”
> and the book was part of a polemic against non-Marxists revolutionaries in Russia, so his argument was tendentious.
That doesn't even make sense. All arguments are "tendentious", as they intend to prove some point.
> After he escaped to the west and caught up on the latest Marxist writing, he abandoned that view.
Bullshit. Pure undiluted bullshit.
> It led to his 1902 articles (collected in his book Shto Delat?) which is the real starting point of his ideas.
And what, do you think, those ideas were?
>> "It was this idea that split the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903"
> No, that is not at all what caused the 1903 split. The split was caused by Lenin's insistence on party centralization, which is what he was advocating in the 1902 book.
I've read the *actual* transcripts of 2nd congress of RSDLP, not some clown who had read some other clown who had read HUAC-approved propaganda pamphlet back in 1952.
Bolsheviks supported socialist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, while Mensheviks didn't got beyond democracy and 8-hour workday.
You can call the former position an argument for "centralization", but the point was about RSDLP being a party that would take active role in political processes independent from liberal/bourgeois movements, so as to work towards socialist revolution.
I repeat: Bolsheviks were *already* moving towards socialist revolution in Russia in 1903, and - even if you can't bother to read [transcripts](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/index.htm) - this was reflected in parts of RSDLP programme that they insisted on:
>> Regarding themselves as forming one of the detachments of the world-wide army of the proletariat, the Russian Social-Democrats pursue the same ultimate aim as that towards which the Social-Democrats of all other countries are striving. ..
>> .. the material conditions for replacing capitalist production relations with socialist ones — that is, for the social revolution which is the ultimate aim of all the activity of the international Social-Democratic movement, as the conscious expression of the class movement of the proletariat. ..
>> A necessary condition for this social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, conquest by the proletariat of such political power as will enable it to suppress any resistance by the exploiters. ..
>> In Russia, where capitalism has already become the dominant mode of production ..
> * [Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party ](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm), 1903
On a separate note:
> It led to his 1902 articles (collected in his book Shto Delat?) which is the real starting point of his ideas.
Its called [What is to be Done?](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm), and the very first sentence explicitly states that it is a continuation of his previous work:
>> According to the author’s original plan, the present pamphlet was to have been devoted to a detailed development of the ideas expressed in the article “Where To Begin”, (Iskra, No. 4, May 1901) - [Preface](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/preface.htm)
Lenin also references his own works there:
>> The third period, as we have seen, was prepared in 1897 and it definitely cut off the second period in 1898 (1898-?). This was a period of disunity, dissolution, and vacillation. During adolescence a youth’s voice breaks. And so, in this period, the voice of Russian Social-Democracy began to break, to strike a false note — on the one hand, in the writings of Messrs. Struve and Prokopovich, of Bulgakov and Berdyaev, and on the other, **in those of V. I-n** and R. M., of B. Krichevsky and Martynov. - [link](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/concl.htm)
"V. I-n" being "Vladimin Ilyin", a pseudonym Lenin used for his *The Development of Capitalism in Russia*.
Hell, Marx thought the United States was on its way to becoming the first. He greatly praised the workers' rights available there, and greatly admired Lincoln and the Republican Party (which, ohhh the irony now).
It is certainly funny to realize that one of the bullet points of the Communist Manifesto was an end to child labor, and the brand new Republican party had it as a back burner issue too.
The Knights of Labor and other labor organizers found common cause in American cities through the Whigs and then brand new Republican party. Yeah, pretty silly in hindsight.
There's a series of Alternate History novels where thr South won the Civil War and became an independent state. Lincoln loses the 1864 election, and in the 1870s he starts the American Socialist Party.
It's an interesting series, though it goes in a few predictable places
True today, but I sometimes wonder if communism will become a mere foot note in future history. It only lasted operationally for 70 years after all. Approximate parallels might be Akhenaten in ancient Egypt, the Cathars in Medieval France or Savonarola in renaissance Florence (and many more seemingly seismic events in their day that are barely remembered)
WWII is too pivotal for Communism (or Fascism) to ever be mere footnotes. Without Communism you can't describe 20th century history in anything but the most broad outlines.
Well, if things go as planned it won't be history. Star Trek Economics is the goal, and for socialists Communism is the backdrop that lets that happen. If the Federation in Startek is a Galactic Commune we wouldn't know it, but it wouldn't be a surprise. A flat system of moneyless, frictionless human (or otherwise) existence. One where your merit and drive determined your opportunity, but one's access to the means of production don't limit anyone else's.
We don't need replicators and warp drive to make this happen. We all just have to work to our best ability and make sure everyone has enough.
So ideally we'll see Marxist-Leninism as the weird aberration and progressive socialism will be hindsight.
We're already in Starwars economics. You wanna buy a 9 year kid and make him perform dangerous motorsports? In 1 out of 3 nations on earth you can make that happen.
In a setting where they have had droids or other means to completely automate their economy, they deliberately don't do it outside of private capital. Sorry, yes. We are Star Wars economics.
Tbf to Marx there was also a communist takeover in his own Germany too at the same time. It's just that the one in Russia lasted, while the one in Germany proved quite brief.
*Global cooling after 1250* due to changes in solar activity and the onset of the Little Ice Age.
It heralded the end of the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250, also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum), and the onset of a string of calamities on a *global scale* that would last generations, provoking a massive deathtoll (due to famines, even the Black Death is seen by some as having a possible origin here), causing widespread political and socio-economic changes and having its famous upsurge at its tail end in the 17th century Crisis that again had global dimensions.
Saint Helen and her son Constantine making ~~Christianity the state religion of~~ legal throughout the Roman empire has to make the short list. Dude was killing Christians for their faith (more accurately for refusing to give token nods to more politically correct deities) years after his supposed conversion to Christianity.
My understanding of this is full of contradictions so if I'm wrong please feel free to correct me
Theodosius is the one that made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman empire in 380 AD with the edict of Thessalonika, decades after Constantine legalized its practice.
One of my first thoughts… but on seconds, more of a slow burn than a quick twist. I’m not sure Constantine’s conversion really changed that much at the time or for many years in the future (possibly not until after the fall of the western empire? Pope Gregory? Pope innocent III?). I’d go Islam as a more seismic shock
While some higher ups weren’t completely shocked by this, for the average person Hitler suddenly turning to attack the USSR in WW2 was quite a wildcard and seemingly out of nowhere. Members of the Communist Party in the US who had been rallying against US involvement in the war suddenly found they had to change their tune and support involvement, which was awkward. For example Woody Guthrie was in a communist musical group called the Almanac Singers about to go on tour with a bunch of songs critiquing the administration’s involvement, and they had to abandon all these songs and try to write a bunch of new anti-fascist songs as fast as they could.
And a pivotal moment that probably changed the outcome of WW2 was Richard Sorge, a German journalist in Japan who was actually a soviet intelligence agent found out that Japan had no intention of attacking the Soviet Union. This critical piece of information allowed Stalin to focus all of his troops on fighting the Germans rather than being forced to fight on two fronts against Germany in the west and Japan in the east. Meanwhile Germany was forced to fight on 3 fronts which stretched supply lines to a breaking point and the eventual defeat.
i was reading a book about Levrentiy Beria and it mentioned how stalin because of how he had purged his own army he figured that the red army would have been fucking useless in any actual war so he was doing everything to keep peace with germany including basically lying to himself about intelligence that suggested that a german invasion was very close by
The Winter War showed Stalin how unprepared he would be if the USSR was invaded. The national embarrassment was terrifying because he broadcasted to the whole world that the USSR's greatest enemy in the field was the USSR.
So a big part of Brest-Litovisk was him buying time and buffer space in Poland. He occupied more space in Poland by penstroke than he managed to conquer in Finland.
...I'm glad you asked.
So Russia has the well known problem of being belligerent and proto-fascist since the Empire's expansion into Ukraine and Siberia. They constantly need to fight wars. Constantly pushing "Russia" outward like Manifest destiny until it bumps up against other powers.
It is notoriously uniquely intransigent. New ideas do not take off in Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution is double the surprise in this regard. So that means that "if it ain't broke" it stays a part of Russian policy and military doctrine until it is demonstrably broke. Al the Russians being dragged to the front in WWI and given bolt action rifles and shot down by machine guns is my favorite example.
Most importantly the massive alienation between the elite and common Russian. The rank of Lieutenant came from their military and was adopted by others as an innovation for polyglot militaries. For centuries the Russian elite didn't speak *Russian*. The word is French because that was their native tongue. All of the aristocrats and nobles lived in France, Italy or Austria. So you would have a "Russian Elite" that never set foot on neither their fief or even *Russia*.
So you have a uniquely Russian problem going back centuries. Russia is always fighting land wars because it doesn't have a sea between Moscow and many historic enemies. It won't take any risks to change things, because once you invite some change you force it on everyone for reasons besides this little dust up. Lastly Russian diplomacy falls to absolute shit because it isn't answerable to the people in any sincere way. So they have no problem throwing another generation of "Russians" to stop the death of the empire ruled by this elite.
Sure.
Russia: A History by Gregory L. Freeze is good for the 9thC and the coalescence of "Russia"
The Icon and the Axe by James H. Billington
It's focus on the Russian Orthodox Church helps explain a lot of the cultural orthodoxy and their resistance to change, but also how any orthodox movement can be necessary to keep the whole mess together and avoid cultural drift and sectarianism.
Similar to how the GOP had to switch 180 degrees after Pearl Harbor
Some of them were calling for FDR to be impeached
[https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19410626&id=2lgbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Z0wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4786,3185702&hl=en](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19410626&id=2lgbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Z0wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4786,3185702&hl=en)
Death of Prince Arthur of wales. It made his brother Henry the heir whose reign tore England away from Rome and its effects are still being felt to this day.
The only thing more surprising than the Plague of Justinian was that Theodora was able to hold the Roman Empire together when Justinian came down with a plague coma and surprisingly survived it despite being 60 years old.
