Bayle Shanks's website: notes-history-summary-histChIntro

This collection of notes is part of [1].

Facets of history

political economic cultural (includes linguistic, artistic) everyday life ideas (note distinction b/t ideas and ideologies) technological (and scientific) religious network-structure-based/interactionist/integration/globalizational ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Discovery silk road https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization 'integration' in [2] etc mb geopolitics too -- is there a name for this?) demographic by institution (eg slavery, fedualism, scientific method) geographic environmental history

great civilizations (and great nations and great cities) great people great ideologies and religions great technologies generational military

Points of view and methods

povs: feminist, marxist, revisionist, etc

methods: a zillion others and written records, material artifacts, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliometrics , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopography

Time scales

In this book, we will devote more space to talking about recent events.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#Phases_of_modernity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_period

Which areas of the world to focus on?

todo: move this section out of this book, and move this book into Stuff You Might Like To Know

As this is only a summary of history, we have to leave out most of the things that have occurred, and focus on a few. We also have to group many things into a few groupings. How do we choose which things to focus on, and how to group things? We're going to focus on the things that seem most relevant to the present day, and those parts of the past which seem most pivotal to explain the present; and we're going to group them in ways pertaining to groupings in the present. This is highly subjective. In addition, the question of relevancy demands additional focus, because there are many present realities and in order to summarize, we are again forced to focus on only few of them.

We choose to focus on the history relevant to present groupings which either are involve a large number of people, or which seem to be particularly powerful, or which seem central to English Wikipedia's description of today's world; as well as touching on other historical topics that seem central to English Wikipedia's presentation of history.

To determine which cultural and political groupings are the most populous and the most powerful, here we survey the most popular languages, the regions with the largest population, and the political groupings with the largest economies.

the most popular languages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers

Chinese and English appear near the top of all lists. Hindi, Spanish, Arabic are also somewhat near the top.

top languages by GDP etc

http://internetdating.typepad.com/courtland_brooks/2011/05/how-to-choose-your-next-market-to-localize-consider-gdp-by-language.html : top 6 are English, Japanese, Chinese, German, Spanish and French

http://www.jetpunk.com/user-quizzes/101309/20-most-important-languages-of-the-world-by-gdp-nominal is the same as the previous, but with Chinese before Japanese

http://alexika.com/why-alexika/world-business-languages/ has the same, but with yet another different ordering

http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn13/ projected 2003-2030 are still English, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, German, French

http://alexika.com/why-alexika/world-business-languages/ has the similar list English,

http://appliedeconomist.blogspot.com/2014/01/gdp-per-capita-by-language.html

http://idibon.com/marketing-budgets-and-language-diversity/ top 5 are English, Japanese, Spanish, Mandarin, German, French (also presents another list, of countries, of which the top five are United States, China, Japan, Germany, UK.

Note that the intersection of the top few languages by number of native speakers, total speakers, and by GDP seems to be English, Chinese, Spanish.

top countries by population and GDP

Here we look at some objective ranked lists of size and find a cutoff point on one such list such that it includes all entries up to some cutoff point on another such list (note that the choices of cutoff points involve subjective bias). As of this writing (2015), the set of the top 3 countries by either population or by PPP-adjusted GDP are China, India, United States. The 4 countries by population are: China, India, United States, Indonesia; by nominal GDP: US, China, Japan, Germany; by PPP-adjusted GDP: China, US, India, Japan. In order to get all of the top 4 PPP-adjusted GDP countries in the population list, you'd have to go down to #10 (Japan is #10 by population); in order to get all of the top 4 population countries in the PPP-adjusted GDP list, you'd have to go down to #8 to #10 (Indonesia is #8 by PPP-adjusted GDP on one list, #9 on another, #10 on another). The top 5 countries by population are China, India, United States, Indonesia, Brazil; by nominal GDP: US, China, Japan, Germany, France or UK; by PPP-adjusted GDP, China, US, India, Japan, Germany or Russia. Brazil is #7 on PPP-adjusted GDP, Russia is #9 by population, and Germany is #17 by population. The EU would be #3 by population if it were a country. The sixth country by population is Pakistan, which is #26 by PPP.

The set of top 10 countries by PPP-adjusted GDP are [3]: China, US, India, Japan, Germany, Russia, Brazil, France, Indonesia, UK; in this list are included all of the top 5 countries by population [4]; and all of the top 7 countries by nominal GDP [5].

top regions by population

The most populous continents, in declining order, are Asia, Africa, Europe, North America, South America [6] (South America and North America are close and their rank may switch depending on time and possibly source).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population has a box breaking these continents further into populous regions and countries. In declining order, with 2008 figures in millions:

China (1333)
other Asia, excluding Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand (2183)
Africa (984)
Europe, excluding the post-USSR (603)
Latin America (462)
North America (444)
Post-Soviet Union (286)
Australia, Japan, Korea, New Zealand (202)
Middle East (199)

summary

Grouping the above together, we will focus on the following groupings:

Africa
the Middle East
East and Southeast Asia (excluding India) and the Pacific islands, esp. China, Japan, Indonesia
India
Europe, North America, esp. the United States, France, UK, Germany
Western and Central Asia/Eurasia and Post-Soviet union countries, esp. Russia
Central and South America, esp. Brazil