A Short History of the World (40 page)

1.
Portuguese possessions
: Mozambique became independent in 1975; Goa was occupied by India in 1961; Macao was returned to China in 1999; East Timor declared itself independent in 1975 but was seized by Indonesia.

2.
silver streak
: The origin of this euphemism for the English Channel is obscure. It is often attributed to an unspecified newspaper article of 1885.

3.
Clive… Hastings
: Robert Clive (1725–74) was effectively sole ruler of Bengal (1757–60), during which time he made an enormous fortune and was thought by many to have set an influential example of corruption. He defended himself in the British Parliament, but committed suicide the following year. Warren Hastings (1732–1818), Governor-General of India 1772–85, was impeached for injustice and corruption in 1786, tried before the House of Lords and acquitted.

1.
Oglethorpe
: General James Oglethorpe (1696–1785), soldier and politician, resettled ex-prisoners and victims of religious persecution in Georgia from 1732.

1.
C. F. Atkinson
: Charles Francis Atkinson (b. 1880), noted historian and translator.

2.
chicane:
abuse of the law.

1.
cantonal system
: A system of small, self-governing districts.

2.
German Fatherland
: The song is ‘Was ist des Deutschen Vaterland?' by Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860).

1.
human locomotion
: 1909 was the year that the French aviator Louis Blériot made the first flight from France to England. Wells recorded the event in an article, ‘The Coming of Blériot', later collected in his book
An Englishman Looks at the World
(1914), known in the United States as
Social Forces in England and America
. Wells saw Blériot's flight as the key moment when airpower began to threaten the security of the nation-state, and did not subscribe to the view that the Wright brothers' experiments in 1903 were of especial significance.

1.
Defoe… Fielding
: Both authors are best remembered as novelists; the writings of Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) include
Robinson Crusoe
(1719) and Henry Fielding (1707–54)
The History of Tom Jones
(1749). Defoe, nonetheless, wrote extensively on economics and trade and Fielding worked for a decade as a political journalist.

1.
Sir Thomas More's Utopia… Campanella's City of the Sun: Utopia
by Sir Thomas More (1477–1535) appeared in 1516 in Latin and was published in an English version in 1551.
City of the Sun
by Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) was written around 1602, during its author's twenty-seven-year imprisonment after interrogation and torture by the Spanish Inquisition.

2.
John Locke… Montesquieu
: The chief writings of John Locke (1632–1704) are
Two Treatises of Government
and
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(all published in 1690). The most influential book by Charles Louis de Secondat, Baron de la Brède et de Montesquieu, is the
Spirit of Laws
(1748).

3.
a new world (1766)
: The
Encyclopédie
appeared 1751–66.

4.
Code de la Nature
: A defence of communist ideas, published in France in 1755. Virtually nothing is known about Morelly except his last name and the fact that he was a teacher.

5.
Marx
: Karl Marx (1818–83) remains one of the most influential and controversial of modern social thinkers. His writings include
The Communist Manifesto
(1848) and
Capital
(1867).

6.
Adam Smith
: Adam Smith (1723–90), famous Scottish intellectual, so in calling him an ‘English economist' Wells presumably means ‘economist in the English language'. Smith's principal work is
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations
(1776).

1.
one-horse shay
: A light open carriage, drawn by a single horse.

1.
the present time
: India became independent of Britain in 1947.

1.
Ireland
: Ireland, except for Ulster, was made a self-governing Free State within the Empire in 1922, declared itself a republic in 1937 and quit the Commonwealth in 1949.

2.
Indian Empire… Aden
: In 1947 the Indian empire became the two independent states of India and Pakistan, the latter incorporating Baluchistan as a province. Burma became independent in 1948. Aden became the major port city of South Yemen from 1968, and part of the Republic of Yemen from 1990.

3.
Egypt
: Egypt became partially independent in 1922, fully independent in 1936.

4.
Sudan
: Sudan became an independent state in 1956.

5.
Malta, Jamaica, the Bahamas and Bermuda
: Malta became fully independent in 1964, Jamaica in 1962, the Bahamas in 1973. Bermuda continues to be a self-governing British territory.

6.
Ceylon, Trinidad and Fiji
: Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) became independent in 1948, Trinidad and Tobago in 1962, Fiji in 1989. Gibraltar and St Helena remain British territories.

7.
Basutoland… Rhodesia
: Basutoland became independent as Lesotho in 1966, Northern Rhodesia as Zambia in 1964, Southern Rhodesia as Zimbabwe in 1980.

1.
Persia
: Known since 1940 as Iran.

2.
many millions of people
: There is little consensus on the death tolls, but the epidemic is generally estimated to have killed around 5 million people in Europe, perhaps 20 million in the world, as against 8 to 10 million who died in the war.

1.
prevents it
: In the event, only seventeen years were to pass between the publication of these words and the outbreak of the Second World War.

2.
Dr Dillon
: Emile Joseph Dillon (1854–1933), Professor of Philology at the University of Kharkov and a widely travelled foreign correspondent for the
Daily Telegraph
. He wrote books on a range of subjects.
The Peace Conference
(1919) was published in the United States as
The Inside Story of the Peace Conference
(1920).

3.
Herr Muehlon
: Wilhelm Muehlon (1878–1944), former director of the armaments manufacturer Krupp. His reflections on the Great War appeared in English translation in 1918 as
Dr Muehlon's Diary
.

4.
in any history
: During the Great War Wells had been one of the leading British campaigners for a League of Nations, but he was unimpressed by the workings of the League as it was eventually constituted. He traces his involvement with the idea of a League and how disillusionment set him writing his version of the world's history in Chapter 9, sections 6 and 7, of his
Experiment in Autobiography
(1934).