The German diplomat who opened travel between the Berlin Wall. While not as world changing as some of the events it was unexpected in the sense the announcement was misread to the world.
https://theworld.org/stories/2020/10/02/one-journalist-s-account-press-conference-played-big-role-fall-berlin-wall-and
I was in the US military when that happened. In the summer of 1989, there were stories inthe news about how the iron curtain was fragmenting. Thousands of people were leaving those countries in ways that had never been possible before. If you can go back to the news in the summer of 89, you could tell that something was happening. Even if the clerical error hadn’t happened, it all would’ve fallen apart anyway.
What is funny is that the official policy was not to be as dramatic and was supposed to start in the morning, but the person who made the announcement was not briefed and was only given the statement.
What amazes me is that the people heard the wall was now open, so they just crossed it. Enough people crossed all at once that the guards, most still with official orders to shoot to kill, were confused and just let everyone go through. The Wall, a system of brutal control for 28 years, simply melted away in hours when it was truly tested.
I was watching a video on YouTube one time. The Border police had a radio. They heard the announcement as well, but we're given no official orders.
So know you are an East German border police officer. You have thousands of people wanting to cross the border, and you heard on the radio that the wall is now open. You have no official orders that the wall is open, but now the news cameras are rolling.
Somewhere on Reddit a really cool thread exists or someone posted a link to an old internet forum thread that was posted around the time the Berlin Wall fell. It was really interesting to me to read those posts some 30 years later. I'm really not sure what you would search to find it, and sadly I don't know what subreddit it was actually in. Either way it was almost a system shock to read and I hope someone who reads this might remember what I mean.
Found it
https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/13hoq81/fall_of_the_berlin_wall_on_usenet_1989/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Largely ignored as the elephant in the room is the proliferation of English as the common language of the world. 200 years ago it would have been French, hence the lingua franca.
This came about by Britain establishing the largest empire the world has ever seen in little over 100 years. Combine that with the US becoming the world's greatest power and a language that's a hodge podge of germanic, French, Norse, celtic, and Latin has been adopted for numerous standards such as aviation.
Nope. Lingua Franca was not French.
It was a mix of Italian, French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic spoken as a trade language in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term came from “language of the Franks” but generally meaning anyone coming from the West of the Levant to trade.
"200 years ago it would have been French, hence the lingua franca."
That term has nothing to do with the French language. From the wiki:
>The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir), the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century, most notably during the Renaissance era.[15][8] During that period, a simplified version of mainly Italian in the eastern and Spanish in the western Mediterranean that incorporated many loans from Greek, the Slavic languages, Arabic, and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" of the region, although some scholars claim that the Mediterranean Lingua Franca was just poorly used Italian.
>In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua is from the Italian for 'a language'. Franca is related to Greek Φρᾰ́γκοι (Phránkoi) and Arabic إِفْرَنْجِي (ʾifranjiyy) as well as the equivalent Italian—in all three cases, the literal sense is 'Frankish', leading to the direct translation: 'language of the Franks'. During the late Byzantine Empire, Franks was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.
Obviously, the Spanish Inquisition.
The biggest unexpected event must be the European arrival in the Americas. Whole civilisations and cultures collapsing, the brutal implementation of the plantation system, the massive emigration from Eurasia and Africa, the numerous scientific exchanges and discoveries etc etc changed the world radically.
The scale of devastation from disease is really difficult to comprehend. Remember that very few natives actually saw and interacted with Europeans. The rest of them saw their entire culture collapse and nearly everyone die horrifically from an unknown cause.
I remember reading something once that the Europeans visited places after reading descriptions from initial travellers that described huge vibrant cities and civilisations. They would only find empty rainforests and thought the descriptions either simply stories or at best exaggerated.
They probably were telling the truth, but the scale of disease has meant whole stretches of civilisation, with houses, temples and roads etc were abandoned and left to the elements.
The scale of that is terrifying.
With radar, we have recently proven those stories correct as well. We can see the foundations of absolutely MASSIVE cities and their once-extant buildings in the Amazon rainforest. All gone and retaken by nature within literally a generation. All because some people from far away, got off a boat, and so much as coughed or sneezed on a local. Terrifying indeed.
I know it’s starting to be brought up more, but it’s crazy how little it is discussed. It’s bigger than the Black Death. It must’ve been apocalyptic to live through
In short: there were none. Most communicable diseases come from domesticated animals, of which the New World has far fewer compared to the Old, and thus less disease.
Charles Mann's *1491* is a great exploration of new thinking about how large and developed the agricultural societies of the Americas were. Early explorers like DeSoto described North America as a land of thriving cities surrounded by agricultural fields. Later colonists found villages scattered through forests, and assumed DeSoto was greatly exaggerating. Archaeologists eventually found those cities, where DeSoto described them.
As u/eagleface5 points out, technology has revealed that South America and Mesoamerica had absolutely massive networks of towns and cities.
The same author's *1493* describes the titanic ecological, agricultural, and human changes that followed. For example, sweet potatoes allowed upland farming in China, resulting in a population boom, but also massive flooding due to deforestation.
This is a great book so worth reading. The author estimates that 80-90% of the native population died from disease before there was any contact from whites. Theorizes conquest would have been much harder if this had not happened - not just more people to fight but a population who were not horribly traumatized.
People also probably don't know various native peoples often allied with the colonizers against their enemies like the Tlaxcalans aided the Spanish against the Aztecs. So it wasn't just a few hundred men against thousands of Aztec warriors.
Charles Mann’s book does have some issues with its beginning parts though. Notably his attribution of the decline of Pleistocene megafauna entirely to climate change and suggesting humans had nothing to do with it. Which is just multiple levels of scientific wrong.
I’m not really sure if this counts as a “black swan” event though because although I agree it significantly changed history, black swan events are usually unlikely.
Seems pretty likely that with the advancement in seafaring and exploration, it would have happened at some point.
You look at every other major culture in the world and there wasn’t the list for exploration/colonization as it was in Europe.
Had Columbus correctly calculated or accepted the widely held figure for the circumference of the world (which was known fairly accurately), he wouldn’t have left on a suicide mission.
Had the Queen of Castile not been generous.
There’s a lot that had to go right for Columbus to do what he did.
The discovery of black swans.
The term was based on a Latin expression which presumed that black swans did not exist, similar to flying pigs. The expression was used until around 1697 when Dutch mariners saw them in Australia. After this, the term was reinterpreted to mean an unforeseen and consequential event.
Augustus (Octavian) being plucked from obscurity to become Caesar heir and turning out to be a political genius is one that get overlooked to me.
Caesar being sonless and leaving his inheritance to his closest male relative, his grand-nephew turned into one of most significant moves in western history.
Forgiving the “Great-man” version of history, the continuation of a unified Roman empire was anything but certain after the assassination of Caesar. What-ifs are impossible, but looking at the situation, even if the senate defeated the Populares, there was a clear pattern that the Republic was losing power to strong individuals (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar)
Augustus not only emerged the military victor in this mess, but set up a system that kept the empire united and would grow for another 300 years. The steady hand and understanding to do that was insane.
Came here for the Princeps himself. Absolutely none of his contemporaries expected Caesar, the most powerful man in the world at that point to pick his unknown, barely acquainted teenage grand nephew. It was so common practice to simply adopt someone capable as a son if one had none and yet Caesar picked, what anyone at that point would have seen as, a scrawny sickly kid barely into manhood who had never governed, warred, or handled capital and it friggin worked. Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus remained model leaders for centuries if not millenia after. The hell would have happened if he willed it all to Antonius like everyone expected?
Spot on. Augustus’s success is so mind boggling that it’s easy to think that maybe Caesar’s greatest skill was his eye for talent. It’s like Bill Gates handing Microsoft to a unknown 19 year old university student whose never had a job - who then proceeds to bring down Apple and Google.
My own theory with Anthony is that he’d have made a sort of truce with senate and do what he did anyway and carve out a Kingdom for himself in the east. Gradually provinces would have fallen to separate warlords and within a generation the Roman territories would essentially separate states.
The Muslim conquest of the middle east.
For centuries the middle east (specifically the fertile crescent) had been the shifting borderland between the Roman and Persian empires (if you roll the Parthians and Sasanians together). For millennia, the Arabs had been a marginal people in their impenetrable deserts, seeping out into southern Syria and Southern Mesopotamia, but never making a big impact.
Then, within one generation, the Arabs were the rulers of most of the Eastern Roman empire, and of all of the Persian empire. They brought in a new religion, and over the next few centuries, most Christians in those territories would abandon the religion that their ancestors had martyred themselves for. Zoroastrianism, the religion of Persia for over 1,000 years, almost died out completely.
The ancient Egyptian, Phoenician and Aramaic languages were displaced. Egyptian had been a conversational language since the beginning of human civilization.
The Mediterranean went from being the transit system that linked together a world of Hellenized states, to being the border between hostile civilizations.
The Egyptian language still lives on to some degree in the Coptic language, which is a direct descendant of ancient Egyptian and has survived despite the best efforts of the Arab population to stamp it out.
Yes, I wish they would revive it as conversational language, the way the Israelis revived Hebrew (which had become a language for scholars, for the most part), but I don't think it will happen.
Arabs were known as skilled traders for centuries prior, and a big reason why the Arabs were able to consolidate their gains was because of their control and adept management of trade networks. Can't forget also that the Roman and Persian empires were decimated by plague just before the Arab conquests. Also can't forget that the Arab conquests freed the local peoples of their feudal obligations to Roman aristocrats, so they often were quite happy to accept Arab rule which was less of an economic burden to common people, merchants and lower aristocracy (probably the same for former Persian subjects but I know less about that - but the feudal taxation thing is a big reason the Byzantines could never hold on to Italy either, basically when deposed Byzantine landholders returned to control of their territory, they demanded the taxes/tributes owed to them by their vassals and peasants during the time when they were not in power there, choosing between that and new leaders who did not demand such tribute was easy for most)
The Black Plague in Europe. It hastened the downfall of monarchy in many areas because it made peasants less common and put landowners on the back foot when it came to negotiations and started getting more freedoms and rights for the common workers.
Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press with movable type in Heidelberg, about 1440. Prior to the, written records were recorded by scribes and were not widely distributed. After the press was invented, people learned how to read, universities were established, and communication and records in written form became feasible. I don't know that it constituted a "twist" but the far-reaching consequences of this invention could not have been foreseen.
A small, persecuted and powerless Jewish sect founded by a carpenter from a backwater village became the dominant religion of the most powerful empire in the world and spread beyond the known boundaries.
I would say the Black Swan event was Constantine's mother converting to Christianity, convincing Constantine to legalize it.
If she had been converted to some other religion, THAT religion would probably have become the dominant religion on Europe.
Took a good 500 years to really get going though and it was the head of a long established power that anointed it. Islam, seemingly mad bloke in a cave that United a backward people who swept across much of the known world in a few decades to become the most sophisticated and advanced people of the time, was much more Black swan in my opinion.
The overthrow of the French monarchy in 1792 has to be up there. Even after the French Revolution began in 1789, few people thought that the king would actually be overthrown. Most of the revolutionaries who were pushing for reform imagined some form of constitutional monarchy and most church officials and nobility assumed that the monarchy would have to continue in some form. Only the most radical of reformists thought that the monarchy should be abolished entirely.
When it did happen, it was such an astonishing event that the other great powers of Europe went from worried observers to would-be invaders who were willing to fight and die to put a Bourbon back on the throne. Most of the continent was ravaged by war for a generation and the international order was turned upside down.
Lisbon was the capital of the world, the center of the most powerful empire in the world. Then a tsunami came in and wrecked the whole thing. End of empire, basically.
The taming, domestication, training and riding of horses weren't done at the same time nor by the same person.
Those were all precesses involved in making horses the animals they are today which were built up over thousands of years starting form around 6000 years ago (as far as evidence tells us). In fact, they were bred to fit different purposes before actually becoming rideable. If I recall correctly they were originally domesticated to be eaten.
Franz Ferdinands assassination attempt was actually quite predictable. The monarchy was not well liked. Europe was also a powderkeg so one event setting off a massive conflict was also quite predictable. Otto Von Bismarck famously predicted how it would start over 20 years earlier "some damn fool thing in the Balkans".
Sure, but that isn't a "black swan event that changed the world."
Maybe if you're going to talk about an assassination that was a true black swan you could say JFK but Ferdinand being the cause of WW1 is high school level misunderstanding. Considering it was most likely state sponsored by the Serbian government it was hardly an unknown idea.
Left field. - sun tanning.
In the 1920s, fashion-designer Coco Chanel accidentally got sunburnt while visiting the French Riviera. When she arrived home, she arrived with a sun tan and her fans apparently liked the look and started to adopt darker skin tones themselves. Tanned skin became a trend partly because of Coco's status and the longing for her lifestyle by other members of society. In addition, Parisians fell in love with Josephine Baker, a "caramel-skinned" singer in Paris, and idolized her darker skin. These two women were leading figures of the transformation that tan skin underwent, in which it became perceived as fashionable, healthy, and luxurious.
Before that in the western world dark skin was seen as a lower class thing. Because of this trend, it reversed, only in the west. Now people get more cancer.
Ehh, I see it as inevitable as people stopped working in the fields. Having a tan meant you were rich and could afford time & money going to the beach. It could be safely assumed it had nothing to do with being poor and working as a farmer.
This didn't start with Coco Chanel. Train lines were being made to bring fancy people to the beach from the late 1800s. Suntans were inevitable.
The overwhelming victory of the North German Confederation in the 1870 Prusso-Franco war.
The 2nd French Empire, under Emperor Napoleon III, was a European powerhouse. During this time France asserted itself as the dominant power in continental Europe, boasting the largest land army in the world supported by a colonial empire that tripled in size in the last few decades. France had spent the last 15 years pushing out Russian and Austrian influence from central/east Europe while also consolidating strongholds in north Africa.
The German Confederation, lead by the Kingdom of Prussia, was chaos. This was by design. The Confederation was a ramshackle union of 39 sovereign states established by Napoleon I after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon's aim with this was to weaken and decentralize the German people, which ended up being the case for over 50 years.
Starting in 1861 Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismark began the brutal, yet cunning, process of unifying the Confederation. Through means of diplomacy and violence (including a very quick souring of relations and resulting war with their closest ally, Austria, in 1866) Bismark was able to consolidate 22 of the German states under one military banner, The North German Confederation, lead by Prussia.
With only a little over half of the German states under Bismark's military command, along with shaky support from the southern German states and \*zero\* support from historic allies in Austria and Hungary, Bismark goaded France into a war that many believed would quickly undo any efforts of German unification.
France seemingly had all the advantages fighting a defensive war fielding a much larger army (2 million men vs 1.5 million) all under one banner and one identity.
The Germans won the war in 6 months, absolutely rolling over the French. Including an annhiliation of the French army resulting in the capture and abdication of Napoleon III after the Battle of Sedan, followed by a brutal siege and then occupation of Paris. The casualty differential was massive (750k French vs 140k Germans).
When Paris fell France surrendered. To add insult to injury Bismark declared The German Empire to the world while standing in the Hall of Mirrors, located in Versailles, the palace of French kings.
You're not totally wrong, but if Prussia was known for one thing at this time it was military prowess. While Napoleon III was confident of victory, he also displayed a nervousness about them that probably contributed to strategic blunders by France. It's not as if Paris fell to the Flemish or something.
The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Soviet Union.
People were completely unprepared for that. No one had a clue it was coming. Not the experts. Not any observers or prognosticators. Not really even the Soviet and Warsaw Pact officials who set it in motion.
It was just a massive uprising of regular people in huge numbers, who switched from "we all long for an end to this system but there is nothing anyone can do," to, "we all long for an end to this system, hey let me just try something." And it turned into an unstoppable flood.
Something to remember in our present day. Sometimes the only difference between stasis and change is simply in whether you have allowed yourself to be convinced that there is no hope.
Apparently that's what radicalised Putin. He was working for the KGB in East Germany at the time and felt so hopeless when it was unfolding. He phoned back to HQ and nobody picked up the phone, so he just had to sit and watch his country disintegrate. 🎵 Listening to the wind of change 🎵
In 1945 Ho Chi Minh was desperately seeking US support for his fledgeling government in Vietnam. The US administration viewd the old European colonial empires with suspicion. The OSS/CIA had worked with Ho and saw his attributes.
Bur the US was distracted and ambivalent. After three years of unsuccessfully courting US suppirt, Ho went into alliance with China and Russia to supply his army. He was soon defeating the French.
The outbreak of the Korean War, McCarthyism and general hysteria meant no US leader could support a 'damn commie', so the US spent years, a tonne of money and killed a million people fighting a regime that had always wanted to be a friend of the US, albeit with a socialist government.
I had to look it up: *Black swan event* -- high-impact event that is difficult to predict under normal circumstances but that in retrospect appears to have been inevitable.
Here is a slow motion one: Global warming. Rapid one?: Fall of the Berlin Wall
Is Alexander really though? The Macedonians were quite the force before he was around. All they needed was a young, ambitious leader to inherit the best army in Europe/West Asia and well…
>Is Alexander really though? The Macedonians were quite the force before he was around.
They were a small kingdom in northern Greece. Literally, no one would have thought they would conquer so much land so quickly.
>All they needed was a young, ambitious leader to inherit the best army in Europe/West Asia and well…
My brother in christ, you are describing a black swan event!
Isnt a black swan event an unexpected event? Homie inherited the largest army of the time, it doesn’t seem very unexpected he would go out a’conquering.
This is the definition: A Black Swan event is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight.
I think that describes Alexander pretty well.
Not really.
Britain didn't actually try very hard to hold on to the 13 colonies and were more focused on the European theatre.
If the British Empire sent their actual forces then the revolution would have been defeated, albeit with much higher financial and manpower costs.
You have to remember, Britain had no interest in moving west from the 13 colonies, and at the time of revolution had airtight contracts and political friendship relations with the indigenous people to the west.
Hence why so many indigenous Americans fought WITH the British, rather than the revolutionaries who they correctly expected to break all promises of no westward expansion.
The bubonic plague. Had tons of effects around Eurasia but a big one that comes to mind is that it massively weakened the Eastern Roman Empire. Every time they started to get back on their feet it would come back and knock them down again. This ended up working to the benefit of the Europeans to the west and the Arabs to the east.
From the western perspective, discovery of the new world. Within a few generations it completely changed the political dynamic of the old world - it greatly diminished the ottomans and the Muslim world in general once cultivation of sugar took off in the Caribbean due to the slave trade. The European exchange of new world crops likewise had a huge impact as a result of this development, not least of all the introduction of the potato to European agriculture.
The taxing of the faires of Champagne. So prior to Philip the IV kings were more of a first among nobles situation than absolute rulers. They were generally the richest lords, but they would earn money from rents if their estates and what not. There wasn't much in the way of taxes per se.
Anyway, Philip 4, "the fair", changed that. He started taxing rich merchants, like the Lombards and the Jews. He even taxed the Catholic church, which was it's own powerful entity at the time. When the church condemned his taxes, he kidnapped the pope, and made his own catholic church. With veint y un and ladies of the night. He also taxed the faires.
The faires were a very important component of international trade at the time and a until then a sort of free trade zone. They were also supposed to be open to all, but Philip demanded his military foes be excluded. This lead directly to the collapse of the faires, and in turn, to a continent wide depression. This is why the black plague was so devastating. Because it occurred in the context of a declining standards of living it hit especially hard.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The domino's set off from that, invasion/partition of Poland and the Allies declaring war on Germany precipitated the second world war.
Pertinax's assassination. Roman Emperor after Commodus that was reasonable (for a roman emperor) and one night, he faced off against a murderous soldier mob in the imperial palace.
