世界の歴史

出典: フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』

移動: ナビゲーション, 検索

世界の歴史（せかいのれきし）では、太古、地球上に現れた人類が長い歴史を経て現代に至るまでを略述する。

[編集] 一体的な世界史を試みた歴史書

en:World Historyを参照。

欧米で「歴史の父」と呼ばれるヘロドトスが紀元前5世紀頃に著したとされる『歴史』は、ヘロドトスが知りえた時代と地域の歴史に関するもので、自らが属するギリシア文明圏を超えた世界を展望した最初の歴史書といえるものであった。

[編集] 概要

en:History of the worldを参照。

[編集] 人類史のはじまり

最古の人類、ルーシーの骨（複製）

チャールズ・ダーウィンによれば、地球上のすべての生物は原始生物から自然淘汰を経てより高等な生物へ進化を遂げたものとして把握される（進化論）。ヒトを含む霊長類もその例にもれず、現在のところ最古の猿人とよばれるのはアフリカ大陸のアウストラロピテクス属であり、これこそが最初の人類とされている。人類と他の動物、他の霊長類の区別は、古来、神学上、哲学上の主要テーマのひとつとなり、諸学の発展した今日においてもさまざまな見解があるが、ここでは直立二足歩行こそが基準とされる。そうでなければ、記録のない時代のことを証拠資料をもとに判断することはできないし、逆にいえば、化石骨とその出土層位さえ与えられれば直立二足歩行の可能性は解剖学、人類学の見地からの検討が可能となるのである。その年代は従来約400万年前といわれていたが、今日では約500万年前、学者によっては550万年前ないし600万年前の年代があたえられている。人類はその後、200万年前から100万年前にかけてアフリカ大陸からユーラシア大陸に生活の場を広げたと考えられる。

約50万年前、原人が登場する。北京原人、ジャワ原人が著名である。かれらの脳容量は猿人の約2倍（約1,000ミリリットル）あったと推定される。洞穴や河岸に住み、堅果の採集や狩猟を生業としていたことが知られ、礫石器や火の使用の痕跡も確認されている。

約20万年前、旧人が現れた。ネアンデルタール人などの旧人の脳の容量は現世人類とほぼ同じ（1,300－1,600ミリリットル）で、剥片石器の使用が認められる。地質学上、氷河期にあたっていたため、炉をともなう住居に住んだり、毛皮の衣服を着るなどの生活上の工夫がみられる。死者の埋葬もおこなわれており、たがいに協力しあって生活を営んでいたことが知られている。

現世人類（新人）が登場するのは約4万年前のこととされる。化石人骨ではクロマニョン人が確認されている。

[編集] 古代文明と諸地域世界の成立

[編集] ユーラシアの交流圏

[編集] アジア諸帝国の繁栄

[編集] ヨーロッパ世界の勃興と主権国家体制

[編集] 近代の確立と帝国主義

[編集] 20世紀世界へ

The 20th century opened with Europe at an apex of wealth and power, and with much of the world under its direct colonial control or its indirect domination. Much of the rest of the world was influenced by heavily Europeanized nations: the United States and Japan. As the century unfolded, however, the global system dominated by rival powers was subjected to severe strains, and ultimately yielded to a more fluid structure of independent nations organized on Western models.

第一次世界大戦における連合国（緑）、オレンジはドイツ帝国、オーストリア・ハンガリー帝国、オスマン帝国などより成る同盟国

World War I, fought between the Allies (green) and the Central Powers (orange), ended the German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire.This transformation was catalyzed by wars of unparalleled scope and devastation. World War I destroyed many of Europe's empires and monarchies, and weakened France and Britain. In its aftermath, powerful ideologies arose. The Russian Revolution of 1917 created the first communist state, while the 1920s and 1930s saw militaristic fascist dictatorships gain control in Italy, Germany, Spain, Japan and elsewhere.

Ongoing national rivalries, exacerbated by the economic turmoil of the Great Depression, helped precipitate World War II. The militaristic dictatorships of Europe and Japan pursued an ultimately doomed course of imperialist expansionism. Their defeat opened the way for the advance of communism into Central Europe, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania, China, North Vietnam and North Korea.

第二次世界大戦の終結と冷戦の始まりとなった日本への原子爆弾投下（1945）

Nuclear weapons, used against Japan in 1945, ended World War II and opened the Cold War.Following World War II, in 1945, the United Nations was founded in the hope of allaying conflicts among nations and preventing future wars. The war had, however, left two nations, the United States and the Soviet Union, with principal power to guide international affairs. Each was suspicious of the other and feared a global spread of the other's political-economic model. This led to the Cold War, a forty-year stand-off between the United States, the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. With the development of nuclear weapons and the subsequent arms race, all of humanity were put at risk of nuclear war between the two superpowers. Such war being viewed as impractical, proxy wars were instead waged, at the expense of non-nuclear-armed Third World countries.

The Cold War lasted through the ninth decade of the twentieth century, when the Soviet Union's communist system began to collapse, unable to compete economically with the United States and western Europe; the Soviets' Central European "satellites" reasserted their national sovereignty, and in 1991 the Soviet Union itself disintegrated. This left the United States for the time being as the "sole remaining superpower," a status whose permanence came into question as that country's economic supremacy began to show signs of slippage.

In the early postwar decades, the African and Asian colonies of the Belgian, British, Dutch, French and other west European empires won their formal independence but faced challenges in the form of neocolonialism, poverty, illiteracy and endemic tropical diseases. Many of the Western and Central European nations themselves gradually merged into a superstate, the European Union, which subsequently expanded eastward to include former Soviet satellites.

アポロ17号の月面到達（1972）

The last exploration of the Moon — Apollo 17 (1972).The twentieth century saw exponential progress in science and technology, and increased life expectancy and standard of living for much of humanity. As the developed world shifted from a coal-based to a petroleum-based economy, new transport technologies, along with the dawn of the Information Age, led to increased globalization. Space exploration reached throughout the solar system. The structure of DNA, the very template of life, was discovered, and the human genome was sequenced, a major milestone in the understanding of human biology and the treatment of disease. Global literacy rates continued to rise, and the percentage of the world's labor pool needed to produce humankind's food supply continued to drop.

The century saw the development of new global threats, such as nuclear proliferation, epidemics of contagious diseases, environmental problems such as the greenhouse effect and deforestation, and the dwindling of global resources. It witnessed, as well, a dawning awareness of ancient hazards that had probably previously caused mass extinctions of lifeforms on the planet, such as near-earth asteroids and comets, supervolcano eruptions, and gamma-ray bursts. Meanwhile the life courses of many states continued to be accompanied by wars, with resulting loss of life, economic devastation, disease, famine and genocide. As of 2007, some 29 ongoing armed conflicts raged in various parts of the world.