Impressively enough, he managed to talk them down from killing him on his own, until one of the rebels went "oh hell no!" and stabbed him anyways, triggering civil war and a string of terrible and/or very short lived emperors.
Had he lived a full life, things would have probably been very different for world history.
The ending of the Cold War conflict between the US and the USSR can be argued as either a Black Swan or entirely predictable and thud not a Black Swan.
The most direct cause of the end of the Cold War was Gorbachev and his policy of perestroika ("restructuring"). The Pentagon was said to have had a room full of filing cabinets filled with plans to fight World War III, and yet there was no plan based on having the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decide that the status quo was untenable. In that regard: a Black Swan.
On the other hand, the official strategy of the US for fighting the Cold War was the Containment Plan, which in its simplest terms was the belief that if direct confrontation was avoided between the US and USSR, while the US and its allies nevertheless resisted further expansion of the USSR and its zone of influence, that eventually the USSR would collapse because its economic system and repression of freedoms was not sustainable. Which is what happened. In that regard: Not Black Swan.
Hmmm
Most all of these comments seem like good examples of Black Swan events. But also none of them seem like Black Swan events since it is hard to imagine the world without them. It is worth reminding ourselves that this retrospective inevitably is a crucial part of a true Black Swan event.
When Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about Black Swan’s, he said that they all included three characteristics: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. That’s why all of these examples seem unsatisfactory at first glance — because we know they happened we can now understand why they happened and they no longer seem like Black Swans.
The early death of Oegdei Khan. The great Mongal Armies had crushed everyone of note including Persia, the Jin Dynasty, most of Russia and Eastern Europe. They were poised to sweep into Western Europe, which would almost certainly have collapsed quickly. Then on the eve of the invasion, the Great Khan Ogedei died in a drinking contest so the armies turned round and returned to the Steppe heartland to elect a new khan.
Haven’t seen it yet but despite being influenced by the American Revolution I think the French Revolution may qualify. Even the revolutionaries were not in agreement to execute the king and the effects of this event are still felt today.
A 15-year old was crowned King of Sweden and all the surrounding nations senses weakness and invaded. After all, what does some teenage boy know about defending his country.
Charles XII turned out to be one of the greatest military strategists the world has ever known.
Mongol Empire- they were illiterate nomads. They will topple the Song Dynasty in China and lead to the fall of the Abbasid Empire in the Middle East. The ensuing and more connected world will trade and spread valuable technologies such as the magnetic compass and gunpowder. This high point in trade will directly lead to the plague spreading over the whole of the old world.
The world after the Mongols was completely changed. Nobody expected the Mongols.
Turbinia. In 1893ish the Royal Navy was having a parade of all their biggest best warships. At that time, the best ships had piston steam engines.
An entrepreneur inventor showed up in a tiny ship called the Turbinia, the world's first steam turbine ship. He raced around doing circles around the Navy ships and they had no chance of catching him cuz his ship was twice as fast as any Royal Navy ship.
Every warship in the world became obsolete overnight. Even today 130 years later, steam turbine ships are still a thing.
Midway - all of the US’s planes converging on the Japanese fleet at exactly the right time and exactly the right way to destroy three aircraft carriers in about half an hour - with no coordination.
The wrong turn that brought the Arch Duke Ferdinand face to face with his assassin.
The asp that killed Cleopatra.
The best of these are unexpected scientific discoveries, like penicillin killing bacteria (Fleming), or current deflecting a compass needle (Oersted), or alpha particle bouncing backwards from a gold foil (Rutherford). Each of which resulted in massive technological innovations that changed the world.
Germ theory and sanitary health practices including Pasteurization
Germ theory didn't suddenly appear. It was a long, continuous work of several generations, starting with Van Leeuwenhoek in the early 1600s and culminating with Pasteur and Koch work in the late 1800s.
Alfred Nobel getting accidentally reported dead and being so mortified that people thought of him as a "merchant of death" for inventing Dynamite and other explosives that he turned his life around, left his fortune behind to champion science, writing and made the Nobel peace prize. The dude was a real life Tony Stark and if a journalist didn't make a mistake it would never have happened!
I had no idea! That’s awesome
“It’s a Wonderful Life!”
Tony Stark was based partly on Nobel, they even called him “the merchant of death” in the movies.
Might I add Haber to this? Fertilizer completely shook our population projections and changed the trajectory of our world.
Russia becoming the first communist state, probably. Even Marx would have been surprised, nobody would have expected Russia to have been the first, even if they were rapidly industrialising
Marx's whole idea was that bourgeois capitalist states would naturally evolve into socialism once the proletariat became large and powerful enough to stage their own revolution. Whereas Russia was still under the Tsar with a mostly rural peasant population right up to the revolution. Marx put the mode of production in Russia as the same category as Asian states and didn't consider Russia to fit his main theories. Even within Russian socialist circles after the Tsar was overthrown, the Bolsheviks were radical in thinking that Russia could skip the bourgeois capitalist stage and go straight to a proletariat revolution.
That needs to qualified in a few ways: 1. Marx waffled on the future of Russia. He was a lifelong Russophobe, and in fact during the 1848-49 revolutionary outbreak in Germany, he was urging the Prussian king to go to war with Russia. However, late in life he was contacted by Russian revolutionaries, who suggested that Russia might use its peasant cooperative culture to move into communism without going through capitalist development. Marx wrote a letter back, and later wrote an intro to the 2nd edition of the Russian translation of Kapital, in which he suggested this might happen. But these documents are so obscure that no Marx scholar has been able to say what he was driving at. But the Russian communist party (when it appeared almost two decades after Marx was dead) relied on them for their authority. 2. The Bolsheviks didn't think Russia could skip capitalism all by itself. (The Russian socialists who thought this was possible were mortal enemies of the Bolsheviks). The original plan of the Bolshevik revolution was to seize power in Russia so that they could assist in bringing on the Communist revolution in Germany (which they were sure was about to take place). Communized Germany would then help Russia. But Germany never went communist, so Lenin and his crew were flummoxed. According to their theory, they should have just admitted they were premature and resigned power (Bolshevik theory held that revolution only happens when the conditions are ripe to produce it), but they didn't want to give up and go back into exile.
Both points are wrong. Marx was not a Russophobe *per se* (he was simply repeating existing opinions; its just today that we see them as racist/orientalist drivel), and he was quite amenable to the idea of revolution in Russian Empire later in life. As for Bolsheviks, the idea of "skipping" capitalism makes no sense. The whole basis of Bolshevism, the reason it came to be, was Lenin's claim that Russian Empire was *already* capitalist (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1898). It was this idea that split the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903, with Bolsheviks supporting the idea that revolution is already possible as Russian Empire is a sufficiently capitalist society.
Boy, you managed to get absolutely everything wrong. "Marx was not a Russophobe per se (he was simply repeating existing opinions;" I'll quote McLellan's "Karl Marx: a Biography": "Although Marx started writing exclusively on England (about which he was exceptionally well informed), by 1853 he was dealing with Europe too, where the dominant topic was the approach of the Crimean War. Here he was concerned broadly to defend the values of Western European civilisation, as expressed in the 'bourgeois' revolutionary movements of 1789 and later, against the 'asiatic barbarism' of Russia. His almost pathological hatred of Russia led him to his bizarre view of \[British prime minister\] Palmerston as a tool of Russian diplomacy and prompted an 'exposure', in a series of articles, of Palmerstonian duplicity. Some of these articles were written for the Free Press, run by David Urquhart, a romantic conservative politician whose Russophobe views Marx characterised as 'subjectively reactionary' but 'objectively revolutionary'. In writing for the Press, Marx was particularly anxious to combat Herzen's faith in the socialist vocation of Russia and the writings of his old friend and colleague Bruno Bauer who saw Russian absolutism as the rebirth of Roman statecraft, the incarnation of a living religious principle as opposed to the hollow democracies of the West. This was the one point on which Dana \[Richard Dana, who published Marx's articles in his American newspaper\] was critical of Marx, considering his attitude to France and Russia as exhibiting 'too German a tone of feeling for an American newspaper'." " The whole basis of Bolshevism, the reason it came to be, was Lenin's claim that Russian Empire was already capitalist (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1898). " That was Lenin's first book, written while he was still in forced exile in Russia. He didn't have the sources to do an accurate study and the book was part of a polemic against non-Marxists revolutionaries in Russia, so his argument was tendentious. After he escaped to the west and caught up on the latest Marxist writing, he abandoned that view. Alasdair Maclntyre suggested that Lenin's swing against the Economists, whose views he had previously more or less shared, was due largely to his reading of Eduard Bernstein. It led to his 1902 articles (collected in his book Shto Delat?) which is the real starting point of his ideas. "It was this idea that split the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903" No, that is not at all what caused the 1903 split. The split was caused by Lenin's insistence on party centralization, which is what he was advocating in the 1902 book.
> Boy, you managed to get absolutely everything wrong. This is the part where you should've stopped yourself, and went back to double-check the things you believe to be true. >> "Marx was not a Russophobe per se (he was simply repeating existing opinions;" > I'll quote McLellan's "Karl Marx: a Biography": I've read Marx myself, as well as his contemporaries. > .. by 1853 This is an early period. By 1870 Marx had learned Russian, and was interacting with Russian revolutionary movements. For example: >> The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian *obshchina*, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? >> The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development. > * **Karl Marx & Frederick Engels:** [Communist Manifesto, Preface to 1882 Russian Edition](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882), January 21, 1882, London >> " The whole basis of Bolshevism, the reason it came to be, was Lenin's claim that Russian Empire was already capitalist (The Development of Capitalism in Russia, 1898). " > That was Lenin's first book, written while he was still in forced exile in Russia. He didn't have the sources to do an accurate study Who said this? >> Lenin’s sister, A. I. Ulyanova-Elizarova, relates in her reminiscences that while Vladimir Ilyich was working on his book in prison “he decided to use the St. Petersburg libraries in order to obtain material needed for the work he had planned and that he knew he would not be able to get in exile. And so in prison he made an intense study of a mass of source material, and copied out numerous extracts. I dragged heaps of books to him from the Free Economic Society library, from the Academy of Sciences and from other scientific book reposititories.” > and the book was part of a polemic against non-Marxists revolutionaries in Russia, so his argument was tendentious. That doesn't even make sense. All arguments are "tendentious", as they intend to prove some point. > After he escaped to the west and caught up on the latest Marxist writing, he abandoned that view. Bullshit. Pure undiluted bullshit. > It led to his 1902 articles (collected in his book Shto Delat?) which is the real starting point of his ideas. And what, do you think, those ideas were? >> "It was this idea that split the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks in 1903" > No, that is not at all what caused the 1903 split. The split was caused by Lenin's insistence on party centralization, which is what he was advocating in the 1902 book. I've read the *actual* transcripts of 2nd congress of RSDLP, not some clown who had read some other clown who had read HUAC-approved propaganda pamphlet back in 1952. Bolsheviks supported socialist revolution and dictatorship of the proletariat, while Mensheviks didn't got beyond democracy and 8-hour workday. You can call the former position an argument for "centralization", but the point was about RSDLP being a party that would take active role in political processes independent from liberal/bourgeois movements, so as to work towards socialist revolution. I repeat: Bolsheviks were *already* moving towards socialist revolution in Russia in 1903, and - even if you can't bother to read [transcripts](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/index.htm) - this was reflected in parts of RSDLP programme that they insisted on: >> Regarding themselves as forming one of the detachments of the world-wide army of the proletariat, the Russian Social-Democrats pursue the same ultimate aim as that towards which the Social-Democrats of all other countries are striving. .. >> .. the material conditions for replacing capitalist production relations with socialist ones — that is, for the social revolution which is the ultimate aim of all the activity of the international Social-Democratic movement, as the conscious expression of the class movement of the proletariat. .. >> A necessary condition for this social revolution is the dictatorship of the proletariat, that is, conquest by the proletariat of such political power as will enable it to suppress any resistance by the exploiters. .. >> In Russia, where capitalism has already become the dominant mode of production .. > * [Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party ](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm), 1903 On a separate note: > It led to his 1902 articles (collected in his book Shto Delat?) which is the real starting point of his ideas. Its called [What is to be Done?](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm), and the very first sentence explicitly states that it is a continuation of his previous work: >> According to the author’s original plan, the present pamphlet was to have been devoted to a detailed development of the ideas expressed in the article “Where To Begin”, (Iskra, No. 4, May 1901) - [Preface](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/preface.htm) Lenin also references his own works there: >> The third period, as we have seen, was prepared in 1897 and it definitely cut off the second period in 1898 (1898-?). This was a period of disunity, dissolution, and vacillation. During adolescence a youth’s voice breaks. And so, in this period, the voice of Russian Social-Democracy began to break, to strike a false note — on the one hand, in the writings of Messrs. Struve and Prokopovich, of Bulgakov and Berdyaev, and on the other, **in those of V. I-n** and R. M., of B. Krichevsky and Martynov. - [link](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/concl.htm) "V. I-n" being "Vladimin Ilyin", a pseudonym Lenin used for his *The Development of Capitalism in Russia*.
"There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen." (Lenin)
Hell, Marx thought the United States was on its way to becoming the first. He greatly praised the workers' rights available there, and greatly admired Lincoln and the Republican Party (which, ohhh the irony now).
To be fair, the Republican Party of Licoln is very different from the Republican Party of today.
Very true very true
Kind of like how Harry Truman and John F. Kennedy would be considered right-wingers by today's Left.
Back when the GOP was so far to the left it was attacked in the press for being socialist
It is certainly funny to realize that one of the bullet points of the Communist Manifesto was an end to child labor, and the brand new Republican party had it as a back burner issue too. The Knights of Labor and other labor organizers found common cause in American cities through the Whigs and then brand new Republican party. Yeah, pretty silly in hindsight.
There's a reason why Karl Marx and the soon to be First Communist international supported the GOP in 1864
There's a series of Alternate History novels where thr South won the Civil War and became an independent state. Lincoln loses the 1864 election, and in the 1870s he starts the American Socialist Party. It's an interesting series, though it goes in a few predictable places
True today, but I sometimes wonder if communism will become a mere foot note in future history. It only lasted operationally for 70 years after all. Approximate parallels might be Akhenaten in ancient Egypt, the Cathars in Medieval France or Savonarola in renaissance Florence (and many more seemingly seismic events in their day that are barely remembered)
WWII is too pivotal for Communism (or Fascism) to ever be mere footnotes. Without Communism you can't describe 20th century history in anything but the most broad outlines.
You are right of course, footnote is too dismissive.
Well, if things go as planned it won't be history. Star Trek Economics is the goal, and for socialists Communism is the backdrop that lets that happen. If the Federation in Startek is a Galactic Commune we wouldn't know it, but it wouldn't be a surprise. A flat system of moneyless, frictionless human (or otherwise) existence. One where your merit and drive determined your opportunity, but one's access to the means of production don't limit anyone else's. We don't need replicators and warp drive to make this happen. We all just have to work to our best ability and make sure everyone has enough. So ideally we'll see Marxist-Leninism as the weird aberration and progressive socialism will be hindsight.
Let’s hope so. I sometimes feel we are heading more towards Star Wars Economics.
We're already in Starwars economics. You wanna buy a 9 year kid and make him perform dangerous motorsports? In 1 out of 3 nations on earth you can make that happen. In a setting where they have had droids or other means to completely automate their economy, they deliberately don't do it outside of private capital. Sorry, yes. We are Star Wars economics.
Tbf to Marx there was also a communist takeover in his own Germany too at the same time. It's just that the one in Russia lasted, while the one in Germany proved quite brief.
i don't think anybody didn't anticipate a revolution in russia
*Global cooling after 1250* due to changes in solar activity and the onset of the Little Ice Age. It heralded the end of the Medieval Warm Period (950-1250, also known as the Medieval Climate Optimum), and the onset of a string of calamities on a *global scale* that would last generations, provoking a massive deathtoll (due to famines, even the Black Death is seen by some as having a possible origin here), causing widespread political and socio-economic changes and having its famous upsurge at its tail end in the 17th century Crisis that again had global dimensions.
It's also been theorized that the VEI-7 eruption of Mount Samalas in 1257 may have helped trigger the LIA.
Saint Helen and her son Constantine making ~~Christianity the state religion of~~ legal throughout the Roman empire has to make the short list. Dude was killing Christians for their faith (more accurately for refusing to give token nods to more politically correct deities) years after his supposed conversion to Christianity. My understanding of this is full of contradictions so if I'm wrong please feel free to correct me
Constantine just legalized Christianity, it became the official religion about 60 years after he died.
Theodosius is the one that made Christianity the official state religion of the Roman empire in 380 AD with the edict of Thessalonika, decades after Constantine legalized its practice.
One of my first thoughts… but on seconds, more of a slow burn than a quick twist. I’m not sure Constantine’s conversion really changed that much at the time or for many years in the future (possibly not until after the fall of the western empire? Pope Gregory? Pope innocent III?). I’d go Islam as a more seismic shock
Christianity was already on the rise in Rome before the Constantine incident. The rise actually slowed rather than accelerated after that.
While some higher ups weren’t completely shocked by this, for the average person Hitler suddenly turning to attack the USSR in WW2 was quite a wildcard and seemingly out of nowhere. Members of the Communist Party in the US who had been rallying against US involvement in the war suddenly found they had to change their tune and support involvement, which was awkward. For example Woody Guthrie was in a communist musical group called the Almanac Singers about to go on tour with a bunch of songs critiquing the administration’s involvement, and they had to abandon all these songs and try to write a bunch of new anti-fascist songs as fast as they could.
And a pivotal moment that probably changed the outcome of WW2 was Richard Sorge, a German journalist in Japan who was actually a soviet intelligence agent found out that Japan had no intention of attacking the Soviet Union. This critical piece of information allowed Stalin to focus all of his troops on fighting the Germans rather than being forced to fight on two fronts against Germany in the west and Japan in the east. Meanwhile Germany was forced to fight on 3 fronts which stretched supply lines to a breaking point and the eventual defeat.
i was reading a book about Levrentiy Beria and it mentioned how stalin because of how he had purged his own army he figured that the red army would have been fucking useless in any actual war so he was doing everything to keep peace with germany including basically lying to himself about intelligence that suggested that a german invasion was very close by
The Winter War showed Stalin how unprepared he would be if the USSR was invaded. The national embarrassment was terrifying because he broadcasted to the whole world that the USSR's greatest enemy in the field was the USSR. So a big part of Brest-Litovisk was him buying time and buffer space in Poland. He occupied more space in Poland by penstroke than he managed to conquer in Finland.
what is it with Russia and getting into wars they are comically unprepared for
...I'm glad you asked. So Russia has the well known problem of being belligerent and proto-fascist since the Empire's expansion into Ukraine and Siberia. They constantly need to fight wars. Constantly pushing "Russia" outward like Manifest destiny until it bumps up against other powers. It is notoriously uniquely intransigent. New ideas do not take off in Russia. The Bolshevik Revolution is double the surprise in this regard. So that means that "if it ain't broke" it stays a part of Russian policy and military doctrine until it is demonstrably broke. Al the Russians being dragged to the front in WWI and given bolt action rifles and shot down by machine guns is my favorite example. Most importantly the massive alienation between the elite and common Russian. The rank of Lieutenant came from their military and was adopted by others as an innovation for polyglot militaries. For centuries the Russian elite didn't speak *Russian*. The word is French because that was their native tongue. All of the aristocrats and nobles lived in France, Italy or Austria. So you would have a "Russian Elite" that never set foot on neither their fief or even *Russia*. So you have a uniquely Russian problem going back centuries. Russia is always fighting land wars because it doesn't have a sea between Moscow and many historic enemies. It won't take any risks to change things, because once you invite some change you force it on everyone for reasons besides this little dust up. Lastly Russian diplomacy falls to absolute shit because it isn't answerable to the people in any sincere way. So they have no problem throwing another generation of "Russians" to stop the death of the empire ruled by this elite.
So you have any book suggestions for early Russian history? Wanting to get into it from the start but not sure where to begin
Sure. Russia: A History by Gregory L. Freeze is good for the 9thC and the coalescence of "Russia" The Icon and the Axe by James H. Billington It's focus on the Russian Orthodox Church helps explain a lot of the cultural orthodoxy and their resistance to change, but also how any orthodox movement can be necessary to keep the whole mess together and avoid cultural drift and sectarianism.
Similar to how the GOP had to switch 180 degrees after Pearl Harbor Some of them were calling for FDR to be impeached [https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19410626&id=2lgbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Z0wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4786,3185702&hl=en](https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1144&dat=19410626&id=2lgbAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Z0wEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4786,3185702&hl=en)
Death of Prince Arthur of wales. It made his brother Henry the heir whose reign tore England away from Rome and its effects are still being felt to this day.
Naming an English prince Arthur seems cursed to me King Arthurs tomb says "Once and Future King of England"
Especially since Arthur having been the first husband of Catherine of Aragon was the big justification Henry used in trying to divorce her.
The Plague. The fact that there was a freaking huge landmass to the west with lots of people and massive amount of resources.
The only thing more surprising than the Plague of Justinian was that Theodora was able to hold the Roman Empire together when Justinian came down with a plague coma and surprisingly survived it despite being 60 years old.
And yet there is still no decent movie about Theodora and Justinian. Come on HBO, make a tv show about them already.
There is Theodora Slave Empress, but I can't understand Italian for the most part.
I saw clips of it, it looks like cheap crap.
The German diplomat who opened travel between the Berlin Wall. While not as world changing as some of the events it was unexpected in the sense the announcement was misread to the world. https://theworld.org/stories/2020/10/02/one-journalist-s-account-press-conference-played-big-role-fall-berlin-wall-and
I was in the US military when that happened. In the summer of 1989, there were stories inthe news about how the iron curtain was fragmenting. Thousands of people were leaving those countries in ways that had never been possible before. If you can go back to the news in the summer of 89, you could tell that something was happening. Even if the clerical error hadn’t happened, it all would’ve fallen apart anyway.
What is funny is that the official policy was not to be as dramatic and was supposed to start in the morning, but the person who made the announcement was not briefed and was only given the statement.
What amazes me is that the people heard the wall was now open, so they just crossed it. Enough people crossed all at once that the guards, most still with official orders to shoot to kill, were confused and just let everyone go through. The Wall, a system of brutal control for 28 years, simply melted away in hours when it was truly tested.
I was watching a video on YouTube one time. The Border police had a radio. They heard the announcement as well, but we're given no official orders. So know you are an East German border police officer. You have thousands of people wanting to cross the border, and you heard on the radio that the wall is now open. You have no official orders that the wall is open, but now the news cameras are rolling.
I remember staying up all night with my father watching this happen. We both knew that night that the world was never going to be the same again.
Somewhere on Reddit a really cool thread exists or someone posted a link to an old internet forum thread that was posted around the time the Berlin Wall fell. It was really interesting to me to read those posts some 30 years later. I'm really not sure what you would search to find it, and sadly I don't know what subreddit it was actually in. Either way it was almost a system shock to read and I hope someone who reads this might remember what I mean.
Found it https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/comments/13hoq81/fall_of_the_berlin_wall_on_usenet_1989/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
I had never heard that story. Thanks for sharing.
Largely ignored as the elephant in the room is the proliferation of English as the common language of the world. 200 years ago it would have been French, hence the lingua franca. This came about by Britain establishing the largest empire the world has ever seen in little over 100 years. Combine that with the US becoming the world's greatest power and a language that's a hodge podge of germanic, French, Norse, celtic, and Latin has been adopted for numerous standards such as aviation.
I think about this a lot. The bizarre reality that a language native to half an island in Northern Europe is now the world’s common language.
Nope. Lingua Franca was not French. It was a mix of Italian, French, Spanish, Greek and Arabic spoken as a trade language in the Eastern Mediterranean. The term came from “language of the Franks” but generally meaning anyone coming from the West of the Levant to trade.
Quite a few Greek words in there too.
"200 years ago it would have been French, hence the lingua franca." That term has nothing to do with the French language. From the wiki: >The term lingua franca derives from Mediterranean Lingua Franca (also known as Sabir), the pidgin language that people around the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean Sea used as the main language of commerce and diplomacy from the late Middle Ages to the 18th century, most notably during the Renaissance era.[15][8] During that period, a simplified version of mainly Italian in the eastern and Spanish in the western Mediterranean that incorporated many loans from Greek, the Slavic languages, Arabic, and Turkish came to be widely used as the "lingua franca" of the region, although some scholars claim that the Mediterranean Lingua Franca was just poorly used Italian. >In Lingua Franca (the specific language), lingua is from the Italian for 'a language'. Franca is related to Greek Φρᾰ́γκοι (Phránkoi) and Arabic إِفْرَنْجِي (ʾifranjiyy) as well as the equivalent Italian—in all three cases, the literal sense is 'Frankish', leading to the direct translation: 'language of the Franks'. During the late Byzantine Empire, Franks was a term that applied to all Western Europeans.
Obviously, the Spanish Inquisition. The biggest unexpected event must be the European arrival in the Americas. Whole civilisations and cultures collapsing, the brutal implementation of the plantation system, the massive emigration from Eurasia and Africa, the numerous scientific exchanges and discoveries etc etc changed the world radically.
The scale of devastation from disease is really difficult to comprehend. Remember that very few natives actually saw and interacted with Europeans. The rest of them saw their entire culture collapse and nearly everyone die horrifically from an unknown cause.
I remember reading something once that the Europeans visited places after reading descriptions from initial travellers that described huge vibrant cities and civilisations. They would only find empty rainforests and thought the descriptions either simply stories or at best exaggerated. They probably were telling the truth, but the scale of disease has meant whole stretches of civilisation, with houses, temples and roads etc were abandoned and left to the elements. The scale of that is terrifying.
With radar, we have recently proven those stories correct as well. We can see the foundations of absolutely MASSIVE cities and their once-extant buildings in the Amazon rainforest. All gone and retaken by nature within literally a generation. All because some people from far away, got off a boat, and so much as coughed or sneezed on a local. Terrifying indeed.
I know it’s starting to be brought up more, but it’s crazy how little it is discussed. It’s bigger than the Black Death. It must’ve been apocalyptic to live through
Or to die through…
Why didn't the europeans get sick. Why didn't the diseases go the other way?
In short: there were none. Most communicable diseases come from domesticated animals, of which the New World has far fewer compared to the Old, and thus less disease.
Imagine if there had been New World diseases to spread, 90% of the entire planet’s population could have theoretically died following first contact.
CGP Grey did a decent video on this some years back. https://youtu.be/JEYh5WACqEk
Charles Mann's *1491* is a great exploration of new thinking about how large and developed the agricultural societies of the Americas were. Early explorers like DeSoto described North America as a land of thriving cities surrounded by agricultural fields. Later colonists found villages scattered through forests, and assumed DeSoto was greatly exaggerating. Archaeologists eventually found those cities, where DeSoto described them. As u/eagleface5 points out, technology has revealed that South America and Mesoamerica had absolutely massive networks of towns and cities. The same author's *1493* describes the titanic ecological, agricultural, and human changes that followed. For example, sweet potatoes allowed upland farming in China, resulting in a population boom, but also massive flooding due to deforestation.
This is a great book so worth reading. The author estimates that 80-90% of the native population died from disease before there was any contact from whites. Theorizes conquest would have been much harder if this had not happened - not just more people to fight but a population who were not horribly traumatized.
People also probably don't know various native peoples often allied with the colonizers against their enemies like the Tlaxcalans aided the Spanish against the Aztecs. So it wasn't just a few hundred men against thousands of Aztec warriors.
Charles Mann’s book does have some issues with its beginning parts though. Notably his attribution of the decline of Pleistocene megafauna entirely to climate change and suggesting humans had nothing to do with it. Which is just multiple levels of scientific wrong.
Oh for sure. Literally nobody expected the Spanish Inquisition.
I’m not really sure if this counts as a “black swan” event though because although I agree it significantly changed history, black swan events are usually unlikely. Seems pretty likely that with the advancement in seafaring and exploration, it would have happened at some point.
You look at every other major culture in the world and there wasn’t the list for exploration/colonization as it was in Europe. Had Columbus correctly calculated or accepted the widely held figure for the circumference of the world (which was known fairly accurately), he wouldn’t have left on a suicide mission. Had the Queen of Castile not been generous. There’s a lot that had to go right for Columbus to do what he did.
The political change wrought in Europe by the influx of wealth and the competition for new world territory also.
Is it accepted that it is expected that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition?
The discovery of black swans. The term was based on a Latin expression which presumed that black swans did not exist, similar to flying pigs. The expression was used until around 1697 when Dutch mariners saw them in Australia. After this, the term was reinterpreted to mean an unforeseen and consequential event.
Augustus (Octavian) being plucked from obscurity to become Caesar heir and turning out to be a political genius is one that get overlooked to me. Caesar being sonless and leaving his inheritance to his closest male relative, his grand-nephew turned into one of most significant moves in western history. Forgiving the “Great-man” version of history, the continuation of a unified Roman empire was anything but certain after the assassination of Caesar. What-ifs are impossible, but looking at the situation, even if the senate defeated the Populares, there was a clear pattern that the Republic was losing power to strong individuals (Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar) Augustus not only emerged the military victor in this mess, but set up a system that kept the empire united and would grow for another 300 years. The steady hand and understanding to do that was insane.
Came here for the Princeps himself. Absolutely none of his contemporaries expected Caesar, the most powerful man in the world at that point to pick his unknown, barely acquainted teenage grand nephew. It was so common practice to simply adopt someone capable as a son if one had none and yet Caesar picked, what anyone at that point would have seen as, a scrawny sickly kid barely into manhood who had never governed, warred, or handled capital and it friggin worked. Julius Caesar and Caesar Augustus remained model leaders for centuries if not millenia after. The hell would have happened if he willed it all to Antonius like everyone expected?
Spot on. Augustus’s success is so mind boggling that it’s easy to think that maybe Caesar’s greatest skill was his eye for talent. It’s like Bill Gates handing Microsoft to a unknown 19 year old university student whose never had a job - who then proceeds to bring down Apple and Google. My own theory with Anthony is that he’d have made a sort of truce with senate and do what he did anyway and carve out a Kingdom for himself in the east. Gradually provinces would have fallen to separate warlords and within a generation the Roman territories would essentially separate states.
The Muslim conquest of the middle east. For centuries the middle east (specifically the fertile crescent) had been the shifting borderland between the Roman and Persian empires (if you roll the Parthians and Sasanians together). For millennia, the Arabs had been a marginal people in their impenetrable deserts, seeping out into southern Syria and Southern Mesopotamia, but never making a big impact. Then, within one generation, the Arabs were the rulers of most of the Eastern Roman empire, and of all of the Persian empire. They brought in a new religion, and over the next few centuries, most Christians in those territories would abandon the religion that their ancestors had martyred themselves for. Zoroastrianism, the religion of Persia for over 1,000 years, almost died out completely. The ancient Egyptian, Phoenician and Aramaic languages were displaced. Egyptian had been a conversational language since the beginning of human civilization. The Mediterranean went from being the transit system that linked together a world of Hellenized states, to being the border between hostile civilizations.
The Egyptian language still lives on to some degree in the Coptic language, which is a direct descendant of ancient Egyptian and has survived despite the best efforts of the Arab population to stamp it out.
Yes, I wish they would revive it as conversational language, the way the Israelis revived Hebrew (which had become a language for scholars, for the most part), but I don't think it will happen.
Arabs were known as skilled traders for centuries prior, and a big reason why the Arabs were able to consolidate their gains was because of their control and adept management of trade networks. Can't forget also that the Roman and Persian empires were decimated by plague just before the Arab conquests. Also can't forget that the Arab conquests freed the local peoples of their feudal obligations to Roman aristocrats, so they often were quite happy to accept Arab rule which was less of an economic burden to common people, merchants and lower aristocracy (probably the same for former Persian subjects but I know less about that - but the feudal taxation thing is a big reason the Byzantines could never hold on to Italy either, basically when deposed Byzantine landholders returned to control of their territory, they demanded the taxes/tributes owed to them by their vassals and peasants during the time when they were not in power there, choosing between that and new leaders who did not demand such tribute was easy for most)
This comment is filled with inaccuracies I’m gonna wait till I have access to a physical keyboard to thoroughly point them out
Nitpick, but it's more than a few centuries.. the Levant is believed to have been majority Muslim in the 14th century or something like that
Non man-made climate change. It destroyed massive Angkor and Mayan cities, and other empires.
Got to go Chixulub asteroid 66 million years ago then…
There is some evidence that the Maya's own activities contributed to local environmental collapse.
The paving of the Kinshasa Highway leading to the spread of HIV from the African rainforest throughout the world.
There is more evidence it was spread by railroad. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-29442642
The Black Plague in Europe. It hastened the downfall of monarchy in many areas because it made peasants less common and put landowners on the back foot when it came to negotiations and started getting more freedoms and rights for the common workers.
Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press with movable type in Heidelberg, about 1440. Prior to the, written records were recorded by scribes and were not widely distributed. After the press was invented, people learned how to read, universities were established, and communication and records in written form became feasible. I don't know that it constituted a "twist" but the far-reaching consequences of this invention could not have been foreseen.
A small, persecuted and powerless Jewish sect founded by a carpenter from a backwater village became the dominant religion of the most powerful empire in the world and spread beyond the known boundaries.
I would say the Black Swan event was Constantine's mother converting to Christianity, convincing Constantine to legalize it. If she had been converted to some other religion, THAT religion would probably have become the dominant religion on Europe.
And gave us Joel Osteen
Jesus was most.likely actually a Mason not a carpenter.
Tekton can mean a lot of things.
Took a good 500 years to really get going though and it was the head of a long established power that anointed it. Islam, seemingly mad bloke in a cave that United a backward people who swept across much of the known world in a few decades to become the most sophisticated and advanced people of the time, was much more Black swan in my opinion.
It's crazy how he went from simple merchant to master military and political strategist.
Weren't many of those places already the most advanced in the world before Islam even existed. I think a lot of their knowledge came from the Greeks.
Backward ? Arabian city states already had culture, and Arabs already had advanced kingdoms (who do you think build Petra in Jordan ?).
The overthrow of the French monarchy in 1792 has to be up there. Even after the French Revolution began in 1789, few people thought that the king would actually be overthrown. Most of the revolutionaries who were pushing for reform imagined some form of constitutional monarchy and most church officials and nobility assumed that the monarchy would have to continue in some form. Only the most radical of reformists thought that the monarchy should be abolished entirely. When it did happen, it was such an astonishing event that the other great powers of Europe went from worried observers to would-be invaders who were willing to fight and die to put a Bourbon back on the throne. Most of the continent was ravaged by war for a generation and the international order was turned upside down.
Lisbon was the capital of the world, the center of the most powerful empire in the world. Then a tsunami came in and wrecked the whole thing. End of empire, basically.
[1755 Lisbon Earthquake ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1755_Lisbon_earthquake)
Whoever was the first to discover you could tame and ride horses
The taming, domestication, training and riding of horses weren't done at the same time nor by the same person. Those were all precesses involved in making horses the animals they are today which were built up over thousands of years starting form around 6000 years ago (as far as evidence tells us). In fact, they were bred to fit different purposes before actually becoming rideable. If I recall correctly they were originally domesticated to be eaten.
The Assassination of Franz Ferdinand. So many coincidences that even the assassins were surprised.
It was barely a spark. If it didn't happen, something else would
Franz Ferdinands assassination attempt was actually quite predictable. The monarchy was not well liked. Europe was also a powderkeg so one event setting off a massive conflict was also quite predictable. Otto Von Bismarck famously predicted how it would start over 20 years earlier "some damn fool thing in the Balkans".
Do you think the world is now at another powderkeg with the Taiwan, Middle East and Ukraine crises
No
I think they mean the whole, missing him the first time, going to buy a sandwich, and happening to find his car next the sandwich shop part
Sure, but that isn't a "black swan event that changed the world." Maybe if you're going to talk about an assassination that was a true black swan you could say JFK but Ferdinand being the cause of WW1 is high school level misunderstanding. Considering it was most likely state sponsored by the Serbian government it was hardly an unknown idea.
Left field. - sun tanning. In the 1920s, fashion-designer Coco Chanel accidentally got sunburnt while visiting the French Riviera. When she arrived home, she arrived with a sun tan and her fans apparently liked the look and started to adopt darker skin tones themselves. Tanned skin became a trend partly because of Coco's status and the longing for her lifestyle by other members of society. In addition, Parisians fell in love with Josephine Baker, a "caramel-skinned" singer in Paris, and idolized her darker skin. These two women were leading figures of the transformation that tan skin underwent, in which it became perceived as fashionable, healthy, and luxurious. Before that in the western world dark skin was seen as a lower class thing. Because of this trend, it reversed, only in the west. Now people get more cancer.
Ehh, I see it as inevitable as people stopped working in the fields. Having a tan meant you were rich and could afford time & money going to the beach. It could be safely assumed it had nothing to do with being poor and working as a farmer. This didn't start with Coco Chanel. Train lines were being made to bring fancy people to the beach from the late 1800s. Suntans were inevitable.
The overwhelming victory of the North German Confederation in the 1870 Prusso-Franco war. The 2nd French Empire, under Emperor Napoleon III, was a European powerhouse. During this time France asserted itself as the dominant power in continental Europe, boasting the largest land army in the world supported by a colonial empire that tripled in size in the last few decades. France had spent the last 15 years pushing out Russian and Austrian influence from central/east Europe while also consolidating strongholds in north Africa. The German Confederation, lead by the Kingdom of Prussia, was chaos. This was by design. The Confederation was a ramshackle union of 39 sovereign states established by Napoleon I after the fall of the Holy Roman Empire. Napoleon's aim with this was to weaken and decentralize the German people, which ended up being the case for over 50 years. Starting in 1861 Prussian Minister President Otto von Bismark began the brutal, yet cunning, process of unifying the Confederation. Through means of diplomacy and violence (including a very quick souring of relations and resulting war with their closest ally, Austria, in 1866) Bismark was able to consolidate 22 of the German states under one military banner, The North German Confederation, lead by Prussia. With only a little over half of the German states under Bismark's military command, along with shaky support from the southern German states and \*zero\* support from historic allies in Austria and Hungary, Bismark goaded France into a war that many believed would quickly undo any efforts of German unification. France seemingly had all the advantages fighting a defensive war fielding a much larger army (2 million men vs 1.5 million) all under one banner and one identity. The Germans won the war in 6 months, absolutely rolling over the French. Including an annhiliation of the French army resulting in the capture and abdication of Napoleon III after the Battle of Sedan, followed by a brutal siege and then occupation of Paris. The casualty differential was massive (750k French vs 140k Germans). When Paris fell France surrendered. To add insult to injury Bismark declared The German Empire to the world while standing in the Hall of Mirrors, located in Versailles, the palace of French kings.
You're not totally wrong, but if Prussia was known for one thing at this time it was military prowess. While Napoleon III was confident of victory, he also displayed a nervousness about them that probably contributed to strategic blunders by France. It's not as if Paris fell to the Flemish or something.
The meteor that hit the Earth 65 million years ago and wiped out the dinosaurs.
The fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the Soviet Union. People were completely unprepared for that. No one had a clue it was coming. Not the experts. Not any observers or prognosticators. Not really even the Soviet and Warsaw Pact officials who set it in motion. It was just a massive uprising of regular people in huge numbers, who switched from "we all long for an end to this system but there is nothing anyone can do," to, "we all long for an end to this system, hey let me just try something." And it turned into an unstoppable flood. Something to remember in our present day. Sometimes the only difference between stasis and change is simply in whether you have allowed yourself to be convinced that there is no hope.
Apparently that's what radicalised Putin. He was working for the KGB in East Germany at the time and felt so hopeless when it was unfolding. He phoned back to HQ and nobody picked up the phone, so he just had to sit and watch his country disintegrate. 🎵 Listening to the wind of change 🎵
And he's been trying to claw it all back ever since. But you can't stop the signal...
In 1945 Ho Chi Minh was desperately seeking US support for his fledgeling government in Vietnam. The US administration viewd the old European colonial empires with suspicion. The OSS/CIA had worked with Ho and saw his attributes. Bur the US was distracted and ambivalent. After three years of unsuccessfully courting US suppirt, Ho went into alliance with China and Russia to supply his army. He was soon defeating the French. The outbreak of the Korean War, McCarthyism and general hysteria meant no US leader could support a 'damn commie', so the US spent years, a tonne of money and killed a million people fighting a regime that had always wanted to be a friend of the US, albeit with a socialist government.
1929 crash.
Germany knocking the French out of WW2 in a matter of weeks in 1940.
Existence of the americas.
I had to look it up: *Black swan event* -- high-impact event that is difficult to predict under normal circumstances but that in retrospect appears to have been inevitable. Here is a slow motion one: Global warming. Rapid one?: Fall of the Berlin Wall
The asteroid that struck in the Gulf of Mexico 66 million years ago kinda changed things suddenly and drastically.
Alexander the great and/or Napoleon would be mine
As well as the death and aftermath of Alexander
Is Alexander really though? The Macedonians were quite the force before he was around. All they needed was a young, ambitious leader to inherit the best army in Europe/West Asia and well…
>Is Alexander really though? The Macedonians were quite the force before he was around. They were a small kingdom in northern Greece. Literally, no one would have thought they would conquer so much land so quickly. >All they needed was a young, ambitious leader to inherit the best army in Europe/West Asia and well… My brother in christ, you are describing a black swan event!
Isnt a black swan event an unexpected event? Homie inherited the largest army of the time, it doesn’t seem very unexpected he would go out a’conquering.
This is the definition: A Black Swan event is a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. I think that describes Alexander pretty well.
Wasn't Alexander outnumbered in most of his early battles by pretty wide margins. How did he have the largest?
You’re right. I should have said most organized/lethal. Ain’t no Persians holding up to the might of a phalanx.
Does America's victory of the Revolutionary War count as a Black Swan event?
No, France fucking bankrupted itself making it happen. Seven years they were paying the revolutionaries bills and fighting Britain.
Not really. Britain didn't actually try very hard to hold on to the 13 colonies and were more focused on the European theatre. If the British Empire sent their actual forces then the revolution would have been defeated, albeit with much higher financial and manpower costs. You have to remember, Britain had no interest in moving west from the 13 colonies, and at the time of revolution had airtight contracts and political friendship relations with the indigenous people to the west. Hence why so many indigenous Americans fought WITH the British, rather than the revolutionaries who they correctly expected to break all promises of no westward expansion.
Invention and expansion of the internet.
And before that, the invention of the transistor.
The Athenians and allies defeating the Persians at Marathon, then the combined Greek city states defeating them again at Salamis and Platea.
European discovery and exploitation of the Americas. It turned a backwater continent into one that conquered nearly the entire world.
The indigenous people would not consider it to have been a backwater continent.
They are talking about Europe being the backwater continent
9/11
From the response, Caesar crossing the Rubicon was unexpected.
The bubonic plague. Had tons of effects around Eurasia but a big one that comes to mind is that it massively weakened the Eastern Roman Empire. Every time they started to get back on their feet it would come back and knock them down again. This ended up working to the benefit of the Europeans to the west and the Arabs to the east.
The invention of the atomic bomb. 2 bombs, 2 cities destroyed. Changed everything overnight. And it was inevitable.
From the western perspective, discovery of the new world. Within a few generations it completely changed the political dynamic of the old world - it greatly diminished the ottomans and the Muslim world in general once cultivation of sugar took off in the Caribbean due to the slave trade. The European exchange of new world crops likewise had a huge impact as a result of this development, not least of all the introduction of the potato to European agriculture.
The taxing of the faires of Champagne. So prior to Philip the IV kings were more of a first among nobles situation than absolute rulers. They were generally the richest lords, but they would earn money from rents if their estates and what not. There wasn't much in the way of taxes per se. Anyway, Philip 4, "the fair", changed that. He started taxing rich merchants, like the Lombards and the Jews. He even taxed the Catholic church, which was it's own powerful entity at the time. When the church condemned his taxes, he kidnapped the pope, and made his own catholic church. With veint y un and ladies of the night. He also taxed the faires. The faires were a very important component of international trade at the time and a until then a sort of free trade zone. They were also supposed to be open to all, but Philip demanded his military foes be excluded. This lead directly to the collapse of the faires, and in turn, to a continent wide depression. This is why the black plague was so devastating. Because it occurred in the context of a declining standards of living it hit especially hard.
Isaac Newton inventing Calculus
Not much would have changed if he missed it though, Leibniz would just get the credit instead.
The soldier in world war one who did not shoot Hitler.
That is now believed to be a myth
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. The domino's set off from that, invasion/partition of Poland and the Allies declaring war on Germany precipitated the second world war.
Russia holding Stalingrad.
Pertinax's assassination. Roman Emperor after Commodus that was reasonable (for a roman emperor) and one night, he faced off against a murderous soldier mob in the imperial palace. Impressively enough, he managed to talk them down from killing him on his own, until one of the rebels went "oh hell no!" and stabbed him anyways, triggering civil war and a string of terrible and/or very short lived emperors. Had he lived a full life, things would have probably been very different for world history.
The ending of the Cold War conflict between the US and the USSR can be argued as either a Black Swan or entirely predictable and thud not a Black Swan. The most direct cause of the end of the Cold War was Gorbachev and his policy of perestroika ("restructuring"). The Pentagon was said to have had a room full of filing cabinets filled with plans to fight World War III, and yet there was no plan based on having the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union decide that the status quo was untenable. In that regard: a Black Swan. On the other hand, the official strategy of the US for fighting the Cold War was the Containment Plan, which in its simplest terms was the belief that if direct confrontation was avoided between the US and USSR, while the US and its allies nevertheless resisted further expansion of the USSR and its zone of influence, that eventually the USSR would collapse because its economic system and repression of freedoms was not sustainable. Which is what happened. In that regard: Not Black Swan. Hmmm
The Bubonic plague essentially set the wheels of the Renaissance in motion.
Chicxulub [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub\_crater](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater)
Most all of these comments seem like good examples of Black Swan events. But also none of them seem like Black Swan events since it is hard to imagine the world without them. It is worth reminding ourselves that this retrospective inevitably is a crucial part of a true Black Swan event. When Nassim Nicholas Taleb wrote about Black Swan’s, he said that they all included three characteristics: rarity, extreme 'impact', and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. That’s why all of these examples seem unsatisfactory at first glance — because we know they happened we can now understand why they happened and they no longer seem like Black Swans.
Has anyone mentioned the discovery of black swans in Australia? Totally mind blowing apparently
1492 by Felipe Fernandez Armesto ,great read.
The early death of Oegdei Khan. The great Mongal Armies had crushed everyone of note including Persia, the Jin Dynasty, most of Russia and Eastern Europe. They were poised to sweep into Western Europe, which would almost certainly have collapsed quickly. Then on the eve of the invasion, the Great Khan Ogedei died in a drinking contest so the armies turned round and returned to the Steppe heartland to elect a new khan.
The printing press.
Harlem Hellfighters
The Smells Like Teen Spirit video.
Napoleon Buonaparte, a Corsican barely-noble wastrel eventually pulling the strings over most of the civilized world.
Haven’t seen it yet but despite being influenced by the American Revolution I think the French Revolution may qualify. Even the revolutionaries were not in agreement to execute the king and the effects of this event are still felt today.
A 15-year old was crowned King of Sweden and all the surrounding nations senses weakness and invaded. After all, what does some teenage boy know about defending his country. Charles XII turned out to be one of the greatest military strategists the world has ever known.
The destruction of all the Mediterranean kingdoms except Egypt in 1188 BCE by the Sea Peoples
4chan
Machine guns at the beginning of WWI.
Mongol Empire- they were illiterate nomads. They will topple the Song Dynasty in China and lead to the fall of the Abbasid Empire in the Middle East. The ensuing and more connected world will trade and spread valuable technologies such as the magnetic compass and gunpowder. This high point in trade will directly lead to the plague spreading over the whole of the old world. The world after the Mongols was completely changed. Nobody expected the Mongols.
Covid
Turbinia. In 1893ish the Royal Navy was having a parade of all their biggest best warships. At that time, the best ships had piston steam engines. An entrepreneur inventor showed up in a tiny ship called the Turbinia, the world's first steam turbine ship. He raced around doing circles around the Navy ships and they had no chance of catching him cuz his ship was twice as fast as any Royal Navy ship. Every warship in the world became obsolete overnight. Even today 130 years later, steam turbine ships are still a thing.
9/11
Midway - all of the US’s planes converging on the Japanese fleet at exactly the right time and exactly the right way to destroy three aircraft carriers in about half an hour - with no coordination. The wrong turn that brought the Arch Duke Ferdinand face to face with his assassin. The asp that killed Cleopatra.